SPOILERS! This section of the story takes place after "Here Lies the Abyss" and Before "What Pride Hath Wrought". I've been writing this story under the assumption that you have played the game before. It isn't my desire to transcribe the game's dialogue, so I try to summarize those sections. At this point this story diverges heavily from the main plot. A lot of what goes down is extrapolating from a variety of tidbits through all three games that explain the name of demons, mages, magic, and possession. I took a bit of my own spin in this story, and I'm sure there's some rules I don't know about or just plain get wrong, so please forgive and keep reading.
Some parts of this story depict sexual acts, but I hope in a tastefully vague way (this chapter is totally clean). If you're not okay with that, then at least you were forewarned.
Trigger warning: Much of the this story deals with anxiety, personal demons, mental anguish, and human misery. I think a lot of why I've written this story is to try and communicate a reflection of my own struggles, but please know I don't write this to make those who are suffering feel worse. Instead, I hope to show that eventually there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it just might take your friends dragging you physically along the train tracks to reach it.
Please review! This is my first time ever posting to this site. I've written and drawn other stories, but this sort of blindsided me from nowhere. I'm just hoping others enjoy the story as I try to spin it out of my head.
LASTLY! I do not own Dragon Age or the characters, nor do I receive compensation for this work.
The sheer amount of unexplored territory in the Frostbacks always astounded Habrynn. Even if she followed the well-trampled army trails, it was a week's ride to the nearest major settlement. Now that she headed south without a destination in mind, she was coming to understand just why it was so difficult to eradicate all the brutal tribes who claimed these valleys and ravines.
Three days had passed since that night at the Tavern, and she had barely slept. The last Inquisition camp she stopped at seemed leery of her solitude. With a week's supplies packed on her mare Spectacle, she decided to avoid even the Inquisiton's dedicated encampments from then on. Every night her sleep was interrupted by whispers as if someone was in the tent with her, or a grasping hands pulling at her. Again and again she would awake, only for the terrors to dissipate into green flashes at the edge of her vision as she sat up, choking down a scream before she might attract attention she didn't want. After barely resting at all, she would ready Spectacle's saddle and packs in the cold half-light before dawn, and gallop away in the hopes that the next campsite might prove more restful.
*,*,*
"THREE DAYS!" Sera thought. She kicked a rock, and cringed after it bounced over the terrace in the main courtyard and hit the camp surgeon on the head. Sera dove into a convenient bush to watch as the grumpy middle-aged woman turn this way and that, shouting curses at her invisible assailant. Sera giggled despite her gloom, with a hand clamped tight on her own face to keep her complicity from being heard.
It was from the bush that she spied a tall woman sitting among the more recent pilgrims. The woman turned to the surgeon and said something calm and soothing, and the small horns at the top of her head became visible. Sera stared at the Qunari, transfixed.
Sera's thoughts returned to Habrynn, and she stood straight up from the bush angrily. She turned on her heel, and ignored the Surgeon crying out at her as she stamped off towards The Iron Bull. She strode up to him in the Tavern and grabbed his arm in what she thought was a commanding way, though with his great weight and size, she was barely able to move his arm. With just a small flex he dashed her hopes of impressively dragging him away.
The Iron Bull had a lazy look today, which Sera figured anyone else would think was just his usual nonchalance, but she knew it was two other things altogether. "One," She thought, "He's drunk. Not a good Drunk. Like, An 'I'm so sad I'll drink and people might not ask me stupid how-are-you-feeling questions'' … drunk. And TWO," she continued to think, "He's sad. Poor big soppy bull."
But what she said aloud while she tugged and tugged and finally put her foot up against his hip for leverage was, "COME OOOONNNNNNN!"
The Iron Bull sighed, and set his tankard down as her increased effort made it start to slosh. "What do you want, Sera?"
Sera let go of his arm and stood tall as she could with her arms on her hips. She swung an arm out towards the door dramatically and said, "There's another Ox- er.. Q lady, like you out there. Maybe she'd be some help?"
The Iron Bull stared at her a while, and then peered over to the Chargers, who were scrunched tighter into their dedicated corner than usual. They all peered back and shrugged. The Iron Bull finally shrugged, "Alright. I'm sure she's no one important, but it can't hurt."
"It got you up off your ass," one of the Chargers muttered, but Bull seemed unphased or deaf to their sarcasm today.
It was a short walk through the garden tunnel down to the lower camp. As soon as they neared the row of medical tents, the Inquisition Surgeon grabbed Sera right by the ear and tugged her aside to give her a lecture on where rocks should and shouldn't be.
Bull was left to find the woman Sera had been so excited about on his own. As he rounded the corner towards the stable yard, he noticed her immediately. It was hard not to, when she was more than a head taller than all the human and elven refugees around her. She turned to him, and walked straight towards him with a careful smile on her face. "Are you-" She began,
"Tammassran," He identified quickly by a single pointed pendant hanging around her neck.
She looked past him for a moment, and fingered the necklace as she spoke, "Oh. Once… decades ago, I was. This is just… a momento. The only small piece I kept."
The Iron Bull nodded. "Good. We aren't on good terms with the Qun these days."
"And I would have already tried to poison you if I was," She chuckled softly. "You're so hostile. I can practically feel the tense shoulders in your voice."
The Iron Bull, surprised at himself, apologized, "I'm sorry… it has been a rough year."
"People trying to kill you will do that to a man," She answered back.
Again, Bull stumbled to speak as she seemed to know what he would say. For a long moment, he pondered what he could possibly say. Before he could overthink, the woman reached up an ebony hand to touch his arm, and glanced away to the other side of him. He could see clearly in her eyes now that they were fogged and gray over dark green irises. She could probably barely see him.
"Please… I'm just trying to find my daughter," she begged.
The Iron Bull shook his head, "No other Tal-Vashoth here but me."
She furrowed her brows, "Her name is Habrynn Vertrande. She sent me this letter."
"Habrynn," Bull stammered, looking the letter over with incredulity. He had rarely seen any of her writing, but that was indeed the Inquisition's seal on the parchment, and Lellianna's cryptic, intricate code scratched into the very corner of the outer flap. An untrained eye might have even mistaken it for a bit of decoration to the note's edge, but Bull had seen it before, and figured it was either secret codes being carried on more innocent messages, or a way for the falconers she worked with to direct the messages along the branching network of handlers.
But he had never heard Habrynn use the name Vertrande before, nor had she said a word about her family. The past few days were revealing many things he hadn't expected from the Inquisitor, but for some reason, a small lie like a hidden name struck a painful chord amidst the current chaos.
"Please." Her lip quivered as she continued, "I'm afraid she may be in terrible danger."
"You… must know your daughter is the leader of the Inquisition. Some even say she's the Herald of Andraste."
The woman twisted the edge of her cloak nervously, and covered her mouth. "I had no idea. I thought she was just a mercenary. Perhaps an Apostate advisor. No… this is too much for her-"
Her arm had begun to shake with enough force that she looked like she might fall. Bull leaned in and offered an arm, and the woman clenched his wrist and nodded appreciately as he walked her to the Chantry's garden to speak more privately. Normally he would have brought her to the Tavern or his room, but a strange burst of shame filled him when he even considered bringing his lover's mother to his disheveled sleeping place.
"My name… the name I took on twenty-two years ago, is Ella Vertrande." She explained as the termor had subsided.
They sat in silence observing the wind in the ghost-bark trees, until Bull finally began in Qunlat, "You were of the Qun? Seemed like Inquisitor Adaar never knew anything about it… she was always asking questions that would have been obvious to me."
Ella flinched, "Why do you call her 'Weapon'?"
Bull shrugged, "It's her name. The name she gave us. I never thought anything of it until now."
Ella worried a lock of hair and frowned, "No… I thought I made it better."
Bull contemplated her reaction for a moment, before inquiring, "Made what better?"
Ella stammered, "I wish we had some tea… or something stronger," She chuckled dryly, "Perhaps we should have gone to your tavern. I'm sure you won't believe me… but ever since She was conceived… I've had visions of that child."
The word "Vision" stuck out amidst the Qunlat. The Qun did not believe in such things. The Qun was. The see what would be would only see the present. It was explicitly foreign to the language.
"Visions?" Bull glared. He was really getting sick of all the "Maker's got a plan for us all" that had been going around in the past year. Habrynn's ambivalent use of her title as a tool and not a religious mantle had been refreshing, even if her decidedly Andrastian cursing habits said otherwise.
"I… you have to understand. They placed her father and I together, but it didn't work. What should have been a few consummations became… months! But they were insistent. Her father, his name is Gerimonde now, and I were given quarters together. They wanted us to produce a child so badly." She reached over and gripped his wrist hard. Through the contact he could feel her shaking.
"That's very strange." He said. She nodded.
"I didn't intend to, but I grew to love him. We cared so much for each other that when I-"
"What visions?" Bull interrupted her.
"Oh, yes," She stammered. "I saw… I saw a child I knew was mine. Saw what they do to the Saarebas. And I saw-"
Bull sighed, "You saw the same torment every mage endures. You wanted to give her a life, I understand, but-"
"NO!" She gripped his wrist tighter, with a ferocity that surprised him. When he looked into her failing eyes he saw the commanding Tammassran that must have once been there. "No!" She declared, "I did this for everyone. I did not see her suffering. I saw everyone's suffering!"
*,*,*
Habrynn lifted her foot high, and then tentatively plunked it down into a deep snowdrift that came up higher than her boots. Spectacles had tossed her as she hit some obstruction under the snow, and though they had cleared most of the snowline on their way down the next valley, now the snow was wet and covering a layer of thick mud that sucked at her feet as well as the Mare's, making each step a chore to keep one's shoes on one's feet, and not topple over before the next step.
"Blighted bollocks, this is obnoxious," Habrynn cursed. She scanned the valley below again, and saw a great expanse of evergreens and little patches of wildflowers. Tiny plumes of smoke in the far distance told her that there were likely remaining Avaar tribe camps the next peak over, but this valley at least was probably a safe place to rest.
She continued down the slope one freezing, sucking footstep at a time.
*,*,*
"What are you talking about?" Bull grumbled.
"I saw a pillar of light, burning and absorbing everything around it. I saw that if I had let the Qun have this child…"
Bull's eyes grew wide. "You're shitting me-" He dropped out of Qunlat in his haste, "She would have destroyed Par Vollen?"
"Asit," She trembled, "tal-eb." It is meant to be.
Bull yanked his arm away and roared, "NO!" He began to circle around, "You are NOT telling me this! I will not hear you tell me that Habrynn is some… some second Kirkwall waiting to happen!" He loomed over her, glaring into her eyes, searching for an answer. "Why would you keep her if you thought that?" He grabbed her shoulders and shook, "WHY?"
Ella wept, and covered her face. "I loved him! The Qun would not have killed the child. They had some reason they wanted our child! I had to flee. When we left Par Vollen, the visions stopped. When she ran away twelve years ago, they began to come back!"
*,*,*
Habrynn sat down on a fallen log and let Spectacle roam the wildflowers in the small meadow they had finally reached. It had been hours, and it was all she could do to just sit and rest. She was too sore and tired even to eat. As she rested her head in her hands, she wondered again why she was still travelling.
"Why not go back?" She murmured. "I don't even know why I got so mad…"
The smell of seared flesh and singed wood came back to her. Chairs squealing on the floor. Eyes locked on her, judging her. Staring at her with fear and doubt. Condemnation clear in Vivienne's gaze.
"Right," Habrynn groaned. "Right, thanks, Habrynn… now I remember."
"Adaar," Her mother's voice whispered back from her memories.
A familiar crackle and warped groan reached her ears far across the empty valley. She grabbed her staff from her back and a fist full of lyrium vials from Spectacle's sides and charged forwards towards the rift.
"If I can do anything right!" She shouted, "It's close a damned RIFT!"
*,*,*
"So you're saying you've had visions that your daughter would become a living bomb for the past twelve years?!" Bull snarled.
Ella laughed through the tears, "The things I see, they aren't all like that. Sometimes she's fine, sometimes she's not. It seems, the less I can see of the real world, the more I see of her fate. The day the Breach appeared in the sky, they stopped… I thought she had died…"
Bull scrutinized her quietly.
Ella bit her lip as she whiped away tears and waiting for the tremble to pass. She whispered, "but then, a month ago, they started again. And I received the letter, so I knew she lived, but…"
"What letter?"
"She asked if her brother was a mage. I came to tell he's not, he's normal. I wanted to see her, to explain everything to her in person. Knowing that she is part of the Inquisition-"
"Part?" Bull guffawed. "Do you realize what the Inquisitor does?"
"I didn't know she was the Herald until today. You must believe me! She's in terrible danger if she stays near the Rifts. I don't know why, I just know-"
*,*,*
"Barrier," Habrynn recited, "Aura, stop them with with Lightning, Sword, then let the fire walls flow from me."
She dashed forward, knocking back branches and jumping over washed out roots as she kept the green glow in her sights. Brilliant blue energy streamed behind her as the barrier spell washed over her as she ran. "Barrier, Aura, Lightning, Sword, fire. More sword. More fire," She recited again, and chugged down the first Lyrium potion. She felt a warm rush tingle towards her toes and up through her horns, making her feel like three days without sleep was nothing. Making her feel alive.
She smiled giddily, and burst through the final swath of branches and stuck the ground with her staff as she landed. Shockwaves of lighting arched through the shades, and as she looked up, she counted two wraiths and a single spindly terror. She powered through them as best she could with her spell blade, and concentrated hard on the rift as she counted the seconds.
"One, two, three," She whispered, and the energy burst into a wave around her. "Four, five, six," she counted as she paced around the rift while it arced out raw fade energy, shattering the ground where she had been moments before.
"Seven, eight, nine-" She growled, and held a dispersion spell in her mind as circular summoning points bloomed all around her, "TEN!" She shouted, and dispersed the two wraiths nearest her and reinforced her barrier as a new wave of shades descended.
She held the barrier through ground teeth, trying not to contemplate the possibility that one would attack with just the right harmonic to disrupt her effort to collapse the rift with a straight shot of Anchor energy.
The rift burst open and levelled the shades around her with raw fade energy again, and a strike of her staff against the ground brought fire roaring up all around her, and the shrill cries of the spirits disappeared back into the rift once more.
She stood back up, panting out another count, "Seven, eight… nine…" And a deep chiming note raised her eyes to the rift, which expelled a small halo of energy, and then relaxed to a play of lights like wheat fluttering in the wind. Holding up her left hand, she felt into the rift, pulled the disparate energies together, and tugged hard until she felt the weave of the universe snap back into place.
She drew in a breath and smiled for a moment. Though she was shivering now with sweat and mud caking her body, the world was a little bit safer now. Her eyes opened slowly as energy began to crackle around her again. Right in front of her where the rift had just closed, a new spark of energy began to grow, and her left hand throbbed in time with it.
She held up her hand, and began to back away. "No," She gasped. "No, no… this isn't how rifts work! CLOSE, DAMNIT!" She thrust her hand back again, but instead of the point of light shrinking, it exploded with a crackling shriek of energy that knocked her on her back.
*,*,*
Ella screamed, and fell to her knees, clutching her head. "No! Where is she! Take me to my daughter!"
Bull backed away as the Chantry sisters began to shuffle over with concerned faces and well-meaning intention glinting in their eyes. Bull could only shake his head in confusion, "We don't know!" Then he shouted at her and the Chantry Sisters who were starting to crowd in at the same time, "What's wrong? Help her! What's happening?!"
"It's too late!" was all Ella could sob between bursts of pain.
*,*,*
Habrynn's boots slid in the mud as she staggered to her feet again. All around her, the meadow had been blasted back, revealing carbon where dirt had been, and disjointed rocks glowing green like unnatural coals. Where the rift had been before, a window into the Fade cracked ever-wider in front of her. A dark, hungry chasm expanded out ahead of her, the same landscape that the Nightmare ruled. Terror weakened her, and she stumbled backwards.
"NO!" She screeched. "No! I'd rather be dead!" She chugged another lyrium potion, and a then her last, throwing the glass vials into the void defiantly. "You," she raised her left hand, even though pain shot through it and expanded into her chest. "WILL," she opened her fingers, willing the energies to meet.
"CLOSE!" She snarled. A green pulse shot from her to the void, and everything around her seemed to slant sideways, like the world was falling away. Her vision flicked black, then brilliant green, then pale blue. For an instant she saw the mouth of Nightmare's realm grow like it was swallowing her whole, and then she was falling past mirrors, disjointedly angled around her, casting back green and shadowy scenes that made Adamant seem cheerful by comparison. She crashed through glass and the veil seemed to shatter around her, cutting through her robes and leaving ribbons of blood threading through the freefall around her.
Then she was lost.
*,*,*
"Too late," Ella whimpered, and then went completely limp into the arms of the Sisters who were already whispering amongst themselves and shouting orders to their fellows in the Chantry. Bul paused to watch them fuss and carry her away to the healer's tents, feeling a deep coil of unease tighten in his stomach.
The Iron Bull left Habrynn's mother in their care and raced to the south facing wall of Skyhold, urged on by a fear he hadn't felt since the siege of Adamant. It seemed like all of Skyhold was growing quiet. As he sprinted up the stairs, he started to notice how even his armor, his clothes, his footfalls grew deaf in his ears. Running was normally a rhythmic thing for him. There was always an echo of metal and hardened leather in each step, a second heartbeat.
He stopped at the outer wall, and saw that Sera was already there, gazing out into the Hinterlands with a terrified expression on her face from a ledge high up one of the watchtowers. At the distant corner he saw Cassandra also looking out from a distant parapet. Bull gazed into the forest as well, and in the early glow of sunset he watched as a thin plume of green fire rose into the sky and continued to burn.
"Saarebas," Bull whispered. He felt the shockwave first through his feet, just a tiny vibration in the stones at first. Birds flew out of the canopy before them, squawking and silently skattering in all direction. The treetops rustled like a wave, and then a force like a giant slammed into them all with a burst of screams and grinding metal. It knocked the wind out of him as it bashed him into the back wall of the parapet.
Through the ringing in his head, a voice cried out through a metallic echo, "..'m… s..rry."
He growled and clammered to his feet and saw Sera coughing from where she had been knocked to the walkway near him. He offered her an arm up even as he looked back to the green plume that remained far in the distance. The echo rattled through his mind again, louder now, "...I'm sorry.. f.. failed you all."
Bull could see Sera shouting at him. Her arms were thrown up next to her face like being louder would make him hear her. Anger as replaced by confusion. She obviously suffered the same effects as him, but Sera was never one to suffer anything silently. Gradually, the noise around them returned, and her cursing cut through the cacophony that grew across Skyhold as soldiers and messengers alike sprang into alert.
"YOU FELT IT TOO, RIGHT?" Sera grimaced up at him, and rubbed her ears. "It hurts. It's her, isn't it? Your chest's all burny and stuff too, right?" She coughed again. "Bleeding nug-humper, that HURT, though!"
Bull looked over to Cassandra, who was throwing off the attentions of several soldiers trying to help her up as well. He spun as Sera shouted at him, "That voice. It's Habrynn! Something… BAD… HAS HER!"
"Has her?" Bull growled.
Cole flicked into visibility crouched on an outcropping, watching the plume motionlessly. "She is torn, and tears the world to escape."
"Ugh," Sera shivered, "That thing is talking again."
Cole turned owl-like to Bull, and intoned, "The mind fights, and the spirit hides. The wolf hunts itself. You are afraid, not just of demons."
"Eyw," Sera growled, "Shut it up!"
The Iron Bull just glared at Cole, but said nothing.