Prompt: Fate, for dao_challenge
Originally Written: 9/4/10
Notes: The LJ community dao_challenge hosts weekly "lightning rounds" in which a prompt is given and people have fifteen minutes to fill it. All entries for dao_challenge are from lighting rounds unless otherwise noted.
things I still have not read: The Stolen Throne
It's in your blood, they say, but his blood is tainted and furthermore it has never been his blood they've cared about; it's his father's, as if command and charisma are as obviously transmitted as hair and eyes. That's what they want. It's what they need, but he doesn't know if he actually has these qualities or if they hide themselves the way he hides himself behind his fellow Warden. They forget he wasn't born for the throne, but for the stables; they forget that no one has handed him the tools to take the throne because his father had even less and reached even greater heights, and blood is something which calls to blood. His father's majesty lies within him, if he only looks; the stars shining through the windows have gilt the throne, if he will only take his seat.
He feels instead the tug of the taint, the scent of darkspawn slain by his sword, the Veil, closed to his attempts to peek into the Fade and yet present, rippling in the unseen breeze. He went with Duncan because for the first time in his life he felt called, and while the taint writhes in his belly like a demon it settles in his blood like a friend and this is all familiar, echoes in his mind telling him that this is the place the Maker set aside for him.
And he doesn't know-and no one, aside from a man once as fresh-faced a recruit as he is now (and perhaps also a dishonored teyrn), knows-that this is the life his mother wished for him as he formed in her womb, that he follow in her footsteps without hesitation, blind but sure, blood singing to blood under the twinkling starlight in the open sky.