JUSTICE FOR DAVINA CLAIRE I'M SO FUCKING SERIOUS FUCK OFF OH MY FUCKING GOD

End-of-Year Writers' Ask! 6 and 7

thanks for the ask! :) these require a lot of those T.T 6. What’s your favourite piece of dialogue you wrote this year? “Quark,” Odo growled. Quark splashed innocently. “What?” “The splashing.” “I have a right to splash,” Quark said. “If you’re humming, I can splash. There’s no law against that.” “There should be,” Odo said. “Being a public nuisance.” 7. What’s your favourite piece of description or narration? fanfic from a game you’ve never played--basically the guy who breaks into heaven tries to rip the key to what is basically Jerusalem that got locked away in a different dimension off the player character’s hand, though the character is only just starting to piece together how fucked they are. they start an avalanche and try to rejoin everyone on the other side of the mountains. it’s a long slough that they make the player drive their character through, which is very effective storybuilding on the first playthrough, a bit much on your second and third.

Everything hurt but she was hot, hot, hot on cold stone, her mother had died burning herself in her rage and half an army too, protecting the People, that is what a Dalish mage does, da’len, if you must lose yourself be grand about it, and make sure someone will sing of your name, oh mamae, your little favorite is dead, Halla’den didn’t do anything grand but I was killed by a would-be god, maybe human, Tevinter definitely, legend killed me and legend can resurrect me too, my children will not be ashamed of me, now all will know Clan Lavellan can only be killed by the gods, not mortal might. She opened her eyes and saw light trickling down a stone shaft. Not dead yet: fuck. Selfish, selfish: get the fuck up.

She touched her feet: still there, no toes broken, and her ankles and knees survived the fall too. Her ribs hurt, every breath choked, but she could move her fingers, her arms, and her eyes still saw through the dark. Falon’din had not come to claim her yet. Imladris used her staff to level herself up, and began to drag herself through. She did not let herself look back. When Antoine of Jader came to marry the Duchess of Wycombe, he brought an Orlesian guard and their prejudices. The Dalish towns that flourished within the Wycome Delta--Imladris, the Golden Wood, Ithilien--revolted them. Wycombe and its rivers belonged to the Duke, they said, and all must pay their tithe to the Chantry. It did not matter that these settlements predated the Blight, that the Dalish moved seamlessly from the city-elves and smaller towns for centuries. It did not matter that the Free Marcher inhabitants of the city-state were not fond of even more taxes levied, paid to the Orlesian Chantry and to the Duke and even to the Empress of Orlais. Wycombe remembered it had been Dalish wardens who saved the city from the Blight. Its new duke did not care. And when she was a child, he struck: to clear the Dalish out. Mamae, mamae you and Keeper burned the city to keep the shem from taking it and I would not have done that to Haven, I didn’t particularly care for an empty hut, a bathtub with no one to share it with, the only other elves wary servants, flinching every time Cassandra glanced at them, I didn’t want to die for some Chantry religion, not where Shartan was buried, not like this. They docked his ears but at least they gave him the Dales. What will they do to me, if I die? Mamae, mamae, you burned . Let me carry that anger, that heat, my magic like your magic keeping me warm. Into the snowblind whiteness Imladris stumbled out of the cave, and distantly a wolf howled. “Fen’Harel ma ghilana,” she choked. She fell to her knees, cold seeping into the blood-soaked lambswool of her leggings, why had she not let Harrit talk her into proper chainmail? Or leather? “Fenhedis lasa.” She did not want to die, ripped apart by wolves, bones cast about by the storm. Something would come back if she died like that. She clenched her hands into fists and, huffing, heaved herself back up. Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe like the molten core under the sea. She coughed sparks into her hands and walked. Keep moving, Lavellan. You have survived worse than this. Dead in a ditch off the Ithilien River, if that farmer hadn’t found you. Starved out in the Barghello in Wycombe proper, if Sister Lucie hadn’t intervened. Dead in her own namesake, Imladris, a burnt out shell, when the guards came. Dead, dead, dead, dead and publicly executed  if Briala hadn’t gotten you and Mahanon out of Val Royeaux when you robbed the University: stupid fucking idea but how dare they. How dare. Outrage was good, outrage helped bank the fire, Halla’den had fallen to a Despair demon, but Imladris was stronger than that, older, more experienced, better trained. Nothing but the cold would nip at her mind. “Keep fucking walking,” she told herself. Breathing was difficult, like a lodestone in her chest. No pendant, nothing for them to loot, the boy had it, Cole, Varric wouldn’t let him steal it, she gave it in full of everyone, someone, who knows, it would get to her daughters and they would know they could wear her legacy, something of both of them, gone but the stone remained, in the Frostbacks only the dwarves and the Avvar eked an unlikely living, the closest Dalish clan was Boranehn, and she had met the arl that commanded them, hadn’t she? Vivienne said she had done bad. Well she was punished, if only it would be only her punished, if she died with this fucking Anchor dragging her down would that mean that creature could not take it? If she died they would all die too. She passed a hastily-built campfire, still smoldering, and stopped a second to flare the embers. Her Keeper had taught her a trick, to siphon off the heat from another’s fire, to conserve one’s own energy. She had taught it to Mathalin, but Mirwen was too young when she left. Deshanna would take over the training, she must have already begun, and Imladris shuddered as the wind kicked snow into her face, if she stopped she would freeze to death, be eaten by wolves, taken by despair. So cold it felt like her feet were burning as they were losing sensation, she lugged herself through the snow, kicked into her face like glass after the explosion, when a different Carta clan had blown up her printing press, was it the wind or the wolves or some hungry ghosts howling. Regardless the Frostbacks soared higher than her eyes could track, granite mountains older than her gods and she asked Dirthamen, you guard the knowledge lost to your children, but if you have mercy, any mercy at all, if you want this knowledge to carry on, reveal one of those lost caches the ancestors left. These mountains were old when Elgar’nan was still new, blinking into the blinding sun: show me where we carved the mountain path. Everywhere I walk I go in the steps of those who lived before. Ensure that there will be those after me. Spring down the mountain but no spring here: Imladris could not feel her feet anymore, and when she fell she wailed as she clambered on her hands and her knees, she did not want to die like this, the Dalish did not bend the knee. Thought faded as consciousness became only the snow on the mountain, the unthinking rock, the ice that cut, inch by inch, piece by piece, nothing special. Dirthamen ghilana ma : an old cry, never answered. The god of secrets kept his counsel close. A pile of snow, raised higher than the others: she tripped over it, a pot, Ferelden-style, the smell of stew still frozen to it. Imladris gasped, cutting through the pain, and wrenched herself back: there was still a chance. She coughed, sparks flying, and sent that pulse of mana back down to her feet. The pain was not a mistake: it was a reminder she was still alive. She screamed anyway. In Duke Antoine’s prison, there had been a Tal-Vashoth that had murmured to herself the Soul Canto during the worst of it, when they were left alone listening to what was being done on the other side of the world. She would say, “If you love purpose, fall into the tide. Let it carry you. Do not fear the dark. The sun and the stars will return to guide you. The sea and the sky themselves: Nothing special. Only pieces.” “Nothing special,” Imladris repeated to herself, lumbering on. “Only pieces. Nothing special. Only pieces.” Elves saw better than shem and qunari in the dark. Hallucinatory the sun creeped into the mountains, shifting steel to gold, her blood moving, Elgar’nan’s father returned by Mythal’s mercy, no secret, only pieces. Fire in the body, blood in the limbs, dawn coming she reached the top of a slope and exhausted, gazed down at a herd of druffalo snuffling amongst tents: Avvar? A bear came running and Imladris fell to her knees. Dirthamen had answered: nothing special, just pieces. “Lavellan! Lavellan! Maker, she’s alive. Cassandra, get a medic!” Not Dirthamen. Fucking Inquisition. With that realization, she let the sun take her, and melted into its warmth.