This series began as a prompt fill from the Dragon Age Pairing Generator of "Leliana/f!Cousland, Letters" but will cover other letters sent to and from Elissa in the months and years following the end of the Blight. All events and characters mentioned throughout the series coincide with my continuity from A Warden's Duty, building on a combination of my gameplay and fic and Bioware's own canon.
11 Wintermarch, 9:32 Dragon
Leliana,
You know perfectly well that none of those titles apply to you. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be as pleasant a letter as I'd hoped to send in reply to yours.
Things are quite a bit more complicated than I'd expected them to be when I arrived in Amaranthine almost two weeks ago. You remember the rumors of the continued darkspawn activity in the arling, don't you? Well, it seems to be worse than we thought; instead of just random bands of darkspawn raiders harassing travelers (although there are those, too!) there seems to be a level of organization behind the attacks that simply shouldn't be possible now. Vigil's Keep was under attack from within when I got here, and every Grey Warden assigned to it was either killed or has gone missing-only one was away from the Keep when the attack came from below its foundations, and he is still unaccounted for. From the stories told by the surviving soldiers, it seems the darkspawn only directly attacked the Wardens that were present; recruits who'd not yet taken their Joining and other laymen were secondary to the darkspawn.
Something is leading them, Lil. I don't know what, but there's no other answer for what's happening. It's not an archdemon. Alistair and I would know—and trust me, the moment word reached Denerim that something had happened here, Alistair had half of the Grand Cleric's templars, and probably just as many of Cauthrien's men, on a forced march straight here. He and Oghren both say hello, by the way. (Yes, Oghren's here, too. No, you probably don't want to know.) At any rate, Alistair will be leaving to return to the capital first thing in the morning. We decided he should stay to symbolically oversee the induction of the first Fereldan Grey Wardens since my own Joining, but we can't justify him staying any longer. I have a total of three new Wardens—Oghren (I told you you didn't want to know), an apostate we found, Anders, plus Howe's own son Nathaniel. It's terrible, but I was disappointed that he survived where one of my other recruits did not.
But I digress. When you gain access to the Divine's archives, I'd like you to focus on anything you can find regarding sentience among the darkspawn, especially in the case of non-mage hurlocks. I don't have any other information at the moment to narrow that down, but please look anyway and let me know right away if you find anything. I'll be leaving after Alistair does, to ask in Amaranthine City after the one Warden not present during the attack, and after that I'll likely be heading to the Wending Woods for a few weeks at least.
Thank you,
Elissa