Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/10791702.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage, Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence
  Fandom:
      Dragon_Age:_Inquisition, Dragon_Age_(Video_Games)
  Character:
      Female_Lavellan, Clan_Lavellan, Nightmare_(Dragon_Age)
  Additional Tags:
      Eventual_Female_Lavellan/Cullen_Rutherford, A_Cosmic_Horror_Story, Pre-
      Inquisition, POV_Second_Person, Warning:_The_Fade, Fade_Shenanigans, Fuck
      the_fade, Being_a_Mage_Sucks, Templars, Demons, Eldritch_Abominations,
      Character_Study, Dalish_History_and_Culture, Alternate_Origin_Story, What
      if?, What_Have_I_Done, Clan_Lavellan_Dies, Alternate_Universe_-_Canon
      Divergence, Minor_Character_Death(s), Implied_Rape/Non-con, Mind_Rape,
      Trauma, Insanity, The_Inquisition_is_fucked_if_this_is_their_Herald
  Series:
      Part 2 of a_cosmic_horror_love_story
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-05-10 Updated: 2017-05-12 Chapters: 3/? Words: 20687
****** How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fade ******
by kerricarri
Summary
     That time a young Lavellan meets an eldritch abomination and goes
     quietly insane.
     Mature content inside. Scratch that, extremely disturbing content
     inside. Mind the tags, please, and leave your sanity at the door.
     Because this is a universe in which the Inquisition can try and make
     a demon-worshipping blood mage its Herald. This is a world where baby
     Lavellen can grow up to be a monster.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Chapter Summary
     Introducing Clan Lavellan, that clan all others must disown.
Chapter Notes
     Reading Part 1 of the series isn't necessary to understand this fic,
     as this one stands alone.
     Normally I love me some Lavellan/Cullen fluff wherein he blushes a
     lot, they get a dog, and they build a house together on some Ferelden
     farm. In that world Lavellan would be some sweet doe-eyed innocent
     thing and he'd be gentle with her a lot.
     Suffice to say this is not that universe.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
At the tender age of six you begin to show signs of the Fade. At first your
parents are at a loss as to what to do, so out of their depths are they at
handling a child who cannot control her powers. They are not mages. They are
busy warriors, the only two scouts of the clan. And though they try, though
they love you, it soon becomes clear that they cannot help you.
 
There hasn't been a mage born to Clan Lavellan in years due to dwindling
population numbers. Your clan is dying. Decades earlier there had been a
massacre; few can remember the purge. In the Free Marches, few city elves can
cite it as anything other than uncomfortable historical fact while the event
itself is remembered even less by the shemlen—ironic, all things considered.
But for Clan Lavellan it is particularly difficult to recall this piece of
Dalish history precisely because yours was the clan chosen, desecrated, and
made an example of so long ago. To this day your clan hasn't recovered while
other Dalish elves avoid your own, as if to prevent the bad luck from catching.
You are pariahs to be subtly shunned among your own.
 
But your Keeper can remember. Decades ago she may have only been a child, but
today? She is the last surviving mage to have escaped the purge. This is why
she is cherished by the clan, venerated above all other leaders to have come
before. Even the other clans that ostracize your own have to respect her. This
is why every ten years onward she and her people are still invited to the
Arlathvhen.
 
This is why you are brought before her now. Your parents know the value of you;
your Keeper understands it even more. But it is only when they are finally
beside themselves in trying to raise you that they beseech Deshanna to take you
in and raise you in their stead.
 
She does so only upon one condition. They agree.
 
And so you take on your Keeper's name. So promptly does she begin your
training, with the tacit understanding that you are to be the First. You are to
succeed her. But that's due less to your own merit than to the accident of
birth as well as circumstances forced upon the clan. To this day you will
always regret not having a choice in it at all.
 
Still, your teacher understands how to instruct you in your powers while your
parents go about their business and back to scouting, distraction-free.
 
Life is a tedium of studies and sweat in between the typical chores: fishing,
mending, hunting, foraging. The wet and warm humidity of summer trees is all
you know. The Free Marches are where you constantly roam. This is your
ancestral home, which is why the clan will never flee despite its history.
There are no borders and boundaries beyond these mountains and thresholds, this
sea, these forests worth knowing. Or at least that's what your Keeper says.
That's what they all say. All you know is that you want to leave.
 
No forays into the city-states beyond are allowed. There will be no slinking
into villages or skirting busy towns in the midst of harvest days, feast days,
celebratory events. The warm glow of festival lights and torches are not for
you. These bonfires are not meant for you. The Dalish do not dance and sing in
the crackling light of roaring flames. They are of the People, glorious and
dignified, and so huddle together in the darkness instead. And so in the
shadows, in the unceasing darkness, you dwell. Because light attracts attention
during long winter nights. Light attracts danger. Yet when low burning embers
are one's only means of warmth, one grows cold. The night is long and you feel
alone.
 
Eventually comes the year you turn fourteen. You are preparing busily to
finally to take on the mantle of First because until you do you cannot receive
your vallaslin and be declared an adult. Your coming of age ceremony will be
conflated with the formal end of your apprenticeship. This is the year. It has
to be. You can practically taste the ascension.
 
But until then there is more training, more preparations. You must earn the
privilege of being called the First even if it is only mere formality seeing as
you are the only candidate around. So you learn magic, you recite the old ways,
you practice the healing arts, and you prove yourself in all the ways that
matter, but still Keeper does not declare you ready. Still, you do not receive
your vallaslin.
 
Your clan suffocates you. Your people are afraid of losing you, your potential,
what you represent, and so keep you close to camp because you are tangible
proof that Clan Lavellan ever once existed as something more than a shadow of
itself. You are the living, breathing repository of their hopes and dreams.
More than just being the First, more than simply becoming a future leader, you
are to serve as a reminder of a time in which magic flourished and the People
were flush with health.
 
Because you are strong. You are easily the strongest mage here in the absence
of all competition.
 
The Keeper doesn't count because she is so old, so frail. You may be her
successor, but in her eyes you're meant to be something more. You are in
actuality a symbol. It's writ so plain on her face—you are an artifact of
glory, nothing more. You may as well not be a person at all. You feel so alone.
 
Living as a Dalish means to meander. There is no purpose. Your people are
aimless. The inescapable truth is that there is no future among the Dalish. Yet
it is only out of duty that you keep to your studies in order to fulfill your
bleak role. It is only out of duty that you close your eyes to this grim truth.
You've always been good at denial.
 
Especially when there is only wandering, only shivering. No farms. No food. No
hearth. Only little snatches of fresh water when you can before the rivers are
inevitably staked out by templars. Rumors of blood mages, maleficarum, savage
cannibals, and the newly come elves always ensue; this is nothing new. It is
only ever templars who seem to stumble upon your clan, after all. The only ones
brave enough and willing to patrol the lost winding paths found among the
Vimmark mountain range.
 
Especially Sundermount. Clan Lavellan stays to the north of it, far from
Kirkwall, so as to keep a whole mountain's length between the city-state and
the clan. You will not be sent to a Tower. You will die before you suffer
capture. Luckily, it need not come to that. Stories of Sundermount's sheer
infamy usually keep even the most audacious away. It's long been believed that
revenants and ancient spirits, restless demons and vengeful ghosts, have long
since trickled from the shadows of its peaks and into the surrounding forests
below. More than any other place in the Free Marches, the forests at the base
of the Vimmark range seem even denser while the wilds feel even wilder. Even
slavers seem to stay away. Your clan has always taken advantage of that. Just
to make doubly, sure, though every month the clan uproots and and moves.
 
And yet despite these precautions still the templars come, as if less by
accident now and more by design. It happens so frequently, so predictably,
throughout the seasons that it becomes clear somebody is actually hunting the
clan. Clacking is the sound an aravel wheel makes in mid-panicked flight, a
familiar noise.
 
It is a mistake to assume they'll just go away because they don't. It soon
becomes clear they are searching for you. You are the one they hunt. They stalk
the forest for you. Until your adolescence you have not truly understood the
templar threat, but now you experience their ceaseless, rabid hunting for
yourself. Some shem must have caught sight of you once. It only takes the one
time. The disturbingly renewed interest in your clan can only be explained
thus.
 
This must be how these templars know about you. That must be why they so
obsessively track you down. Keeper suspects it is because you are still a
fledging yet; the stronger your control becomes, the harder it will be for them
to detect you. But isn't that why the clan keeps fleeing about the valleys of
the Vimmark range? There is already so much ambient magic in these parts. How
can one mage alone be powerful enough to stand out?
 
Oh, da'len, you are more powerful than you know, she says. This is why you need
to study hard and learn the rituals of the First well. Master your power, so
you can finish your training.
 
You doubt it.
 
This is your doing, your Keeper's words seem to whisper instead.
 
And so the curse of your magic harries the clan now as much as the templars. It
is not such a blessing after all. And yet, still, the threat seems surreal. Can
they be so monstrous indeed?

You've never encountered a templar face-to-face before. Your parents are too
good at scouting ahead in order to chart a safe path while your teacher keeps
you too close for such a grievous mistake like that to ever occur. So
eventually you start getting annoyed. You don't understand why anybody would
expend so much hate and energy in chasing you. Shouldn't they just give up?
 
And yet every year of your adolescence thus goes as such: as the leaves turn
from spring to summer, and then to autumn decay and winter frost, still the
templars come looking for you. Pattern eventually transforms into a haggard
desperation that drives the clan onwards and onwards without rest, without
break. Tents set up in the night, once efficiently placed for weeks at a time,
are now hastily broken down at the crack of dawn because the daylight means it
would be harder to evade the templars.
 
With this past winter comes a near breaking point, a particularly trying one,
in which clan no longer even bothers to set up camp. Everyone just sticks to
the aravels. Numbers are few enough that this is actually a viable plan. There
is only the clan, huddling tight in cramped corners, with everyone breathing
the same stale air while exuding the musk of sweat and fear as the templars
come ever near. If that sounds as unnerving as the Dread Wolf nipping at your
heels, it is.
 
But it is spring now, summer soon.
 
Keeper keeps you close during this time with a clawing grip as she sends out
scouts and hunters and warriors—everyone but you. Never you. Bow and knives in
hand, even your parents tell you to listen and be good.
 
By now you are so sick of flight, of fleeing, of cowardice when you want to
stand and fight! Your magic is already so strong. When will they trust you? And
when will Keeper proclaim you to be ready?
 
Over and over again this happens again, this cycle, this despicable pattern,
until you are so very sick of it and tired of running, never living, always
having to stop looking over your shoulder even while you bathe in a river. You
want to leave the forest, leave the Free Marches behind.
 
You want the clan to stop circling round and round these human cities, sneering
at the idea of venturing too close, yet ironically never hesitating to claim
any and all of their refuse and tossed out scraps, materials, and resources—as
if you were all just good enough to be scavengers and thieves, vultures and
rats! You are sick of being Dalish. You are sick of always being lectured. You
are so sick of your studies. But most of all you are heartsick at never seeing
your parents, the clan’s scouts, whom the Keeper keeps sending away when there
is no point, no purpose, when the next destination will just be another
Creators damned forest anyway.
 
And when your frustration boils over each time they leave?
 
Listen to the Keeper, your mother will tell you.Stop being childish, she will
say, marring each goodbye. You aren't a child anymore.
 
Just as you predict, the cycle happens over and over again. Keeper advises you
not to be angry during these times. That path is not wise, she'd say. And yet
you are. You are so very angry. You are angry at them as well as her. Every
adult is standing in your way.
 
You never wanted this position, but this is birthright and duty. Your only
duty. But while each new day brings a fresh conviction that you cannot bear the
weight of it any longer, you have no choice.No one else can be the First. Yet
how much longer will that take? How can you be admonished for being a child
when no one will give you your vallaslin?
 
As spring becomes summer, though, comes a season where things turn a little
differently.
 
This is the summer in which your family will part ways forever—the last time
you will get to see your mother’s face, the last time your father will get to
hug you close. Usually at such partings, your mother will huff and turn away
from your complaints while your father will do otherwise. Instead of treating
you with that same wearied exasperation, the unique frustration from dealing
with a willful daughter, he will instead close his eyes, hold you tight, and
murmur for you to be good. He will murmur endlessly about how much he loves
you.
 
You no longer remember his voice.
 
After one such trying occasion, your Keeper ends up approaching you to confirm
that you are nearly ready to become the First. It is time to meditate upon your
choice of vallaslin. You are in disbelief at first. The news manages to
distract you successfully for a time. Actually, you find yourself distracted a
lot because of it. Your coming of age ceremony even starts to be tentatively
planned.
 
This is finally happening, and yet it doesn't seem real. In hindsight, nothing
about this year will feel real.
 
The summer in which you are to finally take on the mantle of the First seems
auspicious at first. Though your parents spend longer and longer trips away,
they are not in vain. There are discoveries to be had, rich bounties to be
teased out of crevices and hidden paths. As the hunters follow migration
patterns, the needs of the hunt dictates that the clan edge closer and closer
to Sundermount's northern base. Yet that makes Kirkwall only mere leagues away.
Everyone a little nervous. Less so at the fact that you are apparently in a
forest that is particularly cursed.
 
Every forest in the Free Marches is purportedly cursed, this one even more so.
But this is where your clan finds shelter now because humans will always find
some reason to stay away and never take advantage of resources were their ears
to catch the barest wisp of rumor. After all, this area is reviled by shems due
to tales of lost spirits trapped in the woods, in the trees, by blood mages
performing dark rituals under the light of the waning yellow moons. Baseless
rumors, but humans will believe anything.
 
That isolation is precisely why the clan has been drawn to this place. It's the
only reason the hunters don't immediately abandon yet another fruitless chase
and the only reason Clan Lavellan stays. Everyone is weary of running and
hiding. Whether or not those blood mages exist, it is better to take advantage
of shem fear, shem ignorance. It's true there's great power to be had in
siphoning away the ambient power from the nearby Sundermount range; the shadowy
arts of Tevinter would excel here and so would the primal powers of ancient
elvhen magic.
 
Yet therein lies madness. Demons would be doubly so attracted to such
foolishness. Your Keeper takes care to warn you away from such ideas.
 
Scribing vallaslin on your face, she states, will be the only blood ritual
performed here.
 
But the oppressively close atmosphere of Sundermount only serves to depress
many in the clan further. It's so overwhelming that it drives even some hunters
to become paranoid enough to jump at shadows in the dark due to how frequently
they must stray far from the clan's protective warding.
 
The only thing that could've made the situation worse would be sightings of
more templars. Yet their presence seems missing, their hunt oddly eased.
Perhaps this can finally be a reprieve, however brief. Though there haven't
been much successes lately in the hunt, maybe that recovery time alone would
make staying here work.
 
Still, there is a lingering pall of despair hanging in the air during the
summer you turn fourteen. And yet that is precisely when the true glory of the
Creators becomes revealed.
 
Andruil reveals her summoned stags. Here and now, she gifts the clan with whole
herds of them— enough to comfortably feed everyone for two seasons with careful
planning, hunting, preserving, and rationing so as to not deplete the area and
strain this local population of fauna. But without ironbark to craft new
weapons and bows, Andruil’s gift would have gone wasted. Additionally, travels
have been hard as of late. There hasn’t been time to repair old equipment since
the last miserable winter while dodging templars have eroded and worn down the
aravels even further.
 
Yet more ironbark is miraculously found much to the joy of the smith, who
praises June’s name. But the full trinity of domestic security would not be
complete without Sylaise’s divinity: enough elfroot, embrium, and herbs to
fully replenish the clan's stores.
 
With less stress on communal resources, things become relatively peaceful for
once. The clan finally has time to flourish, perhaps grow. As the days turn
longer and the sun sets later, there is also less darkness to be wary of and
more natural light to do productive things.
 
There is even less conflict when everyone is now allowed to leave the tight
confines of the aravels and stretch out their legs—both a literal and a
metaphoric breath of fresh air. And with less conflict, comes more laughter.
More hope. Camp is set up with an air of permanence for once, especially when
it stays standing every consecutive morning afterward. The invigorating sight
of such makes everyone eager to help with tasks and chores, anything create
more stability.
 
For weeks the clan manages to hide without being tracked down by a single
stubborn shem. In the summer that seems safe, even humans rapidly fade to
become a distant, bad memory. How can such terrors exist amidst the overlapping
trees of a blessed forest?
 
Survival seems almost a given now, an afterthought, when everyone can finally
begin to banish memories of templars. So great is this communal sense of
equilibrium, this sense of restoration, that you no longer have to walk among
your own people feeling the crushing guilt of being alive. Everyone is too busy
recovering, after all, to think on oh so distant storms—even to pay much
attention to you. A miracle, indeed.
 
Since the thought of past or future crises do not yet so harshly intimate in
the fresh light of a summer's dawn, everyone can breathe a little easier. And
so Mythal the All-Mother, that great protector, is praised.
 
But what the gods give, the gods can take away.
 
And you do not yet realize that the Creators, so silent, pale in the face of
true gods.
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     Oh boy. This is when the story tags start kicking in, folks.
     I always did think the cosmic horror elements of Dragon Age needed a
     little more cranking up. Let's dial it up to 11, shall we?
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Summary
     Lavellan thinks templars are the worst things in the world. She is
     wrong.
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
In the shadows of Vimmark lies a village outside of a forest. Back in the
spring, the clan had to carefully bypass the area in order to cross safely into
those woods—an ordeal at first due to how the aravels also had to navigate
unexpected ruins. Human constructions are never kind to aravel wheels.
 
Because stretching along the length of the forest is a long broken remnant of
Imperium highway road. Today this epitaph to human pride sits empty of grand
ambitions, a ruined road of Tevinter make that turns to dust. Though impossibly
long, it's more of a sad dirt-trodden path these days. You're not even sure if
it's still being used because everything is being eaten away by uncontrollable
plant growth, by the encroaching trees, as the wilds of the Free Marches
reconquer all. The only traces of former Tevinter glory to be seen here is
found in the last vestiges of crumbling stone, in the multiple pillars that
still stand or the archways that loom. Yet some day soon they, too, will be
erased. What the trees haven't claimed yet will be eventually consumed.
 
Perhaps the whole of the empire that had once picked clean the corpse of
Arlathan will one day disappear. If only your people were so lucky.
 
For now much of the toppled fragments of the imperial highway have already
sunken in the ground. Occasionally, stark glimpses of buried white stone can be
seen poking up through the dirt, gleaming in the sun. They form jagged lines of
sharp teeth that snake along the length of the road; it doesn't look exactly
safe. Looking north, you can see that the highway continues onward to Tevinter
until its many varied segments stretch far from sight. But when you look in the
opposite direction, you can see how the road weaves in a southernly manner
because it is at the whims of interruptive ancient trees. When it finally hits
the base of Sundermount, the road begins to lazily wind and curl and slink up
its sides. Eventually, this part of the highway disappears as well after it
turns a corner, melds into a tunnel, and becomes one with the rock—only to
reemerge as a visible mountain pass, the only one in sight. The southern half
of the Free Marches beckons.
 
In its heyday, you suspect this would've been a ridiculously tricky road to
traverse, much less today when it is in such disarray. And that's without
taking into account the additional detours inside the passages of Sundermount
itself, which are as inevitable as they are foolish. Yet humans will always
wander where they want to conquer, so fumbling through a mountain full of the
restless dead seems to be right in line with shem logic.
 
But witnessing how these ruins and unnatural structures clutter up the
mountainside is even more dismaying than knowing that it is Kirkwall that waits
at the end of the road. At the height of the Imperium, a slaver's port would've
undoubtedly been too valuable to ignore, especially when such highways are
famed for having once connected all the major cities on the continent together.
All roads lead to Minrathous, even from faraway ports.
 
And so the ancient shems must have taken the otherwise insurmountable mountain
as a challenge, leading to land routes being carved out of holy grounds. Such
signs of human domination should disgust anyone. Desecrations such as these are
the reason the Dalish have stayed away from the region for centuries, but your
clan has always been a stubborn one. Still, it is unnerving.
 
The imperial highway project must've been one of excessive hubris indeed. Even
today's shemlen historians crow about it. Man's will made manifest, after all,
through the conquering of nature—the only cost being, of course, the blood of
slaves. The entire network of roads must be rank with suffering. No wonder the
Veil is thin here.
 
Some say the bustling activity and transport of ancient slaves can still be
heard today in the gnashing, wailing, agitated moans of the rattling undead.
They're not entirely wrong. You can see them right now: ambient wisps floating
free as they glow in the light of the setting sun. They may be restless
spirits, but these are harmless ones—not that humans can make that distinction.
The wisps are drawn out of the woods at night because they are attracted to the
ruins, which isn't surprising considering how Tevinter roads were once
magically hewn. And as you watch the wisps gracefully converge along its
length, you find yourself marveling at shem ignorance, at how often humans
misunderstand the truth.
 
Something about the thought of restless elvhen spirits seems to scare shemlen
more than the actual historical fact of their brutality, which you will never
understand. Despite the highway's gruesome history, the village has been built
conspicuously closer to the road than to the mountain itself. It is as if the
shems think that spirits will be less likely to appear if they live closer to
the recognizably human-built structure. This is silly considering how the whole
area would be affected by tears in the Veil.
 
That's why you're so fascinated with this little shem village—it's so full of
contradictions and nonsensical logic. Free Marchers are notoriously suspicious
of both blood magic and elves, yet here's a village placed so close to a
forest! The only thing separating these ancient trees from farmland is the
grand skeleton of a highway road. And so what's to stop a terrible elf like you
from spying? Because that's precisely what you're doing now.
 
For the past summer weeks in which Clan Lavellan has camped close to
Sundermount, you've caught yourself daydreaming about this day multiple times.
You know from past experience traveling around the Free Marches that this week
is the first wheat harvest of the year—and with that comes festivals, bonfires,
dances, and crackling lights cheerfully standing out in the darkness of the
night.
 
And now that time of year has come around once more.
 
You've always yearned to witness such sights for yourself. You've burned with
envy whenever you've had to look upon the warmth of shem lights, only to be
forced to turn away. And yet here, finally, is the opportunity to experience
such an event for yourself—albeit from a distance. So in a fit of pique, you've
come to watch the humans dance. You have snuck away from the clan. The festival
is supposed to go from sundown to sunrise, you know. But while you don't quite
have the nerve to stay out that long, surely you can stay just long enough for
the bonfires to burn? Already the shadows stretch and grow as the sun dips
lower in the sky.
 
While crouched in the ruins of the Tevinter empire, you hide behind its pillars
as you spy on the villagers. All the village is awash in the red and orange
warm hues of the bowing sun. You watch as the farmers finish setting up torches
and bonfires in and out of their village square. Only a wheat field stands in
between you and the starting festivities. You are eager, too eager, for the
festival to start, but they're not quite ready yet. In an effort to distract
yourself from becoming overly impatient, though, you've been examining your
Tevinter surroundings for what feels like hours. But now that the sun has fully
set, it is now time to start paying attention again.
 
If this is taboo, which it is, then you don't care. It's just one night. That's
all, you tell yourself. Can't you just seize this one night for yourself?
Because as always your studies are tedious, your Keeper is busy, you have no
friends, and your parents are never ever around. So who's going to stop you?
Things have finally settled down for the clan, but who knows when everyone will
have to flee again because of you. This may very well be the last and only
opportunity you will ever get to fulfill a wish you've always had—you can feel
it. You're utterly convinced of it. And you are sick of not getting what you
want, so in the end you couldn't resist. Slipping away spontaneously at the
time felt like a dangerous decision, yet it's one you can hardly regret now.
 
Because despite your nervousness there still beats an excited flutter in your
chest, a yearning in you that has been ever blooming and growing until it is
all encompassing.
 
The sun fully sets and night arrives. A cheer rises up from the collective
crowd of shemlen, as the bonfires are lit and their flames soar into the sky.
More shems spill out of their dwellings, dragging out platters of food and
casks of drink. All the while there are others carrying out freshly slaughtered
animals and game in preparation for spits and roasts. Even from a distance, you
can find pleasure in feasting your eyes upon such a spectacle. Their enthusiasm
proves infectious when it heightens your own because you feel drunk off of the
excitement of it all.
 
At first you take care to not be seen by staying put. There's little chance
anybody can catch you so long as you stay hidden among the broken crevices of
the highway. But you are still so far away from the village lights, and they
beckon, and you yearn. This field of wheat impossibly seems to start stretching
wider and wider the longer it stands in your way.
 
And as the sky grows darker, it also gets harder to see any village activity
until eventually you can only guess at the festivities based on sound alone.
You are stuck in shadows away from the light. The frustration and unfairness of
that inherent truth stings until you feel stupid when you suddenly realize that
you've been treating the shems overly with caution—as if they could see as well
in the dark as you!
 
You wait until everything plunges into darkness, except for the roaring
bonfires that beckon, before you make your move. As you carefully make your way
through the ruined fragments of Tevinter road, you grow bold enough to then
slip right away into the nearby field of wheat at the first chance you get.
Excitement beats in your chest. You are daring and adventurous. You are elvhen!
You can see very well in the dark, so all of this is child's play. You remain
hidden and undetected the whole time.
 
Eagerness dogs your every step, pushes your heels, pressuring you to move
faster, but you are crouched low and savoring the slow anticipation of moving
through the wheat field. You fancy yourself a hunter with the village as your
prey. Though the wheat has been harvested already, you are still small enough
to successfully hide among its stalks by staying low to the ground. It's like a
game. Creeping ever close, you eventually in the middle of the field once you
can see the village square. You can see all the festivities now quite clearly,
and this is when your breath hitches in surprise.
 
There is a group of giggling girls that dance and play and demand every ounce
of your attention. From the ruins you couldn't see them, but now their activity
is so evident and clear. Never have you ever seen anyone behave like this
before. Or chatter like so. Or laugh aloud raucously, noisily, gloriously. So
enamored are you that your eyes end up tracking these girls for the next
minute, the next hour, the rest of the night until time streams together. You
don't know how long you have been hungrily watching village from the field, and
yet the longer you watch, the more fascinated you become.
 
This is a theater of dance.
 
These girls are about your age and as they dance the night away, you are
further struck dumb by their mesmerizing free-floating hair. Long tresses hang
past their shoulders while the back of your head curls with the rising
humidity. Already you can feel more sweat form at the nape of your neck. Only
the practical shortness of your locks provide relief, but at the cost of having
your cut bangs be jagged and messy—a dagger's specialty. It's only now that you
realize it's ugly, but never has it occurred to you to cut your hair any other
way.
 
And how are their clothes so neat and mended? Without the telltale signs of
hasty stitches on top of repaired holes? Their dresses rustle loosely and
freely from their bodies, whereas the edges of your own are always wrestling
with and snagging upon the sharp ends of wild branches. How do these shem girls
make even the act of sweating from dancing look delightful? Even the thought of
trying to do the same right now just makes your leather-clad body feel even
more suffocatingly sticky.
 
You absentmindedly swipe at your forehead, wiping away a trailing bead of
sweat. The gear is practical for sure, but during travel? The armor never fails
to cling like second skin, especially at the slightest hint of exertion, to the
point it seems to always be slick and tacky with the feel of sweat. It's
disgusting.
 
Nothing at all like these shem clothes. Their skirts spin so freely, as if they
were light and airy, whereas the obligatory robes you must wear during your
studies have always felt heavier than cloth need to be. They may be the mantle
of the First, but they are burdensome due to how wretchedly they hang in the
turgid summer airs. You can't even imagine the personal suffering of trying to
dance in them either.
 
Yet would you dare to remark as such aloud? Or hint to anyone that such clothes
make you feel clothed in anything but honor and dignity? Living in the forest
is hard enough as it is without being forced to wear robes that just serve to
make you even more sweaty and filthy—never mind how paradoxically impractical
it is to wear such garb in the middle of stuffy forests or in the midst of
horrible weather. Yet it is the Dalish who dictate it so. It is the clans who
insist on such a tradition for their mages. Why?
 
All this time you thought only shemlen to be so illogical and insane. But it is
only now, after watching these shemlen girls dance while in the flush of
rebellious youth, that you feel like the insane one.
 
This startling realization, the utter unfairness of it all, makes you want to
rail at the tyranny of culture, but you can't. Because even now you still
wouldn't speak such criticisms aloud, would you? Especially not in front of
your Keeper. You'd die of shame. She wouldn't suffer such complaints anyway and
neither would your peers. Not when you alone among them have the luxury of
sitting inside a tent, poring over books, for days on end.
 
And it is then and only then in one complete moment of madness does it happen—a
sudden impulse, a whim, a deliciously traitorous thought.
 
What if you were inside that tent right now while surrounded by your peers as
you strip off your robes and toss them away, only to end up putting on a
girlish shem dress instead?
 
For a moment you stop breathing.
 
It's appalling. It's shocking. It's fiendishly appealing.
 
Watching the girls feels like a waking dream. With every whirl of a dance,
every flirtation, every slight movement of their delicate birdlike hands, you
are addicted. You need to see more. This is a theater of shem ritual, love, and
dance that you continue to be fascinated by because it is only now that you
finally realize why.
 
Suffering doesn't flag their every step. Shadows don't dwell in their eyes.
These are not the downtrodden, beaten down People of the Dales. These girls
don't live like rats. They are not Dalish. They don't need to live moment to
moment, day by day. They need not be obsessively concerned with survival with
every active and conscious thought or even torture themselves with questions
like when will the next meal come and where will fresh water be found?
 
Instead, these silly girls can afford to leave behind so many trails of broken
hearts, flustered boys and men, but in an aravel everyone is packed so tight.
In a Dalish camp there can be no flirtations, no privacy, no innocent blush of
first love without everyone else finding out. You’ve caught others sneaking
away successfully, though, no doubt to revel in privacy just as you have now.
But whereas they've been fooling around and learning to kiss, learning to glow,
you’ve come out here to watch humans dance. You start to feel a little pathetic
at that.
 
You’ve never been held. Who'd sneak off with you? Who is there to embrace you
in some private copse of trees? Your peers are not really your peers, not
really, because besides your Keeper you are alone. You will always be alone. A
bonding will happen someday, you know, but that's a given. You are a mage. That
makes you precious breeding stock, so a bonding is inevitable, but it's not
like duty or inevitability attracts boys. There is propriety at stake.
 
And even if there is boy who would want to spirit you away, you wouldn't know
what to do with one anyway.
 
The girls stop dancing and leave your line of sight.
 
The once soft blooming yearning in you now twists and tightens and turns
bittersweet.
 
This is asinine. You shouldn't have come. You shouldn't even be here. As you
struggle to dampen the sudden hurt in your heart, the taboo and excitement of
it all now turns crushing with the weight of your own shame. Foolishly, though,
you're still reluctant to pull away. Half-heartedly, you try to convince
yourself to head back to the highway, to go back to camp, to go curl in your
bedroll, yet you hesitate. You keep lingering, perhaps daring the world to just
give you one more excuse to stay.
 
And that's when it happens. In an instant your gaze catches a new searing
sight—a human couple, laughing, as they flounce away. Not only do they leave
the festival together, they leave the village altogether.
 
Forget the girls. Now you track this couple with your eyes. As they carelessly
head your way, you crouch even lower to the ground while still being hidden in
the wheat field. When you move to a more advantageous, you end up straying
dangerously close to the outlying buildings on the village boundaries. But this
sudden sense of danger, coupled with a strange sort of anticipation, excites.
The danger further makes you heady with recklessness, as you intuit you are
about to witness an intimacy so rarely found in the open of a Dalish clan. You
ought to feel a thief, you ought to be ashamed, but you push the feeling down
with surprisingly little guilt as your breath catches in your throat. Your keen
eyes feast upon the sight of the boy's face, as he moves away from bonfires and
into starlight.
 
It's striking. The difference is startling. It makes so visibly clear that this
is a boy without a single streak of vallaslin. In your culture, he wouldn't
even be a man. Yet in lieu of smooth and supple elvhen skin, there's a
tantalizing sort of swarthiness instead—a farmer's rural tan, some stubble, a
broad jaw, and jutting sensual lips. And all the while the sight of his skin
continues to intoxicate: little beads and pearls of sweat as they rapidly
transform from a gleaming firelit bronze into the pale cool hues of midnight
blue.
 
He hasn't the look of a hardened Dalish warrior. He is irrevocably human, he is
undeniably forbidden, but you swallow and can't look away.
 
And as the boy reaches out to tuck his smiling companion’s hair behind her ear,
she giggles. He take her hand, deposits a white ribbon in her grasp, and her
gasp is audible and clear. As she delightfully strokes its length, winds it
between her fingertips, moonlight glows off of its texture. Even from a
distance, you can tell it is a delicate wisp of silk, ethereal and aglow with
the flush of first love, first kiss. They kiss.
 
No one has ever given you such a gift.
 
The boy briefly breaks the kiss and pulls back, only to then bring ribbon-clad
fingers to his lips. How long do they stare into each other's eyes? A
distracting sight. He seems so enamored with her, and so you are stunned at how
gentle he seems, how preciously he treats the girl.
 
How long do you crouch in the field, watching them? A clapping applause breaks
out in the night, as the villagers celebrate the end of a hard harvest, but the
sound may as well be distantly far for all the notice the lovers give. And as
they embrace again under the weight of the full moon, increasingly are you
filled with a hollow sort of yearning that makes you ache, makes you sick.
 
You've begun to dream of impossible things, think of impossible scenarios.
You've become distracted. The dance, this ribbon, the innocence of two
loves—none of this should have mattered in the first place because you are not
in the forest anymore. In the camouflage of dense leaves and bark, it is easy
enough to hide away from shems. You do it in your sleep. But here in a wheat
field? On the outskirts of a shem village in the stark light of the moon?
You've let yourself be drawn away. You've let yourself become careless.
 
You are just a fool.
 
A templar catches you. He looks like a regular shem when he finds you. You
don’t know how he senses you. He isn’t wearing armor. He isn’t armed. You don’t
know his true nature until it is too late. He’s even tipsy with drink when he
first stumbles out of the village and comes upon the two embarrassed lovers.
The mood is ruined. The scene is in tatters. Your greedy eyes had wanted more,
to see the next continuation. You’re distracted. You think he is just a normal
man, perhaps a farmer, another festival drunkard, which lets your guard down,
which is a mistake, because one moment he is still laughing at the two of them
when suddenly in the next his body stiffens, goes taut, goes fierce.
 
His stunned face contorts with the rage of discovery, of terror and revelation,
as he whips into motion and shoves the other shems to safety, shouting about
abominations. In their stumbling panic, the boy cries out while the girl drops
her ribbon. They flee as it crumples to the ground, stained.
 
The templar snarls and searches the field where he sees you, finds you, hates
you. In your panic, you're already mid-rise out of your crouch, but then are
stopped short by his roving gaze. You are stricken. The shock of it all, this
sudden turn, freezes you until you can do nothing else but gape in horror at
his eyes, his all-seeing eyes—no, his aura. This sticky-sweet menacing aura,
the saccharine call of rising lyrium, this power, and the additional bitter
twang of blood you can taste on the back of your tongue when out of reflex you
suddenly bite down hard—you recognize it, this taste of despair. How can you
not? How could you have let your guard down? But there's no time to berate
yourself when this abrupt sickly molasses pressure throws you off your
feet—making you reel, making you sick. It sears your senses as you choke and
gasp for air, for even a puff of breath that isn’t there, as the oxygen rapidly
leaves your lungs, depletes, goes scarce.
 
You’ve heard the stories. You’ve heard the tales. You’ve been lectured at over
and over, but Keeper’s words had met deaf ears.
 
Because how could you have known, how could you have truly comprehended, when
your parents had worked so hard just to keep the clan one step ahead of the
templars?
 
You've never been Silenced before. You’ve never been so full of fear.
 
You are insensate with numbness, pain, and a dazed sort of confusion as you
writhe in terror, as your back seizes with convulsions, as your mind recoils
with existential horror every time you try and reach for the Fade only for the
magic to not be there, never there. You can’t stop reeling from the sluggish
syrup response of your mana—so dampened it may as well have never existed at
all. But still you can’t stop trying until eventually you can’t move at all,
can’t think. You think you can hear screaming only to realize it is coming out
of you.
 
The templar steps closer, arms raised, chin high, with his voice hoarse and
throaty with triumph as he continues to chant at you.
 
Time stretches, softens and slows, like the thick ropes of honey your father
once shares as he gently nurses you back to health that time when you are
young, bedridden, and convinced of your own death. The memory of your father
can be distilled into ribbons in golden form, awash with love and warmth, but
those ribbons are torn apart now. So when you try and remember what it was like
swallowing whole that sweet medicinal honey, those silken strands of comfort,
you can't. You can't open your mouth to do anything but scream, even when
you're desperate to accept the offering, when you want to remember a time
without pain, without agony. You can’t due to the ceaseless, violent
contractions of your body. The memory of your father is left in tattered
shreds—the worst violation of all.
 
The screaming won’t stop. It may as well be white noise at this point. Static,
an unchanging chant. That makes sense as the templar draws near. You can tell
his mouth is moving yet can hear nothing. You are nothing. You have become
small, made smaller still by his overwhelming silence.
 
Still, there is a ringing in your ears. It sounds like the keening whine of
death, abruptly bringing to mind the first time you saw a creature die. You
were so young.
 
Here is the scene: your mother, your six-year-old self, and the fish you watch
die by the riverside. As you witness the fading light in its black trout eyes,
you remember a stricken sort of horror rising up to fill every fiber of your
being. You remember its row of tiny teeth, the way its mouth flaps open and
shut, open and shut—a movement that both sickens and mesmerizes all at once. It
seems so mechanical. So unfeeling. But as the fish's body quivers to a halt, as
its wriggling form finally settles, you are trapped still by its gleaming eyes.
 
One minute you are a giggling child, and it's alive. Then in the next, in one
fierce instant, your mother catches this fish and spears it to the ground. But
in that second when the fish is first pulled from the water, there is a surreal
moment in which it does not struggle. Instead, it goes still as though it
functions under the eerie artificial calm of an animal that does not believe in
its own death.
 
That disbelief does not last.
 
You feel like throwing up because suddenly you can see yourself in the fish's
place, as if its death were your very own. It is all too easy to imagine a
sudden wretched pain, the shock of it, as well as the mindless terror of being
pierced and penetrated as your body flops about on the tip of a spear. And
still the fish keeps writhing on. You watch as it finally, mercifully, bitterly
expires.
 
Until this moment, all you know of survival is how to fill a waterskin and how
to separate poisonous herbs from the useful ones. This is why your mother has
brought you out here to the river bank. You’re old enough now, she declares.
But you never wanted this.
 
Later, your mother will put a knife in your hands and teach you how to properly
gut a fish, belly to tail. She will ignore the way your body trembles, trembles
like the fish, until it is with impatience that she corrects your shaking grip.
She will show you how to clean and scrape off its scales. And, finally, she
will scold you for dropping the knife when your hands end up too slippery slick
from handling these luminescent scales.
 
In the stark light of day, those rotting slivers of fish will shiver and wink
at you.
 
On your deathbed, in the face of the templar, the sudden remembrance of this
fish seizes you in a squeezing grip. You haven't thought about that riverbank
in years.
 
But death is the sticky feel of blood flecks that dry too slow on your
fingertips. It is the oozy, slimy sensation of little fish scales that cling no
matter how hard you try to rub them off. Though you witnessed the fish
physically die, something inside of it still feels alive. Even as you hold its
corpse in your hands, as you prepare to gut it from belly to tail, some part of
you still refuses to believe it is dead. And when the skin and muscles of its
belly are flayed, split open, and peeled back apart, you can tell there is
something still lurking within its corpse-still eyes.
 
You suddenly realize why you had tried so hard to suppress this memory, what
had so terrified you when you were a child.
 
Because when you stare into those eyes, you can see your own face reflected
back at you—tiny, trapped, and small.
 
It's a study in contrast. It's a lesson in terror. All your life darkness has
evoked a sense of dread in you; it is only now, with a singular sort of
stunning clarity, that you finally understand why.
 
The second you see the light in its eyes die is also the exact second your mana
reaches out, touches the Fade, touches the fish, and connects you to both
simultaneously as it dies. You are only six. Not only does your magic manifest
for the first time, but you become the fish that dies. This is when you feel
the Fade. This is the precise moment you become a mage.
 
But as you feel the fish's essence wither and slip away into the unknown, into
the unfathomable, you make yet another terrible mistake.
 
When you look into the abyss, it is the abyss that stares back out.
 
Deep inside that black dead gaze, something begins to stir as it turns its gaze
onto you. You end up screaming as loudly then as you do now.
 
Because it is pitiless.
 
The stars now outline the templar’s head as he looms over you. Dimly, you hear
the panicked, screaming shouts aroused from the village square. How soon until
the shems organize enough to seethe out as an angry singular horde? Worse than
darkspawn, more foul than the Blight—at least the latter is merely a force of
nature.
 
Still gasping for breath, you feel your hand sluggishly move on its own like a
separate entity detached from the rest of your body. You feel it reaching at
your hip for something, as the templar pulls out a hidden knife and raises it
high.
 
Belly to tail.
 
Sternum to navel.
 
He's going to gut you like a fish.
 
Then your mother’s fierce image sings in your mind. Get up, she says. Get up
and fight!
 
A spike of fury pierces your numbness. That fuzzy detachment abruptly rips
apart, torn and shred, while reality screams back into existence under the
templar’s pitiless gaze. All the world is drowning as lyrium screeches in your
ear. You want to curl up and die. But your mother just told you to get up.
 
Your hand gropes the handle of your knife, the very object your mother has
always insisted to keep on you at all times. As you grip it tight, preparing to
wield it in a wild slash to ward your assaulter off, your muscles flex then
tighten. In the sudden certainty of death with inaction, your hands stops
shaking. You stop screaming. Instead, you roar.
 
You thrust up your blade, startling him, disrupting his grip. But he roars back
as he regains his fury, knocking you away when you aim for his soft belly, that
unprotected gut. He should have worn armor. Templars are always cursed with
armor. But without it now, he is quicker, more nimble.
 
With a panicked flail, you strike again, only for him to jerk back
instinctively. He lifts his blade, tries a feint, and then a stab, but he is
clumsy. He has been drinking. His hand lashes out. Once again your blade cuts
his own thrust short. You will not be easy prey.
 
Something desperate, something wild, begins to grow in his eyes. He is in a
battle for his life, but then so are you. Before, when you were stricken on the
ground, he seemed so powerful, so in control. But now you are both just trying
to survive.
 
Everything else fades into a distant din, as your focus sharpens on nothing but
him. Metal screeches when you deflect his next slash. You try again and the two
blades hiss and shriek apart from each other with metallic contact made. You
try. You try and try and try again, but you are so very tired.
 
Though the acrid lyrium stink he carries recedes back slightly, your mana still
won't come. With his need to fully concentrate against your wild attacks, he is
rapidly losing his grasp on his templar powers. But until then it is all you
can do just to barely hold him back. You are weakening. Your will weakens
without the Fade to bolster you. And so he will kill you. He will kill you, he
will find the others, and he will do it by bringing more templars. He will drag
Keeper from her bed in order to slaughter her in front of everyone, and then
spit on her corpse and let her rot without burial, without rites, without the
rituals needed to pacify her soul and let it pass peacefully into the Beyond.
She will be lost instead to the Void, and it will be all your fault.
 
You have wrought this. You will have brought this upon your clan. Things have
been so hopeful, the future had seemed so bright, but it was a lie. And when
this templar has finished with her corpse and has slain everybody else, he will
wait. He will stand there, waiting for your parents to come back to burning
tents and broken aravels, where the other templars will immediately subdue them
and drag them forth just so he can murder them as well—all the while laughing.
Laughing.
 
The slack-jawed emptiness of your father's face. Your mother's vacant gaze. You
can see their bodies fall. The templar will kill him first, and then her next.
And after she hits the ground, lips soundlessly moving, gasping, she will turn
her head with the last vestiges of her strength just to see what's left of her
family once more. She will not see you because you will be already dread.
 
Mamae, you want to weep. Mamae, don’t leave me.
 
But all you can see now is the back of her head. And though you cannot see her
face, it does not matter. You can already sense it—the last glimmer of her
essence as it finally dies. It is all too easy to imagine. You mourn her death.
You are already mourning your own.
 
In a sudden deft motion with his blade, the templar finally manages to disarm
you, wrestles you to the ground.
 
You try to break free, but it's hard. Your legs kick, your arms flail, and in
the scuffle he loses his weapon. You shout and reach for it yourself, but then
it's with a snarl that he grips your hair and pulls, wrenching it back only to
slam down your head. Blood streaks free. You become dizzy. Your vision blurs.
Your temple throbs with every frantic heartbeat as the back of your head
bleeds. Perception of the world is knocked loose and ajar, as your head is
slammed against a stone again and again, and you are so very tired. Your eyes
flutter shut.
 
You can see your family still, the image of their corpses trapped under your
eyelids. They're waiting for you.
 
You blink and he's suddenly on top of you. As your struggles weaken further, as
you flail less and pant more, it is easy for the templar to drag you close. It
is easy for him to lift one leg, then the other, to straddle you freely. He
seizes your wrists, holds them tight, and it hurts. Capillaries break and your
delicate skin bruises in your efforts to get away, but every time you try to
fight he releases his grip just long enough to hit you again. The next time he
tries to strike your face, though, you are ready.
 
You bare your teeth, and then snatch his merciless fist with a newly freed arm,
lunging for whatever part of him you can grasp until you can savagely bite down
deep. He seeks only your submission and death, so he will bleed for that, and
he does. He bleeds. But your vicious satisfaction is cut short when he tears
himself from your teeth, curses, then starts choking you. And choking you. And
he doesn't stop, he will not stop, and that's when despair wells up in your
heart as you can't breathe, you can't breathe.
 
Then everything stops.
 
Hands release your throat. You take your first unimpeded gasp of air, but you
can barely swallow. Black spots dart across your vision, but dazed and dimmed
as it is you can still perceive the glorious stars. They are the only pinpricks
of light in the dark when the clouds drift across the sky, across the moon.
 
You struggle to sit up, squirm away from the male weight, when a sudden
arterial spray of blood splatters across your face. For one endless moment you
think it yours—that you are the one to have died.
 
Moonlight breaks free and sets the scene aglow. Your mother has slit the
templar's throat. Her expression contorts with a snarl, with grief, as she sees
you. One hand is pulling back his head, baring his throat. Her other hand is
clutching the dagger already dripping from its bloody deed.
 
The templar, you note, is trying to scream. But as his lips keep trying to form
wordless cries, they keep flapping open and shut. Open and shut. His vocal
cords have been cut. His eyes are bulging and wild, begging to meet yours, but
you shun them and glance away. You try not to be drawn to them, so instead you
are fascinated with his newly formed second mouth—blood gushes from his throat.
It dribbles down past the neck of his shirt, past his collarbone, down toward
his sternum and chest.
 
The trails they leave gleam black in the night.
 
Beyond relief, beyond blind searing relief, some small quiet thing you’ve never
noticed before speaks up, some small terror you've been suppressing in the back
of your mind. That part of you starts out as a whimper, a murmur, until it
picks up into a keening cry, sounding even more just a little bit louder, a
little bit more deafening, more demanding, until your perception of such is so
warped you can hear nothing else.
 
As your magic trickles back into your being faster and faster, your mana is
restored to you in the rush of a tide, but still you notice that eerie roaring
growing louder. You can sense the Fade now as the connection snaps back into
place. The barrier and threshold of Silence that had kept your soul from its
grasp now fractures, and then shatters completely.
 
Almost against your will your gaze drifts back to the templar's gaze. Some
unholy light within is burning to consume and swallow you whole. It gulps for
you.
 
Something is watching you. Something has always been watching you. You've never
told anyone. You've tried dismissing it. Over and over, you've refused to see
it. Never have you wanted to give any more validity to Keeper's claims that
obviously it is the duty of the First to learn to avoid the Dread Wolf's gaze,
but. But. It's watching you now. That same entity.
 
The stilted paranoid instinct in you has always attributed this feeling to
Fen'Harel if for nothing else than the reassurance of the known, in the
emboldened power from being able to name a thing. But now you know how wrong
you were. Something terrible is behind that templar's face. Some misshapen
thing. And it is not Fen'Harel.
 
It has watched you. It is quivering for you. You've kept it waiting for so
long. It is so beside itself, it is gasping for you.
 
All throughout your life, ever since that little fish, some small tiny part of
you has always been shrieking. That part of you is screaming now because you
finally know the truth. Finally, you can see.
 
In the Fade is an ever hungry mouth panting and drooling for you, insatiable
for you. Embedded in this nightmarish puckered flesh are a hundred black little
blinking eyes, their eyelids twisting and folding in on themselves. They like
to wink. They like to greet you. I see you, says the mouth to the mage, and it
is a convulsing slit of existence that flaps open and shut under its own
delight.
 
You see both concrete reality and this glimpse of the Fade together at once,
with the latter a hazy overlaid dream, a fleshy construct that does not yet
seem real or whole. These lips are not enough to paint a complete picture. You
think you can catch an impression of spindly limbs, bursting pustule growths,
but at that thought your mind shies away, with each formless thread of
perception trying to solidify instead sent scurrying away like a rat that wants
to hide.
 
Some last vestige of self-preservation forcing you to look away lest your stare
too long, too deep, but it is too late. These actions are in vain. They are all
in vain.
 
You thought yourself blind and deaf without mana, but if only it were so. You
were so naive. Without your magic, you were safe, but now? With it rapidly
pouring back into you now, you want to die.
 
You can be forgiven at this moment for breaking. For you are broken. You are
nothing at all. You are a little songbird collapsing under the weight of its
own insignificance. You want to sing a song of praise as much as you are
compelled to keep screaming because it is so grotesque a thing that vies for
your affections, your attentions, your pleasure. As if to reward you, to
encourage you, it wriggles like a little worm each time you feed it so. It
yearns to pay back your gaze readily tenfold. Thus with every instance in which
you give in, submit, and succumb to this creature, it becomes filled with
nothing less than complete and total ardor—a heightened ecstasy that only grows
with every lick it gives your cheek, getting more and more excited the more you
whine, the more you writhe.
 
As its large fetid tongue finishes wiping clean your face of tears and shem
blood, you beg it to stop, you beg it to stop, until it starts caressing your
own tongue, and then turns the rest of its attentions onto you. It is crooning.
You are weeping. Yet still it just keeps going, thrusting into you all the
while until you are moaning.
 
Your mother is shouting at you now, shouting that there are other shems coming.
She fights for your attention. But what is she compared to a god?
 
So overcome are you, this might as well not be reality at all. You might as
well be dreaming. The words that spill forth from her lips barely register on
this plane for this god is a jealous god. So wide and broad is its floating
carcass, it need only open its mouth a little more, extend the turgid length of
tongue and flesh just a bit further, in order to swallow you whole.
 
Even now it encompass your whole field of vision. And that's what you want. You
are salivating for Void-forsaken mercy, but you do not know yet whether you are
beseeching for a new beginning, an extension on life, or for merciful finality.
 
It chooses for you.
 
This is the sound of your identity cracking. This is the sound of glass
shattering, gears halting, metal cranking, and wood splintering as wheels grind
to a stop. It is the spokes and beams of the aravel that finally snap, sagging
as it was too much under the weight of its own horror. This is the point in
which the finite scope of your comprehension breaks. Welcome home.
 
Your mother is looking at you. Your mother is staring at you as if she's never
seen you before. She seems to mistake your terror for something else, but she
is wrong. You are in awe. How can she not see? How can she not see?
 
Forgive her. She is so mortal. She does not know.
 
As her countenance twists, as she readjusts her grip, as she wrenches back the
templar's head just a little harsher, a little crueler, she raises her dagger
high. It is action born of desperation. He is crying, but when the blade slices
through the air again he does not again survive.
 
The templar dies. And you feel nothing.
 
He falls like so much useless chaff, reaped from all semblance of mercy, left
to the soil to rot for all that body is good for now. But the templar falls
forward on top of you instead. A mistake. He is heavy and you are trapped,
pinned. Your mother makes a noise, her lithe form struggling to wrestle him off
you, but you hardly notice.
 
Your cheek to his cheek. His slick neck flush against yours. Even now his
corpse weeps. There is a gushing from his slit throat. There is dripping from
his eyeballs. You wonder what that tastes like. You want to crawl inside.
 
You don't think Keeper would approve.
 
As your mother finally drags the body off of yourself, you can't help but try
and catch another glimpse of this new god and its corpse-still eyes, of its
visage, its face.
 
Its face.
 
It is a gaping black maw lined with sharp teeth, pointed and gleaming little
hooks of memory. Those lips curl like they've been smiling at you all along.
Each glimmer of a decayed pitted tooth winks back at you in a mockery of the
stars. Each radiant wink gives off a viridian light that is so warm, so warm,
it glows. You do not flinch in darkness now. It is your friend.
 
Panic seems so far away now, as every fabric of your being is seized upon by
this glorious creature, leaving you helpless to no less than to behold and
tremble before its form. You are awe-struck. You are in agony. It is eternity,
the eternal. You've seen it once before. You've seen that exact set of teeth in
the shape of a hapless fish. Your mother had been so fierce then, but now she
is afraid. You were afraid once like her, but you no longer have to feel so
alone. You will never be left lonely ever again.
 
For it is beauty. It is grace.
 
It's the abyss.
 
It grins.
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     So I kinda like cosmic horror. Can you tell?
     Thank you for reading! If you like where this is going, please drop a
     kudos or a comment so that I know I'm on the right track. Posting
     this chapter makes me nervous.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Summary
     When templars can't follow you into the Fade, but other things can.
Chapter Notes
     Please be advised that this is when the Rape/Non-Con, Underage, and
     Violence tags really kick in. I'm sorry, Lavellan. I am so, so sorry.
     Credit for elvhen language goes to FenxShiral at Project Elvhen.
     This is such a messy chapter, such a hot mess, but I needed to get it
     out there. All nearly 10k words of it. From here on our story will
     not be the same.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
You are on an aravel and your breath hitches in your throat—alone in a wagon?
It is dark and empty inside. But where have your people gone? Are they dead?
Are you truly alone? Unfamiliar circumstances make you even more anxious. You
start to hyperventilate, become dizzy.
 
You are disoriented. You are clearly moving, with the wagon lurching to and fro
in a familiar beat. But this eerie silence is what gets to you. Why? Why is
this so? And where do you go? What you don't know is why. You don't know where
you go.
 
Your whimpers have awoken a hitherto unseen companion. He emerges and slinks
from the shadows. Your breath hitches at this sudden threat, but watcher rushes
to your side, sits you upright, and presses the rim of a bowl close to your
lips, but you are insensate. You wail, limbs knocking away the bowl, smacking
him in the face, but the man only shushes you and holds you close. That is when
your father fully materializes in form. It is a welcome sight. Though he cries
along with you, his lips don't move. He is blank-faced. You think his noise to
be faint, vague, as if muddled from a great distance, reverberating waves. And
then a woman says,
 
Da'lan...da'lan...!
 
Flashes of memory: a corpse, a fire, a village on fire, your mother dragging
you away. A forest looming, beckoning. A forest full of angry shems and shouts
at your heels.
 
You weep. You don't know for how long or what for, for the Fade is surely
already snatching away at your dream. You can't bare it otherwise for terror is
piecemeal. It forms a tattered picture, an impression in the sand. Let it be
washed away by the Waking Sea. But you know now that you are safe because your
father is here to stay.
 
As if in agreement, the aravel wheels give another mighty lurch and your head
almost bangs into the ceiling. All wits have fled. You wince and clutch your
head, feeling at the wrapped linen edges of a bandage while your father looks
grimly on. You can barely comprehend what he's telling you. As it is, you
already feel like you've been knocked about senseless.
 
He tells you you've been attacked. That you've lost a lot of blood. You've been
wounded very badly. Do you remember? Did that templar do this to you?
 
But you shy away from the memories, so your father abstains. He only takes your
hand.
 
Where is mamae?
 
But he only looks at you with beetle black eyes and that's when you know. She
is out hunting templars.
 
She is out hunting them because of you.
 
She's going to die because of you.
 
His words reverberating in your ears, you are not prepared for when he suddenly
lunges at you next.
 
Fingers at your throat! Esophagus gagged, throat clenched, and a hiss in your
ear—So is this your fear?
 
There's something being wrapped around your neck, some rope, pulling tighter
and tighter until you choke. Swarthy hands, once beloved, now wrench with
merciless glee. Quickly, his skin peels back and shudders until it is wrapped
in shining gauntlet armor. He is transformed. He is of the Templar Order. And
still he pulls.
 
Is this what you fear?
 
But that's not quite right, is it? In your rapidly blurred vision at the edge
of peripheral sight, you see ephemeral glossy strands of iridescent ribbon
white. The ribbon that doesn't belong here. You've never owned anything so
fine, so glossy, so shemlen. Though a tear is squeezed from the corner of your
eye, as it rolls down your cheek your horror feels unreal.
 
The moment you realize this you blink and you are alone again. Your father
disappears like he was never really there. Light flickers and attracts your
attention. Peeking outside between slats in the wood, you see it is so much
brighter now. The world is screaming white.
 
All the aravels are burning tonight. The one you are in right now bursts into
flame. You rear back. Everything is lit so bright. It's all on fire, yet
doesn't burn, and that's when you know.
 
The camp is being attacked. This is a purge.
 
Here are are your screaming dead. The walls and roof shake with the sound of
their shouts, pleas, yelps. Their echoing cries are met with savage chants, a
swing of the sword.
 
You stare at the door. It's only mere steps away, but it may as well be
impossibly far for all the obstacles that stand in your way. Each time you look
at a new different corner, a bit of debris falls into place while new wooden
beams shoot out and splinter from the ceiling. It's a little unnerving. But
none skewer you.
 
The walls are pulsating. The interior encloses in on you like a lover or a
womb. The fragile structure of the wagon is breaking, crumpling inward like so
much collapsed fruit, with you as its indomitable seed. Because you are not
dead. As the walls continue to quiver, pulse, and close in on you with the many
chambered squeeze of a rapid heartbeat, how are you not dead?
 
You know you should go outside and help, as you are apparently impervious to
harm somehow, but there is only screaming chaos out there. It may be all
relative, but at least it's calmer in here. You find it hard to find your
resolve because you keep hesitating. What is really out there, after all? It
could be trap. You don't want that. Let's just stay inside. There's a din out
there made from an amalgamation of suffering and fear. That's not something you
want to involve yourself in. And although hearing it doesn't seem so surreal as
to be removed from all possibility of reality, it still doesn't feel real. Your
own fear is removed from your person somehow and made distant, perfunctory,
like this is all a stage. This all seems so theatrical somehow. You resolve to
remain unimpressed, unmoved.
 
The aravel burns in slow, sluggish motion. There's a sort of beauty in that, in
this infinite suspension, this unending stasis of destruction. Time doesn't
really move forward, but neither does it move back. It's comforting to imagine
a future without agony, without pain.
 
The room expands and grows. Oddly still as tight as usual, just as it's
supposed to be as in your memory, but the dimensions also seem to stretch on
forever at times when you peek from the corner of your eyes—it's disorienting.
Yet wherever you glance from the corner of your eye again, all things snap into
place, everything reframed and back to normal.
 
Except for the flames. They are continual. They lick at your back, stroke at
your neck. Curling and caressing, they dance and flick and push you forth.
Something insistent seems to almost pressure you toward the door, but when you
look over your shoulder there is no one there. You blink and the aravel is back
to normal, no longer enflamed. Blink again and there it is—chaos in fiery form.
And then to nothingness again when the flames shudder away into nonexistence.
 
This is a game. But are you meant to hide? Or run away? Your mother told you to
stay out of sight. But the wagon she put you in is on fire. This is a very poor
game of hide and seek. And those poor souls outside just won't shut up about
you, won't stop crying out your name.
 
But how do they know your name? you think with a sudden startled jerk that you
bang your knee against a beam. You scowl, pained, then start hopping in place,
trying to shake off the pain.
 
It vaguely occurs to you that you must make a ridiculous sight, but at a guilty
glance around your surroundings you see nobody around, so you shrug. You wish
you could sit down, though, and on the wings of that thought come a solution: a
cot appears behind you. You don't know how you know it's there besides knowing
that wishing hard enough has apparently made it happen. That's convenient.
Somehow you know if you turn around, there it'll be, waiting for you. Yearning.
But some queer instinct compels you not to turn. Consequently, the cot looms
large in your imagination, but that's silly. It's just a bed. Just a shem bed.
A ridiculously large, oversized, overcompensating shem bed. It is furniture of
gleaming, polished wood with smooth manufactured edges foreign to Dalish craft.
Flickers of light gleam off its surface, winking at you.
 
Odd that it's on an aravel, but no matter. It beckons and tempts you to sit
down, lay down, close your eyes in eternity and submission and rest. Just
imagine those feather-stuffed pillows, comes a sly voice that beckons in your
mind. Never have you experienced such delights! So. Won't you let me ferry you
to sleep?
 
For a split second, you almost do it. You're used to sleeping in tents on the
ground. On the hard ground. With sharp rocks poking at your head.
 
Rocks?
 
Blood. Blood and gore matted on the back of your head. Something about that
sounds right. You know the feeling of having brain matter splatter silly
patterns outside of your cranium. But surely not your own. Surely not.
 
Do you?
 
Shouldn't you be dead?
 
Or maybe you're thinking about blood instead. Red makes such pretty trails down
your neck—some of its yours, most of it shem.
 
Something, something, you've lost too much blood. Blood transfusions, elfroot
potions, a bit of magic, but never is there enough. And then a woman says,
 
Stay still, da'lan, stay still! Just hold on!
 
But when you whip your head about you cannot see her. It leaves you feeling
flat-footed, clumsy, and wrong. You are suddenly week-kneed, anemic. Your legs
threaten to crumple you to the floor. Your knees do wobble slightly to the
point that colllapsing back down on that bed is starting to sound more and more
appealing. And then a woman says, a different woman says, a woman older and
aged and wise and ever bitterly familiar—
 
Listen to me. Hear my voice. Heed your lessons. You are lost, but can be found.
Do not shut your ears now, my First, my Apprentice, my Da'lan.
 
My surrogate daughter, something else in you whimpers for instead.
 
How do you know these things? How are you hearing all this! Your head is
starting to hurt. That sounded like—but that can't be. She isn't here. No one
else is here. Except me, says the sly voice instead. Flames gently nudge you
toward the bed. So stay here.
 
With me.
 
But the mesmerizing allure of its commands is punctured, shattered, by a
shrieking chorus of a man or woman or two or three who start screaming outside
even louder now, more shrill. And then, and then, that same woman says,
 
Can you hear them, da'lan?
 
You don't want the responsibility for their lives. So just stay inside. Stay
inside. You only have me.
 
But that can't be right. They're calling for you. You shake your head, but
can't clear the fuzziness clouding your vision, throbbing in your head. This
game is ridiculous! No one follows the rules. Everyone just keeps making more
and more noise when they should just shut up and let you think. You just know
no one is supposed to find you. You know everything will end if they do. Why
should anyone look to you for rescue, mercy, salvation? You're the one always
being protected. You're the one always made out to be the precious First—first
in priority, first in life, cherished always. Everyone is always telling you to
never be reckless with your life. So you're supposed to stay inside.
 
So you are supposed to hide from those screaming souls outside?
 
If you go outside, the voice so sweetly croons, then wouldn't you die?
 
After all, the rules of camouflage in the face of pursuit are—actually, you're
not sure. It almost frustrates you enough to make you stamp your feet. You
can't remember!
 
Nuisances and insects. Little crawling worms. Why can't they be quiet? Why are
they so distracting? Why, oh why, when we are finally inside do they nag and
nip and whine—
 
Be quiet. Aren't we supposed to be in hiding?
 
Any possible response has been cut off. The silence is deafening. You wonder
where the voice went.
 
But surely you're not supposed to be a hypocrite and make noise yourself? That
would make it too easy on your hunters, your pursuers. Once when mamae tells
you to hide when there are strange unfamiliar noises outside, she scoops you up
and places your huddled form among the thick winding roots of a hiding tree.
But you're safe already, aren't you? What a strange doubt. Since you're already
hiding, why are you remembering this now?
 
Because nobody else is hiding with you.
 
You can't help yourself. Before you know it, you have already absentmindedly
counted the number of screams you hear outside, and then realize you recognize
them all. Somehow. So the outside world must not be a trap. It sounds too real.
Especially when your chest throbs and aches the more you are able to easily
match each anguished voice back to its familiar face—a familiarity that starts
to shake the cobwebs off of you. Things stop rattling so fiercely within the
confines of your mind, your skull. The compulsion to turn around, lay down, and
submit disappears.
 
Yet the persistent noises you hear now aren't those of strange passerby shems,
but of the screams and cries of your brethren.
 
You are in an aravel. Therefore, you are part of a clan. An aravel is part of a
clan just as surely as its tents. There is no need to hide inside an aravel,
which is decidedly not a hiding tree.
 
This makes sense. This is making more sense than anything else has so far. Yes.
 
You need to go outside.
 
To the baker who can't resist slipping you an extra loaf for supper every time
you ask. To the tanner who likes to fashion you new vestments whenever he
notices your leathers wearing thin. To the hunter who takes the time to show
you how to fletch your arrows, string up new guts for your bow.
 
In a clan where food is scarce and resources are scarce, with time as the
scarcest and most precious of them all, people have always made time for you.
They've always been kind to you, secretly devoted as they are at looking at you
with stars in their eyes. Yet no matter how undeserved their praise, because
you are not worthy, they keep going on and that makes you feel guilty. You want
to bow, buckle, break under the collective weight of their attention and
investments. You can never repay them back. You know this.
 
You know who you are. You are the silly girl way in over your head. You are
drowning under the weight of this guilt. That's one thing you wish hasn't been
brought back to mind.
 
But without that guilt, how would you know repay back the smith, that
curmudgeonly old man? How could you have forgotten him? The one who normally
gruffly keeps to himself yet still goes out of his way every month to show you
the newest piece of ironbark found?
 
In a life where resources are rare and shared collectively amongst the clan,
here you are with your pick of the latest rarities found. Based on their role
in the clan, everyone gets a monthly allotment of precious metals and other
resources to expend on the repair and order of personal equipment. But ironbark
is rare enough to be withheld by the smith and only distributed at his
discretion.
 
Yes, that's right. This is all right. You're remembering now.
 
Because you are one of the few able to get reserved ironbark, guaranteed, even
if it is never a sizable amount. But in this life guarantees are a rare thing,
and all the more precious for it, and thus this smith has always advised that
you save up. He'll urge you to keep bringing all the pieces to him, so that
overtime he can build you a new weapon instead of that sad splintered stick, as
he calls it, you inherited so long ago. Ironbark, he declares, is the only
material worth its weight. No shem can bend ironbark quite like a Dalish can.
Collect enough of it and you'll see, he gloats, goading you enough times about
it every year to the point it makes your eyes roll.
 
But that's precisely what happens. It takes years for you as a child to collect
it, and takes even more years of him withholding the project for him to perfect
it, but perfect it he does—stubbornly, willfully. By the time you hit your
teenage years, it's become a running joke in the clan that the old curmudgeon
will never let go of the thing, that he'll be dragging that stick with him to
his grave.
 
And then comes the day, finally, when he presents you your very own staff. You
almost can't believe it, but you notice there's an odd whiff of formality in
the air when he gifts it to you, though. A bit of ceremony that you're
surprised by. That isn't usually his way. He's usually much more blunt and
frank than that. What does he care for namedays? Never once before have you
seen him give a single gift to another, much less invest years of his life into
someone else like he has done for you.
 
Still, you shouldn't be surprised; everyone always remembers your nameday, so
keen are they to recall your birth as a miraculous event. As if the sheer
accident of having magic makes you the second coming of Shartan or something.
It's ridiculous. But you know why your clan so dearly clings to you. You've
always shied away, embarrassed, at such reminders until you turn sullen instead
with adolescence, so bleak is your secret conviction that you would never live
up to the clan's image of you.
 
But when the smith remembers your nameday, it actually feels like a special
event. As if you are truly cherished.
 
So when he urges you to try the weapon out, to test the heft and weight of it,
to make sure it is absolutely perfect, you indulge him with all the
exasperation of youth rather than actual bitterness. It's not like you're
expecting anything momentous. Shows what you know. The moment you grip it in
hand and start to twirl is the moment you become a fervent believer in the
power of bespoke-made staves. As a true test, though, you start to wield it in
conjunction with your magic, slowly at first, until you are effortlessly
weaving enough spells of restoration and creation in the air to create a
shimmering array of vitality and growth that prompts even wild plants to react,
spurt, bloom, and glow.
 
You hardly notice, though, so willingly enthralled are you by the magic that
consumes. The tapestry you create comes effortlessly to you, with the sonorous
call of ancient magics slipping in silkily between every thought and emotion in
wondrously easy connections. It is as if the very fabric of the Fade is in
essence your own. You are an empty vessel filled anew. You dance without
reservation, summon power without hesitation, and exude mana without self-
consciousness. You are incandescent with joy in this moment. You sing a song of
the ancestors, then, without an ounce evident of adolescent cynicism, so giddy
are you by the hitherto unknown breaking of limits and rules.
 
This is the moment when some deep part of you intuits it—the Fade will never
feel like this again. Magic like this can only ever be felt once in every
lifetime. Until now you have never been part of something far greater than
yourself, greater than your tiny insignificant form, than your singularly
mortal self.
 
As the high of intoxication dies, so too does the feeling of invincible
strength, incredible power, that mighty conviction in the impossibility of
containment and constraints. But you are already becoming smaller now and can
hardly remember what you just were. It'd be heartbreaking, if the experience
hasn't already been cataloged in the theoretical sense, because as soon you try
again to grasp a second impression of that intoxicating power, the memory of
such is already slipping away. The harder you hold onto it, the faster it
flees.
 
Even your final attempt to snatch away even the barest trace of that magic is
half-hearted at best. No point in trying to taste it to relieve the moment and
convince yourself of its reality because it has already faded fast. You are
resigned to it, to being frustrated by the fleeting nature of revelation. You
can only weakly chase after it, as it flits away already in the farthest
reaches of your mind wherein fast forgotten dreams upon awakening become
transformed instead into half-remembered memories.
 
And yet, even though the moment is gone, it leaves you happy still.
 
And so when you finish your dance, when you gasp and heave from your glorious
exertions, when you return back to consciousness itself, that's when you notice
you have drawn a crowd and for the first time you just don't care. Your eyes
wildly rove for one person and one person alone—the smith—who you are shocked
to discovered is crying, weeping proud glimmering tears.
 
You are struck by this image. It'll be something you will never forget. And you
are yet again stunned by the thought that this smith is in fact the last from
proud old Clan Lavellan in the days when it openly roamed free—so confident in
its own strength and magic, so careless in its open hubris and snubbing of
humans.
 
And then came the purge, the stories like to ceaselessly remind you.
 
A whole clan, gutted.
 
A whole generation, culled.
 
The clan is dying now because of that. The near extinction of artisans and
craftsmen is just one more consequence of that. With not enough new babies born
to the clan, there are not enough promising youths. And among those promising
youths, there are even less capable of taking on apprenticeships as complex as
the forge. And even if there are, so many are needed instead for the hunting or
fishermen tracks. A clan can survive with just one smith, after all. But the
clan cannot survive in the absence of food.
 
And so the smiths die off one by one before they are able to pass on their
craft, their secrets dying with them. June weeps at the shameful weakening of
his craft while Dirthamen crows at every strengthening of his own. And a
distinct lack of mages in the clan, it's been even harder to hold onto
increasingly esoteric knowledge like the art of the staff. The ancient ways of
production for magical conduits are rare enough as they are without grim modern
necessity excising it from further practice and remembrance.
 
The years just keep chipping away at Dalish inheritance. But no longer. Clan
Lavellan has long paid the price for its folly. The clan may be dying a slow
death decades in the making, but today it has never been more alive.
 
You remember fondly that he will loudly deny letting even a single tear drop.
He'll scowl and fix immediate accusing glares upon anybody trying to hide their
snickers poorly. But in reality some inner contentment will simmer in his
being, occasionally rising up to tug up the corners of his lips in damned
displays of happiness.
 
When your own mother is often too busy for you, when your own father may be
regretful but nonetheless keeps parting from you, there is the old man and the
hand he rests upon your shoulder. He will never hug you. He will never embrace
you close like kin. Even now, not once, has he ever said anything to the effect
of lathan na or ma vhen'an. The closest he'll ever come to acknowledging his
love for you is to grumpily call you da'lan. Your Keeper calls you that, too,
but never in so secretly fond a tone.
 
In a clan where everybody else raises you so high above themselves, you may as
well be a drifting wisp of a cloud, your smith has always taken it upon himself
to drag you back down. He will never call you friend. He will never call you
daughter.
 
Yet all that pales in comparison to the way he looks upon you in the quiet
moments shared between the two of you. Moments that allow to breathe into
creation subtextual spaces of contemplation wherein words are meaningless,
gestures are worthy, but the truth can be found in the unseen, unheard, unsaid
underpinnings of silence.
 
After such a moment of stunned silence at the demonstration of your new staff,
the clan rushes forward to enthusiastically greet and congratulate you on your
new weapon, spells, control, and magical displays. As they surge upon you,
crashing forth like an overwhelming tidal wave, you need only to ignore
everyone and search out his gaze in order to feel calm.
 
And there he is.
 
He stands there weeping and meets your eyes freely, with nary a sliver of
shame.
 
This is for you.
 
 
 
 
Later, as the crowd dies down and individuals start to stagger to bed, when an
impromptu celebration leading to spontaneous rounds of drinks will have soundly
closed the night, this smith of yours will go on and keep on drinking. The clan
has built a roaring fire pit just for this occasion where the meat is roasting
and the fish are crisping, and he has kept you occupied all this time. He pulls
you down now to sit at his side. He will enthuse to you and lecture you about
the proper care, maintenance, and handling of your new ironbark staff. With
drink-rosy cheeks, he'll go on and on about the beauty of its subtle carving,
the ways in which you can further smooth out its grip to prevent any splinters
from forming outright. Your smith's enthusiasm, so rarely seen, will make his
worn-house face crinkle with delight in the dusk of the night, as he effusively
expounds upon the beauty of magical weaponry, how the relative difficulty in
manipulating ironbark oftentimes end up paying even more untold dividends.
 
Then he'll get a little more rowdy, a bit more nostalgic, at remembering the
earlier days of his bloodthirsty youth in which he gifted all his mage spy
friends clever new weapons to assist them better at navigating shem lands. He
will go on to describe the many, many ways on how to obfuscate, disguise,
confuse, distract attention from obvious magical signatures by hiding them
behind seemingly mundane facades—from sticks, to stones, to slingshots, to
brooms, to little paring knives found in the toolset of any commoner. Anything
can be made a conduit, he posits. How energizing a mundane object actually is,
though, depends on the materials used to craft it and the right temperament
found in the right mage.
 
And of course he can create actual weaponry, the usual assortment of daggers
and blades and bows, all of which he will dismiss before swerving quickly into
great effusive detail of the many many ways in which you can gut a man with a
staff, starting with knowing how to properly graft metal to shaft in order to
be able to attach new wicked blades at its very tip for physical melee.
 
Crystals are too obvious, he will crow to anyone who will listen as he sloshes
his drink around. Effective, but not cunning at all! Shems will always
underestimate our silly Dalish sticks. Isn't it so much better to stab your
opponent first and watch his face fall when tries to pull it out only for him
to discover, too late, it's electrified?
 
You are enjoying this memory. You are caught up in the emotions of it all. His
gesticulations and mannerisms are so out of character, driven as he is by
triumph, pride, and drink. Flames soar wildly into the air, casting great
flickering shadows against the forest floor. The logs of the glowing pit are
eaten away when one suddenly creaks, unsettles, breaks in half.
 
Like the snapping of a wooden beam. The creaking of an aravel.
 
The fire pit should not be this bright, you realize. It would be too
noticeable. It acts as a beacon in the night. Your eyes flicker around the
clearing, at its hidden dark spaces veiled from you.
 
The clan would never build a pyre this high—a pyre?
 
A pyre?
 
Consuming so much more organic matter now than burnt up blackened logs or the
sizzle of smoking fish. Yet no new meat is being cooked.
 
But the air still smells of acrid flesh.
 
The forest surrounding you looms larger. Green blotted walls encroaching upon
you now.
 
Your smith is still recounting tales to anyone who will hear, but you're not
listening anymore. Alarmed, you stand.
 
Then he turns, stopping you short. His face remains as enthusiastic as ever,
but your mouth goes dry. His back is to the flames, his face cast in shadows.
Your dearest friend's face is set in an unfamiliar mien. That's when you know
something is wrong.
 
There is a gleam in his eyes. His expression is a little more eerie, a little
hungry. The already weakened, slackened grip you have on a tankard you don't
remember holding loosens even more.
 
It falls. His coiled up form suddenly strikes, his hand snatching out to catch
it mid-swipe. He holds out his prize. Not a single fluid ounce sloshes out now.
Your breath catches in your throat.
 
You're so powerful, he says, smiling. Have you always been so powerful? If only
we were all so powerful.
 
He would never have boasted about you like this once, you think, numb.
 
The funeral pyre licks up high in the air, crowning his head in flames.
 
This is all wrong. The Dalish bury their dead, and then plant a tree. But there
is no tree here. Everything has been set aflame.
 
The smith is a standing, burning corpse with a mouth spread out wide in a
rictus of emotion, a mockery of love. His teeth gleams while his eyes watch. He
opens his arms in welcome, an invitation to an embrace that would never have
occurred. This is a corruption of memory. It hurts. It hurts to look directly
into his face.
 
Clawing branches crackle and snap to reshape and reform around your being into
recognizable wooden walls and roof. And all the while this transformation
occurs, the forest becomes closed to you, disappearing out of sight as the
walls of a wagon cage rapidly surge forth to envelop you and swallow you whole.
 
I'll find you, sings the smith to the mage. His lips part more as if to taunt,
but what comes out his throat instead is the sound of a hundred overlapping
voices pleading, begging, and crying. The shrill sound and dirge of a clan
dying.
 
A door swings into place, slamming shut on the sight, cutting off the noise,
locking you indoors. The walls of the aravel have fully reshaped and reformed
around you. But you can still hear the corpse scream. The aravel burns even as
the din cannot be ignored. Then one voice rises above the rest.
 
The old man begs.
 
You cannot believe your ears. The smith is pleading for you, sobbing for you.
 
And this is the moment you realize you are in the Fade. Because outside the
burning aravel you're stuck within, where all the screaming din is happening,
you can hear that old man beg. And that really is in the realms of true
impossibility.
 
You've seen him cry once; he's already used up his allotment of strong emotion
in a lifetime.
 
The corpse outside is not really him. You know it can't be, that it simply
couldn't be. It is a demon. It must be. No other answer is acceptable to you
now.
 
He asks to know why you have forsaken the clan.
 
He demands to know whether you are going to leave him.
 
But the real smith? The real one would save himself. And, barring escape, the
real one would much rather grit his teeth than wail. To spite his captors, he
would just kill himself outright and be done with it than to allow himself to
be reduced to this sobbing mess. You are greatly offended on his behalf; in
real life circumstances, there would be no bargaining with the man.
 
He is Dalish, after all. Part of the old guard that has long convinced itself
that there can be only be pride in death were it in service to defiance.
 
Because he would die before he'd ever grovel. He'd never break under a little
torture or when faced with the certainty of death. In the face of templar
executioners, in the face of all their questions and demands, he'd never give
up his life for something so trivial and demeaning.
 
But he would, you realize quite suddenly, give his life for yours.
 
There are templars out there.
 
The walls of the aravel stutter, jerk, then go still. Your mouth goes dry. Your
mind becomes startlingly sober and clear. All noise suspends, slow, like
freshly fallen snow dampening the world.
 
That's when you notice it—the silence.
 
No one is screaming anymore.
 
The sudden horror of it is inescapable. There is only silence. Not the good
kind either. There is only Silence. There is only Silence.
 
Mamae, mamae, are we no longer playing now?
 
Be quiet. Be still. Be as insignificant as a mouse. Don't move, don't breathe,
don't think. Just freeze.
 
There are templars outside the door.
 
Somehow you know this as inescapably as you know the unseen sky is green:
they've found you, they are here to kill you, they are here to murder you.
 
The truth of it resounds in your being. Your conviction of such is so
convincing, so unnerving, that you believe in this threat they represent
wholeheartedly, completely, utterly. You are focused only on listening,
waiting, with baited breath.
 
You shiver then huddle within the folds of your clothes. You find yourself
hiding in a corner of the aravel, tucked away underneath a table, tucked away
from the smokey flames, but you don't remember how you got there. Everything
looms so much larger than you. The monsters are coming to find you. They've set
the aravel on fire.
 
You blink. Fire should not be green, you think. Something about the color
injects a bit of fear in you, but you don't know, can't know, will not recall
why.
 
When did the roaring light of the aravel surrounding you turn green?
 
Something about the color tells you that you should feel more afraid. Shouldn't
you be more afraid?I t's a truth as unnerving as knowing there are templars
outside the door. You are itching to do something, take some action, as there
is some renewed agitation crawling along your skin. You ought to do something
even if it's to go outside. Because maybe then the flames out there will be
back to its meandering whimsy shades of orange, yellow, red, red, red.
 
As in blood. As in danger.
 
A threat.
 
So what does it mean when viridian starts feeling more dangerous than red?
 
You pat the back of your head, but feel only greasy locks, no blood.
 
That's right. You are in the Fade. Did you forget again? Comprehension gets so
hazy here. Clarity slips away with half a thought. It's difficult to remember,
but remember this: You are in the Fade. There. You said it. Now let it ring
with truth.
 
If only it were so easy to banish your fears.
 
You imagine some hysterical part of you must have pulled aside the Fade earlier
and asked it pretty please, oh so nicely, to manifest only one fatal threat at
a time so as to not overwhelm you. There are only so many representations of
your death you can handle all at once right now, thank you. It is taking all
the willpower in every pore of your being, as it is, to keep from breaking down
into wails.
 
Sweat beads at your temple, the slick salty trails of them crawling their way
down your cheek in an emulation of tears.
 
It gives you an idea. For want of nothing better to do, you start crawling on
your hands and knees through a maze of slats and beams. You must reach the
door. Hissing flames attempt to block your way at each gap, each crevice. With
the wave of an impatient hand, they part, and you reach forward to open the
door only for the handle to snap right off. You throw it away, then start
banging at the door. That's when you notice your hands.
 
They are child size hands. Have you been a child this whole time? No wonder
you've been stricken with the rambling delusions and remembrance of the Fade.
Memories of childhood will always try to make you stray just as surely as
demons will.
 
You grimace when you remember the image of the smith made corrupt.
 
But still. You can't help but notice that something is wrong. Even more so than
usual, you mean.
 
Yes, you are now in the clumsy, stubby fingered form as a child. But when you
don't recognize your own skin, that's a problem. It's a small inconsistency in
a realm full of them, but why this? Why now? So you stare.
 
Your skin now chars and cracks as it melts. Your hands are melting.
 
Are you for whom the pyre burns?
 
Your eyes immediately squeeze shut, but then you roughly shake your head. This
isn't real. Nothing is true. Believe in nothing but yourself. You are not in
actual pain. Still, you brace yourself.
 
Everything is melting. Your hands, your arms, your torso and legs. As you lift
your fingers to inspect this phenomena even closer, you can see flayed strings
of muscle, ligaments, and fat stretch out and snap until they fall limp and
saggy from knuckles to wrists to elbows and arms, with every exposed inch
revealing more and more of your stripped inner being.
 
Skin keeps peeling back. Muscles are flayed in layers. You are disintegrating.
The Fade is going to have to try harder than that. You are almost fascinated
with the way strips of your pale white flesh hangs loose, moving slightly under
the own sway of its saggy weight. In the extreme heat of the aravel flames that
you only know notice, pustules and drippings of fat sizzle and pop away. What
doesn't burn away splatter, falling to the wooden slats on the aravel floor,
creating such a mess. Your mother would scold you for that. Still, their drip
drips keep falling between its cracks, awakening something underneath.
 
Something stirs. Some entity beneath the floor. Another demon? Time to end this
charade. You goad the entity on. It's a mistake.
 
You think it just another demon, but you are wrong.
 
With a flicking gesture from yourself, more tender slabs of meat start peeling
off to the floor only to be ripped apart by unseen hands, by sharp splintered
debris, until these awkward quivering chunks rapidly shrivel to pieces after
that in the white hot heat. But some hidden bits, shivering in corners and
under wooden beams, remain seeping bloody raw—uncooked, untouched. These
splattered growths eventually untangle themselves to reveal their true forms:
pulsating hearts and organs, a wet miasma of fat. In the broken shadows of the
collapsing aravel, they haven't been found yet. They haven't melted. They
haven't been licked up yet. But something is moving beneath the floorboards—too
soon do these squeezing globules also get suddenly sucked away by an unknown
force. In a panic, the rest scatter. Now exposed, any other squirming bits of
sentience left suddenly attempt to flee into other such dark tight spaces like
so many little ants when one by one are they inevitably slurped away by
invisible lips, which give a resounding gluttonous smack.
 
You blink once and out from the floor morphs an abomination. From countless
tiny drops of burnt up viscera comes a hundred chitinous eyes, beady and black,
the flesh surrounding them the pale color of sour milk, fleshy fat, while
hungry teeth grow green and furred with the stink of meaty mold. These teeth
clack and chitter away at you, as spindly limbs rapidly swarm out from
underneath the floorboards, too, as well as your skin. They've been inside you
all along. You've been with you all along. You suck in a breath.
 
Oh, you think. You would really like to leave the Fade now, please. Now wake
up.
 
Wake up.
 
Please.
 
But you can't.
 
Real panic grows. It should only take willpower to open the door. You have to
get out now. You have to leave now. You reach for your magic, but you have no
power here. Who are you fooling? You fall down to the floor—oh, Creator, the
seeping weeping floor—and scrabble backward hard when your back hits a cot.
 
A bed. A shem bed.
 
In an aravel.
 
Crooning and simpering at you, with the corners of wiggling feather-light
pillow stroking upward to reach you.
 
Skin crawls now when it hasn't before. Some instinct of terror drives you to
scrabble and rear back, but there is nowhere else go. You are so small. You
jerk to your feet and start to lunge for the door. Your efforts renewed to
escape, however, are in vain. They are all in vain.
 
You are thrashing and clawing at a door with no handle.
 
Just a dream, you chant. It's all a dream. The monster isn't here. The aravel
isn't here. But your hysteria grows more and more, louder and louder,
screeching at you the more you try to fool no one.
 
You are in the Fade. You are a mage, you are fine, and you are only dreaming,
yes, only dreaming. Dreaming. But are you? Are you really? The whisper that
hisses in your ears says it is not so, that perhaps it is your clan that is the
pretty dream. So how do you know for sure? You pivot, slap at your ear,
convinced a little worm has burrowed inside your ear, but what a mistake! Your
back is to the door while the monster is before you clear now in all its glory.
It pulsates. It stares. Or is it a hundred bulbous eyes that blink back at you
instead?
 
Its body constantly shifts and morphs as it comes near, splaying apart a
multitude and pairs of insectoid arms, spreading them wide in welcome. It grows
taller, thinner, lankier in form.
 
The monster leans in close.
 
You don't know what it is you don't know what it is you don't know what it is
 
The door was never meant to be opened, you realize now. You've rejected it,
see, yes? Don't you see? There was never a door in the first place. Never the
faintest hope of it even opening. That other world has already been lost. There
is no hope.
 
There is only the impossibility of escape. This is why you have stopped your
stupid, worthless struggle over the door. It is futile. This is known. You are
nothing. You are a wriggling little worm in the face of incomprehensible power.
It could crush you underfoot without even noticing. The monster looms so large
and great indeed, so terrible to behold, that this and only this this shall
ever be your reality.
 
To your back is no threshold to freedom. It is futility. Just accept it. Give
in to despair and collapse to the floor for denial has been your last shield,
but look how feebly you cling to it now. So shield your eyes, grip your face,
tear at your hair, and wail.
 
Denial has been cracked for some time now, and so has your mind, but you
recognize that it is in this one last grasp for sanity where you perch upon a
precipice as your mind wavers over whether or not to let the wool drop from
your eyes.
 
Because you've been telling yourself all this time that you don't know what's
really happening out past that door, but that's a lie. You've chosen to ignore
the truth.
 
Because if you leave, hisses the monster knowingly, you won't like what you
see.
 
You keep ignoring it still. There is only death waiting outside. You are so
scared.
 
Four shriveled arms deftly reach behind you and pull you in by the waist,
dragging you flush against its own form. You wail, but this is reality now. The
more you struggle, the more you slough off more of your fat and skin, which
serves to do nothing else but to feed the creature even more as it continues to
consume the fleshy discarded parts of you. Even now it nibbles away at your
jawline and cheek until it works its way up to one long sensitive ear.
 
It nips at the tip. You shudder. And despair.
 
We can be monsters together, you and I, it whispers to you, slurping and
gorging upon the terror of you.
 
But the most terrible thing is in how its massive form curls around your little
body—the way it grips your face with one of those many black spindly limbs, the
ends of which sprouts fingertip pads, gooey with the sweat of you. It reaches
for your mouth, daintily dips a point in between, then pulls out. Spreads fluid
on your lips. You want to gag. This is not love.
 
As it cuddles you close and croons, smoothing back your hair, it ties a silken
white ribbon in your locks. But this is no pretty gift to be bequeathed by a
lover. Stained as it is by the profane touch, the fabricated length now rapidly
molds and decays into the mottled grey of your innocence. You are a doll at the
whims of its many limbs when the creature manipulates you into an embrace,
wrestles you into bed. In its gluttony it would suck you dry until there is
nothing left but bones, until you are reduced to a quivering mass of marrow.
You close your eyes.
 
The old man smith would be so disappointed in you.
 
You open them. There is the monster hovering above you, spreading your legs. An
extra ghastly protrusion from its back reaches over to slice a path down the
valley of your prepubescent breasts. Your clothes split apart at the seams upon
its unholy intent. Sticky fingers are everywhere as it suckles your chest,
grips your hips, and plunges, and plunges, and gives a guttural moan—and it is
so unnatural, so tight, you want to scream.
 
There is only defiance in death.
 
You are crying until you are snarling, and then you are wrenching yourself from
its grasp, spitting at its face. You roar for your staff, it materializes, and
the demon screeches when you swing it around and bury a bladed tip deep into
its flesh. You rip, you tear, you claw; so monstrous are you in your hate that
you don't stop. You defile and defy its presence by splitting it apart asunder.
Sour black ichor gushes forth from its wounds and sprays onto your face, your
shorn clothes, as it screams and screams while you slash away at it in rage,
and then fling back toward the door.
 
Dribbles of red blood fleck away from your thighs and onto the floor while you
flee. You have no time for sorrow.
 
Oily fingers latch onto your shoulder, but in one deft move you pivot, lower
your center of gravity, and stab upwards at an angle.
 
In the Fade willpower is everything. It does not matter if you are small. It
does not matter if any foe would have normally been able to physically
overpower you.
 
With one great thrust of the blade, you rip up through an elongated, obscene,
white throat. The creature flails while it is speared on your weapon,
scrambling for any purchase anywhere on the smooth heft of your weapon so as to
yank it out, but it can't. You've always kept your staff in pristine condition.
You've always listened to the old man. So you ready yourself, feign weakness,
let it slip limp from your grip, and then when it starts tearing the bladed end
from its throat and shrieking in triumph is when you suddenly strike, having
summoned a knife in your other hidden hand.
 
It failed to kill a templar once; it will not fail you again.
 
You stab its face, cheek, neck. Wherever one protruding eyeball out of a
hundred pops out of the folds of its roiling skin is where you stab and stab
again.
 
The creature wriggles, hisses, and recoils from you, but it is trapped under
the sheer flurry of your blows. It is nothing more than an open wound filled
with a flapping, flopping, ineffectual tongue, and you are filled with nothing
but contempt. Death rattles from a gulping, ventilated esophagus, and it is
only now you see it for what it really is—a pathetic, mewling avatar of fear.
It serves its god of nightmares, but you care not for the power it once held
over you because you are already dead.
 
So as it attempts to flee from you, as it writhes and stews in its own
pulsating terror of you, you throw yourself upon it before it can wriggle away
into the darkened cracks between the floorboards. You straddle its squealing
form, wrestle it close with one hand while raising your knife with the other,
and then plunge your blade down into its gut, slicing upward from belly to
torso, exposing black and shriveled intestines. But you are most interested in
its stomach. You set about your grim task, create a slit in the organ, then
discard the knife and thrust your hands deep in its inner workings. You peel
back the edges of the slit to expose an open raw wound. In the midst of pooling
puddles of its sticky black ichor are the eaten tenants within, quivering for
you.
 
The demon moans once, low, and attempts to dissipate and slink away. You don't
let it. You seize its neck in place with one glowing hand. Droplets of blood
begin to rise and hover in the air around you, taken from the demon, the floor,
and your own form. From between your legs, you siphon up the womb blood, too.
Then while still griping the creature you slowly lift your other glowing hand,
concentrate, make a fist, and command the dead.
 
From the hole you have created, the distended stomach spews and vomits back out
the digested parts of you. Some hit your body. They cling like they've come
home. The rest of the bits dribble of their own accord out onto the floor where
they then rapidly coalesce into more discernible flecks and pieces—strips of
muscle, some flayed skin. They crawl up your legs to reach and join with the
missing pits of your disintegrated flesh in order to reconstitute your form,
restored. Your limbs lengthen and grow until you are made whole again, until
you are no longer in helpless child form.
 
Forbidden magic, perhaps. But you're no longer the gentle healer you once were.
 
You release your necromantic hold, but the body holds, and your newly wrought
flesh is bare of all bruises and cuts now from the templar's vicious assault.
That fight feels so long ago now. The field is a distant memory, and that shem
village may as well not exist at all for all that it feels so faraway.
 
Your concentrate slips. The demon slithers out from underneath you then bursts
into a haze of viridian green, but you don't allow it to go. You send a message
by snatching its essence in the air, grip it tight, and then set it aflame on
the wings of crimson, orange hues. It shrieks as it burns, crumbling to naught
but ash and dust. It calls to its god, and then you are alone.
 
The air is cloudy with smoke until it dissipates. The green aravel flames
encroach upon you even closer, but the warm glowing fire cupped in your
trembling hands protects you, keeps back the rival flames. It morphs and grows
until your magic in fireball form reaches out to nuzzle away the tears from
your shining cheeks as you begin to weep with relief.
 
You kneel, lean back, and close your eyes. You hum deep in your throat while
you wait for death to come. You are ready. You keep letting your fire grow and
grow, as all blood in the room is consumed in service to its glow. You wait for
the true end. You just want it all to end. You don't bother with escape.
 
You want to burn away to nothingness instead.
 
Something rumbles outside the door. The aravel begins shaking violently at this
new arrival. A pitiless being now darkens its threshold, and green shadows
sweep indoors like a rushing tide from underneath the door. Every other open
sliver in the walls, every space, not completely sealed against the Fade now
also glows a brilliant green from the oncoming storm.
 
Your message has been delivered. You have an appointment to keep. No point in
waiting. You open your eyes.
 
The walls crack, splinter, then shatter apart in a blinding iridescent show of
power. Sheer emerald radiance instantly blinds you, whites out your vision,
until the sight of an unholy god is hovering before you.
 
In the Fade there is a monstrous gaping maw. You meet its multitude of cold,
black eyes boldly for this is the end, you are resolved, and you respond to
such by parting your hands, with each wildly aglow in flames.
 
And so your people are dead, it intones.I could have saved them all.
 
You ignore it, focus, and then let loose your tenuous hold. Too late does the
god realize your intent until all control suddenly snaps and collapses upon the
tide of magic that swells up in you, as it rushes and pours out of you,
releases from you in the ultimate manifestation of pyrrhic flames unhindered by
inhibitions, reservations, and self-preservation. This is to be your first and
final act as a Dalish First, after all. This will be how you avenge your clan.
 
In mutual destruction, there is a deafening roar. The world is nothing but fire
and blood that wraps around your form, suffocating you, until you are naught
but a corpse. You've only ever been a corpse. Everything is a twirl of complete
and total chaos. The god seems moved to respond by the sheer audacity of your
actions alone, the sheer futility of it all.
 
There is only refuge in madness. You are prepared to go screaming, vindictive,
into the night.
 
It is not to be so. Before the god can crush you, before your flames can even
try lashing out, some white hot sigil abruptly carves itself into the flesh of
your chest and burns. It's real. It's more real than anything else you've
experienced thus far—a sudden, searing agony that distracts and consumes all
words, all thought, until you only just notice as everything ephemeral and
viridian dissipates like so much useless smoke.
 
The last thing you hear is the nightmare god's enraged thrashing howls as its
victory is spoiled, your life is stolen, when all consciousness is yanked from
the Fade.
 
 
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     So did I do the Fade justice?
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!