By Gods Forsaken

by inwardtransience

One day, the shadows will part, and the skies will open wide. When he rises, everyone will see. (How do you do a summary for something this big? Total retelling, Mahariel!Warden, mage!Hawke, Dreamer!Trevelyan!Inquisitor, worldbuilding, too many OCs, serious plot edits, primarily F/F.)

12. The Arl of Redcliffe — III

9:30 Nubulis 18

Redcliffe, Chasingard, Kingdom of Ferelden

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Alim was pretty sure the barbarian wilder hedge witch was flirting with him.

Brushing off his unease with the suggestive tone on Morrigan's voice — she was doing that on purpose, right? her voice did just kind of sound like that... — he threw his hands up over his head, started down the stairs ahead of her. "I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to learn how to magically pick locks. A dungeon has plenty of them just sitting around." Coming around a curve in the stairwell, Alim was definitely below ground-level now — he cast a wisp of greenish-yellow fadelight, binding it to follow him over his shoulder.

Morrigan had hesitated a moment, but he could hear she was following now, a few steps behind. "To be honest, I had nearly forgotten. There has been much going on."

Alim snorted. That was one way to put it. He'd originally made his impulsive promise to teach her his lock-opening trick before the battle, even — he guessed it was fair to assume he might have forgotten about it in all the excitement. Especially given he'd burned out so hard he'd literally fainted.

Which was slightly embarrassing, passing out right in the open like some kind of scandalized Orlesian maiden, but he had just single-handedly taken down the gates of Redcliffe fucking Castle, so he was pretty sure it was a wash.

"By the way, did you ever get a look at the Arl? I figure, you know some pretty esoteric magic, you might be able to figure something out." Because, of course, taking down the abomination hadn't entirely solved the problem. After sending Lýna off with the Sister — given how hard of a time Lýna had had with the Blight in the Wilds, maybe putting her in the same room as an abomination hadn't been a great idea — they'd searched the castle, looking for any survivors.

There were a few, members of the staff the Arl's son would have been familiar with. They'd clearly been under the influence of the demon, compelled to keep working and act like everything was fine — now, the spell broken, most of them were inconsolate, clearly traumatized by the experience, though they'd probably be fine given time. The Arlessa also lived. She hadn't been bespelled, and from her panicky rambling she'd been trying to reach the real Connor through the demon controlling him. (Which, that was not how possession worked, she should have gone down to the Chantry to get the Templars the second she noticed something was wrong.) Once she'd found out Connor had been killed, there had been a lot of enraged, tearful screaming; someone must have told her the details, because her despondent sobbing now traded off with demands for that heathen savage rabbit's head. In Orlesian, so most of the armed men around didn't understand her anyway, but still.

Thankfully, Bann Teagan, Fergus, and their men were in absolutely no mood to accommodate her there. They might not like Lýna much — Teagan in particular obviously found her unsettling to talk to, though Fergus just seemed to think she was funny — but they did owe her, for their help defending the village...and she had crippled the abomination long enough for Alistair to finish it off — Alistair had killed the abomination, but for some reason Isolde fixated on Lýna — preventing who knew how many additional deaths. Even Teagan, the boy's uncle, could admit she hadn't done anything wrong. Despite theoretically being the person who should be in charge with her husband incapacitated, the Arlessa was shut up in her rooms, her every need provided for but otherwise left to marinate in her misery.

And "incapacitated" was the correct word — the Arl was alive, but not available. The moment Alistair had exorcised the demon, all the animated corpses remaining had suddenly dropped, like puppets with their strings cut, but only active magics were bound to the life of the caster. Whatever it had done to Arl Eamon was more complex than that. He looked to be in a deep sleep, lying motionless in his bed, but he couldn't be woken. After a brief examination, Alim had found the Arl was in some kind of stasis, the magic somehow tied off into the Fade itself — that would have been a smart thing for the demon to do, since it didn't have to constantly expend the effort to maintain the spell. However, Alim was not a fade-walker, or a spirit-healer, or any kind of mage who might have the expertise to break that kind of magic. He could try, but he might easily kill the Arl on accident.

So, the plan was to go to Kinloch Hold, on the Lake less than a day north by sail, and recruit assistance from the mages there. They'd already chosen the party that would go to the Circle — including Fergus, who as a Cousland of Highever (and the rightful Teyrn) might have better luck convincing the Templars to release some mages to them — but they were waiting for the villagers out on the islands to be ferried back to Redcliffe first, and also just for things here to settle down a bit. Not that the delay of a few days really mattered, in stasis as he was the Arl would live pretty much indefinitely. Not only was his condition not worsening, he technically wasn't even aging — he'd outlive them all, he could wait for them to get their shit together.

That whole trip could be put off if Morrigan could pull the Arl out herself. They would be going to Kinloch Hold eventually, since Lýna still planned to recruit the Circle, mages and Templars, to join the fight against the Blight, but still.

Personally, Alim would like to put it off as long as possible — he didn't relish the thought of returning to the Tower, for any reason. And they needed him to come, so he could explain what was wrong with the Arl with the proper magical jargon intact, to make sure they got someone who could actually help. Ugh.

Morrigan's voice floated down to him, somewhat muffled by the rough stone walls of the stairwell. "Your fellow Warden may not respect the wishes of our hosts so much as to hand over his commander to be slaughtered on the whim of a pampered fool, but that doesn't mean he'll force them to allow une païenne sauvage to ply her evil magics on their lord." She sounded faintly irritated, but mostly just amused, a slow, overly-precise feel to her words Alim knew by now was sarcastic.

He blinked, nearly turning around to shoot her a look before dragging his eyes back to the stairs in front of him. They weren't quite even, not looking at where he was going sounded like a great way to fall and break something, which would be even more embarrassing than fainting after blowing something up. "You speak Orlesian?" He'd assumed she wouldn't have understood a word of the Arlessa's raving...

"Of course. What manner of barbarian do you take me for?" That was definitely amused.

"Uh, the barbarian kind? That is what the word means, you know," he drawled, with an air of sarcastic nasally condescension, "that you don't know any properly civilized tongue."

"For a people who think themselves to have so risen above their base natures, you northerners have a peculiar obsession with our mouths."

...Alim was pretty sure the barbarian wilder hedge witch was flirting with him.

The stairs led to a wide but low-ceilinged hall, rough and undecorated. There were a couple lamps affixed to the walls here and there, fadelight glinting off the metal, but none of them were lit. To the right, he spotted a flicker of warm firelight through an open door — the storerooms were that way, probably. Which meant the dungeon was most likely in the opposite direction. Alim turned off to the left, waving his fadelight to float ahead a bit, so he could see where he was going. A doorway loomed out of the darkness, the room beyond nothing but slashing shadows and flickering dust.

It was a short walk to the dungeon, down a featureless hall and, surprisingly, another flight of stairs. (He wondered how deep the builders of the castle had carved into the cliff.) Finally, through a heavy door reinforced with iron bars, was what he was looking for. The place was rather larger than he'd expected — low ceiling, yes, but in front of him was a hall between two rows of cells...five long, it looked like. There was a turn before the first cell to the left, so there might be more aisles of them down there. It also didn't smell nearly as bad as he might have expected — especially since it wasn't at all unusual for prisoners to die in custody and be left to rot — the air thick and musty, left untouched for years but not actually home to anything too unpleasant. As rough and old as the stone was, the iron of the bars gritty and rusted with age, it was actually rather clean, no hints of grime or refuse or anything.

Which did make sense, when he thought about it — Redcliffe probably almost never had prisoners. Minor crimes would be dealt with down in the village, and though this was the home of the Arl the local magistrate was actually out at the Crossroads. The prison here probably hadn't seen much use since before the unification of Ferelden. Well, maybe during the Occupation, but it would have been built to a different purpose.

Old prisons in Ferelden, or traditionally Alamarri lands in the Marches, tended to be relatively humane by most modern standards. So far as the amenities went, anyway — it wasn't unusual for cells meant for a single person to be relatively large, with some basic furnishings, in a few exceptional cases even running water. The reason for that was deceptively simple: they were built to house enemy soldiers caught in battle until their release could be negotiated. At the very least, the local arl or teyrn (or whatever the warlord was calling themselves) would have to wait for a response to come back before figuring out what to do with them. If nobody wanted to pay to get them back, they were usually just executed, but they were treated relatively well until then.

Of course, it was the important prisoners who were executed if nobody wanted them, the common soldiers were usually just let go. Ordinary people weren't really a threat if they were released, after all, and building good will with the natives could only be a benefit if the warlord ended up conquering those lands later. For all that this region had had a reputation for being a land of violent barbarian tribes, they'd been surprisingly civilized in some ways.

That used to be how things were done, anyway — the percentage of criminals who survived through the squalid prison conditions long enough to stand trial was horrifyingly low, especially in major cities. The point was, the design of the place was relatively nice and open, at least so far as these sort of things were concerned. Nicer than the cells of the Tevinter-made jail in Kinloch Hold, anyway.

Alim made for the nearest cell door, leaned in to peer at the mechanism. Hmm, no lever or anything. Must be a ward lock, then. He bet in the guard room (wherever that was) there was a single key that opened all the doors — which was itself a security feature, since that meant they could only open one cell at a time. Lightly slapping his palm against the surface, pushing magic into it, yep, that was a ward lock. All right. Ward locks were actually much easier to open with magic than pin locks, so, good thing to start with.

"Okay," Alim said, turning back to Morrigan. She was standing a short distance away, the fadelight glittering in her hair, her lips pulled into a faint crooked smile. Probably because he'd just gone awkwardly silent at her flirting a moment ago, that hadn't been his greatest moment. "This here is a ward lock. They're probably the most common kind out there — they're the cheapest to make, and much less finicky, fewer moving parts in there than pin locks. Generally, if you just see a block of metal on a door without a handle or lever or anything, chances are you're dealing with a ward lock."

"Like the door on the forge?"

"No, that one was a pin lock — they're usually ward locks, but not always." It'd been a pretty complicated one too, the blacksmith had probably designed it himself, but it worked just like a normal pin lock. "Now, basically, to open a lock the way I do it is just doing what the key would do, but with telekinesis. That's pretty hard to do with a pin lock, requires holding multiple points of pressure on very small areas all at once, but ward locks are easy. But to do that, you have to understand how the lock works, first."

After a brief moment of concentration, Alim cast some more fadelight, but this time twisted into a very particular shape. It took a little fiddling, tweaking the color of some parts of it to make the contrast more obvious, but soon he had a projection of the inner workings of a ward lock, as though someone had come along and cut away the front face of it — the hole for the key, the track the tines would be rotated down with little obstructions sticking up, the lever at the end of the track. A rough impression, but it looked fine.

Once he was happy with it, Alim turned the projection around to face Morrigan. "Okay, so here's a basic idea of what the inside of a ward lock looks like. The key goes in the yellow hole, it's rotated through the green track — those little nobs in the track stop a key with the wrong shape from getting through — until it reaches the lever, in red here. When the lever is pushed up, the latch pulls in, and the lock is open. Most locks, there will be another hole at the end of the track, so the key can be pushed in further and hold the lever in place.

"Oh, also, I forgot: the locks on cuffs usually work on the same principle. In case you find that information in any way relevant."

By the very attentive look on Morrigan's face, she definitely thought that information relevant.

"What you need to do is push magic into the device, dense enough you can feel the shape of the bits inside — which is kind of awkward to do, if you haven't done that sort of thing before you might need to practice." It'd been a basic exercise in their enchanting lessons, but he realized someone living out in the wilds her whole life might not have practiced that sort of thing. Marian, for example, certainly wouldn't be able to pick this up very quickly. "Then, all you have to do is find the lever, and push it up out of the way."

Alim bopped the device with his palm again, flooding the innards with magic. An instant of concentration to find the precise location of the lever, the tiniest mental push against it, and a second bop sent the door creakily swinging open. The entire process only took the space of a single breath — Morrigan's eyebrows ticked up a bit.

"Easy." He grabbed one of the bars, yanked the door closed again. "Go on, give it a shot."

Morrigan didn't get the door unlocked nearly as quickly as Alim had — he would be shocked if she did, it'd taken him occasional tinkering over weeks to figure it out the first time. For some minutes, she hovered over the device, her palm pressed against it and her face held only a couple inches away. Her eyes were squinted shut in concentration, her lips twitching with near-silent words, even at this distance Alim could only hear a faint hissing of breath.

He leaned a little closer, until he could pick out a few syllables here and there. Not that it did any good, it definitely wasn't Alamarri. Chasind, he was pretty sure — he didn't speak it, obviously, but it did sound familiar, like something stood halfway between Alamarri and Anders. Though, a lot of the vocabulary was weird, a slew of borrowings from Avvar and elvish, where Alamarri had borrowed from Orlesian and dwarvish instead. So, only vaguely familiar, but enough he was pretty sure that was Chasind.

Finally, after what was probably a minute or two, Morrigan gave the cell door a shove, and it went swinging open. She straightened again, her face splitting with a grin. There wasn't a trace of the usual sardonic edge, just pleased, uncharacteristically cheerful — almost childishly gleeful, really.

Alim tried very hard to not find it adorable.

"Good work," he said, breaking eye contact for a second to wrench his wandering mind back to the topic at hand. "Managed it much quicker than I did the first time."

"I imagine you hadn't known exactly how it was to be accomplished." Morrigan reached for one of the bars, pulled the door back toward herself — the latch clanged off the frame, she hadn't held the lock open.

Easily reaching forward to push the latch up (he remembered exactly where it was, didn't need to look again), Alim pulled the door closed himself. "No, but I did have more...direct incentive. You don't want to get through this door as much as I did that one."

"Oh?"

...She was going to turn this into an opportunity to flirt at him again, he just knew it. "Ah, back at the Circle, the apprentices all slept together in a big dormitory, but they were separated by sex, one for boys and one for girls — and we're locked in there overnight. I was fourteen when I first figured this out, I'm sure you can imagine why." A smirk blossomed across Morrigan's face, he moved on before she could say anything. "Go ahead and give it another try. Once you got it smooth and easy we'll see if we can track down a pin lock — those aren't nearly as common, but they're much harder to deal with."

Morrigan raised a knowing eyebrow at him, but she stayed blessedly silent. After a moment of concentration, she unlocked the cell again, quicker than last time but still pretty slow. One more attempt at it, and they moved on to the next cell — the iron of the first one was saturated with too much magic by this point, making it much easier than it would normally be. Morrigan opened this one easily enough, and while she didn't really stumble with it it was still slower than it should be.

After a brief discussion, Alim realized Morrigan was simulating the action of the key — that is, projecting a band of force through the keyhole that she then rotated through the track, pushing the lever up at the end. That really wasn't at all necessary, she could just reach straight through and push the lever up. "You surprise me, Alim. I hadn't marked you for a man who cuts to the heart of the matter."

...This was going to be more flirting, wasn't it? "Really? I've been told I can be very blunt sometimes." Not that that was really his fault, in the Circle they hadn't bothered teaching them the properties normal people grew up with. Alim honestly hadn't even known "table manners" were a thing until Keran had gotten snippy at him back at the tavern in Lothering.

Also, openly talking about sex was considered extremely crass. He still didn't understand that one. He meant, it was perfectly natural, everybody did it, what was the big deal? He realized how bragging about one's encounters could be boorish, but...

If she spent even just a half hour with the apprentices at Kinloch Hold, Alim was certain Keran would come out the other side absolutely scandalized.

The barbarian wilder hedge witch was smirking at him again. "Even so, I imagine you prefer to...linger. Or am I mistaken?"

He probably shouldn't, but if she was going to go giving him openings like that he really couldn't help himself. "Well, I do like to do the job properly — you saw what I made of the gate, right? I wouldn't—" Clearing his throat, Alim cut himself off. "Ah, I just realized using my opening of the gate as an innuendo probably isn't great imagery, considering the condition it was in when I was done."

Morrigan cackled.

With his last bit of advice, Morrigan got her unlocking down to the space of a few quick breaths — not as quick as Alim himself could do it, or even Jowan, but not bad, certainly good enough to be getting on with. She kept working at it, now trying to hold up a conversation while also casting the magic. This slowed her down some, her voice occasionally trailing off, once letting go of the spell too soon, pushing at the door only for it to stay stubbornly in place.

She gave the lock a disobedient lock a forbidding glare. Alim also tried not to find that adorable.

They were at it for a while when, in a lull in the conversation, he heard a shuffling of cloth against stone, coming from somewhere further in the prison. For a mad moment, Alim thought they'd missed one of the dead, but that wasn't possible — the magics animating them had dissolved upon the abomination's death. There really shouldn't be anyone else down here, though. It didn't look like Morrigan had heard anything...but then, she was human, with terrible human hearing. Mm.

He only had a couple seconds to consider it before a voice came wafting from the same direction. "Is there somebody out there?" The voice was thin, hoarse, made even thinner by the corner it had to turn before reaching them. Weak with thirst, wavery with exhaustion, he could barely hear it.

Even so, that was enough. It might not have been, if Alim hadn't heard this voice so many times similarly breathless before — huddled together in the library, muttering to each other so passing Enchanters wouldn't overhear, crammed together on one of their beds in the night, the sheet pulled over their heads, trading whispers so soft, held back to avoid disturbing their neighbors, there was no way the Templars out in the hall would hear. There was no context in which Alim would ever not recognize that voice.

"Jowan?!" Alim jerked into a sprint, rounding the corner at the beginning of the cells, it went back further than he'd thought, there must be more down here...

"Hello? Is it over? I haven't seen..." Jowan, of course, hadn't recognized his voice right away from the opposite side of the prison — human hearing continued to be terrible. There were multiple aisles of cells, it looked like, but now that Alim was out in the hallway it was much easier to pinpoint where Jowan's voice was coming from: the very next aisle, partway down the right side. He was in the third cell, each hand gripping one of the bars, blinking and squinting from the fadelight still following over Alim's shoulder.

It was him. He was alive. Several Templars had gone off looking for him, he hadn't known if...

"Alim?! What—?"

Alim slapped the lock on Jowan's cell door, a hard push of magic shoving it open. Holding on to the bars, Jowan was pushed with it, staggering back a bit, he hadn't recovered before Alim was on him, his arms snapping around him. He let go after hardly a second, cringing back like he'd just run head-first into a Templar's nullification. "Maker, Jowan, you smell awful." Now that the shock was starting to trickle away, that was finally registering, sweat and piss and shit lingering in the air in his cell, clinging to Jowan's clothes. It wasn't so bad Alim had noticed it from the first aisle, but he'd clearly been left in here for a while.

"Oh, excuse me for offending your delicate elven sensibilities," Jowan said, automatically. It'd been a recurrent argument some years ago, when Alim had been twelve or so but smelly adolescence had been hitting his human friend full force — Jowan was a couple years older than him — Alim had insisted Jowan was disgusting sometimes and had to bathe more often if he ever again wanted to stand within a couple steps of him, which Jowan had teased him for incessantly. Jowan seemed to realize what he said the instant after he said it, something soft yet sad at the same time flickering across his face.

Andraste have mercy, he looked terrible too. It might be Alim's imagination, he had always been kind of pasty, but he seemed even paler than usual, his skin turned a sickly green in the fadelight. He was dressed in linen trousers and a loose chemise, the material relatively fine, and both colorfully dyed — borrowed, presumably, he'd been in much cheaper plain Chantry wool when he'd fled — though he still had the soft cloth shoes the mages wore around the Tower. All of it was completely filthy, especially the shoes, practically black with dirt, the chemise stained and the pants torn in a few places. The way the chemise hung off his shoulders, he was noticeably thinner than Alim remembered — the plentiful food in the Circle and their sedentary lifestyle meant the mages tended to be a bit soft, especially the more bookish ones like Jowan, but the paunch was gone, his wrists boney and his cheeks flatter. His looked rather drawn in general, strained with worry and exhaustion, deep hollows around his eyes, his lips cracked and stubble thick all along his neck and jaw.

"Maker, Jowan..." Alim's hands drifted over to his friend despite the smell, clasping each of Jowan's with one of his own. (There was a thick metal band around each wrist, the tingle of an enchantment against his skin — Templar work, Jowan probably couldn't cast a spark at the moment.) He was far enough away he wasn't quite gagging, but his nose still burned, his stomach twisting a little, he tried to ignore it as best he could. "What are you doing here? I was worried you'd died, the Templars..."

Jowan grimaced. "I crossed the lake west, I probably lost them right away." He crossed the... Walking across water was trivial for any competent mage, but Kinloch Hold was dozens of miles away from the western shore — that was possible, sure, but it would have been exhausting. Not to mention seriously fucking cold. "Alim, what are you doing here? I thought you'd be back in..." He trailed off, a wary frown aimed over Alim's shoulder.

"Oh, that's Morrigan. Don't worry, she's a friend." More or less, but it wasn't really important to explain that weird situation right now. Distracted by the thought of Morrigan's mother, who happened to be the legendary Flemeth, sending her to help them fight the Blight, his mind bounced back the other way, a stray thought summoning a bubble of inappropriate glee into his chest. "She's going to teach me to turn into a bird!"

Jowan smiled, shakily, as though his lips didn't quite remember how to do it properly.

"Never mind what I'm doing here, what are you doing here? Why come to Redcliffe? Wait, are you imprisoned here? Why?"

"Ah, please, Alim, too many questions, you're drowning me over here." He hesitated just for a second, glancing over Alim's shoulder again, before letting out a thin, tired sigh. "I thought the Templars might have been waiting for me at Highever before I got there, so I came here instead. I planned to take the Kingsroad to Denerim, maybe Gwaren, find someone who'd be willing to take me north."

That wasn't terrible thinking. The Templars had probably assumed Jowan would be trying to get out of the country as quickly as possible, so would be headed to Strike-over-Dane, or maybe further to Highever — looping around south would have been unexpected. If it were Alim, he thought he would have tried to make for Orzammar instead — various dwarven merchant companies were always looking for mages to bring in new enchanting techniques and guard the Deep Roads entrances and their shipments to the surface — but he could see the logic of it.

"But, I was passing through the village, seeing if anyone would take me across the Lake east, down toward Lothering, when a Templar found me. I think he felt my magic, I don't know. I thought I was dead, that they'd caught me and I'd be brought back to the Tower to be made Tranquil." Jowan took a short, girding breath, his hands tightening around Alim's — involuntarily, it felt like, from nervousness. "They took me to Lady Isolde instead. She said she'd protect me from the Templars if I'd help her with a...problem, she had."

Alim winced. "She wanted you to teach her son, didn't she?" She'd known her son was a mage before his possession? That just made it worse — he'd assumed the Arlessa had been blindsided by her son becoming an abomination, but if she'd known about his magic, and kept him hidden and ignorant...

Finding the boy a tutor was the right thing to do, so he'd know how to keep himself safe from demons at least, but she should have found someone willing to teach him in secret from, Alim didn't know, Nevarra or Rivain or something. He didn't doubt it should be possible for an Arl's wife to find an apprentice Mortalitasi or Seeress who'd be willing to take a couple years in Ferelden to teach him. Plucking some random runaway Circle mage off the street and coercing him into it was a catastrophically stupid thing to do. Jowan wouldn't do anything bad with the opportunity, but the Arlessa didn't know him the way Alim did — she could have invited a seriously dangerous maleficar into her home, for all she knew.

"Wait," Alim added, frowning to himself, "was it already too late? If I have the timeline in my head right, you couldn't have gotten here that long before Connor was possessed."

Jowan sighed — tired and frustrated and sad. "I think the demon was already talking to him when I got here. I don't know, Connor didn't quite... He didn't trust me yet, I was still a stranger. I was starting with, you know, basic things, fun little harmless spells, before I started trying to get him to open up to me about his dreams and his fears and all that."

Which was the right thing to do, honestly — in Alim's experience, a kid had to like the person they were getting advice from to listen to it at all. If Jowan had waltzed into his life telling him what to do and how to think, Connor probably would have just blown him off. Alim knew he would have when he'd been that age. Honestly, if Uldred and Wynne hadn't given him the same lines about the danger of demons and all that as the other more irritating Enchanters, Alim wasn't sure how much would have sunk in back when he'd been an annoyingly contrary little kid. (In retrospect, Alim had been such a little shit.) It really wasn't Jowan's fault that it'd already been too late for him to build up the trust necessary...

"I was barely here for a week before Lord Eamon fell into a sleep he couldn't be woken from. Lady Isolde blamed me immediately, said I'd cursed him or some such nonsense — I wouldn't even know how to do that to someone! Not without dooming them to death, at least, and last I heard the Arl was still alive."

Alim nodded. "He lives, though he's still in stasis."

"Oh, good." Jowan sounded honestly relieved, a little bit of the tension going out of his shoulders. "Lord Eamon's a good man, he's been so kind to me. Anyway, I was locked up here before I knew anything had happened to Connor. There was an interruption in the meals coming down, and when the servants appeared again they seemed...off. Not quite themselves.

"Then the next day, Connor came to see me, but...it wasn't Connor. The evil thing taunted me," Jowan snarled, "saying how it'd tricked Connor into letting it in. Lord Eamon was going to join his men in Ostagar, you know, Connor was afraid he would be hurt, that he'd never come home. The demon offered to stop him from leaving, to keep him safe. It said Connor hadn't required much convincing to let his best friend help."

"Yeesh," Alim hissed, wincing. "Yeah, that would do it. Poor kid..."

Jowan nodded, grave, a hint of simmering hatred in his eyes. "The people that Connor knew, it didn't harm those — that would be breaking the terms of their deal, you see. Smug bastard. Everyone else, it started raising an army...to keep them safe from the darkspawn. Bragging to me about it, it was so proud of itself, that it was giving Connor exactly what he wanted while still causing so much suffering...

"Is he..." A reluctant, fearful twist to his lips, Jowan muttered, "Is Connor...?" He couldn't manage any more than that.

"It's not your fault, Jowan."

"Alim..."

"He didn't make it. The demon is gone, the dead have fallen, the village is safe. But Connor didn't make it."

Jowan let out a long, hissing breath, his eyes closed. He was still a moment, his fingers in Alim's shivering a little. "I thought he might be. If you're here, and... I know possession can be rough on the body, but I still hoped he could be saved."

"It was probably too late by the time we got here." There were cases of people surviving possession, but the window was very narrow. A few rare examples were in the literature of people surviving week-long possessions — though it always resulted in serious damage, both physical and psychological, often irreversibly debilitating — but in cases of hostile possession by a demon of any significant power, the deadline was closer to a single day and night. From what Alistair had said of how Connor's body had been deformed by the demon in him, how long he must have been possessed, there was absolutely no chance he could have made it through any exorcism alive. "And, well, we had no idea what had happened here. Our priority was to stop the attacks on the village — when our people spotted an abomination, they just attacked. Trying to save the boy simply never occurred to any of us as an option."

"No, that was the right thing to do. How long Connor had been possessed, any effort to get the demon out of him would have just killed him anyway. There was nothing you could have done."

"Exactly," Alim said, voice firm, squeezing Jowan's hands. "There was nothing you could have done."

His lips flickered, a little. "What are you doing here, Alim? I thought, back at the Circle..."

Alim gave his old friend a wry sort of smirk. "Jowan, I'd just been caught helping a maleficar escape justice."

Jowan winced at the use of the word maleficar — guiltily, Alim thought. Then his eyes went wide, his jaw dropping, his skin somehow going even paler, that did not look healthy. "You— Maker, Alim, I didn't think— Oh no, I'm so sorry! I thought, you hadn't done any forbidden magic, you couldn't have been held responsible for what I did!"

"Yes, well, Templars aren't exactly known for being reasonable, are they?" Jowan winced again, avoiding Alim's eyes. "After whatever you did to knock everybody out, I woke up in one of the cells under the Tower. I was in there for...a couple days, I think? They pulled me out eventually, and I thought I was being brought to my execution. Instead, they brought me up to the Warden-Commander — Duncan, remember, he was at the Tower recruiting? Before I could even open my mouth to ask what was going on, Duncan told Greagoir he was invoking the Rite of Conscription, and demanded I be released into his custody."

His mouth dropping open in shock, Jowan's eyes had gone wide, sparkling in almost childish excitement. "You're a Grey Warden now? That's amazing!"

"Oh, yeah, it definitely is, I'm not annoyed with you leaving me holding the bag for the whole incident with the escape and the blood magic at all, since it brought me here. I mean, you were just desperate, which is perfectly understandable, but also if you hadn't I'd still be stuck at the Tower, and fuck that." Jowan still looked faintly guilty, but some of the awkwardness went out of him, at least, instead looking an odd combination of tired and relieved and fascinated. "I would have gone with Duncan to join willingly, but Irving would never have let me go — crusty old cunt never did trust me."

"Alim, you set his robes on fire."

"I was eight!" He would claim it had been an accident, but Jowan knew full well it hadn't been.

"And there was that time you asked if you had a dream where a demon said—"

Alim cut him off with a laugh. "That was a joke! The self-righteous, pedantic shit always did take himself too seriously."

That doubtful, disapproving raised eyebrow was very familiar.

"Anyway, I'm here with the survivors from the battle at Ostagar — I guess you haven't gotten news, trapped down here, but the battle didn't go well. We were coming to Arl Eamon for protection and also for help in the Landsmeet, but we have to wake him up first."

"The Landsmeet?"

"Oh, right, you wouldn't have heard about that either. Teyrn Loghain stabbed the King in the back at Ostagar, the King is dead and the Teyrn is blaming the Wardens for it, it's a whole big mess." Jowan gaped at him, the disbelief clear on his face, but Alim moved on before he could ask any confusing, complicated questions. Not like Alim could tell him why Loghain was doing any of that, he had no idea. "It's been a crazy...what, a bit over a month now? maybe almost two? Yeah, I've fought darkspawn, met crazy, multi-centenarian abominations, been subjected to secret ancient blood magic rituals, participated in the battle that saw the end of the line of Calenhad the Great, got in skirmishes with highwaymen and soldiers serving a traitorous usurper, joined forces with ex-Templars and Dalish hunters and thieves and Chasind wilders and a crazy Chantry Sister, fought a legion of undead before single-handedly incinerating the gates of Redcliffe Castle—"

Somehow, Jowan managed to gape at him even wider. "You did what?!"

Alim gave him a gleeful grin. "Don't look so surprised, Jowan — I'm amazing, you know this." Somewhere behind him, Morrigan let out an amused huff.

"Maker..."

"Anyway, yeah, everything has been completely mad, I'm not gonna deny that. Also, the Archdemon tries to talk to Wardens in our sleep — it sings, it is the most creepy thing ever, you can't imagine. I could definitely do without that." Just thinking about it, Alim fought to repress a shiver. "But I wouldn't go back to the Tower if I could. I'm free, Jowan, the Templars have absolutely no legitimate authority over Wardens. I'm never going back, ever. So, it was kind of stupid of you, just whipping out blood magic like that, and you did almost get me killed, but it's fine. I wouldn't go back and stop it from happening, if I could."

Jowan, apparently, had no idea how to respond to that. He just stared down at him in silence for several seconds, slowly blinking, his face slack with...surprise, Alim was pretty sure. This could happen sometimes, the world charging on past him fast enough Jowan hadn't been able to follow along, had to take a moment to catch up. Mostly when people were joking and trading innuendos that went over his head, but still.

"Anyway, this place is awful, let's get you out of here. You could use a bath, at least."

Drawn out of his stupor a little, Jowan's lip twitched. "I can't really help it, Alim. They haven't exactly shown much concern for hygiene, sticking me down here and forgetting about me."

"I know, I know. Come on." He let go of one of Jowan's hands, turning around back toward Morrigan...and made it two whole steps before he suddenly jerked to a stop. "Fuck!"

"Li...?"

"I can't just break you out. The Arlessa is such a bitch, and she already hates us — if I just take you, when the Arl wakes up she'll tell him, complete with her accusations about you being responsible for his little nap in the first place. We're trying to make an alliance with the Arl, if I go around freeing evil maleficarum I'll sink the ship before it can even set sail. Lýna would kill me. Well, not really, but..." Furious frustration simmering through his chest, Alim punched downward with a shaking fist, a roar of fire tearing the air, a ball of flame splashed against the floor and licking away across the stone in a flickering wave. (Jowan yelped, skipping a bit to the side behind him, which was silly, even distracted by rage Alim had the presence of mind to aim away from his friend.) Setting things on fire usually made him feel better, but unfortunately that hadn't helped. "I, I can't— Fuck fuck, fuck!"

There was a short pause before Jowan spoke, his voice gone softer, hardly above a whisper, a weak, shaking tone to it. "If you... Stopping Loghain and the Blight is more important than me, Alim, I understand that. If you have to leave—"

Alim whirled around to glare up at Jowan, quickly enough the taller man backed off a couple steps in surprise, the hand Alim still had a grip around jerking in his. "I'm not leaving you down here, Jowan. There must be something I can do."

Behind him, Morrigan cleared her throat. Alim jumped — she hadn't said a thing this whole time, he really hadn't expected her to involve herself. "I have a thought, if you'd like to hear it."

He half turned, so he could easily look between the people to either side of him. "If you have a way out of this, I'd love to."

"The Grey Wardens have won no small amount of good will with the local rulers." It almost wasn't obvious from her expression that Morrigan had opposed fighting the dead to protect the village in the first place. "Perhaps not this Isolde, 'tis so, but Teagan and Fergus owe you much — and Eamon, though he doesn't yet know it. It seems to me, if the Wardens were to demand Teagan hand this Jowan—" Her eyes twitched away from Alim's, looking over his shoulder, just for a second. "—over to you, he may be inclined to listen. Especially if Jowan is so innocent as he claims."

"I am, I had nothing to do with what happened with Connor and the Arl." Jowan sounded rather annoyed, almost offended, as though Morrigan had meant to subtly accuse him of ensnaring the Arl or summoning the demon that had possessed Connor or something.

Morrigan glanced up again, her head tilting and her lips quirking and one eye widening a little in a very elven expression of disdain. "'Tis not me you must convince, boy. I haven't the power to decide what happens to you one way or the other."

Jowan was spluttering a bit, before he could rise to defend himself again — Morrigan was just fucking with him, but he didn't know her well enough to realize that — Alim cut out ahead of him. "You're saying I should go get Lýna."

"Yes. And perhaps the oaf as well — he's somewhat competent in explaining her intent to Teagan, if nothing else." That was perhaps the nicest thing Morrigan had yet said about Alistair since she'd joined their group a few days ago now. Which really wasn't saying much, it hadn't been that nice, but still.

"And if Lýna and Alistair can't convince Teagan to let him go?"

Morrigan smirked. "Lýna has a far more practical mindset than most accustomed to the ways of your people. I'm sure, given the circumstances, that she could find some use for someone practiced in blood magics."

...Conscription — she was suggesting that, if Lýna couldn't convince the local authorities to release Jowan, she could invoke the Rite of Conscription and simply take him. That was an...interesting idea, to be sure. Alim didn't know if they could do his Joining any time soon — they needed that liquor stuff to make the potion, which Duncan might have given Lýna some of when she'd been promoted, but if he had Lýna hadn't said anything — but if they couldn't that might actually be a good thing, since there would be a much lower chance of Jowan immediately dying. And Alim doubted Lýna gave a damn about Chantry prohibitions against certain kinds of magic. All she would see was another potential asset who could bring even more magical heft to their efforts, one with somewhat exotic areas of expertise at that, and also one who already had a connection to one of the people on their team, so would both be easier to integrate and had personal motivation to perform well.

Huh. That...actually might work.

Behind him, Jowan was saying something about not really knowing that much about blood magic — which, Alim suspected that was true, but Jowan did know a bit about fade-walking and magics involving the Veil, and was a better healer than Alim, which could also turn out to be extremely useful anyway. The real problem was that, "Jowan is one of the worst fighters in the Circle. Don't even bother trying to argue with me," Alim said, glancing back at him over his shoulder, "I knock you on your ass every time in combat magic lessons." Jowan winced, probably remembering getting his ass kicked in practice bouts over and over — and over and over, he really was quite terrible at it.

Which might have something to do with why he'd been so terrified to face the Harrowing, come to think of it. Perhaps Alim should have been clearer about there not being any actual fighting involved... Oh well.

"Forgive me if I'm mistaken," Morrigan said, a lilt on her voice showing she was certain she wasn't, "but the Grey Wardens put great value on scholars as well as warriors. Perhaps he can't fight, but 'tis possible he has other uses. The taint carries through blood — who can say what secrets a Warden familiar with blood magics may discover? Or, perhaps, do you have any skill with enchantment, boy?"

"Oh!" Jowan started, faintly surprised at being addressed. The faintest hint of excitement slipping into his voice, he admitted, "Some, though I haven't gotten as much practice at it as I would like — we need approval before attempting any of our designs, and the Templars prefer to leave all the enchanting to the Tranquil. They think it's safer, you see. I have all kinds of ideas, though I don't have my sketchbook on me, obviously..."

Morrigan smiled, just barely. Amused with Jowan's enthusiasm, he guessed, but trying not to show it too much. "There you have it. I can't say what Lýna will choose to do, but surely she'll consider it, at the least. 'Tis the best option you have, I think."

...Right. Alim turned back to Jowan, giving his old friend the most reassuring smile he could manage. "I guess I have to go have a talk with my boss. Come on, let's put you in one of the clean cells in the meanwhile. And I'll see about getting you some food, you look like you're starving..."

---

It was only circumstance that led to Leliana spotting her at all.

In the aftermath of the battle against the dead, she had found there was very little for her to do. Leliana was a mediocre medic, but the injuries they'd taken were sparing, the healers they had more than enough to handle what was needed. The people who had fled the area, squirrelled away on islands in the lake or across the shore, were in the process of returning, flooding the village with more idle hands than there was work to be done — Murdock and a few his assistants were directing people toward various jobs all through the town, sending others out to reclaim smaller settlements that had been abandoned during the disaster, her help wasn't needed there. She'd poked around the castle a little, tidying up a few messes she'd found, tracking down food for the Wardens that first morning, but the castle had quickly been restaffed — older orphans mostly, she suspected — so there was little for her to do around here anymore either. They would be leaving for the Circle with Fergus and a couple of his people, and it truly wasn't far, so she needn't worry about provisioning for their trip either.

There was much in the way of arrangements for the dead to be made, but she was no use there at all. She wasn't from the area, so she was helpless to identify even the most recognizable faces. Attending to the bereaved, preparing the pyres, that was something she should be able to help with — she hadn't finished her initiation, but she was a sworn Sister, she'd even helped with a few funerals back in Lothering. She knew all the rites, all the songs, by heart. And she had offered, the local Mothers had been pleased to have the extra help.

At first. It hadn't taken very long before she'd started to make the Mothers and Sisters here...uncomfortable. It'd barely even reached noon the first day before the Revered Mother, a refreshingly down-to-earth elderly woman named Hannah, had apologetically asked her to leave.

Not that she was entirely surprised. Leliana had never quite fit in among the Sisters at Lothering, no matter how much she'd tried — she realized she went spouting heresy pretty much every time she opened her mouth, but what else was she supposed to do? lie? Besides, if she was being honest, what she was supposed to say to people in these situations often seemed horrible. She knew the words about trusting themselves to the will of the Maker, to trust in the certainty that He had a design by which the world was ordered. That such things happen with purpose.

But to say that to people who had just lost loved ones in some terrible tragedy, to her that felt...cruel? Was that supposed to be a comfort, that the Maker decided they should live while those they love should die? She didn't... She didn't like the image of the Maker that kind of statement drew. For one thing, it was itself heresy — there was nothing in the teachings of the Chantry that could lead one to think the Maker took that direct of a hand in earthly events — and for another, it made Him sound heartless, and almost evil. If an earthly lord were to indiscriminately slaughter his own subjects so, no Fereldan would consider such a man worth giving fealty to, Leliana was certain.

There was no grand design in this. A young boy had known too little, and a demon had taken advantage of his weakness to cross the Veil and bring suffering into their world. The Maker had no part in any of that.

It was not providence that the survivors lived, but circumstance. And it was only right to mourn those they had lost, yes, but that darkness should not be allowed to overwhelm the light they had known before their deaths. They should remember the happiness and love the lost had brought into their lives, to hold it close to carry them onward — like an ember of holy fire, constantly burning away at the center of their souls. They lived, and they should rejoice in that, seek out all the wonder and joy and love this world has to offer — and in their wonder see the glory of the Maker's creation, in their joy feel His light upon them, in their love see a shadow of the realisation of what He desires for all of His children.

The Revered Mother didn't want that kind of talk in her Chantry. Leliana had been disappointed, and a little offended, but not really surprised.

Leliana had spent most of the remainder of that first day crafting arrows to replace those she'd lost during the battle. Acquiring the materials turned out to be something of a pain — the points weren't a problem, there were baskets of the things sitting waiting outside the forge, but the wood and fletching took some time to figure out. In the end she'd gathered an armful of branches out in the woods on the hill opposite the castle, and after a bit of searching around brought down a pair of geese with two of the few arrows she had left. Between them Leliana had more than enough feathers, and they'd also contribute to feeding the ever-hungry Wardens.

When he'd found her at work in the guest hall in the castle, where the Wardens were staying for the moment, Alistair had stood over her table for a long, silent moment, as though considering whether he should say something. But in the end, he'd walked off without a word, shaking his head to himself. She had the feeling she made the former Templar nearly as uncomfortable as she did the Mothers.

It was now the second day after the battle, and Leliana had absolutely nothing to do.

After puttering around inside the castle for a bit, looking for some minor chore to occupy herself with only to find everything of note had already been handled, Leliana had taken to just wandering around the outside of the castle at random. The transition between winter and spring, that liminal time that was too warm for a proper freeze but to cold and dry for the land to awaken, always seemed to drag on too long in Ferelden, especially so far from the Sea. But now, in the waning days of Nubulis, spring proper was finally starting to bloom — the wind coming off the Lake was missing the bite of even only a few days ago, a hint of warmth sweeping over the land, heavy and faintly fragrant with a promise of the rains soon to come. Finding herself atop the outer walls of the castle, she looked over the lake, the shore to the northeast a hazy mass in the distance, to the north the water stretching on, and on, and on, until it met the horizon and dropped away, unknowable.

Leliana gasped at an abrupt flare of aching homesickness, bent to let her forehead fall against the stone in front of her. About a day's travel north of Lydes was a port town, Valsienne — like many places in the Dales it had originally been an elven city, connecting their major population centers around Halamshiral and Verchiel to sea trade. On a hill outside the town stood the remains of an old elven fort, picked clean centuries ago and left abandoned. Looking north from a surprisingly sturdy tower the opposite shore was just barely visible, faded and blurry — on a very clear night, she could almost convince herself she could see the lights of the capital just to the west, sparkling off the water like colorful stars — to the east the sea stretching on, and on, and on...

She'd spent some significant years in Valsienne, when she'd been young. She'd loved it there — smaller than Lydes, the breeze off the sea fighting back the smell of too many people in one place, covered further with flowers and exotic spices, the port town scattered with people and things from all over the world, mixing to create a complex character of its own, lively and energetic, something always happening. She hadn't been there since...oh, not long after she'd met Marjolaine, before she'd truly become wrapped up in the Game. She would have been...seventeen? eighteen? It felt like another lifetime...

Leliana hadn't realized she remembered what the view from the old tower looked like.

When she straightened again, she turned away from the Lake first, not wanting to look over the water and again see another place, another time. Another her, the girl she'd been then hardly recognizable to her now, she might as well be a stranger. She'd left Lydes and Valsienne so far behind, so much had happened, it was... Remembering, it was disorienting and painful, she'd rather not dwell on it.

So, it was by complete chance that she spotted Lýna. Not far away was the jumble of halls and towers that made up the main keep. The nearest tower, slightly above Leliana's head and some distance away — too far to comfortably shout, or make out small details, but a skilled archer could definitely hit people on the wall from the tower — a figure sat on the flat rim of the peaked roof shielding the inside, legs dangling off the edge. Leliana was far enough away, if it weren't for the subtle color of the tattoos on her face and the brilliant white of her hair she might not have recognized Lýna at all.

It was somewhat difficult to tell from here what Lýna was up to. Leliana suspected she was working on something, her hands making little repetitive motions in her lap, but at this angle she couldn't see anything. Curiously, it looked like Lýna was at least partially undressed, her dangling legs bare at least up to her knee, above the waist perhaps wearing a breast-band or vest of some kind, or perhaps completely uncovered, it was hard to tell.

...What was she doing up there?

Curious, and also a little concerned — Lýna had been even quieter and further withdrawn since her close scrape with the demon, and she hadn't been in the guest hall this morning — Leliana found her way back down to ground level, then picking upward through the keep. She tried to keep track of which way was north, how far she'd walked into the structure, but the floorplan inside the keep was surprisingly complex, she got lost at least once. Eventually, Leliana found the staircase leading up what she was pretty sure was the right tower — she wasn't certain until she'd reached the watchroom at the top, through the windows the Lake visible over the jagged edge of the outer wall.

The wooden shutters over the windows had been pushed aside in one place, the spring breeze flowing in uninterrupted. Just in sight at the upper corner of the gap hung a single pale foot. Recognizable as a foot, but looking a little off, too long and narrow, the bones in the ankle formed slightly different, making the heel appear somewhat pointier, the toes too long, flexible — elven, obviously, Leliana had seen more than enough of them to know that's what elven feet were supposed to look like.

"Lýna?" she called, walking up to the open window.

The foot stilled, just for an instant, before settling into an idle sway again. "Leliana. What is?" Her soft voice was nearly blown away by the wind, Leliana could barely hear it.

"May I come up?" It was only polite to ask first, since she suspected Lýna wasn't exactly presentable at the moment.

There was a brief silence, and then a sigh so quiet she might have imagined it. "Okay. Don't fall."

A giggle bubbled up her throat — she couldn't help it, the way Lýna said it all flat and casual, it was funny. Leliana poked her head out the window first, glancing up. The rim of the roof wasn't even, jutting up and down at regular right angles like tiny little merlons. It wasn't very high, but it was nearly a foot out, she'd have to reach out and forward to get to it. She suspected Lýna wouldn't have any trouble at all getting back inside, but Leliana would have to be very careful or else risk missing the window ledge.

Given how far down the bushes hugging the keep below were, such a mistake would be a fatal one.

It wasn't at all difficult for Leliana to get up, though. Her left hand braced against a stone support to the side, she crouched low on the bottom of the window, bringing up first one foot then the other, reached forward with her right hand to find the rim of the roof. Wrapping her hand around a tiny merlon, she turned carefully on the balls of her feet, pulling with her right hand as she stood, reaching high enough to get her left elbow around a peg of stone. Letting go with her right for just a blink, only long enough to fold it around the same tiny merlon as her left, and she lost purchase on the window ledge, her legs swinging out under her, a thrill of instinctive fear thrumming through her as she came to dangle by her arms over the deadly drop.

At the all-too-familiar feeling of giddy excitement, Leliana grinned.

She levered herself up, her shoulders burning a little with the effort — it'd probably been too long before she'd tried anything like this, jumping straight to something this dangerous might not be wise — until her waist met the edge of the roof. Pushing her lower body one way before using the momentum the other, right shoulder coming down and left hip up, she rolled over the edge and up. That was a little uncomfortable, the little merlons jabbing into her stomach and her side, but it worked.

The slope of the roof, coming up to a point over her head, didn't start immediately, a narrow shelf leading up to the edge not quite wide enough to comfortably walk along, the surface of the stone rough and striated from generations of wind and rain. Lýna was sitting in this little flat part, her thighs tucked into the gaps within the tiny merlons. Set in an orderly sort of chaos around her were bits of leather, metal, cloth — a couple wineskins, a little pouch Leliana could just make out a bit of cheese through the lip, bundles of dark leather and shining metal that... Oh, Lýna's armor! Or, her clothes, Leliana guessed, she suspected Lýna just affixed scraps of metal to what had been ordinary wandering Dalish clothing for a bit of protection. She must be doing work on it, okay.

Now much closer, she could see Lýna was wearing loose shorts made of linen, or perhaps very finely-spun hemp, the soft cloth plain and undyed. There was a row of laces on both sides, from the top low on her waist to the bottom high up her thighs, holding the bit of cloth in its shape and in place over her hips. Other than that, she was entirely nude.

For all that people focused on the ears, there really were plenty more differences between humans and elves than just that. Herself, Leliana had always focused more on the eyes than the ears — elven eyes were much larger than humans', colorful and expressive, the dominant feature of their faces. She'd noticed in daylight there was often a faint shimmer to them, in the night they seemed almost reflective, like a cat or an owl. (Lýna's were a rich blue-ish violet, a color humans couldn't have at all, very striking.) And their hands, longer and slimmer, the fingers thin and graceful, delicate, their feet similarly stretched out.

And the rest of their body was built noticeably different too. From a distance, the most visible was the slightly off proportions — their limbs were longer relative to the rest of their body — and their somewhat rounded shoulders, an arch to their upper back humans didn't really have. Their chests were also built somewhat differently, the sternum set into their bodies a little further, making their ribs seem to bow out just a little — not a lot, but enough it was noticeable. As a consequence, the hollows up by their shoulders and under their ribs were more noticeable, their clavicles more prominent. Their legs, hips, and lower spine were also fitted together somewhat differently, though it was subtle enough it was really only obvious when they were moving around, the elven gait identifiable to anyone who knew what to look for, even if all their features were obscured.

(Leliana assumed the differences in how their hips were put together had something to do with why childbirth was rather easier for elves, though she hadn't been told for certain.)

The differences in their skeletal structure meant elves tended to have less range of motion than humans in their shoulders and elbows, but more pretty much everywhere else. It was uncomfortable for elves to fold their arms behind their backs, and it was pretty much impossible for them to reach straight behind themselves. Reaching straight up was also a problem, but not as bad. On the other hand, they could turn their wrists and ankles to all kinds of weird angles, often without losing any strength or dexterity, and from knees to ribs could be very bendy, humans would badly tear something trying to imitate it.

Leliana had once known an elf woman who'd demonstrated for her. Laying face-down, she'd propped her chest up on her folded arms, arching her back so far around she'd folded her ankles under her own chin. Also, sitting in a split, one leg going out straight to other side, she'd been able to turn both her legs and bend her knees so her toes were pointed up, then lean over to touch the side of her head to the ball of her foot.

That second one had hurt just watching, Leliana had begged her to stop.

It was actually Marjolaine who had taught her a lot of this — she'd met plenty of elves before that, of course, she'd just had no reason to pay that close of attention. Elves were physically weaker than humans, but faster, and fighting with blades they tended to prefer sideways slashes, building momentum with steps and turns, that momentum sometimes suddenly shifting in surprise jabs. It wasn't hard to follow, but their footwork was completely different than what humans learned, so Leliana had needed to be taught to recognize both. Also, since joints and pressure points worked differently, she'd had to practice grappling with elves too.

And Leliana had gotten completely distracted, she'd lost track of her thoughts, just kneeling here blankly staring in Lýna's general direction. Shaking her head, she smiled. "Nice place you have here." She did kind of mean it, Leliana had always liked being high up, though it was a little hard to get here. "What are you up to?"

Lýna tilted the bit of leather in her lap Leliana's direction. It took a second to process what she was seeing: her trousers, but only half of them (the back half, she thought), the inside facing up. She hadn't realized Lýna's clothes were lined with fur, a honey brown streaked with black and silver here and there, the hairs squished flat and smoothed from so long pressed tight against her skin. The lining had been partially stripped away, the length all down one leg flapping a little in the wind. In one of her hands she held a little tool of some kind, a couple metal hooks on the end.

"Ah, I see. Getting too warm in there, then."

"Spring comes," Lýna said, nodding. She reached toward her other side, pulling another bit of leather into her lap — the other half of her trousers, the fur lining replaced with a layer of cheap southern linen. Not the same material as her shorts, Leliana guessed the lining was local and her shorts were Dalish-spun. Putting it back, she said, "Also, I have more armor, for my legs. I will do that after the Circle."

Leliana let out an ah of understanding, nodding. After a quick glance around, making sure she wouldn't be sitting on anything, she sank down next to the underdressed woman, sticking her legs through the gaps to hang over the edge. The spaces were narrow enough Leliana could feel the stone against both sides of her thighs, but she fit comfortably enough. "Do you always do that? I mean, do the Dalish all make their own clothes, or are you only doing it because the people who would do it for you aren't around?"

Picking out a stitch with a hook, Lýna shook her head. "Always. But we don't make all. This," she reached over to pinch a bit of the lining, "some it is their job to make. To shape them, this we all do."

"I see." That wasn't at all unusual, really — common people tended to make their own clothes, since most hadn't the wealth to afford a tailor. Leliana herself had never learned how, which the other Sisters back in Lothering had thought was very peculiar. She'd had to learn, since Sisters were largely responsible for their own wardrobe, but she hadn't any confidence in her ability to do it properly, she'd needed her hand held the whole way through.

...Belatedly, she realized Lýna had designed and built her own armor. She hadn't forged and shaped the metal she'd stuck on here and there, true, but that was still kind of neat.

For a short time they lapsed into silence, Lýna silently working, Leliana alternately gazing out over the water and watching her. She really thought Lýna would be cold, but she wasn't shivering or anything — a little pinked here and there by the wind but she seemed fine. "Oh! Those are pretty. I didn't realize the Dalish tattooed anything besides their faces."

Lýna's lips twitched a little. "You not seen much of Delje, I think."

...Delje, not Delen? Hmm. She knew Delen meant Dalish, the people collectively and just as an adjective. A lot of feminine words ended with that je, so, did that just mean a Dalish woman? Probably, seemed like a good guess. "You're not the first I've met, but if you mean that literally, no."

"Literally?"

"I haven't seen one with their shirt off before." There might have been a little bit of an arch lilt to her voice, almost teasing, she hadn't meant to do that...

Because, Lýna did have more, sketched across her chest and both of her upper arms — Leliana had been trying not to look too closely, not wanting to make Lýna uncomfortable, it'd taken her embarrassingly long to even notice. The designs on her chest were rather complex, dense figures framed with the gently curving, colorful lines Leliana recognized from a lot of elvish art. That was, perhaps, a fennec, the curl of its tail transitioning into drops of rain — no, blood, it was red — the blood condensing into the twining horns of a halla, its nose bumped up against... She couldn't make it out, the curve of Lýna's breast was hiding the rest from this angle.

The drawings on her arms were somewhat... Well, they weren't simpler, but less pictographic — still with the colorful swirls, but instead of framing shapes of recognizable things the center was a single unbroken line a steely silver-black, curving and switchbacking and curling, occasionally meeting another curve or dash, that— "Is that writing?" Leliana asked. She leaned in a little, getting a closer look at Lýna's near arm, fascinated. She didn't think she'd ever seen native elvish writing before.

"Yes." Dropping her hook in her lap, Lýna leaned back a little. Her finger following along her chest, from dancing fennec to blood to halla — Leliana could now make out the halla's nose had pushed through a mirror, it looked like, broken glass forming into a downward-facing arrow, then into a mass of more lines like those on her arm — as she went slowly speaking, "Sabhrajeᶅ lĩ, Maharjeᶅ enashẽ, Lýna õ dirthuvenĩ iśa, õ gal-sýtalĩ Muthallã õ boghĩ dy-sa."

"That's very pretty, but I have no idea what it means." A couple words sounded vaguely familiar, and she thought she heard Lýna's name in there somewhere, but...

"Oh. Let me try." Lýna paused for a couple seconds, her eyes tilting up to the sky. "Blood of Savraj, daughter of Maharjaj, Lýna that...fire swore? No, promise. Fire has promised."

"That's your full name? Lýna that fire has promised?" That was...dramatic.

"Name?" One shoulder lifted in a little shrug. "I don't know how to say, but is not name. A thing parents choose, when child is young. I can't explain. From here, that bonded with Muthallã that is lost to her." Before Leliana could ask, Lýna pointed at her right arm, "She that protects her people," then the left, "She that finds the way. All hunters have these. Parents and elders and mages have more. Or, if you do something big. The Keeper chooses if it is big enough to write in blood."

Leliana felt her eyebrow twitch. "Write in blood?"

"It is long story." Something on her voice made it very clear Lýna didn't want to talk about it — which was fair, the Dalish could be very secretive at times. She wouldn't be surprised if they were getting uncomfortably close to the sort of thing Lýna wasn't supposed to be talking about with outsiders.

Speaking of which, "Is this okay? I have the feeling I shouldn't be seeing these at all." The ones on her arms were maybe fine, but Leliana wasn't sure about the ones on her chest. To begin with, they were on a part of her body hardly anyone would ever see, and also they just seemed...kind of private. Maybe if Leliana were Dalish, then it would be fine, but she couldn't help the suspicion this was...kind of a big violation of propriety or privacy or something.

But Lýna shook her head. "Is okay. I am far from them, now, it's no difference."

...That sounded like Lýna's clan would have a problem with Leliana seeing her like this, but since they weren't around they couldn't kick up a fuss about it. Which suggested this was inappropriate...and now she felt vaguely guilty. She really shouldn't be, Lýna had said she could come up, but. "You know, if I'm bothering you you can tell me to go."

Slowly and precisely, taking care to say it correctly, "You are not bothering me."

Okay. Still felt a little awkward, but she wasn't going to belabor the point.

They lapsed into silence again, Lýna studiously picking stitches out of her disassembled trousers, as though Leliana weren't there at all. Normally, such a thing wouldn't trouble her, but the quiet was quickly making her a little uncomfortable. For one thing, Lýna was... Well, Lýna was always quiet — at least partially because she was self-conscious about her awkward Alamarri, Leliana suspected — but this didn't seem like the same kind of quiet.

Some quiet people, Leliana got the feeling they were that way simply because they had nothing to say, or at least nothing interesting. While Lýna didn't really talk much, there was always this intensity about her — energy held back from motion, a subtle tension, as though there actually was a lot going on in there, she was just keeping it to herself. Lýna was always watching, always listening, something always turning in her head. Leliana couldn't help being deeply curious about her — she probably would have been anyway, but the Maker had specifically directed her toward this person, so her interest was much keener than it would have been — honestly it took some effort to not ply her with questions constantly. She was curious, yes, but Lýna didn't know her, she didn't want to...put her off.

But anyway, this wasn't quite the same quiet. It was subtle, her posture somewhat looser, without her normal rigid intensity, some of the constant observant acuity in her eyes faded. In fact, she seemed...kind of tired. It was hard to tell, but she thought so. Lýna face seemed lax and drawn, her focus not as sharp as it should be, picking at the stitches a bit slower than Leliana knew she could — it was possible she was just taking her time, but. Once, Lyńa let go of her trousers for a moment, rubbing under her eyes and over the bridge of her nose.

Hmm. Leliana had been faintly concerned before, but it was only worse now.

Besides, not only that, she should find something to distract herself. Sitting here with nothing to do, Leliana...looked. More than she should, she caught herself more than once. She was trying not to, she didn't want to make Lýna uncomfortable, but she couldn't help herself. It wouldn't be the first time she looked, and Lýna not wearing very much at all was making it harder to avoid it.

Leliana had always had a weakness for pretty things, she was aware of this. It was even worse with pretty people, she could be...distractible, sometimes. And elves always had a delicate, graceful sort of beauty to them, she thought, one the subtle lines of muscle visible along her limbs and her middle, the old scars scattered here and there, didn't detract from at all. Also, the tattoos were pretty. Leliana was trying not to stare, really, but she feared she wasn't doing a very good job of it.

So, something else to focus on would be good, yes. Tearing her eyes away from Lýna for a second, clearing her throat, Leliana asked, "Did you sleep alright? I didn't see you in the guest hall this morning." She'd checked after waking, Lýna had been nowhere to be found, her abandoned bed already cold.

"I slept, there." Lýna's head tilted in a nod, toward the southeast — toward the hill on the opposite side of the village, topped with crumbling ruins and forest. Reaching across herself, she picked up a wineskin, held it up toward Leliana.

Why was she— Oh, she must think Leliana had cleared her throat a second ago because she was thirsty, okay. She could use a drink, so she took it, downed a gulp of vinegar water quick. (Blech.) Anyway, there was something very Dalish about sneaking out to sleep in the woods when she had a perfectly serviceable bed in a perfectly nice room in Redcliffe Castle, of all places, Leliana found herself smiling. "Do you not like your room?"

Lýna's eyes narrowed a little, her lips pursing, a faint elven scowl. "Sleeping in stone is... It's too still. Quiet. I will learn but, now..." She shook her head. "Also, with the sun I...pray? I think this is the word you use. To All-Mother."

...She'd been under the impression the wandering Dalish didn't do that sort of thing — after all, they believed their gods were locked away somewhere, there was really no point in trying to talk to them. (With the exception of the Wolf, of course.) Though, Leliana didn't really know that much about Dalish beliefs. She knew of the All-Mother, of course, she was one of the more important ones. Human scholars tended to oversimplify her into a goddess of motherhood, of love and of the family and so forth, but Leliana was pretty sure that was wrong. Elvish stories, even the ones the elves living in Orlais remembered, portrayed her more like a goddess of justice — often of the eye-for-an-eye sort, a balancing of the scales, but sometimes ironic punishments, bringing the guilty low by highlighting their crimes or personal flaws in horrible but amusing ways — and also a great protector of the innocent. Rather like Toth, she thought, the old Tevinter god and the elven All-Mother were strangely similar in some ways.

Though, one of the weird things Leliana knew about the All-Mother was how divided elves were about how her story ended. All the others, there was no deviation — the Wolf walked the Fade, and the rest were locked away somewhere. Some said the All-Mother had been locked away with them, but there was disagreement on that. Some claimed the Wolf had killed her shortly before trapping the others. Other stories said she'd been murdered by another of the gods, either the First of the Sun (the All-Father, her husband) or their god of the dead, though Leliana hadn't heard a great explanation for why — usually just written off as the other gods being jealous of the elves' love for her. One Dalish man Leliana had met once had claimed the All-Mother was still out there, somewhere, to this day executing her justice for those who sought it. If Lýna were one of the Dalish who believed their All-Mother was still in the world, then Leliana guessed it wasn't so strange at all.

"It wasn't your fault, Lýna."

She blinked, shot her a confused glance. "What?"

"What happened, with Connor. With how long he was possessed, there was nothing anyone could have done — he would have died in the end, one way or the other. If the All-Mother truly punishes only the guilty, you have nothing to fear."

Lýna's eyes widened, just a little. Surprised Leliana knew even that much about her gods, perhaps? "No, with All-Mother, that is other thing. The boy, I know that." There was something on her voice there, a tension Leliana couldn't read.

"The nightmares haven't stopped yet." She'd gotten maybe only a couple hours of sleep after the battle, slipping out to occupy herself with something else she'd woken Leliana up, still very early. Now, it had only been a day and a half, and according to Alistair these things can stick with people for a little while. A week or two, maybe. That Lýna might still be having trouble sleeping was not surprising, exactly.

"Yes." Lýna's hands stilled in her lap, her head tilted back a bit, letting out a thin sigh. "Ashaᶅ, this time."

...Normally Leliana wouldn't ask after her nightmares, might be too private, but Lýna was sort of inviting her to, wasn't she? "Who is that?"

"What? Oh, you weren't here for that talk. Yes. My parents died, when I was very young. Ashaᶅ kept me. Other hunters they..." Frowning out toward the Lake, Lýna hesitated a few seconds. "Many in the clan, they don't want me there. Because my parents' clan, there are things, long story. Other hunters, they don't want to teach me, but Ashaᶅ was one too. If not for her, I be... I don't know. Not hunter."

So then, her adoptive mother, and also her mentor. Okay, noted. She was a little curious what it was about Lýna's parents' clan that made other Dalish so leery of them...but it probably wasn't important for Leliana to know about internal Dalish politics right this second.

"She said many things, on what we are, do. When it is right to hurt someone, what kind of hurt, when not." Lýna was silent a moment, steely glare fixed on her hands in her lap. In a low mutter, her voice thick, the wind nearly swallowing it up, "She says she's shame, for me." Oh, poor thing... "I mean," she said, one hand raised to flutter around near her head, "in dreams. Ashaᶅ is dead, I know."

"You may understand it's not real, but that doesn't mean it isn't painful to hear. I'm sorry you have to go through this, Lýna." Unthinkingly, Leliana reached out, her hand finding one of Lýna's in her lap. Going almost painfully rigid, hardly seeming to breathe, Lýna stared down at their hands — she didn't pull away, or do much of anything at all, her face expressionless. Leliana shouldn't have touched her, she knew — the wandering Dalish could be very stand-offish, especially so with humans (doubly with Orlesian humans) — it'd been impulsive. And now it was too late anyway, so she slipped her fingers through Lýna's, gave her hand what she hoped was a reassuring squeeze. "There was nothing you could do. In every way that mattered, that boy was already gone. All you have done is save lives that would have been lost otherwise. You have nothing to be ashamed of, and I'm sure Ashaᶅ would understand that."

Lýna didn't respond at all for long, heavy seconds, just staring down at their hands in her lap. Silently, blankly. Finally, she twitched into movement. "I know." She made to lift her hand, so Leliana let her go. Picking up her trousers again, the fur lining by now almost fully removed, shifting in her seat a little as she set to work again, looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable. (That had been a mistake, Leliana shouldn't have touched her.) "The demon makes it real, but when I wake I know.

"Mostly, I do. It is..." Lýna hesitated, the hook in her hand shaking a little, before she steadied herself again. "I never kill child, before. I see children die, but, by sword in my hand is...bad."

Maker, Leliana didn't doubt that — even with all the things she'd gotten mixed up in, she didn't think even she'd ever seen a child die before. Actually killing one would be... No, she didn't judge Lýna for being shaken by this, not at all.

"The demon used that, it—" Leliana jumped as Lýna suddenly jabbed out in front of her with her hook. "—struck me, deep. Alistair says, I will heal, but. Until then, nightmares."

That was what he'd told the rest of them, yes. Keran had wondered aloud yesterday evening whether Lýna was still fit for command (the implication on her voice being that she would prefer it if she weren't), so Alistair had taken the time to explain what had happened, and what the long-term consequences would be — in short, none, though Lýna would be somewhat fragile for a short time. Obviously, Alistair must have talked to Lýna about it at some point too, and it almost...

There was a faintly defensive tone on Lýna's voice, as though Leliana were suggesting that she should...well, she wasn't sure what Lýna thought, exactly. That she was broken enough that she shouldn't be listened to, that she should be kept back from the fighting still to come. Which, of course Leliana didn't think that. Perhaps in an ideal world, they would have the opportunity for Lýna to relax through her recovery, but with a Blight rising and the kingdom on the knife-edge of civil war they didn't really have the time to sit around. That was unfortunate, maybe, but they didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.

But, Lýna hadn't directly drawn attention to that line of thinking, so Leliana wasn't going to either. Instead she'd jump back to something else she'd been wondering about, while Lýna had been explaining her tattoos — something of a change of topic, true, but somewhat related? "I was wondering, earlier, that was your husband's name, Mutha..."

"Muthallã."

"Muthallã," Leliana repeated, committing the name to memory. At first, she'd thought that was...somewhat unsettling, the idea of women being branded with the name of their husband...except, presumably, the husband himself would be marked somehow too, so that wasn't so bad, then. Kind of romantic, the more she thought about it, carrying some small piece of their love with them at all times...but perhaps an unpleasant reminder of what was lost, should one die. "Oh, if this is a painful topic for you, we can talk about something else."

Lýna's eyes narrowed, a little, but she shook her head. "It is fine." The fur lining fully removed now, she tossed it over her shoulder to fall against the slope of the roof, dragged over the waiting linen.

...As much as Lýna said she didn't mind, Leliana still got the impression from that little frown that she didn't want to talk about him. Fair enough. "I was wondering, earlier, do you have children back home?" It certainly seemed plausible. She thought Lýna was younger than her, but not by that much — the wandering Dalish started families early, so she was no doubt old enough to be a mother, especially if she'd been married and widowed once already. And, obviously she wouldn't have been able to bring kids along into the Wardens...

But, by the flat look Lýna shot her, she thought Leliana was being silly. "No, of course." She pointed at herself, around her waist a bit to the side, a little over the curve of her hipbone, but—

"Oh! Right, I'm sorry." She'd mentioned, earlier, that parents got something for their children, but she didn't have anything of the kind, so. Oops. "That seems a little sad. I mean, that Muthallã is gone and you don't—"

Lýna let out a shocked laugh — not much, just a single sudden heh! but Lýna hardly ever laughed, it was still surprising. Smiling to herself a little, shaking her head, "No, is good. With Muthallã, I was very young, not ready. It is good I didn't. Even so, we were not well, the clan — I was needed, hunting, wayfinding, fighting. Also, in the Blight, many children didn't live."

That made sense, she guessed. "How old were you?"

"When bonded? Thirteen. He died months later."

...Oh.

Never mind, that was perfectly reasonable — she hadn't realized Lýna had been quite that young at the time, and if they'd only been married a few months, well.

Andraste wept, of course she hadn't been ready. When Leliana had been thirteen, she couldn't imagine, that would have been a disaster...

"And of you? You think so, that you are sad for this?"

It took a moment, distracted by her thoughts — thirteen, Maker... — for Leliana to put together what Lýna was trying to say. "Do I regret not having children, you mean?" Focused on her sewing, Lýna just nodded. "...Maybe a little, sometimes. I did intend to marry, when I felt the time was right — I wasn't born to nobility, but Lady Cecille always said she would be able to find someone suitable, the second- or third-born son of un baron o un comte."

That would probably have seemed peculiar to her peers, for Cecille to arrange a respectable marriage for the bastard child of a lowborn handmaid, especially one who'd already been dead for a decade by then. But, truthfully, her mother hadn't been a handmaid — Cecille and Leliana's mother had been lovers. When she'd been twelve, she'd been told the only reason she hadn't been taught to speak of Cecille as a second mother growing up was so she wouldn't slip up in public. So, arranging a respectable marriage for her daughter was only appropriate. Her peers would have thought it strange, there definitely would have been gossip, but it probably would have blown over before too long.

Anyway, "I always thought I would, when I imagined the future, you know. At this age, I thought I'd be living with some kind, charming lord — probably in the south, outside Montsimmard o lo Val Firmin — along with our, oh, at least two or three children by now. But around the time I came into courting age, I..." ...met Marjolaine. "There was always something else that had my attention." The Game. "In time I chose to leave Orlais behind, and...so there I was in Lothering, when you came through," Leliana finished, somewhat awkwardly, summoning a weak smile for Lýna.

"Cecille?"

By this point, it was very obvious Lýna was trying to deflect the conversation away from herself — perhaps legitimately curious, yes, but Leliana suspected she'd shared as much as she was going to today. (Touching her probably hadn't helped.) So Leliana took the bait, and babbled off about her old life in Lydes for a while. Cecille, kind and patient, but with a razor wit usually only shown in private, her gaggle of gossipy, meddlesome siblings and cousins. When she'd been maybe eleven or twelve or so, and started showing interest in story and song, finding excuses to visit places minstrels would be performing (Cecille normally hated mingling with her peers), hiring tutors to teach Leliana.

A memory struck her, sitting on a balcony with the city laid out below them, the wind playing with Leliana's hair, her old eight-course lute in her lap, reciting something she'd been working on, Cecille reclined on a chair nearby, asking questions, picking over the weak points with her, her voice warm and gentle. The flash of memory was intense, like it was only yesterday, Leliana had to pause to blink back tears.

(Cecille had approved of her interest in minstrelsy, but she hadn't liked the turn her studies had taken after meeting Marjolaine. Leliana regretted how they'd drifted apart, but Cecille had passed years ago now, it was too late to fix it...)

They passed some minutes, Lýna steadily stitching at her trousers while they chatted about music. Apparently, it was also common among the wandering Dalish for stories to be accompanied with music, much like in Orlesian minstrelsy, though it wasn't quite the same. They didn't have lutes at all — in fact, Lýna had no idea what a lute even was, Leliana had to describe it — but they did have a variety of flutes and the like. Of course, a person couldn't play a flute and speak at the same time, those were a separate thing. From how Lýna (haltingly) described it, Dalish storytellers were perhaps more rhythmic than lyrical — like speaking in verse, dramatic and emphatic and deliberately paced, accented with an instrument that sounded very much like a tambourine. Sometimes, there'd also be a flautist or several backing the poet up, but that was harder to arrange (especially for a people who didn't write any of this down), so that was less common.

It did sound sort of fascinating, honestly — Leliana had heard elven music before (often actually in elvish), but the traditions and techniques of those in the modern Dales were quite different from what Lýna described of the wandering Dalish. Unfortunately, Lýna claimed to not be much of a storyteller, even in her native language, it just wasn't something she'd practiced much. She had played around with a flute some — she claimed all of her people did at some point, and most owned at least one — but she didn't think she'd ever been very good at it.

Leliana teased that they should find her a flute, so she could hear it and judge for herself. Lýna had turned that right back around, that they should get her a lute, which, Maker, she was so out of practice. She wasn't opposed to the idea, it would just be...awkward, at first.

Besides, getting back up to scratch with her archery and swordplay was more important at the moment.

Leliana was explaining what minstrels actually do — the concept of a person who travelled around making their living singing tales was clearly fascinating to Lýna — when they were finally interrupted. Of course, Lýna noticed first, her wide-eyed curiosity compressing with a vague frown. "What is it?"

"Someone comes." Lýna's head tilted back the other way, her frown deepening for a second. "Alim, I think."

How good even was elven hearing, Leliana didn't hear anything out of place at all. "Lýna? Are you up there?" Okay, she heard that — that was definitely the excitable young Warden mage, an uncharacteristic note of tension on his elven-smooth voice.

"Yes. What is?"

"I need to talk to you about something. Hang on a second, I think I can pop up there..."

"Wait, no!" Next to her, Lýna twitched at the sudden outburst, shooting her an odd glance. "Ah, Lýna isn't decent right now. You probably shouldn't come up."

There was a short pause. "What are you two doing up there?"

Leliana tried not to look flustered at the suggestion — Lýna was sitting right there, she didn't want to give the wrong impression. "Nothing untoward, Alim. Lýna's removing the winter lining from her clothing, and I'm simply keeping her company."

"...Right. Okay."

Frowning a little with confusion — did Lýna not get what Alim was implying? — she said, "You need me for what?"

"Sorry, boss, I know we were, ah... I was showing Morrigan my lock-opening trick, and I found someone in the jail under the keep."

Leliana gasped. "Someone's been down there this whole time?"

"Yeah, the abomination was remembering to feed him, apparently. I'm worried the Arl is going to have him executed when he wakes up. He didn't do anything wrong! But he happens to be an old friend of mine, and...I was hoping you could do something about it."

"Old friend? He's a mage?"

"Yes."

Lýna let out a hum, her eyes tipping up to the cloud-streaked sky for a short moment. "Wait a little, I will dress first."

"Right, yeah, um, thank you."

Pulling her legs back through the slots, in a couple seconds Lýna had one half of her trousers under her, the other laid over top, quickly hooking the pieces together down the insides of her legs. Leliana had half-stood, preparing to get back down but also giving her feet more room. Though, she was kind of thinking she should wait for Lýna to go first — how far out the ledge was, she would really like someone down there to give her a hand through the window. Alim was still down there though, Leliana could hear him pacing, it was probably fine. He could just pluck her out of the air with magic if he really had to.

"Lèlja." Lýna had paused, her eyes on her hands paused a little below her knees. With her face turned down, it was especially hard to read her expression — uncertain, maybe, wary. It looked like she was about to say something, but—

Oh! That word there, lèlja, was that supposed be an elvish nickname for Leliana? She thought so. It'd taken her a moment to get that...

Finally, barely above a whisper, Lýna muttered, "Śerynĩ." Thank you.

Leliana wasn't entirely sure what she was being thanked for, but it didn't really matter, did it? Giving the younger woman her best warm smile, she said, "It's no trouble at all, Lýna. How do say that, you're welcome?"

Her lips twitched. "Śerynĩ."

That sounded the same as— Oh, it was the same! One person says, what you've done, it lifts me up, and the other person says, doing so lifts me also. That's so nice, she loved it! "Well then, śerynĩ to you too, Lýna."

Lýna gave a little bobbing nod, then went back to seemingly ignoring her, picking at laces along the outside of her legs.

Okay, then. Let's see about getting back through that window...

---

[un baron o un comte] — Leliana is slipping into Délois, in the sense of Dalish Orlesian (irl Occitan). Yes, I know it's "ou" in French, but it's not French.

On vallaslin — I always found it kind of peculiar that a people who went so far as covering their face with tattoos wouldn't do anything anywhere else, even if it's only decorative. I really think there being more would make sense. Just like the face-markings, the two kinds Lýna shows here also have ancient precedent. It just makes sense to me that people might want to have some way to...track the provenance of their property — I feel gross just saying that. Anyway, slaves in Elvhenan would have been marked with an identifying term of some kind (names were weird back then), their immediate family, and their kindred. The descendant of this is the stuff on Lýna's chest. It also makes sense that slave owners would want to be able to tell at a glance what kind of skills one had — after all, many would have owned more slaves than they could possibly be familiar with on an individual level — which is where the stuff on Lýna's arms comes from.

Now, the Dalish obviously don't use the same designs that existed back then. There were a several generations between the fall of Arlathan and Andraste's Exalted March where most elves weren't free to do as they liked — a lot of old cultural practices were lost immediately, and then gradually changed over time. Especially during the Republic in the Dales, they started introducing a lot of new aesthetic stuff. Like Lýna's on her face being elaborated with vines and flowers, it's the shape of it that points to a particular god (Falon'din, actually, long story). They've made other innovations, like the things they do for big achievements or life events, blah blah. Point is, if one of the Evanuris waltzed into a Dalish clan, they would recognize none of the designs on people's faces — they've changed too much over time.

Also, as some other fanfic writers do, the original vallaslin were blood magic that could be used to compel the person wearing them (hence, blood-writing). That's not really a thing anymore, though, it's just ink now — it is magic, it won't fade or stretch and will heal with the skin under it if damaged, but not that kind of magic. So, if one of the Evanuris walked into a Dalish clan, they wouldn't be able to influence them through their vallaslin either. They're just aesthetic now.

Fun fact: back in Elvhenan, people who defected to Fen'Harel's rebellion would have had the ones on their face removed, and any that could be used to control them, but the others would have been kept, for interpersonal cultural reasons. Dalish recruits in the modern day would do the same thing. Some of Fen'Harel's immortal allies even get vallaslin themselves, since they're only aesthetic anyway — some of them wear the marks the Republic-era elves made up for Fen'Harel that hadn't actually existed before, because they think they're funny.

Dalish clan names — I know Lýna's clan is supposed to be Sabrae (the same one outside Kirkwall in DA2 Merril is from), but the Dalish elf origin's last name is Mahariel, and it...doesn't make any sense for people in the same clan to have different surnames? So, canon Sabhraj has been renamed Maharjaj, and Lýna's parents' birth clan is now called Sabhraj instead. I probably should have just made Lýna's last name Sabhrajeᶅ, but it slipped my mind writing the first chapter.

Right, that's enough rambling about that for now.

---

I continue to entertain myself refining Leliana's belief system. It's actually inspired by real-life medieval Christian heresies, because I am a dork.

Just recently I did some plotting ahead, through the entirety of DA:O and Act I of DA2 (which are concurrent). I didn't figure it out scene-by-scene — that would never work for me, this chapter even had a third scene that I got halfway through before deciding it was unnecessary and axing it — but I have all the major events planned.

So, I can say for certain that the Urn of Sacred Ashes plot is cut in its entirety, as is Nature of the Beast. The former irritates me on principle, and I have issues figuring out how to fit the latter into worldbuilding — besides, even Lýna doesn't know where to go to easily find Dalish, nomadic people don't work like that (especially while fleeing the Blight). The Dalish will turn up, just in a different context. A less significant change, Anders won't be turning up in Kirkwall until Act II, because his timeline in canon makes no fucking sense.

My current plan is a short(er) Evie chapter next, then Broken Circle. After that, we'll be checking in on Aedan and Shianni, wake up Arl Eamon, and then it's off to Orzammar. And that is going to be a huge, complicated mess, good times.

Thanks for putting up with my bullshit,
~Lysandra