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Jessyn Brillwater would meet Daeon Mahariel in the Anderfels, her tribe playing host that year to the migrants from the dry Nevarra south.
The Brillwater family, part of a coastal clan nearer Antiva, was dark and clever and skilled with boning knives; they wore their sharp regards in their smiles and the glint of their blades, wily as the sea itself.
The Mahariels, by contrast, were light-haired and solid and skilled with weaving rope. They who had spent most of their generation wandering the mountains, having been borne of a clan wider in frame and sturdier of constitution, were very dry and stoic and Nevarran.
Jessyn Brillwater had fallen in love immediately. She was Daeon Mahariel's opposite in nearly every way, fierce and loud and full to brimming with music and laughter, long hair snapping loose in the wind as an inky sail caught dancing through a storm. She was thin; he was stocky. She'd burn the fish in haste; he'd sit patiently by the netting.
It did not take much convincing for Daeon Mahariel to trade rocky mountain road for stormy coastal forest. When their son was born, Keeper Briendl warned the couple of the conflict the child would face with his mother's blood running hot and his father's blood running cold through his veins. With his mother's night-black hair and his father's earthy golden eyes, the babe carried his colors as did the blackbears found in the plush southern forests and thus was called Mathain, and pledged to Dirthamen of Secrets. So too would the child grow with the moon and the sun burning bright and cold in his belly - as the great bear whom the creators had slain in order to retrieve the sky, settling his pelt over the earth to become the dark loam beneath their sleeping heads.
Keeper Briendl had drawn the crow's feathers from his bag and scattered them over the infant's krattel. What he read in the crooked message of their fall, he refused to divulge. Within that year, Mathain Mahariel would be an orphan.
When the Arlathven came to its end, it was to Ashalle Reddain of clan Sabrae the babe was trusted. Through Orlais, the coasts, the mountains - Sabrae passed the years in the aimless searching drift of creaking aravel and baying halla.
Mathain would grow to be a surly child, advancing through a brooding youth with a dark temper what brought itself out as a swift and cruel intolerance. This, more often aimed towards the blood-quickened shemlen in any land the clan might linger. Often Mathain would be found removed from the company of his clan by choice, nose-deep in a book when he wasn't tasked with the usual chore or bloodying the usual cousin. By the time Mathain claimed the right to wield a sword and shield in his clan's defense, his blood had settled into the patient indifference of his father, though the flames of his mother's passion lurked just beneath the surface and none of his peers would poke twice to rile him - in jest or otherwise.
By the temperance of his unpredictable moods, Clan Sabrae would call him Mad Mahariel - but the greater world would know him only as the Hero of the Blight.
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Mathain put his boot heel to the broad shemlen back, bracing the corpse as he yanked the arrow free. The first shot had been too low, Mathain's indelicate strength souring his aim. The kill shot belonged to Tamlen Birch'reagh, a relative of Ashalle's with whom Mathain had been spending much of his nineteenth summer. Mathain pointed the bloodied tip of his arrow at his clansman, glaring for the thievery of the kill.
Tamlen, a fair-haired hunter with a needling wit, hid a tranquility behind his rakish smile and a cold ruthlessness behind that tranquility; an iron trap under the viper under the flower. He snorts, kicking the second corpse over to inspect for valuables. "We are going to catch hell for this, you know. Especially if these are from that patch of dirt they like to call a village." A stiff silence, both more than familiar with Keeper Marethari's calcitrance to war-mongering with the locals. Shem villages often encroached on the forest's hunting borders; hot-headed youths often sported itchy bow-fingers - still prickly from the wrongs they had suffered in their more vulnerable years; deep-rooted grudges for whose inception they hadn't been alive to witness were often reinforced by fresh incidents; all a recipe for disaster. It would be the third relocation in as many seasons, should the retaliation escalate. "Too bad we cannot collect their pelts. Earn your vallaslin at last."
Mathain grimaced, stepping over the third and final kill, through which he had lobbed his short sword like a throwing axe. He kept a stony silence against Tamlen's suggestion; it had been a handful of seasons since he'd qualified for the ceremony, capable both in courage and skill. As Mathain's temper had matured, though, so his oddities had grown; keeping to the solitude of the forest, speaking very little and even then only when it was demanded of him that he answer some question or another. He hunted alone, mostly to fritter away time, never once to return with the more significant pelt of a wolf or... or bear.
Never once did Mathain show interest in a bondsmate, or in claiming a more official title in the clan's intimate hierarchy of skill and knowledges.
Echoing Mathain's thoughts the way a very near friend would be able, Tamlen presses forward, "It is not as if you are weak. You might not be able to shoot down a wolf, but I bet that sword could do swift mercy to a heavier animal, eh?" Tamlen's own vallaslin tattoo creases sharp around the smile in his eyes.
Mathain's voice bears the deep lilt of the Dales, as did that of most caravan-born, "I feel as though you, of all people, have compromised your position on this matter, cousin." And he of book and solitary afternoons often spoke as a man out of time, though this was a new affectation much to Ashalle's surprise - indeed through most of his years Mathain had made up his mind not to speak much at all - and here the chattering cicada had cracked from the cocoon at last, words flooding free as a damn burst by years-long rains. Mathain crosses his arms, patient. Staring down at the twisted shock of horror on a dead shem's face. Calculating.
Tamlen had developed his friendship with Mad Mahariel during the early years of wordless ill temper, driven by a persistent curiosity - an irrefutable urge to pry into Mathain's life that had seen them both snotted-up in the dirt on more than one occasion. He knew why Mathain refused to bend to the coming-of-age ritual, but was wielding an obtuse sarcasm to his own ends - "Oh yes, I have forgotten. The day our winsome Mahariel is officially recognized as an eligible bachelor is the day half the free women in the cold marshes make war on the other half for his favor. Hundreds maimed, dozens wounded! Dalish numbers take an invaluable blow. Shut up," it is drawled, teasing, then hardens into a sincerity which strikes like the knife after the caress, "Ashalle was not trying to mate you like a stud halla, Mad. She just... she worries. She was trying to appeal to your sense of duty, as it seems to hold a higher regard in that thick skull of yours over, er, romantic sentiment."
Mathain steps quick, close, not as swiftly nor as silently as his more spry clansmen, but the threat is evident in the hard glare under the dark furrow of his eyebrows. "And what if I did hold the sentiment higher than my duty? A sentiment that would never fruit Ashalle grandchildren, never strengthen our numbers with fresh blood?"
Tamlen is faking his surprise, a smirk hiding just under the wide-eyed inquisitive tilt of his chin.
Mathain allows Tamlen the falsity, respecting the viper as much as he loved the flower, and the steel trap beneath them both loved and respected most of all. "Ashalle would have taken me in for nothing. Souver'vhenan, I would be a dead weight to this clan, just another blade they do not need causing trouble with the shems."
Tamlen follows the gesture to the slain intruders, snagging the change in topic, "What exactly were these three doing, I wonder, this far into our clearly marked borders? For that matter, what hath brought our winsome Madman along this time around, when I know for a fact he'd been assigned elsewhere for the day?" Tamlen chuckles, scratching his chin, "I mean, aren't you supposed to be studying with master Ilen right now? I happen to recall a certain excitable bit of 'dead weight' eager over a rare type of spring-bough for his border traps."
Mathain scoffs, peering down the trail their quarry had been blundering through before they'd been caught short. "A fine snap-maple bough is not nearly as prized as time alone with you, lethallin."
Tamlen steps around Mathain, following the trail, a dart of willowy tan and leather. "Flatterer. I have half a mind to take that seriously, you know." At the answering silence, he turns.
Mathain is cutting a dark silhouette at the top of the trail, gazing off into the underbrush with a stern and puzzled frown. "No," he shrugs, crossing corded arms. "I'd not want to take anyone else away to a fruitless marriage," eyes shuttered against some long-buried emotion.
The bitterness is as palpable as if it were the dense forest fog draping through the mossy boughs, and Tamlen sneaks up to nudge Mathain toward the path and out of his reverie. "You'll come with me to this fabled cave of demons and treasure, will you not? We may talk as we search." A placating smile, blue eyes eager with curiosity.
Suspicion hooded, Mathain shakes his head. "We ought inform the keeper first. Get these corpses burned." He turns, resolute, stopped in his retreat by arms that had snaked their way around his shoulders. Tamlen's silent grin presses against the jumping pulse of Mathain's tawny neck. Mathain drives an elbow back into the hard leather of the breastplate behind him, a muffled thump.
Tamlen makes a noise, half laugh and half complaint, gliding fingers through Mathain's thick black hair, burying his nose in the soft heat behind a long ear. "You know what I think, cousin?" A thumb drifts over Mathain's chin and glances across his bottom lip. "I think, that you really have no business worrying over shite like marriage an' offspring, when you haven't even got..." Delicate fingers trace the pattern where a vallaslin tattoo might lay, wordlessly illustrating. "You leave that up to the adults, 'ey." Tamlen is shoved away with naught but a snarl for his efforts, laughing, pushing, forever prodding Mathain forward where his stubborn pride would see him stagnate. "Well it is true!" Tamlen darts down the path, just out of reach, taunting and coming up short, an uneven pattern to their usual disagreements - he stops, they collide. Tamlen keeps the blows from landing, breezing through Mathain's guard to land a kiss on his scowling face.
Instantly, Mahariel is transformed. His eyes widen, soften. He stills, tugging weakly against the embrace. Heart thudding through his armor, swallowing back an insult already half forgotten.
Tamlen Birch'reagh is breathless; for all his skill the risk is still as great in sparking Mahariel's temper so casually - and they were both too old not to hurt each other in earnest, physically or otherwise. "I've got five teeth riding on the guess that those shems just got spooked by a bear." He nudges Mathain's forehead with his own, the heat of a blush warm between them. "A bear you could slay. A skin you could give me -" breathless, unable to continue. Trying to say Mahariel's name, mouth ghosting over the shapes the letters might make through his lips. Meeting the open hope in eyes so light a brown as to be gold, a face that had long stopped showing any emotion beyond anger or that cold, dead distance of introspection. Stopping short, swallowing, breathless. "And then you'd have the right to complain about marriage." A kiss that doesn't quite land; a flutter of skin and one last final squeeze before Tamlen is stalking off, shaking himself loose and coming back to alert.
They had a cave to find, and Tamlen Birch'reagh had yet to catch his breath.
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It was the memory of a fever he'd had in the distant past; of falling arse over teakettle into a freezing bloomtide thaw that had swollen the river thrice its normal size and deepened its current to something ruthless and dark. The Orlesian fur trappers who had fished them out were drunk, and for some reason their cruelty deemed especially shemlike with a casual shrug, as if being poor and drunk they had no choice but to follow their barbarity to its ends.
Like dragons they fly, glory upon wings. Like dragons they savage, fearsome pretty things.
When it was Duncan of the Grey who held the fevered elf, there was no less violence. A ribald encouragement from another shem, "This one still got some life in him, Commander!" and Mahariel was ill all down the front of the polished Warden armor. The world pulsed, quickened. The sun and the moon chased each other in the hollow place inside of Mathain, where his heart used to be.
"Then let me die, Hahren!"
The slap is delivered with force, an icy sting. Marethari is too angry to speak at first, lips pursed into pale lines. "Da'len," she begins, slow, careful. "You have a place in this life that is not yours to determine. Nor is it yours to abandon, child," the thready reprimand is followed with a warm, feeble embrace.
The river had pulled deep, an inky mirk. It had nearly been peaceful, that crushing depth.
Beside the camp fire mellowing under a tipped copper pot, sharp tang of blood, the grunt of a half-waking fur trapper.
The sun rose, the moon chased it.
"I am Duncan of the Grey. Your death need not be in vain, young one."
An answering sneer. O plant no trees, elder. I will bring Tamlen back if I must fight the Dread Wolf to do so.
A fire in his veins. No river could douse it. Mathain Mahariel lost color; time.
"The Blight affects us all, da'len." Marethari gathered the clan around Matha'in Mahariel. All of Sabrae took him to his feet and passed him on, a dead kinsman walking.
The sun rose and fell; the moon chased it.
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It was the loneliness that ate at Mathain, even more than the darkspawn taint, down the long road to Ostagar. Where once he'd slept under the stars, snug in the press of the limbs and snores of his kin, now he huddled against hard ground in a small, oppressive tent. Mourning, gripped by fear - Duncan frankly terrified him, and he was too proud to let this show as anything more severe than a stony Dalish grudge. He hurt, and was hurting still, and could only trade hurt for hurt.
The fever made the days long and the nights surreal; by the booming voices of the Wardens Mathain was driven to the trees, only to reappear by morning exhausted and starving at the breakfast fire. Some days he couldn't be arsed to care, silently pleading that one of the heavier men he picked for quarrel might just run him through and get it over with. Never had Mathain been so confused before he'd met the type of shem who considered his intemperate brawling as a comradely sparring, and not the attempt on their lives (and the stain against their honor) it so very obviously had been intended.
When Ostagar was reached, Mathain Mahariel had no sanity left for politesse with the king; he later maimed a shopkeep offhand for ordering him around under the mistaken identity of a camp servant. This saw him caged with the mabari hounds, delirious and ill as the beasts themselves, and the irony would later throw him into a fit of hysteria - thoroughly unsettling passers-by. Eventually he was stood from the straw bedding, given his sword and put with the trainees to their task.
Immediately beyond the gates of camp, Mahariel disappeared into the boggy forest. He felt the earth sing in his bones, skirting throngs of darkspawn, fleeing his chaperone's sharp bark of aggravation. The shems were tall, even the not-so-tall cutpurse, and every one had a reach much longer than Mathain's, and Mathain himself was weak and delirious and consumed with grief and did not just then feel like walking into a warzone alone with three strangers in the peak of health.
He gathered the vials of darkspawn blood by himself, caught sometime midafternoon in the middle of skinning a wolf.
"There you are," The fair-headed Warden had growled - stern and worried.
Mathain looked down at his field knife, then back up at the inquisitive stares of his bloodied comrades. "It's a wedding gift," He tried explaining, pale and overwrought.
It was a bone-deep, bottomless despair that gripped Mahariel when he woke from the Joining, and couldn't hardly remember how he'd gotten there. The one thing he could recall with cruel, exacting clarity; he was alone. His clan had given him away. His lover was dead. Even his fellow recruits had not survived the ordeal.
"Rise, brother, and be welcomed at last into the ranks of the Grey Wardens."
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