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.

A/N: Upon rereading, chapter twenty-one may have been just a bit too brief and…oogy. I don't mind short chapters when they work but that one did not, as far as I'm concerned. I had great difficulty writing it and was somewhat unwell besides (that's the last time I challenge Oghren to a pickle juice-drinking competition). I endeavor to do better! For the nonce we have this, which could very easily have been part of the last chapter had I been in my right (or write) mind.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Reflection

Loghain lay awake late into the night, listening to the night sounds of wind rustling the leaves of a nearby stand of birches and the endless chirp of night peepers and crickets. Beside him, laying close but not nearly close enough, Elilia slept deeply, untroubled by the frightful dreams that Wardens had, even when there was no Blight. Thank the Maker the ashes had worked to cure her. He'd done it because Ferelden needed her, not because she'd wanted to be free of her burden, but he was glad that she'd set aside her anger and allowed herself to be glad of her freedom. She would not suffer the gruesome fate of the Wardens when the Taint overpowered them, she would not go to the Deep Roads for her Calling only, perhaps, to be forced into the service of the Darkspawn as a mindless abomination of womankind to produce innumerable filthy offspring to bolster their wretched numbers. Best of all, he thought it quite likely that any infertility the Taint had given her must be expunged. If she could refrain from pushing her body to such extremes of physical exertion that she could not have her natural monthly courses, then she might yet bear a child. The thought of starting a new family at the age of sixty-plus was daunting in the extreme, but he was not a man to back down from a challenge. Perhaps he might, in his dotage, have at last the wisdom to avoid a few of the many mistakes he'd made the first time around. If Arl Wulffe, of all people, could manage then so could he.

His fingers twitched and he wished absently for a cigarette. He'd picked up the habit during the Restoration, for him a far more trying time than the rebellion itself, and it had gotten rather severe during his early days as Teyrn of Gwaren, but the gentle disapproval of his wife Celia, and later the sharper admonitions of Anora, had forced him to lay the vice by. The cigarette that morning had been his first in a good long while, and he still wasn't exactly sure why he'd felt compelled to cadge a smoke when he saw the tobacco pouch on the guardsman's belt. Too much worry, he supposed. Too much strain. He had a lot invested in this little expedition, not coin of the realm but the more valuable coin of hope, and that was a money he did not often allow himself to spend.

Oh, but there was a far better cure for his stress than a pinch of the best Highever Broadleaf, if he could but take advantage of it, a cure that sprang also from the fine soil of Highever near the high Cliffs of Conobar. He turned onto his side and watched her for a time in silence. Her face was naked of cosmetics and looked to his eyes almost painfully young with its few lines smoothed out by dreamless sleep. She looked very much like that willful sixteen year-old who first tattooed her face in a bold if misguided move to avoid an unpleasant marriage contract. Sometimes it was hard to believe she was the daughter of an ancient line of Ferelden nobility. She had the guts, constitution, and attitude of a particularly gritty breed of freeholder - of the type of which Loghain himself was a proud scion.

He reached out and ran a light hand down her outflung arm. The strong muscles tensed under his fingers, reflexively, but she did not waken. He wondered at the strange twists fate held for hapless mortals. His first love, Rowan Guerrin, betrothed of Maric and intended Queen, had been a powerful warrior woman. His wife had been as unlike her as it was possible to find, small and soft and undemanding, a starstruck peasant girl who never dreamed of challenging him on anything, though in time she found ways of working him around to her will - a will far stronger than her meek ways suggested. She had been offered to him in marriage during the latter days of the Rebellion, after the Battle of River Dane, when Maric had at last the full support of all his rightful subjects and the nobles who were newest on the field looked with alarm upon the brash farmer's son who appeared to be making a bold move for the power they considered theirs by Divine Right. Maric begged the proposal to Loghain himself, to allay the qualms of those who feared he would marry into their families and so seize noble title for himself. The joke was on them, however, as it was only a handful of years before Maric raised him above all of them with the exception of Bryce Cousland. Very few of them found it remotely funny.

He hadn't known Celia two hours before they were married by the Revered Mother in the Gwaren Chantry, but he set himself to love her the best he could regardless. He'd found her faintly alarming, actually, so pretty and pale, like a flower. He wasn't particularly adept with flowers. It was some years until Anora was born, and the addition of a tiny and utterly helpless little girl nearly frightened him away completely. He'd missed out on a lot of her earliest years, even the ones he spent in Gwaren. He regretted that very much. He'd loved them both, too strongly, perhaps, to feel that he should inflict his awkward and unworthy presence on them. Time lost that he could never recover. No use sighing over it now.

And now here he was, in the winter of his days, snow on the mountain, and life's wheel had rolled around to the place where he'd begun, with a high-born woman beautiful in her strength and how much of herself she was willing to sacrifice for her ideals, a woman unafraid to meet him toe-to-toe and stand him down on the battlefield he'd had mastery of for the better part of his life. She was Rowan and she was more than Rowan, she was Elilia and her like had never been seen before in Thedas. He was still shocked and somewhat appalled that she would waste herself on him, but he certainly wasn't going to look a gift Warden in the mouth, even though he found that mouth quite appealing.

He felt his blood stirring restlessly and shifted position. Dislodged from a springy curl of hair, the amulet he wore slid across his chest to his shoulder. He'd never been one for jewelry, even of the enchanted sort most warriors throughout Thedas made part of their basic equipment. It was an irritant, always in the way. But the little silverite mirror was different somehow. He was perfectly aware that the spirit he saw in the temple that day was not his mother, but it had aped her so well he wasn't sure that it made a difference. He didn't know if the amulet had any enchantments upon it, though it seemed reasonable to suppose it did, but whether there was any tangible benefit to wearing it or not, he felt protected by it. Shielded from his own darker nature, if only by the reminder it gave him of the spirit's kind words to him. So he would attempt to set aside some of his burden of guilt, enough so that he could do his job effectively at least, and he would not consider himself a failure if he could not fix everything that was wrong in Ferelden. He would be damned if he would not try, however.

It had not escaped his attention that Elilia wore an identical amulet. She had taken off the little crystal vial of blood that was her Warden's Oath and laid it in an ornately-carved box of fine greenstone with a sentimental sigh, but snapped the lid shut with great finality. The silverite mirror rested on her clavicle above the longer chain and larger pendant that had been her gift from Seanna back in Denerim. Loghain wondered what the Gauntlet had shown her, what truths about herself she'd had to face. He would never ask, though. Some things were too intimate even for lovers to speak of.

Careful not to wake her, he gathered her into his arms and close to his body. Her heat and scent were both tantalizing and intoxicating, as was her firm, solid flesh. She was soft in only one place, but Maker how soft she was. He'd once overheard a pair of Antivan diplomats discussing the various merits and flaws of Ferelden in their native tongue, unaware that he understood enough of their greasy talk to know the gist of their words, and one of them had said to the other how nowhere else in Thedas were the women blessed with such fine breasts. They seemed to feel this was the major selling point for the country. Elilia certainly had a beautiful bust, neither too large nor too small but perfectly balanced to her broad square shoulders and powerful physique. He groaned softly into her hair, cursing again the fate that had saddled them with a pair of unknown companions who could not be trusted to be discrete. It was ludicrous, the effect she had on him. He was no longer a headstrong boy but a man of advanced years, and the fire in his gut ought by now to be mere embers, capable of warming but not much more. She had a way of stoking them back into a merry blaze without effort.

Perhaps she sensed his increasing ardor, or perhaps she was being poked too roughly in too sensitive a place, but she stirred and opened sleepy eyes. She blinked at him several times, then smiled and snuggled closer. "This is a nice way to sleep," she said.

"I wouldn't know," Loghain said, feelingly. She laughed at him.

"Poor man. Are you absolutely sure we can't…?" She waggled her eyebrows at him. "We could be very quiet about it."

"Not quiet enough," he groaned. "The last thing we need is that bawdy dwarf telling tales out of school - and embellishing them, like as not, with his purple prose."

"It is quite the coincidence that we should meet up with the author of the book Seanna and I have been reading," Elilia said.

"I don't believe in coincidence," Loghain replied, glowering.

"Oh come, you don't mean to say you think this meeting was planned? No one knew of our intentions but the King and Queen."

"Others knew. You can't keep secrets in a palace, servants see and hear everything and their tongues are easily loosened with coin. I certainly find it interesting that he was aware I was a wanted man in Orlais. No one in Ferelden seemed to know about it."

Elilia laughed. "Everyone in Ferelden would simply take it as a matter of course, so it wouldn't be considered news. He's not an Orlesian spy, Loghain. I truly do not think they employ dwarven bards."

"He's obviously a bard, Elilia. Whether he is an enemy bard or merely an opportunist remains to be seen, and I shall be keeping a very close eye on him. Him and that 'sister' of his. She looks like the type who is quite familiar with the art of cutting throats."

"Loghain, if she stood on Varric's shoulders she still couldn't reach to cut your throat. Or mine."

"She could while we're lying here asleep. Don't laugh, Elilia. Careless trust is the greatest danger of them all."

She sighed. "Fine, fine. You worry about the big bad dwarves and I'll worry about something a little closer to home."

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what it was she intended to worry about when her hand suddenly slipped down his body and showed him, and his jaws snapped shut with a painful click of teeth on teeth. Clever fingers did for him what he'd been too uptight to do for her, and his resistance melted beneath her ministrations. Be damned to the dwarves. If the blasted fool put one word to paper Loghain would have his tongue for a blotter before the ink could dry.

He slept at last, and it was Elilia's turn to lay wakeful, watching. Even asleep, Loghain's face bore always that sharp, suspicious nature. Perhaps it was only the way his features were arranged, with a sloping brow over quite an heroic nose (or beak, if one were to draw the obvious parallels between his appearance and that of a large bird of prey) but rather thin cheeks and a relatively narrow jaw. But no, even his sharp pointed face could not explain all the bristling aura he retained even in his sleep. Likely enough the Fade demons sent him dreams of assassins and invasion.

He was a skilled lover. That did not mean he was an uninhibited one of course, in fact he was easily taken off-guard by a bold move. If she'd known that in years gone by it would have made her dual at the Landsmeet a thousand times easier - although she granted that it would have been difficult to grab his manhood through plate armor. In any event he was quite adept at wringing a few shrieks of his name out of her, which was very new to her. She came to him on the eve of battle that night not a virgin but certainly lacking experience, particularly of the pleasurable kind. She had not, as was rumored, had relations with any of the companions who followed her as she gathered allies against the Blight, but there had been others, experiments all. There'd even been a woman, a shrewd Rivaini sea captain who'd traded sex for secrets. Her first had been Bann Loren's son, Dairren.

Poor Dairren, so eager to please. He'd had less interest in her than in her status, by quite a stretch, but he'd labored gamely. Curiosity and lack of better opportunity drove her to invite him to her rooms. Treachery and ill-fortune had made it the very night her home was raided, and Dairren was killed even before she'd known what was going on. That certainly wasn't something she was likely to talk about with Loghain - perhaps less so even than the incident of the lady pirate.

She snuggled into his shoulder and toyed with the silverite amulet at his throat. Another experience they had in common, one that she thought he might well agree with her was more difficult than many of the battles they'd faced. That vision had staggered him, in a way she'd never expected to see him knocked off-balance. She hoped he'd managed to find a bit of peace in it as well as the pain.

She caught herself in a gaping yawn, stretched languidly, and draped herself across his body to sleep. The warmth of his body had a deliciously soporific effect, and despite the fact that he'd been tromping around all day in heavy leather armor and hadn't been able to properly bathe he didn't smell all that unpleasant, either. Of course, the love they'd made had its own unique scent and that overlay much. Cozy and satisfied, Elilia slept.

A/N: On the touched-upon subject of the blood mage coven, I'm still not entirely sure how much influence I intend to determine they had, or whether it should make any difference at all in a story set so much later on. I do believe that Caladrius at the very least would have done something to ensure cooperation even if his "clients" seemed fairly willing, and it would have been very easy to obtain blood from Loghain as he was leading numerous sorties against dissenting nobles evidently from the vanguard and would certainly have taken wounds from time to time. I don't even know yet whether the back-alley coven was part of the larger slaver conspiracy or another, unrelated group of maleficarum, possibly even sent by Orlais to surreptitiously create chaos amongst the rulers of the country. I wouldn't at all mind hearing some views on this, whether or not it ultimately works into my tale. It could be that there's still an extant phylactery of Loghain's blood labeled on a shelf somewhere in Tevinter, awaiting further use - which they might have for it if he becomes Elilia's Teyrn-Consort - or even in a repository somewhere in Orlais, which has a nice sound of ringing doom to it.