First off, Anders hated boats.
Second off, Anders hated boats.
Third off, with a slimy tentacle creature from the depths of the sea trying to get a grope up his robes, Anders hated boats!
And fourth off, that sound that escaped him when he realized that the wet "tongue" on his ankle was not Brutal's nor was it a tongue? That was not a yelp!
His reaction after not yelping was to grab his staff off his back and jab the bladed end into the violet tentacle that had been wantonly violating his personal space. The tentacle stiffened before jerking back over the side of the ship, leaving nothing more than a translucent, viscous ichor in its wake.
"What in the name of Andraste's bountiful backside was that?"
Fenris cautiously peered over the railing, Aveline's sword in his hand. "Gone. At least for now."
Anders rucked up his robe to wipe his ankle. It was only a bit damp, but he couldn't seem to convince himself that it wasn't coated in some disgusting slime.
"Varric would tell me not to say this," Anders began, "but it bears mentioning that whatever was on the other end of that tentacle was probably very large."
When shouts arose from the bow, Anders considered that perhaps there was a good reason for Varric insisting that people should stop tempting the capricious forces of the universe with silly statements like that.
Together he and Fenris swung around to see tentacles as thick as a man's torso flailing over the side of the ship. Anders pushed down a tiny screaming part of his mind that wasn't Justice and which wanted to remember the Mother and broodmothers and generally horrific things about being a Gray Warden. He promised himself that he could have a small fit of the heebiejeebies when this was over, but until then he was bloody well going to hold it together. If he didn't, Justice would probably hold it together for him, and that did not always work out so well.
One of the tentacles wrapped around a barrel and hoisted it into the air, squeezing it so tightly that the barrel burst, spraying the deck and frightened sailors with fresh water.
Anders exchanged a look with Fenris and groaned. "Whatever you do, just don't glow."
Fenris practically dragged Anders into the thickest part of the tentacles. He swung Aveline's sword while Anders threw out what spells he could, cursing the exigencies of shipboard life for keeping him from his favored fireballs.
He used ice and lightning in place of fire. At sea, the lightning came more easily than ever, arcing from his fingertips to dance snakelike over the tentacles that shaded from delicate violet at their tips to darkest purple, virtually black where they disappeared into the water.
"Get them back," Fenris snapped to the captain.
Anders didn't spare time to wonder whether Fenris was warning him about the tentacles or about the mage. As far as he was concerned they could fear both, and he would show them why.
Most of the deck hands stayed, bringing out heavy cutlasses to help Anders and Fenris while the few noncombatants scrambled belowdecks to wait out the fighting. They fought with swords and with magic as tentacles swarmed over both port and starboard railings, blindly picking up anything they touched, some even wrapping the mast.
Despite his earlier musing on tempting the universe, Anders thought that the fight was going rather well. The tentacles tended to draw back when they were wounded, and so far the injuries on their side were relegated to bumps and bruises from tentacle swipes.
A scream from one of the hands alerted him that their good fortune was shifting. A tentacle had caught a deck hand in a grip around his legs and had hoisted him into the air. Anders winced when it squeezed and the sharp cracks of breaking bones cut through the shouts and grunts of effort from the defenders.
Fenris snarled something in Arcanum and dragged Anders behind him to close the distance to the tentacle holding the hand, incidentally dragging them into the thickest concentration of the things.
"Bastard," Anders hissed, ducking as one swung just above his head. That close he could see that the suckers on the thickest parts of the tentacles were as large as his face.
"Complain later," Fenris snapped. "Ice now." He used his left hand to indicate where the tentacle lay over the railing.
Anders felt a flash of surprise that Fenris was actually requesting the use of magic, but that was another thing that could be given consideration later. On a more immediate basis, he followed Fenris' instructions, casting a wave of biting ice out to slow the tentacle's motion, giving Fenris time to gather himself for his attack.
It must have been muscle memory that led Fenris to grip Aveline's longsword in two hands and attempt to leap into the air to bring his weight down behind a blow aimed to shatter the ice Anders had called into being. How else to explain how he forgot that there was a full-grown human man attached to him at the wrist?
Anders was thrown into the railing, the impact driving the breath from his body in a grunt that included the awareness that something had cracked, but that was something that would have to queue up with things that could be considered later. He fumbled to keep hold of his staff when a thinner tentacle slid across it and jerked. Fenris was still striking at the ice, his body was screaming for attention to its pain, and the tentacle was simply much stronger than he was. He lost his staff and then lost his footing when another flailing tentacle found his ankle and hoisted him into the air feet first, cracking his head against the railing along the way.
Some people might have worried about drowning or even about the fact that his robe was falling toward his face, displaying the fact that he had always preferred going au naturel with robes. No, his thought process had more to do with his regret about not wearing boots that day. I am never going barefoot again.Blame the blow to the head.
He knew when Justice took the reins – the ringing in his ears receded and the world took on a blue tinge past the Fade light that filled his eyes. He was still there, just as Justice was always still there, but now he took the back-of-the-mind role while Justice tried to keep them both alive.
His thoughts took on such clarity when he was Justice. In some ways, it was so much simpler. Justice did not care about his boots or his currently exposed bits. Justice cared about the important things, and at that moment, survival was important because none of their other goals could be achieved if they were dead.
Justice saw Fenris dropping the sword to get a grip on the railing to keep Anders from being hauled overboard, which would have inevitably dragged him along into the deep thanks to that damned chain. Justice saw the deck hands finish cutting through the frozen tentacle to allow their comrade to drop to the deck. He saw the others still hacking at the diminishing number of tentacles, he saw Brutal rising up on his back legs to rake his front paws over a tentacle before he closed his jaws over a tip that was barely thicker than Anders' wrist.
It was all there, held in a crystalline moment, then Justice shouted out the words of a spell that Anders would never have tried to cast staffless and with his bare backside pointed at the sky, not to mention with an elf chained to one of his arms. Calling lightning was quite enough bother when on two feet on solid ground.
Lightning flashed out from his fingertips, dancing down the length of the tentacle, jumping from one to the next and leaping to a third. For a moment even with Justice riding him, he screamed when the tentacle spasmed, breaking – no, crushing– his ankle, but it also dropped him to the deck, which at least eased the blaring pain in his wrist where the manacle that bound him to Fenris had been pulled tight while Fenris had kept him from being dragged into the water.
Justice paid no attention to Anders' thought that they were going to have to thank the bastard later. He was occupied with pushing a flash of blue healing magic into their ankle to let him stand, also ignoring Fenris, who was retrieving the longsword and growling oaths in Arcanum.
Once upright, Justice ruthlessly dragged the power for one last spell out of Anders' body, leaving him feeling as though his bones were hollow and brittle – and for all he knew, they were. The magic went out, shooting up into the sky, swirling clouds out of the clear blue, breathing life back into the dead wind that had left them becalmed and helpless, and dragging the sudden fury of a tempest down onto the ocean that harbored their attacker. Lightning began to fall around them like rain, striking the water, the tentacles, and the ship's mast with equal indiscrimination.
Anders was the twist of incredulity in the back of his mind. Are you mad?At the same time he could not help being more than a little jealous that Justice could do so much with his magic, so much faster than he could achieve himself.
Justice was coolly certain that they could survive a lightning strike – they had done it before – but they could not survive being eaten, or the drowning that would likely precede it.
Lightning-struck tentacles thrashed wildly, jittering and jerking as the crackling electricity stole their owner's control until whatever was on the other end of those monstrous appendages retreated from the sudden raging elements, taking its tentacles with it.
The captain shouted orders that had deckhands swarming the rigging, taking advantage of the localized storm to get the ship moving again.
Fenris clamped a hand over Anders' wrist before Justice could see to the crewman they had rescued. The lyrium laid in his skin touched one of the cracks in Anders' flesh and Justice's mind sang. Their body sang.
And Fenris' eyes grew wide.
"Newlyweds." The captain's comment cut through a moment that had gone thick with tension.
Fenris dropped his hand, Justice relinquished control to Anders, and both men turned their attention to the captain.
"Just when I was starting to wonder, you two go and have a moment." His lips pulled wide in a humorless approximation of a smile. "Now I want to know what that was." He made vague hand gestures along his arms and at his eyes, perhaps attempting to illustrate Justice's glowing manifestation.
Anders darted a look at Fenris before opening his mouth to answer.
"Magic," Fenris said before Anders could say anything. "I married an apostate."