Open the gates.

To my Golden City you must sojourn.

Silence 1:3 - 1-2

'I utterly fail to comprehend why I am the one doing all the rowing,' Dorian complained, not hoping for much mercy.

'Because you are the only man in the boat, darling,' Maevaris responded, with a wide smile. 'Besides, you are working up a sweat, and, dare I say, you look absolutely fabulous.'

Veldrin chuckled, not truly paying attention to the exchange, but merely feeling pleased that Mae was at least pretending to be light-hearted; the Gods knew that it had not been so for most of their crossing…though, the elf admitted, it had not been as bad as it might have been. If ever there had been a moment to be grateful for friends…

The water lapping softly against the bow of their small rowboat, and the gentle cry of seagulls in the early morning mist created a dangerously peaceful impression, yet the seas around them carried ill memories for all – wars left such scars on hearts and minds, and even though a dreadnought had not been sighted in over three years, she could tell that the crew of the ship that had brought them most of the way were watching the horizon in grim tension. The fear had never left them, perhaps it never would, and it was hard not to think of what lay under the now serene waters – the wrecks of ships, the bodies of men, memories and ghosts both old and new drifting in the wind and clinging to their sails…

Ath Velanis had once been the old Imperium's key for controlling the shipping lanes around Seheron. Built just before the Imperium's height and the corruption of the Golden City, the former citadel was a classic example of high Imperial architecture: built near the edge of an outcropping of rock overlooking a crucial bay, its base was a pair of concentric walls resembling stone crowns from which the main keep rose as if the earth itself had spewed it forth, the natural stone suddenly and disconcertingly giving way to ordered brick and ironwork.

It was hard to imagine any semblance of normal life had ever existed on these shores, who'd known no peace since the Steel Age, when the Qun had first wrestled it from the Imperium. It was also all but impossible to see that the massive ruin that now loomed darkly on the horizon might have once born resemblance to Quarinus.

In name alone, the Imperium had once again claimed the isle from the Qunari, yet the lack of any permanent outpost and the utter disinterest in any sort of reconstruction efforts spoke dire truths, which official maps omitted – Seheron was a dead no man's land, that neither the Imperium, nor the Qun truly had an interest in, the stage of a war that the Arishock preferred to keep away from the shores of Par Vollen, and the Imperium sought desperately to keep away from Quarinus.

As any corpse, the island and the remnants of the fortress were crawling with scavengers, Fog Warriors and Tal Vashoth, escaped slaves and pirates; the captain of the vessel that had sold them the small row boat had told them of a few mooring places that he considered safe, yet could not swear that they remained so, and the only concession he had made to the three, who were blatantly – and, judging by the passing glances of the sailors, hilariously – unfit for any sort of physical exertion was that he'd waited for a day of calm waters before hasting them off, and speedily sailing off himself. He'd nonetheless left them some five miles off shore, on the wrong side of the fortress, and with a boat which, judging by its price, should have had golden nails and diamond ores, yet accommodated little more than the clothes on their backs, two coffers of books, and the mirror that was almost an eluvian.

Not that it much mattered; the greatest weight was still in their hearts, and though Mae did her best to jest around the loss of her creature comforts, she was pale and jumpy, while Dorian was visibly suffering from cold, and would probably be so exhausted by the time they reached shore he would be utterly useless until nightfall.

'Thank you,' Veldrin whispered, looking to them both.

'Well yes,' the man huffed. 'Ball and chain they say; rowing was never mentioned in the vows.'

'Shut up and look gorgeous,' Mae beamed. 'You do it so well…'

'I am not that cheap, Mae,' he muttered; the blonde woman shrugged, and wiggled herself into whatever comfortable position she could attain.

'If you prefer negative reinforcement,' she said, 'I could tell you you already smell of wet dog.'

'Yes, well, your hair is flat,' Dorian replied, sounding genuinely offended.

'How dare you!' Maevaris protested, splaying her hand on her chest; Veldrin thought that she could have not loved either of them more. She wanted to say so, yet somehow the words seemed insufficient.

'Do you want to switch, Dorian?' she asked, instead.

'Ah, now that we are within sight of shore, you ask!' he grunted. 'I still have some pride, Vel,' he finally chuckled. 'You're a quarter of my size, Amata; I'll manage, and then take great pleasure in complaining my heart out later.'

Fortunately, the grove of trees that the ship's captain had described did actually look safe, and dense enough to hide them and the boat; once they had finally pulled it ashore and emptied it, Dorian had indeed collapsed with exhaustion. Still, the two women were strong enough together to capsize the small, rickety thing, while Veldrin still remembered how to erase the tracks of it being dragged up the beach, and how to skillfully hide its presence under leaves and branches. Not that it would serve much, she thought, glancing at the fortress' tower. If anyone up there had been watching the waters, they would have seen them coming from miles away.

'At least it isn't pirates,' the elf said, softly; Mae nodded in tense agreement.

'They would be upon us by now, yes,' the Magistra said. 'Everyone else will wait until nightfall.'

'Your optimism gives me heartburn – and by the way, my hands are raw and my feet are freezing,' Dorian sighed. 'The only thing we have going for us is the fact that we probably don't look as if we have anything worth stealing.'

'We actually don't,' Vel shrugged.

'That particular notion also gives me heartburn, so please, don't remind me,' Dorian answered.

Veldrin bit her lower lip, and nodded. 'Can you make a shelter, while I…'

'Excuse me?' the two humans exclaimed, in a single, terrified voice; the elf cringed.

Right, she reminded herself. Tevinter nobles: raw hands, freezing feet, likely to eat toxic berries, lie down in poison ivy, and use chain lightning to kill a hare…if either of them actually knew what a live hare looked like. To top it all off, Maevaris' décolletage seemed more appropriate to an impending orgy.

'We do need to see what is out there,' Veldrin apologetically said, 'and truth be told, eh…Neither of you are wearing the right shoes for the occasion.'

'I don't want you going out alone, doll,' Maevaris said, exchanging a doubtful glance with Dorian. 'Dalish you may be, but you certainly are no rogue…'

'I'm closer to one than either of you,' Veldrin softly responded. 'Come on,' she gently entreated, 'half the Imperium thinks I am some sort of woodland creature, anyway. Give me a chance to prove them right. I'll try to find some shelter first,' she said, looking up through the foliage. 'If we make fire here, it will be seen for miles.'

And, she thought, if it starts to rain, Dorian will truly be ill.

She could see it coming, too, and felt nothing but deep and sincere concern. Half of his pretense of frailty was a front, one that he enjoyed hiding behind and sometimes selfishly exploiting, yet she had not lived and fought beside him for so many years to know that some of it was dangerously true. He was a fit man, but sea sickness cared not for physical shape – he'd hardly kept anything down in the two weeks of the crossing, and, along with the food deprivation, he'd also been sleep deprived. All three of them had spent long hours poring over Radonis' diagrams for the orb, but though they'd sometimes retired at the first light of dawn, Maevaris and Veldrin had rested, while Dorian had not.

For the first time in the half decade they had been married in name, they'd shared a room and a bed; the ship they'd been on was too small for all to have their own cabins. He had said nothing, of course, but she had felt him tossing and turning, then finally renouncing any idea of sleep, or simply rushing out of their shared cabin to heave, sometimes so often that there was nothing in his stomach left to expel. He was tired, and he was cold, and no jests about unpeeled grapes could hide it.

The morning announced itself sunny, but the air already smelled of rain to come, and she had brought her friends here, she'd placed them in danger, and stirred bad dreams…

'I'll be back very fast, I swear,' Veldrin decisively said. 'The captain said there is a cave…'

'Fabulously rustic, darling,' Mae smirked. 'We'll take it, if you find it.' She pragmatically concluded. 'Please, don't go up to the fortress alone, doll,' she added, the look in her eyes deathly serious. 'A woodland creature you may be, but last I saw that approach it was scorched rock on all sides. You're a tree monkey, not a rock monkey, eh?'

'I will be careful.' The elf promised, then shed the cape that had sheltered her from cold, yet now would have hindered her movements, and vanished.

The forest was foreign and familiar at the same time – there were no great tree trunks, and no vigorous branches that could be used as paths or vantage points; compared to the trees of the Dales, these were mere, vine riddled shrubs. Travelling amid the branches, as her brother, the hunter, might have advised thus appeared all but impossible. Veldrin was slight and nimble, but the branches seemed too flimsy and too narrow even for her; still, the densely entwined foliage provided for excellent cover, and starved the lower vegetation of sufficient sunlight for significant growth. If she did not trip on the vines, something not even a Dalish toddler might have done, she found the forest floor easy to navigate, and, more importantly, easy to read: no humans had passed this way recently, as otherwise the vines and shrubs would have been slashed or trampled; the weight of a Qunari, be they Fog Warrior1 or Tal Vashoth2, might have left imprints so deep on the moist ground that not even long rains might have erased them…

And Dalish shoes, she thought, smiling to herself, while remembering the confusion they always caused amid the humans, were not only worn to honour Ghilan'nain for religious reasons; if one tread lightly on their toes, and not stomped on their heels as humans did, the footprints of the Elvhen were scarcely distinguishable from the tracks of halla or deer.

All damage to the vegetation around her was, therefore, attributable to wild creatures – a small bear had sharpened his claws on a tree recently here, a young stag honed his horns on another there, in some months past, for the bark was beginning to recover; she was no hunter, but she knew that where there were predators, there was prey, and that they were in no danger of starving. For what was better, the cave the captain had mentioned was not at all far off, and she found it by following the sweet water stream that fell over the cave's mouth like a curtain, forming a small, clear pool before rushing on towards the sea.

She paused to make sure that they would not be disturbing any other creature that might have called the cave a home, but the moss within was not torn by claws, and the cave had only one entrance. It was damp, but perfect in all other ways, and small enough to be warmed by fire.

Veldrin had made faster progress than even she had anticipated, so she stood by the edge of the clear pool, watching the sleek lightning of fast swimming trout and wondering whether she should have ignored Mae's advice, and explored onwards. She could not see the fortress' towers from here, but it could not have been more than two to three miles off; further, she thought, feeling a little sting of concern, the fact that the path she had taken to reach the shelter seemed untraveled did not imply that the road onwards was equally unused. The spot was perfect, too perfect to have gone completely unnoticed by the island's other denizens. The three mages were hardly defenseless against a lone fisherman, but fishermen did not dwell completely alone…

And where there was prey, she reminded herself, there were predators.

Worrying signs did not fail to appear but a mile and a half off – vines neatly severed by blades, paths cleared by many steps, and river rocks fashioned into rudimentary steps on steeper slopes; there was even a sign of a large skirmish no longer than a week past in a clearing – animals had carried off whatever had remained of the losers, with claw marks heading in all directions, but traces of dried blood lingered on the grass and on the few fallen leaves. A short, ill made scimitar, too worthless to be looted lay discarded in a small, thorny shrub.

Of more concern, however, was the fact that the closer to the edge of the patch of forest she got, there were more and more signs of not vagrants, but an actual settlement lying not far off. The bark of some of the trees had been expertly peeled, and their sap was being collected in small, wooden buckets. If there was anything encouraging, it was the fact that none of the buckets were more than a quarter full, and whomever had set this up would likely not be returning to collect the tree sap very soon…yet, she was obviously approaching the territory of a group who had been living here for long enough to know how make use nature.

Fog Warriors, not Tal Vashoth. Not that it much mattered.

She'd clearly explored far enough.

Veldrin made her way back swiftly, avoiding the treaded paths and the clearing; she passed by the cave but did not approach it again, instead making straight for the grove where they had moored. She could hear her friends debating from a few hundred yards off, and inwardly cringed, not only at the noise, but at a fact she had allowed herself to forget: perhaps the denizens who lived on the other side of this jungle outcropping had no interest in this particular area because, much like her, they could read that there was no movement. Two humans, two heavy coffers and the mirror would leave a trail that not even a blind man would fail to follow.

'Creators have mercy,' Veldrin whispered to herself; so absorbed were Dorian and Maevaris in a particular sequence of symbols, that she stood behind them, but three feet away, for five long minutes before either took notice of her. 'The continued survival and proliferation of your race leaves me bewildered.' She sighed, out loud.

'That's because we don't live in mosquito riddled jungle wastelands, honey,' Mae smirked.

'You don't live in any sort of forest because you can't,' Veldrin muttered. 'Keep your voices down, I could hear you for a mile off, and we are definitely not alone.'

'I dare say we knew that pretty much when we left Quarinus,' Dorian dryly observed.

'Yes, Amatus, but this time we don't have an army waiting to jump to our rescue.' Vel softly replied, then quickly recounted what results her scouting had yielded. 'I was planning to sort of…eh, take liberties with Mae's advice and have a look at the fortress itself, but I thought it wiser not to run head first into whatever village stands between us and the Ath Velanis landing…'

'What's a small civilian massacre to add to our collection?' Dorian asked, cranking his nose. 'It's practically the only thing we haven't done. Knowingly, at least.' He conceded, a second later.

'I'd try to avoid it, at least until we've had a decent dinner.' Veldrin replied, scowling. 'Seriously, Dorian, enough with the questionable humour…'

'The questionable humour is the only thing preventing me from swimming back to Quarinus, and hiding under Lexi's bed until this is all over,' the man replied, frowning in earnest. 'So,' he sighed, rubbing his forehead, 'cave or no cave? That is the question.'

'Definitely cave,' Maevaris responded, instead of Veldrin. 'We can't be the only ones who know this spot is relatively safe.

'I am torn,' the elf sighed. 'A rag-tag party of pirates might be easier to dispatch than a Fog Warrior hunting party.'

'On the other hand,' Mae said, running her fingers through her blonde locks and pointlessly trying to fluff up her curls, 'once we do dispatch the rag-tag party of pirates, we will receive a friendly visitation from the Fog Warriors as well. It's not like any of us fight with swift arrow and silent blade; if we start casting, half the island will be on our backs in the next blink of an eye.'

'Do you think we could parlay?' Veldrin asked. 'I mean, we intend no harm to the Fog Warriors…'

'And tell them what, sweetness?' the blonde woman smirked. 'Never mind us Tevinter Magisters, just passing through to that ominous looking ruin over there – we give you our personal assurance that we are no longer members in good standing of the Sisterhood of the Cackling Abomination, and only one of us intends to summon a god and do blood magic with unpredictable consequences?'

Vel sighed, and conceded with a shrug. 'Cave it is.'

Hello all, and welcome to Seheron! A place we all love to small bits...At least the company is good, eh? And it will get better. Just...we don't think you should get a holiday Villa there until they get cell phone coverage. Just Abstract's advice, as she has been running around a courtyard in Spain with her laptop in her arms trying to get a stable line of Wi-Fi, and all but fell in the pool doing so. Sounds funny? Well, give her a lot of love, she has a heavy laptop :)

Thank you all for reading and commenting!

Note: I (Abstract), assume that Fog Warriors are a Qunari racial variant, which pre-dates the Qun as a faith/territorial entity. I take this assumption from the fact that they speak Qunlat (Fenris of DA 2 is taught Qunlat by these guys, as I think if his master did not teach him to read in Tevene, he would have no reason to teach him Qunlat), and I assume they pre-date the Qun as a faith, because otherwise they would have no reason to resists Par Vollen's rule. There is remarkably little lore on them, so we shall be making some up as we go along ^^