Authors note: Thanks for the review :)
Then she stood before him in the Landsmeet, that same air of defiance and self-assuredness. She walked with grace that few had attained, and carried herself not with pride but with the knowledge that she could kill.
He acknowledged her then. Not as she deserved perhaps, but enough. he thought he knew how the battle would play out, only one person could walk away from this. only one person survived.
And with all his years of experience behind him, he thought he knew who would win that battle. and while the thought of her death pained him, his cold calculation came back. one life for thousands, one life to save the rest.
But she had been like water, flowing around him, darting beneath the broad reach of his sword. In the camps at Ostagar he'd heard her sparring with comrades, and as quick as her feet had been, her sharp tongue followed, slicing at the enemy as keenly as her blades. But in this battle. she was silent.
And when she drove her knee into the chain of his armour and winded him, he knew he was finished. No longer the young man with endless stamina, he knew she had won.
He yielded, expecting her to drive the points of those lethal daggers into his throat there and then as he lay sprawled on the rich red rug. But again, she surprised him. the hand that should have descended with all the righteous fierce power of vengeance and hate, instead opened in supplication. She offered him her hand, and accepted his surrender.
Then, to the surprise of all, accepted Riordan's proposal to have him join the Grey Wardens. The bastard son of a once great king, the new recruit she had dragged from Ostagar vehemently protested. But she was resolute, she was calm. And she refused to let him die.
Even when the recruit left in a hot fury, his words biting with scorn and hatred at her decision, she showed nothing but calm acceptance on her face.
He had underestimated her, badly. The recruit he had seen at Ostagar, half drowned in rain and buried in mud could not have raised an army. but she had. United all the races and marched on Denerim to take the armies of mankind to war. And when she could have struck her killing blow, she instead offered mercy.
No. this was not a woman that was easily understood. Her true measure defied easy calculation.
An when he drank of the Darkspawn blood, of the joining goblet as countless other wardens had before him, he knew that fate would not be kind and just let him die. instead he would survive, live for as long as he was allowed with the memories of that awful presence in his head, the whispered voices of the chittering darkspawn and the skull cracking pressure of the Arch Demon calling to him.