Part XI
Kalamari has moral issues, but we get to meet Shale at last.
Xox
Hosomaki's face was scrunched up in all the ways it was possible for a face to be scrunched up, but especially those of agonised decision-making.
"And I never, ever, ever, never, ever want to see you again," he told Jowan. "Never ever. Just... go."
"Thanks, Hosomaki," said Jowan, breathing a sigh of relief and oh-my-Maker-he-finally-opened-it-jubilation. He hugged the elf. "And, for what it's worth, I'm sorry I let you down."
"Jowanyouidiotwhy'dyouhavetobesuchaprat?" said Hosomaki into Jowan's shoulder. He was getting a little bit tearful. "... goodbye."
Jowan decided not to answer that. It would just make the situation worse. "Bye, Hosomaki."
"Bye."
"By- no, don't do the sad eyes!"
"Oh, just hurry up and get out of here before I start crying again!"
Xox
" 'Step one," Kalamari read. "Here, have a stick. Dulef gar. Step two. Go to Honnleath and dot dot dot. Have fun!' Who wrote this thing?"
"Doolef jar? Dot dot dot?" said Hosomaki.
"That's what it says," Kalamari told him. She peered at the bottom of the piece of parchment. "Signed, SacredBob Cousland. Oh. Okay! So Team Elf is off to Honnleath! Let's go, team!"
Zevran raised his eyebrows at the name, but decided not to comment. He supposed there were worse things one could do in life than travel with a group of mad slaughter-happy elves, even if they did have to advertise a quite frankly embarrassing team name. However...
"Do you know why we are going to Honnleath?" he said a few minutes into the journey.
"To be quite honest, no," said Hosomaki. "I'm sure Kala knows what she's doing, though..."
"Really?" said Zevran, who really wasn't very sure. "You are also a Grey Warden, no? Shouldn't you also be in the know, as it were, with these plans?"
Hosomaki looked a little worried. "Should I? It's just that Bob and Tim seem to have everything under control, and I really didn't want to bother them... and then there was this girl in the tavern..."
"Ah, so we are just along for the ride. And pretty barmaids, of course, where we find them."
"... well, if you want to put it that way. So where did Kala pick you up, anyway?"
As Zevran was explaining the intricacies of Antivan assassination, a small distance ahead Kalamari was attempting to introduce Cel to the politics of arranged marriages and various other Alienage facts.
"-so if I hadn't got kidnapped, then I wouldn't be here right now!"
"So you're happy," Cel said.
"Uh, I wouldn't go as far as to say that," said Kalamari carefully. "Of course I wish that it had never happened - two dead and my cousin was, uh... and, okay, I would rather be in a nice stable job as a housemaid than all this blood here. But I do look on the bright side! It's been quite fun, actually."
"I liked it better when I was Dalish. I hate... this," said Cel, glaring moodily at her feet.
"But you are Dalish!"
"I got kicked out," Cel muttered.
"What?"
"Really."
"Are you sure? What did they say to you? Explain!"
They walked on silence with nothing but the sound of Hosomaki detailing his 'exploits' in the Circle Tower to Zevran. Five minutes passed, and Cel noticed that Kalamari was still looking at her with an expectant expression.
"Well?" said Kalamari, poking her.
"There were these ruins and Tamlen," started Cel, and then she stopped because Hosomaki had stopped too, and had joined in with Zevran with the whole looking-at-her-expectantly thing. "What?"
"Oh, don't mind me," said Zevran. "I'm simply interested in what you have to say, since for such a lovely woman you do speak so rarely." Hosomaki nodded vigorously. It was also true that Cel's hoarse and broken voice was easily the most recognisable of the whole lot of Grey Wardens and their associated allies, and that everyone's attention was turned immediately on her should she choose to use it. Nevertheless, Hosomaki felt it would be untactful to say that.
"Lovely, huh," said Cel, not looking (with her current glowering expression, at least) or sounding lovely in the least. "There were these ruins, and I dragged Tamlen inside. There was a mirror, stuff happened and the clan gave me away to Duncan."
"That can't be all," said Kalamari. "What mirror?"
"Some darkspawn piece of shit, I dunno. They said it tainted us."
"So... you got the darkspawn taint already then? But, but surely then Duncan was only trying to help you! ... I think. But they must have loved you! I've heard all sorts of stories about the Dalish, you know, and the taint..."- Cel tried to say something, but Kalamari had launched into another grand speech of True Love and there was no stopping her.
"I suppose we're to just wait it out, then," said Zevran, cheerfully turning back to Hosomaki and tuning out Kalamari's voice. "So tell me more about this Amell..."
Xox
"... so there's really no need to feel so bad about it! Besides, once we kill the big old Archdemon, I'm sure they'd love to have you back. See?"
"Uh huh." Cel wasn't quite sure what she was agreeing to, but Kalamari had stopped talking and the only time she did that was when she expected Cel to say something in reply.
"You're not even listening!" Kalamari said, waving a hand in front of her face. "But it's okay. Did you say something about a Tamlen? Who was that?"
"Guhhh," said Cel. "Someone I knew. And shut up."
Kalamari had opened her mouth to start on another speech of True Love (or at the very least, True Friendship), but was silenced by Cel's pre-emptive strike. She closed it. Then she opened it again. "What happened to him?"
Hosomaki, having previously been comparing 'interesting library encounters' (the quotation marks around that phrase were so obvious that Zevran was somewhat surprised that the other elf had refrained from actually making the corresponding finger gestures while talking) and discussing the uses of rope in a nighttime setting with Zevran, had gone suspiciously silent. In fact, so had Zevran. Cel turned around.
"This is a private conversation," she growled at the two male elves. "Stop. Eavesdropping. And. Piss. Off."
"Oh, do try to be nice," said Hosomaki. Cel gave him a look that was so withering that it metaphorically withered him to the contents of his stomach. Hosomaki squeaked a bit.
"Ah, don't mind us," said Zevran, smirking slightly in the face of Cel's glare. "We are a team, yes?"
Cel didn't bother to answer that one.
Xox
Cel was adamantly refusing to open her mouth for anything other than a sip of water, so Kalamari had reluctantly moved on to chatting with the other two of the group. Zevran had just finished telling an amusing tale of how a he had been chased nude across a ship by pirate's not-quite-so-pirate-like husband for sleeping with her, and Hosomaki was about to start one about the girls' bathroom in the apprentice quarters. They were disappointed in that, however, because they had just arrived in Honnleath and there were darkspawn.
"Why did they tell us to come here?" wondered Hosomaki once Cel had dispatched them all in a whirling column of flashing blades. "Surely this village must have been massacred if there are already darkspawn swarming out here."
"I don't know," said Kalamari. She took out the stone rod and the note wrapped around it. "I suppose these must do something – we'll go further in and look for anything unusual."
A few dead genlocks and a basket of bird seed later, Kalamari stopped by a stone statue. She thought she might be onto something, since the stick Bob had given her was made out of the same strangely sparkling stone...
Still, even with Zevran reading out the instructions (if "Step two. Go to Honnleath and dot dot dot," counted as an instruction, that is) in his smoothest Antivan accent, Kalamari simply could not figure out what to do with the thing.
"Come on," said Cel impatiently. She threw down a runt of a genlock that had been impaled on one of her daggers and kicked its face. "There's more where those came from."
"Perhaps we can find the answer to this puzzle elsewhere," said Zevran, passing the note back to Kalamari.
"Okay," Kalamari said. "We can always come back here afterward we're done, right?"
Xox
The strangely large cellar, like the rest of the village, was filled with darkspawn. Hosomaki wasn't quite sure how he had managed to pick the right door out of the hundred here to go through, but if his uncanny intuition led them to the Honnleath hideout and got them a nice rescue for the villagers, he couldn't really complain. Unfortunately Kalamari had to spend a few patient minutes explaining to Cel why she was not allowed to kill the villagers once the barrier had gone down, which lessened the yay-good-deeds mood for her a little.
"You mean that statue outside's a golem?" said Hosomaki. "Well, how do we use it?"
"What's a golem?" said Kalamari.
"Um... it's something big and stony and probably useful," Hosomaki said, who didn't really know what a golem was either, but since it seemed to be the only way to proceed with this quest he reasoned that it must be a good thing to bring back to life.
"It killed its old master, my father," said the man. "I don't know why you came here with its control rod, but it's a danger to us all. You... My father deserved better than that. But if you really want to wake Shale up... well, I guess it's yours now."
"So how do we use it?" said Hosomaki.
"The command phrase," said the man. "I can tell you the words... but there's one thing you need to do for me first! My daughter-"
He stopped, because Cel was behind him with a specialised throat-slitting knife held exactly where it was designed to be held.
"No, we'll help," said Kalamari firmly.
Xox
"It's a talking cat! That is so cool!" squealed Kalamari.
"No!" cried Hosomaki, springing forward to stop Kalamari from petting the creature. "It's a demon!"
"Huh?"
"Perhaps the purple glowing eyes give it away," said Zevran.
"Huh?" said Kalamari, still not getting it.
"It's going to kill you! Or possess you! Or... other bad things!" said Hosomaki. "You can't talk to them!"
"But... why not?"
"Demons are just bad!"
"Please," said the cat. "There is no need to argue. Why don't you listen to what I have to say?"
"Oh, are you speaking to them, Kitty?" said the girl. Kalamari pursed her lips. Yep, the girl was a bit creepy. Little girls were often creepy.
"Go ahead," said Zevran, once it was clear that Kalamari was too busy thinking about racism towards demons and horror stories to give the talking cat an answer.
"You see, Amalia loves me now. There is nothing you can do that will take her away from me. But I have been trapped here for too long – I yearn to be free, and you can help me. There is-"
THUNK-UNK.
Two daggers had sunk into the startled demon's flesh – three of the elves turned to see Cel taking two more from her belt and cocking them to throw.
"How entertaining," said Zevran, and quickly beheaded the cat. Another two daggers thudded into its now-headless body, a girl screamed, and he quickly stepped away from the knife-throwing target range. There was a brief flash of light, and then instead of a cat's body, a purple thing was lying on the floor. Zevran looked at the demon's head in his hands, smirked briefly, and then kicked it away.
"Oh," Kalamari said, and stopped. She closed her mouth, and looked down at the demon's body. Then she tried again. "... kay. There is so much wrong here that... I don't know what to say."
"Amalia?" said Hosomaki worriedly. The girl was making a sound that was halfway between gulping and sniffing, and in between those, staring wildly around like a madwoman. "I'm sorry you had to see that. Did she hurt you?"
Kalamari shook her head. "You've- you've traumatised her for life! You've scarred her memories! You just beheaded her beloved kitty!"
"Demon!" Hosomaki said. He patted the girl's shoulder and handed her a handkerchief. "Now, let's go and find your daddy, shall we?"
Xox
"Well, at least you've fulfilled your dreams of viciously murdering a practically naked lady in the bottom of a cellar," said Kalamari moodily to Cel as they climbed up the ladder.
"Kala, it was a demon! It was going to possess Amalia, I know it! The Mage's Tower..." Hosomaki paused and swallowed. "You can't listen to anything they say. Haven't you heard of demons at all? Zevran, Cel, tell her!"
"Oh, I rather enjoy watching you do that," said Zevran, with the expression of a particularly satisfied theatre-goer.
Hosomaki gave him his patented Sad Eyes (TM).
"... Your friend was in the right," Zevran said. "Demons are tricky creatures. Had we not dealt with her, she would undoubtedly have taken the girl for herself. I have had the misfortune of meeting a couple, when I was sent to assassinate the mage's butler's lemon gardener... and I can tell you many stories from others, too."
The Sad Eyes (TM) were a rather useful trick. Hosomaki gave himself a mental pat on the back and looked at Cel.
"The one time I help a shem, you're not happy with me," mumbled Cel after a few minutes. (Even she was not entirely immune to Hosomaki's persuasions, even if the persuasions had to be kept at impossibly high powers and then some, and even if Hosomaki's eyes were in agony afterwards. He quickly cast a small healing spell and felt much better. Zevran noticed, and sniggered quietly.)
"What?" said Kalamari. They had reached the statue – golem – and she was now searching her pack for the so-called 'control rod'.
"The only thing worse than a shem is a demon," said Cel, still mostly mumbling because by the Creators, admitting that she'd just saved a shem's life was embarrassing. She would have remedied that problem, but the rest of her daggers weren't really for throwing, and after all she'd seen Morrigan do she wasn't ready to throw herself headlong into Hosomaki standing protectively beside the shem child...
Kalamari sighed. "Okay. But I just think it's a bit, well, racist to kill demons just because they're demons! Uh, not that killing humans isn't racist... but at least Hosomaki and Zevran agree with me on that one, and I'm going to attribute some of that to cultural bias. And darkspawn."
"But darkspawn are tainted," said Hosomaki. "They kind of have to be killed."
"But it's like killing lepers just because they're lepers! That's a bit tainted, isn't it?"
"But leprosy doesn't want to wake up an Archdemon and destroy the world!"
"But they wear clothes and have leaders and they must be able to communicate and that's basically people!"
"Stop saying 'but'!"
"But you're saying it too!" Kalamari tried to calm down. "The point is that what if they just want somewhere to live and we just keep killing them? Not that that's really true... I think... but what if? We always kill them on sight! And anyway, that demon didn't have the taint, and nor did those demon trees in the wood – that rhyming one actually helped us! And same with Witherfang. Wait, was she a demon?"
"But they always kill us on sight," said Hososmaki reasonably. "Demons are bad because they're bad spirits. It's what they are."
"Oh," said Kalamari. "Well, if that's the definition... But how did you know the kitty was a demon then?"
"She was a practically naked purple lady...?"
"So was the Lady of the Forest!"
"Yes," said Hosomaki who seemed to vaguely remember through someone else's memories who the Lady was, "but..."
"They're both dead," growled a voice behind them, "so shut the hell up and do the statue!" Hosomaki and Kalamari yelped and jumped in opposite directions as Cel de-stealthed herself with two axes held in a rather threatening position between them.
"Okay," said Kalamari, sighing. "And... dulen harn. Wakey wakey!"
There was another sigh. Kalamari looked at Hosomaki, who looked at Zevran, who looked right back at her. Then she looked at the statue.
"I knew that the day would come when someone would find the control rod. And not even a mage, this time. Probably stumbled across the rod by accident, I suppose. Typical." To Kalamari's surprise, the golem's voice was surprisingly... smooth. And androgynous. She'd been expecting something a little more rough, a little more like Cel's, perhaps, and did statues even have genders? Well, it was certainly booming enough for Kalamari's expectations, at least.
"Hey!" said Hosomaki. "I am a mage!"
The golem turned its head. Hosomaki noticed with some interest that the action was rather like a door handle turning – obviously, he thought, because rock would be rather hard to stretch like skin. "Ah. What a pleasant surprise. Thirty years I've stood in this spot, watching the little villagers scurry around me like flies on a pigeon, and here is another mage with its control rod ready for the ordering."
"Thirty years?" said Hosomaki, eyes wide.
"It seems surprised. Thirty years, and I was just beginning to get used to the quiet." The golem sighed again and turned back to Kalamari. "It – or the other ones – does have the control rod, doesn't it? I do not feel..."
"Thirty years?" said Hosomaki again, as Kalamari nodded and waved the rod in front of the golem's face.
"Is it deaf, or simply stupid?" said the golem, seeming to muse upon this question. It looked up again. "Perhaps both," it said when Hosomaki had not answered. "Well, go on then. Order me to do something."
"Um... I'm not comfortable with ordering people," said Kalamari. "I mean, I'm an elf, and we're usually on the receiving end... and I have to say that a lot of us are protesting against that as well!"
"You ordered us around in the werewolf's dumpsite," Cel said. The golem looked at her – and Zevran, who seemed content to watch the proceedings with a raised eyebrow – as if taking them in for the first time (which may have been true, really).
"A wandering group of elves?" it said. "An interesting sight, I must admit. Nothing like that ever happened here in the last thirty years."
"It's quite cool actually!" Kalamari said. "See, I'm from Denerim, Cel's Dalish, Zevran's Antivan and Hosomaki's a mage! It's like a mixed bag of... elves."
"I cannot say I share in its amusement," said the golem. "Perhaps one of its less irritating friends could give me an order."
"Fine," said Kalamari, glaring at it. "Uh, go and kiss Zevran."
Zevran looked a little taken aback. He also stepped (a)back. "Well, this will be a conquest for the records, I'm sure. If I survive it, that is."
"It holds the control rod, and yet I... I feel no compulsion. Thankfully," it added.
"Ah, now, if I were a sensitive man then I might take offence at that."
"So," said Kalamari, mostly to stop the golem and Zevran descending into a full-scale snarking bout, "what do you want to do, um, Mr Golem?"
"My name is Shale," said Shale. "If I cannot be commanded, then... I must have free will? I do not know what I should do. I have no memories before this village, or of ever having such a choice before..."
"You could come with us," said Hosomaki. "And then when you find something you want to do, you can go and do that. How about it?"
"And what is it going to do on its journey?"
"Killing darkspawn, mostly," said Kalamari. "It's all very messy, but we do need to stop the Blight... Grey Wardens, you see."
"These darkspawn are the creatures that destroyed this village, correct? Yes, I see they are an evil, and must be stopped. Though these pigeons are more so – damnable creatures!"
"Pigeons?" Hosomaki said.
"Feathered fiends," said Shale. It looked at Kalamari. "I suppose I will go with it for now. Lead the way."
Xox
"So what is next on our list?" said Zevran. "I can only assume that Shale is the reason SacredBob sent us here, and there is a small mountain of letters that we were told to answer."
"Ostagar... I think," said Kalamari, hands crammed to maximum capacity with the aforementioned small mountain. A few pieces of parchment fluttered to the ground. "Gah! Donkeynuts! Here, hold this, thanks! It's... yes, Ostagar, or we can find this Levi Dryden back at today's campsite, but apparently Ostagar's closer to wherever he's taking us. Oh, and there's this thing about Amgarrak, but that's something to do with Orzammar and the underground, so he told me not to bother with that since Tim and Billybob'll be there. Then we can go to Denerim."
"Ostagar? But why?" Hosomaki said. He might have had an unfortunate bout of traumatic amnesia, but he did have a vague recollection of Chasind trails and the worst drinking session of his life. "And... oh! So that's who that stranger with the exclamation mark in our camp was!"
"Yes... Bob says that he'll probably follow us around forever, so we'd better get into his good graces."
"I'm sorry; did you say 'with the exclamation mark'?" said Zevran.
"Yes," Hosomaki said confidently, even if he wasn't quite sure why he was so confident that there was an undetectable and imperceptible exclamation mark over the man's head. There just was. Like how the door to the village hideout today just was the right door to go through. "I did speak to him last night, but after giving me some new Codex entries he just kept trying to make me spend some 'biological points' or something whenever I offered to help him..."
Kalamari and Zevran looked at each other, and silently agreed not to ask.
Xox
Some way behind the three rather confused elves, Cel was relaxing by sharpening not one but two knives at the same time and laughing in a quietly maniacal way as she walked. Shale, beside her, had noticed a Great Evil on the side of the road.
There was a small 'splurt' as the chicken was squashed. Cel, the resident expert on Gruesome Methods Of Murder, snapped round immediately to see who had just been turned into jelly.
"You killed a chicken?" she said, noticing the white feathers on Shale's foot.
"It has a problem with ridding the world of these pests?"
"A problem?" Cel laughed (it sounded a little like a toolbox coughing) and fumbled in her bag for a bow. "Yeah, no. Make it a competition." Kalamari couldn't blame her for being friendly, could she? It was all for a good cause, really. She strung an arrow, squinted, and fired. Something squawked.
"One all," Shale rumbled, and decided it rather liked this elf.
to be continued...
A/N:
- I just found out while writing this that Word automatically corrects "genlock" to "gunlock", so if you see any gunlocks elsewhere in this fic, that's why.
- I'm halfway through the Witch Hunt DLC - after spending no less than SEVEN HOURS downloading it - and I'm loving it so far. The Anders references made my day (well, night). Have you guys downloaded it?
- Cel is Dalish, so she must be a pretty skilled archer... I just forgot to ever make her use her bow. Plus in-game she never ever does archery, so it's all very true to the game. Anyway, she prefers getting down and dirty with the stabbing and the hacking, because that's just so much more fun than twanging a string from ten metres away.
- And completely off-topic, this week I started my very first art commission. How cool is it to get paid to do a hobby you love? (Even if I let him get away with asking me for cheapskate prices... but it's my first time, I just need the experience, right?)*is happy*