Disclaimer: Bioware owns all, except what I most humbly create. While, at times, I will take verbatim from the game, I mostly use the events of the Dragon Age games, expansions and universe as a loose structure around which to construct my re-imagined tale. If you are looking for a strict canon piece, I have no desire to offend, and so I warn you upfront!

When reading this tale, I hope you can easily imagine it being told by the very best of storytellers in Varric (from DA:2). In my version of events, Varric meets "The Hero" (my Elissa Cousland) in Kirkwall during the time period of DA:2. I mention this only so that readers can understand his connection along the way, and so I don't have to mention and rehash it again and again as I make my way through the tale.

A/N: The prison scene and a bit more from Nathaniel's prospective. :)

Thanks to all my readers, followers and reviewers! Hugs to artemiskat.

Happy Reading!

-Frayed One

Chapter Three: The Ice Queen

"Have you ever taken a bite of something you expected to be sweet, only to be left with a mouthful of bitter?" the archer asked, remaining focused on his fletching though he answered the question I'd asked him with regard to The Hero in record time.

"More times than I care to imagine…" I chuckled, tossing down my own arrow into the communal pile.

"That's what it was like to see her again." Nathaniel remembered, stroking his thumb gently along the feathers he'd just seated into the wood. "Like I'd just gotten my hands on the most perfect apple I'd ever seen, only to realize it'd gone rotten once I bit into it."

I grimaced at the thought, but understood his metaphor. The pair had gone nearly a decade apart and during that time the landscape between them had been littered with mines just waiting for detonation.

Nathaniel had fought like a bear at first, dodging and striking out as the Wardens cornered him in the room that had once been his father's archives. He caught one of them in the eye solidly, and rattled another one's head against the wall in the process of tackling a third.

As he pressed his forearm against the man's throat, cutting off his air supply long enough to leave him unconscious and stood to face off against the fourth, he realized it was stupid to keep fighting. More Wardens would come after these, and even more after those. He was already feeling exhausted and sore from restless nights and one too many near misses at the previous Warden's blades, and so, with very little ceremony, Nathaniel Howe simply gave up. He raised his hands, allowing the remaining Warden to capture him.

The Warden shoved Nathaniel forward roughly with the heel of his boot, muttering something in Orlesian (Maudite fausse couche!) and wiping at the bloody nose he'd been given somewhere along the way.

"Bloody Orlesians…" Nathaniel hissed, earning another kick as the man escorted him down the long hall and out into the courtyard.

The next few days proved to be nothing more than a string of endless humiliation. They stripped him down and took everything he owned, tossing it roughly into a chest and leaving the room with it. He'd fought when they took off Elissa's pendant, feeling more naked at the loss of that tarnished slab of silver than he already was standing there bare as the day he'd been born. That had earned him a hard blow to the face and a long cold night on the dirty stone floor with not so much as a rag to cover himself.

The next morning when they'd come in to bring him some food and water, they brought him some ragged clothing as well. Only because the Seneschal insisted he be treated humanely, they explained – making sure he saw it when they spit in his food before sliding it to the floor just inside the door.

They spent most of the rest of the day asking him questions he resolutely refused to answer, the reaction to which had been the reclamation of his threadbare garments and a continued neglect to his proper nourishment or hydration over the course of the next twenty-four hours.

The next person he laid eyes on was the Seneschal himself, the wizened man grumbling angrily at the guard and giving specific instructions that the prisoner be left alone until the Commander arrived to deal with him, before making his way to the cell with a less offensive selection of clothing along with food and water.

"I apologize for your treatment." the man said, opening the cell and sliding the things through so that Nathaniel could reach out for them. "The Orlesians can be a bit overzealous in their approach to information gathering."

"Overzealous?" Nathaniel asked, raising an eyebrow as he quickly tossed on the clothing – choking down a crust of bread just in case it should be reclaimed.

"Can you blame them, honestly?" the seneschal asked, only half hiding his smile at the thought of the havoc this single man had managed to wreak before he'd allowed his capture. "I think one of them is still recovering from his injuries."

"To his pride, maybe." Nathaniel snorted, noting the twinkle of amusement in the man's eye. "The damage I inflicted on their bodies was not so severe."

"Don't underestimate the profound impact of damage to one's pride." the seneschal laughed, turning to walk away from the cell again after locking the door.

"If you only knew how ironic those words were, old man…" Nathaniel chuckled, sitting roughly on the floor and continuing to enjoy his first full meal in several days.

The next few days kind of ran together, without the random bouts of cruelty and questioning to separate them. He found himself wondering if the Commander would ever show up, or if he'd simply live out the rest of his time trapped within the stone and metal walls his father built years before.

He only started to actually worry when the sounds from outside the chamber door became increasingly erratic. When the guard came scurrying back inside – barring the door not just with the latch but also with the table – he knew something was very wrong.

"What is it?" Nathaniel asked, watching the guard turn fearful eyes in his direction from where he sat, deathly white and trembling against the wall inside the door.

"Darkspawn…" the man said, his voice shaking, "they're everywhere."

"Let me out!" Nathaniel insisted, knowing they both stood a better chance if he was free and armed than if he stayed locked inside the cell.

"I-I've strict orders to…" the guard muttered, snapping his head back to the door when something slammed against the upper end of the stairs followed by a scream that dissolved into the guttural sounds of a death rattle.

"Sod your orders!" Nathaniel yelled, holding his arm out through the bars. "Give me a bow, a blade, anything. I can help you! We stand a better chance together than alone and you know it!"

There was more screaming, and the door beyond the guard rattled with the force of something slamming against it – sending the man scrambling fearfully back against the bars of Nathaniel's cell.

The man didn't reply to anything Nathaniel asked after that, and they spent the next span of days listening to the horrors unfolding above them. Eventually, the sounds of chaos seemed to dwindle down and they heard the first sounds that were not uttered by darkspawn drifting through the door.

"The Commander's come!" the man called through the door, sending the guard running to shift aside the table and undo the latch admitting the beaming messenger into the room.

"Thank the Maker!" the guard replied, rushing up the stairs behind him and leaving Nathaniel alone in silence once again.

Well, Nathaniel thought, flopping back against the wall. At least it will all be over soon.

It took much longer for the Commander to make her way down to deal with him than Nathaniel would have liked. His guard had returned nearly two hours before she set foot in the chamber, bringing him a full plate of food and an entire jug of water at the Seneschal's insistence.

When she finally did make it into the room, she was more like a drowned rat than a mythical piece of history. Her entire body was covered with mud and muck he could only assume to be what was left of the darkspawn she'd encountered, all of it running down her soaked body with the rain into a large messy puddle on the floor.

He settled himself into his usual posture of indifference, determined to offer her nothing more than he had given her lackeys before she'd decided to grace them all with her arrival. That's when he heard her voice… and everything screeched to a halt.

He struggled to even out his breathing, to keep his body from shaking, to will away what was clearly insanity finally settling in on his battered mind – all the while listening to the rising and falling of her tone as she questioned the guard, the lilt of it as familiar to him as the back of his own hand.

"If he's so dangerous, why not simply execute him?" Elissa asked, walking directly into the torchlight and allowing him to see her eyes for the first time – the familiar flash of green stabbing into his heart just as sharp as if she'd thrown a dagger.

They'd argued after that, everything blending into one hate filled string of insanity where they'd hurled insult after insult at one another – some deserved, some… intentionally hurtful and unnecessary.

When she'd stripped off her armor and come barreling into his cell he'd nearly lost it, cringing back against the wall like a child and praying to the Maker she'd just go away. The love of his life was standing a few feet away from him for the first time in almost ten years, only instead of folding her in his arms and kissing her senseless as he'd imagined so many times before, he was pressing a dagger into the flesh of her bosom – just as aroused as he was disgusted when a stream of blood trickled down into her cleavage and drew his eye.

He'd dropped the hilt then, staggering limp against the wall with the horrific realization that he might have more of his father's darkness inside him than he wanted to admit.

She'd walked away from him after that, hastily fastening up her armor and calling the Seneschal and his guard into the room so that he could be dealt with.

She shook off the suggestion of both hanging and decapitation, leaving him to wonder what other more tortuous death she had in store for him.

"The last thing I ever expected her to do was let me go." Nathaniel chuckled, a rare smile turning up the edges of his mouth as he tossed another arrow into our pile. "But, that's Elissa for you. She's nothing if not unpredictable."

"I've learned that myself, over the years… though, I suspect not in the same ways…" I laughed, drawing out another smirk from the normally morose archer, pleased that I'd gotten not one but two in the span of a single day. "Why did she let you go?"

I knew the answer to this question already, rather – I knew what The Hero had given in response when I posed the same question to her months before. I simply wondered what Nathaniel Howe thought about it.

"At the time I suspected she just wanted me out of her hair." he said with a shrug, remembering the sight of her standing atop the ramparts and watching him leave – wrapped in the arms of his replacement. "Now, I don't know. She never gave me an honest answer… not really. Mercy, I suppose? Perhaps to prove to herself that she hadn't become my father in the end?" He leaned back in the chair then, folding his arms behind his head and staring into the fire as he did so often when we spoke. "All I can tell you for sure is that when I left that night, I had every intention of never looking back."

Obviously he had. Obviously he'd not only looked back but actively turned and run in her direction, but he grew quiet – packing up his share of the arrows and leaving my room at the Hanged Man soon after.