Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Age or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other fans like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.

Rating: T

Spoilers: Takes place ten years or more after the events of Dragon Age: Origins, from the background of a female Human Noble pc who has recruited Loghain and persuaded an "altered" Alistair to marry Anora and rule as King despite his survival, and persuaded Loghain to perform the dark ritual with Morrigan. May contain spoilers for Origins, Awakening, and Dragon Age II as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling.

Chapter Nine: Rough Travels, Rough Travails

Even though it was her idea from the get-go, the Warden seemed unaccountably grumpy as they trudged cross-country to the hidden temple. Loghain thought he might know why - during the time pre-Denerim he'd spent traveling with her throughout Ferelden and even the Deep Roads, "wrapping up unfinished business," as she put it, he'd noticed she had a penchant for looting - anything and everything they found, in fact, which accounted for why she kept that Orlesian girl close at hand at all times. Leliana had an annoying voice, prattled endlessly, and required constant attention in battle or she'd be knocked out cold despite the fine armor the Warden had no doubt made a gift to her of, but she could pick a lock with ten times the dexterity of the assassin Zevran. All those dead Chevaliers back at the battlefield represented untold fortunes in shiny objects and equipment, and someone else was going to benefit from it all. He did see her stoop quickly and scoop up a cameo brooch from the breast of one foe as they were leaving, however.

He had a hard time believing that the ashes of Andraste were really at the far end of this little side-trip they were making, or that they would truly have the power to heal him if they were. He had an illness, yes, but in his considered opinion what he was dying of was nothing more nor less than a bad case of old, and there could be no cure for that. This was a waste of time. It was right that he die, he'd been prepared for it a long time now. He'd come back to Ferelden, despite thinking Alistair would call for his execution, because damn it all to the Void and back if he couldn't die useful then at least let him die at home. Stopping the Orlesians' plans to invade would make him feel that he was dying both useful and at home, which was the best hand fate could deal him.

There was another, under-the-surface reason why he didn't want to go along with this grand scheme of the Warden's, one that he did not like to have to speak of aloud. But the map he carried about with him in his head showed the village of Haven and the temple where he'd helped the Warden slay their holy High Dragon was quite a goodly walk from Sulcher's Pass, and he was bloody tired, and it wouldn't do to let them get too far out of their way before he managed to talk them out of it.

"You said this Gauntlet of Trials can only be passed by the worthy," he said to the Warden. "While I believe in the Maker and all that, I can't say I've been a good little Andrastian since…ever, really. What makes you think I can make it through?"

"You will," the Warden said simply. "It's not difficult. I don't even know if it's really real."

"How can you say that?" Alistair said reproachfully. "You passed through the Gauntlet, you saw the Urn, you touched the ashes…you certainly saw that they saved Arl Eamon's life. You know it's real."

"I know it works, Al, that's a very different thing. Oghren said there was lyrium in the mountain, even in the construction of the resting place, powerful lyrium of a type he'd never felt before. Maybe that was what made the ashes a curative - I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure. Seems a little more likely to me than the idea that the charred remains of a dead woman have retained some blessing of a Maker that doesn't seem to give a good flogging damn about His favored creation or the Bride he supposedly chose from amongst us. He let her bloody well burn, after all."

"You were deemed worthy and yet you'll stride along calmly blaspheming the Maker and His Bride," Loghain said wryly. "I suppose I don't have so much to worry about, then."

"Hey, I'm not the one who told the Divine, in absentia, to go roll in the mud and finger herself."

"The Divine is a mortal woman in the back pocket of the blasted Orlesians, and she's welcome to do that any time as far as I'm concerned," Loghain retorted glibly. "And more, for I would be made quite a happy man were I to hear she had suddenly and with no prior warning taken a very long walk off a very short dock."

Alistair, good Chantry-going lad that he was, stuck his fingers in his ears. "I'm not hearing this. La-la-la-la-la."

"Let us leave aside the subject of the provenance of this curative for the time being, shall we?" Anora said. "You are at least quite certain that it will work?"

"Pretty damned," the Warden said. "Brought Eamon back in a heartbeat from poisoning and the after-effects of being held captive by a demon, not that I haven't had some doubts in the years since that he actually deserved to live. Bloody Lung shouldn't be much of a problem compared to that, I would think."

Alistair glowered, but held his silence. The Warden saw it and clapped him on the back hard enough to make him stagger a few paces. "Come on, Al - you claim the man 'did his best' for you, but it always sounded to me as if you were barely tolerated and shuffled off to Chantry School as fast as humanly possible."

"He repaired my mother's amulet," Alistair began, but then he remembered Loghain saying that the Redcliffe serving girl might not have been his actual mother, which made him think that perhaps the bastard son she'd died giving birth to most likely also died just as the woman's daughter had been told, and that since the boy was evidently not Maric's child, he might well have been Eamon's. Further meaning that the amulet might never have been repaired with the intention of returning it to him.

The Warden was unapprised of Loghain's conjectures, but she sighed and clapped Alistair on the back again. "You are a sentimental fool, Al." Blushing and half-crushed beneath the weight of dawning reality, Alistair could not deny it.

Despite the mage's healing and the dose of treatment the Warden had forced down his throat, Loghain was experiencing certain difficulties keeping up with the younger folk over the rough terrain, alarming as even a day before he could have run all three of them into the ground in terms of endurance if not speed. Before they'd covered half the distance the ragged wheeze was once again evident in his breathing, and the occasional cough wracked up aspirated blood that stained Anora's white handkerchief with tiny pink spots. I'll have to buy her another one, he thought dimly, for even thought was difficult when so much of his energies were necessary just to keep one foot plodding in front of the other step after step.

The Warden saw he was flagging and shored him up on one side. "Not much further. Just hold it together another couple of miles. Easy for an old warhorse like you, right?"

"Right. Easy," he said raggedly, but pressed on, without the energy to spare to feel embarrassed by needing to lean on the woman's shoulder so. It was more than a couple of miles to the foot of the mountain temple, but Loghain was nothing if not relentless and made it, tired and out of breath but still with strength to spare. The Warden was anxious to press on but allowed them a moment to sit and rest upon the steps of the antechamber.

"By the Maker," Anora said reverently, "this place is magnificent."

Loghain grimaced. "By my memory, even though the Warden had already cleared the main rooms pretty well, it is less magnificent than it is run-down and sadly defiled by generations of dragon-worshipping fools. And there's dragon shit everywhere, as I recall."

"Not in the Gauntlet, though," the Warden was quick to assure the Queen. "The Guardian wouldn't let the cultists near - they were unworthy, of course - and it's clean in there, if not entirely untouched by the decay of time."

"The…Guardian?" Anora said doubtfully.

"The spirit that guards the ashes," Alistair explained. "He looks a formidable warrior for all he's not entirely solid and all, and I for one was glad that fighting him wasn't part of the Gauntlet. He just asks you a very personal question for which you already know the answer, and he doesn't even seem to care whether or not you answer him. I suppose he can see the answer in your eyes, or something."

"We're here for Loghain, and he'll be the one who must take the lead in the Gauntlet itself," the Warden said, "but when we came before he asked all of us questions. Prepare yourself, Your Majesty, because the questions he asks are the type that open some emotional wounds. Like Al said, though, you really don't have to answer."

The Queen looked momentarily pensive as she considered what emotional wounds this spirit would choose to rankle, but her expression settled back into its usual polite neutrality and she tossed her head. "Let him ask. I daresay I won't be taken unawares by anything he might say."

"Are you rested enough, Loghain?" the Warden asked. "Without another dose of medicine to hand I don't want to dally. With the High Dragon dead I think it likely we'll meet no resistance in the form of cultists, and hopefully no more dragons showed up to hatch out what eggs we left to spoil on their own."

"There will be a fight, though," Alistair said. "Shadows of ourselves, if the Gauntlet does not vary. You can expect it to be…grueling."

The Warden shuddered, and it did not look theatrical. "Shadow Loghain. A sobering thought. I would suggest we target that particular shade first and deal with the rest after it falls."

"The Shadow Loghain might be as ill as the real one," Alistair pointed out. "It might not be as formidable as we expect."

"Let's hope. Being knocked off my feet by a roar from the real thing is humiliating enough - to be bowled over by something I can't even properly see would be far worse."

"There's a ponderation for the ages for you - could Loghain repel himself with a war cry?" Alistair said, smiling.

"The Sten might have been able to give us an answer to that," the Warden said, shaking her head. "I remember he spent hours one day while we were walking the Imperial Highway trying to explain to me the sound of one hand clapping."

"I thought you said you did not wish to dally," Loghain pointed out irritably.

"So I did, and so I don't. Let's press on."

They climbed up through the temple's many levels, into and through the Wyrmling's Lair, and they encountered no resistance and indeed few if any signs that anything had entered the temple in the years since they'd killed the dragon, though the Warden said the Chantry had sent an expedition to verify the discovery. She didn't sound too pleased about it, either. Loghain wondered how she knew the Divine hadn't had them simply take the urn and its holy contents back to Orlais to be fawned over and defiled by the thrice-damned clergy and he realized that much of her displeasure surely stemmed from the fact that she didn't know, not for sure. "The Guardian would never let that happen, never," he heard her mutter under her breath.

Eventually they came once more to the bright sunshine on top of the mountain peak. They paused briefly at the bleached remains of the High Dragon as they passed.

"Maker's breath," Anora breathed. "I realize that the Archdemon was the greater foe, but this…this is impressive. Who was with you when you killed it?"

"Me, Oghren, Wynne, and your father," the Warden answered. "Loghain actually killed it - he seems to have a knack for dragonslaying. Perhaps because by the time the bleeding things were ready to fall he was the only one of us that still had enough stamina to strike the damned thing down. I actually thought he killed the Archdemon but evidently it was only knocked out for a moment - and then I felt a little bit like a pretender, making that final blow after he'd crippled the beast for me."

"We all worked together to cripple the beast," Loghain said. "With the Archdemon as with the other dragons we faced. The kill falls to all who battled, not the one who happened to land the final blow."

"Even Wynne?" the Warden teased, knowing that there'd been no love lost between Loghain and the healer, although by the end of their association the mage had relented somewhat in her low opinion of the former Teyrn, which had from the start mostly been a reaction to how much she had adored Cailan, who probably could not have picked her out of a crowd, and Alistair, in whose company she spent the remainder of her life. Her state funeral had been a scandal that reached Loghain's ears even in Orlais, where he kept himself busily occupied in not hearing news from home for fear it should send him on a murderous rampage through the streets of Montsimmard.

"When she cast spells of ice and stone to slow the beast, and spells of healing to keep the rest of us alive? Yes, even Wynne."

"Her will always petered out before Loghain's," the Warden confided to Anora. "Morrigan's, too, for that matter. Remember when we were clearing out the Brecilian forest and we found that trap the ancient shade had set for travelers?" she asked Loghain.

"The fake campsite. Yes, I remember."

"Two mages in our party, and all of us were trapped in the thrall of the spirit's spell. All except Loghain, that is. Wynne managed to wake up before the rest of us did, thanks to her guardian spirit, but she was badly sapped and hardly any help to him in slaying the beast. I remember how upset she was that she'd succumbed when you didn't. Didn't she actually end up accusing you of being an apostate?"

"She did, yes."

The Warden laughed at the memory. "Well, enough reminiscence. The Gauntlet awaits."