Where My Demons Hide

DAFFW October Challenge

By JayRain

Prologue: Where My Demons Hide

It was the coldest day yet out of Redcliffe, and Jowan could not stop shivering. He watched Cailan—no, King Cailan struggle to build the fire in the camp. Any one of the Arl's men would have done it, but the King seemed intent on doing it himself. Jowan huddled into the threadbare cloak a soldier had tossed at him and wished that he'd not exhausted himself conjuring the blizzard during their most recent darkspawn encounter; he didn't even have enough mana within to spark a small fire.

The King had freed him and taken him along because he'd be useful. So far he'd done his best, but now? In the bitter Fereldan cold their small contingent sat clutching their cloaks close to them and rubbing their hands together. Jowan swore several Redcliffe soldiers kept glaring at him. You could poison our Arl, but you can't light a fire? What kind of mage are you? They seemed to say.

It was a question he'd often asked himself in the long nights staring into the darkness of the apprentice dorms while his friends and peers seemed to move on in their studies, becoming Harrowed or Tranquil, but at least becoming something, while he, Jowan, just waited.

"Maker's balls!" King Cailan swore, falling back into the slush and waving his hand about while a thin column of smoke rose from the pile of wood. But his eyes were wide with excitement, and he scrambled to right himself and blow into the weak fire. "My father would hardly believe it," he said, glancing at Jowan, his face illuminated by the flames' orange glow. "He always tried to teach me how to build a fire, and I always blew it off. And now here I am, starting a fire." He grinned.

It was infectious, and Jowan grinned back. "In the Tower they had to find ways to stop us from starting fires," he said. "Me especially."

King Cailan raised an eyebrow. "I never figured you for a pyromaniac," he said.

"I'm not. I just couldn't control it very well. Just one more reason they were going to…" He looked away from the fire, from the king, from everything. Just one more reason he was a failure; just one more reason he wasn't good enough to be who he was born to be.

"You don't really talk about life in the Tower," the king observed.

"I don't think you'd really enjoy the stories, Your Majesty," Jowan said, still not daring a glance at him. He was grateful to the king for freeing him from the Redcliffe dungeons, and rescuing him from Lady Isolde's cruel torture. But he still wasn't sure how he felt about the king himself. Some days King Cailan was pensive and grim, every inch the king determined to save his country. Most days he was like this: a boy trapped in a man's body, learning as he went, and finding delight in his small victories. He was nothing like the senior mages and the templars said a king should be.

"I've told you before. You and everybody else. Just Cailan. Kings have countries they rule. I kind of don't right now," he said. Jowan expected him to still be grinning, but when he finally did glance at him, Cailan's face was grim and hard in the firelight. "But when I'm king again, I need to know my country, and that means knowing about the Circle Tower."

He had a point. But where to begin? "It wasn't the best place," Jowan started, staring into the flames and hugging the cloak closer as a chill shuddered through his body. "I don't know if that's what you want to hear though."

"I spent the last twenty-five years of my life surrounded by people telling me what I wanted to hear. Or what they thought I wanted to hear, or should hear," Cailan said, surprising Jowan with the vehemence in his voice. "You ran, so it's not great, I get it," he said. "But… wasn't there anything good about being a mage? Pretty mage girls?"

Jowan wasn't prepared for the pinprick of tears behind his eyes, or the way his throat tightened or his chest clenched. He swallowed. "There were some of those, yes," he managed. "Though… none ever looked at me as anything other than another apprentice."

Cailan studied him with those eyes of his that seemed to see more than he ever let on. More and more it seemed that he'd gotten used to being underestimated, and used it to his advantage the best he could. "But another girl did. Not a mage," Cailan guessed. He leaned forward, one arm resting on his knee. "I could use a good story," he said, face softening.

"It doesn't have a happy ending," Jowan warned.

"Good stories rarely ever do." Cailan was watching him intently, and Jowan, who had never been very good at dealing with unwanted attention, squirmed. He smiled, but he wasn't going to let Jowan go without hearing a story.

Jowan turned his eyes to the soft orange glow of the flames and inhaled the smoke: it was pungent and earthy, nothing like the hazy spices of incense, yet it still brought him back to afternoons in the chapel and mornings stolen away… "The demons in the Fade aren't the ones with the real power," he began.

Cailan tilted his head to the side. "So where does a blood mage find the most powerful demons?"

"The past."

Author's Note: For the Dragon Age Fanfiction Writers Group October challenge, we had to pick a song and write a story based on it. This is a story I've wanted to write for a long time. I came to really enjoy working with Jowan in Returns A King, and looking at his background and his flight from the Circle is something I wanted to explore.