Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to the Dragon Age franchise.
Requiem
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She asked the treacherous questions, despite already having made up her mind. They fell from her blood red lips like razor-sharp blades cutting deep into her flesh, ripping her scarred heart in two. It was a hollow, festering pain born out of suppressed guilt and a perverse desire to hurt herself.
A desire to make her pay for the betrayal that came almost too easily to her.
The woman before her looked at her with those sharp, piercing blue eyes, but the tone of her voice was lost in reverie. It was so easy to behold the Queen's porcelain face, perfect and immobile, and see nothing but an enemy, an obstacle to overcome and leave broken in her wake. So easy to hear nothing but the Queen's manipulative, self-serving words and think of treason.
So easy to feel justified in bringing her down.
She should have walked away. Should have played the game of empty pleasantries and deceiving words, affirming alliances that would never be. It had not been hard to lie to the enemy. To promise things that she never intended to allow. Because it was the enemy. A faceless entity without merits. A blank canvas.
Instead she had stayed. And asked. And learnt.
With every word Queen Anora spoke, the canvas filled with colors and shapes, with beauty and shadows of the past. A myriad of brushstrokes, both bold and delicate.
"I remember my mother once asking his help with a sick rose vine."
She tried to close off her ears and her mind and not to hear these words. They spoke of peaceful times and memories held so fondly, so beautifully human. Forced her to acknowledge the fact that the enemy was a daughter, just like she. She, who had been torn away from mother and father against her will, leaving them to die at the hands of a usurper.
In truth, she had never hated Queen Anora. It would have been so much easier if she had, but she didn't. Couldn't. Instead, there had even been a time, when she had looked up to her like a shining symbol of what a queen should be, graceful and untouchable behind her husband's throne. Was it circumstances that had pitted them against each other? Life? Selfishness?
The Queen fixated her with her gaze, a gaze that would haunt her for many nights to come, and spoke words that seeped like ice-cold venom into her veins.
"I think my father truly believes that all he has done has only ever been for the good of Ferelden."
Deep down, she had feared this. It didn't make it anymore easy to accept hearing it spoken out aloud. During her travels, she had cut a bloody swath through monsters and men alike, without remorse, for remorse clouded the sight for the necessary means to reach her goals. Remorse invited in weakness, where none was to be had. It had been a hard, bloody lesson, but it had made her far from soft-hearted. Still, it felt suffocating to listen to a daughter justifying unforgivable crimes with such heart-breaking conviction.
Had it been her own father…had there been a way to justify him into living, would she not have done the same?
Anora was right. Silently, she could admit to the fact. It would have made everything so simple, but Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir had never been the power-grabbing kind and she knew it. Feigning ignorance where none was to be found would be unworthy of her. She had not grown up sheltered in far spread tribes or small villages, suppressed in an isolated tower or a dreary alienage, not under rock and stone, neither in the wilderness. She knew the nobles of this land, for she had been one of them. They were more to her than the far away upper class that was to be mistrusted by default, as a common man would see them. They all fought for what they believed was right and Loghain had made his choice.
But did that make it right?
Did it bring back the lives lost in a cruel, unforgiving civil war? Did it take the torment out of the souls that had been crippled in the wake of his crimes? Master Ignacio of the crows, an assassin she had struck down without second thought, had asked her this before he perished: Does a grieving wife care for what cause her husband died?
She looked at her queen with the same mask on indifference that she saw on Anora's face. Neither of them had had the luxury to be taught mercy for mercy's sake, as the Chantry preached to the common folk. A merciful lord was noble, but mercy in excess weakened him. Her father had been a beloved teyrn for he had been good and reasonable, but he had had to stand by his word firmly when someone was to be flogged, banished or even executed. Where Chantry law didn't reach, nobility upheld secular law. Firmness in judgment was a necessary trait to rule.
She had never been taught anything other and life had made her believe in the justice of vengeance. To make up for the massacre of Highever, she had killed Rendon Howe dead, ignoring the void that had filled her afterwards. To right the crimes against the elves of Denerim, she had stabbed the late Arl Urien's son Vaughn in cold blood. She had let Keeper Zathrian give his life in order to lift the curse he had unfairly inflicted upon humans who had nothing to do with the atrocities committed to his family, she had killed Branka for the lives she had sacrificed in her feverish search for the Anvil of the Void. Every action called for retribution in one way or the other.
Would she herself not pay for the injustices she had committed in her life-time one day? She, a tainted creature, infertile and on her way to be slain by darkspawn, be it now or in a decade or two?
Did that make her decisions justified?
Giving her fallen queen a last court nod of farewell, she turned her back on her and exited the chamber, her mind reeling beneath the ice-cold surface. Did it justify nurturing another daughter's hope to see her father live beyond the Landsmeet only to slay him and leave her bereft of a throne that had been promised?
What was justice, if not an unfathomable ideal? A beautiful play of word in heroic songs that faded high into the sky without ever leaving a trace? Did their Maker listen? Did he care?
Should she?
A bloody trail followed her path as she slaughtered her way through the slavers from Tevinter. Crimson carnage, justified, oh so justified. Crime and retribution, she sang in her head, even though it was slowly driving her mad. Crime and retribution. Loghain had sold people of Ferelden to pay for weapons that were turned against people of Ferelden. And as always these days, their queen had known nothing. Their queen had done nothing.
How did you forgive such a thing? Did his cause make it right? Did her trust in her father make it right?
She stood before them all in the Landsmeet, feeling naked under the gaze of all eyes on her. A battle-hardened stranger amongst her own. Tainted. Raw shame and anger fought a fierce battle in her mind. Look at what I have done; she wanted to tell them. Look at what I have become in order to protect you. Never again the same noble maiden sheltered in her castle that you once knew, but I have survived. Always, I will survive.
Dare you defy me?
Looking into Loghain's half-mad eyes, her bright flickering flame of righteousness dimmed. There was the hero of River Dane, a man larger than life brought down by life's injustice. He was doing this for Ferelden, she knew it. So was she. How she would love to stand before them as the shining, unquestionable Grey Warden on her righteous quest to end the Blight, but it was not so. She had been born a noble woman of Ferelden and in her heart she would always be, it was ingrained in her brain. Growing up, she had been taught gratuitous mercy, not selflessness, an open ear to the plea of the masses, not self-sacrifice. A noble had to believe that they were the only one to fulfill their task, because doubt and lack of confidence made them weak, expendable. There was always someone waiting to step up and if you weren't the best for the job, why be in your position at all? Lives depended on the strength of a leader. There was no use for failures. They were all doing what they thought was right, all of them, and she was no better.
She knew that she had no justification. And proceeded.
It had never been about being right or wrong, she had learnt that by now. Because there was crime and retribution, but there was no justice. In the end it all came down to the one rule of war that had shattered so many loves, broken so many friendships and brought the beast out in man.
You against me.
My people against your people.
Loghain had wronged and weakened her people, the people of Ferelden, and she would make him pay. She had undermined his efforts to unite and protect his people from the Blight, the people of Ferelden, and he would make her pay.
She could not forgive him and one day retribution would find her.
As she condemned him to death, her eyes were not on him, but on her fallen queen Anora and the small flicker of terror in her eyes. A fellow daughter, just like her. Adorned with the red, red pearls of her father's blood trickling down her porcelain face. The stirrings of hysteria, of faint madness, always laid forcefully to sleep, awakened in her mind. She remembered twinkling eyes, laughing and loving embraces, hands calloused from battle ruffling through her hair. Cherished gifts from foreign lands and amusing tales told in front of a rustling chimney. Scraped knees and kisses to her forehead to soothe away the pain.
How could she, who had seen her own father bleed from the wounds of treachery, sentence another daughter's father to death?
She closed her eyes as her queen fell down beside her father's lifeless body. Because it was always the same song, no matter how righteously the tune. Crime and retribution. Justice was dead. Vengeance prevailed. And once again, she had survived.
So she took the throne from an inwardly grieving, fatherless Anora and broke her word for the second time that day. Not out of ill will, because she had never hated her. Never. But she was no warrior. Her weapons were shadows and poison, of the liquid and the verbal kind and she wielded words the way others wielded a blade. She didn't think Anora fit to rule anymore and that was all the justification she would ever have for her shattered promise.
Drawing a shaky breath, she felt pillars of her mind were crumble down on her as she spoke. So clear, so calm, so coolly collected. So subtly haughty and contemptuous, as was natural for her. You against me, it reeled in her head, again and again. One side prevailed and history would not care for the loser, it never did. She would fade away, a Grey Warden of legend, but the noble woman she'd been would be dead. And then he would win.
But she had survived. She would never stop surviving.
There was no good or bad way to go about this. She had tried, oh, how she had tried to be good. There was a heart inside her; there was compassion and mercy, even love and regret. As in any human being, as in Loghain and Anora. But the only thing that had worth was survival. The only thing that was definite in this world of choice and consequence was the darkspawn threat, her saving grace in the chaos that was slowly erupting inside her. Which bitter irony.
And she was arrogant enough to believe that she could stop this Blight by herself. Arrogant or…justified?
I believe you're wrong. I believe I'm right.
That was all it ever really came down to, wasn't it?
The nobility of Ferelden rose from their seats to welcome the dawn of a new age and she felt the raving madness, that had simmered in the shadowy depths of her mind ever since the fall of her house, rage through her.
Tonight she would be crowned in blood.
Her mother had always said that she looked beautiful in red.
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A/N: I wrote this, because I am about to enter the Landsmeet with my final and canonical warden and needed to get this out. Cousland will always be my one true origin, so it's on my mind quite often. Listening to Anora talk about Loghain always strikes a chord in me and yet I have my warden betray her, because that's the kind of person she is. Consequently, this was born. I prefer to execute Loghain and make my Lady Cousland queen, because it is a tragic ending in its own right, yet somehow a fitting completion of my Warden's tale. Sacrificing herself to kill the archdemon is nothing she would ever do and although she's reckless and arrogant, she's too scarred and caught up in her upbringing to relish endless adventure. If that makes any sense.
It is far too much to hope for any kind of feedback on this, but if ,by chance, you have dropped by and read this, please let me know. I'll cherish it forever.