First Person (Akela): Senseless
.o0o.
I claw my way into consciousness and bolt upright, panting from useless fight-energy as the whining yammers of my Taint-filled nightmares grudgingly shred into silence. The bedroll is a shambles as usual, though mercifully whole; in my dreaming struggles, I've ripped the cover to pieces on two different occasions. It occurs to me, as I arch my back to pull on my breeches, that I'll have to sleep fully clothed when the winter sets in for earnest, else I'll fight away the blankets and freeze. Just as well neither the assassin nor I are inclined to nest after pleasure. The warmth would be welcome, but I'd undoubtedly awaken with my hands around his throat. What a waste.
I rapidly comb and braid my hair, seize a shirt and duck out of the tent into the dim pre-dawn light. Time to face the whining yammers of my shem-filled days.
The faint mist is welcome and cool on my skin as I move silently to the firepit in hopes of a few moments of peace before the others begin to stir. When I crouch to stir the embers into life, my thoughts return inexorably to the familiar track, revolving like squirrels chasing around a tree trunk.
It makes no sense.
No matter how I look at it, I cannot understand why the Keeper just bowed to the stinking shem Duncan's whims. There was only one of him and the entire Clan. Doughty warrior he may have been, but at a word from you, Marethari, he would have been bristling with arrows in a heartbeat. Yet when he undermined your authority, did his best to prevent our search for one of our own, my lost lethallin, you bowed and scraped and all but licked his arse. What did he say to you when he took you aside for that so-private conversation? Did he threaten you or the Clan? Did he have some hold over you?
Senseless. The manner of my death should have been my own choice. You clearly believed you could have kept the sickness at bay – and I'm not convinced he had nothing to do with my contracting it in the first place – but even if you couldn't, if my death was so inevitable, then I should have been allowed to end my days amongst my own kind. Or if I was a danger to the Clan then kill me, burn me and scatter the remains to nature. Why condemn me to die cut off from everything familiar and precious, alone in a mob of stinking shemlen?
Senseless, senseless. Why was Duncan so determined to take me when I was utterly, absolutely against going with him? If he was so in need of recruits why not take a willing candidate? If you believed his cause was so righteous why not offer anyone else the choice? For that matter, why take only one person if the need was so dire? After all, it seemed you couldn't stand in the way of his treating our Clan like his personal stockyard, like the shems treat our brethren in the cities.
Or, perhaps you simply chose not to? The blight-sickness burned through my veins, but I wasn't so far gone that I missed what flashed across your face when he made his "offer."
Relief.
And then you put on a mournful expression and began mouthing about how it "broke your heart" to see me suffer and to think of sending me away. What, was I supposed to pat your hand and offer you comfort? Even when I abandoned all pride (never again!) and begged you, begged you, not to cast me out, I was stunned to see it still meant nothing. Nothing to the invading Warden, nothing to you, Marethari, my Keeper, nothing to my Clan. You threw me to that treacherous shem like so much bait, and my people just stood gaping like a herd of blank-eyed halla while they watched him take me away.
No, I do the halla a disservice, for those noble beasts will always rally to defend one of their own against a predator.
I wrench a stick into pieces and throw them onto the fire to watch them burn to nothing.
A few days ago Alistair asked me why I bothered to fight the darkspawn if I thought the "nasty old shems were so awful."
"Because I'm not an idiot," I bit out, quickening my pace to leave the unspoken like you hanging like an overripe fruit.
The shemlen are a plague on my people, make no mistake, and I'd like nothing better than to leave them to be wiped out, but obviously it wouldn't stop with them. Only a damned fool would think to ally with creatures that poison creation itself by their very existence. And yes, that means you, you giant flapping lizard, so you can stop whispering into my dreams.
Besides, what else is there to do?
Nothing makes sense anymore.
Everything I saw of Duncan, right up until the end in Ostagar, gave me a picture of a lying, manipulative, obsessive if not outright insane shemlen. Duncan couldn't have been your respected friend; he must have threatened you, Marethari, surely? He had to.
Because if he didn't, if you willingly went along with everything he wanted?
Then may Fen'Harel rend you and shit your soul over barren rock.