A/N: So, DiT is definitely ON HOLD. That muse has fled and been replaced by another, the product of my most recent playthrough: Female Cousland! :D Please, please PLEASE read and REVIEW! I'm really in love with this one, and I have lots of neat ideas for the story. I've done tons of research into the lore and stuff!

Thanks a million!

-AA

Disclaimer: Bioware's nouns, babe. Bioware's.

It began just like any other day.

Soraya Cousland woke, on her back, staring at the elegantly embroidered canopy above her head.

"Oh, Maker," she moaned, throwing an arm dramatically over her eyes, "not another day!"

There was a tiny bit of light filtering through cracks in the heavy blue and gold bed-curtains. The thick, Orlesian silk comforter weighed down on the young woman like a ton of bricks. The gigantic pillows that she was lying on were so soft and plump and squishythat she felt like her head was slowly sinking. Everything about the room Soraya was in could be described as "plush".

There was a clinking of silver as the maid set down the breakfast tray, presumably on top of Soraya's desk.

"Winnie, is that you?" she asked, not moving an inch from her position.

"Yes, my Lady Cousland."

"You didn't put that down on top of my stuff, did you? And dispense with the Lady nonsense."

"No, I did not put it down on top of your dolls."

Soraya sat up, short-cropped red-brown hair sticking up wildly, as her cheeks colored.

"They are not just dolls!"

"Pardon me, but they don't look an awful lot like anything else"

"They are painstakingly crafted, unique and individual works of art!"

"Yes, my Lady. I think I'll take my leave now, if you'll dismiss me."

Soraya sighed, suddenly feeling spent.

"You're dismissed, Winnie."

"Thank you, my Lady."

The youngest Cousland slumped back on her overstuffed pillows with a groan, picking one up and smacking it down on her face.

"Maker, Rohlan, I can't do anything right. Now even the servants will hate me." she lamented, invoking the name of the man who had practically raised her for the last seven years.

"I'm completely useless here."

At the age of sixteen, Fergus Cousland had followed in his father's footsteps and gone to Alamar to train. Soraya, at the time only eleven, had raised such a ruckus in protest of being kept home that her parents had agreed to allow her to go as well when she was of age so long as she stopped threatening to break priceless family heirlooms.

They had assumed that she would forget the whole thing when she got a little older and came into her more womanly attributes, so they settled back into their daily routine.

Instead, on one of his visits home (the training was put on hiatus from mid-Harvestmere till the end of Wintermarch every year), Fergus had brought his little sister a handcrafted, exquisitely detailed miniature bow.

That was the end of any peace of mind their poor mother had hoped to gain as her children grew up.

Soraya quickly became an adept archer using the arrows her father had blunted with cotton. She practiced day and night - so much so that the Teyrn had a practice range set up near the stables. This was, despite the Teyrna's protests, actually quite a good idea, considering, as one servant put it, that "...them poor guards was going to go deaf, what wi' awl that fearful clattering of arrows on their 'elmets."

Once she reached the appropriate age, it was almost with relief that Soraya's parents waved goodbye to her on the ship from Denerim.

Now, they would be able to settle into their twilight years with their patient, loving son and his new family - he'd married at nineteen and produced an heir a conspicuously short number of months later - all the while expecting a matured, manageable daughter who was just as content as her brother with her lot in life to willingly return home in a year or two.
Yes. A suitable match would be made - perhaps one of the Howe boys, or that lad Vaughan, Arl Uriel's son - she'd give them plenty of grandchildren, and they'd be able to retire to somewhere near Lake Calenhad confident that their children and their Teyrnir would be in safe hands.

This was not, however, meant to be.

The residents of the city Alamar are a hard, tough bunch. Living so close to the island of Brandel's Reach - the fabled docking-place of every raider ship on the Waking Sea - can take its toll on friendliness. They are a suspicious, unforgiving, and utterly unmovable people. It turned out that their stubborn pride and complete disregard for both etiquette and courtesy was exactly the right catalyst to bring out the person behind the spoiled little girl in Soraya.

Her master, Rohlan Swiftdraw, did not stand for ceremony. His was a grueling, seemingly endless course full of insurmountable obstacles and impossible demands. But Soraya was strong, and determined not to go home in defeat. It took nearly the entire length of the eight-and-a-half-month training period, but the young Cousland managed to earn both Rohlan's respect and his willingness to train her further.

She turned seventeen on the twenty-sixth of Kingsway, and spent her birthday cavorting through the streets of Alamar on a romp of hard-earned revelry with several of the townspeople and other students whom she had come to call friends.

That winter, she returned to Highever a confident, capable young woman. Her mother suggested that she stay, but Soraya insisted that she had more to learn, and her father and brother were in support of her return. Considering the massive improvement in her daughter's behaviour, the Teyrna made what she would later tell friends and family - and occasionally potential suitors - was probably either the biggest mistake or greatest achievement in all her days of mothering, and acquiesced.

So passed the young Cousland's eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth years. The winters at home came and went, with Soraya always staying for a shorter and shorter period of time. She seemed distant, distracted, and almost melancholy when she was living at the castle.

One evening at dinner with guests, her father remarked that, with all her standoffishness, she seemed practically Alamarri already. She responded, to the shocked silence of all assembled, with a terse

"Would that I were."

and left the table.

When she turned twenty-two and came home with most of her long, burgundy locks of previously waist-length hair completely unaccounted for and remarked on the situation only with a shrug and a "Fits better under a helmet." to offer her mother in explanation, the Teyrna called a stop to the young woman's adventures.

"This," she said, staring forcefully into her daughter's narrowed green eyes, "is the end of that."

And so Soraya now lay in her chambers, hating the stuffy room, the stuffy castle, the stuffy everything after a full year of her mother's "re-conditioning" program of enforced noble attitude, surroundings, and activities - which most certainly did not include tearing through the countryside on horseback in your smalls on a dare, or really anything the young Cousland found fun or worthwhile at all.

She rose from her bed and parted the curtains, turning to fix her covers. One did not leave one's bunk untidied in the Alamar training camp, and she did not intend to lose the habits that let her feel as though she could take care of herself.

She had allowed her hair to be trimmed to look more tidy, but kept it short. She had refused to take on a lady in waiting.

But the Alamarri people had also taught her about something other than independence - they taught her of duty.
And here, in Highever, she knew she had one. To her mother, to her father, to her brother. To her very country. So, she had consented to her mother's desire to begin the matchmaking process in earnest, and, since Cailan was taken, the aging Teyrna had called in every contact and favor she'd had in reserve from her considerable political career until she had quite a list of possible husbands.

Soraya, for her part, was just determined not to pick one she didn't actually like.

At least, that had been the goal, before this thrice-damned blight had started.

She sat in front of her desk and contemplated her breakfast.

Father and Fergus will be leaving soon, she thought with a sigh, recalling the argument that had erupted when she had been informed.

"I should go, not Fergus!" she screeched at her father's retreating form as he backed hastily out of the room. She threw another glass pot of paint at the door as it closed, splattering the 400-year-old wall-hangings with more of the colorful liquid. Then, distraught, she collapsed on her bed and cried for the first time in years.

Her mother, unlikely as it seemed, was who came in to comfort her. She held Soraya until the tears dried up.

"He has a family," the girl whispered thickly, "I should go. I have less to lose."

"It's a man's duty to protect his family, sweetheart."

"Why can't it be a woman in stead?"

The Teyrna nudged her daughter into a sitting position, and smiled at her lovingly.

"Think about it like this: Men are put on the frontlines because they are hot-headed and yearn for battle. Women are left at home so that someone with sense is able to rebuild after they've broken everything with pointy sticks."

Soraya laughed. Perhaps her mother understood after all.

The young noblewoman picked at her food, finally taking a deep breath and drawing on some of her teachings.

Always eat, especially if you don't want to

she thought as she shoveled the food into her mouth, finishing breakfast in a few minutes flat. She then stacked the plates and silverware on the tray and left them on her freshly made bed to be retrieved by the maid.

Usually, she would take it down to the kitchens herself, but today she wanted to get some work done before she had to leave her room.

When Soraya was in Alamar, she had wandered by chance into a shop for childrens' toys. The owner had been uncharacteristically kind and jovial for an Alamarri, and had offered to teach her how to fashion the fascinatingly sweet-looking wooden dolls that lined one wall of the store. The young Cousland, in return, exercised the knowledge of fine stitching and embroidery that her mother and nurses had drilled into her as a child and made clothes for the dolls.

The toys were a hit among the children, and Soraya quickly became fast friends with the little ones of the city. When she came back to Highever, she'd seen no need to discontinue the practice, and had been making dolls to send back to Alamar as Satinalia presents.

She was just putting the finishing touches on the face of a little boy soldier doll - he still needed a little gold on his epaulets - when there was a polite rap on the door.

"Come in," Soraya called, not looking up from her work.

"My Lady Cousland," said a small voice, "Your father requests your presence in the main hall."

She turned and nodded to the young page, then put in the last stitch on the soldier doll's uniform.

"There," she smiled, trying not to think about her father and brother's imminent departure, "you're all ready for battle."

She set the doll down, slipped on a pair of shoes, and stepped out into the corridor.

This is probably to say goodbye, she thought, waking down the hall and through the castle, nodding at servants who passed her by;

I only hope that nothing goes wrong at Ostagar.