Written for a challenge on the Dragon Age Writer's Corner here on the fanfiction forums: "Write with a pairing you don't usually use/that surprises you. Long or short as you want."
I decided to use the DA Random Pairing prompt generator to settle on a pair, and this is what I ended up with:
Kell/Dagna - throw away the key
Kell is a character in "The Calling", a Grey Warden who sacrifices himself (in company with his mabari, Hafter) to distract the darkspawn chasing after them so that Maric and Fiona can escape from the Deep Roads. As such he died at a time likely well before Dagna's birth, which made figuring out a premise for them a little tricky!
Note: use 438s52t as a tinyURL to find the generator if you're curious about it.
Dagna raised her light on high, peering at the pile of bones in the corner. Big ones - human, not a dwarf. And a smaller set nearby that puzzled her, at first. Too large for a deepstalker, too small for even a young bronto... a mabari, she realized in puzzlement. A man and a mabari had died here, long ago.
She crouched down, carefully looking over the bits of armour left scattered about; not much of it remained, the insects of the Deep Roads having long since eaten away every scrap of leather, every organic fragment of the two save their bones. A scattering of studs and rivets and a tarnished crest of some kind were all that remained of the man's armour; a buckle and loop all that was left of the dog's collar.
A chain gleaming among the neck bones of the man caught her attention. A translucent pebble she recognized as a long-burnt-out glowstone hung from it. Fragile finger bones were scattered around the handle of a tarnished silverite flail. She rose to her feet and looked around at the wide scatter of distorted bones around the two, remains of a very large number of darkspawn.
The two, man and dog, had clearly sold their lives dearly. It didn't surprised her when the crest, upon polishing on her sleeve and careful scrutiny, proved to have the double-griffon mark of the Grey Wardens on it. Not the first such crest she'd seen in her exploration and mapping of the now-empty Deep Roads, and likely not to be the last, but by far the farthest-in one she'd ever yet found. She wondered what quest or calling had brought him in so very deep to die.
She marked his location carefully on her map, peered at the name engraved on the back of the crest, and printed the four letters beside the mark, along with the little sigil that she used for warden corpses, then returned the crest to where she'd found it.
"Sleep well, Ser Kell," she said. "May the Stone protect your rest, and your Maker take you in."
She turned away, and resumed her journey. Somewhere down here she'd find out the clue that would allow her to answer the question currently perplexing men and dwarves alike, the key she needed to unlock the mystery of why the dark spawn had abandoned the Deep Roads beneath Ferelden. Somewhere down here, surely, there was a clue of some kind.