"Late as always," the old woman grumbled. She'd had a long, uncomfortable trip, and she hated waiting - even in Kirkwall's best teashop, with fawning staff and brightly-coloured cupcakes for company. The girl should've had better manners.
She poked at the lurid purple icing of a cupcake with a long fingernail. It rocked back on its saucer. "Ah... the cupcake fears the inevitable plummet into the stomach." She impaled it on a fork and brought it up to eye level.
Beyond the cupcake, a young woman stood in the doorway. So beautiful was she that a hundred poets could each write a hundred sonnets, filled with a hundred clichés (tight squeeze in a sonnet, but her beauty was so inspirational that scansion itself would bend for her) and spend a hundred days reading them to her a hundred times over, and even after listening to that much tiresome verse, she would still be beautiful.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" As she spoke, the sunlight seemed sunnier, the colours more colourful, the tables more tabular and so forth.
The old woman, who'd been staring at a cupcake that was already painfully bright before the intensifying affect of the new arrival, dropped it. "Show-off," she muttered.
"I'm sorry," the beautiful girl repeated, hurrying to the old woman's table and dropping into the chair opposite. "I had a few... difficulties getting out of the house."
"You don't have to be tactful, girl," the old woman said. "I don't like your husband either." It was a long-held and cherished grudge, but she wasn't stupid enough to hold it against the girl, who'd come into the picture much later. Besides, she'd nagged her husband into things before, and Flemeth had high hopes of getting the girl on her side eventually.
"I know," Andraste sighed. "But we don't have to talk about him, no matter what the Chantry says. It's been Ages, Flemeth – nearly five of them. How are you?"
The old woman shrugged. "Plotting and scheming, scheming and plotting. One of my daughters sent her man to kill me a few years back. I'm very proud of her."
"Have I ever mentioned that you have a peculiar attitude towards your children?"
Flemeth cackled – then took a sip of tea because it made her throat hurt. "Not that strange, girl. I steal the daughters and mould them for one purpose alone: to save my sons. The boys are mine, flesh, blood and scale, and I'll get them all dug up out of your Maker's prisons and safe, however long it takes."
"You've said that before," Andraste pointed out, and smiled a thank-you to the woman who'd just brought over her tea. The server stumbled back to the kitchen, temporarily blinded. "I just don't understand why you'd be proud that one of those carefully-trained daughters tried to get you killed."
"Because that's what I taught her. And that's what she'll teach Urthemiel, until he's old enough to remember me and his brothers and be a dragon again." Flemeth peeled the icing from her cupcake with an air that suggested she was flaying it alive and listening to its crumby screams. "You'll understand when you have your own children. If that old fool is capable of siring any."
There was a crack of thunder.
"I wasn't talking to you!"
Andraste wrinkled her nose. "I wish you wouldn't say those sorts of things about him – but I'll admit there are certain... disadvantages to having a purely spiritual husband. Still, we haven't been married very long. I'm sure I can convince him to experiment a little."
The thunder rumbled in the distance, as expressive of embarrassment as thunder could ever be. Mostly it sounded like indigestion.
Flemeth licked the remains of her cupcake off her talons. "Men can be very stubborn, girl. Gods doubly so. If you ever doubt it, try telling Fen'Harel it's time to let Mythal and the others out."
Andraste considered this while she nibbled on a violently yellow cupcake. Her husband would hardly be in favour – he'd rejoiced when Korth and his pantheon disappeared, and look at how he'd reacted to a bit of competition from Flemeth's brood of Old Gods! – but it would be nice to meet the Elvhen goddesses. If they were free, she wouldn't be stuck with Flemeth when she wanted the company of another female divinity.
It'd be good to get out of the house a bit more, too. The Bronze Bungalow could feel awfully small when her husband was sulking, and he'd been doing that frequently ever since she'd been killed. She'd suggested moving into something a bit bigger, but he said a Silver Suburb was just as likely to get trashed by magisters as his Golden City. The Bronze Bungalow was too small for them to bother with, apparently, and it was tucked into an unfashionable corner of the Fade where they'd never bother to look. They did get the occasional Rage Demon throwing eggs at it, but that was only to be expected.
And at least they weren't living in the Timber Hut.
"Close your mouth, girl, I'm not about to spoon-feed you." Flemeth peered over the edge of her teacup.
"Sorry. Just thinking."
"A dangerous pursuit. If you start to think, you may gain ideas. Perhaps even knowledge. Who knows where that may lead?"
Andraste waved her hand dismissively. As she was currently holding a half-empty teacup in it, the results were somewhat messy. "Save the cryptic mentor act for your daughters and the Dalish, Flemeth. I don't need it."
"Oh, of course not. Your Chantry is in perfect order."
She sighed. "Don't remind me. That hasn't turned out at all how I'd planned." Andraste bit into a cake laced with so much colouring it turned her teeth blue. "But at least I have a Chantry. Even the Tevinters ignored you."
Flemeth laughed. "And that's the way I prefer it, girl. I like my privacy, and I prefer not to be hearing 'By Flemeth's wrinkles!' or 'Asha'bellanar's horns!' all the time."
"You have a point." Andraste grimaced. "People swearing by your body parts are more tiresome than amusing. You know, I heard a guy say 'Andraste's knickerweasels' the other day? I'm not sure what a knickerweasel is supposed to be exactly –"
Flemeth snickered.
"What? ...oh. I don't even have one of those! They might've taken me a bit more seriously during the Exalted Marches if I did!"
"You would not have met with much success," Flemeth said. "Males are easily ruled by their... 'knickerweasels'. If they have them."
There was another crack of thunder.
"I will believe it when I see it," Flemeth replied, her expression dry and unimpressed by the blustering storm brewing outside. "And, no, that is not an invitation."
Andraste shuddered at the thought, then tried to wipe blue food-colouring off her fingers.
Their chat grew a bit more relaxed over the next few cups of tea and garish cupcakes, and Andraste was reminded of why she arranged or agreed to these occasional meetings – Flemeth was amusing company when she chose to be, and in some ways the old witch understood her in ways her husband never would. It wasn't mutual, but then Flemeth was much older and had never been human.
Eventually the door opened again, and four men filed in. Men looked unusual enough in the frilled, floral and fully feminine atmosphere of the teashop, but there was something about these that suggested they wouldn't fit better anywhere else, either. It might have been their eyes, green-gold and exactly like Flemeth's, or the unmistakeable aura of power that clung to them; it could have been the way that they had white hair and ageless faces.
On reflection, though, it was probably the fact that they were all incredibly weird.
"Ah," Flemeth smiled. "Hello, boys."
Andraste rose to greet them. The one with a full beard who mouthed 'Nice to see you again' – or something like it, the beard made it difficult to tell – was Dumat, the Old God of Silence. Who, of course, never said anything. Andraste had once seen him stub his toe; not a sound escaped him. He just mouthed 'Fuck it sideways and sandpapered with a Howe'.
The one dressed in a mish-mash of everything from full-plate armour to a crinoline and wearing a flowerpot on his head was Zazikel, the Dragon of Chaos. "Nice to see you again," Andraste said.
"Turquoise bicycle," Zazikel replied. "Shoe fins actualize radishes greenly!" His worshippers, Andraste believed, were crucial in understanding why Tevinter had never defeated the Qunari in battle.
"Toth," she said to the next man, who was even easier to place than the rest of them; the Old God of Fire was smoking. All over. He offered a hand to shake, which Andraste declined. She could feel the heat radiating from him, and she'd been burnt nearly to death before. As an immortal she probably wasn't flammable... but no sense in taking risks.
"Sorry," Toth said, with a sheepish expression. His breath filled the teashop with smoke, making it difficult to hear his next words over the sound of people coughing, yelling 'Fire' and fleeing in a screaming panic. Zazikel watched the exodus with approval.
Flemeth just chuckled, regarding her sons with such open adoration and love that it was completely horrifying. "This is Andoral; he woke since our last little chat."
"Pleased to meet you," Andraste said, although as a former slave herself, she wasn't very.
The Dragon of Slaves nodded curtly. "Have you looked around this city? There's some very... expressive statuary in the Gallows."
"Uh..."
Flemeth rose from her chair and looked at the empty counter. "Ah. No need to pay."
Andraste tossed some coins on the table anyway – enough to pay for their tea twice over – and ignored the old woman's obvious disapproval.
The dragons clustered about their mother as they left the shop and bid Andraste farewell, and despite the fact that they were all morally ambiguous at best and both crazy and evil at worst, she was envious. They looked so happy together, a family that had been broken apart (perhaps deservedly) and were finally finding each other once more.
A family.
She wanted that.
She wanted the pitter-patter of little divine feet about the Bronze Bungalow, the joyful laughter of little voices in the Fade. She wanted to chase them about the place with a broom for breaking dishes – and she'd have to find some dishes and a broom for that, not to mention a floor that things could break on, but she wanted it anyway.
The only question was how to persuade her husband.
Andraste wandered invisibly through Kirkwall, paying special attention to the courting couples and the families. In the hush of a summer evening, there were plenty of both – but whatever she was looking for, it wasn't there. She went into the Chantry, and was both amused and mildly disturbed by the giant statue that was supposed to represent her. The sculptor clearly had no idea what she looked like, either as a fighter or as a divinity, but that was probably inevitable.
He didn't seem to have had the slightest clue about functional armour, either.
More disturbing was the young brother with the receding hairline who was wearing her face on his groin.
Andraste stood and gaped, unable to tear her eyes away from it. The question 'why?' repeated itself in her brain. Her face. His groin. Why? Her face. Looking entirely happy about shielding his genitals.
It just... it was...
"Sebastian!" a woman called cheerfully, her low, smoky voice breaking the horrific spell of the groin shield face. Nearly naked, she sauntered past Andraste, a tall man with her and a dwarf following them both.
"Got a little expedition out to the Wounded Coast tomorrow," the man said. "Missing Qunari. You in?"
"It would be my pleasure, Hawke," the creepy brother said.
"Excellent," the man said, and after exchanging a few pleasantries, turned around to leave.
They got as far as the storage cupboards near the entrance before the underdressed woman stopped. She cast a glance at the cupboard, at the man named Hawke, and back at the cupboard.
That was all she did. Then the dwarf laughed and excused himself, the man pulled her into the cupboard and locked it – and by the noise, removed the few clothes she was wearing.
Andraste raised her eyebrows, impressed. Three glances with a particular expression, and that was all the woman had needed for a seduction.
Exactly the sort of thing she needed to learn.
Lightning split a sky that had been clear of clouds a moment before, and the deafening roar of thunder went on for a full minute, but Andraste was no longer listening.
She had a plan.
Epilogue
"Maker, no, Isabela. I am not listening to your confession again. Come back when you've repented of your sins, and speak to a woman no longer troubled by the desires of the flesh."
"Oh, do I trouble your flesh?" Isabela grinned. "Good to know. But actually I'm here for something else. Sebastian..." she lowered her voice, suddenly devoid of its customary playful sensuality. "I had a vision."
Every syllable he spoke dripped with pre-emptive regret for asking the question. "Why bring this to me?"
"It was a vision of Andraste."
"Maker, I did not want to know that!"
"Oooh, now who's got a dirty mind?" She thought about it for a moment. "I bet she'd be fierce between the sheets. The kind of woman who'll wage war to get what she wants, attentive to others' needs, good with a sword..."
There were some days he really missed alcohol. "Maker, have mercy on your servant and this unworthy harlot who would profane your bride..."
"Funny you should mention him," Isabela said, leaning forward. "Because that's what it was about. Andraste came to me in a vision and asked me to help her seduce the Maker." She chuckled a bit. "I gave her the usual advice – alcohol, skin, persistence – and she thanked me. Then I told her to come back if she needed any help, maybe a hands-on approach, and she said she'd keep it in mind."
"Isabela..." he groaned.
"Oh, I nearly forgot! She wanted me to pass on a message – your groin shield freaks her out and she wants you to stop wearing it."
Sebastian buried his face in his hands.
"But that's not the real reason I'm here..." the pirate said slowly. "I've had a vision of Andraste. I have seen the light of the Maker's Chosen, and it's really bright. And sexy. How do I get to be a sister?"