Fenris walked next to the lumbering beast Hawke had been bodily hefted onto, the woman tugging at it's reins working her jaw as they trudged through the snow, tapping her armored fingers against the metal of her helmet and muttering something to herself in her mothertongue.
She was a head shorter than him, but that made her no less fierce in his eyes and he kept his grip on his greatsword firm.
He had never seen anyone quite as wild looking as this woman. Her hair was a messy white and red mane that fell around her face and shoulders, and down her back, falling as low as her hips over her onyx black armor, glinting fearsomely in the half-light.
The largest brother trotted up beside him, his visor now open to show the shock of silver hair and auburn eyes. A grin on his face as he scratched the head of his mount lightly and regarded the distant mountains. "Freya, what do you expect father will say of our hunting tales this time?"
That earned a snort from the woman, who looked over her shoulder at the behemoth of a man "He has his mind on other things. I doubt he will say much about the slaying of another waste leviathan." Her voice had a low, shadowy quality to it and an accent that he had heard in the large man.
"So serious, my sister. You should show our honoured guests your smile." He chuckled and rode ahead, after the smaller brother.
She hissed, completing the illusion of her ferocity. She reminded him of an angry fox, and he felt his skin prickle when he looked up again and those crimson irises were directed at him for just a moment before they snapped back to the empty space between her brothers ahead of her.
"It has been generations since our people have seen your kind, elf." She didn't look at him then, her single, perfunctory glance having apparently been sufficient for her to work out what he was. "Rarer still to see one who travels freely with Humans."
"Hawke does not suffer slaves to be kept." Fenris spat. If this woman thought him to be a servant to the other two she wouldn't survive the night.
She chuckled at his outburst, tossing her hair to the side "I meant only that in my lands an elf and a human were once rare to be seen together in anything approaching civility. All our texts insist that you should be attempting to scalp those two men and burn their corpses."
"No, he reserves that kind of treatment for mages." Anders shot from his seat behind Hawke who groaned.
"Please don't start you two-"
"If I wasn't constantly running from demon-posessed mages trying to enslave and kill me maybe I would." Fenris growled, glaring at the blond abomination with his narrowed green eyes.
"You seem to find enough time to plunge your fists into our chests and rip our hearts out when the mood suits you." The mage barked back.
"This is more of what I expected." She mumbled none-too-quietly to the animal beside her.
They fell into a tense silence. Boots and paws crunching through the snow, heavy breathing and wind echoing off the approaching cliffs.
Hawke cleared his throat painfully, it was deafening after nearly an hour of nothing.
"What are you? We have never seen your kind in Thedas."
She looked back at him, an eyebrow raised "'Nor would we expect you to. We are Drakhena. We rarely travel outside of Drakinder. You were quite lucky that my brother spotted the Leviathan when he did, we had thought our hunting trip to be finished this day."
"Thank you." Hawke stammered.
She gave a short, saturnine laugh. "I am hardly in the habit of letting men die in the wastes, foreign or no."
"I've never even heard of Drakinder." The mage sounded disbelieving. Fenris had no idea how a man this offensive was still alive.
She glanced ahead to her brothers seemingly thinking the same thing "Again, I would not expect any Thedosian to retain any memory of my people. The last records we have of you are near to eight thousand years ago when the elves founded their cities, any mention of you dissapears with the founding of your second empire."
"Tevinter." Fenris said tersely, he had once heard an old legend about the dragon-men of the South. But these days it was passed off as a fairy tale. Something elven mothers in Tevinter told their children to scare them.
"Precicely." She dipped her chin to him. A nodd of respect that loosened his grip on his greatsword. "To say we were surprised to find you would be a vast understatement."
The foot of the mountains met them as the sun began to dip into the West. A trail leading upwards through a forest of pine the only indication of any foot traffic. It was less trecherous than the ice and snow of the waste, but the steep incline as they began upwards made up for it. The bears, Ursids, the woman had called them, grumbled as they wrestled their heavy load up the incline.
The trail gradually evened out, became almost flat once the silvery moon peaked over the trees. The silence of the day fading into the sounds of owls hooting around them and wolves howling eerily in the distance, the vibrations bouncing off the rock walls of the mountains.
Ahead of them rose an enormous stone wall with an iron gate, red banners edged with a coiling black braid of winding embroidery and emblazonned with a similarly fashioned snakelike dragon, draped from the parapets on either side, shifting in the wind.
Fanaladi, as the little town was called, was about as big as Lothering back in Ferelden. The path leading from the gate cut straight through the town and down the mountains. Houses were of stone and logs, snowcaked with smoke rising from chimenys and the sound of men and women closing their shops for the evening, and families sitting down to dinner, the smell of pine and smoke permeating the village as they moved down the road to one of the larger cabins. The tallest brother helped Anders get Hawke down from his sister's Ursid and then moving off to put them into their stables for the evening.
She grumbled at the fifth papercut she recieved on the blasted parchment of this letter and pressed the hairline cut to her mouth, tasting copper.
By all logic she should have been sleeping at that moment, It was easily past three bells but Freya found herself unable to nod off, bothered by the sounds the wind made against the window of her borrowed room and by the anxiety swimming in her mind.
She could practically smell the change in the air; like the smell of the earth in autumn that tingled in the back of her mind and twisted like a living thing. She would have normally passed such fanciful ideas off as just that, a figment of her imagination. But the note in her hands brought the reality of it careening into her mind like a well-aimed arrow.
She dropped her finger from her mouth, replacing it with the back of her pen. The parchment, with the red leviathan seal mocked her and she wished she could crumple the damnable missive and toss it into the flames burning low in the hearth of the small library. That somehow that action would make it less real.
The floorboards creaked to her right and she looked over. Her eldest sibling leaning heavily on the doorjamb, A bottle of what looked suspiciously like moonshine in one hand. His white silver hair was tied out of his face and nearly pink irises watching her intently. "I had a feeling I knew what was in that envelope before I gave it to you."
"It's so..." She tried to find the word as he moved to sit in the chair on the oppisite side of the desk, crossing his legs and folding his hands together as he set the bottle down.
"Official?" He offered.
She snorted and spread the note out in front of her, flattening it with careful fingers.
To her highness Freya Tarania Niobel Volken, Drakhera of the kingdom Drakinder,
On behalf of his majesty Halford Baron Regnus Volken we hereby notify you of your temporary discharge from active duty until such a time as you have completed your Gaesling trial.
Virtus in honore
And then the long scrawling signature that could only be her father's.
Tiberius nodded slowly, a hand rising to his jaw and his face fixing in a frown that she knew all too well. He was about to say something that she wouldn't react well to.
"Out with it Tie." She sighed.
"You know Soren and I can't come with you but I spoke with that Hawke fellow a-"
"No."
"-nd he agreed to escort you-"
"Absolutely not Tie! I can handle myself just fine." She huffed and then hastily added "And they couldn't even take down a lesser waste leviathan! What in Drakhir's name makes you think they're qualified?"
"If they hadn't been half starved and nearly frozen solid they would have been fine. From what I gleaned of them they travelled on foot across the wilds and waste and that alone is an impressive feat." He stood, making his decision final and making Freya groan. Tiberius was impossible to argue with.