Here with another chapter, and this time I decided to focus on something different. Hawke will not be in this chapter, though I promise he'll be here next time, but instead I decided to use this chapter to focus on strange friendships, particularly concerning the youngest boy named Tamlen. For reference, Ser Rylien is a character found in Dragon Age: Awakening.
If any of you have suggestions for future chapters don't be afraid to let me know. I have other things planned, like a chapter where Isabela comes for a visit, or even one that involves the Hawke brothers having a conversation with their strained familial relationship they find with the Warden. Another idea is Merrill having fun at the expense of a pissed off Hawke when a boy classmate of their children shows up at the farm looking for Bethany instead of Malcolm. Etc, etc, you get the drift. I had a ton of fun writing this chapter, like I have a lot of fun with this story in general, and as always I appreciate any and all feedback that you want or are willing to give. I can't tell you how excited I am for Inquisition. I legitimately had a dream the other day where I woke up, walked to the store and picked up my copy that I preordered. I'm just glad I can play as a Dwarf again, since I've always seen as playing as a Human in a fantasy game as kind of pointless.
Quote of the day:
"The Mad King was obsessed with it. He loved to watch people burn, the way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones. He burned lords he didn't like. He burned Hands who disobeyed him. He burned anyone who was against him. Before long, half the country was against him. Aerys saw traitors everywhere. So he had his pyromancer place caches of wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself. Finally, the day of reckoning came. Robert Baratheon marched on the capital after his victory at the Trident. But my father arrived first with the whole Lannister army at his back, promising to defend the city against the rebels. I knew my father better than that. He's never been one to pick the losing side. I told the Mad King as much. I urged him to surrender peacefully. But the king didn't listen to me. He didn't listen to Varys who tried to warn him. But he did listen to Grand Maester Pycelle, that grey sunken cunt. "You can trust the Lannisters," he said "The Lannisters have always been true friends of the crown". So we opened the gates and my father sacked the city. Once again, I came to the king, begging him to surrender. He told me to bring him my father's head. Then he turned to his pyromancer. "Burn them all," he said "Burn them in their homes. Burn them in their beds". Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then?"
Ser Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, Game of Thrones
Merrill's first instinct was to use her magic, and after doing so, to run for Hawke so that they could gather the children and some things they deemed too important to leave behind, before dashing away from their farm to leave Amaranthine forever. She was able to hold back with a bit of difficulty though, her heart beating fast and the Elvhen woman calming the magic that practically surged from her Dalish blood writing, all the while her eyes remained fixated on her six year old son Tamlen, and the Templar that was standing with the boy at her doorstep.
She didn't know how much of a crime it was to attack a Templar in Ferelden, but what she did remember from her time in Kirkwall was that standing in the way of a Templar's supposedly sacred duty of hunting apostates was a hanging offense. She and Hawke had been careful with their magic in Amaranthine, using it only behind closed doors and only with the people that they held dearest to them, but children more often then not had trouble in hiding their gift, that particular fact being one of the main reasons that most mages found and trained in the Chantry's Circles had been there since their youth. She was prepared though, and Merrill pitied any Templar that would ever try and take one of her children away from her.
The Templar that was holding little Tamlen's hand however didn't seem angry or stern despite the possible circumstances, which confused Merrill a bit since more than once in her time in Kirkwall had she seen angry men with flaming swords emblazoned on their armor drag people away from their families, to send them away to far off lands, or worse, to keep them in the gallows. She studied the Templar's face for a moment, seeing what she could gather from it, searching for the desperate confirmation that she needed that her son would be safe. The Templar was a woman with black hair that dropped to her shoulders, pretty and about her own age, and the armored woman at her doorstep offered Merrill a smile, but the smile did little to reassure the Dalish woman, the entire time Merrill watching just how closely this Templar held Tamlen to her side.
The Templar didn't seem to notice, or if she had, didn't seem to care about the way that Merrill was searching for something so intently in her face, studying hard and staring even harder. Instead, the Templar remained silent, her eyes soft in slight confusion as her sight flickered from Merrill's delicate frame to the woman's pointed Elven ears. "Madam Hawke?" the woman at the door asked hesitantly, clearly not having expected to see an Elf acting the part of the farmer's wife.
"Merrill," Merrill said with a voice harder and fiercer than she usually used with strangers, "Merrill Hawke."
The Templar considered the Elven woman in front of her for a moment, the image being something that was seldom seen in Ferelden. Dalliances with Elven women was a tale as old as the Chant itself, but marriage between a Human and an Elf was an entirely different thing altogether. True, most men found Elven women to be more beautiful than their Human counterparts, said men willing to pay almost any price in gold or sweet words to be able to find a pretty young Elf to lie in their bed with them for a night, but that was usually as far as things went, even love sometimes being a force too weak to overcome what society expected of Humans and Elves.
She wondered what she herself thought about this young Tamlen's family life, the little boy telling tall and happy tales the entire time on their walk to his family's farm, seemingly oblivious to whatever scorn those out in the world sometimes had for Elf-blooded Humans. The Templar looked down for a moment at the little boy whose hand she held tightly and firmly, but at the same time gently all the while. Perhaps he was still too young and innocent to know the harshness of the world, to know the brutality of the Dragon Age, but also perhaps he would grow into a person who was willful and proud, strong and bold enough to not let any of the curses and jeers of others tear him down. As she regarded the child, remembering one of the stories he told about the time that he and his dog Jesse apparently slew an ogre, she hoped it was the latter.
The Templar turned her attention back to Merrill, giving a quick respectful bow of her head before she spoke. "I am Ser Rylien of the Templar Order, stationed in Amaranthine's Chantry of Our Lady Redeemer."
Merrill recognized the name of the Chantry as the one James would go to every other week or so to listen to their sermons and attend their services, usually Bethany going with him to listen to whatever teachings the Revered Mothers had to offer that week. She herself had gone with Hawke to more than one service, the whole family in tow for special days like that, but those visits were far less frequent, usually only happening around a holiday, or a wedding of some of their fellow farm folk, which they interacted with on a far more regular basis than the people who lived behind Amaranthine's city walls. Her eyes still remained trained on the Templar's face, and she wondered for a moment if she had in fact seen this woman before on the rare trips she made to the Chantry. If she had, it was no use, because she could see the lack of recognition in Ser Rylien's face just as much as Ser Rylien could see the lack of recognition in her own.
In any case, recognition or not, to Merrill there was no more time for pleasantries. The Elvhen woman refused to let her guard down, and prepared herself to do anything that she could to protect her son. Her eyes trailed to little Tamlen's hand as it was clasped together with Ser Rylien, and Merrill's own hand clenched into a fist. Tamlen's magic was too untrained and not strong or precise enough to protect himself like his sister could, and Merrill had long ago known about the special abilities that Templars had to nullify normal types of magic. She knew Hawke wouldn't approve, she knew the evil her husband saw and the darkness that had taken her too long to realize was in a demon's whisper, but she knew of one specific kind of magic that not even the Templars could smite. If they tried to take away her son, if this Ser Rylien was bold and stupid enough to stand against a mother's love, Merrill would show them the power of blood.
"What are you doing with my son?" Merrill responded with a pointed indignation, her voice being just as sharp as the sword that rested on the Templar's hip. She prepared herself, and she was ready. They would not take her son.
Ser Rylien frowned, the Templar not liking the accusing tone of the woman in front of her. The Templar's eyes narrowed in Merrill's direction, and she had half a mind to reprimand her concerning Tamlen, but she softened her gaze after a quick glance to the little boy beside her, the armored woman not wanting to fight in front of her tiny and strange companion's mother. She didn't let go of the boy's hand though, and instead felt it best to tread carefully for the moment.
Ser Rylien's grip on Tamlen tightened as she spoke. "I was returning from my patrol in the Wending Wood, and I ran into your boy and his hound playing in a forest trail near here. I thought it best to bring him back to his mother."
Merrill arched her neck at the mention of Jesse, and was relieved to see just like this Ser Rylien had remarked, that the Mabari was faithfully as ever right behind her youngest son. She studied the hound's demeanor for a moment to see just what exactly he thought about the Templar that had found themselves knocking on the door of a family of apostates. Trusting a Human was something that had it's difficulties and trials and doubts, but a Mabari was ever loyal, being a truer friend than most to whoever it found itself calling master. She didn't trust Ser Rylien, she didn't trust any Templar in fact, but she trusted Jesse, and Merrill hoped that whatever trust she placed into her husband's dog was a trust that was as well placed and blue and true as any that she could give to the world.
Her eyes went back and forth between Jessie, Tamlen, and Ser Rylien, and she readied herself, Merrill silently praying to the Creator's for a second that whatever it was that this Templar knew or thought she knew, that it was a knowledge that Ser Rylien had kept hidden from her comrades-at-arms, if for just a moment. "How far was he?" she asked, eyes still glancing from Ser Rylien and her son and over again.
Ser Rylien looked over her shoulder in the direction of the woods that she came from, and bit her lip as she tried to gauge the distance she had walked with little Tamlen. After a moment of thought, she looked back at Merrill. "I didn't find him too far away from your farm. Just by the first creek you find twenty minutes or so into the woods."
Merrill nodded, knowing exactly where Ser Rylien was talking about. It was a favorite spot of the family's to go to, the creek being shallow enough for the kids to play their water games in, and the trees in the woods being obscuring enough for all of them, with the exception of Malcolm, to show off their magical prowess. With that idea in mind she looked down at Tamlen, and wondered if the reason he had sauntered off to the creek was to show off his magic to Jesse. The sudden thought that frightened her however was if Tamlen's magic had been seen by someone else other than Jesse, and if it was in that situation that Ser Rylien had come across her boy.
"Thank you for bringing him back," Merrill replied cautiously to the Templar's words, still unsure what it was that this Ser Rylien had seen, if anything at all, "but if you don't mind, can you tell what you were patrolling for?" She paused for a moment, before she wisely decided to add an addendum to her words, the woman feeling as if she was channeling Varric for his cleverness, "Just so I know what I have to be careful of that is around here of course."
"Apostates and blood mages." Ser Rylien answered with a shrug, the usual duty of a Templar not being anything that was in any way a secret, "The apostates we hand over to the Grey Wardens on the order of the Warden-Commander who acts as the Arl of Amaranthine, and the blood mages we try and eliminate."
"Eliminate?" Merrill questioned.
"Eliminate," Ser Rylien repeated softly, voice sounding sad for a moment as if it was something that she didn't like to have to do, "but everything we do, just like the Grey Wardens, is for the greater good. Tamlen is a sweet boy, and it wouldn't sit right with me if someone like him got hurt because I was too relaxed and hesitant to enact my duty to my vows."
She remained silent until Ser Rylien let go of Tamlen's hand, and Merrill bent down and hugged her son, giving him a kiss on the cheek, glad that it seemed as if Ser Rylien had taken no notice of her young boy's magic. She looked up at the Templar and offered a more genuine smile than before, "Thank you for bringing my son back, and for worrying about him."
Ser Rylien smiled back, and gave a solemn and curt bow of her head. "Madam," she said, before beginning to turn back around so that she could head into the city to report back to her superiors.
It was with that thought that the two women intended to leave things, strangers often meeting in life to share a moment of time together before eventually never seeing one another ever again. As Ser Rylien began to leave however, the knight stopped in place when the little boy she had spent the afternoon with called out to her, to the surprise of the two women who were present.
"Will you come back later?" the young boy asked innocently, Tamlen oblivious to what the Templar order actually represented, "I never got to finish my stories."
The two women met eyes once more, neither of them knowing just how exactly to answer the little boy's hopeful question. Merrill and Ser Rylien continued to stare at one another, both of them clueless to what the future held, and to the true stories that were going to be written across the sea by a familiar Dwarven hand, about a young apostate boy in the woods showing off his magic to his hound, and the Templar who found the glowing spectacle being put on by the child, but who nonetheless forsook her vows to bring him home to his family.
Just to share some information about my own personal beliefs about Dragon Age, I am a supporter of the Templars' overall goal, and believe that their cause is just. I didn't used to when I played Origins, but after playing Dragon Age 2 where literally three quarters (probably more) of the mages you meet are blood mages performing atrocities, I see that the Templars do have a point, though the Templars in Kirkwall were truly a bit too hardcore in some respects. A headcannon I have to explain that though is that similarly to how the Catholic Church rarely excommunicates priests accused of different things, instead preferring to move them around from place to place when something goes down, is that Kirkwall is a dumping ground of sorts that the Templar Orders of other places use to ditch their most crazy people. Like say, Meredith for example, or Cullen who was kicked out of Ferelden for being too extreme.