Disclaimer: I don't own Marvel Comics, Dragon Age, Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or any of their related characters. Character Warjen Zevonishki or "Zevon" is an homage to my favorite musician, long deceased, no disrespect intended, I included him because King dedicated the novel Doctor Sleep to his memory. 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 Doctor Sleep, Dragon Age Origins, Origins DLC, Awakening, and Dragon Age II, Dragon Age II DLC, Dragon Age Inquisition as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling. May also contain spoilers for Marvelmovies, series, and/or comics. Song lyrics included herein were used without permission.
Chapter Six: Palimpsest
Loghain marched back to the Alienage, swinging the late Lord Vaughan's decapitated head at his side. He didn't think much of openly carrying his grisly trophy, even through the streets of the market where there were children, because Ferelden was a land used to the spectacle of death, and children, in his experience, were typically pretty macabre little fuckers, absolutely fascinated with the spectacle of death because the concept was so utterly foreign to them. Of course, he tried to keep the actual processes of death from their eyes, much as he could, because that could bring the reality of their own mortality crashing down on them quite hard. It had certainly done for him.
And then there were always those few who went the other way, and started to like death, and the infliction thereof, a little too much.
When he reached the Alienage gates he paused. The gates were quite high, and designed especially for punishment displays, with sharp, rusty iron spikes at the top upon which heads or even whole bodies could be hung for a warning to criminals. Typically these warnings were to the Elves themselves, but Loghain knew that for the most part, they did not require such warnings. They had their own means of policing their little neighborhood of wrongdoers of their own kind, and they were good at it. No, it was the bigger, more powerful predators they had to fear. Vaughan's head would serve as a good warning to those miscreants for some time about the dangers of preying upon the Denerim Elves. Loghain had to reach to stick the head firmly on one rusty spike, but he did not have to stretch.
He stepped back and eyed the result. Vaughan's eyes were rolled back so that only the whites showed. His mouth was open, and his tongue protruded. His skin had taken on a bluish-white, waxy appearance and you could see a good many of the veins beneath. He looked very, very stupid and very, very dead. Excellent.
He headed straight for the Hahren's house. It was the nicest of the ramshackle little huts in the neighborhood, and had the best view, being nearest the Vhenedahl – the great sacred tree in the middle of the Alienage. Dunmer didn't have sacred trees, but Bosmer definitely did, one holdover from the old traditions that even city elves kept. He could feel his good mood evaporating with each step he took further into this squalid place. Killing Vaughan hadn't improved the drainage systems, fixed the roofs, or cleaned up the piles of garbage left to fester in the sun because the Arl couldn't be bothered to send the collection men out more than once a month. It was better, yes, but there were problems here that he just couldn't fix with his sword.
Would that he could. If every problem in the world could be fixed with a beheading, there probably wouldn't be a neck still attached in Asgard.
He stopped outside the Hahren's door and shook his head sadly. No, there was no help for it. He didn't have the answers for the problems of the world. Someone else, maybe, but not him. He hoped someday someone would step up with the answers. Loki, maybe. He was a smart boy. But he didn't envy him the job of getting everyone in the world to change their minds about everybody else. Racism was a disease that anyone could catch. No one in Asgard was immune. The Dalish hate the City Elves, the Dunmer hate the Dwarves, the Altmer hate everybody, Nords hate everybody, and everybody most assuredly hate the ones who wrong them.
What a mess. And Asgard was supposed to be a pillar of civilization in the universe.
He knocked on the door, and Valendrian let him in. Loki was seated at the small dining table in the large room, a quill and ink and a large pile of parchment palimpsest before him. A palimpsest was a piece of previously used parchment that was carefully scraped to be reused again. Elves generally reused parchment until it was almost transparent, because they couldn't get their hands on fresh. Valendrian must have had quite an unusual amount of old letters, or had been able to get them from somewhere, but what Loki had done with them, Loghain had no clue.
"What have you been up to, Pup?" he asked, brows furrowed.
"I had a story in me, Papa," Loki said.
"He wrote like a man possessed all the time you were gone, Commander. I was quite curious, I admit, but he writes so small I cannot read it myself," Valendrian said.
"May I?" Loghain asked, and the boy nodded and pushed the pile over to him. Loghain picked them up. The story was divided into three parts, but oddly, part three was on top. Loghain started to shuffle pages but Loki stopped him.
"No, Papa. It starts with Part Three. Then it goes on to Part Two, then Part One."
Loghain smiled. "That's… not how it works, Pup."
"You'll understand by the end. I hope."
Loghain turned his attention back to the story and read. Part three, it seemed, was about the end of the world. Ferelden was burning, Kirkwall and Starkhaven were falling into the ocean, all systems were failing. Loghain's eyes flicked to Loki's face. Was this a vision of the future? Something the boy had seen? He turned back to the pages and read on, about a man in Nevarra who recognized that the world was on borrowed time, and wasn't really all that upset about it. Just putting one foot in front of the other, living day by day, waiting for the inevitable, really. But one day, he sees a billboard on his way home from work. Billboards were not common in Ferelden, in Thedas in general, where they were felt to be obtrusive and ugly, they were much more prominent in Eos, so Loghain wondered exactly how Loki came to know of them. Had they seen any in Tenebrae? He couldn't remember. But doubtless even if they had not, Loki had plucked knowledge of them from someone's head while they were there. In any event, this billboard, in the story, had a picture of a smiling, ordinary, moon-faced man in ordinary business attire, and it featured the logo of a well-known bank, and it said "CHUCK KRANTZ! THIRTY-NINE GREAT YEARS!" The man driving home had no idea who Chuck Krantz was, or why that sign seemed to him so significant, but he marked it in his memory.
Loghain paused. "Chuck" was not an Asgardian name. Nor was "Krantz." "Krantz" sounded vaguely Krogan, a very war-like race of people from a distant realm. "Chuck" he couldn't put a finger on. Significant? Maybe, maybe not.
In any event, the world continued to unspool, and messages showing "CHUCK KRANTZ! THIRTY-NINE GREAT YEARS!" along with his pleasant, smiling moon face kept showing up everywhere. The Nevarran man was living separate from his wife, but they were on better terms with each other as a result, and he went to her house to speak to her about the strange messages. They were in each others arms when everything went black. That's when part three pulled back to show a man with a moon face, in a hospital bed, a Healer standing over him, and a young man, no older than fifteen but still, somehow, an adolescent, trying not to cry. They had just taken "Chuck Krantz" off life support. "'I think when a man or a woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin,'" the boy's uncle tells him, trying to comfort him with philosophy.
Loghain sat down in one of the spindly little twig-back chairs, hard. The chair buckled, but amazingly, held up. He knew Loki was smart but he hadn't realized the level of sophistication behind the intelligence. This boy was writing about death with the insight and clarity of an old man who faced it and did not find it terrifying. Hands shaking just the slightest bit, he went on to part two.
In it, Chuck Krantz was quite alive, surprisingly, and in Denerim for a bank conference. Days of stuffy accountant talk and speeches, and he would even be giving one himself. But on his way back to his hostel after one day of conferences, he saw a busker, a street minstrel, and stopped to listen. Soon he was dancing, with a carefree abandon that he had not achieved since he was an adolescent. People, who hadn't paid attention to the minstrel, stopped to watch the dancing, and eventually he pulled a young lady from the crowd to dance with him. People loved it! Money poured into the busker's hat and people crowded round, laughing, dancing, stomping their feet, and applauding! At the end of the day, exhausted, the busker gave them a lift back to their hostels and asked if they wanted to take up busking full-time.
"Oh, no thank you," they both said. "It was fun, but it's a bit much for full-time employment!" Chuck left the vehicle with a pounding headache. He got a lot of those lately, and he felt he knew what they were about…
Part one took place, as he had almost been able to guess, when Chuck was a boy in Nevarra. His parents died in a skiff crash and he went to live with his Grandma (or Bubbie, as she liked him to call her) and his Grandpa (Zaydee, for preference). Loghain didn't know if those were Nevarran terms of affection for Grandma and Grandpa or not. All Speech, that native gift of all Nords, didn't make anything in particular of them. Of course, All Speech didn't translate things for which there was no direct translation, but if it meant "Grandma" and "Grandpa" it should have translated that. His dancing skills, it seemed, came from Bubbie, who liked to cut a rug to what Loki called "rock 'n' roll" music, whatever that was. But if he could accept a world in which Nevarrans were named Chuck Krantz and were young men at only thirty-nine years of age, he could accept a world in which Bubbies danced to "rock 'n' roll." The story wound its way through Chuck's childhood, through the death of his grandma – a stroke, in the bread aisle at the local market – to the eerie tale his grandpa told him about the locked cupola in the attic. How it was haunted by "ghosts of Christmas yet to come." Loghain didn't know what Christmas was, but that whole "ghosts of … yet to come" sounded ominous.
In the end, after his Grandpa's death many years later, young Chuck musters the courage to go and unlock the cupola and face these ghosts. He doesn't see anything but an empty room – until he turns away, and chances to look back. Whereupon he sees an image of himself, laying in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines with tubes and lines. So he knows what is coming, but he doesn't know when. And then the story was over.
Loghain sat where he was for a long time, pondering. Loki watched him anxiously, awaiting his verdict. Loghain looked at him, then back at the pages in his hands.
"This is… heavy stuff, Pup, and no mistake."
He could almost see the boy's ears droop. "Yeah, I suppose so."
"I take it this was inspired by… what happened in Tenebrae?"
Loki nodded, eyes downcast.
"Well, I must say, it's absolutely beautiful, Pup. Sad, but heartening. It's not the time you're given, it's what you do with the time you're given. A fine theme, and I love the idea of a world falling to ruin each time someone passes away. I think that's very likely true enough. The world they knew, the world they believed in. It's all gone. You did a great job, Pup. We shall have to show Momo. She loves a good story. Might even show it to her old friends at the Denerim University."
"I don't want to make her sad," Loki protested. "Well, more sad."
"I don't think she can become more sad than she is, Pup. This might actually prove a comfort to her."
He stood up. "Come on, Pup, we still have to break the news to Commander Cauthrien at Fort Drakon. Valendrian, I thank you for the care you've shown my boy, and I will send you fresh parchment and ink."
A/N: "The Life of Chuck" is a story collected in If It Bleeds, by Stephen King. Obviously I have abridged and altered it considerably. If you have never read it I highly recommend it. It is not scary, it is deeply poignant, a side of King's work not often seen. How Loki knows it is questionable, as Stephen King has not yet been born as of this time in our story – indeed, Earth does not yet exist – but as he is possessed of the Shine, and is presumably in contact with spirits of some type or other, perhaps he is in contact with the soul that will, one day far down the road, be Stephen King.