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 Three: Ultimatum

Loghain did not even attempt to sleep. When Zevon put Loki down on the bed in the room the servant showed would be his for the duration of their stay, he remained there, sitting on the floor by the bed, simply watching the boy, or perhaps sitting guard over him. The servant started to say something, to make the offer of more comfortable accommodations, perhaps, but in the end said nothing and left with the rest of his charges to show them to their rooms. Before the night was over he would have two visitors. The first was not unexpected.

The Oracle, come to cure Loki's Starscourge.

"Shouldn't this wait until he's awake?" Loghain said, reluctant even to allow her near him now that he knew she was a maleficar. Certainly she had… helped… him, or at least she claimed to have done, but if magic made him nervous, and it did, then blood magic made him downright terrified. And she'd killed Celia. He wasn't going to be forgiving her that any time soon.

Or himself, either.

"The experience is not traumatic, but still I feel it is perhaps best that it happen while he sleeps," she said, in a quiet voice. "Besides which, you can see how swiftly it is spreading. We must not delay any longer, or it will only be harder."

Loghain looked at the boy and saw a small patch of dark purple skin on his cheek, like a bruise with no clear cause. He had noticed it, but hadn't realized its significance. So that was starscourge.

His voice, when he spoke, was choked. "Please, help him."

"Of course." She moved to the far side of the bed, lay a long, thin hand on the boy's chest, and closed her eyes. He watched her carefully for signs of anything untoward, not certain exactly what he was looking for. Maleficars needed blood to work their wretched magics but it didn't seem to matter how or where they got it. A white light rose up all around the tiny figure on the bed and she took her hand away. The boy's cheek was still dark purple, but the mark was smaller, and perhaps a bit paler than before.

"It will take time for the starscourge to fade from his system entirely," she said, opening her pale blue eyes once again and gazing upon her work. "I suggest you stay long enough for me to see him fully recovered, in case it comes back in force, which typically doesn't happen. Otherwise, he should be fine in a few days. I suggest you get some sleep, but I know you won't."

She left them then, and he settled back in to wait for morning, but his night was destined again to be interrupted when Odin arrived. Odin, one of the two men who had, long ago, disrupted his not-quite quiet peasant life with his bloody Royal doings. The one he had never quite learned to get along with. The one who had demanded the hand of his eldest daughter when she was barely out of school, even though he himself was older than her great-grandmother. Loki's true father. The sight of him made him angry, but that was nothing new. He climbed to his feet when swept into the room but he did not kneel as he ought by rights. He never did, so Odin was not surprised, at least.

"Loghain."

"Odin," Loghain said, with a slight incline of the head by way of acknowledgment.

"My servant, Heimdall, told me of your loss. My condolences."

"And did you give your 'condolences' to my daughter as well?"

"I could hardly keep the fact of her mother's death a secret."

"I can imagine how tactfully you put the news to her. You didn't come here to offer me your limited compassion, Odin, so get to the point. Why are you here?"

"You were shaken when Maric died. It surprised me. I never thought to see you waver. But this… this knocked you off your feet."

"Maric was my friend, little as I understood how that ever managed to happen. Is it so surprising that it hurt me when he died? I am not without feeling. But he was not my wife. Celia meant more to me than anyone but my children… and Loki."

"I need to know you're still up for the job."

"Up for what job?"

"The job of being Loki's caregiver. His mentor. His surrogate father."

Loghain snorted. "Of course I am. Haven't I always done my duty, and Maric's, and yours for you?"

"Then you need to remarry."

Loghain's eyes bulged alarmingly. "WHAT?"

"I will make an allowance for a time of grieving, but I give you no more than… ten years to find a wife of sufficient noble birth as befits a Teyrn. No more cabinet-maker's daughters for you, you were still a commoner when you married Celia but it wouldn't be appropriate now. This is a Command of the Alfadir. Fail me and I'll cut your head off. I'm tired of you disregarding Royal orders."

Loghain glared at Odin, a look hot and venomous enough to kill a lesser man. Odin was probably the only man in the universe who could withstand such a glare. He gestured to the fawning servant, who showed him out. He paused on the threshold and half-turned. "Ten years. Don't fail me," he warned. And then he was gone. Loghain wanted to shout a profanity, but he didn't want to wake up the boy, so he swallowed his anger and plopped down on the floor beside the bed with the fingers of both hands tangled in his hair.


Zevon rose early, wakened by nightmares and what might have been visions. Whatever it was, it precluded the idea of any more sleep, so he got up, dressed himself in the same clothes he'd worn the day before, and went to see if anyone else was awake, and what he should do and where he should be if they weren't. He wasn't terribly surprised to find Teyrn Loghain up and about. He doubted that the man had slept at all. He certainly didn't look rested. He looked like five miles of bad road, truth be told, but he was holding together, which was admirable. What was surprising, and unsettling, was that he gestured for Zevon to follow him into a private parlor for a word.

"There's… something I should have said to you when we were introduced, but I… well, I chickened out," the big man said ruefully. "Your name, Zevonishki… that's your surname, correct? I mean, no one thought that was appropriate for a given name, I'm assuming."

Zevon laughed, just a little. "Yeah. My first name is Warrjen. Why?"

"Warrjen. A Nord name. Odd for a Breton."

"Yeah, I suppose."

"Tell me, Warrjen Zevonishki, are you any relation of a Legate Barra Zevonishki, of Odin's Imperial Army?"

Zevon's dark eyes grew wide. "You knew my mother?"

Loghain leaned against the wall and nodded, his head hanging. "I did. Not well, exactly, but she was… something of a mentor to me, in my early days of service."

"Whoa. This is… mind-altering."

"Do you know aught of your father?"

Zevon shook his head. "My ami said Mother told her he was a young soldier she met while she was stationed in Ferelden during the Thalmor Wars. She never told anyone his name, though."

"Ami? Is your grandmother a Nord?"

Zevon smiled nervously. "No, she's a Breton. All my family are Bretons. But I've always spoken Nordic Standard. And I always called her Ami. She wanted me to call her by the Bretonian word but I never would. Don't know why."

"You do speak Bretonian, I would assume?"

"Fluently. And Orlesian, and several other Asgardian languages. But I don't know, Nordic Standard always feels most natural to me. Maybe because most people speak it."

"You're well-educated," Loghain said.

"I've done a lot of traveling. I picked things up along the way."

"You were raised by your grandmother, I take it?"

"Ami and Afi, yes, but Afi died when I was still pretty young. Killed in a workplace accident, actually. He was… a violent drunk… but I still loved him, you know? Ah, I don't know why I'm telling you this shit, you don't want to hear it."

"Actually, I do. So, your father was a young Fereldan soldier, but your mother never said who. I wonder if she was ashamed? Can't say as I wouldn't be, were I in her shoes. What became of your mother? She was transferred back to High Rock and I never saw her no more."

"She was killed, by a drunken skiff operator, when I was just a baby," Zevon said.

Loghain grimaced. "The curse of the doomed lover strikes yet again. I had hoped it had passed over her. But then, too, I had hoped that Celia had some immunity, and that proved untrue."

"Curse of the doomed lover?" Zevon said.

"Oh, just some old backcountry superstition. I'm not much given to believe such things, but I've seen a great deal of evidence of this one's efficacy. It may be coincidence, I suppose, but it certainly doesn't feel like it. Tell me, Zevon, would you like to know who your father is? I believe I can tell you, but perhaps you would not care to know."

"You… know who my father is?"

"I believe I do. I may be mistaken. But whatever it may have sounded like, your mother was all duty and all discretion. As far as I'm aware she only slipped up the one time, and I honestly don't know why or even how it happened. And I had no idea there was issue from it. I honestly thought there couldn't possibly be. Although that does explain why a high-ranking officer was transferred away from the front lines so abruptly."

"Who was he?" Zevon said. There was an undercurrent of dread in his voice.

Loghain smiled sickly. "Telling you that he was a 'young Fereldan soldier' was gilding the lily quite a little. He wasn't merely young, he was a fucking child. And he was no soldier, not then. Just a scared kid who was drawn into the conflict because he had nowhere left to go."

"What are you saying?"

"Zevon, I'm saying I believe that I'm your father."

"Whoa, whoa, wait – if you were my father, I would be a Nord, right? That's how that works. Nords breed Nords. Like when Humes breed to elves, the offspring are invariably Hume. Nords breed Nord children no matter what they breed with."

"It's not universally true. Sometimes Hume/Mer mixes come up with Mer children. And sometimes, Nord mixes come up with children that are essentially the non-Nord parent's race."

"Yeah, but if my father were Loghain Mac Tir, I would not only be a Nord, I'd be twelve feet tall, black haired, gray eyed, and shit lightning."

"I don't believe I've ever actually shit lightning," Loghain said, with a thin smile. "And none of my other children are any of those things, as of yet. Well, Loki's got black hair, I guess, but…"

"Damn, I could use a stiff drink," Zevon said.

"Sideboard right over there," Loghain said, nodding at a tray of drinks in crystal decanters.

"Tempting, believe me, but I definitely shouldn't."

"You're sober?"

"For about a year now."

"Hmph. A rare thing, sobriety. Asgardians rather look down on the practice, overall. Which is quite unfortunate, I think. Drunkenness leads to nothing but sheerest stupidity."

Zevon looked up at him, head cocked questioningly. "You're sober?"

"For approximately two thousand years now."

"Wow. That's a long time."

"It may be true that the demon drink never got its claws thoroughly set in me before I shook it off, but I won't try and tell you that it hasn't been difficult keeping it at bay all this time. Sometimes, like now for instance, a nice, hard knock of Wyvern's Ridge would go down a right treat."

"What's Wyvern's Ridge?" Zevon asked, thinking he would like to know from firsthand experience.

"Gwaren moonshine. Prior to my assumption of the Teyrnir the distillery was selling people the foreshot, which is potent beyond belief. It killed a lot of people. When I took over in the area I tracked them down and forced them to sell only the finished product, which is still extremely potent but, at the very least, not lethal with ordinary consumption. It's still illegal, thanks to it being an illicit distillery, but it's damned good shit, so I let it be."

"I don't know whether to be sorry I'm sober now or to be grateful I got sober before I learned about the stuff," Zevon said. "Did you ever fall for skooma?"

"Skooma is not much of an issue in Ferelden. We're far from anywhere moonsugar grows here, so what skooma there is is prohibitively expensive. If that was your major issue, you picked a good place to get away from it."

"Yeah, but unfortunately all other hard drinks are quite plentiful."

"That is unfortunately true."

"Does Gwaren have a chapter of SAA?" Zevon asked.

"It does, though of course most of the people in it are alcoholics, and not actually skooma addicts. But that, as they say, is most likely only a matter of opportunity."

"You know who's in it?"

"I founded it."

"I'm a member of the Denerim chapter," Zevon said.

"And so that is how you are acquainted with Healer Johann."

"You know he's in SAA?"

"I was aware he was a… what do you call someone who is sober but still struggling with their true nature? Just calling him an 'addict' doesn't seem quite fair, not after all the success he's had, and yet, that is most certainly what he is."

"'Struggling' is probably the best term. We're all struggling," Zevon said.

Loghain inclined his head respectfully. "You have the right of it. Not surprising you should have a way with words, if you are indeed a minstrel. Loki has a way with words as well. Don't know where you got it from. It certainly didn't come from me."

"Well, let's be honest, there's clearly no doubt that Loki's your son, but there's still nothing certain about this idea that I am, too."

"There can be. All it would take is a few moments with a Healer."

"I suppose I -"

Reyne walked in then, and headed straight for the sideboard. She poured herself something dark and drank it down immediately, then stood there, fingers at her temples and her eyes closed.

"Reyne, I…" Loghain said, but seemed unable to finish. She held up a hand.

"It is all right, Loghain. I know what you would say, but it is not your fault. None of this is your fault. She did… what she had to do. What any mother would gladly do."

"It should have been me," Loghain said.

"It couldn't be you. Loki needs you to teach him to be a great man of the people."

"Celia could have done that just as well. She taught Frigga and Freyr and Freya, after all."

"They learned the social graces from her, true enough. But what they really needed to know, they learned from you."

A soft sound of bare feet on the marble flooring, and Loki entered. He looked quite upset. He made a beeline for his father and raised his arms so that his father bent down and picked him up.

"I had a bad dream, Papa," he said.

"What kind of dream?" Loghain said, expecting something like his visions of the drunk father and the Blitzball boy.

"I dreamed that… that the Alfadir came and told you to take another wife or he'd cut your head off. It wasn't just a dream, was it? He really said that to you."

Loghain sighed. Sometimes this gift of the boy's was very inconvenient. "He gave me ten years," he said.

Loki buried his face in Loghain's shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was muffled. "You'll do it, won't you? Don't let him cut your head off. Please, Papa!"

"Don't worry, Pup. I'm not going anywhere."

"That man should die shitting," Reyne said, with great feeling. "Giving you such an ultimatum."

"Be careful, Reyne," Loghain said, quite seriously. "He has ways of knowing you said that. Although I quite agree with you."

"I thought you and the Alfadir were supposed to be friends," Zevon said. Loghain scoffed.

"I was friends, all against my better judgment, with High King Maric," he said. "Odin and I have never particularly seen eye to eye, especially since he demanded to marry my eldest daughter. Who was just barely old enough to even consider such a thing as marriage."

"Wow. That's not how the stories go."

"Stories are often lies. At best, Odin sees me as a useful tool. But it could be said that that is the best he thinks of anyone, including his own blood kin, so there may be a thin shred of truth in those stories after all. But he considers tools quite disposable if they don't do his bidding. And I have a hard time putting up with his Royal Bullshit. Especially since he started capitulating to the bloody Thalmor."

"Oh, yeah. I always kind of figured you weren't… fully behind… the White Gold Concordat," Zevon said.

"Not behind in the least. Odin says he's too old to keep fighting an endless war of attrition. I say I'm the one doing most of his fighting for him, and I'm not particularly old at all. But I do see his point, in part. He is balls-dragginglyold."

Zevon snorted, then coughed to cover it up. He'd never heard that particular descriptor before. He wondered if he could use it in a song lyric.


It took several days for the starscourge to completely fade from Loki's system, or at least the Oracle claimed it did, and would not allow them to leave before then. They could not complain about their treatment in that time, for they were honored guests. That it was all under the pall of Celia's horrid death was just something they had to deal with somehow. Her funeral was held promptly, and Loki stood by his father's side near the pyre as Loghain waited to toss the torch. There was no Chantry Priest to sermonize. Tenebrae was not much on the Chantry, apparently, and neither were the Al Bhed, so it didn't even seem appropriate in the first place. Loghain had never cared for the Chantry much himself. Tied inexorably to the province of Orlais, they were, and Orlais was willingly Thalmor-controlled. Not all Chantry types were Thalmor sycophants, of course, but a lot of them were. And they possessed their own independent army, which was ominous as fuck. Loghain had many times proposed the dissolution, disbandment, or outright destruction of the Templars to Odin, but had been met from that quarter only with amusement.

Well, he'd see. When the farm was on fire and the horses were burning in their stalls, he'd see. And who would he expect to put out the flames? Who indeed.

Instead of a Chantry sermon, Reyne spoke, at some length, about her granddaughter. She was a good speech-giver, and Loghain let her go on, saying all the words that would never have come to him in a million years no matter how true they were. When her words gave out, a pair of liveried servants stepped forward to wrap the body in the fine linen pall that was to be its shroud. Loki, standing approximately ankle-high to Loghain, clutched at him for support as the only mother he'd ever known was hidden away from his sight for the last time. He wasn't crying, not yet, but he was close to it. Soon he would break, probably the moment the flames took her.

Loghain was supposed to step forward and toss the torch now, but that was hard to do with a small child clinging to your leg, and with his arm span he didn't really need that step anyway. He dropped the torch onto the pyre, and the oiled wood caught and flamed up. Soon the whole pyre burned, and the linen shroud with it. Sure enough, Loki turned, buried his face in the side of Loghain's leg, and wept.

Loghain wished he could reach down and comfort the boy, or pick him up. He wasn't supposed to bend down until the funeral was officially over, by some ridiculous ceremonial procedure. He was too damned tall to simply pat the boy on the head, which would have been something at least. Well, he damned sure wasn't going to stand here and watch his wife burn to ashes while Loki cried. Who was going to say anything about it if he broke procedure? There were no self-righteous priests here to chide him. The most Priest-like person in attendance was the Oracle and she was a bloody maleficar!

He bent down and hoisted the boy into his arms. He thought about the Oracle. She had been unfailingly polite and gracious. All her people were. And if there really had been a daemon inside Loki's mind, then she and her blood mage ritual had saved Loki's life. It wouldn't surprise him at all if the Chantry was lying about the dangers of maleficarum. The dangers of mages in general, come to that. It had never sat right with him that they took children from their parents and locked them away in prison for their whole lives. It was a grand way for the Chantry to control people, control the very power of life and death, really. Magical support for armies in battle, magical healing for the sick and injured, all given or denied at the Chantry's whim. Bloody fuckers. He would like to take his blade and run it right through the bloody Divine, sodding Orlesian Thalmor-fucking bitch that she was.

"Let us repair to the Hall," the Oracle said, after the pyre had burned sufficiently to satisfy custom. "I shall have a feast prepared, and we shall toast the deceased. With or without spirits."

She led them to a great dining hall, where they sat at a grand dining table meant for many people. Servants came around with drinks on trays. Loghain was presented with a crystal wine glass of some pink liquid.

"What is that?" Zevon asked.

"It appears to be epli juice," Loghain said, with a thin smile.

"Epli juice? Isn't that something kids drink?"

"I rather like it, too," Loghain said. "It's rather sweeter than I typically care for, but it's very healthful. Certainly much better than spirits. And it's got quite a kick to it, really. Nothing like Wyvern's Ridge, but nothing is. And it's cheap. Epli trees grow pretty much everywhere in Asgard, and epli orchards are legion in Ferelden. There's never any shortage of epli juice."

Another glass was brought for Loki, of the same pink liquid. Zevon was treated to a mug of what appeared to be butterbeer, which was not really alcoholic despite the name, although Moogles were known to find it slightly intoxicating in large amounts. Reyne received a glass of dark red wine. The Oracle held up her own glass of something sparkling and clear. "To the Teyrna, may she rest in the grace of the Maker and the Divines!"

"Hear hear!" they chorused, and drank. In remarkably short order, food came around, and then desserts. Loki was presented with a chocolate and berry-topped cake that he was able to find quite impressive despite his depression. Loghain was glad. If the boy could take even a little comfort in something as trivial as a sweet, perhaps he would do better than he expected.