Note: Trigger warning for rape.

CHAPTER 2

How could I have been so stupid?

I wake up, bleeding and sore, and have no idea where I am. For a fleeting moment I am afraid that my eyes have been damaged, and then realize that the dimness and the flickering is because there is no light where I am save for a few oily torches stuck in sconces out of my reach. I feel naked, and not because I am clad only in my smallclothes—my weapons are gone. The door in front of me is solid iron, as are the bars I am penned within. The ground is gritty, hard stone and voices scream and choke, begging for mercy somewhere not far from me.

I am alone.

I should have known better.

When the Queen's maid proposed disguising ourselves as guards in order to rescue the Queen from Arl Howe's clutches, I had agreed, thinking it was the best idea. She somehow even had a guard uniform that could fit me, although it was still a little long in the arms. I asked Zevran, Leliana, and Morrigan to accompany me. The more humans, the better, I thought, and anyway Zevran and Leliana were trained in stealth like me. It is always a good idea to have a mage with you, and we could keep Morrigan safe between the three of us if it came to it. I would have asked Alistair as well, but Erlina insisted that our group be as small as possible.

But the disguise was meaningless the minute I set foot inside the estate. I should have known that Arl Howe would not be using his own estate in Denerim. I didn't remember much of the palace my cousin Soris and I had torn through last year, but I knew this place. And it came back to me in a rush: A distant cousin's corpse, sneering humans, screams and blood—and Shianni. Shianni, my spitfire cousin, my best friend, lying on a cold stone floor in tears, her face swollen from blows, her throat necklaced with marks left by teeth and callous hands, and bruises all up her legs where the shreds of her bridesmaid's dress could cover no more. She saw Soris and me enter the room and cried from her heart that she wanted to go home. And everything went red.

Shianni and Soris had never been touched; I made sure of it. I was between the two in age, Soris only a few months older than me and Shianni younger by two years. My mother had told me once that she was training me to fight so that, one day, if it came to it, I could keep them safe. But I had to keep them safe sooner than I knew how to fight off humans three times my adolescent size. I intervened one day before a young lord could drag Soris off the way I knew he planned to, and as scared as I was at thirteen years old, I endured the heavy breaths and thick hands and thought that this was what my mother meant when she said I would keep my cousins safe. I quickly learned how to take my mind elsewhere while it happened, my thoughts always turning to my cousins' faces. Every tongue rammed down my throat meant one less in theirs; every bruise on my hips and wrists and neck meant none on them. They knew it was happening, and I knew that that hurt them. But they never knew I did it for them, because I also knew that that would hurt them even more, just as I had hurt when Mother took the strikes meant for me. I wanted them to stay happy and strong. We lived miserably, but no misery would touch them.

And it was gone, gone, all gone. Leaking from Shianni's eyes and draining from Soris's face. My wounds had never been.

So I killed Bann Vaughan and his cronies, used what Mother taught me to slit their throats like the pigs they were. I watched them bleed out at my feet. I put my wedding doublet on Shianni and Soris found her some pants to wear, and we took her and the other survivors home. And when the guards came, brandishing their weapons and demanding to know who was responsible, I stepped forward before Soris could say anything.

The Joining ritual says that you become a Warden the moment the chalice touches your hands. In my mind, I became one the moment I stepped foot outside of Denerim.

But it hadn't been enough.

I knew the very first guard we encountered. He had been in the Bann's employ for a few years, and was a regular in the alienage. Maybe he had been off duty that day a year ago, because I know I wouldn't have spared him if I had seen him then. He stared disinterested at all four of us before he suddenly seemed to focus on me, and somehow I knew with every fiber of my being that he recognized me beneath the helmet and the armor.

For a moment, I couldn't breathe. Every time he followed me behind Alarith's store, he would hold his sword to my throat, as if it wasn't enough that I had already promised I would not run away or fight back and never did. Him, I associated with shallow breaths and trying to stay as still as possible.

But I had a sword now, too, and his was still sheathed at his side. I realized too late, while his head rolled across the floor, that it was not possible for him to know who I was beneath all of that armor. But it meant nothing; our disguises were useless to us now.

Leliana was horrified. Morrigan seemed amused. Both said that I was not acting like myself. They did not know how wrong they were. This is the part of me that has roiled beneath the surface for the past year, restless with the knowledge of unfinished business, unsatisfied and thirsty.

And Zevran? He said nothing at first. He must have had an idea, even though I still have not told him much about the alienage. He just looked at me as I tore the helmet from my head and threw it at the man's corpse. He was all half smile and lazy eyes again, and I could not meet his gaze for very long. Then he suggested that we stash our disguises so that we would at least have a fighting chance with our own armor and weapons. I agreed.

We killed every last guard we came across as we worked our way to the Queen. It was too easy. I laughed every time the death belonged to a human I knew. This happened at least five times, and even Morrigan sent me a questioning look at the fifth.

The Queen was trapped behind an ensorcelled door that Morrigan could not break open. On the hunt for the mage responsible, we found ourselves in the dungeon, face-to-face with Arl Howe himself. He had a rat's face and knew I was one of the Grey Wardens, and seemed to care about nothing else—not about the dead bodies piled high in one of the rooms we passed by, or Zevran hovering behind me, or the plague in the alienage, or that the man he had aligned himself with for power's sake had left his king and an entire army to die at the hands of a darkspawn horde.

I killed him, too. An Arl is no different from any other human in the end. He said he deserved more. No, he didn't. Not from me.

We freed the Queen and made our way straight for the estate's front door. Leliana asked me if I wanted to pause a little, just to breathe, but I ignored her. My head buzzed and I felt unstoppable; no human could withstand my blade that day.

No human except for the small army Loghain sent to stop us, apparently. Why didn't I try to talk to them? At any other time, I would have—but not this time, not with everything behind a cloud of red and my gut singing for more. I recognized the woman at their head—Ser Cauthrien—she had been at Ostagar, too, by Loghain's side. She was just as responsible as her master. Just another human playing with lives like they are pawns on a chessboard.

It was a mistake to attack them. I should have realized it, with the room lined with archers and two mages at the door, and Ser Cauthrien charging right at us with her damnably huge sword. Morrigan got both of the mages before she was thrown off balance by a bolt straight to her shoulder. A guardsman rushed forward and cracked her head with the pommel of his sword. She collapsed as surely as if he had cut her strings. Leliana had tried to block the bolt before it hit Morrigan, but could not get there in time before two more pinned her to the wall. The same guard who took out Morrigan turned and slammed Leliana's slender body with his shield, and something popped and crunched as she stopped struggling and went still. And Zevran—I do not know what happened to him, because Ser Cauthrien was swinging at me and I had bolts bristling in my sides and one stuck straight through my left hand because I had been stupid enough to try and block it, and all I remembered then was turning my head and seeing a floor rushing too close, too fast.

Oh, Maker. What if they are dead? Is that why I am alone? I've failed them all. I shouldn't have led the mission. Denerim was an emotional trap waiting to explode in my face, with triggers around every corner and flashing on the point of every sword, and in every sneering eye and twisted lip. I knew it, but no one else did. They thought I would be the same Grey Warden they had come to know, and had no idea that inside Denerim's stone walls I was no longer their Warden—I was only Daen Tabris of the Denerim alienage, desperate and miserable elven trash through and through. No matter what becoming a Grey Warden has changed in me, it cannot change this.

Blessed Andraste, please, please, let them all be alive and under Wynne's watchful eye. Don't let any of them pay for my mistakes, least of all Zevran. Their only mistake was following a gutter rat with even less sense than his own dog.

I am not as alone as I thought I was. The cell beside me holds a human in its fist, his beard gnarled and gray. I do not know when he has last seen the light of day. His skin is as pale as a fish's belly beneath the light of the torches and his eyes say that he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. I do not want to know why he is here next to me, although I tell him why I am here when he asks. Let that be a warning to him.

"Where am I?" I finally ask.

"Fort Drakon," he replies.

I blink in confusion. Fort Drakon is a symbol of Denerim, a towering Tevinter structure that represents power and awe, not a torture chamber. But his answer is as good as any, and the location hardly matters in the short term, other than telling me which direction I would have to run in to find my way home again. And I would have to go home, back to the alienage where I belonged—no one would want me in the fight against the Archdemon now. Alistair could be the Grey Warden Ferelden needed, and be far better at it than I. He has changed since we met his sister, and I think it is the change I have hoped to see in a good man who might one day be king.

I force myself to look around in calmness. I am bruised and sore, but there are no arrows in me and I have been bandaged, if not healed entirely. It means that they intend to keep me disabled, but at least they also want me alive. It might also mean that my voice is meant to join the screams from somewhere beyond the cell door, but at least I am not dead yet. And I have no intention of waiting here, only to find myself on a torture rack in an hour.

There is a clink of bootheels shifting against the ground and the sound of armor joints rattling together. I peer through the bars of my cage and spot our guard—only one man, stifling a yawn. I do not question my luck. His face is bored and says that he has been given a duty only the lowest ranked peons receive: Guarding defenseless prisoners who are going nowhere any time soon. All he has to do is hold the keys and make sure we are not doing anything strange, such as trying to escape. I do not know why he tolerates a job such as this.

He sees that I am awake and eyes me, licking his lips nervously.

Ah, but I know that expression. I have seen it many times before, in faces that wandered through the alienage, staring like they are at a butcher's hunting for the perfect cut of meat for dinner. He licks his lips again and I know what I am going to do. I wish I did not have to do this, but it is what I know, and it is a good thing that Zev and the others are not here to see it. He might understand, and would probably even appreciate it, knowing him, but it is already bad enough that they saw me at the Arl's estate. This, especially, is a part of me that I do not want any of them to know about.

I hang to the bars of the cage with one hand and rest my head on my raised forearm, and allow a smile to play deliberately across my lips. "Hello," I drawl. I am channeling Zevran and I have to spare a quick apology to him. "Bored?"

I do not know if he has been told who I am, but based on how quickly he approaches, it is not likely he has. Lucky again. I can tell that all he sees in the cell is a skinny, mostly naked, and very harmless elf. My captors probably did not expect me to come to so easily. I have my Grey Warden strength to thank for that, I suppose.

"A little," he says.

I tilt my head to one side. "Me, too," I say, and lower my voice to a purr. "And it's so chilly, too, when I'm all alone like this." Morrigan used that line on me once. I offered her a blanket and left it at that, too flustered to do anything else. She didn't like that very much.

Luckily, it works better on him than it did on me. He almost seems to expect it when he comes to me—he was probably told that sex with desperate prisoners is one of his little perks. It is too easy to get him to open the door and step inside the cell. My eyes note him shoving the keys behind his breastplate after he closes the door behind him, trapping him well within my reach. I look up at him through lowered eyelashes and ask him to take his armor off. He does. He does not take off his helmet, for some reason, but I can see that he is surprisingly young beneath it, and not much older than me.

His hands are on my arms and he turns me around and pushes me up against the bars of the cell. His breath is a wall of heat on my neck and has none of Zev's artful subtlety, and smells very strongly of tomatoes and onions and fish besides. Standard guard fare. The odor brings back buried memories of times spent on my knees in the dirt of the alienage. Where I belonged.

Somewhere in the fort, a voice screams for help. It is pitched high in desperation and barely intelligible, words bursting free with all of the force of steam shooting from a teakettle's pinched lip. It dies away into a strangled gurgle soon after it begins, so quickly that I wonder if it was only something I heard inside my head.

Perhaps it is the guard's youth that makes him so gentle compared to others. He could have grabbed my hair or made it harder for me to twist free in many ways, but he doesn't. I almost feel guilty when I slip behind him to lock my bicep across his throat, squeezing it until he stops struggling and goes limp. He will wake up parched and with a headache in a few hours, and naked in an empty cell, and will probably lose his job in the process. But a boy like him will find another in no time. And hopefully he will be smart enough not to take another guard position.

I release my fellow prisoner while I am at it, if only to spite whoever put me in the cell in the first place. He stands there looking down at me, bug-eyed, the door wide open before him. "Well, go on," I say, and hope that he has not been locked inside for so long that he is too scared to leave.

"I'm sorry you had to do that," he says.

I am taken aback and do not know what else to say. "You'd better get out of here."

He stumbles off in his smallclothes, shouting thanks over his shoulder, and I silently wish him luck. We both need it.

I still smell tomatoes and onions and fish on me and cannot wait to scrub it off. But for now, maybe it would add some realism to a guard disguise. So I inspect the unconscious guard's discarded armor and, in a cruel twist of irony, it is much too large. What I would give to have Erlina here now.

It seems luck is still with me in some way, however, as I find all of my armor and weapons inside of a crate by the door. They were probably going to move it somewhere else. I tear a strip of cloth from my undershirt before I put it on and use it to secure my dagger to my left hand, the puncture from the crossbow bolt in the palm too much for me to hold anything in it without help. In my right hand, I take up Starfang, and as my fingers close over the wrappings on its hilt, I feel whole again.

Except for the smell of tomatoes and onions and fish lingering in my hair. Maker. I wish guards would get fed something else once in a while.

There is nothing else for me to do except to stick to the shadows and search for a way out. I try to avoid alerting anyone, but this doesn't work for long. I run into a pair of mabari almost immediately and their barking brings the guards. I give up on stealth. There is some force at hand that seems to want to make sure I have a very difficult time getting out of Fort Drakon alive.

But I am fine with that. It is almost cathartic, the idea of fighting my way back home again. If I can survive this, then maybe I will have earned the right to give up being a Grey Warden.

I spin and behead a mabari and run up a flight of stairs to get some height on my attackers. One of the guards reaches me first and brings his sword straight down at my head—a common mistake, as I do not wear helmets. I am gone long before his blade touches me and by the time it nearly shatters against the stone staircase, I am on his back, shoving my dagger straight through the exposed part of his neck where his armor and his helmet do not meet. Guard armor always has openings at the joints. He staggers and starts to fall. I jump free and take my next attacker, parrying her first swing and taking her sword arm off at the elbow. She stares down at her stump and I axe Starfang's pommel sideways into her temple. She crumples immediately, her helmet dented.

The second mabari comes barreling out from the shadows and knocks me over, its giant paws on my shoulders and teeth snapping for my throat. I almost break my arm getting my dagger between its ribs, but it is just in time. The dog whimpers and jerks and I push it off of me. There are voices in the distance that do not belong to prisoners, shouting for reinforcements. I shoulder Starfang and set my jaw. Guards are always humans. Yes, this is fine indeed.

By the time I make it to the Fort's chapel, I am tiring and very tempted to go inside to lie down a little. A Grey Warden's stamina has its limits, it seems, and I am reaching them fast. I did not know how tiring it would be to fight alone. I feel blood dripping down my legs and gathering in my boots, and my right arm is wet with it as well. If Mikhael hadn't been so clever about Starfang's hilt and overall balance, I would have lost my grip on it at least twice.

I peer in through the open door. It is a typical chapel, lined with candles and benches, and complete with a sister kneeling before a statute of Andraste. The sister is bad news; I trust only one in all of Denerim, and this one is not she. I will not find rest here. I want to fall over in despair. I wonder if I will be able to lift my sword again after this.

I look up into Andraste's face before I turn, although I do not know why. I was raised Andrastian but never feel welcome inside a Chantry, even as a Grey Warden, the unease ingrained in me after years of getting chased away out of fear that I would steal something. My first close look at Andraste in a Chantry was in Lothering, and She seemed then, as She does now, to be at peace. One hand rests upon Her chest, over the heart She dedicated to the Maker, and the other rises with a flame balanced in the delicate palm, as if it is that very heart that She extends skyward for Him to take. The sight reminds me of our journey to find Andraste's Ashes, and my surprise at learning of Shartan in the Gauntlet there. His was the one riddle I did not answer correctly, the wrong answer spilling out of me in my excitement at seeing an elf. Alistair didn't let me live that one down.

Leliana told me a little about Shartan, later at camp. Was it out of love for the Maker that he followed Andraste, I wonder, or did the pain of his people win out in calling him to Her side? Hers was an undertaking only the insane or desperate would follow.

These are unkind thoughts. Shartan brought elves out of slavery under the Tevinter Imperium. No matter what his motivation, we all owed him that much. I cannot help but wonder how different my life would have been if his name had not been expunged from the Chant after the March on the Dales, if my family had just a little bit of hope that elves had once fought on equal ground beside humans—as they would soon do again, although without me among their ranks. I gaze at Andraste's tranquil face and ask for strength in finding my own freedom.

A familiar shout and a peal of laughter catch my attention and it is only a bruise on my neck that keeps me from spinning around any faster. What are Alistair and Morrigan doing here? And why have they not torn each other's throats out yet? I drag myself to the doorway and find them finishing off a squad of guards, Alistair resplendent in the heavy armor he prefers, Morrigan's hand aloft and ablaze like Andraste's. They see me before I can hide and the relief in their faces is palpable and undeserved.

"There you are!" Alistair exclaims, rushing forward. I want to collapse in relief at seeing his big grin, all thoughts of finding my way home forgotten. I had not trusted him when we first met, but we had been thrown together by fate and grown side by side in ways more lasting than even the evolutions between childhood friends. He is the brother I never had, the one I could count on to protect my back while I had his. We have our differences and I had a moment of mistrust after I found out he had decided it unimportant to tell me that he was a potential heir to the throne of Ferelden. But I forgave him in the end, and even felt a little hopeful about the future afterwards. With my brother on the throne, there was a chance elves would not be in the alienage for much longer. Maybe I would have a better life to go back to after all of this was over.

Unless he knew about how I nearly got our friends killed in the Arl's estate. Something inside me falls and I sway on my feet, the world spinning around me.

He puts his shoulder under my arm and lifts me before I can stop him. "I can walk," I manage to croak, but he ignores me.

"We need to get you to Wynne," he says. He turns and Morrigan is there, lifting a hand to my arm. It is still warm from the ball of flame she held in it only moments before, but soon it is warm with the calming light of her small amount of healing magic instead.

I look at her, her yellow eyes narrowed in concentration and thought, and my heart skips a beat. She is beautiful in ways I wish I could explain, her confidence and arrogance only increasing her wild allure in my eyes. But the love I have for her is very different from what I feel for Zevran, even if I had thought it was the same in its early stages.

"Are you okay?" I ask her, my voice embarrassingly creaky, like an old man's. I try to find a wound on her head, but there is none to see through her dark hair.

Her gaze flickers to me as she takes her hand away and moves on to my legs, deftly rearranging shreds of leather to find the cuts I bled from. "We are all well," she replies. "The Queen brought some of her guard back for us after Loghain's men departed with you, and the insufferable one took care of our wounds. 'Tis good that you are not too badly harmed."

"We were expecting to rescue you ourselves, not greet you at the door," Alistair explains.

"Is Zevran...and Leliana..."

"Leliana flits about Eamon's estate driving us all mad with her useless twittering, and your elf is recovering nicely," Morrigan informs me.

"Recovering nicely and nearly strangled me when we said he couldn't go with us. Maker, I do not know what you see in him." Alistair shakes his head. "Is that good enough, Morrigan?"

"'Twill hold him for now."

The world is fading away. They are all right. My exhaustion has caught up to me and my eyes can barely stay open. Alistair is moving, and every step feels like I am being rocked to sleep.

"Ugh, I realize this is going to sound completely moronic coming from me, but you, my friend, need a bath. Like, really. You smell like...onions. And fish. And really bad tomatoes. I guess the cooks here don't know the proper way to stew them, huh?"

I can't bring myself to care about how I smell now, or where the smell came from. Alistair can make even the Deep Roads seem like a stroll through the woods. I wish Soris was here, too. I could use one of his slobbery kisses and his comfortingly huge bulk between my arms.

I am adrift, and set all thoughts aside for now.

Daen is a bit religious. This may make some in the fandom feel uncomfortable, which I apologize for. I'm agnostic myself and I enjoy exploring the DA pantheon, but for this story I don't plan on raising the topic more than it is discussed here.

Until next time. -K