After that, nothing feels impossible. The new Warden was a mage, Duncan was dead, Loghain had betrayed them all – so, Darkspawn knocking them out to feast on their innards? Naah, no problem. Being rescued from said Darkspawn by the creepy Witch of the Wilds shapeshifted into a giant bird? Tell me something I don't know. Being sent along with said Witch of the Wilds' equally-creepy daughter on an impossible quest to save the world? Child's play.

If he doesn't think of it like this, Alistair rationalizes, he won't be able to move at all. Might as well write a trite little note and go drown himself in the swamp. It would be simple; there's plenty of swamp. So he takes each new impossibility in stride.

It seems right that she – Verissa, her name is Verissa, and he's going to have to use it now that the bitch-witch Morrigan has joined them and Verissa isn't the only she around – leads their little group. Seniority be damned. He is afraid of too much, afraid of loss, afraid of leading itself (the last time he led, people ended up lost in the woods and he was missing his pants – no joke, he tells her, though it did involve ridiculous amounts of ale, and the embarassment of that story is so worth hearing her laugh again). Verissa, he's realized, is afraid of nothing. Another impossibility. He accepts it because he needs to.

It makes Morrigan make horrible thinly-veiled jokes about his masculinity, but that had always been an easy target anyway.

Verissa leads them onto Lothering, where he expects that they'll find horror and poverty and all sorts of doom. Doomity doom doom. What he doesn't expect is that they collect things. Normal people collect trinkets, or cats, or notches on their bedposts; it seems that Grey Wardens collect people. There is a dog (not surprising at all, considering she'd told him about the mabari earlier) with an unholy liking for cheese that rivals his own. She names the dog Fenharel. He thinks it is a bizarre and, frankly, stupid name until she tells him it's the name of some Elvish god. "I've always been fascinated by the Dalish," she tells him, scratching the beast behind the ears with startling tenderness. "The lore, the history, the way they practice magic outside the Circle..."

"You don't need to be Dalish for that," Morrigan drawls from her Corner of Creepiness, and he is grateful that they both ignore her.

"What would you have named him?" Verissa asks.

"Er...Dog. Very descriptive."

"Riiight. That's much better."

"'Course it is! I am a veritable font of originality, I am."

So he decides that the name isn't stupid, merely bizarre, and makes a note to look up which god it is the next time they get to a decent library.

Then they collect a Qunari warrior (fairly surprising, considering the man's been in a cage for over a fortnight and should be dead by all rights) who calls himself Sten. He does not smile. He does not, in any real sense, talk.

Then they collect a Lay Sister (very surprising, considering what little he's gathered of Verissa and Morrigan's thoughts on the Chantry) who calls herself Leliana and talks a lot, in an accent that reminds him all too much of the honey-tongued Arlessa.

Then they collect the news that the Grey Wardens have been declared traitors, and that he and Verissa have a price on their heads that is either impressive or horrifying, depending on how you want to look at it, and that they're supposed to be to blame for...everything.

And then Verissa takes the man who delivered the news by the throat and sends lighting through his spine until his skin is charred black and the scent of it chokes the entire room.

And that isn't surprising at all.