A/N: No spoilers, just vagueness and pre-release character study. Don't mind me, just trying to get to know my Inquisitor.
Virago
what we see, we see
and seeing is changing
(adrienne rich)
I.
She's six and on her knees in the dirt, spitting blood and tasting bile behind her own tears. Around her a circle made of feet and voices and she should crawl back from where she came, turn on her heel and run. Or get to her feet, get back into the fight. These are the rules of the forests and fields, these are the agreements of everything taking place on the long stretches of land beside the water.
"Let's throw her in the Minanter!" Fat Thomas sing-songs. His parents are farmers so he always smells of cattle and dung but he hits hard, hits fast, unrelentingly before the insults even touch the air around him. Yesterday, she knows, the templars came for his sister. "Minanter, Minanter. Throw her in the Minanter."
When she looks down there's a rivulet of red on the muddy ground; she tightens her scraped hands into fists and rises, swallowing.
.
.
And back home, Father and her aunts discuss apostates and the Circle at the dinner table like it is nothing more remarkable than the baked trout and the potato soup in front of them.
They drink their wine and speak with reflexive pleasantry about threats from demons and the laws of the Chantry and she plays with the food on her plate thinking about Fat Thomas and his sister who had tried to set herself on fire when she saw the chains.
.
.
She's seventeen and Thomas is one year older and they hide their lack of grace behind rickety barn-walls. He kisses like he hits, she wrecks him down on the ground and straddles him and for a moment they are nothing but children again. Ugly Evelyn and Fat Thomas, the only two children in the Chantry that never learned to recite the Chant of Light without stuttering.
.
.
II.
She's nine and her arm is broken but her spirit roams free and strong in her chest all the same.
A cursed temperament, her mother tuts. Bull-headed little girl.
"What is it you do out there?" Sister Petrina asks, a whiff of spices and oils surrounding her as she walks across the floor of the Chantry library.
Evelyn shrugs. "Different things."
It's not a lie. Yesterday they had competed against the waves and currents, dared each other to swim all the way to Brander's Reach before Jorah and Breanna refused, claiming the cold water would kill them. A fortnight ago, her arm broke – painfully, bloodily - in two different ways as they were horse racing through the forest; you'll have scars they had told her and she had felt a swell of pride.
.
.
"Yours is an old, wild soul, lass," her grandfather says; the fall of his hand is warm and safe on her shoulder, at the back of her head. "Keep it, always."
Grandfather is a scholar and a recluse, has no patience with people. He claims he has so little time left in this world and the right to choose how to spend it. Just humour him, Father sighs.
"Is it you, Evelyn?" he asks every time he hears footfall outside his chamber door. "Otherwise, go away."
Legs crossed and eyes wide, she spends the nights on his floor listening to the words she struggles so hard to read but never quite get. Grandfather has all the books at his command and his voice never tires, spiralling around her like breaths and blood, an invisible bond between them.
They share the same threads of unbridled curiosity, people say. Valour and stubbornness with just a splash of that family temper, flaring up like forest fires at the worst of times; only great fools can remain calm in a world of chaos, lass.
Grandfather knows how to read Thedas, how to frame it in winding sentences written in his slow, careful hand-writing.
When he died the following year, Evelyn says nothing because she has lost more than she has the means to explain.
.
.
.
.
She's nineteen and punished in front of the endless lines of Templar recruits.
Everyone is silent. Where there ought to be clattering of steel and boots accompanied by a soft murmur of voices, there is only silence. Nothing valuable can grow out of that overwhelming obedience, she thinks. No wars of importance can be won this way.
Perhaps she ought to be kneeling. But she's standing up straight, her gaze meeting the Captain's. He's shorter than her, his features sharp and angry.
"Templar training is a serious matter, Trevelyan."
"No, the world is," she says even if she knows he is not clever enough to make such a distinction.
:
:
.
III.
She's sixteen and wants to join the Grey Wardens.
One rainy day when the fog lies thick from water to land, there are Fereldan Wardens in Oswick, walking down the city square with the open glances that suggest they are searching for something.
"Recruits," one of them – the woman - tells her. Her face is strangely ageless and there's harshness in it though her voice is warm. "Can you fight?"
"I..." Evelyn blinks. "Yes."
The Warden offers her a quick grin, a flash of teeth lighting up her pale face. "You are welcome to come look for us by the harbour any time you like, my lady."
She wonders briefly at the title before she realises the Warden has that stitch of wildness in her gaze, too, the one that marked her grandfather, that marks her. Takes one to know one, lass.
"That is the blighted Hero of Ferelden, that is," one of the fishermen tells an old woman when the foreigners have passed.
.
.
"The Grey Wardens are hardly respectable," Mother huffs over tea cups and cake; her cheeks are flushed, her tone restrained.
"Crude warriors," Aunt Nora chimes in.
"I hear the Wardens in the Free Marches are recruiting blood mages now."
Evelyn thinks about the foreigners by the harbour and how they had walked tall and proud, seamlessly shoulder-to-shoulder. She thinks about how the woman had carried herself, how she had smiled and how Grandfather would have liked her.
Her fingers tap restlessly on the table, the blunt nails clicking against wood with an intensity that makes Mother frown.
.
.
She's ten and Aunt Hilde runs off with an apostate that recently escaped from the Circle. Father wears a permanent scowl for most of that winter season and by the time the roads are safe to travel, he sets off to Starkhaven to find her.
He returns alone, empty-handed.
"They are boarding a ship to Antiva," he says when he thinks only Mother can hear. "She's... with child."
"Will you tell the Chantry?" Mother asks him.
Evelyn remembers all the dolls her aunt has brought her from her travels before, remembers bawdy songs with words not quite meant for children and Thomas's little sister who is locked up in a tower.
She cannot stand to hear Father's response so she walks away.
.
.
IV.
She's twelve and practices shield bashes and blocking until her limbs are too sore to move and tears well up in her eyes.
Her body has betrayed her this long, hot summer. No longer the tallest in her crowd of peers, her straight and narrow lines have turned into curves that seem to spread out more for every day, making her ache underneath the breastplate. Everything seems heavier, like she will have to work twice as hard to win but she still beats them at running and jumping, still lifts the heaviest loads and complains the least.
"Shame about her face," Jorah whispers to Thomas as they drop their wooden swords on the ground.
.
.
Everyone in her family speaks only of Kirkwall, of mages and war.
Evelyn declares that she does not intend to fight any mages and Mother can't stand to look at her for the rest of that day.
.
.
She's eighteen and overhears her parents seal her fate.
"She is good with a sword," Father says, as though he's trying to comfort Mother who doesn't say anything at all.
.
.
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V
.
She is twenty-five but ancient, ageless and on her knees, spitting blood and dirt. Around her nothing but death. Nothing but death but she crawls to her knees, one hand clutching her right shoulder that feels wrong somehow underneath the heavy plates, the other reaching for her sword.
How could they die? So many of them so helplessly, so quickly. How can people die like a swarm of insects, like it is nothing?
So you could live, something answers in the void or in the turmoil of her own mind; she is no longer certain.
All she knows is that for the first time in her life fear storms her heart, the walls caving in like those in this ruin that is now a grave, this battlefield that has left them with little beyond ashes. And with fear comes passion, fury, determination, gasping breaths of humanity breaking through the layers of the impossible.
Her wild soul, tempered to resolution and steel.