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: May contain spoilers for Origins, Awakening, and Dragon Age II as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling.
A/N: Believe it or not, the initial idea here was just a semi-slapstick side-quest involving killing assassin squirrels (an homage to my other fandom, Psych, and the squirrel-hating Carlton Lassiter (essentially Loghain+ Barney Fife) from that series. I added the pigeons when I realized it would make a good tie-in for the eventual acquisition of Shale some chapters from now. I promise, all the weird little quirks in the story (the deliberate ones at least) are all planned to be explained, right up to and including why at the end of DAII Leliana told Cassandra that the Warden was "gone" when in my tale she seems never to have left Ferelden. I should get to that before I get to Honnleath, actually. The…scope…of this story has long since begun to terrify me. I've certainly never attempted anything so complex in fanfic before. Fortunately it's fun as hell. Your comments help keep me on-track, so keep it up!
Chapter Forty-Two: Squirrel Assassin
When they reached the park, the sun had just peeked its head above the walls of the city at last.
"So these things attacked you in the dark," Loghain said. "You're sure they'll still be here while the sun is up?"
Hawke nodded. "King Alistair said that people have reported attacks day and night."
"Tell me; is there anything that doesn't want to kill us?" Loghain asked. "I have been attacked by any number of wild animals, but this…let's just call this a first."
"Wild animals?" Varric asked. "Shit on a shingle. What kind is it this time? Wolves? Lynxes? Rabid wildebeest?"
"Pigeons," Loghain replied.
"And squirrels," Merrill supplied helpfully.
"Ah. Well. Ah."
"Oh mighty warriors, we," Isabella said, with a roll of the eyes. "At least the dog should enjoy this 'battle.'"
"I don't see any squirrels or pigeons, Sister," Bethany said. "Are you sure they don't only attack in darkness?"
"They're further in," Hawke said. "Don't worry. They'll find us."
They entered the park. Loghain scowled at the memorial stone honoring "those who perished in the Fifth Blight." He didn't mind there being a memorial, but this one was rather impersonal, somehow. He let his imagination wander momentarily. A great long wall, rising up out of the earth, of black granite polished to a shine so bright the surface would be like unto a mirror, and engraved upon it the names of the lost from every available record. That would move people. That would ensure they remembered.
Not that there was any danger of Denerim forgetting what it had suffered in the near future.
"Er…I think we…I mean, I think they…found us…" Varric said.
Loghain looked up. In the trees ahead of them, birds perched, regarding them intently. Squirrels, too, clung to the boles and branches and watched them with bright, glittering black eyes. More squirrels came running up from other parts of the park. They were eerily silent as they lined up in what appeared to be military formation before the party. It was not the boldness of well-fed, half-tamed park animals accustomed to being fed by children and old folks, but the feral fearlessness of something wild and deadly.
"Lovely. I think they're hungry," Loghain said, and drew his bow. "Let's try to stay out of each other's lines of sight, shall we?"
The animals attacked. A pigeon swooped at Champion and she snapped it up in her lighting-fast jaws. Isabella managed to strike down two leaping squirrels before a third managed to bite her on the arm. Bianca began to sing her strange song - "RattlerattlerattlePOOMfwwpp!" Pigeons dropped out of the sky like hailstones, frozen solid by blasts of ice from the staves of Merrill and Bethany. Many more birds and squirrels fell with crossbow bolts or elf-flight arrows through their bodies. Hawke tried her best to keep up, but though she was a skilled archer she was not particularly a swift one, and she was stunned at the speed with which Loghain's bow was nocked, loosed, and nocked again. Big was certainly the proper adjective to describe him, lumbering was not.
"I told you time and time again, Hawke," Varric said, even as he continued to pwing away at squirrels and pigeons. "Speed, not power. You're shooting pigeons, not dragons: loosen your stance, girl!"
She tried, but the unfamiliar body language made her awkward and her aim suffered badly. A few shots even went wild. She hoped that none of her arrows struck anyone.
Near the end of the fight, when the creatures' numbers were failing and the mages' mana was running out, a pigeon swooped at Merrill's face. Too exhausted to strike it down herself, she shrieked and ducked, but the bird only corrected course. Just before it would have struck her it fell to the ground as if struck by a bolt of lightning, impaled through the body upon Loghain's hunting knife. Shocked, Merrill glanced over at him, nearly ten feet away from her. He cocked a questioning brow at her. "You all right?" he asked. Numbly, she could only nod. "Good," he said, and took up his bow again.
The last mad, blighted, or possessed creature fell not long after that, and silence again reigned in the little promenade park. Champion grabbed up one of the pigeons she'd killed and chewed it, enjoying the crunchy quills in her teeth. "Leave it, Champion," Loghain commanded. "We don't know what made them act so."
"Ancestors' asses, those birds were crazy!" Varric said. "And the squirrels were totally berserk!"
"Well, you'd be angry, too, if you had to carry your nuts in your mouth," Loghain said. Varric stared at him for a good long moment before he realized it was in the nature of a quip. He laughed, but not with much strength.
Loghain stepped up to Hawke. "This is yours, I believe," he said, and raised his arm. Sticking into the meat at the back of his triceps was an arrow, thankfully not deeply embedded.
"Ow. Uh…sorry," Hawke said, as she flinched. He waited patiently, arm up, so she took the hint and, with a wince, yanked the arrow out. Loghain turned his attention nonchalantly to the retrieval of his hunting knife and as many arrows as could be recovered.
Merrill investigated one of the slain squirrels. "There are demons in the blood," she said after a time. "Weak, perhaps not even whole. The Veil must be thin here."
"There's been a lot of death and blood in Denerim, particularly in recent years," Loghain said. "I'm hardly surprised."
He turned then, and his eyes did widen in surprise. He even recoiled. "Maker's breath," he said.
They all looked, and brought their weapons to the ready. All they saw was a young, blond elf, standing quietly by the memorial stone, smiling from ear to pointy ear. "Chatterly," Loghain said through clenched teeth.
The elf immediately broke into rapid-fire Orlesian. What he was saying was difficult to follow, even for those in his hearing who understood the language well enough, but his wildly gesticulating hands and broad grin seemed to indicate that he was attempting to relate his impressions of the great Battle of the Assassin Squirrels.
"Come on," Loghain said, in a tone of weary resignation. "I need a drink."
He led them back to the tavern and ordered up a round. Chatterly refused to sit or to drink, and merely stood close by the table, smiling. He could keep quiet, it seemed, as energetically as he could speak, and gave the eerie impression of absorbing everything that was said.
"Keep a close watch on your tongues," Loghain cautioned the others, voice pitched so as not to carry far. "The lad hasn't assayed a word of Common, but I believe he can understand it."
"Oo, you think he's a Bard?" Isabella asked, eyes alight with sudden interest.
"I think if he was sent here to spy, they picked a damned dangerous way to introduce him into the country," Loghain said. "He was a catalyst, a sick elf to spread disease amongst our laborers. But people tend to get incautious when they think someone can't understand what they're saying. Believe me, I know that from personal experience, and most of the embassies in this city have suffered for that kind of indiscretion."
"What do you mean?" Varric asked. Loghain grinned wolfishly.
"I mean that, given how most of Thedas so looks down upon Ferelden as a backwards, barbarian land, it seems very difficult for them to believe even after many evidences that anyone who so epitomizes that very backwards barbarism could possibly understand them when they speak their native tongues."
"You speak more than just the King's Tongue?" Hawke asked.
"No."
"But you just said - "
"I speak only one language, but I understand quite a few of them, well enough to get by at least. Never could quite work my tongue around them, though." He reflected upon that for a moment. "Or maybe it's simply a matter of not really caring to."
Isabella chuckled. "So, play up the ambassadors perceptions of the 'stupid Dog Lord' and listen in on all their private conversations, eh? Loghain Mac Tir - you're a fox."
"I am hardly to blame for their ridiculous bigoted preconceptions of Ferelden," he said simply. "An ambassador ought to be wiser."
After several rounds, they were joined by a rather sleepy-looking Laz, who sat down, ordered a drink, and asked what they were all doing up so early. No one particularly wanted to cop to killing possessed squirrels and pigeons.
"Oh, just drinking and jawing. Nothing exciting," Varric said.
A/N: The scene where they first encounter the merry little parkland creatures is pretty much stolen from a favorite Far Side cartoon, which may actually be too much "before the time" of some of you whippersnappers (the ones that ARE whippersnappers; Dragon Age seems to have a higher-than-usual fan base of people round abouts of my age, or at least that's mostly who I've encountered). Depicted: a man in safari gear standing in the middle of a forest, facing down a line of wide-eyed, grinning squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, raccoons, and the like. Caption: "As usual the forest was full of happy little creatures…but this time, something seemed awry." The suggestion that they're using battle formations comes again from Psych, when Lassiter says of the wild marmosets that have attacked him and his partner, "Lower Primate my ass: I recognize a military formation when I see one.") And obviously Loghain's concept of the Fifth Blight Memorial Wall is neither more nor less than the Vietnam Memorial.