We were joined by a handful of the clan's hunters when we ventured into the forest early the next morning, and they formed a tight, protective ring around their keeper as we made our way towards the ruins.

My fabulous plan to avoid mortal peril by intervening with Zathrian had not accounted for the forest's non-lupine inhabitants, and the first couple of hours into the journey had been slow-going and tense.

We were yet to encounter any werewolves, but one of the Dalish received a nasty bite from a venomous giant spider. Wynne administered a vial of anti-venom and healed her wounds, but she wouldn't be fully recovered until she had rested, so we had to spare another two hunters to accompany her back to camp.

Sten received a rather nasty-looking splinter, roughly the width of my arm, from a very pissed-off Sylvan before Morrigan turned it into kindling, and it was only Zevran's impossible speed and agility that saved him from becoming an elven pin-cushion when another of the tree-giants unleashed a hail of razor sharp thorns as large as daggers.

Wynne had attempted to heal the Qunari but he had brushed her off with a moody growl, muttering under his breath about bas saarebas, and wrenched the bloody wooden stake from his shoulder in a display that was as impressive as it was nauseating.

"Lauren."

"Grayson."

"Explain to me again why we're doing this?"

As we walked, I heard Wynne muttering under her breath and the stream of blood flowing down Sten's arm trickled to a stop. I grinned when I saw him pretend not to notice and turned my attention back to Grayson.

"What do you mean? You know why. It's perfectly simple, it couldn't be simpler." I said, brightly. "We have to break the curse to save the elves and the werewolves."

"Yes, but why couldn't Zathrian just have broken the curse back at camp? Why are we journeying through a forest that's infested with giant spiders, wolves, werewolves, demons and great big tree giants who want us dead?"

"Sylvans."

"Beg pardon?"

"The big murdery tree guys." I said, waving my arms like branches - helpfully, I thought. "They're called Sylvans."

"Oh good, that answers a question I didn't ask." Grayson rolled his eyes.

"Well, it's complicated." I said, stepping closer to him and lowering my voice so that only he could hear, conscious of the highly-emotional, heavily-armed elves behind us. "I'm sure Zathrian probably could break the curse anytime, anywhere. But we have to make sure it's done properly. If he ended the curse back at the camp, the Lady of the Forest would disappear and the werewolves would stop being werewolves and none of them would know why. The bad blood between them and the elves would just stay bad, forever."

"Lauren." Grayson said, wearily. "I don't mean to sound insensitive, but why do we care about their feelings?"

"Oh, you got me." I said, sarcastically. "Classic Lauren, always risking the lives of the people she loves for the sake of cheap sentiment."

"So you see my concern." He replied, matching my tone.

"The spirit is like Andraste to these werewolves. They need to hear from her that it's her choice to sacrifice herself to end their curse. If we take that closure away from them, I have no idea what that would do to them. More importantly, I have no idea what it would drive them to do in retaliation. I'm trying to meddle responsibly with the fate of the world, here."

"Yes, alright. That...makes sense." He said, begrudgingly.

"You sound disappointed." I grinned. "Honestly, Grayson, I thought we were past this. I have the wisdom of the beyond now, remember."

"Wisdom of the beyond, my arse." He muttered, slicing his sword through a far-too-large spider-web obstructing our path that I forced myself not to think about, fighting a wave of arachnobia-induced panic that threatened to thoroughly embarrass me in front of the already unimpressed Dalish contingent. I had barely held myself together during our earlier spider encounter and I could only hope that nobody had noticed my shameful attempt to use Sten as a meat-shield.

"You don't know what great and terrible secrets I might have gleaned from my stint in the netherworld." I said, keeping my face as straight as possible. "As far as you know, I spent untold aeons having tea and crumpets with Andraste herself, getting the lowdown on all of the divine gossip."

Alistair coughed uncomfortably from behind me, but I pretended not to hear. I knew he had a very particular aversion to the topic of my death, but I had privately decided that he really ought to get over it. It was my death. He was the one who wanted to be my friend. If I wanted to indulge in a little post-mortem humour, the least my friends could do was allow me my little jokes.

"Forgive me, Warden." Zathrian interrupted, cutting off what would have undoubtedly been a snarky response from Grayson, eyeing me curiously. "I recognise that I may be misinterpreting a dark joke between comrades-in-arms but…am I to understand that you claim to have died?"

I turned to gauge his demeanour before answering. He looked interested, but not like he was contemplating ramming a wooden stake through my heart if I answered in the affirmative, so I decided it was probably safe to indulge his curiosity.

"I did." I said, brightly. "If you're looking for any travel trips from the recently deceased to prepare for your upcoming trip, I'm your girl. Oblivion is lovely this time of year."

Alistair made the uncomfortable noise again.

"I do not mean to question your honesty, Warden, but you do appear to be rather…active - for a corpse."

Alistair made the noise louder - it sounded more like a growl than a cough this time.

"Thank you. I do try to get my ten thousand steps in every day." I grinned. "You're right, of course. It's quite an outlandish tale, isn't it? Just typical shemlen superstition - you know how we enjoy our flights of fancy."

It was a bit rich of him, I thought, to doubt the veracity of my claim, given his own unnatural relationship with life and death. My flippant, half-hearted deflection, however, seemed to have convinced him that I had, in fact, been telling the truth.

"Fascinating." He breathed, looking me over as though expecting to see evidence of my past condition that he'd previously missed. An arrow shaft protruding from my heart or bolts on my neck, perhaps. "You were revived immediately?"

"Fourteen days." Alistair spoke before I could answer and the sudden revelation that he could form actual words rather than just emit pained grunts and snarls surprised me so much that I stopped walking and looked back, only to see him studiously avoiding my gaze, his eyes trained on Zathrian. His voice was low and dangerous. "She was dead for fourteen days."

Zathrian looked from Alistair to me and raised an eyebrow. I glanced back at Alistair to see his jaw working furiously as he visibly struggled to contain whatever wretched emotion he was battling, and I felt immediately guilty for provoking him.

"Right." I said, shortly, suddenly feeling less willing to get into the gory details with Alistair's glare scorching the skin on the back of my neck. "Honestly, it's not as interesting as it sounds."

"I find that quite impossible to believe." Zathrian said, clearly not picking up on my shift in body language.

"Really, it wasn't a big deal." I said, dismissively, hoping he would take the hint and drop the subject. "It was just like falling asleep and then waking up after a really long nap with a bad hangover."

This was, apparently, not the correct thing to say.

"Wasn't a big deal." Alistair repeated, in a hollow voice that shot straight to my heart. "Well. I'm pleased you seem to have recovered so much that you can find humour in the subject. Forgive me if I don't find it quite as amusing as you apparently do."

"I think we should keep the conversation to a minimum." Grayson interjected before I could respond, in a less-than-subtle attempt to prevent the situation from spiralling. "The trees are thicker here. We have to be on our guard."

We fell into an uneasy silence, and I forced all thoughts of my past relationships, with death and with Alistair, out of my mind and turned my attention to the surrounding trees, attuning my ears to listen for the sound of tell-tale paw pads on the forest floor.

It was almost another hour before, finally, the welcome party of werewolves appeared in front of us so suddenly they might have materialised from the ether. It was fortunate that they wanted to talk - if their intentions had been bloodier, we would never have detected their approach. Larry, who had been wandering off the path, apparently on his own very important mission to sniff and mark every single tree in the Brecilian forest, was by my side in an instant, his hackles raised.

Despite the very real and present danger, I couldn't help but feel my heart swell just a little. I really did have my hound back.

The elves around Zathrian raised their weapons and huddled closer to their keeper. I had planned to hang back during the negotiations, but I really didn't like the look in the eyes of the lead guard - his bow hand was a bit too twitchy for my liking.

"Tell your people to lower their weapons." I muttered to Zathrian. "We're just talking."

The lead werewolf had already engaged Grayson and Alistair in conversation, and I approached them, throwing Leliana a meaningful look and she nodded in understanding, turning her attention to the elves at the centre of our group to make sure the tenuous peace was kept.

"We have not encountered any of your watch-wolves." Grayson insisted, clearly in response to some accusation to the contrary. "I do not know why they failed to report our presence but I can assure you, we mean you no harm."

"Do you think me a fool, human?" The beast snarled, flexing his clawed hands in clear agitation. "You lead a band of Dalish to destroy us."

"Beasts!" One of the Dalish growled from behind me. I shot him a withering look, before turning back. The werewolves answered with growls of their own, and I sensed that the situation was about to spiral wildly out of control. Both sides of this conflict were operating on a hair trigger. Grayson was not handling this as well as I had hoped.

It would take an extremely delicate touch to defuse the situation.

I stepped forward, ahead of Grayson and Alistair. They both moved to reach for me at the same time, but I avoided their grasp and thrust out my hand to the leader of the pack, offering him my scent.

"Swiftrunner." I hoped I had remembered his name correctly and hadn't substituted it in my mind for some other fantasy werewolf. He regarded me strangely, but sniffed the hand offered to him and I thought I noticed the smallest of changes in his posture. "My name's Lauren. We're Grey Wardens - our fight is with the Darkspawn, not with you. We're here to escort Zathrian to meet with the Lady of the Forest. We all want the same thing: an end to the curse."

"Zathrian!" He snarled, the name clearly enraging him to the point that he didn't seem to register anything else I had said. I steeled myself in the face of this - now that I was right in front of him, I noted - truly terrifying monster, and did the only sensible thing I could think of to distract him from his blind rage.

I flicked his nose.

Alistair let out a strangled gasp from behind me.

"Be good." I warned, in the voice I usually reserved only for Larry when he was misbehaving. "The Lady of the Forest will be very upset with you if you lose your temper and ruin the one chance you have to free your people from this curse, once and for all. I've taken a huge risk to arrange this meeting, you know."

He appeared to still be reeling from the shock of having his nose flicked by a tiny, bossy lady who was half his height, but some of my words seemed to penetrate this time, and he panted, heavily, cocking his great head to the side with a low whine.

"Is this true?" He growled, his eyes searching for the source of his plight.

Zathrian stepped forward, dismissing the protests of his hunters.

"The Warden speaks the truth." He proclaimed, still regarding Swiftrunner with a look of absolute disdain. "Escort us to Witherfang, and we shall put an end to your suffering."

Something in his tone of voice gave me pause, but I brushed it off. He was staring down the barrel of his own imminent death, I wasn't going to give the guy a hard time for sounding a bit put out.

"This is what you've been waiting for, isn't it?" I said, softly, trying to soothe the beast's rage and encourage rational thought. "This is what the Lady of the Forest wants. You must bring us to her."

He snarled and grunted, visibly fighting an internal battle against his bestial nature.

"Take you…to the Lady." He said, slowly, before roaring in frustration. "How can I trust that you will not turn on us and try to bring harm to her?"

His aggression was intimidating. I could feel the unrest of the Dalish behind me, and the surrounding werewolves responded to his rage with furious snarls. I had to do something to get him to trust us, and I had to do it fast. If any one of the many loose cannons surrounding us decided to fire a shot or engage in a spot of light mauling, all Hell would break loose and their blood would be on my stupid, meddling hands. I considered my options, and groaned internally at the only one I thought might actually work.

I sighed, swearing under my breath, and held out my hand to him again.

"Bite me." I said.

"What?" He barked in surprise, cocking his head to the side.

"Yes, what?" Grayson demanded, glaring down at me in furious disbelief. I ignored him, maintaining eye contact with Swiftrunner, who looked like he was trying to figure out if I was tricking him, somehow.

"Absolutely not." Alistair snapped, moving closer to me.

"Ignore them." I said. "I'm the leader of the pack. If you need proof that we want to end the curse as badly as you do, bite me. If we are true to our word, the curse will be broken before I even feel its effects. If we're lying, I'll either die or become one of you."

"Do you really think I'm just going to stand here and let you do this?" Alistair demanded.

"Yes." I rolled my eyes towards him. "Back off, Alistair. I'm handling this - unless you have a better idea to stop this from turning into a massacre?"

He stared at me with barely restrained rage, before turning to Swiftrunner.

"Bite me instead." He commanded, offering his own forearm and knocking mine out of the way. I panicked.

"What? No, Alistair, don't be-"

"Don't be what, Lauren? As reckless with my life as you are with yours? Oh, perish the thought."

"I will not bite you." Swiftrunner said, and I looked back to see that his stance had diminished from aggressive to neutral. Possibly even a little bewildered. "We spread the curse to the Dalish only so that Zathrian would come to us, to end it, and now he comes. I will bring you to The Lady. But be warned, human. If you go against your word and try to harm her, we will kill you all."

"Understood. Give me a moment." I nodded, glowering briefly at Alistair, who returned my glare with equal displeasure, before turning to Zathrian.

"Dismiss your men." I said, quietly enough that the rest of the Dalish wouldn't hear. "Send them back to camp."

"I hardly think-" He started to protest, but I cut him off.

"That wasn't a request, Zathrian. Their blood is too hot, and their pain is too fresh. We are going to make peace, not to fight, and peace is going to be difficult enough to maintain with one angry, unpredictable pack to contend with: I don't need another. If you bring them with us, you'll only endanger us and them."

"I have to agree." Grayson said, sympathetically, from behind me. "As…insane as that stunt you just pulled was, it does seem to have worked. If it comes to a fight, a few more bows won't matter, but they may be the difference between a peaceful resolution and a bloody one."

Zathrian looked like he wanted to argue and a small, insane part of me briefly contemplated flicking his nose, but Grayson's words made him hesitate and he reluctantly agreed, with a resigned nod, before turning to speak with his men. Grayson looked down at me and shook his head with the air of a long-suffering parent.

"Is there any point in me telling you how many ways that could have gone wrong and asking you, again, to please at least try to practise some self-preservation?" He asked, in a defeated voice.

"Depends. Is there any point in me telling you that I had the situation under control and the constant patronising I get from you and Alistair is as boring as it is insulting?" I asked, crossing my arms.

"That's what I thought." He said, walking away from me with a weary sigh.

We hung back while Zathrian and his clan members exchanged emotional goodbyes that I had to avert my eyes and heart from because it really hadn't been so long ago that my friends and I had said our own emotional goodbyes and that line of thought had to be avoided at all costs.

I had just started stretching my heart, testing the limits of what I could allow myself to feel now that I had decided to be strong, but those feelings were still too big for me. I needed something more manageable, something I could wrap my fingers around. This was entirely too big for my hands to hold.

One day, I promised myself, I would get around to tidying up all of the Big Feelings that I had been avoiding. I would sit, cross-legged, in the messy bedroom of my heart, and carefully open the neatly-stacked cigar boxes I kept piled up behind that wall in my chest, and I would sort through them all, and find a proper place for them. But that was a job for future Lauren. Sorting my feelings for Alistair into neat piles had been a daunting enough task in itself. I could afford to throw a few more cigar boxes onto the stack before it toppled over, and now was simply not the time for organising memories.

The wolves bounded ahead of us, circling back every now and then to herd us onwards. To my relief, we were much closer to the ruins than I had thought. Apparently the watch-wolves that should have alerted Swiftrunner to our presence when we entered the forest had failed to do so, so the encounter I had expected took place much deeper into the woods than I had anticipated.

I wondered about this change, absently, twirling the chain around my neck before realisation slowly dawned on me and I carefully tucked the Token of the Packmaster amulet inside of my armour, deciding it probably wasn't in any of our best interests to share the theory that I had maybe, possibly, quite by accident, charmed the werewolves entire first line of defence into letting us pass by unchecked. I had hoped the wolf I'd spoken to the day before would carry my message to the Lady of the Forest - I guessed there must have been a breakdown in communication. I made a mental note: wolf telegrams - surprisingly unreliable.

I almost wished I could have taken credit, it would have been an ingenious tactical move if it had been intentional. I decided if anybody asked about it later, I would probably claim it was all a part of my flawlessly executed master plan.

Of course, that last part was very much contingent on our meeting with the Lady of the Forest not going astronomically tits up, and Zathrian was starting to look shiftier with each step we took towards the ruins.

"You look troubled." I said, eyeing him cautiously. "If you're planning on doing anything reckless, I would ask that you give me fair warning to get my people out of harm's way first. Remember, you're journeying with the last Grey Wardens in Ferelden. If Grayson and Alistair are lost, every living thing on the continent is doomed to blight and ruin, including the surviving members of your clan."

He looked mildly insulted by the insinuation, but I had been attacked by this guy before, he had nary a leg to stand on. Granted, that had been in a video game and he had already made significantly smarter choices in reality than his avatar had, but still.

"I am troubled." He replied. "I am haunted by ghosts whose faces I can barely remember, and my soul is heavy with anger and regret. There is little room for anything else."

"I know." I said, gently. "They say time heals all wounds but…well…they never consider polio when they say that. Some hurts only ever sink deeper."

He looked confused by the polio comment - perhaps understandably - but nodded.

"I fear I have lived too long with this anger, and in my rage I was too blind to see that the time for justice passed many years ago. That blindness has cost my clan dearly." He said, bitterly. He looked up at me, with eyes that were almost hopeful. "You told me that you have Seen things that are yet to come."

I hummed in confirmation.

"Have you Seen what will become of my clan?"

I considered his question, trying to remember if there was any mention of Zathrian's clan in the later games. At least it wasn't Merril's clan, my face would have given that shit show away immediately.

"The future is a fragile thing. I've seen more than one, and I'm quite certain that in doing so, I've changed even the possible futures I know of." I said, with a wry smile. "I would never usually be so candid about what I've Seen, but…"

"But I will be dead soon enough." He said, finishing the thought I had started, before I realised how callous it would sound. I offered him an apologetic smile. "A word in the ear of a dead man is as safe a secret as one could ask for."

"Usually. Although, in my experience, the whole death thing doesn't always take."

"I rather think your circumstances, whatever they may have been, were quite unique."

"Hmm. Rare, at least." I said, remembering a scene on a mountain-top an ocean away. "The things I've seen, Zathrian - they're not happy events. They're scenes of war and chaos and too much death. I haven't seen the future of your clan beyond their assistance in the final battle of this blight. That means that wherever they end up, they're too far from the chaos for my sight to reach."

"I see." He said, and the creases in his forehead smoothed in relief and acceptance. "Thank you, Warden. That is…well, it is something, at least."

We approached the ruins just as dusk settled on the forest, and Swiftrunner led us into its depths, growling the occasional reminder that he would take great pleasure in tasting our flesh if we attempted to harm his Lady.

We were brought to a pair of massive oak doors and Swiftrunner barked an order for us to wait while he informed the spirit of our arrival, and he slipped into the chamber, leaving us to wait in heavy silence.

I bounced agitatedly on the balls of my feet, rolling my neck and shoulders to try to rid myself of the unbearable nervous energy coursing through me. Sensing my anxiety, Alistair placed a quieting hand on my shoulder, and I raised my eyebrows at him, incredulously. He retracted his hand quickly, with an embarrassed cough.

"Sorry. Habit." He mumbled. "Wasn't thinking."

"Well, that is certainly nothing out of the ordinary." Morrigan smirked. He glowered at her, and the self-conscious pout on his face made me soften, despite myself.

"It's okay." I said, gently, and his eyes flicked up to meet mine. "I was just surprised."

He nodded, dropping his gaze again.

"You seem more anxious than usual." He said, hesitantly, clearly testing if the boundaries of our newly-minted friendship extended beyond casual joking and professional disagreements.

"Well…there are more werewolves staring at my delicious throat than usual." I said, gesturing pointedly at the closest wolf, who acknowledged the comment with a hungry growl.

Alistair huffed a laugh, and I hated how much his smile made my heart swell..

"Of course. I just thought…maybe you were nervous because this is the first time since Ostagar that you're using your Sight to try to change things."

I narrowed my eyes at him, with a reluctant grin.

"Alright, Mr. Astute-All-Of-A-Sudden." I teased.

"Mr. Astute-All-Of-A-Sudden?" He grinned. "That's an interesting name I have. Orlesian, is it?"

"You should hear some of the other names I have for you." I smirked, before rolling my eyes, reluctantly. "Okay, yes, I'm a little on edge. If things go badly, it will be entirely my fault and I shall have to march myself into the nearest ocean. If they go well…well. That would mean…"

"A whole lot more responsibility just fell onto your shoulders because you've proven that you have the ability to change the future rather than just preserve it?"

"You're really earning your new name." I said, genuinely impressed by his insight. "Kind of hate it. I'll have to endeavour to be more mysterious, going forward. But yes, I'll admit it. I'm best-prepared for the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is…terrifying."

He opened his mouth to reply, clearly hoping to stretch this brief, not-terrible conversation on as long as possible, but he was cut short when the doors in front of us began to creak open.

"This is it. Zathrian...are you still with me?" I whispered to the mage.

His face was drawn and pale, but he nodded, his gaze fixed on the slowly opening doors in determination.

"Alright." I rolled my neck again, and took one final, steadying breath. "Okay. Let's go see a Lady about a Wolf."

AN: I have the next few chapters written but I think they introduce too many Big Ideas so I'm probably going to rewrite them. Should still be up pretty soon, though, I'm having a good time. I just haven't written in so long that I have to keep stopping myself from just blowing my load immediately and remember things like plants and payoffs and pacing so I am trying to exercise restraint and patience.

Terastrasza: I don't know how long it'll take you to re-read the whole thing so you might not see this for a while but thanks for the review. Your dedication is inspiring.

Judy: Thank you! It's always good to see your name, thanks for sticking with me after the far-too-long hiatus.

zillah1199: Larry is actually an Old God and is therefore extremely difficult to kill, and immune to perma-death. This is canon now. Larry lives forever. I know I'm cruel but I'm not kill-a-dog cruel. Promise.