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thistlecatfics · 3 years

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Fic Masterlist

Hello! I'm thistlecat on ao3. I've been reading Harry Potter fanfiction for 20 years (!!) and started writing in 2020. I find myself drawn to writing messy, dark, political, and niche fics and whatever I feel like is missing in fandom, but my interests are very much all over the place. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black has most of my focus.

** marks personal favorites

**Andromeda Liberata (140k+, M, Andromeda/genderbent!Ted Tonks, 3 part series)

In which Andromeda Black cruelly betrays her sisters and sets in motion the total destruction of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black because she fell in love with a lesbian muggleborn.

(do please mind the tags, particularly sexual violence, bigotry & prejudice, suicidal ideation, and alcohol abuse/alcoholism)

Book 1: Andromeda Vincta Catenis (6th year) - 77k, Complete

Book 2: Andromeda Ausa Ire (7th year) - 55k, Complete

Book 3: Andromeda In Bello (Graduation-1981) - WIP

Bonus: maybe I would have been something you’d be good at (1.5k, Ted POV set during Ch 9 of Book 1)

Slash:

**Waxing Gibbous, October 1981 (6k, E, Remus/Fenrir, Remus/Sirius)

Remus cuts his soul open for monsters.

A Rat in the Drawing Room (1.6k, M, Peter/Regulus for @wormtailweek)

Peter’s first task for the Death Eaters is a familiar one. He has years of practice watching over self-destructive Black men.

A Marriage Declined (1k, M, Remus/Sirius)

On top of the old oak desk, next to a stack of books on unions and promissory magic, crisp white parchment announced, “An invitation to the marriage of Lord Sirius Black to Lady Narcissa Black.” One drop of blood stained the white of the parchment, plotting out the “N” of Narcissa, two on the oak of the table, and then countless more on the rug.

**Alphard’s Favourite (5k, M, Peter/Sirius, past Alphard/Sirius, @blackcestfest)

Peter tries to find out why Sirius is so upset over Alphard’s inheritance. Then he tries to make sure Sirius doesn’t fall off the roof. Then he tries to ensure Remus doesn’t hear them.

Till Tomorrow and Till Death (11k, E, Regulus/Remus for @hprarepairfest)

Regulus, traitor to the Dark Lord, is given to the werewolves as punishment. Trapped and confused, Regulus wishes he knew if Remus is trying to help him or hurt him.

**rugby boys, they play 15s (4.5k, M, Flintwood for @quidditchfest)

Fifteen significant moments in Oliver Wood’s collegiate rugby career that did not make his highlight tape.

Creative Uses for Interior Design Charms for the Young Wizard, His Best Friend, and His Best Friend's Brother (1.2k, E, James Sirius/Albus Severus/Scorpius for kinkuary/shipuary)

Sometimes apologies come in the form of double penetration.

Starina (2.7k, E, wolfstar for @hpkinktober)

Sirius reveals more than planned during one of his drag performances. Remus has some choice words for him afterwards.

Femslash:

**you will burn right now but then you won't regret it (32k, M, Fleur/Tonks for @hpwlwbigbang)

Eight years after Voldemort’s defeat, as the illegal potions trade ravages England and the government intensifies lycanthropic restrictions in response, Fleur and Tonks join forces to uncover corruption in the Ministry.

As they discover a scandal deeper than they could imagine, Fleur contends with her complex legal status, Tonks contends with her mother, and they do their best to avoid contending with their feelings for each other.

**Icarus (20k, M, Pansy/Parvati/Millicent for HP Triad Fest)

A year after the war, Parvati runs into Pansy and Millicent at a club in Ibiza and finds herself embedded in their debauchery. None of it’s healthy, and it works until it doesn’t.

Icarus Before the Fall (2k, M, Pansy/Millicent)

August after the Battle of Hogwarts, as most of the Slytherins gather together in the Nott Castle, trying to find ways to forget, Millicent worries about Pansy’s new liquid love.

A prequel, unfortunately, as much as Millicent attempts to convince herself otherwise.

if you built yourself a myth (7.5k, E, Dorcas/Narcissa for Rare Pair Fest)

To celebrate completing her potions mastery, Narcissa goes to tea with Dorcas at the Ritz. A fight, a fuck, and a flight ensue on this unexpectedly busy day.

Taken by the Mountains (3k, E, Bellatrix/Marlene)

Marlene was just supposed to get intel on Bellatrix in London. So why is Bellatrix naked in her arms in a marble mine in Norway? And why oh why is Marlene thinking about kissing her?

Only One Bed at the Three Broomsticks

(2k, M, Andromeda/Augusta for Sapphic Bingo)

Andromeda drinks only one day a week, when she doesn't have Teddy to look after, because she is a responsible grandmother and certainly not an alcoholic. Getting too drunk to Apparate home is expected. The presence of Augusta is not.

**Acting Out (2k, M, Molly/Narcissa for shipuary/kinkuary)

Narcissa’s to-do list for the evening: -Drink enough champagne she forgets she ever had more than one sister. -Make someone cry. (Does not count if it’s herself.) -Be told she is the most beautiful woman at the party. (Preferably by multiple people.) -Have sex that would scandalise her parents. (If they would even pay attention.)

Two Quaffles Pub (9k, M, Cho/Ginny for @hpqueerfest)

Witch Weekly’s Dating Tip #7: On a first date, stick to topics such as hobbies, family, and interests. Avoid topics such as the war, former lovers, and politics.

Or, Ginny and Cho meet at a gay bar.

Narcissa’s Kindness (3k, M, Narcissa/Lily for febuwhump/shipuary/kinkuary)

In order to protect Lily from the Death Eaters, Narcissa offers her a version of kindness.

Like Fiendfyre (1.5k, T, Hermione/Pansy for @careofmagicalshippers Fall Fest)

"She apologizes, and maybe it’s the shock that Pansy Parkinson actually apologized for something (as if Pansy had done anything other than apologize for her existence for the past five years), she agrees, and Pansy is frightened by the thrill of hearing Hermione Granger say yes."

Blackcest:

what if he's written "Mine" on my upper thigh only in my mind? (1k, E, Sirius/Regulus) for @torturedpoetsflashfest

Regulus and Sirius are brothers. Regulus and Sirius are no longer brothers.

Or, a culmination of fatal fantasies.

**Bellatrix Black: An Elegy (5k, E, Bellatrix/Andromeda, /Cygnus, /Rita Skeeter) for @blackcestfest

Bellatrix Black Lestrange was survived by her husband, sister, nephew, and me, whatever I could be considered, if I could even be considered someone who survived her.

**Nymphadora, Nymphet (20k, M, Bellatrix/Tonks) for @womenofthehouseofblack

Dear Nymphadora, I’ve been informed of a temporary Defence professor this year, and you may have gathered she is (was) my sister. Be careful. If she attempts to harm you in any way, report straight to Professor Sprout. We shall talk more at Christmas; it may be time for you to learn more about my side of the family. Please watch your potions work – I know you can do better than last year. -Mum

A Swan’s Son (Or, Caring for Bellatrix) (7.5k, E, Bellatrix/Cygnus, Bellatrix/Andromeda, Bellatrix/Sirius) for @hpcestfest

Cygnus will have a son - even if it means killing his wife and dosing his daughter with arousal and fertility potions until she gives him one. But an inclination towards murder and incest runs in the Black family, and Cygnus isn’t the only one with ideas.

**Duty (2k, M, Regulus/Sirius, Regulus character study)

Regulus knew what a duty was.

Reenactment (9k, E, Andromeda/Narcissa/Hermione for @careofmagicalshippers Fall Fest)

Hermione has an idea to stop her nightmares. To her surprise, both Andromeda and Narcissa agree.

Helpless (2k, E, Sirius/Narcissa for kinkuary/shipuary/febuwhump)

At a party, Sirius is immobilised after being hit by one of his mother’s curses. Narcissa… helps.

Blood Is Rare and Sweet (8k, E, Andromeda/Bellatrix for @femmefest)

In the spring of 1979, Bellatrix began sending Andromeda messages in the bodies of members of the Order of the Phoenix.

no sound, only me and my disgrace (2.8k, E, Andromeda/Bellatrix)

(An alternate version of ch 5 of Andromeda Ausa Ire.) During the Christmas holiday, Bellatrix takes her drunk sister to bed. Andromeda asks her to stay.

wedding dress (1.6k, E, Andromeda/Bellatrix)

Bellatrix goes with Andromeda for a wedding dress fitting.

‘I only bought this dress for you to take it off’

Gen:

Cygnus’s Failure (3k, T, gen for @siriusblackfest)

In December 1981, Cygnus tries, and fails, to get his nephew out of Azkaban.

Multi/Other:

**Family Legacy (1.6k, T, Tedromeda + Remadora + Teddy/Victoire for @hptransfest)

Three generations of trans/nonbinary/gender questioning Tonks-Lupins.

Het:

Silent Garden (1.3k, T, Daphne/Theo for @hp-flowers)

Daphne stopped speaking one year, two months, and three days after the war ended.

Drabbles:

Angsty (Sometimes Sexy) Vibes-

She's the Albatross (She's Here to Destroy You) (313 words, Narcissa-centric, T)

First Death/First Kiss (700 words, Merope/Myrtle, T, ghost kiss)

**the kind of radiance you only have at seventeen (300 words, Dorcas/Druella, M, age gap)

Ensnared (700 words, Amelia/Emmeline, first war angst)

Ravenous (200 words, Bellatrix/Lily, vampire AU)

A Bouquet Not Made (200 words, Narcissa/Lily, soulmate angst)

The Third Universe (400 words, Remus/Sirius, Bring Back Black)

Abandoned (100 words, Helga Hufflepuff/Salazar Slytherin)

School Discipline (200 words, Daphne/Theo, torture)

Dorcas’s Tattoos (200 words, Dorcas/Andromeda, MCD)

Impact (200 words, James/Regulus, MCD)

Wedding Invitation (100 words, Percy/Oliver, homophobia)

**No Rescue (500 words, Bellatrix/Hermione/Narcissa, torture & sexual assault)

Bloodflows (500 words, Pansy/Daphne, DV not between P/D)

Delirium (500 words, Katie/Alicia, sex trafficking & addiction)

Intelligence (100 words, Narcissa-centric gen)

Fun (Sometimes Sexy) Vibes-

Eager (300 words, Astoria/Narcissa, Mommy Dom)

Morning (300 words, Pansy/Ginny, top/brat)

**Lately She’s Been Dressing for Revenge (300 words, Rita/Marietta, NYE)

The Prop Closet (400 words, Remus/Sirius, celebrity AU)

Vulnerability (200 words, Cho/Ginny, explicit consent)

Sculpture (100 words, Pansy/Millicent, daddy kink)

Beefcakes (100 words, Dudley/Greg, Olympics AU)

Dormitory Living (100 words, Fred/George/Oliver, face-sitting)

Pet (500 words, Fleur/Tonks, pet play)

A Happy Accident (350 words, Angelina/Fred, tentacles)

**A Farewell Letter (500 words, Remus/Sirius, humor)

**Height Difference (437 words, Remus/Sirius, absurdity)

Dog Star in the Sun (200 words, Remus/Sirius, vacation fluff)

Anything for Our Captain, or, What Else Are Beaters For? (518 words, Oliver/Fred/George for @careofmagicalshippers Fall Fest)

Good Chat (200 words, poly marauders Love Island AU for @hpkinktober)

Meta:

Fanfiction as an Arts-Based Trauma Therapy Modality (3k)

The benefits and potential limitations of utilizing fanfiction as an arts-based trauma therapy modality when compared to traditional narrative therapy. (Modified from an academic paper in a graduate social work program.)

A League of Their Own:

Pop Fly and the Peaches (3k, Jess/Lupe/Reader, E)

"To be a queer means experiencing desire greater than terror, and you – no denying it now with her pleasure on your lips – are a queer."

#thistlecat fics

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probablygoodrpgideas · 5 years

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Since you all loved the Lich Queen and her ex-wife, here is their story!

Bonifatia

Born 13/4 10000 BT

Bonifatia was a potato farmer in Zarn that had nothing special in life. Her parents both died when she was a teenager, she had no siblings, no friends, no lover, no nothing. Until one day, Bonifatia was 127, her local knight became a Vampire and killed everyone who didn’t manage to escape. Bonifatia was turned into a Vampire Spawn. She served the evil vampire for many years.

Hildegard

Born 12/3 10000 BT

Hildegard was the daughter of the local knight of Oifacburg. In that time, Okery wasn’t a unified nation yet, and Oifacburg was simply the biggest town in the region. She and her brother both studied magic, and they were both amazing at it. Like, really amazing. Her brother was older than her so she didn’t expect to ever rule and went adventuring instead. She didn’t have a permanent party, but she did have some people that helped her from time to time. All of that would change on the fateful

08/27 9430 BT

Hildegard decided to slay the vampire that ruled the small village Zarn with an iron fist. She went into the castle and got attacked by Vampire Spawn. But they were no match for the powerful wizard. She got to the Vampire Lord who began to fear for his unlife. He hoped that maybe he could increase his odds of survival if he turned all of his spawn into proper vampires who have much more fighting power after all. So he let one of them drink from his blood. But these few seconds were enough for Hildegard to turn the helpless Vampire into dust. With him, all of the Vampire Spawn vanished. Except for the one that got to drink the blood of the Vampire seconds before. This new Vampire Lord looked at her liberator and fell in love instantly. “My name is Bonifatia. I am pleased to meet you” she said quietly, and also a bit scared. Hildegard knew that this woman wasn’t a ruthless tyrant, at least not yet, and so decided to spare her life. They talked for a while. Hildegard, who never knew love in her 369 years of walking the material plane, fell in love with this woman in one evening.

The next morning, Bonifatia made herself the new knight of Zarn. The villagers first thought this wouldn’t change much, just one Vampire tyrant to the next, but she asked the villagers to her castle so they could draft a code of laws together. The villagers were surprised by this. They agreed that Bonifatia would protect the people of Zarn for a tenth of their monthly income, the usual knight stuff. They also agreed that Bonifatia could request up to 3 people every week to drink blood from, but she was not allowed to kill them in the process. This would allow her to keep living as a Vampire without having to kill anyone. She was also allowed to completely drain anyone she sentenced to death, making them her Spawn. Of course, the villagers would be extra careful about unnecessary death sentences.

Bonifatia and Hildegard decided to marry. This was probably a rushed decision, they hadn’t even known each other for a day yet. But so they traveled back to Oifacburg, to request the approval of Hildegard’s parents. When they arrived there, they found Hildegard’s parents to be very ill, on the verge of death. They thought it was weird their daughter wanted to marry a vampire, but they knew how smart she was so they gave her blessing. Before the two could actually marry, the parents died. Then, Hildegard’s brother surprised her: He didn’t want to become a knight, he wanted to open a school so he could teach magic to other people. Hildegard accepted to take the position instead of him, and so he could open the University of Oifacburg. Too late, Hildegard realized that this could bring ruin to her town. She was married to a Vampire, and most people believed Vampires to be inherently evil. She wasn’t afraid of any individual, she, her brother and Hildegard together were (and still are) capable of killing almost anyone who would dare to oppose them. But in the south, two of the first nations of the world had recently formed. The Empire of Nar’Adsch and the Empire of Oozridge. They had armies, and these armies could kill Bonifatia. But Hildegard had a plan. She wanted to unite the villages of Okery to become a nation.

Hildegard didn’t want to create an Empire like the Basguri or the Dragon-Kaiser. She lived her whole life under a system where the people of a village swear their allegiance to a knight and get protection and governing in exchange for a percentage of their income. Hildegard wanted to implement this system on a higher scale. The knights should swear allegiance to her, their Queen, and get protection and governing in exchange for a percentage of their income. Also, they would have a large group of other knights they could rely on should an emergency arise.

It took them almost 20 years to convince all the knights of Okery to swear allegiance to Hildegard. Some of them saw the benefits of uniting under one banner, some of them refused, so she killed them and replaced them with people loyal to her. After Okery was united, Hildegard realized that she needed second-in-commands, ruling all of these knights at once would be too much for her. So she made two knights her “Major Knights”. These knights would each rule over all knights within their region while still serving Queen Hildegard. The first major knight was the knight of Magdfurt, the second one was supposed to be Bonifatia, but she declined. She was contempt with ruling her little village and helping her wife in ruling the nation. So the knight of Trar got the title instead.

And so Hildegard and Bonifatia ruled together for many happy years. When the King founded his Kingdom of Humans in the east, he modeled his governing system after Hildegard’s. He, Hildegard and Bonifatia talked a lot about government and other stuff and the three became friends. But after a few centuries, Hildegard became very sad. The King was made immortal by his people’s belief in him and Bonifatia was an immortal Vampire. It seemed as if she would die eventually, leaving her best friend and her wife behind.

But it should not come to this. Hildegard was still a very powerful wizard, and one day, a stranger knocked on her palace doors and said he could help her with her magical research. Intrigued, she let them in. The stranger revealed himself to be Micolo, god of Necromancy. He told her that he was deeply thankful, Hildegard and Bonifatia did a lot for the social acceptance of the Undead in Draxnor. For that, he would share the secrets of Lichdom with her. And so Hildegard became an immortal Lich. A few decades later, her brother discovered the Clone spell, essentially making him immortal as well. And so it came that Hildegard still rules Okery to this day, her brother leading the University, her wife leading Zarn, and her best friend leading the Kingdom. Nations around them came and went, but these four remained a staple in the history of Draxnor.

I can’t tell you how they broke up because that might be a spoiler for my campaign! Maybe you’ll find out eventually though! Hope you enjoyed reading this and remember:

It’s not 2 pages of lesbian fanfiction if it’s actually canon.

#not ideas #setting stuff #long post #I feel like naming lesbian undead after local saints is quite a powermove #d&d

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houseofdisdain-blog1 · 6 years

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Book Club, Part 3: #JUSTICE FOR JUDGE SHARON

Welcome back to BOOK CLUB, our four-part book club about the movie Book Club (2018). Catch up on last week’s installment here: I’d Do Anything for Love (Especially if I Were in Love with Mary Steenburgen). We’re back this week to talk about Diane Keaton’s least favourite friend.

R2: She only dresses well after her friends buy her new clothes, though. They buy her clothes and that’s why Jane Fonda has an ugly wig, like it’s punishment for helping Judge Sharon. R1: It just happens magically, like when she pays for the clothes the wig appears on her head and she can’t take it off. R2: And Diane appears in a puff of extravagant black ponchos and goes, You know what you did, Jane, you know. R1: She doesn’t get anything! R2: Let Judge Sharon have fun! She doesn’t even have a house. Does she have a bed? She has to fuck people in her car. R1: Yeah! What was that! R2: Yeah! Mary and Mr. Incredible get to get on a motorcycle and drive home to their house to have nice elderly sex on their comfortable bed. What does Judge Sharon have? Hook-ups in her car! R1: And anytime there’s a scene where she’s at work it’s interrupted by her getting Bumble notifications.

R2: Which really only adds to the tragedy of this character, because everyone else is adept at technology either because they’re Jane Fonda and they’re, like, savvy, or because they have children who can teach them how to use technology. R1: Meanwhile, Judge Sharon is on her own, pressing buttons wildly, trying to figure it out, taking accidental selfies. R1: I did really love the picture of her with her glasses backwards, though. That was good. R2: I was thinking, would I swipe yes on a lady who had that going for her? And I think yes. R1: Oh, absolutely. R2: It shows that she’s funny, has a great sense of humour. I also initially thought it was just a gag, like ‘Oh haha she’s old and can’t take a photo’ and the next time we see her she has a date, so I assumed she finally figured out how to get her nice, federal headshot in but no! R1: No! It was just that photo, because on the date, he’s like, ‘You look great without your mask.’ R2: So she’s just kept her face mask photo. Anyway, I thought her plotline would give her, like, string of great car sex - R1: But it’s one guy! And then on the next Bumble date she runs into her ex-husband and his new, much younger fiancee while she’s on a date with someone uncool and her age. And it gets worse! Because then Judge Sharon gets invited to her son and ex-husband’s joint engagement party, which is a horrifying concept. R2: Diane Keaton is merciless. R2: So she’s not going to get the fun, modern woman with a penchant for car sex plotline. Fine. Then I thought maybe she’d get a younger but more age-appropriate, handsome man. Or she’d show up with him to the party and be like ‘haha screw you family,’ but no, when the day of the party arrives, she just corrects them on their Shakespeare. And we see her son -- R1: Who looks like a terrible person, by the way. R2: He looks like a baby who goes to the gym. A really burly baby with horrible, horrible flaxen hair R1: His hair colour looks fake. It doesn’t look like a real colour. R2: It looks like Judge Sharon’s hair colour, but hers is faded and maybe dyed a bit? There’s no reason he should be sporting that light Betty White as Rose Nylund Blonde. I’d cut him out of my life too. R1: She doesn’t get to show up her gross ex-husband or bland son. Instead, her happily ever after is supposed to be that first guy from Bumble. Who, don’t forget, is an accountant, which is another layer to the tragedy, because we’ve already established that accountants are evil in their universe. Diane Keaton’s lacklustre late husband was also an accountant. It’s a bad thing to be.

R2: Her happy ending is that, after this horrible joint engagement party, she rematches with him on Bumble! Can you imagine that as your happily ever after? R1: I feel ripped off on her behalf. R2: And then she’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to need a bigger backseat.’ What?? Get a bed! R1: Why doesn’t she have a bed?? Go anywhere else! R2: Diane Keaton has locked up her bed! She’s stolen the bed, taken it to Arizona, and locked it up in her basement dungeon. R1: Or, like, Judge Sharon, last time she did something egregious, like skipping a friend date with Diane Keaton to, god forbid, do her job -- she’s the only one of the four who behaves this unreasonably -- last time she did this, her bed just disappeared in a cloud of smoke and was never seen again. So now she has to sleep in the back of her car. R2: I believe that Diane Keaton is a real-life wizard. She dresses the part. Or she goes home and she’s typing in her Word doc in size 20 font and starts typing the next chapter of her fanfiction, “And then Candice no longer had a bed. She will never sleep again. That jerk.” R1: I guess that leaves us with the question of why Judge Sharon/Candice is the most hated friend who gets NOTHING in Diane’s fanfic. R2: Did Candice Bergen ever rob Diane Keaton of a coveted role? Did Sharon poison Diane’s husband? What did she do? I have to know. Someone get on this.

Please join us for next week’s book club (about Book Club). We will be discussing Jane Fonda and lesbian vampires.

#diane keaton #jane fonda #mary steenburgen #candice bergen #book club a book club about book club #fifty shades of grey

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mxquill · 7 years

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tagged by the lovely @evilqueenofgallifrey !!

Rules: answer all questions, then add one of your own, and tag as many people as there are questions you like bc let’s be reasonable here

i’m not gonna tag anyone because i’m lazy but here are my answers anyway

coke or pepsi? pepsi but only if it’s diet

disney or dreamworks? Disney

coffee or tea? books or movies? tea / both! (leaning towards movies because reading is #tiring

windows or mac? windows

dc or marvel? marvel i guess??? idk the dc cinematic universe is shitty but i have like 0 interest in mcu any more outside of gotg

xbox or playstation? i was always an xbox gal but if i had to choose now prob playstation for better exclusives

night owl or early riser? night owl

cards or chess? shit i can’t play either

chocolate or vanilla? c h o c o l a t e

vans or converse? converse

star wars or star trek? please don’t make me...... ok star wars

one episode per week or marathoning? marathons bby i can go all night ;) ;) ;)

gandalf or obi-wan? help me obi juan whoever the fuck you are you’re my only ho

heroes or villains? i mean it’s nice to save the day but i am helplessly attracted to intimidating sexy lady villains

john williams or hans zimmer? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

disneyland/disney world or six flags? Disneyland

forest or sea? sea i guess???

flying or reading minds? flying, reading minds would be exhausting

harry potter or lord of the rings? Harry Potter

cake or pie? cake i guess

you are banished to a desert island, which benedict cumberbatch character would you choose to take with you? preferably none but i would choose teddy from tipping the velvet because i too have had my heart broken by nan king and he probably would build us a boat to go home in

train or cruise ship? train (i’ve never been on a cruise)

brian cox or neil degrasse-tyson? brain cox my boy

wizard of oz or alice in wonderland? alice in wonderland

fanfiction or fanart? both !!! honestly all kinds of fanwork is beautiful and great

the hunger games - books or movies? books

be able to see the future or travel into the past? seeing the future would be pretty cool i guess, i would probably die immediately if i went into the past because i am small and gay

han solo or luke skywalker? han solo is my main man

spring or autumn? autumn obviously because strictly is on and halloween happens

campfire or fireplace? campfire

french fries or onion rings? fries (before guys)

truth or dare? truth, i’m a chicken lmao

winter or summer? summer because i’m cold all the time anyway

vampires or werewolves? vampires

eyes or lips? uuuuuuuuuuu fuck idk burgers or sandwiches? burgers

friends-to-lovers or enemies-to-lovers trope? friends to lovers

pizza or pasta? pizza !!!!

ancient rome or ancient greece? oh man idk maybe rome

foxes or wolves? foxes

mermaids or dragons? mermaids because i am all about that cute mermaid lesbian aesthetic

kate bush or madonna? Madonna

the office or parks and recreation? i’ve never seen the office so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sci-fi or period drama? i want to say both but i’m way more invested in sci-fi

Fairytales or Mysteries? uuuuuu mysteries i guess

Explore the oceans or space? space !!! i’m such a space gay

iPhone or Android? android

Thieves or Assassins? why not both

Metal or country music? neither, both of them make me nervous lmao

#tag game

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 28/38 Fandom: Dragon Age Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, Mind Control, Human Experimentation, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Suicide Attempt Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Her vision never did return to normal. The metallic taste never left her mouth, nor the faint sense of foulness at the back of her throat. She lost her sense of smell entirely. The tips of her fingers tingled, forcing her to use telekinetic magic to write and do delicate work. Patches of her skin discolored and went numb, growing as winding lines around her limbs. They grew just enough to be noticeable, then ceased their creep. Her hair thinned, sometimes falling out in clumps, and grew back white and brittle.

She took extensive notes. Avernus would want them.

Keep Reading

#please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction #dragon age

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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You have wizard lesbian fanfiction?

yes.

it is what happens when you break into publishing, realize that book marketing sucks, and subsequently retire to write uncomfortably personal semi-autobiographical romantic psychodramas about your dragon age OCs

chapter 28 coming soon btw

#please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction #speech act

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 25/38 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Pride Demon(s) (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, Mind Control, Human Experimentation, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Pollard’s blood lasted her only a handful of weeks. One vial she wasted, and for that she spent hours cursing her own foolishness, but successfully distilled second. Pure Blight pulsed black and ugly in the vial, viscous, oozing and alive, more than she had ever managed to get before; it was dreadfully difficult stuff to work with; corrosive, unstable, liable to eat through any vessel she kept it in. She had a thimblefull of taint now, and one vial of Pollard’s blood left over.

There had to be something. Veritas had said the secret was in the blood, and that made perfect sense. The blood of a man dying of the Taint, there had to be something.

But experiment after experiment revealed that the Blight in Pollard’s blood was no different from her own. She tried every test she’d spent all this time devising, distilling, refining, transforming, trying to find a single meaningful difference between the Taint in her blood and the Taint in the blood of a dying man. And there was nothing.

She had only the one vial left. Who knew when the next Warden would begin to hear the song? She should have taken more—curse her, she should have been more careful.

Normally she would have asked Avernus what he thought. He had ages more experience in experiments with Grey Warden blood. He might have even known all this already. If she could swallow her pride

But the thought of crawling back to him for help with something he probably had solved centuries ago made her physically recoil.

Avernus didn’t think it was even possible to cure the Taint, but what did he know? He didn’t care about curing it. He only cared about the power in the Blight, how to use it to make new spells, learn more about magic. She was not like him. She was better. She could figure this out.

The longer she tried, the more her thoughts heaved with spurts of anger and pride and fear, wild despair-shot terror that whispered, you are wrong, you are not good enough.

She redrew the summoning circle. What choice did she have?

Only when she was halfway through the ritual did she remember to cast spells of concealment.

Veritas did not seem surprised to find itself back.“So soon, Loriel Surana? Again with the invisibility. Don’t you think it is a little paranoid?”

“Why doesn’t it work?” she demanded. “You said it was in the blood.”

“Of course the secret is in the blood,” said the demon. “I do not lie.”

“Then why is a dying man’s blood just the same as mine?

“The Taint does not change a man’s blood only, Loriel Surana. The taint is in your skin and hair and heart, it is in every part of you, not just your blood. What made you think you could understand the whole of something from its smallest part?”

“You said—”

“Nothing that was false.”

She scowled. “I should have known better than to trust a demon. You lie without lying, all your kind does—”

Veritas seemed to grow then, filling up the room with its bulk. Its thousands of eyes stared unblinking right at her, its golden mask a terrible rictus. “ Do not dare insult me, mageling! I am Veritas, he who knows ten thousand truths! Not one falsehood has ever passed my lips! Call me a liar again and I will eat your heart.”

Loriel was gratified to know that she was still invisible, and Veritas did not see her flinch. “You might will it, Veritas, but it shall not happen. I have you bound so tight that if I willed it, I could leave you here and never come back. I would bind you to this circle, to this mortal plane, and you would not see your home, nor anything besides this darkness, until you forgot your very name, until you were Veritas no more. Am I lying? Tell me true.”

Veritas was silent.

“That,” said Loriel, “is what I thought.”

“You are a bold little thing,” the demon said disdainfully, “to threaten me so, when you need my help.”

“I do not need your help," she sniffed. "There are other demons like you. I could summon any of them just as well.”

“And yet you haven’t. Why is that, I wonder? If old incorrigible Veritas displeases you, why summon him? You want my cooperation, mageling, don’t deny it.”

“Fine. I won’t. I do want your help. What do you want in exchange?”

“Only this, Loriel Surana. Reveal yourself. Show me your true face, use your true voice. Let there be no unseemly secrets between the two of us.”

She had to laugh. “And what will you give me in return?”

“My goodwill, of course.”

Veritas did not lie. But it had to be a trick. What else could it be? A demon would not offer a deal unless it had the upper hand. The wise thing to do would be to dismiss it, find another spirit to deal with, one less dangerous, one with not quite so many staring eyes…

But...If she was going to show herself, she may as well do it to a creature that might understand her. She released the spells of concealment, and was beheld.

Every one of Veritas’s thousands of eyes focused right on her, boring into her skin, scraping every inch of her. “My, you’re even smaller than I was imagining.”

“Do you even know how to cure the Taint?” Her voice sounded preposterously small without the spell of echoing misdirection layered on top of it.

“No,” the demon said easily. “But I am very curious as to how you will manage it. I’m even willing to help.”

Of course. Of course of course of—“As though you’ve been any help.”

Veritas sat back lazily on its haunches. “You don’t even need my help, not at this juncture. You said so yourself. You know exactly what you need to do.”

“Do I." The words dropped like stones from her mouth.

“Of course you do, Loriel Surana! You must use human subjects! Or elven, or dwarven, or whichever—you mortals are not all that different. I told you as much when last we spoke.”

“I did use human—”

“Do not be coy. Blood alone will not do it. You discovered as much yourself. You know what must be done, but still you hesitate. Why, I wonder?”

She did not answer.

“I will tell you this for free, because you already know it." Veritas turned in a circle and settled itself on its pause, like an enormous cat. "You hesitate because you wish to think of yourself as good, or at least, not evil. You prefer so strongly to believe that you are not like others of your kind that you would fail your stated goal on purpose. For as long as you stay bound to it, doing your reasonably convincing best, though you perform for no one but yourself, you do not have to move or think or be.”

She stood white-faced and silent, for every word rang true.

“Now if what you truly wanted was what you claim to want,” Veritas went on, “you would not hesitate to do what you already know you must. You would accept the price of thinking yourself evil, and pursue that which brings you closer to your goal, and that alone. But this is not what you want above all things, so you make only tepid and halfhearted efforts to achieve it.”

“You sound like Avernus,” she scoffed.

The demon’s golden eyes flared, and now it knew another name important to her. Was she truly so mad in her aloneness that she would give away her secrets to a demon, just to have someone to give them to?

Yes, she realized. Yes, she was.

tck

Brigit concluded her report. No new deaths. No Callings. No sign of the Architect.

“Thank you, Seneschal.” That will be all, but somehow those words did not get spoken, and until she spoke them Brigit would not move. She stood ramrod straight, at attention, the ideal servant.

“Seneschal. Why did you decide to come here?”

“To serve the Grey Wardens,” she answered at once. “To help. In my own small way.”

"And yet you do not join us?"

Brigit shook her head. "No, ser. I am no warrior. I can bear neither sword nor bow, but I hope to be of use in other ways."

"But why?" Loriel fixed her deep black gaze on hers. Brigit’s eyes were light, and they could be green or blue or brown depending on the light. Here and now, they looked slate grey, and did not waver one bit.

"I don't understand. What reason would I need to wish to serve? Why does anybody wish to serve?"

No. No, that rang false. "Please, Brigit. Let there be no secrets between us."

Finally Brigit dropped her gaze and said in a small and quiet voice: “I was at Denerim. During the battle. We had evacuated from the south, but the Blight had come for us anyway. I remember the storm...the only light came from the lightning. I saw the beast there, with my own eyes. I had never been so afraid in my life. I had always believed in the Maker, believed that he loved us, though we his children had gone astray...but when I saw that thing, I was not sure. What father would set such a thing on his children? I don't know why it affected me so deeply.

"And I saw it die. I saw you slay it." You. Brigit said it like a prayer. "Ser, I am no scholar, but I know my history. I know that no Grey Warden has ever survived such a feat. I had never believed in miracles, until that day."

Am I all you hoped for? Loriel wanted to ask. But it only would have hurt her, and hurting her would have been the point. And if the answer had been yes, that would be too terribly to contemplate.

"I survived the assault, and returned to my life, but I never forgot. I wanted my life to mean something, but I was a coward. I cannot fight. I fear pain and death. I would be a useless Grey Warden... but I know sums, notations, and I write well. It is the Maker’s blessing that my mean skills are now of use.”

Loriel nodded slowly. “I see. Thank you.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “You know how much I value you, Brigit.”

The full light of the sun shined out from the smile that split Brigit's face. “Thank you, Commander. I ask for nothing else.”

“You understand what a rare thing it is, to have my trust.”

“I do.”

“Do you trust me as I trust you?”

“Of course, Commander—of course, of course.”

“Good. That’s good.” She hesitated only a moment longer. “Tell me, Brigit, when you hand down judgments in my name—for what do you condemn men to die?”

“Rape,” Brigit said at once. “Treason. Murder. Fire-setting. Poaching. Assault of a Chantry mother.”

“Are these the laws of the land, or my laws?”

“Both, Commander. It is difficult to defy tradition and keep the support of the Bannorn, but the Arlessa has some discretion.”

“Are there many such capital crimes?”

“Not many. But always some.”

“How many?”

“Four condemned men are in the dungeons now.”

“Only four?”

“Most who break your laws or the king’s are punished swiftly within the city of Amaranthine, or by a local sheriff. Only those cases of unusual difficulty are ever brought before the Arlessa. Usually when the perpetrator is a person of note, who cannot be punished without producing political difficulties. I try to resolve such things quickly, in your name, but they often take some time. Justice, if it ever comes, comes slow.”

Loriel noted the shadow that flicked across her face.

“And these men’s crimes?”

Brigit told her. Loriel listened, and when she finished, stood and said: “Take me to the dungeons, please.”

tck

Brigit led her down the long and winding way to the dungeons. She went to take a torch from a sconce, but Loriel waved her away and cast a wisplight. Gamely, Brigit did not fluster.

There were guards at the door, junior Wardens serving a boring patrol, and they snapped to attention when they saw Brigit arrive. Their eyes widened with astonishment at the sight of Loriel. No wonder—these recruits looked fresh enough that they likely had never seen her before. Only heard the stories.

She bid them to leave. They hesitated, uncertain, weakly protesting that the prisoners could be dangerous, until Brigit repeated the order, and they scurried. That annoyed her—but she supposed this was a situation of her own making.

She remembered coming here on her very first full day as the Warden-Commander, called on to deal with a petty burglar. Funny how it had all turned out. She didn’t know where Nathaniel was now. She didn’t even remember him leaving.

Most of the cells were still empty. Brigit ran a tight ship. But many were full.

“This is more than four.”

“Yes, ser. Most are not condemned to die. Many are kept here until their family can pay the geld.”

“And if they cannot pay it?”

“They will be punished, and released.”

Loriel looked at the imprisoned men. They did not look dangerous. They looked tired and afraid and miserable. Her people, and she their warden.

“Which of these is the murderer?”

“The third cell on the right, ser.”

The murderer’s name was Geron, and he had murdered his own daughter. The girl had been seven years old, and Geron had smashed her head in with a cast iron pot. His wife had fled their house in terror, and when no one in the village would help her, had journeyed all the way to Vigil’s Keep to receive the Arlessa’s justice. The Arlessa’s men had found Henrick hiding in the attic of the inn, and dragged him to the dungeons to await judgement. Brigit had rendered it—death by hanging, for the crime of murder.

It had been an unusual decision, considering the extenuating circumstances. Geron had only done it because the little girl had been a mage. He’d caught her making mud-creatures with her mind, realized what she was, and killed her on the spot.

Loriel gazed blankly at him for a long time before speaking. “Why did you do it?”

The murderer raised his head. His eyes were streaming. “Please, ser.”

“Why did you do it?” she repeated.

He could hardly speak. He mouthed something that did not seem like an answer to her question.

“Tell me, please,” Loriel said quietly. “Were you afraid of her? Did you think it better for her to die? Did you hate her?”

This is what my people think of me, she thought. An insect. They would crush me in their disgust, were I small enough. But then, had he not killed his girl, she would have been taken to the Circle. Perhaps he had done her a favor.

She pressed her finger-ring into her palm. “Tell me.”

“I panicked,” the man babbled. She'd hardly had to compel him at all. “I didn’t mean to. Maker, forgive me, I’d do anything to take it back, forgive me!”

No, thought Loriel, I do not think I will.

“Then I offer you a choice.” She spoke quietly, but every ear in the room still strained to hear her. “You may take your death by hanging, or you may take the Joining. A life of service awaits you if you survive. The choice is yours.”

“Yes,” the man said hoarsely. “Yes, I will take the Joining. Thank you, Maker, thank you.”

She stepped back from the child-murderer’s cell.

“And the rest of you?” she inquired. “The same choice lies before you. Death, or the Joining?”

One by one, each condemned man volunteered.

Loriel turned to Brigit, who had gone pale and ghostly in the dim light of the dungeon. “Make the arrangements, Seneschal.”

tck

Brigit remained pale and silent as they left the dungeons. Loriel noted it, but waited to return to the safety of her office to press. “Is something the matter, Seneschal?”

“Nothing, ser,” Brigit said quickly.

Loriel waited expectantly, and thought Brigit would keep whatever it was to herself, when:

“It is only that…” She struggled, then burst out: “Are you certain this is wise, Commander? Vigil’s Keep does not lack for recruits. Why offer this honor to these men who have broken the laws of your land?”

“Everyone deserves a second chance. The Grey Wardens have always recognized that.”

“I—yes, of course, but,” it took her visible effort to continue, “but it is not about what one deserves . If a man is to be made a Grey Warden, I would have to find somewhere to place him. If he might pose a threat to his fellow Wardens, if we could not trust him—”

“Do you have such concerns about any man in particular?”

Brigit set her jaw and nodded. “Yes. Calder. There are details of his crimes that you may not fully appreciate. He is a relative of Bann Helven, and the situation with the Bann is complicated. Condemning his cousin for a crime that in other Arlings is not punishable by death at all was difficult. The Bann does not feel Calder’s crimes warrant death, and I may have to bend to his wishes.” The venom in her voice was enough to take Loriel aback. “To have him as a Grey Warden will only complicate things further.”

“To be a Grey Warden is an honor," Loriel said mildly. "Surely the Bann can see that.”

Brigit pressed her lips together. “It is not only that. Calder, he’s...He would have to be kept away from women and children. The girls he—they were young. He...a man such as that would be a liability for the Wardens, not an asset.”

Oh. Calder was the rapist. Loriel took in Brigit’s tight lips, her white face, and put it all together.

Suddenly she felt she understood Veritas. She let her voice soften. “Then of course I will take that into account.”

“Commander, I…”

Loriel extended a comforting hand, placed it lightly on her forearm. Brigit’s breath stopped in her lungs.

“Seneschal,” Loriel said, in her best pass at soft and gentle. “I understand completely. We are both women, after all.”

The effect on her was immediate. Loriel didn’t even need to say the lie, or even imply it. Brigit did it all herself. The Seneschal, usually a cipher of utter professionalism, cracked into pieces of gratitude and pity and devotion. And there it was. She had her.

“There is no need for you to attend this Joining. I will handle it.”

She tried to hide it, but her shoulders still sagged in relief, just as they tightened again with guilt. “Are you absolutely certain, Commander?”

“Of course. Make whatever preparations are necessary. I will take care of things from there.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Do you believe me, when I say that all I do, I do to fight the Blight?” she said softly.

“I believe you.” She said it at once, with such fervor. Loriel had no doubt she meant it.

“Do you trust me, Seneschal?”

“Yes,” Brigit all-but-whispered.

“Then let us speak no more of this.”

tck

Brigit wasted no time. She had everything arranged by the following evening. She apologized profusely that it could not be earlier, offered again and again to be present, obviously relieved each time Loriel declined.

For her part, Loriel made token attempts to make progress on the work while she waited, but by the second day, gave up. She sat in her Underkeep and thought incessantly of the child-murderer. It did not seem real, what she intended to do. Let alone how much she wanted to do it.

The hour approached at once intolerably slowly, and terrifyingly fast.

Guards brought the prisoners to the deserted chamber, released them from their chains, and departed. Loriel had already ensured they would not remember this, or come back in here. The prisoners were still and silent, awaiting their fates.

Loriel had not been present at a Joining in years. She only remembered the words because she had looked them up in advance. Not that they were important. Not that anyone in this room would leave it alve.

“Join us, brothers, in the shadows where we stand vigilant,” she said. She sounded ridiculous. “Join us as we carry the duty that can not be forsworn.” How did anybody take this seriously? “And should you perish, know that your sacrifice will not be forgotten.” It would not be remembered in the first place. She’d made sure of that. “And that one day, we shall join you.”

The last word echoed away, and then she offered the cup: “Who shall take the Joining first?”

At least she was giving them a choice. Not much of a choice—one death or the other—but it more than the choice Loriel had been given. More than the choice almost every Warden in existence had been given. In her own Joining, Duncan hadn’t even let them volunteer. At least they had done something to deserve it, besides being born.

One of the men shrugged and stepped forward. Loriel knew neither his crime nor his name. He stared at the vile mixture for long moments before finally taking a sip.

A sip was all it took. He spasmed, gasped, and choked. He died over the course of a few seconds, but they were long seconds.The three remaining prisoners stood stiff and staring at the body. They had known this might happen, but now it was real.

It was altogether not surprising. Even honest, devoted, strong-willed people could die in the Joining. She had no reason to expect that men who had only agreed to the Joining out of desperation to do much better.

“His sacrifice will not be forgotten,” Loriel said flatly.

“Th-that’s a horrible way to die. Maker, I…” Another of the condemned men was shaking his head. “I—I think I’d rather hang.”

She shook her head minutely. “That is no longer possible.”

“Please,” his voice was a whisper— “Please don’t make me drink that. Please, I can’t, please just let me go back to my cell, I won’t cause no trouble, please, Arlessa...I’d rather a good clean death.”

The hangman wouldn’t offer him that. “I grant it,” she said, and crushed a blood vessel in the base of his brain. He was dead before he hit the ground. Instant. Painless. Better than a stopped heart or crushed lungs. She had gotten better at this, since the first time she'd tried it.

“His sacrifice will not be forgotten,” she intoned.

Two remained. Calder, the rapist with the noble relative, looked at the cooling corpse in horror, but the child-murderer’s eyes were closed as though in prayer. Loriel thought of drawing his blood screaming out of him, confirming his every worst fear about her kind. She thought of the lies she would tell him—that she could feel his little daughter’s spirit in the Fade, that she was here with her, that she wanted her to do this thing to him. How she would make him suffer, how she would make him weep. How she would use every trick she had ever learned to keep him alive, how he would spend eternities paying for what before she even began to consider granting him rest.

Yes, she wanted it. She would do it. She could not wait to do it.

“Step forward.”

Geron opened his eyes with resolve, stepped forward, and knelt. She watched his face. It was open and honest, terrified but resolved. He regretted what he had done. He wanted to atone.

Well, he would.

“Get up,” she barked. “Drink!”

Geron took the Joining cup and drank.

He collapsed immediately. The Joining cup would have fallen and spilled its noxious contents if not for Loriel’s instinctual telekinetic spell. Geron had looked pathetic in the dungeon, pathetic begging her forgiveness, and now he looked both pathetic and small, collapsed on the flagstones. Her heart thundered. What fortune that this man was there in the dungeons. She might never have otherwise had the courage.

And then she realized that the faint pulse of life was gone. The Taint had taken her prize. He was dead.

The soap-bubble beauty of her little fantasy popped.

“His sacrifice...will not be forgotten,” she said, unsure for whose benefit.

Bitter disappointment settled in her chest, tinged with the faintest strains of shamed relief.

“Guess that leaves me, then,” said Calder. He had raped and badly beaten three young girls. Now he stood swinging his arms, looking around at all the corpses.

“Just how often is this Joining fatal?”

She was slow to reply. “Not as fatal as your one alternative."

Calder barked a laugh. “Point taken. Well, nothing for it.” Calder seized the cup and took an unseemly swig, nearly spilling it down his front. He gagged and coughed, flecks of Joining blood splattering the flagstones. She was not really paying attention to him anymore. She stared at Geron’s corpse. She had been so sure...so ready…

In the heartbeats that followed, Calder, too, gagged and bent, and collapsed insensible to the flagstones.

And Loriel was alone with herself once more.

tck

She hadn’t slept at all when she next saw Brigit.

“Commander,” the Seneschal murmured as she set her morning tea in front of her.

“Seneschal,” Loriel replied, wrapping her hands around the cup, absorbing none of its warmth.

Brigit gave her report, halfheartedly. Loriel listened with even less heart than that. Finally they had performed enough normalcy that they dared speak of the matter at hand.

“Are there new Wardens for me to assign?”

“Oh,” Loriel said, as though she hadn’t even been thinking of it. “No. No, there aren’t.”

Brigit’s eyes widened slightly. “Oh. All four?”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Brigit exhaled with relief. “It is justice, then.”

“No,” Loriel said flatly. “It isn’t.” Justice would be for that girl to have lived. Justice would be for a world where her death at the hands of her father would be an unthinkable absurdity. Justice would be a world where death had not been a kinder fate than the Circle. Justice had fled this place, leaving a massacre in his wake. Justice could not dwell in this world and remain Justice.

“No...it isn’t,” Brigit reluctantly agreed. “But the nearest thing that can be hoped for.”

“Brigit—may I ask you a question?”

“Of course, ser. I am ever at your service.”

An idle thought: As you should be. “Do you suppose I did the right thing, in allowing these men to be Joined?”

A voice, a ghost, a memory: Of course you did the right thing.

“I would not presume to say, Commander. I trust you know what is best.”

“I am asking what you think is best, Brigit.”

Brigit gazed at her feet. “It is immaterial what I think.”

“No, Brigit. It isn’t. Look at me. I value your opinion. I would have you speak your mind.”

The Seneschal lifted her head. “I think...that is quite unusual, for every recruit to die in a Joining.”

Loriel held her gaze steady. “These men volunteered only to escape their imminent deaths. I would not expect many to survive.”

“Yes...but many come to the Wardens seeking to escape their fates,” Brigit said, slowly. “Four is not so many as to be impossible. Perhaps not even notable, to those unfamiliar with the process. But it is...unusual.”

“Hm. Yes. Perhaps so.” Loriel made out as though she were examining her nails. “But this way at least Bann Helven can be comforted that his cousin died in faithful service. To die in the Joining is an honor. Far more so, I think, than to be executed on such charges as he had.”

“That...is certainly so.”

“Tell me again, Brigit. Do you think it was good, or bad, for me to allow those men to be Joined? Answer truly.”

An echo: You always do the right thing.

Brigit held very still. Finally she bowed her head. Perhaps it was only the angle of her head, but she seemed to be smiling. “I confess I think it good.”

Loriel shaped a smile in return. “That is wonderful to hear, Brigit. I do so value your support.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

“You should dress more finely. You speak with the voice and all the authority of the Arlessa of Amaranthine and the Commander of the Grey. Have you no fine brocades in silver or blue?”

How fortunate, that Brigit was pale enough that even the faintest of flushes showed easily on her skin.

“I could obtain some.”

“Good. Do so. You should dress as befits your position. Now, if we have nothing further to discuss...”

Brigit left her office flushed and preening. If Loriel had any doubts about her they were gone now. She was heartened to know that she did not yet need to accomplish everything with blood magic.

She finished the tea in silence.

tck

Loriel long dwelled on Geron’s death, down in her Underkeep.

She had no love of self-deception. She had long prided herself on this. She saw this ugly world, her ugly self, just as they were, and did not flinch. The old commander was the one who flinched. Not her.

And yet she had somehow been so wrong about her own nature.

Some things that Loriel knew about herself—that she liked power. That she liked to be in control. That she was ready to risk other people’s minds and souls, if she could keep her power and stay in control. It didn’t take a demon of knowledge to figure out why. She could imagine what Veritas would say, were it here:

Of course you love power, it would say as it pranced in its binding circle. Of course you would choose to keep power over all other things. You were a prisoner, Loriel Surana! A helpless little girl, bound by walls and violent men and love and fear and duty, and you are that prisoner still, prisoner of your own pretentions. You can no more escape yourself than you can cure the Taint. All prisoners everywhere take any scrap of control that they can get.

A woman who craved power above all else could not possibly be called good . She had tried so long and so hard to be good, and it had been impossible, and the strain of trying had nearly cracked her open. Well, fine. She did not need to be good. The Chantry was good, and the Chantry decreed it good to keep children imprisoned with rapists and torturers and murderers, decreed it good to break their souls. What did she care for being good?

But Veritas had been right, that she was lying to herself about what she wanted most. She wanted to find a cure, yes, that was so—but more than that, she wished so dearly to not be evil. If she could not be good, at least let her not be evil. Let her not sink to the furthest depths. Let her say that some things even she would not do, places even she would not tread.

Yet when the opportunity presented itself to subject a repentant man to torment in plain revenge for a crime that could not be undone, whose victim could not be recompensed—she had wanted it so badly.

Before she had gone to the dungeons she was not sure if she would have really done it. But she would have. And she would have enjoyed it. She had thought that, once the heat of the moment had passed, that she would grow horrified at herself, vow never to consider such a course again—

And that had not happened.

Was that not evil? To wish to inflict harm, just for the sake of it? For the sake of one’s own pleasure? There was no truer face of evil that Loriel could think of.

After that...it would be pure insanity, to slow progress on her work, just to keep thinking herself pure, when she so clearly was not so, and never had been. She had come into this world destined already cursed, already tainted. The Joining that had put darkspawn taint in her veins was little more than a formality. She had thought that she’d understood this.

Veritas had been right about her priorities, but they were changing now. If she could not be good, if her nature was purely evil, then—at least she might do good.

That meant she could not let herself get in her own way.

tck

Calder woke. It surprised him. He’d had such dreadful dreams, but now he was awake—sweet Maker, he was awake. He was alive, he had survived! A Grey Warden, he thought in a heady rush, I’m a Grey Warden now. The relief that bloomed in him was palpable, almost overwhelming. He lay upon what felt like a stone slab in partial darkness, and blessed Andraste, he’d survived.

He had really thought he was going to die, and die horribly. Sure enough he had felt ready to when the vile Joining mixture had burned the back of his throat. He'd never tasted anything half so vile..

And he had had such dreams…

But it was over now. Alive, alive!

He heard someone approach. “Congratulations,” said a voice. He recognized it. The Arlessa—and his Commander, now. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to hear anybody in his entire life. “You are a Grey Warden, now.”

He moved to sit up, to thank her, and found that he couldn’t.

Only then did Calder notice the fact that he was paralyzed. There were no chains on his wrists or ankles,-but the force that bound him to where he lay was far heavie than chains. He could move, and he could blink, even move his head a little to track the Arlessa as she moved around the room, but that was all.

“I’m sorry,” said the Arlessa, and she sounded like she meant it. “If it makes you feel any better, leaving you alive was never an option.” She turned to a workbench. He heard the clinking of glass, the smell of intermixing reagents. “A Grey Warden is bound to a life of service. So you are here, helping me with some important work.”

Calder tried to speak, to scream, but though he could move his tongue to swallow, no sound came from his throat save for a strangled voiceless gargle.

“I’ve stilled your voice, but I can unstill it. We can speak like civilized people, before I begin," said the Arlessa. "If I let you speak, will you do your best not to scream? Blink twice for yes.”

He blinked twice, and all of a sudden had a voice again.

“What’s happening? What are you going to do to me?” The words tumbled out in a stilted rush.

“As I said,” said the Arlessa. “You are helping me with some important work. As a subject. The details, I am afraid, likely would go over your head, though I can discuss them with you for a short time if you truly desire.”

“Please,” he begged, “my father, he can help you. He’s an established man. Surely we can work something out—”

“Your father,” she interrupted, “believes you to have died honorably in service to your countrymen. A funeral is planned for next week. They will burn what looks quite convincingly like your body. Your family will mourn, but they will have closure. Privately some of them will feel a little relieved. I hope that makes you feel a little better.”

Calder threw his head back against the stone on which he lay. Was it his imagination, or could he move more freely than before? “I know I did some bad things. The Maker will judge me, I know I deserve to suffer—”

The Arlessa gave a slight tilt of the head. “Deserve? No, I don’t think anybody deserves to suffer. This has nothing to do with what you deserve. Only what you can offer. If it matter to you, your life will probably make more of a difference to the people of Thedas than any other Grey Warden alive.”

Only then did it dawn on him. Sweet Maker, the rumors had been true, all of them. She was going to-- “You’re going to use me as a sacrifice in your demented rituals, aren’t you?” he said hysterically. “Andraste protect me, you’re going to...to…” His imagination failed him.

The Arlessa looked deeply offended. “I am not going to do any such thing. I need no more than my own blood and sweat and pain to work these spells. You are a subject, not a sacrifice.”

“You maniacal fucking bitch,” he gasped, “I’ll fucking kill you, you evil—”

Just like that he had no voice anymore. The Arlessa looked vaguely annoyed, at best.

“I strongly prefer you do not use language like that in front of me."

Tears leaked silently from the corners of his eyes.

“Perhaps it is foolish to talk to you,” she sighed. “Or rather, I know it is foolish. I admit that perhaps I feel a little lonely at times. But it would be cruel to leave you like this.”

His tears flowed freely down his temples and into his hair.

“You won’t die anytime soon, I’m afraid,” she said, drawing a knife, and at first he feared she would kill him there and then. “I don’t want to have to do this to any more people than I absolutely have to. But you will die with honor, and you won’t suffer. Goodbye. Know that your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

When she spoke next, her voice was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, so lovely and sublime that not to do whatever she wanted was the height of madness. “You do not know pain. You do not know fear. You are a vessel, empty of everything that might cause you to suffer. You are aware of your body, enough to describe how it feels to me, but it no longer troubles you. If you need something to live, you will tell me at once. Otherwise you will stay here, neither living nor dead, and you will know nothing.”

Calder fell into the silence, and didn’t.

#dragon age #dragon age: origins #the warden #surana #amell #femslash #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 24/38 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Loriel had not expected to miss Avernus quite so much.

Months went by without word from him. First few enough for her not to notice, and then too many for her to ignore. A dozen times over the past months she had thought to write him, and then decided that no, she didn’t need to after all, but she couldn’t pretend that forever.

It was her own petty, childish pride, then and now. She had fought him just to prove that she’d win, and writing him now would be admitting that she needed his counsel. Which she did

She still wasn’t going to do it.

More than the man himself she missed his knowledge and experience. And if not that, then at least someone to report her findings to. Someone who would care if she didn’t get anything done, and who would care about what she had to say about it. And yes, perhaps that amounted to missing the man himself, too.

The worst of it was that her work had stalled without him. Her rigor and meticulous care wasn’t enough anymore, and she was no closer to cracking open the crystal and finding the Architect than she’d been any time before. She began to lose whole days to restless pacing, to picking up books and putting them down again, to feeling her eyes move across pages and absorbing absolutely nothing. She had not thought that the loss of a sporadic correspondence partner would undo her so badly.

The work had to continue.

Had she been a spirit mage, she would have had options—spirits of knowledge weren’t that uncommon. The Chantry did not teach its prisoners to speak to them, but a powerful spirit mage could have managed it. The Dalish did so, and so did the Alemarri. Spirit lore was something that might have been available to her, when she was eighteen or twenty and still fresh.

But she had bathed too long in her own blood, and her connection to the Fade had rotted. So it would have to be a demon, and she would have to bind it.

For all her transgressions, Loriel did not make binding demons a habit. Less out of any unwillingness to transgress—what sacred rule had she not already broken?—than a sense of calculated risk. Any imperfection in the binding, and the demon was out, ready to turn its wroth on the first target it could get its hands on—generally, the mage who had bound it.

It was a bad idea, she knew that going in. She would do it anyway.

That did not mean she would be stupid. She did her due diligence. She read up, poring over every scrap of demon lore in her library. Abelard’s Index of Foulest Daymons was particularly helpful. She had borrowed the tome from Avernus and only vaguely intended to return it, and now it seemed like she wouldn’t have to. It was a murderously heavy text, listing every type and subtype and sub-sub-and-so-on-type of demon known to exist, their names and habits, their foibles and tricks, how best to bind one, and what one might ply it with. Better yet, Abelard had lived in Tevinter during the Steel age, and his text was unsullied with Chantry prejudices.

She practiced first. When finally it came time to summon something, she spent hours carefully inscribing the binding circle—with far more care than what she intended to summon really warranted. She started with wisps and wraiths, half-formed blobs of Fade-stuff still waiting to become, lashing them to her will and releasing them again. When she could do this as easy as breathing, she moved on to demons of hunger. Hunger was something she no longer felt, and could not be tempted by, though hunger demons were more likely to try and eat her than to tempt her.

Next she tried Rage and Desire, creatures of things she had felt once, but hadn’t for months and years. If Rage might still bring heat to her blood, if only in the form of intense irritation, Desire offered nothing she’d ever take. Loriel had no fear of Desire. She’d already had the thing she most greatly desired, had it, and thrown it away—on purpose. Nothing else in this world existed that Loriel could be said to desire.

Sloth she avoided. Sloth—Torpor—was the only one demon who had ever gotten the better of her, who she hadn’t defeated herself. It was too great a risk, that she’d lie down and sleep until the end of the world, given half a demon-shaped excuse.

These lesser demons, though, would be of no use to her. What she needed was knowledge, and what that meant something like Pride.

Abelard’s Index was not very reliable for lesser demons who had since returned to the Fade-sea and reformed. It listed appearances they no longer wore, personalities they had long shed, even if their basic natures would reform. But for powerful demons who had amassed centuries of memory—just the one she would need—Abelard was perfect. She read and reread the relevant heading, squinting at the antiquated Tevene. Vainglory, Audacity, Superbia, Narcissus—no, not quite, no, and no. Demons that dealt with forbidden things—Censorus, Proscripta, Obscurus, Taboo—no, not that one, not this one neither. Then she saw the subheading—Daymons of Knoweledge.

Demons of knowledge came in all manner of forms—she paused for a time on Secerne, who collected secrets. It dealt only with knowledge that no-one else knew. Tempting—but such a creature would hardly be likely to give its secrets up and render them useless to itself. A blood mage could bind a demon and constraint it, but to compel it was pointless—you’d probably just end up destroying it, and if you were after knowledge, what good was that? No, once bound, the demon would have to be dealt with the old fashioned way.

Revelatus traded desired knowledge for undesired knowledge. It would tell you anything you wanted to know, and then something you didn’t want to know—the worst thing your lover had ever thought of you, how happy you might have been if you had just chosen differently, what was really in your sausage. Countless men had been driven mad by this one, Abelard warned. Loriel decided not to test her luck.

Finally she settled on a demon called Veritas, who spoke only truths. It was an ancient creature of malice and cunning, but it would tell her the truth, and for that Loriel would give anything.

tck

There came a point where even she could not justify dithering any longer. Weeks had passed since she had decided she would bind a demon. On the chosen day, she made all her preparations, triple-checked her summoning circle, cast spell after protective spell. Finally she could find no more excuses to delay—she spilled her blood and spoke the words.

The air itself seemed to part, and a greenish miasma spilled forth from the crack. A shape was being pulled through, too big for such a modest aperture, yet somehow, terribly, emerging. Reality bulged and bent, and finally, a demon climbed out.

It was smaller than other Pride demons, shaped something like a bear and something like a lion, though in place of claws or talons, it had clever human fingers. Its face was covered with a golden mask, shaped into the form of a human face. Its hide was pitch black, and every inch of it covered with blinking, roving eyes. It raised its head, as though to sniff the air, and bent to examine its new situation, noting the summoning circle, the runes of binding and restraint.

“Hello,” said Loriel. “Might you confirm your name?”

The thousand eyes blinked all at once. “I am Veritas, he who knows ten thousand truths.” Its voice came through as though from far away, echoing around the chamber.

“Ten thousand only?”

“No, far more! Many, many more! I know more truths than there are stars in your sky, more truths than there are grains of sand in your deserts, more truths than the number of breaths you will take—”

“That is more than ten thousand.”

“That I know ten thousand truths was not a lie.”

“Oh, I see. You’re one of those demons of knowledge.”

She had succeeded in offending it. “What do you mean by that?”

“You speak only in riddles and technical truths. You say things that are true by letter only, and lies by implication. Disappointing,” said Loriel, pouring unimpressed into her voice.

It scowled around the room—or seemed to. She could not see its face behind the golden mask. “Why can I not see you, little mageling? Where are you?”

Invisibly, Loriel produced a faint crescent of a smile. “I am here in this room with you, Veritas.” Her voice echoed through the chamber as she spoke, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The demon’s ears twitched, and only then did Loriel realize that even telling it that she was there in the room with it was more than she meant to say.

“So you are, mageling, so you are. Why have you summoned me?”

“Why do mages ever summon you? I seek knowledge you might have.”

“Why should I tell you anything I know, when you have dragged me so rudely from my home?”

“I will make it worth your while, Veritas. I offer knowledge in exchange for knowledge.”

Veritas laughed. It was a horrible sound, like broken glass. Loriel didn’t dare speak. “Little mageling, you know nothing I do not. I have sought out truths for centuries, bent only upon knowing, and you, little girl, whose lifetime is as a mayfly’s breath to a being like myself—you presume to offer me knowledge? You presume to know something I do not?”

Loriel let the echo of the last word fade, then said calmly, “What is my name?”

No answer.

“So you do not know it,” Loriel said. “And I am forced to conclude, Veritas, that I do know some things that you do not.”

The demon paced inside its narrow circle on all fours. “Aren’t you a darling little pedant! Very well, I’ll take your deal, but I will take it on my terms. You may ask me one question, but first, you must tell me something I do not know. Do not lie! If you answer falsely, I shall know, and I shall devour your heart.”

An empty threat. Veritas was bound. It was subject to her will. It couldn’t get out if it wanted to—or else what was the point of blood magic binding? She was perfectly safe. It was bluffing—

...No, it wasn’t. Of course not. The demon of truth could not bluff. If Veritas bluffed it would no longer be Veritas. I shall devour your heart. Not a promise or a threat, but a statement of fact.

“Very well,” Loriel said steadily. “I shall speak truly.”

“What,” grinned the demon, “is the full, entire, and complete name by which you are called?”

She should have seen that coming. “My name is Loriel Surana.”

Loriel was common enough for elves. And Surana was not even her family name; it was just what all elves were called in the Circle. Elves had no family names.

“Loriel Surana,” said Veritas, tasting it, savoring it. “Loriel Surana, Loriel Surana...yes, I know of you.”

She was so startled that the question came out unbidden: “What do you mean?”

“Your name floats upon the Fade like a dying leaf upon the breeze! One who often walks free along its emerald waters has called and called it, lacquered it with misery and love, twisted it with hatred and longing. Your name forms an island of despair and desire; tempests that will not calm; storms that will not pass. Yes, what a name!”

“I see,” Loriel said neutrally. Whatever bloomed in her to hear that, she stoppered it at once. “I answered your question, demon, so here is mine—”

“Ah, ah, ah!” The demon waggled a finger not-quite-at her. “You already asked your question. You asked me what I meant. Now it is my turn again. Where in this room are you right now?”

“I am standing in the northeastern corner of this chamber,” Loriel answered, and slowly, on magically silenced feet, moved to the southeastern corner instead.

“No fair,” the demon complained. “I did not know which way was northeast.”

“Oh? Then my mistake. But I answered your question, so here is mine. Where is the ancient darkspawn being known to many as the Architect?”

“The Architect is underground,” the demon said sulkily.

Loriel felt a vein throb in her forehead. “I could have told you that.”

“Then you should have asked a better question,” sniffed the demon. “Now it is my turn—”

“No,” Loriel interrupted. “No, it isn’t. I didn’t say I would answer any question you asked. I agreed that I would tell you something you did not know. You have just told me you do not know which way is northeast, so I will tell you—it is the direction of the corner where the empty pouch of lyrium powder lies. Here is my second question: what is the cure for the Blight?”

“Why—blood, of course.” The demon smiled with hidden teeth. “It is always in the blood. That was a dirty trick you played, Loriel Surana, but no dirtier than mine, so I will forgive you, this time. Here is the next thing that I do not know and that I would have you tell me.” The demon smiled wider, showing teeth. “What do you love most in all the world?”

“Well?” said the demon, when she had been silent too long. “Will you answer, Loriel Surana? Or will you let me go?”

“I will answer.” And she answered, truly: “Nothing. What I love most in all the world is nothing.”

“How interesting. Yes, very interesting...you are a pleasing little mageling. I think I like you after all. Well, Loriel Surana? It is your turn. Speak!”

“I’m thinking,” said Loriel, and finally settled on: “What concrete set of actions should I take next—immediately after ending this conversation—that, of all possible actions, would take me the further along my goal of discovering the cure for the Calling?”

Veritas grinned wider still, its face little more than teeth. “Take a man infected with the Blight, and find a way to take it out of him. A man, and not a rat. But why waste your time with me asking me that which you already know?”

Loriel exhaled through her nose. “Thank you, Veritas. You may go now.”

The demon’s grin was all that remained of it as it disappeared back into the Fade, making no attempt at all to remain within the waking world. Loriel was alone, the floor littered with truths both new and old.

“Shit,” she muttered finally.

tck

It had been a mistake to summon the demon. She was no good at dealing with creatures of the Fade. When Loriel had been small and scared and helpless she’d had a silver tongue, been so adept and turning minds to her advantage using nothing but her words. Not it seemed she had forgotten entirely how to deal with a mind she could not break and twist and bend.

All she had succeeded in doing was in giving an ancient, powerful demon tools to hurt her with, and what had she learned? Nothing she didn’t already know. Stupid. Careless. Idiot.

“Warden Pollard has begun to hear the Call.”

Loriel had been half-listening to Brigit’s report; now she startled to full attention, rattling her morning tea in its cup. “What?” Brigit repeated herself. “Warden Pollard...who is he?”

Warden Pollard was Orlesian. He had transferred from under Warden-Commander Clarel some years ago. He had served well, saved three of his comrades in a raid, and fought with a pike. He had been a Warden for only thirteen years. This was early, but not unheard-of.

“Where is he?”

“The chapel. He prays for his soul. He intends to visit his mother in Velun before heading to the Deep Roads.”

“I would like to speak with him in private.” She said it so quickly as to be unseemly. But Brigit only nodded and moved to acquiesce.

When her office door opened and Brigit admitted him, Loriel couldn’t help but think he didn’t look much like a dying man. Perhaps he was pale, perhaps a sheen of sweat stood out on his skin, but she didn’t know him. For all she knew, he always looked like that.

Only when traces of discomfort began to appear on his face did Loriel realize she had been staring at him silently for far too long.

“Commander,” he said awkwardly, still with the traces of an Orlesian accent. He’d never met her before. Was he one of the ones not quite aware that she still lived, and still ruled? “I’m honored.”

“Do not be,” she said flatly. “How is it?”

How are you feeling might have been more appropriate. But it would have rung false.

“Not so bad, yet. I knew it was coming. I accept it.” He paused. “Is there some manner of ceremony?”

Loriel had no idea. There probably was. She had never cared to find out, never cared to make sure that her wardens had a good sendoff. “If you wish it. But that is not why I wanted to speak with you. Can you get more specific?”

A flash of confusion.

“About how it is.”

Pollard looked even less comfortable. “I’ve had nightmares, ser.”

“Different from the usual?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“With respect, ser, I’d rather not.”

Her mouth set. “Please,” she said, and there was the power of blood in her voice, and not a trace of a request. “Tell me more.”

Pollard’s eyes went foggy and distant. When he spoke, he sounded oddly flat. “The nightmares were only the beginning. Now when I sleep, I hear the most beautiful voice. Like my mother calling me home. And when I awake, I want nothing more than to hear that voice again. I can hear it now, just barely. And a strange music in my ears.”

“What kind of music?”

“Bells. Like chantry bells, calling me to prayer. Ugly and beautiful at once.”

“Is it anything like lyrium song?”

His brow knit. “Yes. Not unlike lyrium song. But different. Richer and darker. I can almost pick out voices in it, but never what they say.”

She took out a notebook, her shorthand flying across the page. “What do you see? In the dreams?”

“Darkspawn. All gathered together in the biggest chamber I have ever seen. It’s dark, but I can see perfectly. They’re darkspawn, but they do not seem ugly. At the center sits a beautiful figure, bathed in gold, smiling. They welcome me home. I’m glad to be there.”

“When did this start?”

“Three weeks ago I first heard the voice in my dreams.

“Any physical effects?”

“My skin is hot. The sun hurts my eyes, even on cloudy days. I feel stronger now than I have ever been, even stronger than I was as a young man.”

“Anything else?”

“I hope not to be alive by the time there is anything else.”

Loriel finished transcribing. “One last thing. Come here. Roll up your sleeve; give me your arm.”

Pollard obeyed. He did not protest, did not react at all, when she took some of his blood. It glinted darkly in the glass vials she had fetched for this purpose, easily a few shades too dark. She stared at it for a few seconds. There was the Blight itself.

She took a few vials. Enough so he wouldn’t notice, later, and closed the wound she’d made with a clumsy burst of creation magic. The vials went into a wooden box inscribed with a rune of entropic suspension—blood spoiled so soon after it left the body.

Frustration overwhelmed her, that all she had was a few vials of blood and a brief coercive interview. Imagine all she might have learned if she could watch as he succumbed to the Taint, hear in his own words what was happening to him. He was going to die anyway—this way he might help save the lives of countless other Wardens, who could object to that? She could just—

No. Velanna had been wrong. She cared about the Wardens, of course she did, why else do all this? She would not subject an innocent man to such a fate. She was better than Avernus.

Pollard blinked as she released his mind, but if he was aware of the lost time he did not show it. She thanked him for his service and assured him that his family would be taken care of. He thanked her in turn, and departed as quickly as was seemly. She watched him go with only the smallest burst of dark regret.

#dragon age #femslash #amell #surana #dragon age: origins #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 26/38 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Pride Demon(s) (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, Mind Control, Human Experimentation, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Calder was dead.

She hadn't meant to kill him, but it was still her fault. She'd taken away his ability to feel pain or fear. She'd thought it kind.

Loriel put the body in stasis, so it would not rot, and sat down by it. The floor was sticky. Blood new and old stained her robes. She'd hoped to have years. He'd lasted hardly a month.

Idly she wondered whether he would still be her thrall, if she raised him. Probably not. Blood magic affected the mind through the body; it couldn't touch the spirit. But it didn't matter. She didn't need his spirit.

(Probably. Maybe.)

She needed to talk to her collaborator. By now the summoning spell came easily.

Veritas stretched catlike through the rip in the Fade. "Hello, little mageling. Have you updates for me? Did you try the experiment I suggested?"

"Yes," she said flatly. "It killed him."

Veritas tilted its head, curiously. "Oh? What did it?"

"I haven't yet ascertained the exact cause.” Her fingers curled into fists and released over and over again. “I didn't think...I didn't realize it would kill him."

Calder hadn't either. He hadn't felt the pain. Her own fault, for failing to appreciate the necessity of pain. How many times would she have to learn the same lesson? She should have known better.

"Shall we discuss the likeliest possibilities?" Veritas offered.

"Oh, you mean you don't know?" Loriel said sarcastically. "You are an utterly useless demon of knowledge."

"As you've so cleverly noted in the past, my dear Loriel Surana, I do not know everything," sniffed Veritas. "If I did, I would have even less use for you than I do now. I have never taken a mortal body and know comparatively little of such things."

It was true that Veritas had shown remarkably little interest in escaping its bindings or trying to possess her. Perhaps that was part of the reason she kept summoning it. The one time she had asked why it showed so little interest in the mortal world, Veritas had said, I prefer to watch.

"Be that as it may," she seethed, "You've killed my only subject. They are not easy to come by."

"Lie. You killed him. As for coming by subjects-they could be easier to come by if you stopped be so precious about where they come from."

"I’m past that. I don't care where they come from," Loriel said. "I care about keeping the loyalty of my Seneschal. If I were some apostate crouched in a filthy cave, I could do as you say, but I am the Arlessa of Amaranthine and Commander of the Grey."

"Hm. You are that. I wonder why?"

"I have to be. For any of this to matter."

"Lie," Veritas noted.

"Enough. We have work to do,” she snapped. “This situation must be salvaged. I have the body in stasis, but my magic and the taint interact strangely, and it likely will not last."

They talked a while more about what further use Calder’s body might be, before it was too far gone. The next few days went to those experiments. Not useless, but not what she needed.

She did end up raising his shade, out of guilt and grim curiosity. There wasn’t much left of it. Weeks under such crushing mental pressure had left his spirit confused, enraged, and in pain. It didn’t even look human anymore.

It tried to kill her. She dismissed it before it ever got close, but as it was ripped from this world she thought she saw hints of magma in its facsimile of skin.

For several heart-hammering minutes she believed that she had created a Rage demon.

Veritas confirmed that she might have, or at least, the beginnings of one. But more likely before the seed of psychic nucleation could form a demon, the shade would diminish to a wisp and eventually dissolve into the emerald waters.

Most likely.

tck

After that she seriously considered stopping. Would she have done that to Calder’s body if she had known what it would do to his soul? She had thought she had accepted the evil in herself, made her peace with it, but in the abyss of her heart there seemed always to be another unseen chasm, and each time she teetered on the edge she could not help but cling to it.

How could she possibly bear to do that again?

But...could she bear to have done that, and known it to have accomplished nothing? Could she bear to find another way, and know that she needn’t have?

Yes. Yes, she could bear it. Veritas would never let her pretend to be too weak for that. But though she could bear a world where she had done needless evil, that did not guarantee it was this world. It did not mean she was free.

She scrubbed her hands until they were red and stinging and almost clean, and went to go receive Brigit’s report.

No new deaths. No new Callings. No sign of the Architect.

“Oh, and Brigit,” Loriel said, almost on impulse, just as the Seneschal prepared to bow and go. “One further question. The sheriff of Amaranthine. What sort of man is he?”

Brigit had taken her Commander’s direction to dress more finely. She wore a high-necked woolen gown beneath a vest dashed through with silverite. Sapphires glittered at her ears. Her back was ramrod straight and she looked every inch a queen. But there remained the trace of hesitation when she answered: “I believe that he believes himself to be a righteous man.”

“And you do not agree with his self-assessment.”

“He is merciful. But he is not just.” Brigit’s lips pressed together. “I have had reports of certain crimes under his jurisdiction going unpunished, or punished far too lightly. Those committed against women, children, elves…I have thought about replacing him, but he is popular in Amaranthine. Mercy, however unearned, often is.”

“No need to replace him. No need to cause an upset.” The barest of pauses. “But perhaps we might consider having more prisoners sent to the Vigil for processing.”

Brigit listened carefully, and spoke slowly: “You wish to offer them the Joining?”

“Everyone deserves a second chance.” Smooth, perfectly reasonable. “Don’t you agree?”

The Seneschal took her meaning.

“But of course, I do not insist,” Loriel said quickly. "You know how much I value your opinion.”

Faint color came to the Seneschal’s cheeks. She could have said no. She could have taken the out. Loriel gave her every chance.

“I agree with you completely, ser,” the Seneschal said instead, and she knew what she was doing, she had to have known. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

Loriel did not thank her. Only nodded, and that was her cue to go.

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

If she was going to do this, she could not afford to let her pride keep getting in the way. She needed to talk to the expert. She needed to go see Avernus.

tck

She sent a short, impersonal note to Avernus that she would be arriving that week. She gave no further details. Even if she had been stupid enough to write down anything sensitive, every time she sat down to compose anything, after nearly a full year of silence, her mind went blank.

The ride to Soldier’s Peak was long and full of uneasy dread, but when she arrived, Avernus acted like nothing had happened. He shuffled around his tower, checking on bubbling reagents and pulsating petri dishes of living flesh, asking terse questions without waiting for answers. She couldn’t tell if he genuinely had not noticed the absence of her letters or if this was an act for her benefit—and if it was an act, if it was a kind one or scornful one.

Even if it were scorn, it wouldn’t matter. There could be no room for pride.

“I’ve begun to use human subjects,” she said bluntly.

She expected him to gloat, but he only snorted, “About time,” and carried on as though it was nothing, about some experiment with artificial flesh.

“Actually,” she interrupted, “that is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh? So this isn’t merely a social visit?” As though they’d ever had social visits. “Well, then, I will say this much—I am certainly glad of it. In truth I did not think you would change your mind so soon, but I am glad you have. Now we might move forward.”

His approval pleased her, and her pleasure in that approval disgusted her.

Avernus knew in detail answers to questions she hadn’t even thought to ask. How to keep a subject alive, with minimal suffering. How to prevent a subject’s spirit from becoming...that thing she had made. She burned with shame to think that she hadn’t asked him before. So much could have been avoided. Already her pride had wrought so much waste.

The only thing she did not mention was Veritas. She knew what he would say if he knew, and did not want to hear it. Avernus was still sour about his encounter with the demon possessing Sophia Dryden, and would curse her occasionally, anytime he found another thing wrong with the quality of the Fade.

“By the way,” he said, “that black crystal of yours. I looked through my library. I cannot confirm it, but it may be depleted lyrium. You can copy my notes if you wish.”

“Oh. Thank you. I will.” She’d never even heard of such a thing before. When she had shown the crystal to Veritas, the demon had hissed and flinched and demanded she take it away immediately. It had been so enraged, all thousand of its eyes bent upon the thing in hatred; it was one of the few times Loriel had felt frightened of it.

Somehow, despite it all, they settled into an old rhythm, of stark and easy mutual curiosity and intellectual challenge. The extended period of no contact meant that there was much to discuss; his lab space was no longer even recognizable, and Avernus could talk about his ongoing experiments for hours.

There was only one bench he hadn’t spoken of.

“That is old work,” he said. “I figured out the formula years ago. There are some perfections to be made, of course, but there are greater challenges.”

“But what does it do?”

He raised a nearly nonexistent eyebrow. “Do you not know? This is the same tincture you stole from me, when you first barged into my fortress.”

“My fortress,” Loriel corrected. “My deepest apologies for the intrusion. I hadn’t realized you were so enjoying being trapped in your tower and tormented by demons.”

“I far prefer to be trapped in my tower and tormented by my superior officer.” The man’s grin was truly skull-like. She was thankful he rarely showed it. “So, you mean to tell me you never made use of it?”

“No. I hardly even remember taking it,” she said. Lie, she heard Veritas breathe in her ear. “It was only a passing curiosity. Though I suppose might still have it somewhere.” As though she did not know exactly in which drawer she had stowed it.

“Hmph. Your passing curiosity cost me four months of work. I had to reconstitute it from scratch. Mind you, the new one was better...so I suppose I should thank you.” Avernus hmphed in amusement and returned to his workbench. “I could tell you hadn’t drunk it yourself, but I thought perhaps you had passed it onto one of your less talented compatriots. That woman of yours, perhaps. Where has that one gotten to, anyway? I have not seen her here of late.”

At first Loriel could only stare in disbelief. By some miracle, in all these years, Avernus had not once, not a single time, ever inquired about her.

Loriel laughed, a thin dry sound, and couldn’t stop.

She knew that there was some reason that she liked him. No wonder he hadn’t written over the past year. What was a year to him? He probably had no idea she’d even been angry. That she had spent any time at all worrying about what he thought of her suddenly struck her as the height of absurdity.

“And just what is so funny?” the old blood mage said dryly. Dryly, of course dryly. Anything so old would be so dry. Would she live long enough to dry out like him?

The thought of enduring so many years sobered her instantly. “Nothing. Nothing. My apologies.” She shook her head. “So, what does this tincture do?”

“Yes, yes, don’t be so impatient. It allows a Grey Warden direct access to the taint in his blood, and draw power from it.”

“From the taint? Like blood magic, but with darkspawn blood?”

“Ah, but only a mage might learn blood magic. With my brew, any Grey Warden, even a mundane could have gained this power. Limitedly, of course, limitedly...there is simply no substitute for a lifetime of training, but a strong-willed Grey Warden born without a hint of Fade about him might have eventually bested a mage of mediocre Circle training. A Grey Warden is so intimately connected to the taint in his blood, you know...Many of my subjects mentioned how profoudnly it changed them to truly gain mastery over that part of themselves.” Then he shrugged. “But the side effects could be quite unpleasant. Took me ages to work out a formula that wouldn’t kill the subject sooner or later. Worth it, perhaps, but perhaps not. Certainly interesting for a Warden mage...there is nothing quite like it. The precision of blood magic, without the cost.” The old mage shrugged. “Mind—the vial you have must have long expired. It is likely poison now. Here is your chance, if you still want it.”

She glanced askance at the bubbling still. “No thank you,” she said primly. “I am not in the habit of experimenting on myself.”

“That is precisely your problem,” Avernus snorted. “But suit yourself.”

Lie, lie, lie, rang Veritas’s sing-song in her head. Of course she had not forgotten the vial. Every once in a while, organizing her cupboards, she would come across it, black and still bubbling, alive, after all these years. She would pick it up, and hold it, and feel its unnatural warmth in her hand. She had done so just last month.

She ended up staying longer at Soldier’s Peak than strictly necessary. There was, as ever, much to do, but for the first time in a long time she was not eager to do it.

tck

“How much powdered deathroot for a draught of neutralization?”

“One of a thousandth of fifteen grams.”

Loriel measured it out, and did not speak again for many long minutes, when she asked: “What is the temperature at which silverite melts?”

“Six-thousand and seventeen degrees.”

She checked the expensive thermometer, ordered for a kingly sum direct from Orzammar, and raised the temperature in the furnace. It would be some time before it would be ready. She would take the opportunity to organize her notes from Avernus.

Veritas prowled. The summoning spell Loriel had been using lately allowed for it.

“Where was Angletierre?” she asked idly, coming across a name she did not recognize.

“It is an old name for Ferelden, in Old Orlesian.” Loriel hummed vaguely and kept reading, until Veritas lost its patience.

“Was there a purpose to you summoning me? Or do you intend to sit in silence ignoring me except when you desire answers to your petty questions?”

“The summoning spell takes nearly five minutes,” Loriel said indifferently, turning a page. “It doesn’t make sense to dismiss and recall you each time I have something to ask. You have free movement about this space; use it if you like.”

“You are incredibly rude, to invite a guest into your home and then ignore him all day long.” When she did not respond, it prodded her: “So, how has your pet blood mage been?”

“Same as ever. Naturally.” She set the stack of books and notes that she had brought upon the oaken desk. “I believe I am comfortable moving forward now, with the next set of experiments."

“And when can I expect to meet him? I think he and I would get along.”

“Never. Not happening.”

“Why, Loriel Surana. It almost sounds as though you are ashamed of me. Don’t you want to take me home to meet the rest of the family?”

“Shut up,” she said vaguely, without much venom. “Go and find him in the Fade, if you are so curious.”

“That’s the problem with you blood mages. You hardly touch the Fade.”

“Then you will have to live with disappointment.”

Veritas’s lion tail swished back and forth. “It’s mostly the mages with an unusual propensity for my kind that I can find most easily. Spirit mages, you call them.”

“Mhm.” Loriel stayed focused on organizing the notes.

“She’s doing just fine without you, you know.”

She was at first so puzzled by the non sequitur that she had no idea how to respond. “Pardon?”

The demon’s eyes blinked and shivered all over its body, as its words slowly registered.

“You should see her from my end,” said Veritas, relishing every word. “Lit up like a beacon. Impossible to miss. Shall I tell you where she is?”

The spell broke. “No, thank you.”

“She’s in Dairsmuid right now. Surrounded by family and friends, free and whole at last.”

“Good. That was quite the point.”

Silence for a time. “You could have been so happy together.”

“We already weren’t.”

She got through several sheafs before the demon spoke again, “Does it bother you, that you are utterly alone?”

“I am no more alone than anybody else.”

“How interesting. You appear to really believe that.”

“Am I wrong?” She snorted. “We’re all alone inside our heads, at the end of the day.”

“And yet you pour your heart out to a demon, one you regard as not-even-a-person, so desperate are you not to be so alone.”

“I am pouring nothing.” She rolled the scroll up with a snap and turned to give the demon her full attention. “Veritas. Precisely what is the point of this little game?”

Veritas smiled broadly. “Simply making conversation.”

“Not one I am interested in having," she snapped. "I do not live in the past. You cannot draw me there with taunts.”

Veritas chuckled, so deep that the stone itself seemed to shake. “Ridiculous mageling. As though you are anything but a mountainous heap of Past, covered by the thinnest crust of Present.”

She rolled her eyes. “Clever. But if you wish to perturb me then I suggest you try a different approach. I do not think of her. I do not think of that time in my life at all.”

It tilted its head. “How interesting! That was the truth. You really don’t think of her.” It settled, and at first Loriel thought it was the end of it. “But she thinks of you. And such thoughts they are, shouted out into the Fade for anyone to hear. Aren’t you curious what they are?”

“I have no intention in indulging myself,” she said, which was not, strictly speaking, the answer to its question.

Veritas huffed. “You are intolerably boring.”

“I am truly sorry that I cannot be of more amusement. But there is nothing true in this world that I would flinch to know. I am not afraid of you.”

Suddenly the demon sprang up. She felt rather than saw it move.

“You should be afraid. And you should be sorry.” She could feel its hot breath on the back of her neck. “If you did not amuse me, I would not give you so many truths for free.”

Slowly, slowly, she turned around. It knew as well as she did that if it touched her, it would be bound. Loriel had embedded the glyph in her skin. She made a point to smile. “For free? As though I rely on your generosity?”

“You can no more force me to serve you than drink the Fade.”

“Try me," she hissed. "I like you, Veritas, and I like your company. You keep me honest.” She thought—intended—the spell of repulsive force. The demon skidded away from her, into the corner, growling. “But this latest game of yours is tiresome and nothing requires me to tolerate it. I summoned you in the first place because I was not on speaking terms with my collaborator, and that is no longer the case.”

“Indeed? You have no further need of me?” The demon’s thousand eyes gleamed. “Is that why you summoned me hours ago, just to keep you company?”

“I said I liked your company. Not that I needed it.”

“Hmm. That is so. It seems that there is precious little that you need. And even less you want." Again the demon settled. "You fascinate me, Loriel Surana. You are rude, but you are interesting.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

A period of renewed silence, interrupted only by the scratching of her quill.

“Did you know,” said the demon of truth, “that your mother has been waiting in the courtyard to see you for over a fortnight?”

The spilled ink ruined several sheafs of parchment, and the stain never did come out of the woodgrain.

#dragon age #dragon femslash #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 23/36 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Chapter 23

Garahel had served well enough at first. He didn’t know what to make of his commander, but he followed her readily enough. He had a soldier’s mind, regimented, ready to obey. It had hardly hurt him at all when Loriel had made him forget about the massacre Anders and Justice had left behind. She had even told herself that she was doing him a favor—who would want to remember something like that?

That was one little nudge—it did no harm, just like the handful of times Loriel had borrowed Alistair’s mind did him no harm. His mind was not much like Garahel’s—flimsy like paper, not rigid like iron—but it was weak, and she had only done it twice. It did him no harm. She was sure of it.

She never did figure out whether it was her fault after all, the way Garahel started to forget, to lose track, to be otherwise inadequate. It would not have shocked her, but perhaps it was that her own demands rose so sharply, in the months after. She could not afford to tolerate any mistake. That was her policy—things in her Keep were done right the first time, or they were done by somebody else.

Garahel was better off back in the barracks, anyway. It was better for him.

And that had left Loriel needing a Seneschal.

Half a dozen men and women must have done the job incompetently until Brigit.

Brigit had arrived in the second year as a pilgrim. She had been an orphan raised within the Chantry—Loriel suspected that her mother had been a mage—and when the Blight had struck, she’d been utterly wasted in the employ of some traveling Orlesian merchant. Within months of her coming to the Vigil she had made herself indispensable, as clerk, assistant treasurer, recordkeeper, and finally—when yet another candidate proved disappointing and had to be dismissed—as Seneschal. It had been a meteoric rise, one well-deserved. She was fervent, professional, and effective, and worth a thousand Wardens. Sometimes weeks and weeks would pass in which Brigit was the only person Loriel spoke to.

Brigit still wore a Chantry amulet around her neck, and Loriel had never asked why—whether out of sentiment, or true belief. She never spoke of Andraste or the Maker, and it seemed likely that if she truly believed, it would have been impossible to conceal. Brigit believed with a fire like the sun,

The only thing Loriel did not like about Brigit was the awed and breathless way she looked at her Commander. Brigit was a faithful woman. Loriel sometimes wondered just what she put her faith in.

Loriel relied on her, depended on her, believed that anything she asked Brigit to do was good as done. But she did not trust her.

It wasn’t her fault. Loriel didn’t trust anybody. A maleficar, even a famous and beloved one, could not afford to.

tck

But after the fresh spate of assassins, she came as near to it as she ever would.

Brigit had only had the job for a few months when it happened. Loriel was still nominally carrying out most of her duties as Commander and Arlessa. She had yet to build most of the Underkeep—wasn’t even calling it that yet.

The assassin had caught her sleeping—or didn't catch her. He’d triggered one of the traps at the window as he’d come in, but somehow avoided the paralysis it was meant to bestow. It didn’t end up mattering—now Loriel was fully awake from her thin sleep. That there was a struggle at all shamed her, brief as it was. It ended with the unfortunate man smeared on the floor, splattered into the walls, sinking into the upholstery, dripping down from the ceiling. She’d panicked and reached for a messy spell. Embarrassing.

The assassin was thoroughly dead, but she could feel an enchantment lingering at the edges of her consciousness. At first she worried it was a suicide-trap and moved to counter it—after all, if she were an assassin trying to kill a mage of her caliber, a suicide-trap is how she would have done it. Sacrifice a man to let the mark think she was safe, and only then spring the real trap. But it was only the assassin’s amulet. She dug it out from the remnants of a ribcage and probed it. This was an object of power; she admired the skill of whoever had made it. No wonder he’d almost entered undetected. Whoever had sent him equipped him well—but who? Someone from Tevinter, if she had to guess, for no Circle mage could have made something like this.

While she stood in her nightgown, admiring the amulet and wishing she hadn’t killed the assassin quite so quickly, the door opened. Brigit stood there, one hand on the doorknob, the other loosely at her mouth.

Outwardly, Loriel looked at her neutrally. Inwardly she shuddered at the thought of having to find a new Seneschal. Brigit was so good at what she did, absolutely one of a kind. There would be no point in bending her mind with blood magic; her will was too strong, her mind too sharp. If she tried to bend her mind, it would break, and she would be of no more use whatsoever. She wouldn’t kill her, but to make her forget would as good as kill her. Loriel was already regretting it even as she prepared to do it.

“I...commander,” Brigit said, schooling her face. “I heard a disturbance. But I see you have it handled.”

Loriel waited a beat too long to respond. “Most likely the Crows,” she said, then cleared her throat. “In the future, you will knock.”

Brigit bowed her head. “Of course. I apologize for the intrusion.”

“Accepted. Regardless, I thank you for your concern.”

Loriel’s gaze bored into her, and she didn’t so much as flinch.

Perhaps it wasn’t obviously a blood spell that had done this. She knew spells of pure spirit that could turn a man into a walking bomb. Brigit wasn’t a mage; how would she know that it hadn’t been ordinary, Chantry-sanctioned spirit magic? Of course she couldn’t.

“You will be discreet,” Loriel said.

Brigit inclined her head once, deeply. “I saw nothing, Commander.”

...no, of course she knew. She was not stupid. She knew there was something not to see .

“Shall I have a more secure place for you to sleep made up?” said the Seneschal, surveying the remnants of the assassin as he dripped from the ceiling.

“No. I prefer this attempt on my life not to reach too many ears, and servants will gossip.”

It was a risk, of course it was. Perhaps a stupid risk. But there was no one like Brigit. She could hardly believe her luck in finding her in the first place. It would be foolish to waste her for something that may well turn out to be nothing.

And truth be told, Loriel was not all that worried about what would happen if word got out about her, though she didn’t realize it until that moment. She was not a little girl cringing before powers greater than she anymore. She was the only power that mattered here.

With a flick of her wrist the blood and viscera rotted and dried to dust, years of natural corruption compressed to moments. It was a good trick—not even blood magic. She’d learned it when she was twelve. The room was still a mess, but she didn’t much care. She didn’t intend to use it any longer.

tck

After the first incident, Loriel moved her quarters to a room of not-quite-perfect security, a high tower just barely scalable by somebody very determined. The summer was hot, and the window left open. She didn’t have to wait long. When the next assassin came, she was careful not to kill.

She peeled open the woman’s mind, but learned nothing of interest from it. She was indeed a Crow, and knew nothing of the man who had paid him to die in this fruitless attempt on the Warden-Commander’s life. She shaped the remnants of the the Crow’s mind into something bent on the murder of her master. Her body was finely honed; it could kill without thinking. She wouldn’t need her mind for that. Most likely she would fail, but Loriel didn’t need her to succeed. She only needed to send a message.

Soon after she received word from Master Ignacio himself that the Antivan Crows would no longer be taking contracts for her.

Message received.

Of course, that did not mean that there would be no more assassins—only that there would be no more Crows. Though there was reason to believe that any mark that even the Antivan Crows would not touch, other players in the game would not go after, either.

Regardless, Loriel would not be so foolish again. She slept only underground, so wreathed in enchantments that no assassin could even begin to hope to pass through. No more waking with the sun—she set a timed rune of light instead.

At first she feared she would miss it—but after some months had passed like this, she found the sun to be as unnecessary as everything else.

tck

Her work was stagnating.

Months had passed since so much as a sighting of the Architect. Years since a real conversation. Each morning, she still asked—and each time, the answer was the same. How fine, how fitting, that now of all times, did she realize that the Architect was exactly what she needed to make progress.

The Architect could control the Blight itself, without apparent effort, without apparent thought. Whatever the secret to curing the Calling, Blight-magic was part of it. Maybe the ancient creature could cure the Calling himself at will, and simply chose not to—or maybe he couldn’t, and something Loriel could do would make it possible. She had gathered everything there was to know about him, and the more information she had, the more confused she got. She just needed to talk to him—properly, not just the cryptic scraps of scrawled messages she managed to exchange with him via the Deep Roads. And now even those had dried up.

She occasionally had news of the Messenger, wandering the countryside cloaked and hooded, saving farmers from bandits and doing all manner of good deeds—or some cockney story of that nature. On one occasion, she even managed to catch up with him and requested he get a message to the Architect. But the Messenger, it turned out, was no longer taking messages—he was no longer in contact with the Architect. He was his own man now, insofar as he was a man.

Useless. She had nothing.

Except the strange black crystal delivered to her by Velanna, years ago, now.

That thing was all she had, and it drove her mad. She could make no sense of it. It had no structure that she could detect, no enchantment she could touch. It didn’t even rightly seem to be a crystal, not in any meaningful way. It was a piece of the Void itself for all she could divine of it.

Why leave this to her? Was she supposed to know what it was and what to do with it? Was it a puzzle, a challenge? A joke? A mistake?

Finally, despairing of making any progress herself, she brought it to Avernus.

It was humiliating. Infuriating. The old man was not better than her, she could not stand to believe it.

“This?” he said, peering at it hungrily. “Very well, seems simple enough. Disappointing that you could not manage it yourself, but always wise to know when to ask for help, eh?”

“Shut up,” she said impassively. She simmered, but only a little; she was too relieved to finally have help. “I suppose you will be wanting my notes?”

“Yes, yes,” said Avernus, and Loriel gave him her exhaustive and close-written account of everything that she’d used to fail to unlock the crystal’s secrets. He skimmed, and proceeded to try several things she already knew would not work.

“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped, after thirty minutes of this. “Assume I already tried everything a fool might think of.”

“Anyone can make a mistake when working alone, not only fools,” he replied flatly, without so much as looking up. “That I am diligent in my work has nothing to do with whether or not you are an idiot.”

“If you have nothing to contribute, then what was the point of my coming here?”

“Of course I do, child,” he said, snapping her notebook shut. “It is already quite clear to me just what this crystal of yours is.” But an hour later he was still muttering and rotating it before an enlarging glass. And hours later, maybe days—it was hard to tell when neither collaborator needed to sleep, eat or drink very often—the both of them surrounded by reference tomes and testing reagents, they understood, if anything, less.

“Enough,” Avernus barked finally. “We will make no further progress like this. I have the vague beginnings of ideas, but nothing further yet. I’ll keep it here and try my guesses later, and maybe then I’ll make some sense of it.”

Loriel’s head was full of cotton fuzz. She did not need to mind her mortal needs very often, but she did need to, and she was realizing she had found her limit. She couldn’t tell if she needed rest or food or water more—all she felt was deprived. Even so, at his words, she was suddenly fully alert. “Keep it here?”

“Yes, child. Rest and go home, come back in a month. Or don’t come back—the journey is long. I’ll send word when I have something.”

All tiredness fled from her. She was flint-sharp and cold as steel. “No. No, I do not think so.”

“Don’t be foolish, child,” Avernus snorted. “You wanted my help, I’m willing to grant it.”

“It was entrusted to me, and with me it will stay.”

“I need the damn thing in order to help you with it.”

What did he think he was playing at? Had he grown so bold as to steal from her? She couldn’t think of any reason he would want it—unless he meant to contact the Architect first? To conspire with him against her? Did he resent her hold over his life? “I am ordering you to give it to me.”

His eyes flashed. “Ordering me?”

“Yes. Indeed. Ordering.” She sounded manic even to herself. “As your superior officer. Not to mention the sole reason that you are still alive.”

“What you are is a stubborn child, jealous and irrational.”

Loriel had been gathering power almost without realizing it. The temperature in the room had dropped to near freezing. “Do not think,” she said softly, “that because I value your assistance in my work, that I also value your life. You are a betrayer and a murderer. There is nothing you know that I cannot find out myself, even if I had to rip it from your head myself. Do not push me.”

For a moment he hesitated. Was that fear? Or was he merely judging his chances? For a moment, Loriel thought this disagreement might really escalate to a full-blown wizard’s duel.

But it was not a long moment. Avernus scowled and bowed his head and submitted. “Very well. As you wish, Commander.”

The haze passed. She was no longer sure why she felt quite so threatened. Why feel threatened? She was in charge here. Had always been so. Foolish to doubt it. Childish. Absurd.

After that she did not hear from him for nearly a year.

tck

Returning from Soldier’s Keep, a detachment of inconveniences awaited her.

Brigit was waiting at the gates, standing pin-straight with her hands gripped tight at her front. She bowed as Loriel’s coach approached. “Commander. You have visitors.”

“Get rid of them,” Loriel said irritably. “I am not available.”

“I tried, ser,” Brigit said, distressed. “I promise I did, I’ve been holding them off for months. I didn’t expect them to come in person.”

It occurred to Loriel then that Brigit was competent enough that if it was possible to get rid of these visitors, then they would already be gone.

“And who are they?”

“Emissaries from Weisshaupt, ser. They have questions for you.”

Ah.

“Can you hold them off for another hour? At least so I can change.”

“Of course, ser. Will you—?”

“I will not require assistance.”

She changed into a less dusty uniform, washed her face, combed her hair. There wasn’t time for much else; Brigit was very good, but she wasn’t a miracle worker.

This wasn’t the first angry communication she’d received from the Anderfels, but the first who had come in person. Loriel had been batting away their letters and ignoring requests to come to Weisshaupt for years. The First Warden was not terribly happy about her predecessor’s policy of transparency for new recruits. And she was terribly curious as to how Loriel had survived slaying an Archdemon.

She just managed to seat herself at her desk when Brigit let the detachment in.

Three of them, two women and a man. The man was a dwarf, the women both human. One was certainly a mage—Loriel guessed she mostly used primal magic, and classified her as a moderate threat—but the other was an unknown quantity. She was big, that was for sure—if she got her hands around Loriel’s throat she would have to act fast. They were blue and silver still coated with the dust of travel, and they didn’t look happy.

“Wardens,” she said by way of greeting.

“Commander,” the dwarf said eventually. He introduced himself and the two women, and spent nearly a minute on pointless pleasantries before saying anything of substance.

“We came to speak of sensitive matters, Commander. Warden business.” His eyes slid to Brigit, standing off to the side in a protective stance, as though at any moment she would be called upon to defend Loriel with her body. “If you would?”

“I trust my Seneschal completely,” said Loriel. “I can’t imagine there is anything we might speak of that she shouldn’t hear.”

“Nevertheless.”

Loriel sighed. “Very well. If you would, Brigit.”

Brigit left, unable to resist glancing back as she did. Kind of her to worry—but it would be easier this way.

The dwarf—Henrick—waited for Brigit’s footsteps to fade before fixing Loriel with his bright blue gaze. Loriel smiled back politely, utterly vacant.

“The First Warden is interested in you.”

“Yes, I know. I received her letters.”

“But you did not see fit to report to Weisshaupt.”

“I did not think it was necessary.”

“Orders are not generally something left to the discretion of those who receive them.”

“As you may recall, the Grey Wardens of Ferelden were nearly destroyed during the Fifth Blight. It has not been trivial to rebuild the Order here, as the First Warden herself requested of me. Traveling to Weisshaupt would take me away from the Vigil for months.”

“We understand that. Nevertheless, the First Warden has weighed these concerns, and decided that, on balance, such a journey would be valuable.”

Yes, very valuable—very valuable for getting her out of the way and replacing her with someone more tractable. Loriel’s eyes carefully did not narrow. “Then the First Warden and I must agree to disagree. She is certainly welcome to come here, if she feels a face to face conversation with me is so important.”

“It seems that there is a great deal that you and the First Warden disagree on. Such as the importance of our carefully guarded secrets.”

This again. It had been a thorn in her side ever since it had become standard procedure at the Vigil. “If you are referring to the Ferelden Warden’s policy of transparency for new recruits,” Loriel said delicately, “then rest assured that no sensitive information has been made public. The details of the Joining remain strictly guarded. All that the public knows now is that the Joining is sometimes fatal, which any fool could have figured out on his own. In telling them up front, we build trust with those we protect. In the long run, we will be stronger for it.”

Privately Loriel thought it had been a stupid idea to make that information public. It had caused her no end of headache out of Weisshaupt, and probably made no difference to the recruiting rates. The kind of man—it was usually young men—who came to give his life to the Grey Wardens would not be deterred by knowing that the Joining could easily kill him. Every single one of them was absolutely certain that he would survive.

Anyway—she hadn’t gotten a choice. Why did anybody else deserve one?

Loriel picked up her recently-sharpened quill pen and twirled it around her finger.

“Be that as it may,” said Henrick. “You had no authority to do it.”

“I am Commander of the Grey. I rule my Wardens as I see fit.”

“To a point. Warden-Commanders have a great deal of discretion, but not this much. The First Warden has questions.”

“I’m sure she does,” Loriel said icily, dragging the sharp quill across her palm, calming herself.

“For instance—how you survived the slaying of Urthemiel. This should not be possible. There are rumors that Urthemiel is not dead—that he still lives in the Deep Roads in another form, and that you send good lives after bad on patrols to find and slay him. Have you anything to say to that?”

They mean the Architect, Loriel realized with a start, and it took effort not to laugh. “I say it is absurd, but I do not control what the First Warden spends her resources on. By all means—if she wishes to waste everyone’s time in investigating a Blight that has been over for years, she is welcome to. The patrols are purely routine. To read anything else into it is, to be frank, bizarre.”

“That is wonderful to hear,” said Henrick. “I am sure the First Warden will understand when you explain it to her yourself.”

With great effort, feeling rusty and incompetent, Loriel put on her most gracious, diplomatic tone and expression. “I am sorry if I have been curt. Please rest assured that all these concerns will be addressed. All letters will be responded to, all questions answered. Everything will be explained. I may be an unorthodox commander—but I am loyal to the Order.”

“The time is far past for letters,” Henrick interrupted. “We did not come here idly. Our orders are to bring you back to Weisshaupt to answer for all that has transpired since the Blight—by force, if necessary.”

“I see,” Loriel said eventually, her hands in her lap. She looked between the three of them, the blue-eyed dwarf with the tri-cornered beard, the ruddy Anderfels woman, her slight and silent companion. “And there is no dissuading you from this course of action, I suppose?”

Their stony glares were all the answer she needed.

She sighed. “Very well. Then I have only one thing to ask of you.” Pain bit at her palm. “Go back to Weisshaupt. Tell the First Warden that the situation here is far more dire than she believed—that it hangs by a thread—and that it would be dangerous and irresponsible to call me away now. Be persuasive—because it is true. You saw it all with your own eyes. You were very convinced. Convince the First Warden.”

The Anderfels Wardens stared blankly at her. Silence in her quarters. “Now,” Loriel said evenly, her blood pooling in her hand, “ Go away.”

The Wardens went away without another word.

Loriel slumped in her high-backed chair as the door closed behind them. She would maintain some hold on their minds for a while yet, but for now she released enough of them that they wouldn’t look strange departing her office.

Not that she had been really afraid that it wouldn’t work—but the mage might have noticed something before the spell really took hold, and then it would have been so much harder to take her mind. She doubted the three of them would walk away from the experience entirely unscathed, but this way, the damage would be limited.

When Brigit entered, Loriel had sealed her cut and composed herself.

“Is all well, Commander?” the Seneschal said. “I know how you detest interruptions to your routine.” She seemed genuinely concerned. How sweet. How stupid. “What did the Wardens want?”

“Nothing you need worry about. I have addressed their concerns adequately.”

For a beat Loriel met her eyes. Did she really not know? She had to know. Brigit was no fool. Surely she knew.

Brigit slowly nodded. “I see...and do you still want your morning tea, Commander?”

#please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction #amell #surana #dragon age

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 22/32 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Loriel’s routine was by this point quite well-developed.

She woke at dawn, with the sun. Usually the light was enough to rouse her, but in case it wasn’t, she had a timed rune of frost under her bed set to go off half an hour after sunrise. On the rare occasions that she was inclined to laze in bed, it was enough to get her out of it.

Breakfast would be waiting for her, and it was never late. Loriel did not micromanage. Things in her Keep were done correctly the first time, or they were done by somebody else. Her breakfast varied little. One egg, hard-boiled; porridge, salty, never sweet; fruit, whichever seasonal. She could draw some energy from the Fade, but repeated use of blood magic attenuated her connection to the Fade enough that she still needed to eat. Someday she would look into eliminating that need entirely, once her other obligations were met. She would eat on a balcony as the sun rose, less out of a desire to see the day begin, and more out of a removed knowledge that some sun was necessary for her health. Someday she would fix that flaw as well, but for now, if she had to waste time eating, she could at least get that out of the way while she was at it.

Within a quarter of an hour she would be at her desk. A stack of letters would be waiting there. She would skim them; few really required a personal response. The ones from Avernus, she put aside to deal with later.

When she finished with that, she would indicate for her seneschal to enter. Her name was Brigit; she was bright-eyed and fervent, relentlessly competent, utterly indispensable. She was most of the reason the Keep still functioned at all. She would be waiting outside the door, a cup of tea in hand. The tea—bitter, biting, oversteeped—was Loriel’s one indulgence. She would drink it and listen to the daily report. Brigit respected Loriel’s time, and began with what Loriel cared about—first, had there been any sign of the Architect? Second, had any Wardens begun to hear the Calling? And third, had any been killed?

There was never any sign of the Architect. Most of the Wardens at Vigil’s Keep were far too new for the Calling. But every once in a while, there would be deaths. Loriel would ask for their names. She forgot them as soon as she heard them, but it was important she hear them.

The rest of the half-hour was an abbreviated exchange of questions and instructions. If there was anything that absolutely needed Loriel’s personal attention, Brigit would ask for it—but few things did. People needed or wanted the entity known as the Commander of the Grey, or the Arlessa of Amaranthine, or the Hero of Ferelden. Loriel held those titles by an accident of history; she had no personal characteristic that suited her for them.

Then Loriel would hand off any letters that needed replying to. Brigit could mimic her hand and her signature easily enough, and Loriel received far too much correspondence to deal with it all herself.

With the business of rulership out of the way, Loriel would descend to her underground chambers. She would work for ten or twelve or fifteen hours. If she tired early, she would sit and read. She avoided falling asleep underground—it was too disorienting. Each day she ascended, changed into the clothes left for her freshly laundered well in advance, cleaned her teeth, and slept. Once a week, she would bathe, whether she needed it or not—the alternative was to forget to bathe entirely. She did not bother to fall asleep naturally—there was a simple spell for that, and she saw no reason not to use it.

Her research went slowly. But it went.

And so the clockwork of her life ticked on.

tck

The work itself was going better than it had.

Her methodology was much like her daily routine—plodding, relentless, as bland as it was efficient. She followed procedure, did what needed to be done, even if she had no appetite to do it. Her reams of close-written notes were meticulous to the point of exhaustion. She lived and breathed rigor. Almost everything she tried failed, and each failure was a step closer to success.

Eventually—something would work.

A dim awareness fluttered in her mind that the bright scalpel of her mind was now little more than a crude cudgel, but what did it matter that she wasn’t brilliant? The work still got done.

Her underground lab had grown from a single rough chamber to a warren of interconnected tunnels and specialized chambers. The Underkeep stretched nearly as far as the Keep above. In one room, the vastly expanded lab space, tables of glass devices and cabinets of reagents. In another, her library, swollen with tomes both common and rare, with her own notes and manuscripts and diagrams. Another room stood lined with cages holding dozens of creatures subject to her experiments—rats, it turned out, reacted very much like elves and humans to the Blight, and they bred fast. Lines of entropy enchantments lined their cages, keeping them in stasis until it was time for them to be of use. An underground stream provided water, wrested from the depths of the earth and channeled through pipes of stone. All of it climate controlled with her elegant runes. It was never too hot or too cold, never too wet or dry; no mold, no pests, no sunlight, save that which she made herself.

And below that, another tunnel, deeper than the other, longer, and layered with more protections; it lead to the Deep Roads. She ventured there; sometimes for some purpose—to collect a sample, to check for deliveries from her friends beneath the earth—but most often simply to sit in the dark, to feel the miles of stone pressing down on her, and be empty of thought and of feeling and being.

tck

One of the few reliable reasons that Loriel ever left her Keep was when she went to see Avernus. Letters passed between them frequently, almost entirely of a technical nature—what reagent could be used to evoke such and such reaction? What were the best ways to keep blighted flesh preserved for study? Where were the most promising leads to follow up on to search for lost Tevinter literature on the subject?—But often letters weren’t enough. So once or twice a year, Loriel would gear up and make the journey to Soldier’s Peak. She would stay there for a handful of weeks, making aggressive collaborative progress with Avernus until both their tolerances for other people dried up and Loriel returned to her Underkeep.

“I see you are still being unreasonable about human subjects,” Avernus sniffed on one such occasion, while they both watched a cauldron boil in silence.

This was a frequent subject of complaints in his letters. “I see no reason in deliberately poisoning a well. Do you imagine the work would go faster if I was driven from my fortress with torches and pitchforks?

“Torches and pitchforks, hmph! As though peasants with torches and pitchforks are any threat to you.”

“Peasants, no. A Chantry army of Templars? A new Exalted March?”

“Do not tell me you still fear Templars. If that were truly your chief concern, you would not have let so many join your Order. ”

He was baiting her, and it wasn’t going to work. “I do not need to fear them to understand what is prudent, what is necessary, and what is not. The work will continue as it has.”

“And in the meanwhile, your Wardens will continue to die, because of what amounts to self-interest, hm? Because you fear the consequences of a little risk? Because you do not like to think of yourself the way you think of me?”

Bait. This was bait. She was too good to fall for bait. But Maker, Avernus could be really irritating in person.

“I am working with you to cure the Calling,” Loriel said evenly. “To save my wardens from a terrible fate. What sense would it make to sacrifice their lives in order to save them?”

Avernus snorted. “Very well, child, suit yourself. At your age I felt much the same.”

Something in the way he said child— not a word he often used for her, a word he clearly used now because he knew it would enrage her—sounded so much like Irving that she nearly lost control of herself. Who in the void did he think he was? If not for her grace, his desiccated corpse would be enriching the soil by now. She could have killed him when they’d first met. She could kill him now, if she wanted.

The old bastard watched her with a defiant, mocking eye, daring her to try. She could, couldn’t she? She was younger, faster, and yes, stronger. For all his experience, she had the more raw power to throw around. They had both seen battle, but his battles were a century old while hers were fresh and bleeding—and she’d bested him before. Granted, she hadn’t been alone then...but she was stronger now. Yes, she could kill him—

But the old blood mage was all she had.

“My title,” she said crisply, turning her eyes back to the slowly boiling cauldron, “is Commander.”

He rolled his eyes at her, and asked how her experiments with draconic gall had gone, and they spoke no more of it that day.

Avernus wasn’t all bad. He could be a cantankerous, amoral, belittling bastard, but he was clever, and not the worst to talk to. Sometimes he would be taken aback by her original ideas, rendered silent and thoughtful by her insights. Sometimes she would make a remark that seemed to her perfectly obvious, but which would send him consulting his notes and tomes, muttering under his breath. Each such instance left her smug and glowing for hours. Avernus never rendered praise—which she preferred—but this was better.

Pathetic, that she cared what he thought of her. And she did care. Commander or not, intellectual equal or not, she was his pupil. Avernus had plumbed depths of magic yet unknown to her, and his mind held secrets it would take her years to extract. And whatever his faults, he never lied, not about anything.

How badly she had wanted to please First Enchanter Irving as a child. How much she had lived for his praise, for his assurance that she was so bright, so special, so different from the other children. How pathetic he had looked when she had saved him from the Fade, how much she had hated his mealy-mouthed supplications to his Templar master. Each time she remembered it, she coated the memory with a fresh layer of poison.

Loriel was no fool, and she had no love for self-deception. She knew exactly what Avernus was, and what he was to her. But he, at least, was honest.

tck

Before she’d found Brigit, Loriel had managed intelligence of her keep with a network of enchanted crystals. Padding invisibly around her own Keep like a thief in te night would never have served for long. The crystals studded the halls of the Keep in unassuming braziers and in decorative sconces, transmitting everything that they saw and heard to a circle of polished silver in a dedicated chamber in the Underkeep. Crystals had special properties of resonance and purity that made them excellent for conveying sound. The real challenge had been getting crystals in a size and index that suited her. They didn’t occur naturally often enough to be worth harvesting, so she had had to figure out how to make them herself, with heated water and powdered minerals and careful spells of entropy to control their growth. It was finicky business; large enough to work, small enough to not be noticed, of just the right purity. The key was blood—her blood, connecting the network to the mirror and to herself.

The next problem was how to limit the flow of information. The Keep was just too busy to monitor all at once. She’d had the thought to fix it by keying the crystal network to particular activation words, to keep from picking up on discussion of that evening’s dinner—but even then, it was too much. Loriel had lost hours to the mirror, hypnotized by every irrelevant word and image it sent. On bad days, it was all she did.

Three chief things Loriel learned from her mirror:

First: The kitchen girl she’d so thoughtlessly forced to forget her on the first day of her new life was never quite the same afterward. She often cried for no reason, couldn’t remember whole weeks of her life, and she didn’t know why. Her dearest friend—a scullery maid—would comfort her, let her weep into her shoulder, assure her that no, she wasn’t mad, that she needn’t give herself over to the mercy of the Chantry, that surely the Maker would send relief soon.

Loriel regretted making her forget. She would not have done it, had she known it would break her mind. But neither did she indulge her guilt and shame. What a waste that would have been. Of course Loriel had hurt her—was that not entirely expected?

She knew perfectly well what she was.

Second: Nearly everyone in the Keep she ruled feared her. Some hated her, some revered her, some loved her, but everyone feared her.

That Loriel was a maleficar was not exactly an open secret. The new recruits didn’t know, and the old recruits weren’t sure or bold enough to tell them outright.

But oh, there were rumors.

Some seemed convinced that she had died long ago—that her seneschal had killed her, usurped her position, and only pretended to take her directives (after all, how long had it been since anyone had seen her? On these occasions Loriel occasionally made a point to appear briefly in the great hall). Others asserted that Loriel was the usurper, that the old commander had grown too popular and beloved and had planned to betray her, and so Loriel had betrayed and killed her first. Another version had it that Loriel kept the old commander imprisoned somewhere in the depths, chained up and tormented with blood magic. And that was well related to—

Third: People still spoke of the old commander. Anytime something went wrong— the old commander never would have allowed this. The old commander would never have allowed the patrol schedule to change so inconveniently. The old commander never would have stood for substandard breakfast offerings. The old commander wouldn’t have tolerated this. The old commander would have kept us safe. The old commander cared. Many in the Keep were very confident on what exactly the old commander thought and felt about any subject on the sun you could care to name.

The first of Vigil’s Keep wardens were the worst about it. They gathered together some nights to play cards and drink, just the three of them, and the old commander would come up. Anytime the three of them met, Loriel would be there, too, invisible, intangible, unwanted. It was almost an addiction. Oghren would tell embarrassing stories from back during the Blight, and insist that he’d taught her everything she knew about fighting. Velanna always looked vaguely angry when this happened, but she listened anyway, and even asked questions, and many times Loriel caught her suppressing a genuine laugh. They’d wonder where she was, what she was doing. Sigrun would crack a forced smile and say, probably having a great time without us. They’d laugh. They’d miss her.

Loriel had never heard anything so insulting in her life.

In the end, the crystals turned out to be a mistake. It had been a fun project, but a wasteful one. One day she shattered the viewing mirror. If she really needed it, she could always make a new one, but for now, she was done.

You couldn’t spend your life entranced by what you couldn’t have. You just couldn’t.

Anyway—she'd found Brigit by then. Brigit ran things better than Loriel could ever hope to. If Brigit made a popular decision, the Wardens all agreed that perhaps they were on the right track after all, with the Hero of Ferelden at the helm and all. If Brigit made an unpopular decision, the Wardens muttered that the old commander would never have stood for it, and if the Hero of Ferelden knew what was happening she would surely put an end to it.

Loriel herself rarely thought of the old commander. She had too much work to do.

tck

The first to go was Oghren. It had been for his own good. The Wardens had only ever been an escape for him, an excuse to wallow in his own refuse and avoid the wife and child he had been too weak to face. Well, no more. Loriel waited until he was sober, or as close as he ever came to it, to break the news.

“Go home, Oghren,” she’d told him. “Or don’t. Lay down in the gutter and finally drink yourself to death, if that’s what you really want. You can go wherever you want, but you can’t stay here.”

He’d sputtered, protested. Demanded to know why, and why now . Weren’t the Wardens supposed to take any old sod? Didn’t she have any respect for their long friendship? He’d kept an eye on her since she was naive little mageling fresh out of the Circle (now that was a funny joke) and now she was really just going to get rid of him? Just like that?

"Just like that," she confirmed, unmoved. “You don’t belong here. You have a family.”

He swore at her, so luridly that she was almost impressed. And then he calmed down. He called her a sodding waste of space, but his heart wasn’t in it.

She made arrangements to have him taken care of. Supplies, escorts, whatever he needed. She wasn't a monster. She tried to be good to her people, when she could. She hoped he really did go back to his wife and child, though both their names escaped her at the moment. Of course she hoped for the best for him.

But she never did end up following up, and whatever became of Oghren Kondrat, Loriel never learned it.

tck

What was really surprising was how long Sigrun stuck around.

Loriel had assumed for years that Sigrun’s presence in her life was just on the verge of ending. They hadn’t been on good terms since the Dragonbone Wastes, and these days Loriel was not on good terms with anyone at all.

And even if Sigrun was too loyal and true to simply desert, she was foolhardy. She fought like she didn’t care if she died, because she didn’t. Each morning when Brigit recited the names of the dead, Loriel waited and waited to hear Sigrun’s name. That she’d died saving a fellow Warden, or charging a group of darkspawn to give the rest of her squad time, or that she’d simply not returned.

But Sigrun was still here.

How fitting for a dead woman to haunt her Keep, one who continued not to die. If Loriel didn’t know any better, she might have even thought that Sigrun missed Oghren, though Maker only knew why. If Loriel didn’t know any better, she might have even thought that Sigrun missed her, in some strange way. Of the original Wardens of the Keep, Sigrun was the only one who occasionally knocked on Loriel’s chamber doors, tentatively calling out her name and even waiting a few minutes before giving up.

As though Loriel would tolerate her pity.

She hated to think of her. Hated to remember that she was still there at all, accusing Loriel of wrongdoing just by existing, even though she had no right at all to judge her. Hated to remember how much of herself she saw in the dwarf when she first saw sunlight.

Finally Loriel could take it no longer, and had Sigrun transferred to the Warden fortress in Orlais. Sigrun made only a cursory attempt to say goodbye, and within a blessed month, she was gone.

tck

Velanna was the last to go.

Velanna was not her friend. She had never liked her, and tolerated her solely because Loriel represented something that Velanna wanted—justification for what had happened to her sister. But she had understood her, in her own way. For that reason alone Loriel half-expected her loyalty.

Even so, it was not altogether surprising when it happened.

Unlike the last time, Velanna did not succeed in barging through the door. The weave of enchantments on the door was far stronger than before. And Brigit was there to intercept her.

“I said, let me through. I know for a fact that she’s in there—you were just about to go in yourself. You go in there every day, I’ve noticed.”

“I am sorry, Warden, but the Commander expressly forbids visitors who have not been cleared beforehand. If you like, I can make your request today during my daily report.”

“I don’t think so.” A burst of unfamiliar magic rattled the door. Loriel was mildly impressed. It wasn’t anywhere near enough to get the job done, but that she had managed to affect it at all was impressive.

“Alright, fine. You don’t need to let me in but I know that you can hear me, so you are going to listen, whether there is a door in the way or not.” A furious inhale. “Has some demon taken your mind and driven you mad? You are not the woman I agreed to follow.” False. Velanna had never agreed to follow her at all.

“For what purpose do you exile your friends and surround yourself with enemies? Are you ignorant or foolhardy that this Keep is now full of Chantry fools and their attack dogs?” True, but flawed. Yes, the Vigil had a great deal more Chantry-faithful, as well as former Templars, in its employ, than before. But all Ferelden was full of Chantry fools and their attack dogs. All Loriel did was permit them the opportunity to die in the name of some higher calling.

“You aren’t doing any of this for us. You care nothing for us, if you ever did. Are you even trying to cure the Blight? Perhaps you are not!”

False. Loriel was trying. Of course she was trying.

“And if I am wrong—if a lick of what I have said is not true—then open this door and call me a liar to my face, you wretched cowardly betrayef." A beat.“Well?”

It sounded like Velanna really expected her to respond to any of that.

Loriel heard a final frustrated slam against the door, hammering footsteps, and then silence.

After a time, Brigit entered, trembling and hiding it. She alone had the enchanted, invisible ring which allowed the wearer to enter.

“I apologise deeply, Commander,” she whispered. “She overpowered me with magic. I was paralyzed.”

“I’m very sorry you had to experience that, Brigit,” Loriel said flatly, not looking up from the letter she was reading. “No lasting harm done, I trust?”

Brigit collected herself and inclined her head. “No harm done.”

“Good. Then, if you might proceed with your morning report…”

Velanna disappeared that day, and didn’t return. When no one had seen her in days and it became obvious that she had deserted, Brigit pressed the issue during the morning briefing. “Do you wish her hunted down and brought to justice?”

By the ever-so-delicate crease between her eyes, Loriel guessed that this was certainly what Brigit wished.

“No. It won’t be necessary.” She paused, considering. "But if she ever tries to return, do not let her."

#dragon age #amell #surana #dragon femslash #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

2 notes · View notes

degenerate-perturbation · 4 years

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Chapters: 21/32 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

All around Yvanne the enormous cypress thrummed with life. If there was a world beyond the belly of the hollow tree, she didn’t quite believe it.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Of course you don’t understand,” her great grandmother said kindly. Distant bells seemed to ring with every one of her words. All of a sudden Yvanne wasn’t sure if the old woman’s lips were actually moving when she spoke to her. “Who could possibly expect you to?”

“Why did you bring me here? That spirit I saw—was that you?”

“In a way,” the old woman allowed. “But I did not bring you here. You brought yourself.”

“But you called me. You told me to come home.”

“Is that what you heard?” She smiled. “Oh, my daughter.”

That stung. “Stop it,” Yvanne growled. “You don’t even know me.”

“Not as well as I’d like. But we have met, in the world beneath the world.”

“You’ve been spying on me,” Yvanne realized. “Through the Fade. Just what gave you the right?”

The old woman’s bright eyes flashed. “Precisely the same thing that gives you to look in on those you wish to see.”

“That’s—that’s not the same,” Yvanne faltered. “I didn’t want to look. I tried not to look. I couldn’t control it.”

“But you’d like to. And so you are here.”

“No, I’m here because you called me. I’m here because I had just settled into a perfectly contented life when all of a sudden I became tormented by these voices—your voice.”

Yvanne could load quite a lot of furious accusation into a short phrase spoken softly, but the old woman remained unmoved. “Believe me, my daughter, I do not have the power to bring about what you experienced. If you heard my voice, it was as a trickle in a torrent. You have begun to awaken as a spirit mage.”

“And just what in the void does that mean?”

In tones of infinite patience: “For years you have hobbled yourself; now you are beginning to walk freely for the first time. Of course you were overwhelmed. Anyone would be. Nobody here in Dairsmuid awakens in their third decade of life, without the benefit of any guidance whatsoever.” In tones of bottomless sorrow: “You have been done a great disservice.”

Yvanne stood for a while, feeling all the hot air leak out of her.

“So can you help me?” she said, defeated. “Or not?”

“Of course I can. And I will. If you choose it. But how far you walk along the path is always up to you.”

Something sat uncomfortably in Yvanne’s stomach. “Alright, fine. Can you at least answer me this?” she said wearily. “Where is my mother?”

The old woman cast her eyes down. “That I do not know. She never came here.”

An unspoken hope died in her chest. “My father, then? My sisters?”

“Three of your sisters live,” the old woman said. “In one way or another. But of all who I called, only you returned.”

All she did not say fell upon Yvanne like a mountain. She dropped her head. “I see.”

“Oh, my daughter. I am sorry.” She sounded like she meant it.

More questions sprung to her lips. When did my father die? And how? Which of her four sisters lived? And how? But as soon as they occurred to her, she thought better of them. She didn’t want to know. Of course she didn’t. If she’d wanted to know, she would have seen it in the Fade. It was a cruel thing to know about herself.

“Why me, then?”

“You are the one who answered.”

“No. Why call at all? My father never spoke of his home. We have nothing to do with each other, blood relatives or not. What do you want with me?”

“Is it so wrong for an old woman to wish to see her lost daughter?” The old woman’s eyes closed. She said no more for many long moments. “I apologize. I am tired now. I must walk in the Fade for a time.”

“What? But I’ve only just arrived!”

“We will speak again. For now you will go with Itai; he will be your companion today.”

“Now hold on, I—” Yvanne began to protest, but the old woman was already asleep, having slipped into dreams in the space of a few breaths. She was alone. But she did not feel alone. If anything she felt like an intruder. The tree keeping her great-grandmother alive thrummed steadily, like a heartbeat.

“Yvanne?”

She turned to face a young man with wide cheekbones and a halo of black curls. “How did you know my name? Or that I was here?”

He gave her a polite, puzzled smile. “Buya called me, of course. I’ve finished my training for today, so I can show you around.” He was younger than her. Was he even twenty? “I’m Itai—I think we might be cousins.” He crossed his right arm over his chest and tilted his chin down in greeting.

She stiffened. “Well, maybe we’re cousins, but you don’t know me, and I’m only staying here for as long as it takes me to get this—this problem under control, so don’t get too comfortable. There’s no need for all this…this…”

Itai shrugged. “Well, you’re going to have to wait at least a few hours anyway before she wakes up, so you might as well see the city, right?”

—

On her way to the great cypress, Yvanne had paid no attention to her surroundings at all. A compulsion to reach the tree where her ancestor dwelled had consumed her, and only now had it loosened its hold on her. Now she was finally seeing the city with clear eyes.

Dairsmuid was a city built upon the water. Wooden planks, shiny and smooth from the thousands of feet that walked upon them, were its streets, but so was the water; everywhere were gondoliers carrying goods by canoe, chatting with each other as they passed. Some of the buildings were built in the trees themselves, and what trees they were; they flared at their twisted, knotty bases. Some grew fused together, making masses large enough to support homes. Circling steps were bolted to many of them, and cables ran between the boughs, sending packages and messages zipping overhead.

Itai introduced Yvanne to more distant cousins and uncles and aunts than she could possibly keep track of, men and women of all ages. Each one greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and a quick embrace, too swiftly and with too much assurance for her to protest.

And not a single one of them batted an eye at all the magic.

Magic didn’t seem to exactly be common in Dairsmuid, but every once in a while she would spot a shopkeeper levitating his wares, or a gondolier lighting a lantern with a snap of his fingers. Everywhere she saw spirits, mostly formless wisps, but larger, more distinct spirits, too. Children chased them like chickens, earning scoldings from their parents when they were caught. She watched, rapt, one group of mage children play a game of spark-shooting with each other. As she watched something cracked open deep inside her, and suddenly she wanted to cry.

“Alright, there?” said Itai. She snapped out of it, drawing her eyes away from a scene where one child chased a wisp right over the edge and into the water, where he was fished out by an irritated gondolier. She just barely managed to nod.

Itai kept rambling as he took her around, away from the center of the city—”Dairsmuid’s mostly on the water now, but old timers will tell you how the sea used to be much further out“—past rows of fishermen hauling in oysters and crayfish—”They’re best with lemon sauce,”—inland towards residential areas that were raised over mud and peat rather than standing water. They went past shrines to Andraste laid with offerings of fire-lilies—”What? Of course we worship Andraste! What a strange question,”—past spirit-lanterns nestled in the branches of the cypresses—”They’re always lit, so nobody falls off the platform. And if someone does, the spirits signal the night watchman to come over and fish them out…it’s usually just the drunks, though.”

Yvanne found herself liking Itai quite a lot. Until—

“And my Templar training isn’t so bad, usually, but master has us getting up so early, and usually at night I find myself thinking of so many things and unable to sleep—”

She stopped in her tracks. It took him a few seconds to notice, and he turned, puzzled.

“Your what training?”

“Templar training,” he repeated. “Are you alright? You look like you ate something curdled.”

“I didn’t realize Dairsmuid had Templars.” She did not try to keep the hiss out of her voice. Including my own family.

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “Sorry, I don’t get it. What’s the problem?”

How in Thedas was she to respond to that? “So was that why they picked you to give me the tour? Were you supposed to keep an eye on me and cut me down in case I turned out to be dangerous after all? I knew I was right to be suspicious—”

“Hold on!” Itai was laughing. Actually laughing! “I think you’re confused. In Dairsmuid, Templar is a ceremonial role. We don’t take lyrium or anything like the westerners. I’m not even being taught to fight with this thing—” He tapped the ornate weapon belted to his hip. “It’s all just rituals and basic forms.”

“Then—” She stumbled. “Then what’s the point?”

He shrugged. “Tradition? Got to be a Circle at Dairsmuid, with Templars. So we have them. We’re supposed to keep the Seers safe, but the Seers don’t really need protection, so it’s pretty boring. Once I finish training, I’m probably going to be a fisherman like my da. Look, the sword’s ceremonial—it’s not even sharp.”

She must have still been staring. He smiled, embarrassed. “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I don’t really know much about western Circles.”

Maker, but this place was weird.

“I can’t believe the Chantry lets this place exist,” Yvanne said just as the silence was growing awkward..

“Well, Rivain’s pretty far from Orlais.” He shrugged. “We do things our own way. Really, the Qunari up north are a much bigger problem, but Dairsmuid’s not anywhere near Kont-Arr. Anyway, the Seers wouldn’t let anything happen.”

“Just what is a Seer? Exactly?”

Itai looked at her like she’d just asked the color of the sky. “Huh? But you’re a Seer. Aren’t you?”

She shook her head.

“You know—a woman who communes with the spirits. You call them mages out west, right?”

“But plenty of men are mages,” said Yvanne. “What do you do with the boys who are born with magic?”

Itai snorted, laughing.“Nobody’s born with magic. Spirits pick who they want to talk to. And sure, boys can talk to spirits, but they can’t be Seers.”

“Why not?”

“They just can’t.” He scratched his head. “Look, I don’t really know. Why don’t you ask Maita? She’s not a Seer yet, but she will be. Come on, you’ll like her. I have to get home and help da clean today’s catch, anyway, so I’ll leave you with her, if that’s alright.”

Three girls sat laughing and weaving reed baskets as Itai and Yvanne approached. One of them stood in anticipation, her eyes widening in delight. All three girls wore bright brass jewelry, but one—the Seer?—wore the most; bangles on her wrists and ankles, and a headdress of overlapping discs that glittered and clinked with her tiniest movement.

“Is this her?” she demanded of Itai, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Oh, it is! Oh, welcome! We are also so glad you have come.” She jangled as she wrapped Yvanne in a tight, loud embrace. “Ambuya told us you had come.”

“But how—”

“Oh, but your hair!” Maita gasped. Never had Yvanne heard anyone sound so heartbroken over hair. She glanced over her shoulder to plead wordlessly with Itai, but he was already grinning, waving goodbye, and backing away, the traitor. “You poor thing, you must have been through so much.”

Yvanne suddenly became aware of her body, sharply and unpleasantly. She hadn’t looked at herself in so long that she had forgotten that others could still see her. Maker, she didn’t even want to think about how she probably smelled She self-consciously tucked a piece of it behind her ear. Unending months of neglect and salt had caused it to dread up into unsalvageable masses.

“You must let me fix it for you. Oh, I love to do braids, but–may I?” She reached out to touch Yvanne’s hair. She struggled not to flinch. “No, I don’t think there’s enough left to do braids. How about knots? Or twists? I do the best twists; ask anyone.” She turned to her two friends, clinking, for confirmation. Both nodded earnestly.

Nobody had done Yvanne’s hair since she was nine years old. Loriel had been useless at it and nobody else had come close to earning the right. “I—Okay.”

“Yes! Wonderful! Please, do come in. You must have some of my beads. I’m getting married soon, so I won’t get to wear them, and I don’t even have any sisters to give them to. Only brothers–it makes me so sad!”. Then an expression came over her face. “Wait! You aren’t married, are you? I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have assumed…”

Yvanne felt the absence of the ring upon her finger, and answered, truthfully, “No, I’m not married.”

Maita’s animated expression returned. “Oh, good! Then you can have the beads. Come, come!”

She tugged her inside, enticing her friends to come join her in solving Yvanne’s hair problem. She was altogether reminded of Leliana. Yvanne slipped out of her grasp. “Look, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but—we’ve only just met.”

Maita gave her a confused smile. “But of course we’ve met. In the world beneath the world.”

Again that phrase.

“Maita, you’re shaming her,” one of the others said, rolling her eyes. “She has no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh,” Maita said, suddenly embarrassed. “Oh, no, you really don’t, do you?”

If Yvanne had not spent the past years being humbled over and over again, she might have taken offense. As it was, she only shrugged.

Maita covered her face in shame. “I’m so sorry—I assumed, since you were training with Ambuya—we were all so jealous when we heard…”

“Sorry,” she muttered. “I’m afraid I only look Rivaini. I’m not a part of any of this. I’m certainly not a Seer.”

“But you are a Seer,” Maita said encouragingly. “Or you will be.”

She crossed her arms, doubtful. “She said I was only beginning to learn. That I was already late.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll learn. You’re her blood, after all.”

“Isn’t half of Dairsmuid her blood? I’ve lost track of how many cousins I’ve met today.”

Maita laughed. She had a musical laugh. “Perhaps not so much as half! Our Buya had many sons, but even those who are not her blood are still her family; she is buya to all of us.”

Yvanne, who had been assuming that ‘Buya’ was the old woman’s name, made a small adjustment.

Dairsmuid had a public bathhouse, and she was in luck—today was the women’s day to use it. The next several hours went to matters of hair and beads and other things so trivial that Yvanne had nearly forgotten they existed. Was there really still a world of moisturizing hair cream and scents and jewelry? She had liked such things, once, because in the Circle they had been—if not forbidden, then strictly discouraged, and difficult to get a hold of. The habit had stayed with her as the Vigil’s keeper, and she had yet to be cured of it. It was so ridiculous. It was so nice.

Somewhere in this process she told the story of her travels. She hadn’t meant to—she’d thought it far too painful—but somehow it all came out. She started with hiding in Highever—she left out that she had ever been a Grey Warden—and by the time she got to the part with the pirates her hair was done. It had been long all her life, and was twisted close to her head and bound with bells and beads. She looked both like and unlike Isabela, like and unlike her old self. She had never felt so light; she couldn’t stop tilting her head back and forth and feeling the absence of the weight. It was strange, but not—bad. No, not bad at all.

By then it was time for the evening meal was upon them, and Maita’s mother—a stout woman who had clearly never taken no for an answer in her life—was insisting. Yvanne ate with Maita and her mother and her younger brothers who stared at her with curious eyes the size of dinner plates. Maita’s mother, it turned out, was not from Dairsmuid, but from a village on the eastern coast.

“—I came here to be with my girl, of course. She wanted to learn here in the capital, and I was not about to let her go alone,” she said proudly.

Yvanne slept there on a palette by the smouldering hearth, sick with imagining what it would be like to have a mother like that.

As the days passed and her great-grandmother did not summon her, she was folded into Maita’s family almost without noticing. Maita had three younger brothers who Yvanne somehow fell into the watching of—boys of six, ten, and twelve, who begged her to show them how to make lightning. She helped with the chores, kept the boys busy. She even learned a few words of the local Rivaini dialect. On the last day of the week, she helped decorate the household shrine to Andraste with marsh-lillies and necklaces of carved wooden beads. The prayers spoken over the shrine were not entirely unlike the Chant, but not entirely like it, either.

Finally came market day, so Yvanne saw the Dairsmuid market. Maita tugged her along as she did her family’s shopping, informing her of what fruits were in season and asking frequent questions about what things were like in Ferelden.

“Oh, I used to love the star-reader,” Maita sighed, pointing out a woman’s nondescript stall. “Of course, it is not Seeing, but that’s what made it special. My friends and I used to giggle for hours over the fates the stars had in store for us. The men we would marry, how many children we would have…” She trailed off, then finished cheerfully, “But I’ll be getting married soon.”

Yvanne could not help but notice that no husband-to-be was in evidence.

Maita clinked loudly as she laughed. “I haven’t met him yet, of course! He lives in a village far away from here, one that needs a Seer. Once I have passed the ritual, I’ll be ready to serve. I’m told he’s very kind. Is it bad that I hope he’s handsome, too?” She giggled behind her hand. “But you aren’t married! Do you want to consult the star-reader? Don’t you ever wonder what your husband will be like?

“Hm,” said Yvanne. “No, thank you.”

Soon after Maita encountered a friend of hers, and fell inextricably into an animated conversation that Yvanne couldn’t follow at all. Slighted, and resentful that she felt so, she wandered away. She could hear in the middle distance bell-like music. The source of it turned out to be a Vashoth woman sitting cross-legged, producing the tune from an instrument Yvanne had no name for, a wooden box lined with metal rods that produced unearthly music under the Vashoth’s careful fingers. Too soon, the song ended, and she lifted her hornless head to smile in thanks at the crowd.

Only then did Yvanne notice the scars around her lips.

“Did you mean to buy something?” the Vashoth asked suddenly. Yvanne forced herself not to stare.

“I have no money,” she stammered, then added, “Sorry.”

The saarebaas sized her up, and smiled. As she did, her scars instantly became the most noticeable thing about her. “Oh, I see. You’re new; one of Buya’s girls, aren’t you? I am called Amarna.”

“So I’m told,” Yvanne said stiffly

“You’re a bit old to start training.”

“I’ve had training.”

The saarebas laughed shrugging. “Mm. Well, it was probably better than the training I got.”

Yvanne’s eyes flicked to the woman’s scars again.

Amarna snorted good-naturedly. “Admiring these?” she said, touching her lips.

“I wasn’t—”

The former saarebas laughed. “Go ahead and look, I’m not ashamed.”

Yvanne wanted to apologize, but now she worried that it would only make it worse. Luckily the awkwardness was broken by a little Vashoth girl in pigtails, no more than eight years old, and already as high as Yvanne’s shoulder.

“Look what my friend showed me how to do!” the little girl said breathlessly to—presumably—her mother, ignoring Yvanne entirely. She extended her pudgy, little-girl hands palms up. Fireballs bloomed there, first, red, then yellow, then green and blue. Yvanne startled backwards and nearly knocked over a rack of fishing spears. “Are you proud of me?”

“Very good!” her mother beamed as Yvanne desperately tried to stabilize the rack of spears. “Indeed I am proud of you. But do you remember the rules?”

The girl let the fireballs dissipate. “No fire without my tutors watching,” she said ruefully, rolling her eyes.

“That’s right. Now go play.”

Only then did the little girl notice Yvanne and mutter a shy ‘hello’ before running off again.

“Sorry for her,” said the saarebas. “She’s always trying things she’s not quite ready for yet.”

“That…must be difficult.”

“I can’t even tell you how many times she’s hurt herself!” She shook her head. “But if she makes no mistakes, she’ll never learn.”

Yvanne had been that age when she’d first discover her magic. She never would have dreamed of showing her father. She’d hidden it. Had prayed for the Maker to take it away. “I’m surprised you don’t worry.”

“Of course I worry! What mother doesn’t? But she has good teachers here. I’ll never be much of a mage, but the Seers take care of her. And if she’ll receive some scars for her own foolishness, she will never have scars like mine.” She said it in well-rehearsed tones, like this was a speech she had been obliged to recite too many times.

Yvanne remembered Cheddar, and what had happened to her sarebaaset. But no, she daren’t ask. Instead she said, “What kind of instrument is that?”

And like so Maita found her some minutes later, profusely apologizing for leaving her alone, exchanging pleasantries with Amarna, and finally dragged her away.

“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you,” she said in hushed tones. “I forget that most people outside Rivain aren’t used to the freed saarebas. Quite a lot of them live here.”

That night Yvanne could not get to sleep beneath the unfamiliar ceiling. She thought of Amarna’s little daughter whose magic would only ever earn her a gentle admonition, and envy rose in her gorge like poison. What she would have given to have grown up here in Dairsmuid. What might she have become if her father had brought her here instead of to Ferelden? Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t he loved her enough to bring her here? All those years in Kinloch, the wretched thing that place made her—

She thought of Amarna’s scars, and thought—yes, it could have been worse. But it could have been better, too.

Yes, she was here now, but what good did that do her? It didn’t make up for it. Nothing ever would. Dairsmuid was not her home. If she had ever had one, it had been Vigil’s Keep.

That home was lost to her. Perhaps did not exist at all. Just like her mother and her father and her sisters. Everything was lost, lost—all that remained was here. A wave of nauseous longing rolled over her like the evening tide, and she went to sleep no less conflicted and confused.

—

She dreamt again of Loriel, buried deep within her tower of stone. Her hair was longer now than it had ever been, neatly parted in the center. Somehow in their time apart it had stopped frizzing, and fell to her back in elegant feathers. Were there new lines on her face? How old was she now?

She was writing busily in a blank parchment manuscript, occasionally consulting a tome at her elbow. She scribbled for hours, only occasionally pausing to sip water or stand up to stretch. All these little gestures, so familiar, so utterly strange.

Who was she? Who was she?

“I never even knew you, did I?” Yvanne said to her, knowing she wouldn’t be heard. “Not that you were any better. You never knew me either, did you? I don’t think I ever felt more alone than when I was with you.”

And Loriel kept scratching away, oblivious. It was starting to make her angry.

“You know,” she said, “If it hadn’t been for all that fucking blood magic, maybe you could have heard me say all these things. Maybe you could have heard me at all. I was too much a coward to say what I meant to your face, and now you’ll never know how I really felt. You selfish fucking bitch.”

And then—

—Loriel looked up.

Her forehead wrinkled in that burningly familiar way. Her mouth began to form the shape of the word, who—?

The dream collapsed.

—

Yvaanne woke in the middle of the night, knowing that she was summoned to Dairsmuid’s great tree. She received no message; only a conviction that she was wanted, and an intuitive understanding of where to go. She walked there, barefoot, the ancient half-drowned forest singing all around her.

Buya was exactly where she had been, awake and bright eyed. “I am sorry to have woken you. Did I interrupt your dreaming?”

She shook her head. “I did not want that dream.”

“I see.” The old woman’s lips still did not move when she spoke. “Have you decided, then, if you will stay and learn from me?”

“I…”

A heaviness lay on her heart. After a week in Dairsmuid, she had never missed the Vigil more. She missed her high grey walls, her fluttering banners, the smell of smelting iron in the air. She missed the training, the drinking games, the knowledge that everyone around her knew her name, that people would care if she was gone.

But here in Dairsmuid, everyone somehow knew her name. They would care if she was gone. So they didn’t know her, so what? Nobody had ever known her.

Dairsmuid was here. Dairsmuid was now. And was love not born of base familiarity? Was love anything besides mere exposure, mere proximity?

“Great-grandmother, I want to stay,” she said. “But…”

Ambuya waited, patient.

“But there’s someone I still love. Far from here.”

“Ah,” the old woman said. “I see. I will not pretend I am not disappointed, but it was good to lay my mortal eyes on you, my daughter.”

Yvanne shook her head, and knelt. Then she looked up, her eyes streaming. “And I never want to see or think about her, ever again. Please, grandmother—I am yours. Please, teach me.”

Ambuya smiled, reached out, and placed a hand on Yvanne’s bowed head. She was resolved; she would become a part of this. She would be one of many, and she would make this life a good one if it killed her.

#dragon age #amell #surana #femslash #rivain #dairsmuid #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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degenerate-perturbation · 4 years

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Chapters: 20/32 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Yvanne set to shipbuilding—an art of which she knew nothing—with a ferocity of an animal trapped.

A ship was just a pile of floating wood and a sail, wasn’t it? It didn’t need to be fancy. It just had to get her off this forsaken rock. She was a mage—the youngest-Harrowed mage in her entire Circle—and she had absolutely nothing better to do, so by Andraste’s fiery tits, she would build a seaworthy vessel, and she was getting off this damn rock.

Her first attempt didn’t even hold together. Her second fell apart as soon as it hit the water. Her third overturned and dumped her into the surf almost immediately. The fourth made it a little further before doing the exact same thing. The fifth was destroyed in a sudden storm and was never launched. The sixth held together in body, but the sail kept ripping away.

By this time it had been weeks, and she was weighing the possibility of drowning herself after all.

Assuming this place would let her drown. Now that was a frightening thought.

You know, you don’t have to do this alone, she thought. Or remembered, or was told.

At first the thought seemed like nonsense. Of course she had to do it alone. There was no one else here.

But—no, that wasn’t true, was it? She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone at all.

“Alright, spirits,” she said aloud. “You want me to come home, you’ll have to help me.” No answer that she could hear, but she didn’t care. They would help her; she’d already decided. It was their own fault that she was in this mess.

At Kinloch, spirit magic had been painfully limited. Even her own discipline of spirit healing, closest to the Fade, had been restricted to interactions with nonverbal wisps. As a safety precaution; lest the spirit mage become corrupted. Yvanne had always liked the wisps, brainless as they were, but they weren’t much for conversation. She needed more than wisps. She needed a shipwright.

So she started summoning spirits.

Everyone she summoned, she interrogated. What was the best shape for a small deepwater vessel? How could she best seal the space between the woven wood? How might she make a sturdy sail, and how ought she rig it? What did they know of navigating deep waters? Of coastal shelves? Of the wind patterns in this part of the sea?

At first it was slow going. She didn’t know much about summoning particular spirits. Even if she could more or less zero in on spirits of knowledge and curiosity, getting one that knew anything about shipbuilding was harder, and getting them to talk about that instead of whatever random thing they were interested in at the moment was nigh impossible. Yvanne learned a great deal about the varieties of beetle native to the jungles of Seheron, the exhaustive details of Avvar inter-tribal relations, and the true names of every mollusc that lived at the bottom of the Narrow Sea, but not much about shipbuilding.

At least spirits were decent company. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to her after months of isolation and fever dreams.

Spirits of Curiosity would be happy to tell her anything they knew, if she answered their questions in turn. Only their questions were esoteric things she never knew how to answer, like ‘how many truth and beauty in a singleton?’ and ‘what is the nature of endings?’. Many spirits of knowledge immediately took offense to be treated this way and refused to share anything until she humbled herself. Some haughty spirits who she was relatively sure were Pride demons in the making could be made to help her just by watching her do it wrong, whereupon their urge to correct her took over and the entire task

One watched her clumsily stitch her sail in the making for the better part of the hour before snapping and begging to have the use of her hands.

She hesitated. Wasn’t that like possession?

No, no, not your soul, not even your whole body, it snapped. Just your hands!

In the Circle this would have been an obvious dupe, a trick to get her to let her guard down. For days Yvanne refused. But her hands would not cooperate. Even if she knew in her mind how to do it, she didn’t know in her body. On the edge of tears of frustration, no longer caring if she became possessed—after all, who could she hurt here?—Yvanne gave in.

It was strange, to feel a force besides her own animating her body, but not altogether unpleasant. The sail was finished by sundown, and she knew that if she had tried to do it herself, it would have taken all week, and still come apart in the end.

She thanked it as it left. It haughtily deigned to acknowledge her, and returned to the Fade. And she was no worse for wear.

One spirit, however, was notably absent—the fiery-eyed charcoal being who had appeared to her before. She’d grown wary of it, even to hate it, but now she missed its presence.

“Well?” she said to the air. “And what about you? You started all this, didn’t you? It was your doing? Come out, then. Show yourself, and let’s talk.”

But the spirit—if indeed it was a spirit—wasn’t feeling chatty. Even the whispers had died down since she had begun work on the ship, as though they were satisfied that she was finally getting a move on.

In those days she came to understand all that a spirit mage could be. To be a spirit mage was to be more than yourself. It was to be part of a vast network of experience and emotion and being; it was to be part of the world, this one and the other. She was not yet such a mage; but she could imagine becoming one.

All the while, the sun rose and set—but never where she expected it. Time was passing on the island, sure enough—but in fits and starts and haphazard bursts. She tried not to think of what world she would find when she finally sailed away from this place.

Slowly, but much quicker than it otherwise might have been, her ship came together. Sometimes the furry jungle creatures came out to watch her at her work, having determined her not to be a threat. A few brave ones even ventured out to have a closer look. On the day she raised and secured the mast, they broke out in excited whoops and chitters. She’d miss them.

Before braving open water, she took her ship for a jaunt around the coast. A sailor’s memory, collected by a spirit of longing, filled her mind, and she knew just which rope to pull, which to secure, how to catch the wind in the triangular sail so that she always travelled in the direction she wanted. She launched successfully, and ran back aground without incidence. She was seaworthy.

The ship could float, but would it survive the open sea?

She began to make preparations to finally leave the island. She stocked up on provisions; preserving what could be preserved, hoping the rest would last at least a little while. With hesitation, she forewent water; for that she would summon rain. There wouldn’t be room on her one-woman ship otherwise; she would be relying on fresh-caught fish for some of her food as it was.

Initially she tried to chart the likely winds in the area; but winds came with seasons, and she had no idea what season it was. She didn’t even know where she was. She had initially assumed a tropical latitude; but maybe even that wasn’t the case. She knew nothing about what she would find when she sailed beyond the island’s coastal shelf.

Finally everything that could be done was done. Her boat was sturdy. Her provisions were stocked. The winds here never changed—they only ever blew inward—so there was no point in waiting for a favorable wind. All that was left…was to go.

Come home, they’d said. And what would happen if they took her back to Ferelden? If she saw the pennants of Amaranthine again? Would she face that place again? Or would she turn around and walk right back into the sea?

“Okay, spirits,” she muttered, double-checking the security of her provisions and hoisting the sail. “I don’t know where I need to go, or what I’m supposed to do, so this one is all on you.”

The wind filled her makeshift sail.

—

The first day at sea, she watched the sun’s path as it rose and set and rose again. She was half-convinced the island would not let her go, that no matter how the wind blew, she would always find the island in her sights.

But that didn’t happen. She watched it disappear behind the waves, and stay disappeared. For so long she’d thought of nothing but getting away.

Now here she was, away.

Even the spirit voices, her constant companions, had quieted.

Now here she was, alone.

She had a paddle, and a sail she could trim, and she could find her way by the stars which now were nearly the same every night, but she knew it wouldn’t matter. The sea was too vast and too strong. She would go where its current took her. Her skin had long since cracked and dried and callused from salt and sweat and labor, and her hands ached as new exposure opened old cuts. All around her stretched horizon.

The wind blew. The waves lapped. The sun shined.

Now here she was, alive.

On one day, a dolphin swam alongside her for nearly an hour, curiously bumping her craft with its head, so hard she worried it would break, until the creature grew bored and swam away. Another day a school of fish leapt out of the water and landed in her boat by the armful, flopping and squirming in desperation. Another day she woke to cloudy skies and an approaching storm, and all day long the rain and wind buffeted her, the waves rose to terrifying heights, and if not for her magic, she surely would have been lost. But as the sun rose the next day, her boat was intact, most of her provisions still aboard, and she was still alive.

There was still no land in sight.

Slowly her provisions dwindled. To conserve energy, she slept. The vivid realness of her Fade dreams had not lessened with distance from the island—they appeared to simply be part of her now. She walked upon the verdant sea as her unconscious body floated. She dreamt of mangrove trees and bald cypresses heavy with grayish tangles of moss, shooting up from deep dark standing water. She dreamt of jeweled spiders in impossible webs, of morning fog and heavy air, of somewhere new-old and strange-familiar. She dreamt of a grand city rising above it all, with a tower of living wood pulsing with life at its center. The whole time she could not shake the sense of pursuing somebody who always remained just barely out of reach. Even when she did not sleep, she was not fully awake. She was a mote upon the endless iron-blue, and she was no one and nothing, and she was the only soul in the whole world, and she was all she needed.

She awoke when her ship ran aground.

Truly awake for the first time in weeks, she shot up and nearly sobbed with relief. There was land! There were the mangrove trees, there were the rocky shores!

Then she realized that her boat was rapidly filling with water.

She shot up. There was no saving the craft; the shore rocks had fatally gashed open the faithful vessel’s belly. In her haste to check the damage, she stood too quickly, overbalanced the craft, and capsized.

It wasn’t the first time on her journey that the vessel had capsized and required rescue. But now there was no saving it. The remnants of her provisions were floating away from her.

She wobbled onto the rocky shore.

Yvanne didn’t know how long she’d been on the island—or how many years had passed in the interim. But wherever she was now, it was where she was supposed to be. She could feel the same pull she had felt before, stronger now, urging her to come further inland.

Wherever this was, it wasn’t Ferelden. She released a sigh of relief she’d forgotten she’d taken.

Well, that could wait. First she would dry off, and find some food. Then she would go and meet her destiny, or whatever it was she was supposed to do here.

Having grown accustomed to aloneness, she quite forgot that openly using magic might earn her sanction. So she quite brazenly summoned a pile of logs to come walk over to her and arrange themselves to her liking, set them magically afire, and earthshaped for herself a comfortable place to recline. She was considering whether her food options would be better inside the forest or in the water when she realized that she was being watched.

A whole group of travellers were staring openly at her. How much had they seen?—no, it didn’t matter. They’d seen enough. Wild visions of discovery by Templars shot through her mind. They would report her. Of course they would. And then she would have Templars to evade—no, better prevent it in the first place. Better handle this before it got away from here, even if she did something she didn’t want to have to do—

And while these awful thoughts spun in her head, the travellers approached with smiling faces and greeted her in a language she didn’t understand.

“I—what?” she coughed. The man who’d spoken, dark-skinned and blue-eyed with a turban wrapped around his head frowned slightly and repeated what he’d said. When her slackjawed expression didn’t change, he said something else, and then—

“How about this?”

“Oh! I—understood.” It had been so long since she’d talked to anyone but Fade spirits. Now he probably thought she barely even spoke Common.

“Good!” he said, beaming. “Greetings to you, Seeress. Have you had a hard journey?”

“I—er—uh,” Yvanne said intelligently, looking back at the sunken remnants of her boat, then back to the travellers. “Yes?”

“Then of course we must feed you! No, we insist. We would not leave a seer in need.” The man gave a knowing look to his companion.

In astonishingly quick succession—Maker, where were they getting it all?—the travellers brought out food, blankets, cushions to sit on, spices for the fire. After weeks at sea and untold months on a deserted island she didn’t have the decorum to protest; she devoured everything they gave her and asked for more.

Near the end of the meal one of their party brought out a pan flute and started to play; a woman besides him started to sing and clap along. Someone handed her a flask of something, something sweet that burned in the best way, even as she realized that she didn’t particularly want to be drunk anymore.

The hour passed in easy, if nonverbal, camaraderie. It seemed that only one of the travellers had a language in common with her, though some of his (she assumed) children made some attempts. It was he that finally said: “Seeress, we have shared with you all that we had, foregoing nothing. Now you will speak to the spirits for us?”

Yvanne stared at him. “Sorry—what?”

The man gazed at her with a small, puzzled smile. “The spirits. You will intercede with them on our behalf, yes?”

“I...don’t know how to do that. I’m sorry.”

The man’s small smile faded to confused frown. One of the children tugged on his tunic, and he said something to her in their native tongue. Now the whole company burst into murmurs. “Of course you can,” the man said to her. “Are you not a seer?”

Yvanne only stared blankly.

Now the man was getting annoyed. “We saw you doing magic,” he said. “Of course you are a seer.”

Oh, she thought. “I’m sorry, I—the problem is I’m not from here, I’m not really a seer. I mean, I am a mage, I can do magic, and I talk to spirits sometimes, but I don’t—know what you’re talking about? I’m really sorry.”

After a beat, the man with the headwrap translated this for the benefit of the rest of the group.

“Not that I’m not grateful!” she assured hurriedly. “Maker knows I am! But I didn’t realize I…”

“No, not. It was our mistake. Do not worry,” said the man in the headwrap, clearly disappointed.

A few more uncomfortable minutes passed. The travellers mostly spoke to each other in their own language and started to pack up their things.

“Well, seer or mage or whoever you are,” said the man in the headwrap, “We must be heading on. Where are you going now?”

“I don’t know. A long time ago I meant to go to Dairsmuid. But I was waylaid. Some force—I think a spirit—is drawing me somewhere, but I don’t know where. I know that doesn’t make much sense. My life has taken some strange turns recently.”

The man adopted gave her a patient, puzzled look. “Good luck to you, then. But if you decide to go to Dairsmuid after all, then you’ve met some fortune. Dairsmuid is less than a league inland, over that way. If you follow the trail you’ll be there within the hour.”

The travellers moved on, and Yvanne was left alone.

The mangroves called: come home. The voice was stronger now than ever.

But this wasn’t home. She had never been here before, for all she saw it in her dreams. Home was flagstones and blue pennants and silverite armor. Home was high iron walls and a mountain of letters to answer. Home was the only person who had ever really known her. Home was someone that she’d never known at all. Home was a tower of shame and disgust, bound up with love and devotion so tight it would never be parted. Home was lost to her.

As though in a dream, Yvanne pushed through the foliage.

As promised the trail through the mangroves gave way to a settlement. Her bare and callused feet stood not on mud but on wood, smooth planks carefully arranged into a walkway raised above the standing water. Houses stood on raised posts, more and more of them as she walked on. A whole city, built on the water. Long and narrow boats made up more than half the traffic of this city. She knew exactly where to go.

Come home.

Finally a tower rose up before her eyes; not of stone, but wood, and not of dead wood, but living wood. The biggest tree she had ever seen in her life grew there. Young men and women stood outside it, but when they saw her approach, they let her pass.

And in she went. Come home.

Inside was dark, lit only by greenish, flickering wisplight. An old, old woman sat upon a throne of living wood. Her eyes were closed. She breathed, but only just. Yvanne watched her for a time, and only then did she realize that the old woman did not merely sit upon the throne of living wood; she was fused to it.

“Was it you who called me here?” Yvanne demanded.

Not speaking, nor opening her eyes, the old woman inclined her head.

Here within the tree, the spirit voices were utterly silent. Yvanne was alone in her head for the first time in months.

Questions leapt to her lips. Why? How? Who are you? What do you want from me? Why did you bring me here? But her tongue remained still, and the old woman said nothing.

“Well,” Yvanne said instead, and sank to her knees. “Here I am.”

The old woman’s ancient puckered mouth formed into a smile.

“Here you are,” she said, and opened her eyes. They were green and pale and bright as the moon, shining out from her ancient chestnut face like jewels. “Come here.”

Yvanne came forward, eyes downcast. She could not stand to look at this person. It was all too much.

A papery hand touched her cheek, raising her chin. Yvanne found herself staring into the woman’s remarkable eyes. For a long moment they only looked.

“So,” the old woman said, “here you are.” Then she smiled, utterly radiant. “My heart rejoices to see you in the flesh, my great grand-daughter. We have all been waiting.”

#please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction #dragon age #enough kvetching about politics back to what this blog is really about--lesbian fanfiction #amell #surana #dragon femslash

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degenerate-perturbation · 4 years

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Chapters: 18/28 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

When the Maiden’s Teeth launched, Yvanne dreaded the onset of seasickness, before remembering that she was here explicitly as a mage didn’t have to hide her magic anymore. At first she felt shy using magic—it had been so long, and a part of her was afraid she’d forgotten—but when the ship began to pitch and roll properly, she rapidly got over it. The spell for suppressing nausea wasn’t exactly simple, but cast well consumed little enough energy that she could afford to keep herself cloaked in its soothing aura indefinitely.

She had spent her last voyage huddled miserably in the hold. Now she stood on the deck, nominally a part of the crew, feeling the spray of the sea

The captain was a grey-bearded Nevarran man. He was, charitably, not particularly talkative.

“When do we arrive?”

“Soon.”

“What should I do if there’s already a strong wind?”

“Eh.”

Yvanne soon gave up.

The strangest thing was how the crew treated her. They were unfailingly polite—but it was a politeness born of fear. After all, all they knew about her was that she was an apostate, a criminal. That she technically wasn’t didn’t seem prudent to mention. Yvanne got the impression that most of them didn’t really know what magic was and wasn’t capable of, and suspected that a few thought that she was already possessed. She tried explaining it to them a few times, and got a lot of polite, nervous nods.

Having nothing to do, she practiced wind spells, dreading the moment she’d be called upon to do her job. The might of her magic had once summoned storms and sustained armies; now she wasn’t sure if she could even manage a decent gale.

But as it happened along the journey the winds were fair, and Yvanne’s services weren’t needed. After several days of bored staring at the horizon, they made port.

Dairsmuid...wasn’t what she’d anticipated. It seemed so plain. She had been expecting—well, more than this. This port looked not too different from any large Ferelden town.

She made to disembark, eager to release her anti-nausea spell, when the captain stopped her. “Be back in two hours.”

“Back?” she said quizzically. “But I’m getting off. Isn’t this Dairsmuid?”

He looked at her like she was stupid. “No,” he said, “This is Jader.”

“Jader? But that’s in Orlais!”

“I congratulate you on your grasp of basic geography.” He went back to examining the manifest.

“But I thought this ship was bound for Rivain.”

“Yes, yes,” the captain said irritably. “Eventually Rivain. But first, Orlais”

“And when exactly will we reach Dairsmuid?” she demanded, but the captain pretended like he hadn’t heard her.

She didn’t go ashore. She spent her two spare hours steaming in her hammock belowdecks, furious at the captain for his rudeness, Anders for putting her on this ship, and the Maker for making her be born in the first place. She would come to regret this decision when the Maiden’s Teeth launched again, and her opportunity to set her feet on dry ground for a time disappeared.

The few days she had spent with nothing to do had been tolerable. The next few, less so. Yvanne could tell by the sun that they were headed west, not east. They were getting further from Dairsmuid. This would be a long voyage.

The prospect of nothing to do for weeks on end but be alone with her thoughts was unspeakable. So she cut the skirt of the dress she’d bought back in Highever in half, clumsily stitched the tattered remnants into half-decent trousers with a borrowed whalebone needle, and resolved to become a sailor.

She learned to tie knots, scale the rigging, read the stars. What she liked best were the songs. The sailors sang work songs as they heaved and pulled, and these she learned swiftest of all; their simple call-and-response structure made that easy.

The crew didn’t seem exactly thrilled by her participatory spirit, though she could usually find someone to show her how to do something that needed to be done. With her magically augmented strength, she made for a fine strong pair of hands, and the Maiden could always use those.

The only member of the Maiden’s crew that didn’t keep some level of distance from Yvanne was a Qunari woman covered in intricate tattoos. She was as much an outsider as Yvanne, and no wonder; as the only Qunari aboard, she stood out. Easily eight feet tall, she had biceps as thick as Yvanne’s waist, and a long white braid that wrapped around the sawn-off remnants of her horns. It was she who taught Yvanne many of the skills she needed to be a real member of the crew.

“So you’re Qunari?” Yvanne finally asked her, by way of casual conversation.

Immediately the woman’s massive hand darted out to cuff her across the ear. Yvanne saw stars. “What was that for!” she demanded.

“I am not Qunari. I am Tal Vashoth.”

“Alright,” said Yvanne, who didn’t know the difference and had a hunch that asking would warrant another cuff across the ear. “What’s your name, then?”

“I am called Cheddar.”

“Cheddar?”

“Under the Qun I was told I was Arvaarad. Now I am no longer under the Qun, and I choose what I am called.”

“So you chose to be called Cheddar?”

“Yes,” she said proudly. “And what are you called?”

She hesitated, but what was the point? “I’m Yvanne.”

Cheddar burst out laughing.

“What?” Yvanne demanded. “What’s so funny?”

She grinned. “Someday when we are better friends I will tell you what that word means in my language.”

Yvanne harrumphed. But she took that to mean that they were at least some kind of friends.

From Jader they made port in Cumberland. The College of Magi met here, Yvanne was vaguely aware. The Maiden wasn’t staying in port for long enough for Yvanne to see much of it, though the soaring pillars and golden domes of Cumberland tempted severely. Surely this was a city large enough to fit several Denerims within it. She found herself feeling terribly provincial, and sorry that she wouldn’t be staying.

After Cumberland the Maiden again made west. Yvanne nearly tore her hair out when she realized where the vessel was headed. She was further now from Dairsmuid than ever. She confronted the captain over this, nearly kicking down the door—with slightly more force than she could naturally produce.

“Yes, yes,” he told her, unphased by the crackling in the air. “First Jader, then Cumberland, then Val Royeaux. Then Dairsmuid.”

“Are there any other stops that I should know about?”

“Get back to work,” the captain said disinterestedly.

Her anger drained quickly, though, when they made port in Val Royeaux. It shamed her proud Ferelden heart, but it was the most beautiful city she had ever seen. They had a few days of shore leave, and received some of their pay besides. This astonished her; she hadn’t realized that she was getting paid.

She wandered the markets and cafes with Cheddar, gawking at the ridiculously outfitted and masked Orlesians.

“I’ve been a sailor for many years,” said Cheddar, “But Val Royeaux still impresses me. Bit of a backwater compared to Qunandar, sure, but I like how colorful it is.”

“What’s Qunandar like?”

“Big. Efficient. Steel and smoke and wondrous works.” The corners of her mouth tightened. “But I don’t miss it.”

They passed a stand of colorful pastries that looked like tiny clouds. Cheddar’s face lit up. “Here, little bird, you have to try these,” she said eagerly. “I’ve only ever seen them sold in this particular quarter of Val Royeaux.”

Yvanne bought one. It tasted exactly like how she always imagined clouds tasted, and disappeared almost at once. The sugar was so intense it made her teeth hurt. “Since when am I ‘little bird’?” she asked, wondering whether it would be worth her meager pay to buy another sugar-cloud.

Cheddar grinned sheepishly. “Sorry. I can’t bear to call you—what you’re named. It’s just so silly.”

“This coming from someone named Cheddar?” Yvanne said indignantly.

“At least I chose my silly name.”

They both laughed.

For the first time in years—for the first time since she’d met her—Yvanne hardly thought about Loriel at all.

—

The next leg of the journey was the longest yet. Yvanne’s hands grew thick and calloused. Salt settled in her hair, and the sun freckled her skin. As time went on, she had to rely on arcane warrior magic less and less to pull her weight. For the first time in her life, she actually had something identifiable as muscles.

One morning she forgot to cast the anti-nausea spell, and didn’t realize it til late in the afternoon, when despite its absence, she felt perfectly fine. The sea was within her now. She wondered how much sooner this might have happened if she’d forgone the spell entirely.

The other sailors never quite felt fully at ease with her, but that was changing, especially as she used magic less and less. Sailors had to trust each other in order to work together. But what she thought really did it was the songs. It was hard to sing with a person, striving for the same goal, hauling the same load, and not get to like them at least a little. The longer Yvanne spent as a sailor the more the crew seemed to forget that she was also a mage.

“You have to tell me,” she asked Cheddar one night. “Why Cheddar?”

The Vashoth woman wrapped her braid contemplatively around one massive finger. “I will tell you,” she said. “When I decided I would no longer be Qunari, it was not an easy journey. First I had to escape the Qun in mind and soul. That part was very hard. Then I had to figure out what I was to do with my Saarebaset—”

“Saarebaset?”

“Things like you. Eh, I forget the word—maj? Mage?”

A drop of cold slid down Yvanne’s back. “Things?”

“In your language Saarebas means ‘dangerous thing,’” Cheddar said casually. “And yes, I knew they were dangerous. I knew if I ceased to be Arvaarad, demons could take them, and many would suffer. But they made me so sad. I didn’t want to hold their leash anymore.”

“You were like a Templar.”

“No,” Cheddar said irritably. “I was Arvaarad. Now I am Cheddar. Get it straight, eh?”

“Alright, alright. So why Cheddar?”

“Oh, yes. I told my Saarebaset that I was freeing them. They begged me not to. They would be lost without me. That was the worst part. It almost made me reconsider! But I was no longer Qunari. I could not protect them, even if I wanted to.”

“What happened to them?”

“Oh, they killed themselves, I think,” Cheddar said vaguely. “That is what they are supposed to do. I doubt they had the imagination to do anything else.”

“And you let them?!” Yvanne stood up, unconsciously pulling in Fade energy in preparation for—she didn’t know what.

“I could hardly have stopped them.”

“You could have freed them, too!”

“I told you—they did not want to be free.”

“You didn’t try!”

“They were Qunari, body, mind, and soul,” said Cheddar, unperturbed. “I had no say over their souls. That was their business and theirs alone.”

“Then—you could have stayed for them.”

“And remained a prisoner myself?” She shook her head. “Now that I was not willing to do.”

Yvanne had no response to that.

“That’s life for you.” Cheddar shrugged. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

With effort, Yvanne let go of the Fade energy she hadn’t realized she’d been holding on to. “Yes.”

“Once I had freed my mind and my soul, I had only to free my body. Now that part was easy. I just walked away.”

“You could do that?”

“Sure. It was easy. I was stationed in Kont-arr, on the north coast of Rivain. Hardly the Qunari heartland.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” said Cheddar, “I was walking down the road, completely alone for the first time in my life. The first night, I slept under an white-barked tree, ate what I could find, drank from puddles of rainwater, and I did not see another soul. At some point along the way I realized I was no longer Arvaarad, but did not yet know who I would be. I could not stand to be Arvaarad, but neither could I stand to be nobody. Within that very hour I saw a man headed up the road, his cart pulled by a brawny goat. I did not speak his language very well, but I asked him the name of his goat. He answered that it was ‘Cheddar,’ and that was as fine a name to me as any, so I decided that it would be my name, too.”

“You named yourself after a goat?”

“Yes!”

“That doesn’t strike you as demeaning? What with, you know—” Yvanne gestured vaguely at the remnants of her horns.

“No more demeaning than accepting someone else’s naming of you like a dumb animal is named,” she said disdainfully.

“Fair, I guess.” Perhaps some day she would leave Yvanne behind for good. “I didn’t realize you were from Rivain. What’s it like?”

Cheddar thought on this. “Bit of a backwater,” she said eventually. “Swamps are full of crazy women summoning demons. But it was home, for a time. Maybe you’ll like it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

They lay in their hammocks for a time—Yvanne curled inward, Cheddar nearly spilling out from hers, legs dragging on the deck floor. The Maiden creaked in her comfortable way. Somewhere beyond the haven of the ship that had become (however briefly) home, roared the sea.

Eventually, Yvanne said: “So will you tell me what my name means in your language now?”

Cheddar grinned. “No. It is much funnier this way.”

—

“Hey, Cheddar,” Yvanne said as Ostwick—yet another stop that Yvanne was not, in so many words, informed of—disappeared behind them. “You were kind of a Templar—”

“Arvaarad,” Cheddar corrected. “Not much like your toothless Templars.”

Toothless. Not the word Yvanne would have used. “Right,” she said, disheartened. “I’m just surprised. Of everyone on this ship you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to think I’m dangerous—”

Cheddar burst into laughter. “Of course you are dangerous!” she said. “At any moment demons could burst through and take your soul, and then you would kill us all in your mad rage.”

“That—that wouldn’t happen!” Yvanne said, indignant. “I trained to guard against that. I was the youngest Harrowed mage in a generation.”

Cheddar waved away her words with a wiggle of her fingers. “Trained,” she said dismissively. “That is just there to make you feel safe! You cannot train to guard against a demon. It will take you whether you will it or no, if it decides it wants you.”

“If you think I’m so dangerous, then why befriend me?” Yvanne demanded. “Why agree to work alongside me at all?”

Cheddar gave her a quizzical look.

“The sea is dangerous,” she explained, as though Yvanne was a slow child. “But still we sail upon it.”

“But—”

Cheddar reached out to pat her on the back. “Do not worry. If demons eat your heart,I won’t blame you. I’ll know you couldn’t have done anything about it.”

Yvanne was so puzzled by this reaction that she only managed to produce a consternated, “Thanks, I think?”

“Enough about that,” said Cheddar. “Ostwick is little to write home about, but next we go to Antiva City. Now that is a marvel! Rialto Bay at this time of year is a flurry of colors from all the ships that come to trade there. You can find anything in Antiva City!”

Yvanne found herself looking forward to it, and not thinking too much about what would come after.

—

But as it happened, Yvanne never reached Antiva City, because off the coast of Llomeryn, they were attacked by pirates.

The rival ship began to approach late in the day. Yvanne didn’t notice it at first. When the captain pulled her away from swabbing the deck to summon a wind, she didn’t think it too strange, although usually she was only ordered to use magic if the winds were really still. A merry gale already the sails that morning, albeit at an angle, when Yvanne took up her position

Her wind magic was woefully inefficient, even she could tell. Only a fraction of the magical energy she was expending was going into the gale itself; the rest sparked off as waste heat, crackling sound, and little lightning strikes that left her hair standing on end. Work like this at Kinloch would have seen her whipped.

“Can’t I stop yet?” she complained to the captain. “The wind’s plenty strong as it is.”

“No.”

“But—”

“You’ve your orders.”

She grumbled, but maintained the wind. Only then did she notice the other ship on the horizon.

“Are we close to a port?” she asked a fellow crewmember, a dwarven woman named Molly who was adjusting the aft sail in earshot. “I thought we weren’t due in Antiva City for another few days.”

Molly only shook her head and grunted in response. By afternoon the captain had not changed his orders, and she was starting to feel faint. Cheddar brought her a midday meal.

“Is it normal for a ship to pursue another for so long?” she asked Cheddar, once she’d finished scarfing the unexciting sailor’s fare.

Cheddar looked to aft, and the other ship there. It was still there—and closer now than ever.

“No,” she said. “Probably pirates. Captain hasn’t said anything to prevent panic, but everyone knows, I think, or at least suspects.”

“Pirates?” Yvanne said anxiously.

“Oh, sure. Plenty of their ilk around here.”

Yvanne watched the ever-less-distant blur for a time. Now she understood the captain’s orders, but would it have killed him to tell her? “How are they still behind us? I’ve been summoning wind all day!”

“They’ll have their own windmage,” Cheddar explained. “And they’ll be in a smaller ship, not so loaded with cargo. They will not catch us at once, but if they are very determined, they will catch us.”

“And then what happens?”

“We fight them, of course!” Cheddar laughed. “These canons are not just for show.”

“And if we lose…?”

Cheddar rubbed her chin. “Well, we might be killed. Or compelled to join their crew, or marooned on an island, or enslaved.”

“Killed? Enslaved?”

“Well, that’s life for you.” Cheddar shrugged. “But I’ve never been killed or enslaved by pirates before, so I don’t see why I should start now.”

Yvanne watched the ship in the distance. It didn’t appear to draw any closer, but that made it worse—the thought that they would be caught inevitably, however long it took if they did not make Antiva City first.

And it was inevitable. At her peak Yvanne had commanded oceans of mana—and even then she’d consumed lyrium by the gallon to sustain her casting habits. Since then, she had abandoned magic, let it atrophy and rot away like a vestigial limb, and while she had forgotten nothing, she was not as strong as she had been. She could already tell that she wouldn’t be able to sustain a wind this strong for much longer; already she was feeling the telltale signs of mana exhaustion.

“Get back to work, windmage!” the captain barked in her ear startling her out of her reverie.

“If I do that, I’ll be useless by sundown,” she protested. “Unless you happen to have a stash of lyrium potions somewhere aboard that you’ve failed to inform me of?”

He scowled at her.

“The problem is you have me summoning wind,” she complained. “I can do so much more than that. If you’d let me—”

“Do your job,” said the captain. She sighed and began again to cast.

And still the pirates approached.

Well, we might be killed...or enslaved. Was that true? She had no way of knowing, but no real reason to doubt. But the Maiden’s cannons were strong, weren’t they?

Now the pirate ship was close enough that even a dull eye could spot the colors they flew.

The crew was beginning to murmur nervously. Some threw her dirty looks, no doubt holding her responsible for being bad at her job.

The next time Cheddar came to check on her, as the sun was setting, even she looked a little unnerved. “What’s going on?” Yvanne panted. She was scraping the very bottom of her well of mana.

“Things don’t look good,” said Cheddar. “Raiders out of Llomeryn can be handled civilly, but these aren’t Raiders. Those are Silesian pirates, sailing out of Tevinter. They don’t generally come this far.”

Yvanne did not like how nervous she sounded. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we had better sink their ship before they engage. Or else.”

“Or else…?”

Cheddar shook her head. “Best not speak of it. If you are lucky you will not live to see it.”

“And what are the odds of us sinking their ship?”

Cheddar made a noncommittal sound and wiggled her hand back and forth.

Yvanne snapped. She ended the wind spell, damn what the captain said. She would have to take this into her own hands. The pirate vessel was obviously too far for ordinary combat magic. She could shoot all the lightning she wanted at them; it would still fall short, though it would probably fry plenty of the fish in the sea in the bargain. And any closer, the pirates’ own mage—and they would well have more than one, if they were out of Tevinter—would be more than a match for her. Her mind tumbled and spun and produced an idea.

“Cheddar,” she said, steady, “would a smaller ship like theirs withstand stormy weather as well as ours?”

“No, of course not,” she answered, puzzled. “It would be much more likely to sink. Piracy’s dangerous business, after all.”

Yvanne’s teeth flash in the growing dark. “Great,” she said. “I’m going to try something.”

Cheddar didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure?”

“I think we have no other choice,” she said grimly “You may want to hang on. And tell everyone else to hang on, too.”

For a moment she thought the Vashoth woman was going to stop her, that her essential Arvaarad nature would get the better of her. But she only shrugged, said “Alright, little bird, good luck,” and asked no more.

Yvanne wasted no time, even as other crewmembers shouted at her for abandoning her post. Betrayer, they called her, faithless abandoner, but she paid no heed. She climbed the rigging with practiced if not expert ease, until the deck below was dizzyingly far away.

Vertigo she was used to. Being in the crow’s nest itself was another thing. Barrel duty—for the nest was little more than a barrel fastened to the main-mast—was often doled out as punishment, and no wonder; every motion of the ship was multiplied many times over, with every motion threatening to toss the barrelman into the sea. Yvanne regretted having no anti-nausea spell, but now there was no time for it.

What she needed was a storm. A big one.

She had always been good with storms. Her earliest use of magic had been lightning, and many had told her that even her healing had felt like a shock back to life. It was all second nature to her, the thunder and the lightning and the wind and rain—not so much the constituent parts as the tempest as whole. Of course she was no good at tempered wind spells; her magic tended to spread out and spark and roil. A simple gale did not become her.

But a deadly storm at sea to sink a rival ship? This she could do.

She reached inside herself, drawing from the endless well of power that she knew the Fade to be, and found—a puddle. A few drops. It was like forcing the ocean through a drinking straw.

Cursing her shortsightedness in not abandoning her post earlier, she wished for lyrium above all things. She had not had a drop of it in so long. But she had no lyrium. She had nothing. She was spent, utterly empty.

...no, not utterly empty. There was power yet inside her. Power in her blood.

Sickening memories overwhelmed her at the thought, worse even than the swaying of the ship. She reached again for the Fade, desperate for any other way.

Please, she called out in panicked anguish. Please! But there was nothing.

She would have to do it.

At first she worried that she would not remember how to do it—but blood magic was not the sort of thing one could forget. She had no dagger; only her own ragged fingernail. She had to make several attempts, and she had to press hard. At first she worried that she simply wouldn’t be able to break the skin, but finally her scrabbling succeeded. The wound bled, and it hurt.

Like a dam breaking, new power flowed through her. It came from a reservoir that was all her own. And from this reservoir, still clinging to the mast, she began to chant.

Nobody came up to stop her. She silently thanked her friend for it.

The storm that materialized off the coast of Llomeryn came on fast, even for a storm at sea. Mere minutes ago the sky had been clear, and now clouds gathered there like battalions of an army. As her lips formed the words—words that were not necessary, no more than the precise shapes of her fingers, although they helped—the storm grew. The waves rose taller, rougher.

The clouds she had gathered rumbled darkly. Rain began to fall, first in drops, then sheets. They fell so cold and hard that it hurt her skin, and this pain, too, she channeled. Life was pain—where had she heard that? Life was pain, sure enough, and life was power.

She could feel the storm’s power. It dwelled in the clouds, in the growing waves, the rising winds. It filled her up even as her blood flowed. For one wild moment, she felt alive again.

Lightning streaked out towards the Maiden’s mast, sure to strike—and at the last moment, she turned it away. Instead it hit the pirate’s vessel. In the distance—though it was increasingly hard to see—she saw a brief fire ignite before being put out.

The waves reared up taller than the mast itself; the Maiden surged up, crested, fell. She could no longer see the other ship, and anyway, now all her focus was concentrated on keeping the Maiden intact. She had more than an inkling that the only thing that now protected it was some fey power she had summoned from within herself—but which was not quite of herself. But the storm was hers, and the ship was hers, as Vigil’s Keep had once been hers; this, she would protect.

Time froze, or compressed, or both. She could not have said how long she clung to the crow’s nest, crackling with blood and spirit, her awareness more in the wind and water than her body.

The storm raged.

Eventually, it ceased.

The Maiden had survived.

She had no idea how she got down from the crow’s nest. Her world spun and sparked, the residual rain flattening her clothes to her skin and making movement all the more difficult. Rough warm hands studied her; the grey blur resolved itself into her astonished friend.

“Wow!” she told Cheddar, breathless and giddy. “I had no idea I had that in me!”

After that she knew no more.

—

Yvanne awoke in chains and darkness, sodden and frozen.

She tried to scream, and realized she was gagged. I failed, she thought despondently. The pirates had captured them after all.

No! She would not allow it! She would die first. She would ensure she died first—

—but no. She had seen the encroaching ship break and sink. Hadn’t she? It had been so dark. Perhaps she had felt rather than seen them go down.

She risked a wisplight, and as its greenish glow illuminated her surroundings, her heart sank. This was the hold of the Maiden. Her own crewmates had put her in chains.

How long she sat there shivering in the dark, she couldn’t say. She’d never been in solitary at Kinloch. Loriel had always managed to protect her. She had no worked out method of marking the time, save by her growing hunger and thirst; and even then this told her little, save that she was very hungry, and very thirsty.

And worse, she was tired; tired in a way she’d never been before. Something vital had been wrung out of her. Even her connection to the Fade felt tenuous, a fog obscuring her sense of it. The blood magic, she realized dully. It had drained her so completely that, though enough time had passed by now that she should have full access to the Fade again, she had almost no mana at all. This was what Loriel had been doing to herself? It was completely unsustainable. No wonder the Tevinter magisters sacrificed their slaves.

The shackles chafed her wrists, and her shoulders ached miserably from the awkward position they’d been forced into, but the gag was the worst of it. It had been done inexpertly and pressed at the corners of her mouth, making it impossible not to drool.

But finally they came for her.

Two men, who she had trusted with her life less than a day ago, hauled her abovedecks, where relentless daylight nearly blinded her. It must have been high noon already. The Maiden had survived, yes, but barely. The mainsail was in shreds. The jibe was gone altogether. The mast leaned at a crooked angle.

But all the crew were alive. Alive, and staring at her, not a shred of pity in their eyes.

The men forced her to her knees.

She found Cheddar in the crowd, towering head and shoulders above the rest. Yvanne stared at her, pleading, but Cheddar only gave a little shrug.

Someone ripped away her gag. The captain approached her, keeping a careful distance. He looked only, and said nothing.

Yvanne fought the bizarre urge to apologize. She kept her chin up and looked him in the eye.

“Windmage, you are being tried for treason,” the captain said finally.

“Treason?” she burst out. “I saved all our lives!”

“You have lead this ship into needless danger. You have blown us hopelessly off course. You have all but destroyed this ship. All this is tantamount to treason.”

“I’m no citizen of any country,” she protested. “How can I be a traitor?”

“You are part of this ship!” roared the captain, “and now you will answer to it!”

She glared. “I did only what was necessary to preserve the life of this crew. At great personal cost. I’m no traitor.”

“She’s possessed, I say!” shouted a crewman. His name was Derrick. He had ruddy red cheeks and a fondness for dirty jokes. He’d shown her how to tie a bowline knot. “Demons dwell within her! Traitor or not, we must be rid of her before she dooms us all!”

Stone-faced, the captain turned to Cheddar. “You, Arvaarad. You know about demons. Is she possessed?”

“Cheddar,” Cheddar corrected absently. She scrutinized Yvanne with her bright blue eyes, and for a moment Yvanne was so bold as to hope. Then Cheddar shook her head. “Can’t say for sure. Demons are tricksy; it’s their nature. She might be possessed, and the demon yet hiding.”

“And do you suppose,” said the captain, “that an unpossessed mage would have been capable of what we saw?”

Cheddar shrugged. “Couldn’t say. Best assume every mage is possessed, if you’re not sure. Saves a lot of trouble in the long run.”

Murmurs of assent spread through the crowd.

“Please,” Yvanne said. “At least consider self interest! You’ve blown off course. With the damage to the ship it may take weeks to find your way back. Once my mana regenerates I could shorten that time to mere days.”

“That would have been so,” said the captain, “if you could be trusted.”

“Alright, then,” she replied coldly. “Don’t trust me. Fear me instead. You saw what I did last night. You all know what I’m capable of. Do you suppose, if you turn on me, that you’ll be spared my wrath? Release me now and I may yet guide this ship to safe harbor. Keep me bound and you may be sure that none of you will ever see land again.”

Scraping at the corners of her soul for even a drop of mana, she managed to briefly make her eyes glow. Just to make a point. Just so that they would remember what she was.

It almost worked. Several members of the crew drew back or gasped.

Then the bosun—an Orlesian elf called Annette—called out, “She’s bluffing. She has no mana left. She said so herself! Arva—Cheddar, that’s true, isn’t it? They need time to regenerate, do they not?”

“That’s true,” Cheddar said reluctantly, not looking at Yvanne.

“If she had any power she would have freed herself already,” the Orlesian snarled. “If she really had the power to slay us all and seize the ship, she would have done so. I suggest we do not wait to see whether she is capable of this. Execute her now for treason while we still can!”

“Bad luck to slay a mage at sea,” rumbled another crewman, a burly Marcher with a short blond beard. “The winds would turn on us. We would be lost for certain.”

This got murmurs as well. Thank the Maker, thought Yvanne, rejoicing, for all these stupid bloody sailor’s superstitions.

“That’s true,” said the captain, measured. “Bad luck to slay a mage at sea. But neither can we risk her presence.”

At length he considered.

Finally, the captain spoke: “Throw her overboard. The sea will decide her fate.”

Yvanne at least had the satisfaction of not begging as they hauled her to the edge. Even now at her most powerless the crew was loath to touch her; they dragged her by the chains.

She had one chance to look back at the Maiden, at these people she had raised her voice with, these people she had trusted, at Cheddar who she had thought her friend. The Vashoth met her eyes. There was no trace of guilt in them. Regret, perhaps, but not guilt.

All of a sudden the crowd receded. She stood bound and alone at the precipice.

“You will jump,” ordered the captain.

“You can’t be serious,” Yvanne said dully.

“We prefer not to force you. We are good men. And I am sympathetic,” the captain said reasonably. “I understand it was not your fault. But you cannot remain aboard this ship. If we must use force, we will.”

Cheddar gave her an encouraging smile and a shrug, as though to say, Well, that’s life for you!

Yvanne gazed at the choppy waves. How many miles would her body sink? How long would it take her to drown? Would it hurt? Would it be so bad?

She tried to think of some parting words, but found that she had nothing to say. Nothing at all.

Whether she jumped or slipped or was pushed in the end did not matter. She managed a single deep breath against all odds, and then she sank, dragged down by the weight of her chains. She struggled; it was a difficult instinct to suppress. Her hair and clothing billowed out, medusa-like. How quickly the light went away, how rapidly the pressure built. Only a moment ago she had bathed in sunlight and in air, and now her world was crushing darkness, crushing cold.

Now this was truly the end of the line. The Fade would not save her. Her blood would not save her; it would hasten her death if anything. She could not escape the chains, and even if she did, what then? She could not swim forever. The sea would get her in the end.

Oh, and wasn’t it better this way? Wasn’t it neater? What in her life had been worth living, since she had left Vigil’s Keep? What a pointless farce it all had been. A drowning woman’s final gasping struggle, before succumbing to the totality of her irrelevance. How fitting, how neat.

Her lungs burned. Seawater poured into her throat. Oh Maker, drowning hurt. She had not thought it would hurt so much.

Then all of a sudden the pain receded. Her rigid limbs relaxed. It no longer seemed so bad to drown.

The blackness in front of her eyes faded to a pale and calming grey. It would be easy. It would be good.

Then somewhere something deep inside called out with the animal fury of a thousand generations:

want

LIVE!

The pale grey of a peaceful death bloomed into a violent green.

—

Eventually she washed up on a beach.

She had no memory of how she came to be there; not of escaping the chains (though she must have, for they were gone), nor of floating on the currents, nor of being deposited on the shore. It did not seem like she had been unconscious; she could not say that she had ‘woken up.’ At best it felt like she had been a passenger inside herself, and was only now fully in control again. When she searched for the memories, they were not there.

Best not to think about it, she told herself as she lay in the sand, the tide lapping at her feet.

For hours she lay there, too tired to move. She drifted in and out of consciousness, half in dream and half in fantasy, not quite in either realm. Every time she managed to open her eyes, the sun had fallen further into the horizon.

Around dusk she finally sat up and examined her surroundings. The beach was deserted, littered with stones and shells and little creatures. The strangest trees she had ever seen grew further up the beach, swaying gently in the late-afternoon breeze.

Abruptly she was struck by a memory at Kinloch Hold. Back before Anders had tried to escape across the lake and gotten them all banned from outside time, they’d been permitted on the lakeshore. Yvanne had liked to swim, and Loriel had liked to sit on the rough grey sand and read, but sometimes she could be persuaded to come play. They’d waded in the shallows and looked for interesting rocks and shells and built lopsided structures in the sand. Then at night they would giggle and whisper about the island they would rule someday, as soon as they escaped. When had they stopped fantasizing about their secret island? Presumably the day they realized that they would never escape.

Despite everything, this place was beautiful. Soft white sand. A soft breeze of gentle air. The smell of salt and fading sunlight, the rustling of the trees. She watched as the sun sank into the sea and set the sky aflame, a panoply of color just for her. As it set, the stars came out, a sparkling veil with no moon to dim their shine.

She wondered if Loriel would have liked it here.

Then she bent over in shattered grief, keening, and for the first time, felt no anger, none at all.

#amell #surana #femslash #dragon age #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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degenerate-perturbation · 4 years

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Chapters: 16/29 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Hawke let go of her, embarrassed, and stepped aside to let her in. “I’m sorry it’s a bit of a mess. I haven’t been taking visitors.”

Yvanne looked around the enormous, beautiful home, with hardly a single decorative pillow out of place. “Yeah, real pigsty,” she said, and immediately cringed. Why would she say that? Did she want her single remaining family member to hate her? Assuming he really was family.

While she boggled at it all, she dripped rainwater steadily onto the carpet. Hawke noticed before she did. “Oh, no, you’re soaked—of course you are, it’s pouring. I’m sorry I kept you waiting—Orana, could you get Yvanne a towel?”

Right away the elf girl disappeared, reappearing moments later with the fluffiest towel Yvanne had ever seen. It felt strange against her skin. What was it made of?

“It’s fine,” she said, haltingly. “It’s not even cold out.”

“Yes, but still. Do you like tea? Let’s have some tea. Orana, could you put on some tea?” Orana left for the kitchen to put on the tea. Yvanne didn’t particularly like tea, but she wasn’t about to mention that. With Orana gone it was just her and Hawke in the foyer, her patting her hair dry, him nervously twisting his hands.

“Er, you should probably have a change of clothes, too,” he said distractedly. “You look about my m-mother’s size—afraid I don’t have anything else. Orana, could you show Yvanne—? Blast, she can’t hear me, she’s in the kitchen making tea. I’m—”

“It’s fine,” Yvanne said before Hawke could apologize to her again. “I’ll dry fast by the fire.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Hawke, visibly relieved. “Yes, I should build it up. Tea by the fire...and we can talk…”

A fire was burning in the fireplace, low but alive. Hawke puttered around in its vicinity, nudging it with a poker, and it leapt implausibly higher, though he’d barely touched it. Yvanne came over to stand by it, feeling the cold leech out of her bones, but not feeling quite comfortable enough to sit. The silence between them stretched more and more intolerably awkward, until Orana finally brought out a tea tray.

“Please,” Hawke said as she set it down, “do sit.”

Yvanne sat, even though she was still damp, and probably ruining the upholstery. Neither of them touched the tea.

“So, ah,” Hawke cleared his throat, but seemed to have misplaced the rest of his sentence. He scratched his beard. It looked a few weeks old at most, coming in patchy and uneven. He looked like a man who shaved under normal circumstances. “I’m sorry, not that you’re not welcome, but—why are you here?”

And she’d so hoped he wouldn’t have asked that right away. She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

He blinked at her.

“Look, I get that this is weird,” she said, all in one breath. “I don’t even know what I want from you. If anything. Certainly you don’t owe me anything. But I haven’t laid eyes on any of my family since I was nine years old. And I heard the name Lord Amell spoken in Highever. And I wanted to know about my family, and you were the only one I could find, and...here I am.”

He looked at her with sudden and impossible compassion. “I see,” he said. “And ah, you said you were Revka’s daughter?”

“I don’t really remember her. I hardly remember Kirkwall at all, even though I was born here. It’s certainly, uh…”

“You get used to it,” Hawke said, trying for an encouraging smile. “It’s not so bad once you acclimate to the smell.”

“How long does that take?”

“I don’t know. I’ll let you know when it happens to me.” He gave a weak laugh, but it came out almost creaky, as though laughter hurt him.

He picked up a tea mug and held it in his lap, not drinking it. “If you’re Revka’s daughter, then...pardon me, but I thought all of Revka Amell’s children were found to be mages and taken to Circles.”

All? thought Yvanne. She knew about her eldest sister who she’d never known...but all? All five of them? When she had first been taken to Kinloch, Yvanne had spent long hours fuming at the thought of her father and sisters getting along perfectly fine without her. Better without her, even. How she had hated them, for daring to be happy without her, for daring to continue to live their lives together when she was suffering alone.

But that hadn’t been what had happened.

Hawke was still waiting for her answer. She had to force the truth out of herself water from a stone. "I grew up in Kinloch Hold.”

“Kinloch,” Hawke repeated. “So you’re from Ferelden.” He gave her a watery smile. “I was born in Ferelden, you know. My family lived in Lothering until the Blight. We came here as refugees along with everyone else. That was a time, hah. I had to work as a smuggler. That first year my brother and mother and I lived all in one room in my uncle’s house, can you imagine? We were so desperate to get out of there, but now I miss it more than anything. Odd, isn’t it?” He laughed uncomfortably.

She stiffened. The Blight brought back uncomfortable memories for her of a different sort. But Hawke was lost in his own memory and didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve been to Lothering,” she said absently instead.

A clock was ticking somewhere.

“Look, if,” Hawke cleared his throat, “if you need a place to stay, my home is open to you.”

He cut her off before she could object. “I won’t ask you how you left Kinloch or how you got here, I can fill in those blanks myself. Tell me as much or as little as you want, I won’t press, or judge. I know how it is out there for a mage.” She must have looked doubtful because he continued. “I promise you’ll be safe here. My partner is active in the Mage Underground, he helps apostates all the time. Look—I’m a mage myself.” To demonstrate he conjured a bright sphere of spirit energy and held it in his open hand before letting it dissipate.

This did catch her off guard. “I heard a rumor that you were an apostate,” she admitted. “But I heard a lot of rumors about you.”

He laughed a little more easily this time. “Varric does like to encourage them. Probably for the best that there are so many that nobody believes the true ones.”

“Right. Well, you definitely weren’t at Kinloch, so what Circle were you in?”

He blinked. “Oh. Oh, I was never in a Circle. My father trained me, and my sister."

That stunned her. She imagined what it might have been like, to be trained in magic by her mage father. Would she still have hated her magic then? Perhaps not. Perhaps her whole life could have been different. Perhaps she would have been the one living in this estate, not this man who didn’t even use the name Amell.

“But I really mean it,” Hawke went on. He stood and approached, hovering, threatening to embrace her. “We’re family, so you have a home here. For as long as you need. There’s plenty of room here, of course—too much, if you ask me. You can sleep in my mother’s old room, I never go in there anyway. Orana does all the cooking, so no need to worry about that. Do you mind dogs? Flower is around here somewhere. My partner doesn’t care for him, claims he’s a cat person, but I know better. You’ll love him—my partner, not my dog, hah—he’s a mage, too. He runs a clinic in Darktown, that’s why he’s not here right now. He’s working late again. Really, he’s wonderful, I’m sure you’d get along…”

Yvanne was getting entirely sick of Hawke mentioning his partner. She hated the way he said it—‘my partner,’ in that syrupy way that made it obvious that the relationship was new. Every time he did it his eyes went soft and gooey. She’d been like that once, with Loriel. Her mood, already ambivalent, took a decided turn for the sour.

“Sorry,” Yvanne cut him off, “could you explain to me exactly how we’re related?”

Hawke brightened. “Yes! There’s a family tree around here somewhere. I’ll show you. Come, come!” He went to one of the gleaming, polished chests and rummaged in it, withdrawing a handful of heavy parchment scrolls. He picked out one particularly wide one and laid it out carefully on a nearby desk, weighing down the corners with four beautifully polished stones. Eagerly he waved her over.

The family tree was beautifully illustrated with tiny portraits of each Amell, richly dressed and ornamented. Beside each portrait was a block of close-written text in such an elaborate hand that she could not make it out, along with lines and lines of annotations along the edges. The tree stretched so far up that surely the majority of the people in the document were now long dead

Hawke plucked a little golden hand-shaped pointer from somewhere and used it to indicate the parchment, avoiding touching it with his hands. “Here you are—and your sisters of course—daughters of Revka and Kiran Amell. I never realized that he must have been Rivaini...I don’t know much about him, I’m afraid. Perhaps you could tell me and I could add to this document, ah? That might be a pleasant pastime.” He produced a cracked smile and moved on.

Yvanne had never thought of her father as being Rivaini. He looked like her and her sisters, and not much like other Fereldans, but she had always taken that as a sign of their nobility, like Queen Asha Campana of Antiva. It had never occurred to her that her father was from anywhere, that he hadn’t simply sprung fully formed from the aether as her father.

“Revka was the daughter of Fausten Amell, and sister to the unlucky Damion—accused of smuggling, and bankrupting his poor father in the process of futile attempts to prove him innocent. Fausten was the son of Lord Thaddeus Amell, our great-grandfather. So I suppose that makes us third cousins! Thaddeus had another son, Lord Aristide, my mother’s father…”

Hawke carried on in this fashion well past Yvanne’s capacity to listen to him. Instead she stared at the little oval portraits of her estranged noble clan. How strange it was to think of these ink-and-paper people as her family, as people who might have loved her, had her life gone a different way.

“...but they’re gone, now, too.” Hawke fell silent, pained.

Yvanne was still looking at the portrait of her mother. Had she really looked like that, pale-haired and long-chinned? The woman whose scraps remained in Yvanne’s memory smelled of rosewater and clean linen—but her face was a cipher. She did not recognize the woman in the portrait. Strange how Hawke had known right away who she was, when Yvanne herself didn’t.

“Do you know where my mother is?” she said, not knowing that she intended to say the words until they left her lips.

Hawke gave her a pitying look, and she felt a hot flash of hatred for him, just for that. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t. Nobody does. There were rumors, I’m to understand, that she went to be her husband’s family. I suppose that would be in Rivain—Dairsmuid, probably. But that’s just rumor. All I know is that she took the loss of her eldest quite hard—but you know that, of course,” he added quickly.

Yvanne imagined her already-mostly-imaginary mother weeping in the streets, begging on her knees for salvation, all out of love for her eldest child. Revka had never cried for Yvanne like that. Revka had left Yvanne on purpose.

“You really don’t know anything, then?” she said despondently. “What about my sisters?”

Hawke shook his head. “I’m sorry. Only that none of them would be the Gallows, being Amells. They try to keep families separated, you see…but you know that.”

She did know it. And now she had lost a hope that she hadn’t known she even had. Some part of her had been imagining that Lord Amell—Hawke—would somehow be her gateway to the rest of her family. That perhaps her mother would be here, against all odds, waiting for her. That this could be her home.

But it wasn’t. All there was was this man, surrounded by riches, living a life she would have killed for, totally unaware of everything he had taken from her.

So she simply stood there with her fists clenched, holding back ridiculous, childish tears.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help,” Hawke said, worrying his fingers. “You have to understand, I’m an exile here myself. I only know anything at all about the Amells from my mother. And she was always closer with Carver, before he...well.” He sighed. “I wish more than anything that I could ask her about our family now.”

Yvanne had nothing to say to that.

“Maybe we can find something later,” Hawke said, with an almost manic optimism. He grabbed her hand. “We have some leads. I have contacts I could write to. The Amells aren’t what they were, but I still have some pull. And money always loosens lips. My partner has contacts as well, he might know something. We can ask him when he gets back from the clinic! I know it seems very hard right now—I remember how hard it was for me.”

How hard it had been for him! How hard for him, here in his golden palace, swathed in silk, waited upon by cringing elven servants, him who had never so much as seen the inside of a Circle!

“But we’ll figure it out!” He smiled at her. He still hadn’t let go of her hand. “Here, let me show you to mother’s room—it’ll be your room now. You look about the same size as she w-was, you could certainly fit into her things. And anything that doesn’t fit Orana will alter. Better they get used by somebody, rather than eaten away by moths. What a depressing thought. Let’s not think it. Come, come!”

“Wait—” He tugged her up the grand staircase to the second floor of the estate. The red carpet was decadently soft on the soles of her thin shoes.

“It’s a bit dusty in here, I’m afraid—I haven’t gone in there for weeks, and it felt wrong to ask Orana to clean an unused room, but that’s all different now. Are you hungry? You must be—I’ll have Orana send something up. Of course feel free to arrange the furniture however you like, I’ll help you.”

Yvanne looked around the darkened room as Hawke flew from corner to corner, lighting the gas lamps to reveal more and more of it. It was finer than any quarters she had ever known, even as the mistress of Vigil’s Keep, which had after all been a military posting, and not a nobleman’s estate. “Hold on—”

“—and tomorrow I’ll show you around Kirkwall properly. It can be a little overwhelming, even for an experienced Kirkwaller. My friend Merrill still gets lost all the time. It’d be charming if it didn’t make me so worried. To be honest, it would be good for me to get out of the estate. M-my mother died recently, and I lost my brother and sister not long before that, and it’s been, well—well, it’s been difficult. You know, if it weren’t for my partner, I don’t know what would have happened to me these past couple weeks, haha!” The manic edge was back in his voice.

Then he clasped her by the shoulders and beamed again. “So I want you to know, I’m really glad you’re here. Really. I have some wonderful friends, a wonderful partner, but nothing can replace family. We’re each all the other has left”

This sent her over the edge. All he had left, indeed! Him with his silk robe and servant and wonderful friends and his oh so wonderful partner. She struggled out of the embrace, skittering to the corner by the door like a feral dog. “Actually, ” she said, breathing a little heavily, “I don’t plan to stay.”

He drooped like a puppet with its strings cut. “Don’t plan to stay? What do you mean? Of course you have to stay—”

“I don’t have to do a damned thing,” she said, feeling for the doorknob behind her, finding it, and escaping.

“Wait—” He nearly tripped over the finely woven Orlesian rug as he chased after her. “I don’t understand. Have I offended you somehow? Please tell me!”

“You haven’t offended me,” she lied. “I’ve simply achieved my aim in coming here. I’ve found out everything you had to tell me about my family. We have no further business together.”

“That’s not true! We haven’t exhausted our leads! I know you don’t know me—but you could!” he pled.

She was struck by how pathetic he was. This was the legendary Lord Amell, who consorted with apostates and pirates and smugglers. Near as she could tell all the stories she had heard were true, and what did all that add up to? A sad unshaven man in a stained robe, begging a woman he didn’t even know to come live in his house.

“And I could help you find the others! I’ve been known to achieve remarkable things, you think those rumors about me are totally baseless? Please, you don’t have to stay here if you’re uncomfortable , but at least let me have Varric put you up at the Hanged Man.”

“Stay in Kirkwall?” Yvanne made a disgusted face.

“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

“I could hardly get used to Templars roving every street like weevils—”

“You don’t have to worry about that!” he insisted. “I’m a very powerful man in this city. The guard, the Viscount, even the Knight-Commander, they all look away if I ask them to. Nothing would happen to you while you lived here. I could protect you. You’d be safer here than practically anywhere else in Thedas.”

“And have nothing but your personal power between me and the Gallows? With that wretched place barely a stone’s throw away?” She clenched her fists. She could hardly believe the nerve of this man. “You have no idea the kind of terror of that place I grew up with. Kinloch was bad enough, but as long as the Gallows existed, they always had something worse to threaten us with.”

“I do, though—my father—my partner—”

“Your father!” she said, furious. “Your partner! Their lives, not yours. You have no idea what it was like. You have no idea what I have been through! We have nothing in common. Nothing at all.”

“But we’re family,” he bleated. How pathetic, she thought, to want things. How disgusting. “We’re all the family either of us has left.”

“We aren’t family,” she said coldly. “We happen to share an ancestor, four generations back. A thimbleful of blood. What could that possibly mean for the two of us now?"

“I still want you to stay,” he said, helpless.

“You don’t know me,” she said furiously. She didn’t understand why her throat was so tight, or why her vision was blurring. “You couldn’t possibly want that from me. You have no right to want that from me.”

Of course he didn’t know her. Who knew her? Loriel had—no, not even Loriel. Loriel had been with her all her life, through childhood and adolescence and adulthood, and at the end of it neither of them had known the other at all.

She paused with her hand on the doorknob. Then she forced it open, cutting her last tie.

It had started to rain harder while she’d been talking to Hawke, and it was fully the dead of night now. She was now right where she’d started before she’d come here—penniless, alone, with only a vague idea where to go next.

Well, not exactly penniless. She’d had to foresight to swipe one of Hawke’s candlesticks, and she was pretty sure the gilding on it had to be worth something

#dragon age #femslash #amell #surana #dragon age 2 #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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