She doesn't know when she stopped thinking of it as home.
Or when home became the people and the causes instead of places on the map; she is uncertain why, too, because people are unreliable and causes change, but Highever stays the same.
It's the small details:
It's the sight of the village they pass quickly - no sign of neither darkspawn nor people - and how it spreads out before their eyes. She'd stroll here so often as a child, using the houses and people as fluid or fixed marks of her games, pretending they were enemies or friends, heroes or villains as the small roads took her to the place of her imagination. Heroes, rebels, kings and queens. And dragons.
It's the earthen smell, the open landscape and the lake just a walk away. Rooted deep within her idea of herself and of the long, windy summers and running, her breathing like harsh, hissing beats of waves against the rocks inside her chest and the taste of salty water at the back of her tongue. She used to play here, used to live here, became a person here in this place full of caught kisses and tears, bloodied knees and nursery rhymes where the innocent words gradually got replaced with crude ones as the meanings and intentions changed.
It's the fears of her younger, different body that seems so soft and breakable now, as she walks here again, carrying half her weight in plate and steel. The fear of settling down, the silly fear of never being married, the tight throat and harsh rhythm of her heart whenever she was late those months when Rory or someone else had accompanied her on her small nightly quests outside; the fear of disappointing and the fear - thick and impenetrable and constant - of confinement.
Highever. It's the same but she knows, because she stood on the top of Fort Drakon and held lives in her hands, made kings and contracts and boundaries crossing life and death, that everything has changed.
And she has missed it like one misses a home or that part of yourself you can never have back.
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Elissa breaches the gravel path leading up the main entrance of her childhood home, Fergus walking slowly beside her, keeping up with difficulty. As they approach the door, her confidence falters. It's a small tear in the ordinary task of entering a home, but large enough for them both to stop, bewildered.
"I..." Fergus begins, paling.
"We could..." Elissa says, scrambling among the shallow forms of her position and titles to find something suitably detached to cling to. There is nothing behind her voice or behind her words, merely empty sounds.
"I was almost hoping it was gone."
She wants to say that is is, that everything is gone and can't he see that? Nothing but the skeleton remains, a corpse of a castle, where the worms and the birds have consumed all that once constituted its flesh; now it's merely old, bare bones and the flurry of echoes that cross the courtyard and land at their feet.
Duncan had dragged her out. They couldn't use the regular entrances and he had dragged her; fought half-heartedly with her to wear her out, she supposes, and tore her away from her own memories with every mile they managed to cover. Elissa saw herself die as they moved. She saw herself on the floor with mother and father, or wrapped around Oren's body, or in the garden, spread out like a sodding martyr; Duncan forced her away from her own life and for the longest time, perhaps even now, she thinks this is what it's like being dead.
"I'm not," she mumbles now, surprised to hear the words.
Fergus looks at her like he's about to ask something but she shakes her head, leaning closer to his warmth.
Then Cauthrien has to be the first to enter, followed by Zevran and Loghain, while Elissa concentrates on breathing. She feels her brother's hand in her own – when he took it she doesn't know – and hears him say something that gets lost in the shuffle of soldiers following their commands and Zevran slipping outside again nodding and saying something, as well, which makes Fergus start walking.
Their hands part; Elissa remains.
"They do not make castles like this in Antiva," Zevran says quietly in her ear, his arm sliding around her waist as he's very smoothly motioning her from the stairs, and begins walking slowly towards the opened doors through which she can hear sounds and voices. "But we have vineyards to console ourselves with."
Elissa looks at him for a long time before her mind has caught up with her body. "Vineyards the size of a bannorn, from what I've gathered."
"Ah, and populated with depraved nobility and their permanently drunk concubines." He pulls at her arm as she hesitates again on the doorstep, the arm around her waist surprisingly strong considering how much bigger she is. "One day I shall show you, yes?"
"Only if the concubines are still there," she manages, weakly.
Zevran chuckles and they take another step, followed by yet another. "You are a woman of great wisdom, my dear Warden."
"I am, I know." There is something inside her that responds to his forced, light-hearted familiarity that has spurted out of the most dire situations before, resounded against the stinking walls of the Deep Roads and over the burnt flesh of dragons; it trickles into her unguarded thoughts and she finds the responses to it simple, natural.
And she may have lowered her gaze to see nothing except the soles of her feet that are marching blindly onwards, and her heart may race and that angry song in her head, the soar of darkspawn and Wardens may upset all momentum but there is something she recognizes in Zevran's voice, the weight and pressure of his body against her own. An odd kinship, perhaps. One not forged by darkspawn blood or necessity.
He lets go of her as soon as they come into sight. Elissa looks longingly after him as he slips away towards the others, as though he was never separated from them at all, but she must. A deep, ragged breath and wide-opened eyes.
And she is back in Highever Castle.
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In the Main Hall, she can still see them.
The knights and servants, the footsoldiers and tutors walking around the corridors, gossiping and giving orders; she can hear the anticipation of feasts and memorable events, trace the bottled up anxiety and stress before something extraordinary and the mundane days that would always follow.
She sees them so clearly on the empty walls where portraits used to frame the room.
Her father who should have been a man old enough to wear life down completely before passing on, her mother with the proud face and the eyes that she could make hard as flint; the men and women before them, who have made no impression in Elissa's memory but all the more within the world, who has shaped it and handed it over and now they are all gone. The portrait of Aunt Dora who was terribly unlucky, dear; it's tragic, that's what it is. Aunt Dora who had nothing – no husband, no heirs, barely an estate worthy of the name - to credit herself with beyond having lived at all. She kept a thorough record of this life of hers, the only thing she had, kept letters and diaries and endless stories of an unforgotten childhood that had never been replaced by much at all; she is still Elissa's favourite relative and greatest fear.
If Fergus hires a painter, she wonders if she will be the Dora. Her portrait hanging on a separate wall, its frame reaching into ghost-territory.
The ghosts.
Elissa knows now, after all these nights of watch and days of vigil that it's impossible to call back the dead. They are too scattered and too whole for that; they are dreams you have to wake up from. And the sensation when you do, when you are no longer capable of remembering anything beside the faint taste of old emotions casting no light any more, like dreams that have been burnt away.
"They are waiting for your orders." It's Shirei, her voice softer when surrounded by the heavy stone and masonry.
"Orders about what?" Elissa asks, feeling as old as the castle.
"There is talk about going down to village to investigate what might have happened... to the people-"
"They have likely been killed," Elissa interrupts. There is something in her throat, grabbing hold of her words so they come out as muffled, twisted. "If not by darkspawn then by the civil war."
Shirei walks up to her. Her staff gives off a low hum in the otherwise quiet room – the remains of some sort of defensive magic, Elissa has learned – and her entire being seems to do the same, radiate some sort of energy that is meant to be comforting. It feels too intimate and not nearly soothing enough, so Elissa angles away from the glances.
"Should I tell the soldiers to remain?" the mage asks, softly.
"Yes." Elissa sighs. "They are under Loghain's command while we are staying in the castle. Tell them to report to him; he will give them orders."
"And what about the teyrn?"
"Don't disturb the teyrn with these pointless questions, for one thing." Elissa sneers. "Surely you can leave him alone? Direct all inquiries to me or Loghain. Understood?"
There is a moment of uncomfortable silence before Shirei nods and slips out of the room.
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Growing up, the armoury was always locked with keys only her parents were entrusted with. She was not allowed to play there, so of course she had been inside it several times already when her mother one day deemed her grown enough for the spot in the castle where they kept their weapons and shields and that locked chest with the Highever crest.
Now she has lost the key and it's her dagger that opens the nearly caved-in door.
Her safe haven is the way she remembers it.
She'd sneak in here when it still was forbidden, pockets full of plums and figs that she had stolen from the kitchen and that tasted like freedom and excitement, and armful of books smuggled out and left behind so the armoury eventually got its own secret library: populated by tall, dark knights and resourceful ladies and allusions that only years later made any sense.
In the corner where the masonry has cracked completely and the stone structure seems to crumble, she can almost see herself, much younger, holding up her skirts and closing her eyes and quietly praying that nobody would burst in but hoping a little, too, that they would. His name was Reginald; she thought they were smooth as a pair of thieves but a couple of months after he had agreed to meet her in her hidden place he got sent to Redcliffe and never returned to her father's service.
Elissa finds a pile of debris in the opposite corner, only realising it's actually not waste but familiar items – paintings, broken tables, even a few volumes of what looks like Aldous' own family chronicles – apparently not deemed valuable enough for gold but tossed into a locked room awaiting their fate of dust and mildew. It feels so wasteful she bites down hard on a curse.
Kneeling beside the lot, she pulls out the painting of her grandfather that belongs in the dining hall. That has always hung in the dining hall and been imprinted into the very air in there; the frame is broken now and there's a dampness along the upper corners, paint coming off as she drags her fingers over it.
"There you are," Loghain says suddenly from the doorway. She has not even felt him approach; her blood seems to have calmed down in this place - or stiffened like her grief.
"Did you want something?"
He walks closer, she can hear the sound of his boots and sense his scent, because some things can't be discarded even in this castle and he is still in her blood. It feels like salt in wounds here, remembering him by Howe's side, remembering him at Ostagar, too, learning about what had happened and all but promised her it would be justly punished – except of course he didn't promise anything, but she had wanted to think so, had expected it of him; Elissa grimaces, staring at the slowly drying paint on her fingertips. Brown, green, red. As though she has dragged her hands through the surface of the earth.
"The soldiers have taken care of the luggage."
She nods, or thinks she nods. He clears his throat.
"I said that the soldiers have taken care of the luggage."
"Fergus' men didn't do a thorough job," Elissa says, chest tightening around the hollow that has swallowed everything else there. "They don't seem to have bothered going into locked rooms."
Loghain falls silent behind her.
"I see," he comments, eventually. She can spot him in the corner of her eyes; he is standing close, leaning against the wall and observing her. What he thinks or feels about being here, she can't even begin to guess and he doesn't let anything slip. And there's a sudden rage in her at the thought of his carefully bound momentum, a rage as much directed towards her own overwhelming emotions as his apparent lack of the same.
"He said my mother died on her knees, like she ought to." Elissa stares at straight ahead, her voice coming out in a strange tone that sounds unfamiliar even to her own ears. "Howe's men threw all the corpses in a pile and burned them. He told me this in Denerim. Like dogs, he said. I can't tell Fergus this."
"No," Loghain agrees.
"Do you think he ever regretted it?"
She turns her head, glances at him over her shoulder, momentarily.
"I doubt he did," he says. "To him, it was an act of war. You do not regret doing what you decide is necessary even when that necessity is monstrous."
Elissa laughs bitterly. "You don't? I know I do."
He sounds different when he responds, his voice harder, like he has coated it in steel for this purpose. "What is the point in regretting that which cannot be undone?"
There is something in her head, a whisper far back, hidden somewhere among the knowledge of history and politics and the art of speaking to people and the secret art of never letting them know how much you know and the uses of shields and everything else. Something Mother Mallol would say, about facing the Maker with your heart open and your hands empty.
It seems unlikely Loghain will face the Maker with anything but this ridiculous posture and it makes her unfathomably sad, for reasons she can't grasp. It also makes her furious, like he has taken her own heart and laughed at it, deemed her grief unimportant and considers it an obstacle in their usual existence of darkspawn and Orlesian politics. She wants to hit him, hurt him for it.
"This painting of my grandfather belonged to my mother," she says instead, "it was her heritage."
"Elissa, I'd suggest-"
"It's broken, look at all this, the bastards have just tossed everything in here and- shit-" she pulls her hand back, realising she has driven a splinter from a broken frame through her finger. Sucking the blood from it, she rises to her feet and almost crashes into Loghain's large frame. "I'm going to-"
"Elissa," Loghain interrupts, his voice harsh, his hands reaching around her wrists and she turns around to tell him to leave her alone, shove him away but the concern in his eyes catches her off-guard. "Calm down."
"Oh, you...you-" She tries to speak – you bloody bastard, what gives you the right - but she can't get any words out of her body, because suddenly the air in her lungs is gone and she gasps, trying to push Loghain away but he is still holding her, hard and ungentle, and it's not until she almost starts crying that she hears what he is saying through the noise in her head and the soaring in her chest.
"You must breathe," he says, releasing her when she stops struggling. "Breathe."
Breathe.
That is simple. She can breathe.
And she does. For a while that is all she does, leaning against the damp stone wall outside the armoury, she inhales and exhales methodically, and Loghain stands beside her, the front of his shirt bloodied and rumpled.
The shame of almost having lost her hold of herself - in front of the person in this castle who is the least likely to respect her if she does, no less - trickles down her spine. Elissa closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again she sees that he is still watching her.
"They were human beings, Loghain." Her voice carries, there is a strength in her even now that almost comes as a surprise. "They were my family. They were important. Howe slaughtered the bloody Teyrn of Highever! And you shrugged it away like they had been cattle."
"Those were not ordinary circumstances," he replies, with the steel-voice. He has lowered his gaze, it grazes the floor. "I... thought that I needed Howe-"
"What for?" She can hear her question echo in the room, it's loud and dark and reaching beyond the past few months' pragmatic reasons and acceptance. "Why would you need Howe? He was a useless vassal barely fit to govern his own bit of land-"
"I needed him to help win the Landsmeet's support. I am hardly a politician," Loghain cuts in, his eyes flaring up a little. He speaks of it like it is nothing worthy of his time, she thinks, probably considering it petty games played by the lords and ladies while others are tasked to do the hard work.
"No," Elissa says, feeling the urge to claw further at the slowly cracked composure. "It has been made abundantly clear that you are not."
They stand like duellists waiting for the cue, she has folded her arms across her chest and Loghain wears the expression she has come to know as the one that means he is about to storm out of the room, ending the conversation. But not tonight.
She shifts her weight between her feet and flickers stray hairs our of her eyes.
"Oren was five. He was killed along with his mother, Maker knows what else they did to her -"
Loghain flinches visibly at that, a ghost of something floating across his face.
"I am aware of exactly what Howe did," he says.
"I know you are." Elissa swallows. "You made him your right hand, after all. You let him near your daughter and you allowed him to... Maker, Loghain, you let him do whatever he wanted – how can you, you shouldn't... How can you even stand the thought of yourself?"
She expects him to explain that they are people, tragic times and important people but still people and those are always, in his own words, the currency of war. She expects a patronising speech of the kind he knows so well how to deliver.
"I have done far worse than this," he says instead, the tone of his voice running hot behind the cold anger, and that she has not foreseen.
"So that is going to be your excuse, then? Because you have done worse things, this doesn't count?"
"It's not an excuse." He spits out the word, like it's a venom she has given him.
"Oh, of course not," Elissa sneers. "You do not make excuses because you do not regret anything."
Loghain clenches his teeth, the line of his jaw stiffening; she walks up to the pile of debris again, wiping her bleeding finger on her breeches and sighing heavily.
"Under all those layers of necessity and duty you must have a sodding heart!" she cries, despite herself and feeling the immediate urge to blush at that idiotic statement or drive a sword through him for having witnessed it.
"What of it?" Loghain sounds like chord about to break, about to snap furiously. "What sort of confession do you want? That I am sorry about what happened to your family? I am. I am sorry about what happened to your family. Does that bring them back?"
"Maker's breath, Loghain, I'm asking you to be human."
"And yet you have already concluded that I am not."
Once before has she seen him like this – about to let go of his control. Once, and she has never forgotten his voice or his gestures or that face he had at Landsmeet, standing before the crowd of vultures ready to devour him: how dare you accuse me!
When Elissa first spoke to him - truly spoke to him - one night when they were softened by worry and battles to come she was introduced to his language of movements, gestures, words and silences. He had seemed so terse, reduced to the exact amount of humanity that was required to accomplish what he had forced himself to accomplish. Nothing beyond this. She knew, of course, that his life has been through a war and like all wars, this one had used everything it had, emptied itself and taken what it needed to. But still.
He had seemed so inhumanly controlled and the mastery of that control - even then, thrown into a new existence when the old one had desperately failed – had been so great.
It wavers now before her and she takes a dark and twisted pleasure in conjuring it, his faltering.
"Would you have done the same if Maric had been alive?"
Loghain makes a sudden move towards her, lips curled in a snarl. "This has nothing to do with Maric!"
She stands her ground, remains motionless as he comes closer, until they are merely an arm's length apart.
"Would you have found the same things necessary if he had still been your king?" she asks, aware that she is cruel, but unable to stop. Something is dragging her forward. "If Rowan had been there, would you-"
And that hits somewhere deep under his defences, she can see it by the way his face dissolves and reassembles itself again, the pieces shuffled together in the wrong order so there's an edge remaining, a little glimpse of him falling through the cracks.
"Don't," he interrupts, coldly, as though all rage has turned to ice. "Do not speak of them as though you know... as though you have any idea of what we did. What we had to do."
"Would you have done the same if Maric had been alive?" she repeats, urging him to look at her but he doesn't; Loghain turns and shakes his head, dragging a hand through his hair in an exasperated gesture.
"No," he admits. It sounds like a sigh.
"Why?"
The room seems to wait with her. Loghain paces the floor, like a prisoner about to be released from a cage.
"I have hardly given you the false impression I am someone else, have I?" he asks, without answering her question. "So why this sudden need for my guilty admissions?"
Elissa looks at her own hands, faintly hoping they will hold the answers. Then she lets her gaze wander up, across the dirty, dusty walls until they land on Loghain's face.
"Because I cannot stand the thought that this callous bastard is all that's left of you," she says suddenly and when the words are spoken she realises they are one of the most honest things she has ever said. It scratches at secrets too raw for her own liking, so she clears her throat. Loghain has stopped, but he stands with his back to her.
"Then don't assume you know so much about me, Commander," he says, and before she has regained enough command of her voice to respond to that, he is gone.
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As a girl, she dreamed of flight.
Dragon-backs and fanciful tales, mountains of snow and ice and oceans whipped to foam by storms and the sea monsters in those stories her father sometimes would let slip into her chamber when she was ill and he sat by her bedside, watching over her until the creatures living underneath the bed had fallen asleep. Oddly enough the bed-creatures were soothed by only the most horrifying tales. Mother never understood, but father did. He told her of dragons and dwarves and swords that could cut through stone if held by the right warrior. And that could be you, my little raven.
Elissa finds her own chambers largely the same as when she left. Almost as though the battle has taken a leap across it, deemed it unimportant and raged on elsewhere.
She doesn't particularly want to sleep tonight but they have travelled far and kept a fast pace so she needs it, her tiredness makes itself present in her body and her temples that throb with a steady beat. Flat on her back she counts the spots in the ceiling. The sound of soldiers rings in her ears. Pressing her hands to her head she thinks of duelling, of archery – no, not of archery because that reminds her of other things that hurt dully and persistently – of her fading knowledge of Orlesian -
No.
When she opens her eyes she sees the arrows hit Iona's body, sees the ensuing uproar and can smell the stench of fire even under the clean sheets. She's burning, she is certain she is burning and with Dog at her heels, she runs out, the same way her feet have taken so many times before.
The garden is faded and untended to, the shape of tall bushes and in against the backdrop of the strict stone walls gives it a appearance of the Wilds. There has been no one here in a long while to curb nature. No Nan to rage against the course of the inevitable in her vegetable gardens where she grew tomatoes and herbs for the kitchen, as stubbornly as the managed the servants and regardless of what everyone said about northern Fereldan climate.
Elissa remembers Nan's hands and the way she used them - giving Elissa a pat on the cheek or a squeezing of her shoulder - and the way they smelled of onions and pepper, sometimes oil and sugar and always, always of safety and bedtime stories underneath it all.
Her footsteps push down into the frosty grass as she's approaching the cave-like arbour where she spent untold hours of her childhood, hiding from Aldous and mother and that loud-mouthed sword instructor that kept insisting Fergus was better suited for two-handed weapons because he was a boy although Elissa bested him at least every other time they fought.
She would sit there, as a little girl and as a slightly older girl with slightly shifted problems, covered in the leaves and filled head to toe with that rich scent of blossoms and grass and the power in being in hiding until she wanted to be found.
Tonight there is no room in there because the opening she always used has grown intact, the bushes are thick and thorny and her own height and width too imposing for hide-outs.
"I knew I'd find you here."
Fergus wears a fur cloak over his regular clothes where he stands, with Dog running up to greet him by nuzzling into the back of his hands, searching for something to eat. But her brother has never been the type to care for dogs like that.
"We used this exit," Elissa says, not coming to a halt, because for some reason she feels like moving, incessantly. Her shadow on the ground flutters like a whisper around her legs. "When Duncan got me out."
"Ah." Fergus appears so old with that simple little sound, so old and weary and done. "Yes."
"I trust everyone has found beds," she says, in a ridiculous attempt at steering the inevitable to a lighter ground, a different world where the rules of their childhood games are prevailing and nobody ever dies.
"They did. There are spare rooms."
"Yes," she nods. "There are."
Elissa remembers stumbling over rocks, running through stubble-fields and watersides and she remembers falling, recalls Duncan's hands pulling her up, pushing her forward. He had carried her for some distances. Despite her size and the strength of her sword arm he had carried her like a sodding child, telling her sharply to shut up and see reason; sometimes he would simply leave her alone, let her rage. When he spoke to her again she would be calmer, but not any more prone to listen. They had an uneasy journey to Ostagar and Duncan did not seem to mind. But he was used to journeys like that, she assumed.
"How?" Fergus asks suddenly, striding across a fallen rose bush. "Do you... where you there to see how they died?"
"Fergus, I..."
"I want to know. Don't... don't spare me."
"They had killed Oren and Oriana already, when I..." She feels her throat burn. "Mother came to look for me, she had not seen father. We fought our way down to him. He was very badly injured. He... the soldiers had surprised us entirely. Rory... he held them back while we ran off to find father."
"Oh, Elissa."
She doesn't come to rest, unblinking she keeps pressing her heels down on the already withered flowers and vegetables at her feet. Rory's eyes, his fingers tracing hers quickly and out of sight as he, too, granted her life. She wonders how much she has cost them all.
"Mother should have left with me and Duncan; I kept saying that she should. Father wanted her to. He wasn't even able to sit up. I... I didn't want to leave them. I tried to stay. I did. Duncan convinced father-"
"He recruited you against your will?" They're closer now, close enough for her to see the puff of white steam around his words. Then he sighs. "Well, of course he did. Why wouldn't he? You're... you."
"I did not want to." It still tastes bitter; for all her bravado and cheap clichés, she can still feel the desire to shout out this injustice, its edges hot and sharp like needles under her skin. "I made a mess. He conscripted me, in the end."
He shakes his head, sadly. "I'm so sorry."
"Whatever for?" Elissa takes a few steps away, feeling a slight dread seeping into her as soon as they're too close, as though she will be entirely decomposed at his touch. "You weren't there, you didn't... I should have seen it. If I had been quicker, perhaps-"
"There was nothing you could have done, Elissa." Fergus sounds like he is near anger.
"I should have died instead of... You know... if I could..." she has to stop to catch her breath. Fergus has caught up with her now, his arms pulling her into an embrace that is unlike anything they have ever shared before, devoid of light-hearted bear hugs and pats on the back because this time they hold on to each other for dear life and Elissa thinks that if he falls, she falls, too. And when he drops to his knees on the ground, she follows.
"Don't say that," he whispers, his mouth buried in her hair. "Please don't say that."
Then her brother gives a cry, an almost monstrous sound rising from him and it takes a second before Elissa realises he is sobbing, violently, their intertwined bodies rocking back and forth on the ground and she clutches him and before she has time to regain her calm she is crying too, her face pressed into the curve of his neck.
AN: Endless gratitude to CJK for being a fabulous beta/sounding board. And lots of love for reviews and other forms of feedback, it really makes my day. Thank you for reading and for staying with me! :)