"Welcome back, child."

I opened my eyes, and immediately screwed them shut again. Everything was too bright. My throat was drier than the Mojave and my head throbbed painfully. I groaned as I heaved myself into a sitting position.

"Oh, God, I'm so hungover." I said, swallowing roughly. "What time is it?"

"Time for you to return to the task at hand."

I recognised the voice and slowly turned towards it, forcing my eyes open and squinting at the woman next to me.

"You're…"

"Yes. I am."

"But...that's impossible." I grinned. "I've just lost my mind, haven't I?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. Here. Drink this. It will help." She said, thrusting a mug of warm, sweet-smelling...something into my hands. I accepted and took a sip, automatically, before it occurred to me who I had just accepted a drink from.

"What's in this?" I asked, suspiciously.

"It is essence of Elfroot...among other things."

"Woah." I said, raising a hand to my head. "That was weird."

"Hmm?"

"Deja vu." I muttered. I frowned, realising that the pain in my temples was gone and my mind was suddenly clear. "Okay. Well your Elfroot has stopped my head from thumping and there's no painkiller on earth that can do that. Except maybe morphine but I'd also be drooling and falling asleep. I'm not drooling, am I? So it must be magic. Which means I must really be here. How...did I...get...here? Exactly?" I asked, looking around the small room. Flemeth's hut, I realised, without knowing how I knew.

"On which occasion?" Flemeth asked, with an amused smile. "You have made a habit of finding your way here, Lauren Duval."

"I haven't...I've been here before?" I asked, doubtfully. "But...I don't remember…"

"What do you remember?" She asked, curiously.

"Uh…huh." I said, struggling to think. "I remember...I was dreaming. Or I might have been awake, only...I think I was in the Fade? So I must have been dreaming, right?"

"And before that?" She asked, gently.

"Before that...I was at my sister's funeral." I said, with a frown. Now that I thought about the funeral, it felt both like it could have happened yesterday or a thousand years ago.

Flemeth sighed, rising to her feet and walking to the back of the hut, opening a cabinet and rifling through it.

"Your memories will return, in time. Time, however, is a luxury you do not have." She said, as she opened a jar of herbs and sniffed, shaking her head and replacing them, before grabbing another from the shelf and doing the same thing. "I may have something here that will help things along...ah, here it is. Always in the last place one looks."

"Like stockings?" I grinned, pleased with myself.

"Well, quite." She replied, as she emptied some of the jar's contents into a bowl. She added a few more ingredients, muttering to herself, before grinding them up, rather aggressively I thought, and returning to my side.

She hovered a hand over the bowl and a small flame appeared in the centre. I watched as the mixture absorbed the flame, giving off a plume of lilac smoke as it burned. She held it under my nose.

"Breathe deeply." She commanded, and I closed my eyes, inhaling the fumes. It smelled familiar, and I frowned, trying to place the scent.

Wood-smoke...a campfire. Familiar faces, looming out of the darkness. Fir trees...a village, covered in snow. Wet dog...my fingers curled in short, brown fur. Copper...sweat...a battle that was lost. Salt...tears...his tears...Alistair.

I gasped and my eyes flew open as everything came flooding back, all at once. Ostagar, Lothering, Redcliffe, Kinloch Hold, Cullen, Denerim, Howe, Gort, Haven, Grayson, Leliana, Sten, Morrigan, Zevran, Wynne…

"Alistair." I said, struggling to my feet. No sooner had I found them than the weight of my memories sent me backwards, reeling, and I felt Flemeth's hand on my shoulder.

"Breathe." She commanded. "What do you remember?"

"I remember...everything." I said, swallowing. I felt like I might vomit, and I closed my eyes, fighting the wave of nausea that washed over me. "I remember everything."

"Do you remember your death?" She asked. I nodded.

"I...I died. In Haven." I said, fighting the urge to turn my face away from the memory. "I felt myself fading...and then I was...different. Lighter. Everything was quiet, and peaceful. I remember...something. Like a breeze, only...it was different, somehow. It was gentle, and warm, and I knew that I was safe. Why...why am I back?" I asked, feeling tears prick my eyes. "How am I here? How am I alive?"

"The first time you came here, I took something from you. Before you woke." She said, her eyes flashing mischievously. "Just a piece...a small piece."

"An insurance policy." I said, numbly, recognising her words.

"Ah, I see I do not have to explain quite as much as I had anticipated." She said, with a smirk.

"But I don't understand. How does that work? I mean...I get how it works with you but I'm...I'm not like you. I'm human. I'm mortal."

"True, the ritual I invoked to return you to this realm does not work for everyone. I was not entirely sure it would work with you. But it has. Make of that what you will."

"But I-"

"I would have thought that you would be grateful, given that I have saved you from the abyss." She replied, cutting me off before I could ask anymore questions.

"I didn't ask you to save me." I replied, lowering my eyes from her piercing gaze. "I'm not sure I want to be saved."

"An understandable reaction, given all you have faced since last we spoke." She replied. "But your work here is far from over. You have so much more life yet to live, so much more yet to achieve. And heed my words, Lauren Duval, when I tell you that this world does need you."

"This world has tried to kill me since the moment I arrived. And it succeeded." I sniffed. I looked down at my hands, and then past them, frowning as I inspected my legs. The muscles I had honed over the last few months were gone. I was the same skinny girl I had been when I had first landed in Thedas. No, not the same. I thought. That girl doesn't exist anymore. "I just want to go home."

"This is your home." She said, firmly. "And you must find the strength to keep fighting. What do you do when the world is trying to kill you?"

I frowned down at my hands again, clenching them into fists.

"You kill it back." I whispered.

"You fight." She said, fiercely. "You fight, until you have no fight left in you to give. And then you keep fighting. This was never going to be an easy road, child. You knew this before you had taken your first steps. But it is your road to travel, and you must keep going."

"I'm supposed to kill you." I said, flashing her a weak smile. "For Morrigan."

"And do you intend to kill me?" She asked, unphased. I shrugged.

"You're just going to come back, anyway. What's the point?" I asked, sullenly. "Just give me your grimoire, and I'll take it to her, when I...what am I supposed to say to them? When I show up, alive? And they've buried me or...burned me or...whatever they're going to do with my...body. How do you apologise to the man you love for dying in his arms?"

"The man you love?" She asked, with a hint of annoyance. "Love is a foolish endeavour. Love is what brought you here. This world will swallow you whole if you give yourself over to fanciful notions of romance."

"I get it, Mythal." I snapped, irritably. "You have some hang ups in that area. But love isn't a weakness. It's a strength. It saved me long before it killed me."

"You saved yourself." She replied. "Trust no one, Lauren, but yourself. Rely on no one, depend on no one. Love is a poison for the mind."

"I've known love and poison. I'm an expert on neither. But I know enough to know the difference." I said. She sighed, but seemed to sense that this wasn't an argument she would win. I returned her sigh with my own and rose to my feet, wearily. "I don't suppose you have any armour lying around that might fit me. My nice, new custom armour is currently warming a corpse that looks a lot like me."

"I am afraid I do not." She replied.

"Weapons?"

"None that will be of any use to you."

"Great. Helpful." I sniffed. "Do you have any clothes that aren't...this?" I asked, gesturing to the white, cotton nightgown I had woken up in.

"I can provide you with clothes, and a mount, to get you to where you need to be." She said, rising to stand beside me. "Well...after a fashion."

She opened the chest at the foot of the bed and retrieved a large, black tome - her grimoire, I realised - and what looked like a pile of cloth and feathers, holding them out to me. I accepted them, dropping the book onto the bed and holding the garment against my chest, draping it over my body. It was almost an exact replica of the dress - if it could be called a dress - that Morrigan had worn when we'd first met.

"You must be joking."

"Morrigan is a little taller than you, but you are not built so differently otherwise." She replied, as if that's what I was worried about. The fit. I was too numb and tired to care, so I sighed in acceptance and pulled the white smock over my head. Before dressing, I took the opportunity to inspect my naked body. I ran my hands over the smooth, pale skin of my stomach. The scars that told the story of my encounter with Gort were gone. I couldn't see my back and there were no mirrors in the hut, but I expected the criss-cross shadows that had been the only physical reminder of the almost-mortal wounds that Wynne had healed were equally absent. This wasn't my body. It had been, for a time, but it had changed so much in the last few months. All evidence of that was gone. A sudden thought struck me, and I turned to Flemeth with a start.

"If the body that carried the taint is lying dead somewhere in the Frostbacks...am I even a Grey Warden anymore?"

"I am afraid not." She said, apologetically. "But the Grey Wardens do need you."

"But that means I...I can't end the blight."

"Not at present." She replied.

"Riordan." I whispered to myself. I shuddered, remembering where we would find him, remembering that I had to go back there. "Well...I don't suppose I'll miss the nightmares. And I survived The Joining once. It'll be just my luck that I survive it a second time."

"Nihilism does not suit you." She said, in a disarmingly kind voice. "This melancholy you feel will pass. It is always the way when one returns from oblivion."

"Well. You would know." I replied, glibly, as I pulled the dress over my head and arranged it tactfully, covering as much of my body with it as I could. It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

"Come then." She said, making her way to the door. "The hour grows late. We should leave now, before night falls."

"We?" I asked, frowning, as I retrieved the grimoire. "You're coming with me?"

"For a spell." She said, throwing me a wicked look over her shoulder.

"I have to get to Haven." I frowned. "Only...I don't know the way from here."

"Haven? Whatever for?"

"That's...that's where the others are." I said, hesitating when I saw the look on her face. "I mean...right?"

"You did not die yesterday, Lauren Duval. You have been dead for almost fourteen moons. Your friends are in Redcliffe. The Arl you sought to heal is awake."

"I've...I've been dead for a fortnight?" I squeaked. Somehow, this news horrified me more than anything else I had learned that wretched day.

"Quite dead, yes." She said, sympathetically. "Your friends will be glad to see you."

"Don't count on that." I muttered, darkly. "I hope you saved up some more pieces of my soul or my essence or my whatever-the-fuck because I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't attack me on sight. Redcliffe has something of a turbulent relationship with the walking dead."

She threw her head back and cackled, before leading the way into the clearing outside. I followed her into the chill air, hugging the book to my chest. She held out a hand to me, gesturing for me to stay where I was and I halted, watching her curiously. I looked around for the mount that she had promised, but there was no sign of life in the clearing other than the two of us.

I watched in open-mouthed awe when she glowed a brilliant white, and suddenly, Flemeth was gone, and in her place, incredibly, impossibly, stood an immense, purple dragon. I blinked a few times, even as the voice in my head told me that this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Another voice wondered, frantically, if she had led me out here just to eat me, but logic quieted the panic when I realised she wouldn't have gone to all this trouble to bring me back to life just to kill me again. You can't get much deader than dead.

I took a step towards her, marvelling at the wonder of the beast before me. 'Beast' didn't feel like the right word, if I was being honest with myself. Suddenly, I was glad that I had died before facing the High Dragon. Not for fear - although she cut an immensely imposing figure - but because I doubted if I would ever forgive myself for killing something that was so much more than I was. I reminded myself that the Archdemon didn't look entirely dissimilar, but that was different. It was blighted, and all blighted things were inherently diminished. This was...magic. Magic in its purest, most awesome form. It was awesome in the true sense of the word. In the sense of the word that we had forgotten in my world, perverted through overuse. Perhaps we would have remembered better, if dragons roamed the earth.

She raised her mighty head and let out a short, sharp cry, and I realised I had been staring for quite some time. I'd all but forgotten why I was here.

"So...when you said you would provide me with a mount…?"

She swung her head around to blink at me, and I nodded in understanding. I approached her, hesitantly, and she bent her foreleg, allowing me to climb up onto her back. I held on to the spine at the base of her neck with one arm, holding the book to my chest with the other, and squirming from side-to-side in an effort to find the most comfortable position I could. Before I could prepare myself, she roared, ferociously, and leapt forward, thrusting off the ground and unfurling her great wings and suddenly, I forgot to be afraid.

I laughed in exhilaration as the wind whipped through my hair, and I leaned over, watching the ground as it got further and further away, along with everything else. All of my fear, all of my uncertainty, all of my pain...it was down there. And I was up here, soaring through the air on the back of a dragon.

AN: Alright, I put you out of your misery. Lauren's back. Can I have a cookie?

Also, the memory on my laptop is a myth, so I couldn't download this from google docs and then upload it to FFNet like I usually do. It was a copy and paste job, so if there are any dumb-shit formatting errors, please blame my ancient laptop.

I know, I know this chapter is pretty short too. I don't know what to tell you. My brain gives me words and I write them down and then I give them to you. BUT the next chapter should be up soon, probably this weekend, so I'm hoping the quick upload time is making up for the relatively short chapters. Maybe? Anyway, let me know your thoughts on this.

Eiris: Two chapters without tears! I must be in a good mood haha

GrayAngel13: No perma-death for Lauren. I did consider it, to be honest. But I'm kind of attached to her. We might have another shift in perpective soon to check in on Emily, but probably only in relation to Lauren's story. For the moment, anyway...

Chimera Spyke: Cullen has clearly never seen The Parent Trap. Silly Templar. He'll learn!

Aenrashir: I hear ya, I like Lauren a lot too. She's fun and complicated and I like to write her. As for the merging of perspectives, I have a pretty clear voice in my head for Lauren, and a seperate one for Emily, so I'm hoping that will lessen the complications of that.

Never33: I hope you enjoyed your nap. I kept this chapter relatively short and sweet too, but I just wanted to end the suspense. I felt like a malevolent creator lol

NinjaKitten712: I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far! Hopefully I can keep you entertained!

Mihoshi 2.0: Ah, the Emily question. I've had this planned from the first chapter, and I'm so happy it's finally out there. I'm glad you're loving it! I'm really enjoying writing it again. It's been an escape from the mundanity of uni work.