Prequel to "Somebody that I used to know". An Insight on a City Elf Warden's life and on the things that she learned that have made her who she is.
There will be two or three parts, covering the main games and the DLCs, including Leliana's Song.
Part 1: The Alienage
She is two hours old, and already causing trouble.
"She looks just like you", Papae says, and Mamae smiles and holds her closer, kissing her forehead.
She waves her chubby little arms, and her little fingers grab the first thing they can find, Mamae's hair, and yank. Hard.
Mamae yelps and laughs, and Papae laughs too.
"She's a fighter", Mamae says. "Kallian. My little warrior."
"She is just like you", Papae repeats, and somehow, he does not sound very happy about it.
He will never be.
"Let us hope that she will learn her place", Elder Valendrian says, accusing eyes glaring at Mamae, who stops smiling.
In the end, Kallian never learns.
She is eight years old, and flames are blooming like flowers in nine-years-old Neria's palm, and she watches with starry eyes, seven-years-old Shianni tucked against her side.
"Can I do it too?" she asks, full of hope.
"No", Neria says, smirking, and the flames disappear.
"Again, again", Shianni begs, clapping her chubby little hands.
It is unfair, Kallian thinks as she goes to bed that night. When she puts her hands in the fire, it always burns.
A week later, men in heavy armor with sword and flames engraved on their chests come for Neria, and drag her away in shackles. Her mother screams and screams and screams for hours afterwards, and people mumble and shake their heads and speak about curses and abominations and other things that she has never heard about before.
She cries, and Shianni cries, and Soris cries.
She wants Neria back.
Papae and Elder Valendrian explain gently that it is for the better, that someone could have been hurt. She does not understand.
It is not fair.
"She did nothing wrong", she sobs, and Mamae strokes her hair and lulls her to sleep.
"I know, da'len", she whispers. "I know."
Kallian learns anger, that day.
She does not know it yet, but it will never leave her. Not really.
She is ten years old when Mamae puts the dagger in her hands and shows her how to wrap her fingers around the pommel.
She stares at the weapon for a long time. She has never seen anything so beautiful. It is incurved and sharp, engraved with elvish runes. There is power here, in her hand. She senses it.
Its name is Fang. The Fang of Fen'Harel, and somehow, she hopes that the Dread Wolf is with her when she wields it. He does not frighten her. The Trickster God only hurt people in the tales that the Dalish tell their children at night, and she is not Dalish.
"Right through the heart, da'len. Never forget that", Mamae says as she hides the dagger under the floorboard.
Never to be seen. The Shem would take it. The Shem always take from the Elves what is precious and powerful and dangerous. Mamae says that it is because they are afraid.
"Your body is a weapon", she says, "the blade is but an extension of it."
And Kallian takes a wooden stick and swirls it in the air just like her Mamae shows her, and there is a proud glint in Adaia's eyes.
Kallian learns how to fight.
Papae disapproves. He thinks it will only bring trouble. He thinks that there is no need for it. Because, in the Alienage, fighting the Shems usually makes things worse. He thinks she should stay home and do useful things. Like cooking. Sewing. Certainly not running around with a makeshift sword, pretending that she is Loghain Mac Tir at the Battle of River Dane, chasing stray cats unwillingly posing at cowardly Orlesians.
Later, though, it will prove to be important.
She is fifteen years old, and Mamae disappears.
She is there, and then, she is not. They blame the Shems. It is the Shems. It is always them. They have taken Adaia, and they will not give her back.
Elder Valendrian says that this is what happen to troublemakers.
But there is no body.
Not yet.
The Alienage holds its breath and watch the sewers, the backyards, everywhere the Shems dump their leftovers. Just in case.
Papae cries alone in his bed when he thinks that she is asleep and cannot hear him.
Kallian does not cry.
She takes her wooden stick and beats a sack of straw with it until it spills its content on the ground. She closes her eyes and pretends it to be a faceless Shem. She beats and beats and beats until her arms are numbs and her palms bloodied.
Then she waits.
There is no body.
Her Mamae is not dead.
They will see.
They say she is a fool.
They tell her to grow up.
They tell her to mourn, then be over with it. Such is the way of the Alienage.
She does not listen.
She waits. Her mother is strong. She will come back.
A few weeks later, she is proven right.
Kallian learns hope, during her mother's absence.
She also learns to hold onto it. Later, it saves her life. Amongst other things.
She is sixteen years old, and Mamae comes back.
She is filthy, famished and skinny. Thin bones are jutting under her skin, her wrists are flayed and bleeding from the shackles that have been holding them. But she is alive, and that is all that matters.
She embraces her daughter and husband on their doorstep, and the Alienage watches wearily and wonders what is coming next. Some think that it is unfair. The bitter ones whose beloved did not come back.
Adaia does not say a word. She smiles all the same, laughs all the same. But her eyes are lying, and she weeps at night, when she is alone in bed with Papae. Kallian lays awake in the dark, listening to her sobs on the other side of the wall, and wonders.
"Your mother will speak about it when she is ready", Papae says.
Mamae never gets to be ready.
One bright Bloomingtide morning, she takes her daughter to the Market District, to collect some scraps left after the Fair, and they come accross a few Shems, drunk and laughing. One of them is bigger than the others, and his hands and smile and eyes are greedy.
"No", Mamae snarls, pulling her daugther behind her, and suddenly, in her hand, there is a knife.
"Run", she whispers, and for once, Kallian does as she is told and runs.
When she reaches the Alienage's gate, she looks back. But she cannot see her mother anymore. Only the Shems.
She goes straight to Elder Valendrian. Not to Papae, because Elder Valendrian has authority. The Shems know him. He can make them go away.
He does not.
He just bows his head and prays.
The guards bring the body back in the afternoon, beaten and mangled beyond recognition. Papae screams when he sees it. It is the first time Kallian sees her father cry in the open.
She hides with Shianni in her room while the Alienage's important people express their more or less sincere grief to her father.
Shianni is not talking. Shianni is drinking, from a bottle of cheap wine that she must have stolen somewhere. Shianni has been drinking a lot, lately.
Kallian takes the bottle from her shaking hands, and takes a long sip. She has not understood why Shianni drank. Not until now. Now she does, and she wishes she does not.
Kallian learns helplessness, that day, and she hates it. She drowns it in the wine. But she never forgets it. Later, when she is not helpless anymore, she will remember it, and hate it even more. But for now, she drinks.
There is nothing else to do.
She is sixteen, and she watches as they bury Adaia with haste, in the dark, so the attenders cannot see the few that is left of her.
Afterwards, Kallian lays awake on her cot and listens to the sobs her father muffles in his pillow, and thinks of the bigger Shem's face. She sees it clearly, printed on her eyelids.
Something is burning inside her, festering in her belly like poison.
Something that scares her.
She leaves her bed and lifts the floorboard, and Fang is there, waiting. She wipes the dust that lingers on it, and mouths a prayer to the Dread Wolf. Not the Maker. The Maker does not care. If he cared, Mamae would still be alive.
She replaces the dagger in its hideout, and waits.
He will come back.
Once they have had a taste of Elf blood, Shems always come back for more.
She does not wait long.
It takes him weeks for him to come near the Alienage again, but he does, and when he does, she is there, expecting him. She follows him through the city. She is good at this. No one pays attention to an elven street rat if they are careful enough.
He has a room, in a bleak bunkhouse not far from the Pearl. But he is too poor to afford their services. So he always stays outside.
She goes back to the Alienage, puts on her mother's prettiest dress, and hides Fang in one of the sleeves while her father is not watching.
Later, when she thinks back on it, she will laugh on how easy it has been.
It is so easy, to lure him in a dark corner with a smile and a wiggle of her hips.
It is so easy, to let him fondle her a bit, to ignore his foul breath and the greasy touch of his lips on her neck, while the dagger slowly slides from her sleeve to her hand.
It is so easy, to bury it to the hilt in his belly, again and again, to watch his eyes widening, his mouth opening on a silent plea for help, to watch him struggle and reach for her in pain and choke on his own blood.
It is so easy, to kill a man for the first time, and rejoice in seeinghis life drowning in his eyes.
Easier even than stabbing her sack of straw.
When she goes back to the Alienage, she burns the bloodstained dress and wipes Fang clean and hides it again, but the coppery taste of blood lingers on her mouth where it has splattered on her face. She licks her lips and slips into her bed and dreams of her mother smiling proudly at her.
Kallian wakes up smiling, and Shianni says that it is the first time that she smiles since her mother is dead.
"Feeling better then?"
Yes.
Absolutely.
No one ever finds out.
Kallian learns several things, in these several weeks.
She learns hatred.
She learns the thirst for blood.
She learns that revenge does not make anything right, but that it feels good.
She learns that she is powerful, because she has taken a life as retribution. Because she has been able to. And because there has been no one to stop her.
Later, she will be careful not to let it eat her from inside. But for now, she is fine with it.
She is eighteen years old, and she does not want to get married.
She throws tantrums like a child, yells, pleads, pouts. Nothing works. Papae dismisses her gently, but firmly.
"I once was like you", he says. "Then I saw your mother, and I knew that I would not marry any other woman."
But she is not her father and not her mother and she does not want to be a wife, she does not want to share somebody's bed, let alone bear his children.
Children.
Ugh.
Except Amethyne, who happens to be a sweet kid whose mother is never here, they are nothing but noisy, useless brats, running around screaming and crying. She does not want any of this.
She says it out loud. It does not end well. Everyone looks at her as though she has just been spitting a snake. Or a toad. Just like in the story.
Alas.
Despite her resistance, it seems bound to happen.
Kallian learns frustration.
She learns the want, the desire for another life that has not been planned for her since her birth, since the day somebody came out with the idea of the Alienage. She learns to yearn for a change that will likely never happen.
It does, eventually.
But as it turns out, it is rather unwelcome.
She is eighteen years old, and she is getting married.
They seem to think that marriage will tame her. That she will sit quietly in her corner and be a good girl. But they do not know her. They do not know about Fang, and the things she did with the man in the dark corner. They do not know about the taste of blood on her lips.
Her husband will never taste it.
She does not know him, she will certainly not give him that. Eventhough her father says that he is quite handsome, and a talented craftsman. She is not interested in handsome. She is not intersted in craft. She is not interested in anything that makes that man she has never seen and does not wish to.
Elva says that she is an ungrateful whore, and she punches the bitch in the face. Is it her fault, if Elva's husband is a greasy husk, and if her brats are the noisiest and brattiest of them all?
"If you have kids, you'll let me play with them?" Amethyne asks, innocent eyes open wide with hope under her blond mop of hair.
"Sure", she sighs.
A promise involving hypothetic offsprings that will likely never exist does not cost her anything. Right?
Turns out that she is the only one not to be overjoyed at the prospect. And Soris, but this is mainly because he is getting married too.
Shianni, for example, is extatic.
"You'll need a pretty dress", she chirps, and she will not stop pestering her about it.
She ends up indeed a pretty white thing that itches like hell. She wants to tear it off as soon as she is wearing it, but she swears that her husband-to-be will not lend her a hand. Not if he wants to keep it, anyway.
Marriage, perhaps, since it seems unavoidable, but he will be sleeping on the couch.
The fact that he is early does not change anything. Nor does the fact that he is indeed handsome and as nervous as she is and quite eager to make it, them, work.
"I promise to make anything in my power to make you happy."
He would make her very happy if he were to depart at once and never show his pretty face again. But she does not say it. She wants to. She does not.
There is a traitorous little voice in her mind that she cannot shut up that wonders if it would really be that bad to be that Nelaros' wife.
She has no time to dwell on it.
Thanks to the blasted Shems, once again, everything goes to shit.
Kallian is not sure of what she learns, at that very moment that turns her life upside down and her wedding day in a bloodbath.
She does not know what a Shem knocking her out with a big armored fist to her face can teach her. She does not know what she learns while she is in the dark and uncounscious, unknowingly dreading what she will see when she opens her eyes.
She still is not sure years later.
She is eighteen, and she is surrounded with corpses.
Somewhere, Shianni is whimpering. She cannot see her. She cannot think. She only sees the Arl's son's empty green eyes glaring angrily at her from where she has sent his head flying accross the room.
She did this.
She did this.
She did this.
There is a sword in her hand, a real one, not a dagger, and the air smells like shit and death and blood.
Blood.
Blood everywhere.
Red, splattered on the walls and on the floor and on her skin and on her dress, too. The pretty white itching dress Shianni was so proud of, thouroughly and utterly ruined. Just like her cousins's bare bruised thighs, soaked with blood too. Sullied. Defiled. Forever.
No.
She must not think of that.
It is better to think of the dress. The dress does not suffer, at least. The dress does not know. White has turned to red, and she cannot know whose stain belongs to the Bann, whose stain belongs to a random guard that happened to be on her way, whose stain belongs to Nelaros. The color is the same. Sticky dark red. She idly wonders why it makes so much of a difference.
Her betrothed's ring is digging in her fingers. It is gold. Pure gold. He made it with scraps, with love, with the coins he could have used to fill his empty belly. He made it for her. He did not know her, but he made it all the same.
He had been early. She now wishes that he had been even earlier.
Until death do part us.
Widow before even being married.
It sounds weird. Sad, even. That is it.
She is weeping, eventhough her eyes are dry.
For the boy that died for a girl who did not even wanted anything to do with him.
For Shianni's stolen maidenhood, taken with tears and pain and blood when it should have been with care and love.
For the last shreds of innocence remaining inside of her that are gone forever, as unsignificant as they were.
On herself, too, because there will be no justice and no future for her, now that Vaug...the Shem whose name she refuses to think of, because he does not deserve it, is dead.
Dead, killed by one of the very Knife-ears he has was planning to use for his own sick, twisted pleasure.
The irony is not lost on her.
"You killed them. All of them?" Shianni whines, trembling and hurt and lost.
"Yes. Like dogs, Shianni", she snarls.
And it is true.
There is no glory, no heroic deed in fighting for one's own life. There is no glory in going on a rampage, slaughtering on the way people that must have had families, children, loved ones. There is no glory in beheading some coward in fancy clothes begging for his miserable life and shitting himself as the sword falls on his neck.
There is no glory.
Only filth and blood and death.
That is what Kallian learns that day.
It is one of the most important lessons of her life. Moreso, because she thinks that it might be the last.
It is not.
Years later, when she takes the wedding dress out of her dresser, the stains have turned to a dirty, muddy brown. But then she looks at the golden ring still glittering on her finger, and she remembers the blood and the filth and the fear and the anger and the smell of death and Shianni's tear-streaked face, and her hatred flares bright once again, like embers on which the wind gently blows.
To be continued...