I guess this is another viewpoint on "The Smell Of Freedom", so you might want to read the last chapter before this one, if you haven't.
I had a little time on my hands, so it'll be a double update today - enjoy.
Trees
Alistair
The walk through the forest is slow, the atmosphere tense and uneasy.
Werewolves. Well, nothing can ever be easy - they came to recruit the Dalish, so of course they end up hunting werewolves.
He sighs, and sees Morgana look to him at the sound; then she turns back, looking ahead, except... not ahead. Up. He follows her gaze, but all he sees are trees, the light through the leaves throwing patterns on the ground. He looks again, but it still seems to be the trees that have transfixed her - much as she is trying to hide it, it's the canopy above them that her gaze keeps darting to. What, has she never seen a tree before?
Oh. Well, she's probably not seen a forest. The thought brings an ache to his chest as he thinks about why that is.
He remembers the way she sits in camp occasionally, when she can't sleep and she thinks no-one is awake, a book on her lap - she brought a few from the Tower - eyes sparkling in the firelight as she frowns, taking in every word like it's her last. He never has the heart to disturb her; she seems so... happy, somehow, so different from the apprentice thrown into a tainted world that she seems to think doesn't want her.
Suddenly, he can just see her as a girl, sat the same way, brushing away fair hair that falls into her eyes as she frowns at a book; already accepting that she'll never see the outside world, already trapped.
He looks to her in front of him and swallows, suddenly struck with the ridiculous urge to... protect her?
She looks back as they reach the side of a river, giving him a smile, and he returns it, catching up with her.
"Are you all right?" she asks him. "You look... pale."
"I'm fine, Morgana," he replies, sighing at her worrying, and in that moment, he finds, to his surprise, that he is.