By the time the Wardens leave the refugee-filled village of Lothering, they've doubled in numbers. As well as Morrigan, the acerbic Witch of the Wilds, somehow Elissa has managed to acquire an elegant Orlesian lay sister from the local Chantry and an extremely taciturn Qunari prisoner. She's also been happily reunited with her mabari hound, who contrived to get out of Ostagar alive and track her down. It's not much of an army (though she thinks that in a pinch, Sten on his own might come pretty close), but she'll take whatever she can get right now.

As she sets about tending the remains of the fire for the night, she spots her other new arrivals setting up camp close by. Bodahn Feddic and his son Sandal are dwarven traders, and whilst they might not be leading the charge against the Blight, at the very least they are scurrying around behind it, harvesting any valuables that might have been dropped by previous, more careless, owners. When she agreed to their request to tag along behind, she thought she heard Alistair mutter something about placing a bet on whether the dwarf or the dog drooled more, but decided not to call him out on it. Besides, it was already a foregone conclusion; clearly Dog had better table manners. In any case, the pair are handy to have around, knocking dents out of Alistair's armour as well as enchanting runes onto Elissa's dagger. Least they can do, they say. Her fellow Warden had readily agreed to that part – it was saving the dwarves from marauding darkspawn that had dented his pauldrons in the first place.

Such musings are interrupted by the sister plucking a lyre from her pack, and teasing a gentle refrain from its strings. The red-haired woman is something of an enigma to Elissa right now, making no claims to be anything other than what she seems, but the Warden can sense that there's more going on than meets the eye. Leliana is very happy to talk about her home of Orlais or her time in the Chantry, but there's a definite gap in the tales. More specifically, the period in between the aforementioned two places. Of particular interest is how a Chantry sister learned to fight quite as well as she does. When she'd interposed herself between the Wardens and Loghains men at the Lothering inn, it had been in the interests of keeping the peace. But when things turned nasty (as things seemed to have a habit of doing these days), Leliana had waded into the fray without so much as a second thought, and acquitted herself more than adequately.

Privately, Elissa wonders if the Orlesian is entirely… there. It's hard for her to put words to these feelings, but when Leliana asked to join her, explaining how a dream from the Maker had laid out her course of action… Well, if it hadn't been for the impressive way the sister helped dispatch the armed guards, Elissa would have been backing out the door and running full pelt for the next town before she could so much as blink. But the decision had been made, so she sees no use fretting over it now. Besides, it's been an extremely long day and her head is starting to throb.

It doesn't help that Alistair and Morrigan have spent a large portion of the past few hours sniping at each other. Leliana's friends Peace and Love aren't getting so much as a look in.

In retrospect, pairing up an apostate mage with a former Templar and expecting them to be civil to one another might not have been the greatest idea in the world. Even when she physically separated them and walked in between, she could feel the looks being cast over her head, despite the silence. And then Morrigan had dispensed some sort of offhand, acid remark and it all kicked off again. Actually, it made her almost grateful for Leliana's presence –it meant she wasn't going to be the only one stuck with the endless bickering.

Luckily for all concerned, Morrigan has taken to setting up her own private camp off to one side, preferring to keep her distance from the others. It is an arrangement that so far no-one has complained about. Elissa is trying hard to put in the effort and be friendly, but the Witch makes it very difficult sometimes. The Cousland children had been raised to help those less fortunate wherever they could, it being a nobles' duty to look after the commons. However every time she had pressed healing salves into a refugees hands, or slipped a coin to a lost waif, Morrigan had voiced her displeasure by varying degrees until she simply stalked away, claiming she would rather purchase reagents for her potions than give hand outs to grubby street urchins.

Elissa's attention moves to the other person still lurking round the campfire.

She doesn't claim to know him all that well yet, but it's clear to her that Alistair has been acting out of sorts for the past week, as they travelled through the Wilds towards Lothering. His seems like a face built for laughter, but he's barely cracked so much as a smile lately, let alone a joke. In fact he's hardly said much atall and that is most definitely not the Warden she first met in Ostagar. Not that she's been looking at his face, of course. At least not justhis face, since Alistair all over is pretty pleasing to look at... No. She's simply been studying him; after all, they're the only two Wardens left in Ferelden and they'll be travelling together for the foreseeable future. It's only natural that she wants to know if she'll get on with him. And she's been a little worried at how he's coping. She's glad she's cleared that up in her mind.

Morrigan naturally started needling him about retreating into his shell after Ostagar, but Elissa discreetly put a stop to that, recognising the same symptoms in him as she herself had laboured under not all that long ago. There are some things she does not yet understand; she too is staggered by Loghains betrayal and the annihilation of army, Wardens and King all in one fell swoop, but Alistair is taking it far worse than she is. Perhaps it's since he's been a Warden for longer. Perhaps it's because she is still reeling from what happened to her at Highever. Perhaps it simply hasn't sunk in yet. But she doesn't truly believe any of those explanations, which leaves her at something of an impasse.

Luckily though, the stop off in Lothering appears to have bolstered his spirits to the point where she is starting to see the old Alistair making a comeback. His snide asides are beginning to pop back into conversation, though the downside to this is he and Morrigan are exploring whole new ways to be unpleasant to one another.

Still, none of that stops a fountain of sympathy from welling up inside her for the pain of his loss, because she's been where he is now. Consequently she has done for him what Duncan did for her, and just let him work everything through in his own head before trying to confront him with any of it. She knows that he'll talk when he's ready to talk, and from what little she has learned of him, once he gets going it's unlikely he'll ever be this quiet again. Privately though, she has missed the little quips he tends to toss into conversation. Even fighting for their lives up in the Tower of Ishal, he'd broken the tension a few times with an off the cuff remark and stopped her going completely insane in the face of everything that was going on. And right now, she feels she needs all the help she can get not to step off the ledge and into the realm of crazy.

She hopes it gets easier from hereon in. Maker alone knows it couldn't possibly get any worse. Killing darkspawn… Well, it's not exactly a bed of roses, but darkspawn are monsters and the necessity of shortening their lifespan isn't up for debate. She knows the principles of sword fighting well enough – stick the pointy end in the bad guy until one of you falls over - it's when the bad guy isn't a hideous oozing creature but a real flesh and blood human being just like you that things start to take a turn for the icky.

Up until Lothering, she's only had occasion to fight the darkspawn. She's never before raised a blade against a person. Oh there'd been all her training at Highever, and she's sparred against plenty of her fathers' knights, but it's not the same. The odd nick, cut and scrape is hardly in the same league as watching someone's innards arrange themselves artistically all over your boots.

So yes, the bandits attacking them outside the village had come as something of a surprise.

She looks around at her companions, and marvels at how much better they seem to be able to deal with this than she is. Leliana barely blinks between one knife thrust and the next, Alistair and Sten look like they've been doing this their whole lives (which, she supposes, they probably have) and Morrigan practically has to be convinced not to kill everyone she meets on sight. Realistically, she knows the score; those bandits would have killed her without hesitation for nothing more than the silver in her purse. But as her sword punched through armour and slid into the body beneath, time slowed down and she watched the light fade from his eyes. It had been bloody hard to remember he'd been trying to lop off her head and that it was 'her or them'. When the group were finally felled, and the road was rapidly being stained a fetching red colour, she had politely excused herself and gone behind the bandits' cart to be noisily sick. It didn't help much. Just added a few extra colours to the ground.

Alistair had shot her a sympathetic look as she emerged. Morrigan had just rolled her eyes impatiently.

She looks at him now, sitting on the other side of the fire, the dancing flames casting his face in a warm glow. He's polishing his sword, carefully removing any trace of vile darkspawn blood and examining the blade for imperfections. She can't supress a smile at his concentration. This little ritual is something he does at night; probably something he's done every night for as long as he can remember, but the intensity with which he attends the task never ceases to intrigue her. It strikes a chord with what her father taught her when she started her own training - to always look after your equipment, and it will look after you. He would have approved…

A couple of things click into place in her mind as that thought passes through, snippets of conversation with Alistair from before the battle. 'Trained as a Templar in the Chantry' he'd said, 'Duncan saved me.' She taps a finger idly against her lips as she ponders.

Maybe he's ready to talk about what happened at Ostagar now after all.

oOo

She's woken in the early hours of the morning by screams of terror, and it's a good few seconds before she's lucid enough to realise that they're her own. Pinching her nose tightly and squeezing her eyes closed, she groggily sits up and tries to work out exactly what the hell is going on here. Some small part of her hind-brain unhelpfully points out that it'd be nice not to wake up confused and with an overwhelming sense of dread hanging overhead, because this has been happening rather a lot lately. A gentle pressure appears on her shoulder and that's the last thing she's expecting, so it causes her to jump almost out of her skin and flail about in a manner that's no doubt amusing to anyone watching.

Thankfully she's only performing to an audience of one. Alistair is backpedalling furiously, holding up his hands in mock self defence from where he'd been checking to see if she was alright. It might just be the murky morning light, but she swears she can see a faint flush appearing on his cheeks.

"Whoa! It's OK, I wasn't... I mean, I was only trying to..."

Oh... Under virtually any other circumstances, she'd be laughing at how massively he's got the wrong end of the stick, but she's starting to remember exactly why she'd woken up screaming, and it's about as far from funny as she can imagine. She shakes her head and raises her own hand to indicate the misunderstanding.

"Sorry" she apologises, "you just startled me is all." Some of the mild panic begins to leech from his expression at her reassurance. "I was just..." She trails off, but Alistair is nodding as if he knows what she's thinking.

"Bad dreams, huh?"

Something of an understatement.

Bad dreams are what she'd had when she'd been six and had listened in to Fergus and his friends telling spooky stories at midnight. Or after she'd spent the day in the company of Thomas Howe and some over-enthusiastic parents. What she'd experienced tonight went way beyond 'bad'. It had all seemed so... real. She tells him this.

Alistair plonks himself down on the ground next to her and listens as she relates what she saw. She remembers darkspawn. Lots of darkspawn, far more than there'd been at Ostagar, crowded together and stretching as far as the eye can see. An immense shadow falling over them all, before all she can see is dragon. Huge, scaly and terrifying enough to make the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, even now. But over all of that, there is the voice. It's a sibilant hissing like no language she's ever heard before in her life, and she can't understand any of it even if she wanted to, but she knows that it is a voice. She also knows that when she hears it, it presses all the buttons in her marked 'Primal Terror' to the point where she wants to hide under a rock until all the bad things go away.

Tentatively, Alistair replaces his hand on her shoulder, and this time she doesn't jump when he does so. Somehow it helps to take the edge off as he takes a deep breath and starts explaining exactly what it means to be a Grey Warden.

oOo

That edge returns about half an hour later.

"So let me get this straight" she says, checking things off on her fingers as she goes. "Refuse the Joining, and you'll die. Take the Joining, and you might die. Survive the Joining, and you'll definitely die."

"Pretty comprehensive so far."

She scowls before continuing. "You'll never get a decent nights' sleep again because of the dragon in your head; somehow you also have to kill this dragon, Maker alone knows how we'll do that. You'll get through a weeks' worth of food supplies in a single day and to top it all off, you're like a beacon to the darkspawn saying 'over here boys, come and get me'." She realises she ran out of fingers a while back. "Did I miss anything out?"

Alistair shrugs helplessly. "I guess if you're only going to look at the down side of the thing..." But he doesn't get very far before he's interrupted.

"And you volunteered for this?"

He adopts an expression of studied incredulity to match her own. "After ten years in the Chantry? Who wouldn't?" This time his shrug is accompanied by a wry smile. "Technically speaking I didn't volunteer - Duncan had to use the Rite of Conscription to recruit me, but that was only because the Revered Mother keeps a death grip on all her Templars. Even the ones that have to scrub pots every night as a penance. When I was offered the choice of staying there or becoming a Grey Warden, I was packed and out the door before he'd even finished asking." The smile became a grin. "Frankly, I'd have happily gnawed off my own leg if it meant I didn't have to take those blasted vows."

Elissa lets out a sigh. No wonder Warden recruits are kept in the dark until they survive the Joining. She's not mad at the Wardens for having these secrets, and she's not really mad at Alistair for being the messenger either. She's just tired, cranky and scared and right now it seems like it's just one thing after another. She really hopes this gets easier.

Considering that so far, her army consists of an anti-social murderer, a religious fanatic armed with a lute, a Warden who keeps falling over his own feet and a witch who wants nothing more than to turn said Warden into a frog, she's guessing the odds could be better.