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Chapter Text

They say that the witches of the Korcari Wilds steal babes from the cradle and leave their mothers to mourn a child still living, but Seluna Tabris has never been one to believe in idle fairytales. She will come to regret this decision. 

* 

It began the night before Summerday. They’d been expecting Valora in the morning, but she and Nelaros had been far earlier than anyone expected. Of course, early evening was too late to begin the wedding preparations, but plenty of time for the festival atmosphere to spread from their small house to the whole of the alienage. Soris was unhappy, of course, but Soris had made up his mind to be disappointed from the moment their betrothals were announced, and if Valora had been as beautiful as the sunrise, he still would have found something to be dissatisfied with. As it was, she was shy, and he was sullen, and while Luna loved her cousin, she could not bring herself to rescue him when more pleasant diversions were on offer – diversions like Nelaros. 

He was handsome, of course, with his golden hair and vhenandal green eyes, but that wasn’t what had enchanted her so quickly. No, it was how he’d looked at her as they’d been introduced – the way his eyes had widened, and a blush had crept into the tips of his ears. The way he’d taken her hand in his own, as though he’d been handed something impossibly precious, and said, with the sincerity of a hero of romance: “I’ll spend every waking moment learning to make you happy.” 

The way those hands – strong hands, smith’s hands – had settled on her waist as they danced, and later, with some coaxing, her hips, lifting her into the air as the music grew wilder and the air grew heavy with the scent of evening blossom and cheap honeywine. The way they’d flexed once, nervous, then tightened on her as she’d pulled him, giggling, into an alley, and kissed him long and fierce and hungry. 

He wasn’t her first, of course, but nobody before had touched her the way he had. Alienage girls weren’t precious, delicate flowers, but to Nelaros- to Nelaros she might have been some great lady out of the stories of Arlathan, some goddess or nymph bestowing one night of her company on a mortal man and driving him half-mad with desire for something impossible. Reflected in his eyes, the torchlight burning in her pale hair, she might even have been Andraste come again, and the very thought of it – heretical, impossible – somehow made desire burn hotter in her belly. 

It was the night before their wedding, after all. Even the chastest Chantry sister could barely call what they did a sin, though of course she’d kissed him goodnight and chased him, giggling, from her bedroom before midnight, and laughed harder at Shianni’s knowing smile.  

“You couldn’t wait one more night?” she had teased, perching behind her to pull a comb through her tousled curls. “You’re insatiable. That poor boy doesn’t know what he’s in for.” 

“Nothing wrong with getting a little practice in before the big day,” Luna had retorted, and yelped when Shianni tugged her hair reprovingly. “Besides, Father’s going to be pestering me for grandchildren as soon as the band’s on my finger, we might as well get started. The house is going to be too quiet when Soris and Valora move out.” 

It hadn’t felt real, then, but she’d imagined it all the same – fair-haired, grubby, noisy children of her own, chasing their own cousins through the houses and alleys, filling the alienage with laughter that had not yet learned loss, that could see her home as the safe harbour she’d once believed it to be. The safe harbour she would make it, with a knife at her belt and her husband and cousins around her.  

She reached for the familiar knife-hilt the next day, when the Arl’s son threw Shianni to the ground, and found only the soft silk of her wedding gown. Her mother’s dress, soft and lovely and precious and useless. It had felt like a lucky charm when she’d slipped into it, but it could not protect her, any more than it had protected Adaia. Any more than it would protect the children she’d dreamt of, the children she’d never have, when the shemlen cut Nelaros down before her eyes. She’d known him less than a day. It still felt like they’d cut away a part of her as she watched him fall, as she gathered him into her lap and felt his blood soak through her hands, through her skirts, onto the lovely, useless dress she’d meant to marry him in.  

“No,” she’d said, a hopeless, useless prayer to a Maker who was not listening, who had never listened to the prayers of girls like her. “Stay with me, please.” 

She was a child again, at her mother's bedside, clinging to her burned and bandaged hand, heedless of the pain she caused in her desperation. Please, please stay. But Adaia had not stayed, and neither did Nelaros. He only gazed up at her with those wide green eyes, as if he’d never seen anything so lovely, and faded away beneath her fingers, taking her sweet, imagined future with him. 

Everything seemed dulled, after that sharp, cauterising agony. She’d never killed anyone before the Arl’s son took her, and vengeance was meant to be sweet, but she could not taste it. It had not saved Nola, or Shianni, or Nelaros. It had not saved her. Even the sting of Elva’s betrayal was a distant, hollow thing – what did it matter now if the shemlen chose to hang her, if her own had handed her over to them? Her husband lay still and cold in the Arl of Denerim’s villa, and her future lay dead with him. She wondered, distantly, if they’d even be allowed to recover his body. If she’d be allowed to wear widow’s weeds to the gallows, or if they’d hang her in her wedding gown, the Butcher Bride of Denerim. 

It was, strangely, her salvation that roused her from her numbed state, and she felt, within her, a tiger’s rage, even as Valendrian’s shem friend looked at her as if she was a kitten.  

“You can’t just take me!” she choked out, as the hahren seized her arm as if she was half-wild or out of her mind. She might have been. “Save him! Save Soris!” 

Soris who still had Valora. Soris who was her little cousin, who could still be happy- 

But the human was shaking his head sorrowfully, as if this wasn’t his fault, and she wanted to shake him – all that shining armour and those two great swords and he’d sent Soris and Nelaros to their deaths to save her, when she was already dead- 

“It takes strength, to become a Grey Warden, a strength I did not see in your cousin,” he said, as if he knew either of them, as if he knew anything about strength beyond what it took to swing a blade, to kill a darkspawn. “You, though- there is a fire in you, a fire that belonged to your mother. You may survive it, for a time.” 

She’d spat at his feet then, called him every curse she could think of, snarled and raged and lashed out like a wounded animal. And he’d stood there, implacable as stone, with that expression of calm, immovable sorrow on his face. As if he’d had no other choice than to do nothing.  

If it hadn’t been for Alistair, she’d have laughed, when she heard how he met his end. Betrayed by Loghain, then stabbed in the back. It had been better than he deserved.  

The girl she had been before her wedding, the merry, mischievous maid always quick to flirt or to fight, would have been horrified by such a thought about a man who’d tried to save her, who’d tried, in his own way, to be kind. But the woman she was now had no space for such horror. She was bitter, barren ground, and only hateful emotions could take root in her now. All sweetness had died with the version of her who might have been a wife, a mother, the defender and hahren of the alienage. It was, perhaps, no wonder that she’d survived her Joining – of course the foulness of the Blight would find rich food in her seething, broken heart. 

She could not quite bring herself to hate Alistair, though, despite his naivety and his pathetic grief for Duncan. He spoke of the dead man as if he’d lost a beloved father, as if he had not dragged Seluna away from her own father’s arms, and though his words disgusted her, his grief- his grief she knew well. Her own grief had left her hollowed-out, but his had left him rudderless, as dependent on her as her orphaned cousins had ever been. More fool him. She had not been able to save them, but she could not quite bring herself to abandon him either. He reminded her too much of Soris, of the bold, brash, self-involved little cousin she had failed to save. 

Morrigan though... the Witch of the Wilds was like nobody she’d ever met, ruthless and independent and remorseless in her selfishness. There were ruthless people in the alienage, of course, and selfish ones everywhere, but they were feral dogs to Morrigan’s wild wolf – they'd turned on a society that had beaten them too many times, and to Luna, at least, the alienage had been a place of small, fragile kindnesses, because nobody would care for them if they did not care for one another. But to hear Morrigan talk, nobody had ever done her a kindness, and if the world had been cruel to her, it was the impassive cruelty of nature. A wolf was not cruel for snatching a lamb from its mother, any more than the wind was cruel when it bit through the thin canvas of Luna’s flimsy tent and left her shivering, longing for the warmth of Shianni’s back tucked against her belly, or Nelaros’ hands- no. She could not think of Nelaros. She had hardly known him long enough or well enough to mourn him as she did, let alone to love him, and yet- 

And yet she mourned him still, in those chill, lonely hours of the night, or at least, the life she’d briefly imagined for them. The life where she still lived in her father’s house, with a husband who kept her knives sharp and kissed every scar on her hands, with golden-haired, giggling children- but his face was already shadowed in her memory, and she could no longer imagine what those children might have been like. Grey Wardens did not have homes, or families. She would never hold her own child in her arms, and hum the songs she could distantly recall her own mother singing. 

If she’d still been in her father’s house, she would have laid her head in his lap, cried into Shianni’s shoulder, or drowned her sorrows behind Alarith’s shop with Soris, but their flight from Ostagar left little time for such indulgence, and even if it had, her companions were not her cousins. For all Alistair reminded her of Soris, he could not see beyond his own grief to attempt to assuage hers, and as for Morrigan, she’d sooner expect the bear she sometimes resembled to offer her a cuddle than the woman herself to offer something as frivolous as a kind word.  

Perhaps it was for the best she had no temptation to go looking for sympathy, though. She was already the weak link in their group, lacking Templar training or wild magic to aid her in a fight, and since the Joining, her body had become a foreign country. She’d always prided herself on her quickness, her strength, but the daily forced marches drove her to whey-faced exhaustion, and she found herself flagging behind the others too often on the road. She hadn’t yet tripped over her own feet in a fight, but it felt like only a matter of time. Surely she hadn’t been that much of a spoilt city girl? But Morrigan’s expression told her otherwise, and for all his clearly noble upbringing, Alistair had spent far more time sleeping on the ground than Luna ever had. Every bone in her body ached from waking to sleeping, and she’d have taken Shianni’s snoring a hundred times over waking cold, alone, and somehow still bone-tired. 

Still, her mother had used to remind her that she could get used to anything if she put her mind to it. By the time they reached Lothering, her life before Ostagar had already begun to feel like another woman’s memories, a girl who dreamt of her wedding day and her children and her glorious career as saviour of the alienage. The girl who did not wake every morning with the taste of blood on her tongue and bile rising in her throat. By the time she reached Lothering, reality had reared up and swallowed that dream whole, and she’d run out of tears to cry over it, even if she’d been offered a shoulder to cry on in time.  

Pretty Leliana, with her wide, dreamy eyes and her tale of a vision from the Maker himself, would likely have been all too willing to offer her the comfort she’d ached for before Ostagar, but for all her sweetness and her charm, Luna couldn’t quite bring herself to trust the other woman. She wore a Chantry sister’s robes and piety well, but no sister she’d ever met had carried a bow with such easy grace, or shown such easy familiarity with the poisonous plants Morrigan reluctantly helped her gather along with the healing herbs. 

“Did you know,” she began, brightly, the first night they camped outside town, “that in Orlais, we call elfroot persinette?”  

“Sounds more like a name than a flower,” Alistair commented. 

“ Persinette?” The ridiculous idea wrinkled her nose, the closest she’d come to a laugh in... a month? Two? She'd lost track of the days somewhere on the road to Ostagar, and still had not quite caught up with herself. “It could be a name, I guess. For a child you particularly disliked.” 

Alistair stared at her for a moment, but somewhere, on the other side of the flames, she thought she heard a snigger from Morrigan.  

“It speaks!” she said. “I thought you’d forgotten how to. I haven’t heard more than grunts from you since we left Flemeth’s house. I was starting to wonder if my mother had taken your tongue or your wits in one of her bargains.” 

“Or perhaps neither of you were as charming as Leliana here,” she retorted, drawing a pout from Alistair, but Leliana’s eyes were fixed on Morrigan. 

“Flemeth?” she asked, eyes wide, “The witch from legend?” 

Morrigan shrugged, an elegant roll of her shoulders through the flames. “Perhaps. I never met another, but mayhap it’s a common enough name among the Chasind.” She smiled, wolfishly, “I can, however, confirm my mother is as great and terrible a witch as you could imagine, little bard.” 

“Are you sure?” Leliana’s eyes were glittering as she returned Morrigan’s smile boldly, all Chantry modesty discarded. “I have an excellent imagination.” 

Their voices were sweet enough to be mistaken for playful teasing, but Seluna could sense the undernotes of something that could, if left unchecked, become a battle for who was to rule the camp. She’d seen it often enough in the alienage, with large families crammed into tiny apartments, and she did not care to see it repeated in far less comfortable circumstances. 

“What stories do they tell about witches in Orlais?” she asked, with a raised eyebrow she hoped Morrigan caught.  

If Leliana noticed, she didn’t let it show: “Oh, we have our fair share of tales of blood magic and apostate wickedness, but my favourite when I was a little girl was The Elfroot Maid. Do you have that one in Ferelden?” 

Alistair shook his head. “I always preferred stories of knights and heroes, when I was a boy.” 

You hardly look like more than a boy now, Luna thought, but did not say aloud.  

“Well, if you listen, there might be knights and heroes in this one,” Leliana teased. “Now, once, beyond nine seas, and beyond nine mountains, was a small cottage where two poor farmers lived. They scratched out a meagre living from barren soil, while, on the other side of a great stone wall, their neighbour’s garden bloomed with a thousand-thousand plants, because she was a great witch, and the earth itself obeyed her every whim. But these farmers were simple folk, and so in their prayers, they asked not for magic, or wealth, or a farm as lush as the garden they envied, but for smaller, simpler things: they longed for nothing more than a baby.” 

It was a familiar beginning to a story, one she might have heard from her father a thousand times before, with Soris fidgeting to one side of her and Shianni asking questions to the other. She relaxed a little into the sensation, letting Leliana’s soft voice carry her back to that simpler, happier time.  

“The Maker heard their prayers, and blessed them-” A scoffing noise from Morrigan, which Leliana ignored,  “but as the child quickened and grew, the woman grew pale and sickly. No food could tempt her to eat, and she became too weak to rise from her bed. Her husband, who loved her with all his heart, begged her to tell him if there was anything in the world that could tempt her to eat, and for days she was silent, until, when he thought Death had already crept to her bedside, she said: ‘My love, I know of only one thing to cure such sickness – the elfroot that grows in the witch’s garden, but I will not ask it of you. She will not share her herbs, and she will kill a thief rather than lose a single leaf of her plants.’” 

“Elfroot is hardly a rare herb,” Morrigan sniffed. “Tabris finds it growing in half the gutters in Lothering.” 

“Ah, but this elfroot was special, because the soil in the witch’s garden had had many years of enchantment and work and even her own blood poured into it,” Leliana continued, as gracefully as if Morrigan’s interruption had been part of the story as she’d learned it, “and the man knew well that such a plant could easily save his wife and child, and he knew just as well that the witch, their neighbour, would sooner part with her own fingers than she would with her herbs. He had but one choice:” She paused, dramatically, before continuing: “to steal the elfroot that would save his wife from the garden of a great and powerful witch.” 

She was rewarded with a quiet gasp from Alistair, who looked very young in the flickering firelight, his eyes fixed on Leliana as though he could see the story she wove with her words. 

She lowered her voice, and it felt as though even the fire leaned closer to hear her next words: “One moonless night, he climbed over the great wall, and stole into the forbidden garden. There he saw plants the likes of which he had never imagined: vines with leaves of purest gold, berries which glowed like the embers of a dying fire, flowers with petals as clear as crystal, but only one could draw his gaze – the humble green leaves of the elfroot. With shaking hands, he drew his knife, and cut away the leaves that would save his wife and child.” 

From the other side of the fire, Morrigan muttered something that might have been fool, as if nobody had ever told her a fairytale before. Then again, the brief impression she’d had of Flemeth made her think that most of the stories Morrigan might have heard as a child likely ended far more bloodily than Leliana’s.  

“He was almost at the gate when he felt the coils of magic snare tight around him, and his feet rooted to the earth as though he had become a tree himself. From behind him, he heard, for the first time, the voice of his neighbour, the witch. 

“‘Tell me, neighbour,’ she said, in a voice as chill as winter wind, ‘why you should not feed the roots of my children, who you have maimed? It has been many years since they have eaten so richly.’ The man was terrified, and would have crumpled to his knees, if the roots entangling him had allowed him to move. 

“‘It was for my wife,’ he pleaded, ‘She is with child, and will die without a taste of the elfroot you grow here.’” 

“What a hero,” Morrigan said, drily, “to surrender his wife in his place.” 

Alistair elbowed her, and there might have been the beginnings of a scuffle had Luna not interjected, as she would have to her cousins: “Now, children, play nice.” 

Alistair slumped with a muttered: “She started it,” but Morrigan raised a hand to her mouth to conceal something resembling a smile. Luna only caught it for a moment, but it was a strange, wild, lovely thing, made sweeter by the firelight and her attempt to conceal it. She wanted to capture it like a firefly in a jar, to hold it at her bedside to keep away the nightmares, but to tame something like that would make it so much less remarkable. 

Leliana exchanged a conspiratorial glance with her, as though they were the adults and the others unruly children, before she continued: “‘Then your wife will follow you into the Void,’ the witch retorted, coldly, ‘and the world will be the better that she did not bring another thief into it.’  

“‘Please,’ the man begged, though he knew words were but wind to a mage of such power, ‘I will pay any price you set, I will even give up my own life, only let me take the herbs to my wife first, that she may be well.’ 

“Then the witch smiled, as cruel and distant as the stars. ‘Anything?’ she asked, and the man knew his fate was sealed. ‘I do not wish for your life, mortal. You are worth less to me than the dying leaves you hold in your hands. But you may take those leaves, and more besides, on one condition – in three months, when your child is born, I will claim her, and raise her as my own.’” 

“I can’t believe our new friend already knows about you,” Alistair muttered to Morrigan, and when he was elbowed this time, Luna did not intervene. The witch had earned that one. 

Leliana ignored them: “The farmer pleaded, of course, but the witch would not be moved by his entreaties, and what was he to do? Without the elfroot, there would be no child at all, and no wife besides. He accepted the witch’s deal, and returned to his wife with armfuls of elfroot to heal and sustain her, and the woman grew strong again, and the child grew with her, until it was born: a perfect baby girl, with hair like spun gold, and eyes as green as elfroot. 

“But no sooner had the child been wrapped in clean linen and placed in its mother’s arms than the witch appeared, sweeping through the window on the wings of a great raven, and laid claim to the child. The father’s pleading, the mother’s tears, neither could melt her heart of ice. She had set her price, and now she would collect. She bore the child away to a far-off tower, and named her-” and here she glanced at Luna, almost impish: “Persinette.” 

“This is ridiculous,” Morrigan scoffed, pushing herself to her feet. “I was sent to fight an archdemon, not to listen to children’s stories.” 

She swept off to her tent, leaving Alistair and Luna as the only audience to the rest of the story – the maiden in the tower growing to womanhood, falling in love with a prince and being cast out of the witch’s affections as a result, before the inevitable reunion and birth of two more beautiful, green-eyed children. 

Leliana closed the story in the traditional Orlesian fashion: “And they lived well, and died happy, and no cup they drank from ever ran dry,” to a contented sigh from Alistair, and to Luna’s thanks and compliments. She really was an excellent storyteller. But as Luna retired to her own tent, her mind did not remain with the maiden in the tower or her golden shining prince, but on the witch who’d eaten at her own campfire. Had Morrigan’s sulk been prompted by boredom, or by something too familiar she’d seen in the story of the witch and her stolen daughter? Luna did not know, but for the first time since the horror of her wedding day, she wanted to find out. 

Chapter Text

The girl had not been what Morrigan had expected, when her mother had ordered her to seek out the Grey Warden recruits who’d been sent a-hunting in her Wilds. The men had matched Flemeth’s descriptions to the letter, dregs of the cities cut free from the noose, or starry-eyed fools who’d fallen in love with the glorious death the Wardens promised. The girl, though- she moved like a sleepwalker, stumbling through the Wilds like a child lost in a nightmare. If she did not flinch from the darkspawn, or from Morrigan herself, it was likely because she’d left what remained of her self-preservation somewhere on the dark road that had brought her here.   

At the time, she’d dismissed her as an irrelevance, a wounded fawn awaiting a wolf’s jaws, for all her pretty manners. Flemeth had raised her well enough to know that pretty, wounded things did not survive long in the Wilds. The darkspawn would kill her before she made it out of the woods, or the Joining itself would, and besides, it was only the men who were necessary for the plan to succeed. She’d hoped, selfishly, that the blond man would not be the only option left to her, but of course, fate – or possibly Flemeth – laughed at her designs. He and the girl were the only Wardens living when Flemeth swept them from the ruins of Ostagar, and they seemed to Morrigan the runts of the litter.   

The girl had lain as still and pale as death for more than a day, for all Flemeth claimed she’d been found with her blades buried in an ogre’s neck, and the man had wept and wailed and raged like a child when Mother had told him his army and king were lost. She’d seen grief of course, animal and human, but his outburst seemed somehow immoderate for a man – for any number of men – he'd never seen more than in passing, and besides, what would wailing do now? Better to lick one’s wounds clean of blood and rise to fight again than to howl one’s grief to the moon.  

The girl’s reaction was equally incomprehensible, if less repulsive to witness. She’d tried to break the news more gently than Flemeth had, for fear she’d be reduced to shaking her if she began weeping as her companion had, but she need not have worried. The girl’s reaction was a choking, terrible laugh – joyless and bitter and strange. It reminded her almost of Mother, and that in itself was unnatural, for what could a city-bred elf-maid have in common with a Witch of the Wilds?  

“I had no love for the King, or for his Wardens, but thank you for helping me anyway,” she said, drily, when she had calmed enough to speak at all. “Is Alistair-?”  

“Taking the news poorly, yes. Perhaps you will fare better with him than either of us, I could get no sense from him.” Mother had always made men sound simple, almost mechanical – a flash of cleavage, a coaxing smile, and they were meant to be malleable as clay beneath her fingers, but he’d wanted none of her smiles or what physical comfort she might have offered to win him to her side, had she liked him at all. She did not like him, but that hardly mattered. Mother had made her purpose quite clear. When their survival, and the world’s, were at stake, they would lie together regardless. Flemeth had raised her to be sensible, and practical, and wise to the ways of magic, and all these things told her that her role in what was to come was as the vessel for the death of an Archdemon, and the rebirth of a long-dead god.  

It had seemed so abstract, when Flemeth had first told her of the role she would play in the scheme which had been years in the making, the purpose she had been reared for. She had seen creatures rutting before, animal and human alike, and knew well its consequences – the swollen belly, the leaking teats, and, eventually, the mewling, helpless infants that emerged, so weak, so dependent. It was no wonder, she had thought, that so many animals were inclined to devour their young when they were so needy, when they made their mothers so vulnerable, when they took and took and took with remorseless, greedy mouths.   

“You nearly drove me to it many times, girl,” Flemeth had said, when she’d expressed this observation one night, when Flemeth had asked her what she’d learned that day. She’d smiled, all pointed teeth and hungry eyes, and Morrigan had felt a swoop of uneasy fear before Flemeth had pinched her cheek and added: “Lucky for you that you were a winsome little thing, and a clever one too, or I would have eaten you up while you were still small enough to be tender.”  

She could not recall being small enough for tenderness, but the Warden woman – Tabris, she reminded herself, Seluna Tabris – seemed to have not yet outgrown it, from the bruised, haunted look in her eyes, to her habit of luring lost souls to her side. True, Morrigan herself could take some of the blame for the Qunari – she'd demanded his release herself, though she’d not expected the proposal he follow them on their mad quest to slay the archdemon – but Tabris seemed to extend not only her mercy but her hearth to every waif or stray that threw itself upon her.  

She should have seen the warning signs with Alistair, but in truth, it was the Mabari that had first revealed this odd weakness in her. She’d kept to the shadows in their few encounters on the road, letting Alistair and Morrigan herself draw the brunt of the fire while she slit throats and slipped away before enemies had the chance to notice her. But when the mangy, lumpen creature had ambled up to her with darkspawn in its wake, she’d stepped in front of it with something akin to fire in her eyes, and her slippery, selfish fighting style had taken on an almost predatory grace. Morrigan had not expected it from the girl, who’d seemed half-child and all wounded, helpless creature, and less had she expected her to drop to her knees and let the stinking mongrel lick the blood from her cheeks.  

“Sweet girl,” she’d murmured, “at least I managed to save you.”  

“Touching, truly.” Morrigan folded her arms. Their packs were getting lighter by the day, and the provisions Flemeth had packed for them would not last much longer. And if these simpletons expected her to feed them along with herself, they were going to go hungry long before they reached Lothering. “Now, send the mangy thing away, and let us be off.”  

Morrigan had never understood why most people seemed so fond of dogs, cooing to them and cossetting them as if they were not once things of the wild. To her they seemed like strange perversions of the wolves she knew well, unnatural in their overbred forms and their grovelling sycophancy. Nothing truly wild would have accepted the embrace the girl lavished upon it.   

Seluna, apparently, did not see the parts of her new friend Morrigan found so repulsive. Or smell them. She glanced up at her, and Morrigan caught the hint of a smile before it was quickly replaced by a glare.  

“You’re not serious,” she said, dull, flat affect returning to her voice as if that tender note had never crept in. “The woods are crawling with darkspawn.”  

“Then he’ll have plenty to eat,” she said, pragmatically, “which is more than can be said for us, if you keep dawdling.”  

“She’ll hunt for us, won’t you, girl?” Alistair cooed, cementing the dog’s place in Morrigan’s heart as a nuisance almost equal to him. “We’re keeping her, right?” he demanded of Seluna.  

Her eyes flickered between them, narrowed and thoughtful, lips pursed. “It isn’t far to Lothering,” she said, finally. “We might be able to find someone to take care of her there.”  

It was a pretty attempt at compromise, and a useless one. Morrigan knew full well the stinking beast wasn’t going anywhere when it curled up at Seluna’s feet by the fire every night, and brought her rabbits to cook in what might have been an effort to prove her usefulness.   

“Don’t look at me,” she muttered to it, when it had placed the third one of the evening at her feet. “If I wanted a beast to grovel for me, I’d be working on Alistair.”   

She should, she knew, have been working on him already, luring him closer with feigned helplessness and desire until he tumbled into her bed. It was what Flemeth would have done, and had raised her to do in her place. But the man was an imbecile, and worse, a talkative one, and she could never quite suppress her sneers beneath the simper she knew would please him. It would be easier to get what she needed from him, if he found her pleasing, and she knew well that her enjoyment of the process was hardly relevant to the outcome.  

It would have been easier, perhaps, if he were like Sten of the Beresaad. The Qunari was his opposite in almost everything, taciturn where Alistair was garrulous, coolly rational where he was sloppily emotional. She’d seen it in him even when he hung in a crow-cage, awaiting a cruel and senseless death at the hands of the darkspawn – that calm dignity of a wild thing who had accepted his fate, and chosen to meet it on his feet.   

“I will not amuse you any more than I have the other humans,” he had said, and she’d felt a pang of something almost like empathy in her breast. She almost hated them in that moment – the townspeople who’d caged him, yes, but also her own travelling companions, who held the leash of obligation they’d watched Flemeth bind tight about her neck, and then looked askance when she snapped at them.  

It was Tabris who’d addressed him, who’d tried to coax him to dance for her amusement, so it was Tabris she directed her anger towards.   

“If you will not release him, for mercy’s sake alone, give him some peace,” she had snapped, and Tabris had turned those wide eyes on her, clearly startled by her intervention. As if she thought a Witch of the Wilds incapable of mercy. “He is a proud, powerful creature, trapped as prey for the darkspawn by cowards and fools.”  

“Mercy?” Alistair had sneered, “I wouldn’t have expected that from you.”  

Nor had Tabris, clearly, but she’d returned to the Chantry regardless and used those pretty words she could, on occasion, pull forth like a conjurer’s ribbons  to pull the key from the old woman’s hands and make her thank her for the privilege. She had, at least, not expected Morrigan to thank her, only looked sidelong at her as the Qunari stepped free of his cage, a little unsteady on his feet, and rolled his shoulders into a long-awaited stretch.  

He might have been her favourite of her travelling companions, Sten of the Beresaad. Seluna was a pretty, fragile thing, and would go the way of all pretty, fragile things in the end, and Alistair was a garrulous fool, but Sten was more than capable of sitting for hours in the silence she preferred to idle chatter after a day in the noise and bustle of the town. He watched her though, with narrowed eyes and an unreadable twist to his mouth, which made her want to pull apart the knot of his eyebrows and unravel the thoughts beneath. Yes, she liked Sten, in as much as she liked any of them. He was a puzzle to solve, an amusing enigma to pull apart little by little.  

Their newest companion was a puzzle too, though not one Morrigan had any interest in solving. The wide-eyed Chantry girl act might have fooled the Wardens, but she was unconvinced. Surely she hadn’t learned her skills with bow and blade in some dour Chantry hall, or honed her skill at coaxing questions in the confessional? In truth, every conversation with Leliana reminded her strangely of Flemeth in one of her more mercurial moods – the kind where she knew – or suspected – you were hiding something from her, and was determined to make walking the knife-edge of secrecy almost as painful as the inevitable revelation. Not that she thought Leliana a physical threat – her main power lay in her ability to feign helplessness, and Morrigan had learned that trick too young to be fooled by it – but her wide-eyed, so-innocent questions dug into her like claws into underripe fruit, attempting to pull her apart to reveal what lay within.   

Perhaps she’d started telling that foolish story when Morrigan had rejected her thousandth attempt to get under her skin, as if the tale of the witch and her stolen daughter might have some secret power over her. As if she hadn’t heard her own version of the tale a thousand times over from Flemeth, without the foolish names and saccharine ending Leliana had added for her audience’s benefit.  

Flemeth had liked to tell her stories, as they chopped herbs together, or curled by the fire in the evening. Sometimes she’d even comb the tangles from her hair as she spoke, as if they were any ordinary peasant family. Her voice was as familiar as the creaking of trees in the wind, but Morrigan could never allow it to lull her into complaisance. There was always a trap in Flemeth’s stories, if you weren’t paying attention.   

She’d had a story like Leliana’s, at least if you weren’t listening too closely: about a witch and her beautiful daughter.   

“The girl was as foolish as she was beautiful,” Flemeth had said, “and her mother, in loving her to the point of blindness, as much a fool as her child. Once, when she had to travel far across the sea, she left her daughter to guard the secrets of their tower against the grasping hands of over-curious fools.”  

“But she did not listen?” Morrigan had asked, because she could already feel the pattern of Flemeth’s story as she spun it out.  

“If she had listened, there would be no story to tell. She would have guarded their home and their secrets carefully, and when her mother returned, she would have been well-pleased that her daughter had shown she could be trusted to protect what was most precious to her.”   

Here Flemeth had paused, sighed heavily, and her hands had stilled in her hair, as if the next part of the story pained her to tell. “But as you said, the girl did not listen. In her mother’s absence, a Circle mage from the north stole his way to the tower, and wooed the foolish girl with pretty words and worthless trinkets until she permitted him past the wards her mother had set so carefully to protect her.”  

“And what did he do then, Mother?”  

“What all men do, to foolish girls who do not protect themselves. He took what he wanted, from the tower and from the girl within, and left her with nothing but lovetalk and promises to return for her soon. But promises are nothing more than pretty words, and when the witch returned, she found her foolish daughter with a head full of her false lover’s dreams and a belly six months swollen with his babe.   

“What was she to do? Her daughter had betrayed her, yes, but worse, she’d shown her weakness – if a mortal man could persuade her to surrender her home and her body, she would be easy prey for the crueller kind of spirit who roamed the land, and the witch could not always be there to protect her, nor did she wish to harbour a traitor and her brat.”  

“So she killed her?” It had made sense to Morrigan’s infant mind – so many of Flemeth’s stories ended in betrayal and just vengeance that it seemed almost inevitable, but it had stuck with her when Flemeth had shaken her head.   

“She’d raised the girl from infancy, suckled her at her own breast, and though she was fierce and vengeful when crossed, she could not bring herself to strike down the child she had nursed. Perhaps it might have been kinder if she had – instead, she severed her daughter from the Fade, and cast her from the tower that had been their home, to wander the world alone, without the gifts of magic to protect her.”  

“But what happened to her?” Morrigan had asked, “What happened to her child?”  

“What do you think happened?” Flemeth had looked down at her with eyes of burning gold, hawk’s eyes, dragon’s eyes, eyes of a wild thing that did not know mercy. “A girl alone, swollen with child, cut off from magic and the essence of dreaming itself, in a world as cold and cruel as ours?”  

Morrigan had felt prey-creature fear seize her throat, as it always did when Flemeth looked at her so, because she was still small and weak and it made sense for her to be afraid. “She died, didn’t she?”  

“Perhaps.” Flemeth had rolled her shoulders, getting to her feet and stretching out with a sigh. “Pray you never prove foolish enough to find out, girl. And sweep the floor before you go to bed.”  

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that Morrigan found little to love in Leliana’s saccharine tale of lovers reunited and kingdoms bestowed on the worthy. Whether she believed Flemeth’s tale or not, it fit better into the world she knew than any spun-sugar story of wayward princes and maidens with hair long enough to climb. Tabris should have known better too, based on those bruised shadows that still lingered within her eyes, but every night, she curled by the campfire and asked, with a too-fragile smile: “Any stories for us tonight, Leliana?”  

She did not ask Morrigan for comforting stories. Perhaps she knew Morrigan had none to offer her. But she did at least listen when she spoke, which was more than could be said of Alistair or Leliana. The former seemed to argue for argument’s sake, the latter to try and pry further into Morrigan’s mind than she wanted to allow.  

So it was when the matter of the bear came up.  

“You want to talk to it?” Alistair was, of course, staring at her like she was a madwoman.  

“I did not say talk, this isn’t some foolish children’s tale. I said I wished to reason with it.”  

“Do bears possess sufficient... reason to argue with?” Leliana asked, an elegant eyebrow raised.  

“One might as well ask that question of Tabris’ idiot dog, and you all seem to believe it can be commanded, or at least bribed,” she snapped, and the dog, predictably, let out a pitiable little whine, which at least aided her argument.   

“You’ve hurt her feelings now,” Seluna complained, crouching to scratch between her ears. “But you know more about bears than any of us. If you say you can communicate with it, I believe you.”  

“And you’ll let me attempt it?”  

She snorted. “Do I let you do anything, Morrigan? No, I- we,” she amended, glancing to Alistair, “won’t touch your bear unless you think it’s past the point of reasoning, or unless it moves to harm you.”  

Morrigan rolled her shoulders, feeling the itch to shift under her skin quiet as she surrendered to the beast beneath her skin. “You don’t need to worry about me,” she retorted, which began as a yawn and ended as a low growl.  

Alistair shuddered. “I hate it when she does that.”  

That would be why I do it at every opportunity, fool. Even clad in bearskin, she felt a shudder of irritation at her own recalcitrance run down her spine. She was making her own job harder, she knew, and yet-  

The scent of the other bear on the breeze. In this form, with its sharper senses, she knew by instinct that it was a sow, and that her cubs were nearby, and young too. Stranger and stranger – she-bears usually kept their cubs far from human settlements, especially this early in the season. She tracked the scent slowly, pausing at each broken branch or patch of spoor to gather more clues.   

A smear of blood on a thornbush revealed the sour-milk of recent pregnancy, and the rancid stink of a fear almost unknown to a predator so powerful and so solitary. Darkspawn, she guessed, had chased this mother from her usual hunting grounds, and now she was here, lured by the stinking swarm of refugees and their beasts and their children, easy prey for a hungry mother struggling to feed her own little ones. She knew her form was young and strong, likely with better reserves of shield-fat than the bear she currently tracked, and that it would not be difficult to chase her away, but something in the idea rankled her. The bear was a fearsome creature in her own element, and she had  as much a claim to the fields around Lothering as any mortal with a flimsy paper deed of ownership. Perhaps more, given the cubs that currently depended upon her. Besides, she would likely win such a battle, but not at cost to her own form, or the bear’s, and she did not wish to tax either of their reserves with a fight for a territory neither of them truly wished to hold.  

She could hunt for her, perhaps, bring down a ram or a stag, but game was scarce in these hills, and besides, bears were not typically carrion eaters. She might not accept prey killed by another, and she would be wise not to trust it. Meat from a human could be poisoned, and meat from another bear a trap to reveal where she hid her cubs.  

She had told the others she could ‘reason’ with the bear, but in truth, such things were not so simple, even with more social creatures like wolves or spiders. When she took on a creature’s form, she gained its appearance, its strength, its senses, but she did not so easily gain the understanding that these creatures developed as they grew into their forms. When she’d been younger, and new to the malleability of her form, she’d sought them out boldly – wolfpacks and spider swarms and flocks of crows – in the childish hope that they’d accept her into their ranks and give her whatever passed among their kind for love or friendship. It would not matter if she was never accepted among her own kind – the strange little girl with Chasind features and ragged clothes was never a welcome sight when she made it as far as a settlement – if she could claim a thousand friends among the wild things of the forest. But she’d known nothing of the forest in those days, and would return to Flemeth bruised or bitten or weeping, driven out as any strange creature’s child might be.   

“Of course they do not accept you,” Flemeth had scolded, applying precious elfroot balm to the worst of her injuries. “Why should they? You are not of their kind, and they know it.”  

In the moment, this had struck Morrigan as incredibly unfair: “But you said-”  

“I told you to seek them out, girl, not bound into their midst like a lamb to the slaughter. Watch them, before you attempt to pass yourself off as one of their kind. You cannot expect them to love you while you remain as foolish and ignorant as you are now.”  

She was no longer quite so foolish or so ignorant as she had been then. She knew well that she could not hail the bear as a sister and offer to share her own kill – bears were not social creatures at the best of times, and had little use for the posturing and play that she might have used with a lone she-wolf. But perhaps a different form of co mmunication could be achieved, or at least one more successful than her erstwhile companions had managed. In the half-hour she’d left them, they’d unintentionally lured out half the giant spider population of the riverbank, and were now washing off the ichor and complaining loudly at one another.  

“The bear’s hungry, fleeing the Darkspawn,” she reported to them, once she’d returned  to a form that could speak. “She needs to eat if she’s to feed her cubs.”  

“So she’s taken to hunting men like the spiders did.” Alistair shuddered. “I suppose that’s that, then. So much for ‘reason.’”  

“Because you men have so much more right to the woods than all other living creatures.” She’d known it was petty and pointless, but so was everything that ever came out of Alistair’s mouth. “Does she not have as much right to survive as every other creature fleeing the Blight?”  

“As any, perhaps, but not more the men she’s killed.” Of course even in her interruptions, Leliana’s voice was soft and elegant, as gentle as if she were addressing a flock of devout little Andrastians. It was possibly her most irritating trait. “The people of Lothering must be protected, they have enough to fear as it is-”  

“And what will it matter? If they are still here in a week, they will be dead either way-”  

“Enough, children,” Seluna said, dropping the last coins she’d been counting back into the purse at her hip and striding ahead, a slight limp to her gait. “We’re not killing the bear, we’re not sacrificing a villager a week to sate its unnatural hunger, this is not the great moral question of the age, now hurry up and move before the market closes for the day. I have to see a man about a cow.”  

Or a small herd of them, to be more precise.   

“Do we have the money for this?” Alistair muttered to Seluna, who rolled her eyes. “We have enough money to pay my rent for the rest of the year. How much could a few cows possibly be?”  

More than Seluna had expected, perhaps, given the way her cheeks paled then flushed at the price the farmer offered her, but she set to the task of haggling with more enthusiasm than she’d ever shown in a fight. It would have been impressive if it had made any sense at all. Still, the girl seemed as pleased as she’d ever looked when she came away from the herdsman with a small string of cattle trailing behind her.   

“Farmer gets money, cows get a few hours of glorious freedom, bear gets fed, everyone stops arguing,” she explained, at the edge of the river, as she carefully untied the halters and shooed the cows across.  

“Because teaching the bear to hunt cattle will definitely avoid future conflict with the locals,” Alistair muttered, and before Morrigan could argue with him, Seluna snapped her head around to glare at him.  

“Sure, maybe in a year, that will be a problem for these people, but do you think any of them will be here a week from now?” she snapped. “Do you think the bear will be anywhere near these woods by then? No! The people will follow the road, and the bear will fuck off to the Hinterlands or wherever bears go, and for once in this Void-damned world, everyone will get to live a little longer.”  

The realisation hit Morrigan, then, how little she’d heard of Seluna’s real voice – not chirping-sweet and fragile, or hollow and empty, but low and coarse and rough like something already broken. She preferred her like this, sharp edges on show. It made her seem less like a girl who would soon be dead. Leliana and Alistair shared a glance, but did not press her further as she carefully shepherded the last of her briefly-owned cattle into the woods in the vague direction of the bear. It was only when she sloshed out of the water, wet to the thigh and muddy besides, that Alistair dared to suggest, meekly:  

“Just on the off-chance that your brilliant plan doesn’t work...”  

“We kill the bear.” She did not look back at them, voice cold and distant as the moon rising above them. “Killing the bear is always an option. It’s just the final one.”  

It was not particularly sharp or witty, but it was the final word on the matter. When they returned to camp, Seluna stalked immediately to her tent rather than taking her usual spot at the campfire. It was not in Morrigan’s nature to check on her travel companions as if they were ducklings, but when neither Alistair nor Leliana moved to do so, she begrudgingly stirred herself when the quiet went on an hour too long. It was unlike Seluna to lick her wounds alone, and a spiderbite could turn nasty quickly.  

Her suspicions were proven correct as she pushed into the tent to find the girl unbinding a poultice from her thigh. She responded to Morrigan’s entry with a cry of protest and an attempted slap that she easily swatted away – the girl was quick, but nowhere near as quick or as strong as Flemeth – and examined the wound with narrowed eyes.  

“You didn’t mention you were bitten earlier,” she accused.  

“I didn’t know you cared,” she taunted, and then gasped as Morrigan probed the swollen wound: “ Ow, I didn’t bother you because I’d already put a poultice on it. Fuck, hasn’t anyone ever told you that isn’t how a woman wants you inside her? Get your fingers out of my leg wound!”  

“You’ll need antivenom before you can sleep on this,” she said, removing the spider fang that had lodged itself in the bite. “You should have asked for it before you went on your harebrained shopping spree.”  

She sniffed at the blood on her hand, scenting for the telltale rot of infection or more venom. There was none, but there was something else familiar – a strange sour note that she could not quite place.  

“I saved your precious bear, didn’t I?” the girl muttered, resentfully, as Morrigan nudged her legs apart to apply a fresh poultice and bandage.  

“That remains to be seen,” she retorted, and then: “It was- an unnecessary expenditure, one that benefitted you little.”  

“I didn’t hear you complaining at the time.”  

“Do you think I am complaining now?” She fastened the bandage as tight as she dared, till the girl gave a hiss of pain. “I am not. I am simply curious as to why you made such a choice.”  

“Did it make you happy?” the girl snapped, yanking her leg away from Morrigan’s ministrations to squirm back into her breeches. When Morrigan did not respond, she repeated: “Did it make you happy?”  

Morrigan blinked at her, uncomprehending. Was this some strange attempt at a seduction? If so, it was an inconvenient one. The girl had the Darkspawn taint in her veins, true, but her anatomy was sadly lacking in the rest of what Morrigan needed for Flemeth’s plan.  

The girl gave an exasperated sigh and made a shooing motion, as if to banish her from the tent. “I’ve seen enough death in the past month to last me the rest of my life,” she said, in that low, exhausted voice. “If I can avoid spreading more of it than I have to, I will. Now, are you done? Because I’m not up for round two of that any time soon, darling.”  

Morrigan rolled her eyes and gathered her herbalism kit before clambering gracelessly from the tent. Ungrateful brat, she muttered to herself, returning to her own fire. Somewhere on the wind, she could hear the lowing of cattle, and she wondered if they were the group they’d loosed into the woods. If she’d had the energy or the mana to take on her bear-shape, she would have slipped into it and gone in search of the mother and her cubs, perhaps herded a weaker-looking cow in their direction, but she was for once as exhausted as her travelling companions, and her amateur surgery had more than sated any thirst for blood that might have sent her hunting. Truthfully, it was a little repulsive, despite the satisfaction of a job well done – it lacked the clarity of purpose a hunt provided. But there was still a mystery in the scent of the blood on her fingers – that strange, sour undertone, one she’d smelled recently-  

The bear. She’d scented something similar on the bear, and now on the girl too. Animal instinct flared up in the part of her brain that flickered bird-bear-wolf-spider, as fluid in form as she herself wished to be. A cub. No, a child, or something that would be a child. Impossible, that such a thing had survived the Joining, and yet- the markers were already here in her veins, rot and new life already bound into the cycle of her blood. It was fascinating, it was impossible, it was- exactly what she needed, she realised, with a heady rush.   

A babe conceived with the taint already in its veins, a clump of cells already blooming into the perfect vessel for the soul of an ancient god. A child already growing in another’s body, with no need for her to surrender her own or lie with a man she found repulsive. The greatest blessing the world could have bestowed upon her, provided she could keep the girl alive for long enough to bring it into the world. And as for afterwards? Well, the world held many stories of the witches of the Wilds and their gift for stealing children. In this, as in all things, she would prove her mother’s daughter.  

Chapter Text

Alistair had talked a little of Redcliffe as the home of his childhood as they travelled – he'd spoken of its tree-dappled beauty, the mountains that cradled it, the bustling streets of the village that the great castle sheltered. She’d listened with all the indulgence she could muster, but of course, his descriptions had not prepared her for the truth – Redcliffe was a horror beyond imagining.  

The castle hunched over the village like a vulture over a corpse, picking off its people little by little like meat from the bone, and that could have been a horror too, but an ordinary one. It could have fed on the villagers the way Denerim fed on the alienage, little by little, never taking so much that they were driven out altogether. Except here it had become realer than metaphor – the castle took, and took, and took from its people, and returned them in waves of the shambling, too-familiar dead, and everything about it made her sick to her stomach. She’d felt nauseous since the Joining, as if her body wanted to reject the poison Duncan had forced down her throat, but in Redcliffe, it was a thousand times worse. She could barely bring herself to eat, and whatever she managed quickly came up again between the ever-present taste of blood in her throat and the stench of rotting flesh.  

It should have abated now they were finally within the castle walls, far from the stench of the bodies outside. The mage-child lay sleeping, awaiting the ritual that would untether him from his demon, and her bloody work was done, at least for the night. But she sat at the high table with a Bann and an Arlessa and a son of King Maric himself, with a plate of rich meat before her, and she could not bring herself to touch it, even now.  

“The dinner is not to your taste?” the Arlessa queried, with a frown, and Luna felt that familiar spark of anger that such things could still matter to the woman after what she had done. But of course she could – what did it matter to these nobles in their great castles if the villagers they charged tithes to lay dead or bleeding at the hands of their loved ones, the friends and neighbours her son had turned into weapons, when at the end of the day, she still had food on the table and the hope of her child back in her arms? What had it mattered to King Cailan, that elven girls were kidnapped and raped under his nose by one of his nobles, as long as he had his war and his glory? She’d thought, in her darker moments, that perhaps such cruelty came naturally to the shemlen , but now she wondered if it was simply innate to the nobles they elevated. Hard to truly care for the hungry, the sick, the desperate, when you could not imagine sharing their woes. She had seen it in Duncan, saw the roots of it now in Alistair, even as she did her best to salt them where she could.   

She forced a smile to her lips, because it would do no good to offend this woman, who’s aid she might need if both her son and her husband were beyond saving. “Your table is most generous,” she said, as her father had raised her to, “I’m just- tired, my lady.”  

“Of course.” Isolde accepted the lie with a beneficent incline of the head. “I can have food sent to the guest chambers if you would prefer. You- will be making an early start tomorrow, I hope?”  

“Yes, my lady,” she replied, rising to bow despite the fresh wave of nausea it sent through her. Foolish, to turn her nose up at the first full meal she’d had in weeks, but how was she to touch the food without thinking of how wan and hungry the survivors of Redcliffe had looked, cut off from the castle’s granary for so many weeks? How was she to sit across from the Arlessa and her brother-in-law, and not feel as though she were dining with monsters? In this hall, with its firelit shadows, she felt that if she turned her head too quickly, she would catch a glimpse of Vaughan’s ghost, laughing even as the blood ran down his fine shirt. She might have killed him, but she could never escape him, not as long as his kind – stupid, selfish, noble shemlen – held all the power in the world in their clumsy fists.  

She hated Redcliffe Castle, hated it to the marrow of her bones, and hated it more because she could not quite bring herself to hate its lady so completely. Foolish Isolde, the cause of so much misery, and her selfish desires first to keep her son close and then to cover for her mistakes. Luna wished she had the stomach for Morrigan’s cold dismissal of her frailty, but hadn’t she made similar choices? Hadn’t she killed the son of an arl, knowing the havoc that would wreak in her home? Wouldn’t she do it again, given the chance, if it saved Shianni even a moment of pain? She would never hold a child of her own in her arms – that chance had been taken from her first by Vaughan and then by Duncan, but she’d been willing to see Denerim burn to save her cousins, and they were grown, or nearly so. What would she not have done, if it had been her own child in danger?  

A knock at the door startled her from her thoughts, and she answered it to find the maid – Valena, the smith’s daughter, she reminded herself – bobbing into a curtsey that threatened to unbalance the plate of food she carried.   

“Milady said you’d be eating in your room tonight, miss,”  she said, hurriedly, pressing the plate into her hands, “and that- you wouldn’t be staying?”  

There was an awful mingling of hope and fear in her voice, one Luna knew too well. “You should go and stay with your father, Valena. He’s been missing you,” she said, rather than answering the question the girl had posed.  

“Of course, miss, it’s only-” Valena gnawed at her lip, glanced around, lowered her voice: “my da’s not a young man, and if there’s more fighting- I don’t want him thinking he’s got to get out there to protect me.”  

He might prefer dying in your defence to living without you, she thought, recalling the narrow, cluttered room he’d barricaded himself into to wait for death. She hadn’t liked the bitter, angry old man, but still... she hoped her own father and Shianni were taking care of each other. They had nobody else, now.   

“Would you feel safer with him, or in here?” she said, and again saw that flicker of hope-fear-despair dance across her thin features, almost too familiar to look at. The world was ending and here they stood, two young women who wanted nothing more than to return to the familiar shelter of their fathers’ arms. “Lady Isolde will understand if you need to check on him.”  

“Will she?” Valena said, with a tragic quirk to her lip that made Luna’s heart ache.   

“I’ll make her understand,” she said, and, shifting her plate to one hand, pulled a handful of coins from her purse. “And if she doesn’t-”  

“Miss, you shouldn’t-”  

“If she doesn’t ,” Luna continued over her, ruthlessly, “you’re taking this money to your da, and you’re both going to head north until you hit the sea. Maybe over the sea, they probably need smiths in the Free Marches as much as they do here. I don’t know how much passage costs, but- it should be enough, to get you started at least.”  

Valena stared at her, slow realisation dawning in her eyes. “The Blight’ll come for us if the dead don’t.”  

“You don’t have to be here when it comes,” she said, dropping her gaze. “Think on it, Valena.” People will die in the Blight whatever I do. You don’t have to be one of them.  

“ Yes, miss,” Valena ducked her head, but Luna caught her closing her fist around the coins, white-knuckled. Good. The sooner she ran, the better.    

The plate in her hands was still warm from the kitchen, but the steam was quickly fading from the food upon it – rapidly-cooling pork and congealing gravy. She set it down on the table, and stared at it as if she could eat it with her eyes alone. Her stomach still roiled with nausea, even now she was alone. She’d never known before how much burning bodies smelled like cooking meat. How could they stomach it, Isolde and Teagan, to sit at their fine table with their fine dinner knowing that in the village, families buried their loved ones who’d refused to stay dead? How could she stomach it, to sit at their table and sleep by their hearth and say ‘yes, my lady, no my lord’ in the name of an alliance she’d cared nothing for two months ago?  

The answer came back to the Blight, of course. It always came back to the Blight, to the darkspawn swarming to the south, to the rot they’d already placed in her veins-  

Her next visitor did not have Valena’s careful courtesy. Morrigan simply barged into the bedroom as easily as she’d invaded Luna’s tent.  

“You know, in houses with more than one room, we’ve invented this thing called knocking,” she said, leaning back on her chair to look at her. “You should try it. Really decreases friction in close quarters.”  

“A lesson in civility from a city elf?” Morrigan retorted. “No, do go on. Do you have thoughts on my table manners, too?”  

She’d eaten happily enough at the Arl of Redcliffe’s table, despite arguing mere hours ago in favour of killing his son or his wife. She’d torn her bread to pieces with her fingers, gnawed her meat to the bones and sucked the marrow from them, every inch the creature of the Wilds she claimed to be. It was almost funny, to watch her absorb every bit of the horror these humans might typically have reserved for an elf at the high table, and devour it with as much relish as her meal. It wouldn’t win them friends or allies , but there was something in her rampant disregard for what anyone thought of her that Luna almost envied.  

Now, however, that disregard was between her and a long evening of privacy to brood, and it was in her way.  

“Did you have a reason for bursting in here, darling, or did you just come to argue that it would be more convenient to kill the child or the Arlessa than to travel all the way to the Circle and back?” she retorted, letting the forelegs of her chair hit the floorboards with a satisfying crack. If she was lucky, maybe they’d leave a scratch the nobles couldn’t sand away or cover up.  

“You have no love for the foolish woman,” Morrigan snapped, folding her arms, “and her son is weak.”  

“Her son is a child. Most children are weak,” Luna replied. “Even you probably made some stupid mistakes when you were young. If you didn’t just spring out of your swamp fully formed and ready to pester innocent maidens at their dinner.”  

Morrigan snorted. “You’re a fair liar, girl, but you had no intention of eating that food, and I’d wager you’re no maiden besides.”  

Luna laughed at that, more out of surprise than humour. “I didn’t know Flemeth could put words in your mouth from a hundred miles away. Let’s try this again: I ask ‘Why are you in my room?’ and you give me an answer that doesn’t involve insulting me to try and distract from whatever is actually bothering you.”  

Morrigan was glaring at her now – apparently a childhood in the Wilds had prepared her for many things, but being laughed at wasn’t among them. “I told you,” she said, “I came to see if you were eating. Which I was right to, because clearly you aren’t.”  

It was so transparent a lie, and so foolish a mental image, that Luna laughed again, because everything in the world was terrible and strange and a child could make the dead walk and control the bodies of the living and still cry for his mother when injured, and the strangest image of all was Morrigan, Witch of the Wild, checking on her like she was a sickly child herself.   

“Adorable, but no,” she gasped, when the laugh had passed through her, leaving another unhappy gurgle in her stomach. “What-“ she swallowed, tried to ignore the nausea, “what are you doing after this, tucking Alistair into bed? Braiding Leliana’s ha- oh, shit. ” The chamberpot was close, but not quite close enough. She hoped the Arlessa wasn’t too fond of the rug.   

Her stomach heaved again, and she had no time to think of anything else until it had finished emptying itself onto the floor.  

When she slumped back onto her knees, she could feel Morrigan’s cool judgemental gaze locked on her still, and she wanted to bite her.   

“See,” she managed, weakly, “that could’ve been so much worse if I’d already eaten.”  

She hoped they wouldn’t make Valena clean up her mess. Maybe she could burn the rug before they left in the morning.  

Hands on her face, blessedly cool after the fever-heat of nausea had passed. Morrigan forced her to meet her eyes as she crouched beside her.   

“You,” she declared, “are a poor travelling companion.”  

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”  

“You hide your injuries and your illnesses. You starve yourself of food and sleep and assume we are too stupid to notice. You drag us after every unnecessary diversion with your naive insistence on-“  

“Saving people?” Luna drew back, forcing herself to her feet, though she had to grasp the table for balance. “Wow, it’s so strange I don’t confide in the witch who’s made it very clear saving people will never be her priority.”  

“Have I ever denied you healing, or medicine when you are injured? Do you think my powers so paltry that mere indigestion could defeat them?” She gestured to her treacherous stomach. “You think me selfish, but Fereldan has only two Grey Wardens left to defeat the Blight, and one of them can’t seem to remember her body is no longer hers to sacrifice!”  

The words sank into her gut like a knife, because they were cruel and because they were true. Her body had not belonged to her since her wedding day, and now moving in it felt like sleepwalking, and caring for it felt impossible. She folded her arms over her stomach, as if that would hold her together under that brutal golden gaze.  

“I’m sorry your big trip out into the world isn’t going the way you wanted it to,” she said, cold now rather than teasing. If this was the rise she could get out of Morrigan, she didn’t want it anymore. “I’m sorry you were ordered to travel with companions you don’t care for. But guess what? Flemeth isn’t here, and you don’t have to be either. Apparently Grey Wardens are needed for defeating a Blight, but I don’t think the records say anything about cranky hedgewitches.”  

“You’re- sorry?” Morrigan was still staring at her, but seemed more disbelieving than angry now. When was she going to leave? The smell of vomit was making her nauseous again in a vicious and unforgiving cycle, but she wasn’t about to scrub down the carpet like a servant in front of the crotchety, arrogant witch. “ You’re sorry? What do you have to be sorry for?”  

"It’s a turn of phrase.” Sweet Andraste but she wanted to shake her. “It means I wish those things weren’t happening to you, but honestly? They don’t have to be. You get a choice here. You can leave. So do it, or don’t, but quit picking at my problems unless you’re willing to help me clean up the mess.”  

The witch pursed her violet-painted lips, and looked her up and down, as if assessing whether she was worth the mess she’d cause. Luna felt her hands curl into fists. Look at me like I'm a person to you, she wanted to demand. Look at me like I’m real, not a bit-part in some story you and Flemeth are telling.  

She did not expect what came next. Morrigan waved a dismissive hand, and a brief chill cut through the air, freezing the puddle of bile in less than a second. A flick of her fingers, and without either of them moving, it was scraped from the rug and cast out of the window, for some unfortunate gardener to find come morning.   

“Is that enough demonstration of my good will for tonight, or do I need to save you from another spiderbite?” Her tone was caustic, as if she needed harshness to balance out her admittedly-helpful actions. “You are correct. I am not compelled by blood magic to seek out and slay an archdemon, and I could choose to leave at any time. Unfortunately, the Blight threatens all of southern Thedas, and I happen to live here too. Would you suggest I leave saving the world in Alistair’s capable hands?”  

“Would you accept the suggestion if I did?” Always the impulse to tease and joke, to slither out from beneath that pinning stare. She hated feeling trapped, and familiarity with the sensation had only increased her loathing. “But point taken. You’re here because you don’t want the world to be destroyed and you don’t trust the rest of us idiots to save it without you. That doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do with my body. Nobody has that right.”  

She attempted to relax back against the edge of the desk, to look cool-headed and calm and open to whatever point Morrigan was trying to make, but she still felt on edge, as if the other woman could see every raw, exposed nerve ending, and knew exactly where a blow would hurt the most.  

“What if I do claim that right?” She stepped closer, not quite an invasion of her space, but enough that Luna had to look up to her. She’d never noticed the few inches between them so much – Morrigan was short for a human, but could still loom over her if she wished to. “How many fights have we been in together now? How many times have I, or Alistair, or Sten, taken a blow that was meant for you? How many times have your knives come between them and a sudden end? Perhaps among your kin things were different, but here, you cannot depend on everyone else to watch your back if you refuse to take steps to protect it for yourself.”  

Luna felt heat began to creep into her cheeks, because as humiliating as it was for Morrigan to be lecturing her on independence, she had a point. Still, she raised an eyebrow. “And you think coming here to lecture me about- what, exactly, not asking you for help? - will make me more independent?”  

“I may not cosset you like a nursemaid, but I am a skilled herbalist. I assume they have those in your great cities, even in the alienages.”  

“I’m amazed you  have so many opinions on alienages for a woman who’s never set foot in one,” she retorted. “ Yes, we have herbalists.”  

“And would you have visited one by now, in the ordinary way of things?” Luna’s silence spoke for her, and Morrigan’s narrow lips curled up into a cat-at-a-creampot smirk. “Exactly as I thought.” She reached a hand into her satchel and produced a small, paper-wrapped package. “Now, if you had acted with a modicum of self-preservation and come to me sooner, you could have had this tea to stave off both sickness and this frankly mortifying conversation.”  

It was beneath her dignity to snatch at the packet like a spoilt child, but the promise of any relief from the nausea was enough to make her jump for it. Which, of course, made Morrigan snicker. Bitch.  

“What’s in it?” she asked, opening the flap to sniff it. The scent was unfamiliar, warm and spiced, almost like the roasted nuts that they sold on the corners of the noble quarter, but not as sweet.  

“How much do you know about herbs?” Morrigan retorted. “If I wanted to poison you, I’d put it in a poultice, not a tea.”  

“Of course you would,” Luna agreed. The tea didn’t smell like any poisonous plant she knew, at least. Deathroot was bitter, and blood lotus had metallic notes it would have been nigh impossible to conceal. “And if I wanted to poison you, I’d slip it between the pages of some awful arcane tome. Isn’t it wonderful that we’re allies instead?”  

“Allies for now,” Morrigan said, but her smile seemed almost real, “at least, as long as you don’t make me repeat this ordeal.”  

It was not an ordeal Luna was eager to repeat either. It would have been bad enough to have such a conversation with sweet Leliana, who would have tried so hard to preserve her fragile dignity and to reassure her that nobody would think less of her for her illness. To have Morrigan of all people be the one to raise the issue – and to imply she was both selfish and a liability to the group – was humiliating. Still, it was almost worth it to have that blessed tea – poison or not, it was as good as Morrigan had boasted, which was just as well, with the brutal pace that Alistair set on the road back to the Circle Tower.   

“Every second we waste puts Redcliffe in danger!” he snapped, when Luna and Leliana mutinied to perch on a rock and rest their aching feet. It was only late morning, but he’d woken them at dawn, and the sun rose earlier and earlier each morning. Now it shimmered on the surface of Lake Calenhad, which seemed to stretch to the horizon in every direction,   

“And if we collapse from exhaustion by the time we reach Kinloch Hold, we’ll waste more time on the way back!” Luna replied, with more sharpness than she’d meant to. Tacking a smile to her lips, she added, coaxingly: “We’re making the best speed we can. I know you’re worried about Arl Eamon, but he’s stable for now-”  

“Under the care of the apostate who poisoned him,” Alistair reminded her.  

“Jowan knows his life hinges on the Arl’s survival,” Leliana said, ever the peacemaker. “He would be a fool to harm him now.”  

“He’s already proven a fool many times over.” Morrigan stood in the shadow of the trees, closer to Sten than the two women basking in the growing warmth. “A cleverer man would have been on his way after poisoning his master, and a wise one would have disposed of the little demoniac before he could cause trouble.”  

Sten gave a disapproving hiss through his teeth. “This is what comes of a land where saarebas walk free.”  

“You mean mages?” Luna asked, and when he nodded: “Well, you’re going to love the Circle Tower, then, because that’s where mages are meant to live, for the safety of us lesser folk.”  

She rolled to her feet, cracking her back, as Alistair grumbled: “You really think the Circles serve no purpose? After what we saw apostates do in Redcliffe?”  

“If Jowan is what your Circles produce, I wouldn’t boast of them as you do, Templar,” Morrigan said, and battle was joined for the next hour of their journey.   

Luna had never seen the inside of a Circle Tower. When she was a little girl, one of her playmates – Melia, she remembered, Melia Surana – had been taken by the Templars, and she’d cried for days, even as her father assured her that Circle Towers were safe, the safest places in the world, and that Melia would never be cold or hungry again. He’d painted a picture of beautiful dormitories full of laughing mage-children, who played with enchanted toys and had more books than Luna could even imagine.   

Her mother had left the room as he told the story, and had refused to meet her eyes when she asked about it.   

“Your father believes it,” she’d said, smoothing Luna’s hair back from her forehead, “and that should be enough for you, da’len.”   

That was how Luna had known it was a lie, of course, even if the lie had been intended to comfort her and poor Melia’s mother. She’d thought of it when she’d woken up in the Arl’s villa, in a chamber more decadent than the two rooms of the house she’d grown up in. As if warm fires, soft cushions and gilded goblets of fine wine could make paradise out of a prison cell. She wondered if she’d find Melia at Kinloch Hold, if she was well there, if she’d managed to make herself a home in the tower they’d shut her in, like Persinette in Leliana’s story. She remembered her as a dainty, birdlike girl, with a loud laugh and bright, dark eyes. Had she learned to sing in her cage? She hoped so, but she could not imagine it. She could roam all of Ferelden as a Grey Warden, but it meant nothing to her, without the freedom to go home.  

That was the real downside to the tea, beyond Morrigan’s unbearable smugness. The nausea had been grim, but without it, and without the protective layer of numbness that had protected her since the wedding, she had to acknowledge what lay beneath – the violent homesickness that crept up to choke her.  

She hadn’t thought there was so much to miss about the Alienage. She'd looked with hungry greed at the fine houses and clothes of the families in the Market District, complained constantly to her friends about how little Valendrian did to improve their home, schemed to brick up the pipes which dripped sludge into their portion of the river. She’d never thought she’d miss the stench of those pipes, but now she did. She missed the smells, the bleating of Taeodore’s goats, the creaking of the walls she’d been born inside. Most of all she missed her family – bickering with Soris, giggling with Shianni, her father’s smile of pride when he’d looked at her. My clever girl. You get that from your mother. She hadn’t realised how many of her memories of Adaia had been tied to those streets, those walls. She could not picture her here, on the shores of this endless lake, could not imagine what she’d think of how far from home her daughter had strayed.  

Of all the things she missed from home, the food was the most frustrating. Rations – leathery jerky, sawdust biscuit, the occasional bounty of dried fruit – were hardly appetising at the best of times, but when the longing for home crept up and clawed at her throat, she could not quite swallow them, even knowing she was hungry, even knowing that she needed to eat. She did her best to swallow what she could, washing it down with gulps of her tea, now gone cold and bitter, and hoped that it would be enough to avoid another scold from Morrigan. The witch barely ever ate at their fire anyway, it was unlikely that she could see how much Luna really swallowed from her distant campsite.  

She was wrong, of course. She should have known better than to underestimate Morrigan’s sharp eyes or quiet tread, and it should not have taken her by surprise to feel the hot breath of a bear on the back of her neck towards the end of her watch.  

She knew, she knew it was Morrigan, that no normal bear would come so close to their fire, or move so close to her so quietly, but she still gave an undignified squawk as she rolled to her feet, drawing her knives.   

The bear chuffed, unimpressed by her blades, and raised a paw to show claws each as long as her daggers.  

“Point taken,” Luna grumbled, though she reckoned that she had the advantage in terms of speed, if nothing else. “Good hunting?”  

Another chuff, as the bear nudged a shadowy bundle in her direction – no, not a bundle, but the better part of an unfortunate deer, its throat neatly torn away by ursine jaws.  

Luna wrinkled her nose. “Lovely. You should be very proud, I’m sure.”  

An ursine snort, and the deer was once again nudged in her direction.   

“Yes, I can see you are very proud of it. You’ll have better eating than the rest of us for the journey, I’m sure, but I don’t think you needed me to tell you that.”  

A third of those strange chuffing noises morphed into a low cackle as Morrigan returned to her human form, rising gracefully from her crouch to stand over Luna.   

“You really can’t take a hint, can you?” she said, kicking the carcass once more. “I said you needed to eat. Did you really think I wouldn’t be paying attention once we left Redcliffe?”  

“You never usually eat with us,” Luna pointed out, which only made her scoff.  

“Must I subject myself to Alistair’s manners to ensure you don’t faint mid-battle? Even if I hadn’t kept an eye on you, your reaction now would tell me all I needed to know. You aren’t as good a liar as you think, Tabris.”  

“You really are making a habit of hunting me down at night to insult me and give me presents,” Luna commented, eyeing the deer with misgiving. She’d never had to butcher her own meat before, and wasn’t looking forward to learning. “A girl could get ideas, you know. Weird, confusing ideas, but ideas nonetheless.”  

Morrigan arched a brow. “A girl would have to display two thoughts to rub together before I’d credit her with anything as exciting as ideas. Now, are you going to say ‘thank you, Morrigan, for feeding me something that doesn’t taste like the inside of a dustcart’, or are you going to continue pouting until the rumbling of your stomach wakes the others?”  

“Thank you ever so, dearest Morrigan, for gifting me the spoils of your hunt,” she retorted, dropping her a mock-curtsey. “Whatever would I do without you to provide for me, delicate city flower that I am?”  

“Starve, probably, idiot. Now, are you going to help me prepare this, or are you going to swoon and provide the camp with more useless decoration, city flower ?”  

It was not in Luna to back down from a challenge, even if it meant taking a lesson from Morrigan on how to hang and skin a deer, a task as messy as it was exhausting, and so disgusting that it should not have left her hungrier than she was before.   

“I might have been more useful as decoration,” she grumbled, scrubbing her arms clean in the lake. “I contributed precious little to that effort.”  

“And yet, the blood does wondrous things for your complexion,” Morrigan said from her small fire, where two thick-cut slabs of venison were releasing mouthwatering smells. “Mother always said that a woman should be at her best while covered in someone else’s blood.”  

“That explains so much about your taste in clothing.” Luna returned to the fireside and held her hands to the flames to dry, drops of water releasing gentle hisses as they fell. “Red and black are so effective for concealing the bloodstains.”   

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Morrigan replied, sweetly, gesturing to Luna’s now travel-worn and –stained armour. “You do tend to get so close to the messier parts of the fighting.”  

"Not all of us can lay aside the blood we shed with a different skin,” she retorted, and then fell quiet for a few moments, adding water a splash at a time to the flour and butter she’d traded a refugee family for. There wasn’t time to let it rise, not on the road, but she wouldn’t sleep until she’d eaten anyway, and there was a soothing rhythm to kneading the dough for parathas that made her feel a little closer to home. There was a song Mother had used to make sure they were kneading for long enough, she and Soris, how had it gone again?  

“What are you doing?” Morrigan interrupted, as she began to hum.  

“Making parathas. Flatbread,” she elaborated. “It’ll cook while the meat rests.”   

Her stomach growled, resentful of yet another delay, but it seemed rude, somehow, to eat at another’s fire and provide nothing to the meal. As the venison steaks were plucked from the griddle, she laid the parathas in their place, watching them quickly begin to brown and bubble and begin to smell of home.   

“You didn’t have to waste your flour like that,” Morrigan observed, as she folded the flatbread carefully around the meat, adding a sprinkle of sorrel and wild garlic. “We have plenty of meat.”  

Luna shrugged. “It seemed rude, to bring nothing to share with you after you went to the trouble of killing a deer for me.” She was hardly looking at Morrigan now – the heavenly scent of grilled venison mingled with wild garlic and lemony sorrel and butter from the parathas was close to her whole world, and if she let out a slight groan when she bit into it, it was because it felt like the best thing she’d tasted in months. She devoured it so quickly she almost burned her mouth, heedless of the juice running down her chin, but when she looked up, the other woman’s golden eyes were still fixed on her, likely in fascinated horror at her table manners.   

Flushing, she mopped the corners of her mouth with the remains of her bread. “Thank you,” she muttered, glancing away. “I was hungry, and you were- right, about my distraction getting in the way.”  

“I didn’t do it for your gratitude,” Morrigan replied, glancing away as if to avoid the topic. “I did it because otherwise you would be in the way.”  

“Still,” she pressed, trying to divine what was bothering Morrigan from the crescent-moon-sliver of her face in the firelight, “you didn’t have to, and I’m grateful for it. Truly.”  

Morrigan’s gaze snapped back to hers, and there was something strange and ancient in it that almost frightened her.  

“I don’t need your thanks yet, Seluna Tabris,” she said. “You’ll settle your account with me soon enough.”  

Chapter Text

Morrigan was not afraid of the Circle Tower. She had been, once, when she was a little girl – it had featured in many of her nightmares, a looming prison where the sky would be swallowed and her body and power bound to a single narrow form, the better to serve the ends of men more powerful than her. It had been Flemeth’s greatest threat, the one held in reserve for her greatest moments of childish defiance – foolish girl, shall I take you to a Circle and let the Templars have you, then? I might as well, for all the grief you bring, and I’m sure they’d take you, wilful and foolish as you are-  

No. Templars and their Circles held no fear for her anymore. Alistair had been a Templar, after all, and if they let such idiots into their ranks, they could not be so very fearful. And yet the fear had been creeping up on her since the tower had come into few, since they’d reached the Calenhad Docks.   

She’d set up her camp high on the hill, far above the fire the others built in the shelter of an outcropping. It was colder up there, and windy too, but if the Templars emerged from their tower, she’d have the most warning. She’d have plenty of time to run or to hide, and besides, she liked the solitude. Since she’d started supplementing Seluna’s supplies, the girl had gotten far too comfortable invading Morrigan’s camp. She was not objectionable company, exactly – not a chatterer or an idiot, and she did not see every careless word as an opportunity to interrogate her about her past, her power, or her plans – but Morrigan had never been comfortable under another’s gaze, and the girl was no exception. Solitude meant safety. Human companionship, whether it had been her mother’s or a stranger’s, had always felt like walking a knife’s edge.  

The climb to her fireside did not dissuade the girl tonight, though. She flopped down beside the fire in a huff, pink-cheeked and a little breathless from her scramble up the steep slope.  

“That was unnecessary,” Morrigan observed. “To what do I owe the dubious blessing of your company?”  

“You don’t have to sleep half a mile away from the rest of us,” she complained, instead of answering the question.  

“No, but it makes interruptions to my privacy less likely. Now, are you going to tell me what this particular interruption is about? Are you hungry and hoping to beg morsels from my pack? Surely you didn’t come up here for the company?”  

Seluna wrinkled her nose. “No, darling, I came up here for my nightly tongue-lashing. I can’t sleep until you’ve informed me that I’m a poor excuse for a Grey Warden and will probably be eaten by bears.” She flopped down on a boulder, arching her back to stretch it out after a long day’s walk. She was already a little plumper, Morrigan noted, curves filling out where before she’d been hollow and wasted. Good. That could only be good for the babe.   

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorted, because she could not allow the girl to have the last word. “You would hardly be a morsel to a hungry bear. A wolf, maybe-”  

“I’ve fought wolves before!” she pouted, “I was battling them in the Wilds before you ever appeared.”  

Morrigan could not quite repress a smirk. “Your prowess is not in question, Tabris. It’s your presence that’s my current concern.”  

Seluna rolled her eyes. “Right, because obviously I wouldn’t drag myself up here for the sparkling conversation. No, I actually came up here to check if you were alright.”  

Morrigan frowned. “I am uninjured. We have not encountered darkspawn or bandits for the past two days, and I am perfectly capable of tending to my own wounds if I have them, which is more than can be said for-”  

She waved her off. “I know, I know, lesson learned, you don’t have to nag me, Mother. I don’t mean ‘alright’ as in ‘uninjured’, I meant-” She paused, gnawed at her lip, glanced out across the water. It glowed almost blood-red beneath the setting sun. “We’ll be arriving at the Circle tomorrow, if all goes to plan.”  

“I am aware, Tabris. I do have ears, you know, even if I do not chatter as your other companions seem inclined to.”  

“I’d hardly call Sten a chatterer, but I’d like to think I’ve persuaded him to open up a little,” she said, with a sly grin, then, more seriously: “If you’d prefer to stay on the shore-”  

“Ah, reconsidering the benefits of an apostate in your retinue?”  

She snorted. “I’d take a hundred apostates if they could back me up as well as you. No, I’m asking because- in your place, I wouldn’t want to set foot in that tower.”  

“We are not so very alike.” What could she know of Circles and templars, this city girl without a drop of magic in her veins? What could she know of apostacy, of a life spent in hiding? How could she claim to understand the fear that ran cold in Morrigan’s veins even now? “And I am unsure how my desires are any of your business.”  

“Any of my-” She cut herself off with a hissing sigh through her teeth. “Fine, keep your desires to yourself. I just wanted you to know you have a choice.”  

Foolish girl, always with her choices and her freedom. As if choice was something she needed to be given rather than something she took for herself.   

“Do I seem like the sort of helpless infant who follows you purely on her mother’s word?”  

“You seem like a woman who would not be following anyone if she thought she had a better option.” Seluna shoved her hair back from her face to glare at her more effectively. “I didn’t want to drag you out of your home-”  

“As if you could have.”  

“-And I don’t want to drag an apostate mage into a tower full of Templars if she’s afraid to go in there!” Seluna finished, thumping the boulder for emphasis and then shaking her fingers out. “I’m not saying you’re weak, or, Andraste forfend, at all susceptible to my influence, but there are five of us now. You could sit this one out, not because you’re ‘an apostate in my retinue’, or however you want me to put it, but because this is a prison built to hold people like you.”  

There was a silence after that outburst that went on far too long. There was surely some cool, cutting comment she could make, something about the girl fretting too much, but none came easily to her lips. Had their positions been reversed, she might have scolded the girl for her cowardice, not reached out in some clumsy attempt at... comfort? Reassurance? No. She might extend those things to Alistair, helpless as he was, or to falsely-innocent Leliana, but surely she was intelligent enough to know Morrigan needed no such softness.  

“I am not afraid of the Circle, or its Templars,” she said, because it was true, in a way. She did not fear that they would seize her, chain her, steal her away from her quest. She feared a different sort of captivity.  

“But there is something else bothering you,” the girl said, looking her over through narrowed eyes. It was too easy to forget, as quiet as she could be, that they’d been travelling together for almost two months, and that even as she’d learned to read her moods, she was being studied in turn.  

“What do you know of the Circle?” she asked, turning the question back on the girl. “I know only what my mother taught me.”  

“I know it’s where they take mages to train,” she said, gnawing her lip. “When I was a kid, my parents would tell me it’s like a school. A beautiful school, where little mages get all the toys they could want and lessons better than any noble’s heir.”  

“But you didn’t believe that?” she hazarded, based on the barely-veiled cynicism in her voice.  

“It seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? A magical school for the specialest little children, a place so lovely none of them ever want to come home again?”  

“It does have a saccharine ring to it, does it not?” She paused, then admitted: “My mother taught me the opposite. The Circle was a prison for foolish mages, where Templars would beat or bribe you into becoming one of their pets, with no will of your own.”  

Seluna shuddered. “I can see why you might want to avoid such a place, afraid or not.”  

She shook her head. “If I believed all Flemeth’s tales of the world, I would never have come into it. But- this tale is a different matter.” She felt strangely naked, a chick only just out of the shell, and she could not quite bring herself to look at the girl as she spoke. “If it is true, perhaps she was right to remain in isolation for all those years. But if it is false... if it is false, what might my life have been?”  

It was a calculated risk, but a risk all the same, and she felt it, as if she danced on the edge of a blade, or Flemeth’s mercurial moods. This would have been easier if she’d been a man – Flemeth had never neglected her education as far as that was concerned – but lust was far easier to stoke than trust, and she needed the girl’s trust if she was to complete her goal without bedding Alistair.   

It seemed to work. Seluna’s face was turned towards hers, sloe-blue eyes as soft as she’d ever seen them, almost tender. Was this what appealed to her, then, feigned weakness, a wounded bird gambit?  

“Want to see something I found in Redcliffe?” she said, reaching into her beltpouch in a seeming non-sequitur. “Here, look at it cupped in your hands first.”  

It was a necklace, simple in construction – a single pendant on a long chain – but priceless in its materials. From the loops of the pendant hung a ruby the size of a pigeon’s heart, and she wondered how much the arlessa would miss such a treasure.  

“It’s lovely,” she said, wondering where the catch was.  

“It’s more than lovely. Hold it in the sun,” she ordered, and, when Morrigan did not immediately obey, seized her hand and pulled it up into a dappled ray of it. She’d been so certain of its nature when it lay cradled in her palm, dark and rich as blood, but held up to the sun, it glowed an impossible, verdant green. “Andrastite,” she said, with a grin, and released her. Perhaps it was the sun, but for a few moments, the heat lingered on her skin. “Changes depending on the light you see it in, but the stone is always the same.”  

“Is this meant to be some sort of lesson about your Prophet?” she demanded, and the girl laughed.  

“The Prophet? What- no, I’m no evangelist,” she snorted, as if the idea were ridiculous to contemplate. “It’s about you, idiot. The circumstances of your life might change, but I suspect you’d come out the same irascible bitch who’s too smart for her own good or anyone else’s, whether you grew up in the Wilds or the Circle or the Royal Palace.”  

“Did nobody ever teach you that pairing a compliment with an insult is hardly the way to charm a lady?” Morrigan sniffed, but could not quite suppress the smirk that curled her lips as she proffered the necklace back to the girl.  

“I’ve heard that the prettiest girls can charm you with an insult as well as they could with flattery,” she teased back, and her heart almost skipped a beat – she'd chosen right, this was working – and them plummeted through the floor as the girl waved away the necklace, refusing it. “Keep it,” she said, with a lazy grin. “It suits you.”  

Here was the trap snapping shut, the gift that evened their balance where before, between the tea and the food, Seluna had been so neatly in her debt.   

“For me?” she said, feigning coyness. “I could not. 'Tis too fine a thing to be seen at my throat.”  

“Hide it, then, or sell it,” she shrugs, “but I have a suspicion you’d wear it well.”  

It was easy to forget how much the girl noticed, how easily she’d picked up on the naked avarice in Morrigan’s eyes as she’d looked at the glimmering, magical stone, its impossible shift of colour, its glimmering facets. She should have been more careful of how much of herself she revealed, but it was too late now. The girl had dropped the chain around her throat like some storybook maiden binding a unicorn with a ribbon, and leaned back with the satisfied smirk such a maiden might have.   

“Whatever we discover about the Circle tomorrow, it will not change who you are,” she said, like a promise, like a vow, and it was not a reassurance Morrigan had wanted or needed, did not even truly strike at the real root of her fear, so it should not have sparked some kind of warmth in her breast, but apparently this evening, her body had decided to defy its familiar patterns. It was an uncomfortable sensation, and she would have avoided the girl’s gaze, had she not been ever-aware of the fragile life that now depended on hers. Instead, she nodded a farewell to her, and watched her pick her way back down the slope, as she considered the truth she had not revealed to Seluna.  

Perhaps she might have been different if she’d been raised a Circle mage rather than a Witch of the Wilds, or perhaps she might be, as the girl had put it, ‘the same irascible bitch’. Her nature felt immutable now, of course, but when she’d been younger, more malleable... she’d longed for companionship once, the warmth of a pack, the soothing murmurs of a flock, the silent single mind of a hive or a shoal. Flemeth had said their isolation had made her stronger, more fearless than any Templar’s pet could ever become, but if that was untrue... She did not want to believe that in another world, she might be both powerful and beloved. She was strong, yes, but what if loneliness was not the cost of her strength? What if she could have had the company of wolves, rather than the solitary strength of the bear?  

In the end, of course, her worries were fruitless. The Circle Seluna had so hoped would provide them with aid had already fallen from within, and the Templars without were already plotting its end.   

“The tower is no longer under our control. Abominations and demons stalk the halls.” The grey-haired Templar at the gate addressed Alistair rather than Seluna, who’d first greeted him, speaking over her head as if she were a child or a non-entity.  

Between them, Sten shifted with a mutter, hand flexing over the hilt of his blade: “This is why we cut the tongues from mages in Par Vollen.”   

She felt a shudder run through her. She’d been the one to demand his freedom, and yet-   

It was as Flemeth had always warned her. Those without power feared it, taming where they could and killing it where they could not. She should not have expected anything more of the Qunari, whatever kinship she might once have felt for him  

“Perhaps your people have the right of it,” the Templar said, shaking his head, as if feigning sadness would make him less abhorrent. “As it is, we have sent to Denerim, calling for reinforcements and the Right of Annulment.”  

“Annulment?” Seluna asked, voice clipped and cool. Morrigan had the strange, lurching sensation that she knew what the answer would be before the Templar even opened his mouth.  

He sighed, then, as if the decision were a terrible weight upon his shoulders, rather than one he planned to crush hundreds of lives with. “In the event that we lose control of a Mage Circle, the Templar Order are permitted to declare the Right of Annulment. We... neutralise the threat of the Circle, and the abominations it contains.”  

“You mean you kill them.” There was something strange and cold and distant in Seluna’s voice, something stirring beneath ice and numbness. “Hundreds of innocents in this tower, and you’ve locked them in with the monsters you claim to protect them from.”  

“Any mages still inside are probably dead already. Any abominations inside must be dealt with.” Alistair said, and then flinched at whatever look Seluna has shot him. “Luna-“  

“Can you hear the screaming?” she said, “There are still people in there, you selfish-“  

“Young lady-“ the Templar began, with patronising calm.  

“Warden Tabris, if you please,” she snapped.  

“Warden Tabris,” he corrected himself, “Young Alistair is correct. The situation is dire, there is no alternative-“  

“There is always an alternative.” There it was on the surface now, that glacial rage, no quick burst of anger but something ancient that had slept behind her wide eyes and sweet, chirping voice for as long as Morrigan had known her.  “If nobody in this Void-cursed kingdom can do their fucking job, I guess I’ll do yours too.” 

The Templar was a picture of outraged manhood, and Morrigan was almost tempted to laugh, but for the screams still echoing around them. The screams, the screams. They might have been her own, if she’d been raised here, if she’d been weak. But Flemeth, in her cruelty, had been right, as she so often was.   

Somewhere, in the world beyond the haze of bitter memory, the Templar continued: “An abomination is a force to be reckoned with, girl, and you will face more than one-”  

“Good!” Seluna snapped, stalking closer as if she towered over him rather than the other way around, “Abominations and demons are more honest company than cowards who are happy to play at being heroes to frighten mages, but hide like children when faced with the real monsters.” She stalked closer still, almost nose to nose with the old man, and Morrigan felt a lurch of something like fear. If he struck her- if she started a fight-   

Instead, he stepped aside. “If you think you know better than the men who have trained their whole lives to face abominations, then go through those doors. But I warn you, once you step through, there will be no turning back until you can prove this tower is cleansed of evil.”  

Pointless. The only thing that could cleanse this place of its evil would be barring the doors and burning it down with the Templars.  

But Seluna had  already begun to stride towards the opening door, fast enough that the rest of them had to jog to keep up with her, and Morrigan- well, what was she to do? Without the girl or Alistair, there would be no slaying the Archdemon at all, and her childish, idiotic disappointment could not endanger that. She trailed after them, but took satisfaction in shooting a venomous look at the Templars as she passed. One of them, who did not look much older than Alistair, actually flinched away from her look. Good. Let them fear her. She would not allow herself to be caged like their pets, bound with sweet words and ribbons ready for the slaughter.  

The rooms beyond were every bit the prison of Flemeth’s stories – endless walls of stone, unbroken by anything so merciful as a window. Bleak dormitories held narrow cots, stacked one atop another as if the mages they contained did not even deserve a narrow strip of floor for their own. Corpses of mages and templars alike lay scattered around like broken dolls, or puppets with cut strings. Seluna was as pale as she had been in Redcliffe, and looked as though she might vomit, either from the smell or from fear, but that cold anger seemed to propel her forward, towards the centre of the tower- and towards the screaming. What was wrong with the girl, that screams drew her more quickly than treasure?  

A cluster of cowering children – apprentices, she guessed – were huddled in the doorway as they rounded the corner, stunned to silence by the rage demon that towered over them. She’d seen them in dreams, of course, but somehow, to see one in waking was a hundred times more terrible – she could feel the heat radiating from the magma of its body, feel the crackle of its anger call to her own. Before her, Seluna had already shoved her way through the children, throwing herself between them and a creature she could not possibly hope to slay- but there was no need for her foolish heroics. One of the Circle mages, less cowed, perhaps, than her fellows, had already stepped forward, and cast forth a shimmering wave of frost that dispelled the demon to a thin crust of cooling rock on the floor. It was the first display of any true power Morrigan had seen within the tower, and for a moment, she allowed herself to be distantly impressed.  

When she turned to face them, though, she was a woman in her middle years, with pale hair pulled back severely from her features, but there was a softness to her as there was to all the mages that now surrounded them. She imagined she felt as a wolf might, in a chamber full of pampered lapdogs. Such unnatural creatures, to have sacrificed strength and power and wildness for warm beds and fine robes and Templars to hold their leashes.  

It was Alistair who spoke first: “...Senior Enchanter Wynne? You made it back from Ostagar?”  

Her brow creased as she assessed them in the blue light of the barrier spell. “Alistair? And... Seluna, wasn’t it? No, come no further.” She tapped her staff on the ground for emphasis, and the children swarmed to huddle around her. “Why are you here? The Templars would not let just anyone by.”  

Seluna stepped closer, hands raised away from the hilts of her knives. “We came to seek the aid of the mages against the Blight. I’m not here for the Right, I swear.” A hushed murmur ran through the apprentices, and they huddled closer like ducklings behind the older mage. “They might have abandoned you, but we’re here, and we’ll provide whatever help we can.”  

Help? These mages were beyond help, beyond salvation. They were everything Flemeth had promised and more – cowed, frightened creatures, made into rich pickings for the crueller kinds of spirits by the Templars who held their chains. They were walking tragedies, and the foolish girl thought she had hope of bringing them to a happy conclusion? She might as well have promised to raise the dead of Redcliffe as more than walking corpses, and return them to the arms of their families.   

“What happened here?” she interjected, coldly.  

“We have something of a revolt on our hands,” the older woman began, and then fell into a long and pointless recitation of a squabble for power which Morrigan could not have cared less about. Between the lines of her tale, the true cause of the chaos was obvious – life in their gilded cage had made these mages weak, susceptible to the first demons to pry through the bars. Even if they saved them now, the cracks of next time were already forming, even in the youngest of these soft, pampered brats. Part of her had hoped, despite Flemeth’s warning, for an army of fellow mages to guard their backs, for a quick and easy solution to their problem at Redcliffe, but now she knew these weak, spoilt creatures were likely more liability than salvation, and she almost hated herself for being foolish enough to be disappointed.  

“You want us to rescue these pathetic excuses for mages?” she demanded, and knew that it was cruelty, bitterness, and rage that stirred her tongue. “They allow themselves to be corralled like cattle, mindless beasts. Now their masters have chosen death for them, and I say, let them have it!” She could not forgive these mages for disappointing her. She could not forgive herself, for being foolish enough to be disappointed.  

Seluna did not look forgiving either as she wheeled on her, the light of the barrier crackling behind her. She seized her scarf, and the necklace beneath it, dragging Morrigan down to her eye-level. “Of course you think everyone who doesn’t behave exactly as you do is weak,” she hissed.  “You’ve spent your whole life listening to an old woman who wants to make you as selfish as she is, even though you could be one of them, in another life.”  She could easily have had a knife to Morrigan’s throat to ensure her words were heard, but she’d sheathed her claws. A fight for dominance, not to the death.  

Morrigan forced herself to sneer, because even for this girl and the future she carried, she would not show her belly and cringe for mercy. “I could be here, had my mother not shielded me from the Templars? What a revelation,” she mocked, because if the girl would turn their private discussions into weapons to wield against her, she could turn on her too. “I should show sympathy for their weakness because of what might have been? My mother taught me things are as they are because they could not be any other way.” She’d always hated it, she recalled, suddenly – the inevitability of the world Flemeth presented to her, as if she would have no impact upon it even were she allowed to explore it. You will travel with the Wardens, and you will get a child with one of them. Well, she could still prove her mother wrong in one regard, provided she could win enough of the girl’s favour or fear. Now though, the chain around her throat tightening like a leash, she was earning neither.  

She shook herself, and shrugged the girl off. “Do what you wish. I care not,” she shrugged, as though this was beneath her, and hoped getting her own way would dull some of the girl’s fire. Even so, she could not quite let her win: “Do not think to patronise me again.”  

Seluna looked as if she might have slapped her then, and Morrigan would have welcomed it – it would have been a familiar end to an argument – but she glanced back at the children surrounding Wynne, and something in her anger seemed to crystallise behind those sloe-blue eyes, retreating back beneath the ice. “Whatever you need, I’m here,” she said, seemingly to the older woman, but then she crouched, and Morrigan realised she was addressing the apprentices. “You’ll be good for Petra and Kinnon, won’t you? I need some very brave, very responsible apprentices to look after my dog while I’m looking for the First Enchanter.”  

“Will you bring us back our toys, too?” One of the brats piped up. “The playroom’s on the other side of the barrier.”  

“I’m worried about Wulfie,” one of the youngest ones lisped around a thumb in its mouth. Disgusting.   

But Seluna only nodded as seriously as if they’d asked her to save something of actual importance. “I’ll bring back as many toys as I can carry, but you all have to be very brave and very good until then. Can you do that?”  

Another hushed murmur, and then a small wave of nodding ran through the crowd as she rose to her feet and bowed to them. “You’re a credit to your teachers,” she said, with a false smile, and stepped up to guard Wynne as the barrier dropped.   

There was a moment of tense silence, but nothing seemed to claw or thump at the door. One of the brats began to sniffle wetly.   

It was Seluna who strode up to the door and pushed it open, revealing a library on the other side. “No time like the present,” she said, and was gone. Cursing, Morrigan followed. It would not do to have her gutted by a demon months before the child could survive without her.  

There was no demon in the stacks Luna had vanished into, but she had clearly found something in the few seconds lead she had on the rest of them – she could hear her soft cry, and the clattering noises of a fight. Between the bookshelves – bookshelves she should be investigating for magical secrets, not ignoring in favour of an idiot – she caught glimpses of workrooms, study areas, small alchemy labs, all abandoned but still lit with eerie blue veilfire. She reached the doorway of the library’s second chamber in time to see Seluna put a knife through the eye of the mage assailing her- no, not a mage.   

The outline had looked human for a moment, in motion, but now, as it flailed out clawlike hands to seize the girl’s throat, it looked anything but. The tattered remains of Circle robes still clung to its frame, but its upper body was warped and twisted like melted wax – flesh warped by the careless hands of a creature never meant to wear it. Its arms stretched long and distended, bending more like the legs of a spider than human limbs, and its shoulders were swollen with twisted bubbles of flesh in place of muscle and bone.  

Seluna kicked and flailed, but with inhuman strength, it lifted her by her neck as if she were no heavier than a doll, despite the knife she twisted into its eyesocket again and again. Morrigan threw out a hand, but she knew no barrier spell, nothing to force the creature away from the girl. Time seemed to slow as it shook her once, like a fox with a rat, and moved to toss her aside-  

Light blazed up around it as Wynne completed the casting of some arcane glyph, and it froze in place, buying Seluna the seconds needed to hack at its wrist before Alistair struck its head from its shoulders. She crumpled into a crouch, clawing at her throat and breathing hoarsely. Morrigan forced her useless legs to move, to apply a poultice or a potion, to ensure the child was unharmed-  

Wynne got there first, though, reaching out a gently-glowing hand to caress the welt at her throat. Morrigan felt a flare of something akin to jealousy – did the old woman’s keepers know that she was a Spirit Healer? Surely the Templars should have beaten such ill-advised entanglements out of her a long time ago. Even Flemeth had forbade her from meddling with seemingly-helpful spirits offering her healing. The pain is a lesson, she’d said, the first time Morrigan broke a bone. Don’t trust anything offering to take it for free.   

Seluna had clearly never learned that lesson, though – she smiled up at Wynne, wide-eyed and grateful as she never was for Morrigan’s potions, and rose to her feet.   

“I didn’t know they were so fast ,” she rasped. “I thought they’d be more- magelike, no offence intended.”  

“Abominations are never a threat to take lightly, and we’ll see more of them ahead,” Wynne said, with a frown. “I should have warned you-”  

“Well, I learned my lesson about running off soon enough,” she said, waving her off, airily. "If there are any survivors on this floor, do you know where they might be holed up?”  

Morrigan was hardly listening, sweeping her finger along the spines of more books than she’d ever seen in her life. She’d learned to read from Flemeth’s scratchings in the dirt, and she’d not been permitted to even touch her few ancient grimoires until she was grown, but this place... a desire demon could have constructed it as the perfect trap for her, and she’d have applauded its ambition. A thousand pieces of hidden knowledge, stirring beneath her fingertips in every leather spine...  

None of them were the grimoire she sought, her mother’s long-stolen book, but she coveted them nonetheless, though she knew they’d likely be dry research or ancient history, and longed for Seluna’s quick fingers, to slip them from the shelf and into her bag.   

But Seluna was not looking at her, of course, because she was still angry, because Morrigan had lost her temper after that foolish, reckless-  

It did no good to dwell on the past. She could only hope, as their climb continued, that she’d be able to regain her favour soon, or at least re-establish the balance of their relationship in her favour.  

Each room they passed into seemed to contain a new horror, beyond even that of Flemeth’s stories. She’d mentioned the potential to be cut off from the Fade, from magic, in passing, but the threat of losing her power alone had always been enough to chill Morrigan’s blood. Their magic had set them apart from the petty, powerless people of the world, given them a secret, shared superiority despite the squalor they lived in, but now she’d seen more of the magicless, she’d seen other forms of power or prowess that could be attained through hard work, even if they would never bring her the joy of a fluid form or flame at her fingertips. Perhaps, she’d thought, in a different world, she could have learned to be content, even without the power that flowed through her veins.  

But the Tranquil were a different nightmare altogether. They were what she had once imagined most mortals to be like – dull and muted creatures, lacking the passions and rages that seemed to flicker through herself and her mother. They were the walking dead, still moving and speaking, but lacking any independent thought or will beyond a vague preference for the familiar. They sickened her.  

“Wynne,” Seluna said, when they’d moved out of his earshot, “where do the Tranquil come from?”  

Wynne’s lips pressed into a thin line. “The Circle requires all young mages to pass through a Harrowing, to prove that they can resist the temptations or will of a demon. If the Templars deem an apprentice too weak, or too volatile... they are made Tranquil. To be cut off from the Fade protects them from demons, and the world from the abomination they could become, but I will not pretend that it looks like a kindness, to outsiders.”  

“Kinder to kill them.” Morrigan did not mean to speak the thought aloud, but she did not regret it either, holding her head high as the gazes of the others turn to her. “Don’t look at me like that. Would you not prefer a clean death over- that?” A life without dreams or hopes or passion. A life without what little will even a Circle mage was permitted.  

“They are provided with the same housing and food as any Circle mage,” Wynne replied, but how would she know if that was true? She was not one of them, and they could not complain. “Their lives still have purpose, even without emotion to sway it.”  

“And would you be content, if your ‘purpose’ was limited to the walls of the stock room and no further? How can you condone this?” Seluna demanded, crackling with rage again. From somewhere in the chamber beyond, the sounds of frantic hushing reached them, and she froze realising too late how sound carried in these vaulted halls.   

The young mages had had time to prepare for them when they rounded the corner, for all the good it did them. Wynne stepped forward, hands raised as if to assure them they meant to harm, but one of the apprentices – in his teens, with patchy stubble just growing in – struck out first, sending an arcane bolt sparking through the air directed at her. Her barrier flared up, just as Alistair’s features slackened for a moment before he shook something off. “Blood mages,” he snapped, and raised his blade.  

It was a trivial fight, all things considered. The apprentices did as much harm to each other as they managed to inflict on the group, suckling the blood and mana from their allies to restore their own. Little fools. They fell in moments: the boy with patchy stubble cut down by Alistair’s blade, the dark-haired girl beside him falling tangled within her spider webs. The last boy, blond, with puppy fat still clinging to his cheeks, was hit square in the chest by an arcane bolt from Wynne. No mercy for blood mages or would-be apostates in the old woman, then. She hadn’t expected that.   

Only one of the rogue apprentices was left alive, now, pinned by Seluna with a blade at her throat. She squirmed, tears beading at the corners of her eyes.   

“Please,” she sobbed, “I don’t want to die.”  

“Why did you do this, Melia?” Wynne said, sinking to her knees beside the girl. “You’re a clever girl, a promising enchanter, you were meant to be put forward for your Harrowing before that mess with Jowan-”  

The girl twisted her neck, looking desperately towards her old teacher for mercy. “Please, Senior Enchanter, we didn’t want to hurt anyone! Not really, we just wanted-”  

“What could you have wanted enough to turn to blood magic?” Wynne sounded baffled, almost wounded now the girl was helpless rather than attacking them. “You know the penalty is death, from your fellow mages if not from the Templars.”  

The girl’s head fell back against the paving slabs, neck exposed to the blade as if all survival instinct had left her at the old woman’s rejection. “We just wanted to be free,” she mumbled, half a sob. “We just wanted to be anywhere the Templars weren’t watching, watching, always watching...”  

She expected the flash of the blade, then, the arterial spatter of the girl’s blood mingling with that of her allies on the floor. She did not expect Seluna to roll to her feet, and stupidly, stupidly offer the girl a hand.   

“I invoke the right of conscription,” she said, that cold, distant look on her face.  

“Luna-” Alistair and Wynne looked equally horrified, but it was he who had spoken aloud. “A blood mage? You can’t be serious!”  

“Why not?” she said, an almost manic note to her voice. “You put me in charge. I suppose that makes me Warden Commander of Ferelden. And that means I get to invoke the right of conscription.” She looked back at the girl, pulling her to her feet. “Melia? Melia Surana, of Denerim Alienage? Do you remember me? It’s Luna, Luna Tabris. I lived across the street, remember? I taught you to climb trees . ”  

“Luna?” The girl blinked up at her, as if she were Andraste come again, or something equally improbable. “I remember a Luna...”  

“And I remember you,” she said, something almost gentle in her voice. “I can’t take you home, but I can get you out of here, if that’s what you want.”  

“It’s all I want, all I’ve wanted for years,” the girl said, feverishly, “but the Templars-”  

“The Templars are as helpless as most of the mages are right now,” she replied. “They’ll hardly notice you’re gone.”  

“I will know,” Wynne said, darkly. “Do you expect Alistair and me to remain silent about this- this-”  

“This what, Wynne?” Seluna retorted, “What word would you use for the slaughter of teenagers who want to see the sky without armed guards around them? Is there not enough death here already without adding to the toll of it.”  

“She is a blood mage-” Alistair snapped.  

“And I am a murderer!” Seluna wheeled on him, turning her back on the baby blood mage completely. Idiot girl. Morrigan moved to interpose herself, but could not avoid her next words: “Did your precious Duncan tell you that?"  

Even Morrigan was stunned by that little revelation. It did not fit with her image of the girl: sweet, frail Seluna, who thought her nausea was based in her horror for killing, who did not even wish to kill a bear if she could avoid it. Based on the reactions of her companions, the others agreed with her. Even Sten seemed stunned, in as much as any expression was permitted to cross those stoical features. Strange, then, that only their sweet Chantry sister looked unsurprised. Had Seluna already confided this to her? What other secrets had they shared? She had not thought them so close-  

It should not have mattered to her. Better the girl lay her head in Leliana’s lap for soft words and comfort than expect such things from Morrigan, but it was strange to realise she’d expected to be her first confidant when she discovered her condition, as if the shared knowledge would draw them to each other automatically. Still, she knew her outburst on the dormitory level had alienated her from Seluna, and that the girl’s ire would do little to acquiring her cooperation, so she shadowed her as the girl rifled through the Senior Enchanter’s quarters in search of further information on the rot at the heart of the Circle. It did not hurt, either, to see the texts and scrolls that the man had kept on behalf of his Templar masters, though she saw no sign of Flemeth’s grimoire among them.  

“Are you going to scold me for sparing that poor kid too?” she said after a few long minutes of a silence somehow more awkward than companionable.  

“For your willingness to use all the resources at your disposal? Hardly,” Morrigan sniffed, “though I do wish you’d spared a more competent one. Still, I suppose if you are looking for recruits among these pitiful excuses for mages, better to recruit those with at least some instinct for independent thought.”  

Her lips quirked at that, in something that was almost a laugh, and Morrigan felt a slight glow of satisfaction. She could still earn the girl’s trust, still complete her variant of Flemeth’s plan without surrendering her own body to it. For all her claim of being a murderer, Seluna Tabris had a soft heart, and Morrigan would sink her teeth into it and claim what she needed from her.  

Perhaps that errant thought had caught the attention of the Sloth demon at the tower’s own heart. When the wave of its power caught her and dragged her under, for a moment, she was back at her campfire, the smell of cooking venison heavy and rich on the air. Across from her, Seluna’s hair glowed like embers, and when she bit into the rare haunch of meat in her hands, the bloody juices ran down her chin, so that she looked wilder and more lovely than she ever had before. It was not how Morrigan had remembered that night, though – the air was too warm, the smell of smoke and meat too inviting, and she already had the creeping sense of a trap closing around her before-  

She woke up. The air was crisp and chill, scented with woodsmoke, drying herbs, and the rich, black peat of home. She knew what she would see before she opened her eyes, because it was the view she’d woken to for as long as she could remember – to her right, the hut’s small kitchen, to her left, the window and the great, familiar tree beyond, with its boughs that had cradled her more often than her mother’s arms...  

Mother. It was not like Flemeth to let her sleep until the sun was high in the sky, particularly not when it would waste some of the last sunlight they would see before winter, and that alone set a chill creeping down her spine. There would be some form of punishment awaiting her when she descended, and lingering within the false security of the blankets would only make it worse. She pushed them aside, and scrambled to dress, skipping rungs of the ladder in her hurry to present herself as awake.  

“There you are, girl.” Flemeth was bent over the cauldron, but turned to bestow a rare smile upon her, as if she were not wasting precious time already. “You slept far too long after your journey, but I suppose it’s not to be wondered at. Now, here, sit and eat.”  

The porridge before her was a rare treat – oats from Lothering, rich, creamy milk from the goats, and a thick layer of grated apple and nuts crowning its surface, infusing sweetness into the steam. She’d eaten such breakfast before, she knew, but not since she was very young-  

“What’s all this for, Mother?” she heard herself ask, and felt like a child again, knowing the trap would come, but not from where.   

“A reward, of course.” Flemeth laid a bony hand atop her head, a rare gesture of affection. “My clever girl, are you so foolish as to expect nothing from your mother after returning to me?”  

Nothing would have been predictable, obvious, even. This was something else, something that set her teeth on edge.  

“You told me stopping the Blight was in my own interest,” she reminded her, “not that I should expect a reward for it.” Her own survival was the greatest reward she could hope for, Flemeth had been fond of telling her, when she’d grown beyond a child’s need for affection and approval.  

“Perhaps not, but you returned to me afterwards, and that, I wish to celebrate,” she replied, with a smile that added a thousand new wrinkles to her face. “Can an old woman not be glad to have her dearest girl home again?”  

There it was again, the fly in the perfect pattern of the spider’s web. She’d never been Flemeth’s dearest girl. She’d been fool, girl, daughter, even, once, that which I value above all in this world. But never dearest, never darling, never the soft, pretty things she’d heard mothers in the towns call their soft, pretty children. She and Flemeth were not made for such sweet endearments – sometimes it felt as though they were the only two real people in the world, and sweet nothings had no place in their reality.  

“This isn’t real,” she said, with a dull certainty, and shoved the bowl back. “You’re an illusion, or  a demon-”  

“Now, is that anyway to speak to your mother?” The thing that is not Flemeth was posed with its hands on her hips, a parody of maternal disapproval, and oh, she felt a fool for not having seen it sooner.  

“As you are not my mother, I can speak to you as I wish,” she retorted. “This is a pretty attempt at a prison, but hardly a convincing one.”  

“You always were an ungrateful girl, to call our home a prison,” the thing tuts, “but no matter how much you wished to explore the world, you ended up back here after all your adventures, because there was no place for you out there.”  

The words had the ring of truth to them, but then, of course they did – in this place of lies, truth itself became malleable, and she would not be fooled by it.  

“If I return to this hovel,” she said, and it felt good to speak with such disdain, as she never could have to Flemeth, “it will be of my own free will, not because some clumsy demon attempts to make it a comforting cage.”  

“But what comfort you could have!” The false Flemeth was suddenly too close again, hands on her shoulders, a parody of an embrace. “What knowledge, too! Your hunger, your intelligence, do you really think you were born to be the apprentice of some ancient hermit when you could be so much more?”  

It was so obvious, now she looked it in the face, the textbook temptation that even Circle mages were likely warned of. And to think, this demon assumed she would be caught as easily as those weak-minded children!  

“Ah, yes, the ‘infinite forbidden knowledge of the Fade’ gambit. You could try to be a little original, you know,” she said, feigning a yawn.  

Something softened in the thing’s face, then, a tenderness that had nothing of Flemeth in it, that reminded her almost of- “Are you not yet tired of constant vigilance, girl?” it said, in a low, soothing tone, as though she were a wounded animal. “Does no part of you long for rest, for comfort? Do you not wish to hear how dearly your mother loves you?”  

She shoved it back again, and the table would have tripped it, had the furnishing of the shack not shifted around them in a dreamlike blur. “Away with you!” she ordered, trying to enforce her own will, her own memory on the shifting surfaces of the chamber. “I shall have no more of your pestering!”  

The thing was somehow close to her again, all encompassing, its arms tight around her in an embrace that was almost suffocating, and some part of her, some distant childish part, wanted to go limp in it, to let Flemeth win, as she always had before, as she’d been raised to.  

“I am your mother,” she heard, and its voice seem to come from all around her now, as though the creature had swallowed her, or not yet birthed her. “Do you not love me? Do you not wish to be loved?”  

“You are not my mother!” she spat, “I know you, fade spirit, do not think you can fool me!”  

“You think yourself cleverer than your own dear mother?” the voice around her rumbled, and yes, she was cleverer, she was brilliant, she could defeat the Blight without becoming a broodmare for an Old God, and she could surely win an argument with a demon who could not manage to put up a convincing illusion. “Surely such pride must be punished.”  

The world shifted again, once more becoming the familiar confines of the hut, but now her perspective was altered – she was on her knees, one hand raised to shield her face, Flemeth already swinging a clawed hand at her-  

The crack of the impact sent her sprawling, head reeling, and that was almost familiar too, felt almost real, the inevitable result of filial defiance, the punishment she always earned for been foolish, headstrong, blind to the consequences of her actions-  

“That is more like it,” she managed, though her head still pulsed with pain, “but it is too little, too late, spirit.”  

“No, my dear one.” The spirit crouched over her, grasping her jaw with a hand that no longer felt human. “We have all the time in the world to quarrel now.”  

She would have slapped it away, but a separate pain lanced through her hand. She could not turn her head, could not escape the thing’s unwelcome grasp, but she could see the blur of a small, grey creature in the corner of her eye, its teeth lodged into the meat of her hand. She attempted to snatch it away, but the creature – a rat, she realised – did not let go, dangling from her hand by its teeth alone, and glaring up at her with sloe-blue eyes.  

“’Tis you,” she realised, though it was impossible that Seluna of all people could be here. A girl without a drop of magic in her blood, wandering the Fade like a mage? Of all the imaginary rescuers her mind might have conjured, she seemed the most unlikely. “Have you come to rid me of this vexatious spirit?”  

The rat fell away from her hand, and then away from itself, fading into mist that resolved into the familiar form of the girl, knives in hand, blood dripping from her mouth.  

“You only had to ask,” she said, with something wild in her grin, and then she flung herself at Flemeth with Morrigan at her side. Afterwards, she’d remember impossible things about that battle – how she’d been a wolf and a bear, yes, but also a swarm of ravens, a great high dragon, how Seluna had gone from girl to golem to flame incarnate.   

When she woke, bleary, in the chamber where they’d encountered the demon, they were already trying to slip from her mind, in the treacherous manner of all dreams, but she clung to them with greedy, acquisitive fingers. Such knowledge of one’s own weaknesses was hard to attain, let alone laid out so clearly, and she would be stronger for it. She had to be stronger for it.  

The others woke with small, unhappy sounds, as if they wished to cling to their dreams rather than be dragged from them, but Seluna – when Seluna woke, it was with the feral smile of a girl with blood on her lips, and Morrigan knew that she had walked in her dreams, and that something of the Fade had returned with her, a white-hot ember emerging from the ashes. Morrigan had been mistaken in her first impression, she realised now. This was not the doomed, tragic girl sent out to slay darkspawn. This woman had walked the Fade like a mage and worn new forms as easily as Morrigan herself. Perhaps it was some strange quirk of destiny, that she was the one to bring the Old God into the world. Morrigan’s purpose now, it seemed, would be to make sure she surrendered it to her keeping, by any means necessary.  

Chapter Text

Luna could feel the change in herself, after the Fade. She was quicker on her feet, her eyes were sharper, the constant exhaustion that had dogged her footsteps since Ostagar had begun to lift. The only thing that hadn’t improved was the nausea, which still left her hideously dependent on Morrigan and her teas and the occasional meals she deigned to offer her. A part of her still held her outburst in the Circle tower against her, but then, in the Fade, she’d seen a moment of weakness she was sure Morrigan would have wished to keep private. She might have expected the other woman to react to such an invasion with anger, or petty spite, but if she recalled Luna’s presence in the Fade, she did not seem to resent her for it. If anything, she seemed a little more willing to listen to Luna, a little less dismissive of her weakness. Or perhaps she simply wished to bridge the coolness which had grown between them since the Circle. Even when they shared a fire, there were no more tentative confidences shared, though sometimes, she’d catch the red-green flash of the andrastite pendant she still wore.   

It was awkward, the more so because it was typically Luna’s role to bridge gaps and smooth over any awkwardness in the group, and here she did not know how to, after the horrors of the Circle tower. Wynne still travelled with them, was still polite and gentle and carried herself with the air of ancient wisdom that reminded her of Valendrian, but she knew that she disapproved of her recruitment of Melia, and saw her as reckless at best and ruthless at worst. Alistair’s anger was more transparent – he still followed her orders, but he no longer joked with her by the fire, or even spoke to her more than necessary. He watched her with Melia as if expecting the younger woman to turn at any moment like a rabid dog, and maybe he was right to, but she couldn’t see any proof of it. Free from the Tower, from the scrutiny of the Templars, Melia seemed girlish and almost innocent, asking Luna a hundred questions about the alienage, about their travels, about her family.  

“They didn’t let me write to them, in the Circle,” she said, with a resignation that cut to Luna’s core. She had not written to her family either. Before Ostagar, words had sat leaden on her tongue, and after...   

“Do you miss them?” she asked, and knew she would regret the answer.  

She shrugged, bobbed hair bouncing. “I used to. After a while it became like missing the sky.”  

For all that Luna felt the loss of her former life, her former self, as a keen ache in her gut, she could not compare it to what had been taken from Melia, what she still took from her. Would joining the Grey Wardens really be anything like freedom?   

“You could run, you know,” she said to her that evening, when they were gathering firewood out of earshot of the others.   

Melia did not look up from her crouch at the foot of a beech tree, where she was gathering scattered twigs into the skirt of her robe. “Is this some kind of test?”  

“Call it an open door. I won’t be your jailer, if you want to run.” She hesitated, then added: “I wasn’t really given a choice, when I joined.” She still hadn’t told Alistair that, couldn’t quite summon the words to tear down the shrine he’d built in his heart to Duncan, to the family he’d hoped the Grey Wardens would be to him. “You deserve one, though.”  

The girl snorted. “I’m a blood mage, and not a very good one, either. I’m pretty sure some of your friends would say the only choice I deserve is between death and Tranquility.”  

That, of course, reminded her of Morrigan again, Morrigan who’s cold words still rang in her ears. They had repulsed her, but so too had the sight of those pale, soft children, like undercooked dough, lacking the strong limbs and freckled or tanned skin from playing in the sun as children were meant to do. And the knowledge that some, perhaps most of those children, would be stripped of their will and their emotions, reduced to Tranquil tools for the Templars to use... there was a part of her that feared Morrigan might have had a point. She had saved those children for now, but what kind of life had she sentenced them to? Better than no life at all, she tried to tell herself, but she wasn’t sure Melia would agree with that. The younger girl had been willing to die rather than live the rest of her life under the watch of the Templars, and that was a too-familiar feeling.   

Seluna had slaughtered Vaughan Kendalls and his men rather than be subject to their will for a night. What would she have done, if the sentence had been the rest of her life? She could not quite forgive Morrigan’s coldness when faced with frightened children, but she could also too easily see her perspective, and she did not like what that said about her. The girl she’d been once, Cyrion’s daughter, Adaia’s daughter, would never have wished such a fate on innocent children, but then, the girl she’d been knew nothing of the horror the future could hold.  

She knew better now, and the knowledge was a bitter as the bile on her tongue. Her infirmity was no secret now – Leliana and Wynne had both caught her vomiting into the bushes after a particularly gruelling bandit attack, and one had held her hair back while the other offered a warm pulse of healing magic to soothe her. It did not help, but she appreciated it anyway.  

“It’s just- stress,” she gasped, swigging at her flask of tea to wash the bile from her mouth, “that, and a little present from the Joining, I think.”  

“Do the Grey Wardens have no treatment for it?” Leliana asked, brow furrowed. “I would have thought Alistair-”  

She shook her head with a bitter laugh. “No, he doesn’t know most of their secrets. He only just learned the herbs needed for the Joining, and he said the sickness never troubled him as it does me.” She rose, kicked some dirt over the pool of vomit, attempted a bright smile. “It could be worse,” she reminded them. “It’s not the Calling yet, so you both will still have to put up with me a little longer.”  

They were both kind enough to laugh at that poor attempt at a joke, but there was still something concerned and curious in Wynne‘s eyes, as though she suspected Luna was hiding something behind her humour. They both accepted her joke as the final word on the matter, though, at least for now, and the three of them were still smiling and talking of lighter things when they returned to the others. Morrigan had the pinched, suspicious look her face usually held when she scented a secret she was excluded from, and had things been easier between them, she might have made a joke, pulled her into the circle of shared glances rather than allowing her to remain aloof and excluded from it. But things were not easy between them any longer. Morrigan’s thin mask of civility had slipped back at the Circle, and Luna had not liked what lay beneath it, or what it revealed in her. Besides, Morrigan was right to suspect her of keeping secrets, though she could not know that she had not confided in Leliana or Wynne. She had not told anyone of what lay hidden at the bottom of her pack.  

She had not entered the Circle tower with the intent to steal- or at least, no more than she entered anywhere with thieving intentions. But life on the road had had a strange effect on her morals with regard to personal property. Most of her days were spent in a privation she’d never experienced before, no roof but canvas, no food but what they could hunt, scavenge, or barter, but there were also rare glimpses of a luxury she had never known, scarcely even imagined. She had hated the arlessa and bann of Redcliffe almost as much for the comfort they scarcely seemed to notice as she had for their careless cruelty, and it did not feel like such a sin to take the jewels that lay around the castle like trinkets. The nobles would hardly notice their absence, after all, and the price they’d fetch from a fence or an unscrupulous jeweller could feed their small party for weeks on the road if they ate cheaply.  

She should perhaps have shown more restraint in the Circle tower. It was a cage, after all, however gilded its walls seemed to an alienage girl’s eyes, and for what little credit it bought her, she took little from the apprentice quarters, only health poultices to balm the wounds they would likely receive in their climb. But the library, and the First Enchanter’s rooms... they held an almost unimaginable wealth, in magical supplies, in enchanted objects, and, most of all, in books. Luna had learned to read from an ancient children’s primer, one that the Chantry sister had snuck out to teach the children of the alienage most willing to sit and listen for an hour or so at a time, but the Circle’s books outshone them as the sun outshone a candle. There were grimoires as heavy as Luna herself, and near as tall, books on reading stands with jewel-bright illuminations and gilt edges to pages, ancient scrolls of parchment that looked likely to crumble to dust at the lightest touch.   

It did not surprise her that Morrigan looked at them with such naked greed – she felt it herself – but it was curious how she ignored the great tomes and illuminated manuscripts of magic that had first caught Luna’s eye, her fingers skimming instead the spines of smaller, drabber texts, more like pocketbooks than the books of ancient, secret magic she imagined. She was looking for something specific, she’d realised, something she knew might be hidden within the Tower’s halls, but whatever it was, she did not find it on the shelves she scanned, or in the First Enchanter’s storage chests that Luna opened as she leaned against her shoulder like a cat demanding its dinner. She’d slipped away in a huff of disappointment when Luna found it – a hidden compartment at the base of a cedar trunk of robes. She felt a spike of excitement that was quickly tempered by the compartment’s size – wide and flat, better for storing papers than coin – but books could be precious too, she knew that well.   

The book within did not look expensive – it was not illuminated, its pages were not gilded, and it did not even look particularly ancient, but the cover was a kind of leather she could not identify, stained black, but for the design of a great tree embossed upon it. She flipped it open, but the text within was not Trade Tongue, was not even the same alphabet. It was familiar to her, though, in a strange, distant way, and she realised where she’d seen some of the symbols before – carved into the bark of trees or scratched into the dirt of the Korcari Wilds. This was a Chasind text. She did not even know the Chasind had a written language  (which shamed her a little), but she could think of nothing more likely to have caught Morrigan’s interest.  

 She might have called her over then, put the book straight into her hands- but her words still echoed in her mind. Now their masters have chosen death for them, and I say, let them have it! What would she think of the alienage, where so many of her friends and families were servants to human families who would turn a blind eye to the rapes, the arsons, the beatings. They chose to remain in the city, after all. Never mind that the roots of the Vhenandal were older than Ferelden itself, that their houses were built among Tevinter ruins, that they had as much right to call Denerim home as any shemlen. They chose to remain in such a place (and at least had more choice in it than the mages), so in Morrigan’s eyes, they were complicit in their abuse. How could she trust the secrets of this book to such a woman, a book so dangerous that even the First Enchanter, for all his power and status, kept hidden away from prying Templar eyes? What havoc could the witch wreak, with such power in her hands and so little compassion for those she considered weak or beneath her?  

It was for the best, she told herself, that she kept the book a secret. Better, perhaps, to leave it safe within the tower walls, where Morrigan could never reach it, but Luna was selfish, and selfishness made her reckless. She’d spent weeks now in Morrigan’s power, reliant on her teas to soothe the nausea, her food when she could stomach nothing else. It would be some small comfort to have a little power of her own, tucked away out of sight. She did not owe it to Morrigan, to give her a book she did not even ask for. She did not owe her anything at all. It was foolish to feel guilty for something that was not even a betrayal, and yet-  

She did feel guilty, and wrong-footed. She’d thought, before the Circle, that she and Morrigan were coming to something of an understanding, something almost like a friendship. Now she knew that had been a foolish thought – Morrigan had never shown any desire for friendship, let alone from Luna, but if she’d stopped trying to lure her into friendship as she’d lured feral cats into the house as a girl, she couldn’t quite squash the impulse to reach out to her isolation.   

And now, a week into the return journey to Redcliffe, it would likely have been better if she had squashed her good intentions down and continued to attempt to earn her favour, or at least her good graces. She’d turned down the First Enchanter’s offer of his personal assistance in healing Connor – she could hardly do otherwise, given the man’s injuries, and his recent brush with demonic influence – and while part of her desperately wanted to trust Wynne’s age and wisdom, her pragmatism and her kindness, she thought of what she saw in the Fade, and- she could not. She’d seen too many dead children in Wynne’s graveyard of failed apprentices, and while some, she’d seen living in the halls below, others... Melia was among them, a girl still living but dead to Wynne’s eyes. How many children had she failed, despite her kindness, despite her wisdom? Connor was older than some of the bodies she could remember from that hazy vision. Would he even be worth saving, in the eyes of a Circle mage, if he’d fallen to demonic temptation before he could be Harrowed?  

Which, ironically, left Morrigan as her only option. Of the mages she’d encountered – of all her companions who’d fallen into the Fade with her – Morrigan had seemed the closest to breaking from the Nightmare’s grip, the most aware that she’d fallen into an enchantment and needed to snap out of it. She was the obvious choice. If anyone had the raw power and stubbornness to defeat a demon in the Fade unaided, it was Morrigan, but for the fact Luna could not trust that, if push came to shove, she’d save the child if a more convenient option was offered. To ask Morrigan to complete the ritual was to put Connor’s life in the hands of a woman who’d already shown how little she valued it. To ask anyone else was to risk losing them as well as the boy. She knew the strategic choice, the smart choice, the choice that the leader Alistair wanted her to be would make. Still, it felt like an admission of weakness to go creeping to Morrigan’s fireside after a week of avoiding her.  

“I suppose you’ve run through your supply of tea?” was the caustic greeting she’d probably earned, but Luna shook her head, sitting cross-legged on the ground.  

“No, thank you. I came to talk to you.”  

“To talk to me! I thought you’d have little need to exchange pleasantries with me now that you have so many new companions. I cannot recall the last conversation we had.”  

Liar. The last true conversation they’d had was their argument in the tower, before the Fade, and she was certain that Morrigan had no more forgotten it than she could.  

“Missed me?” she said, attempting a flirtatious grin that felt false and flat somehow. “I didn’t know you were pining for my company, darling.”  

“I would more describe it as ‘enjoying the quiet’, but you may describe it as you wish.” It was still caustic, but something resembling how they’d talking to each other in their rare moments of companionship. “What do you want, if not tea? A dinner in companionable silence?”  

She could lie, claim to have missed Morrigan enough to make up their quarrel, but she knew the sorceress well enough to know she would not accept such a transparent fiction.   

“I wanted to talk to you about the Fade,” she said, instead. “How much do you remember?”  

“More than most, I would hazard,” Morrigan replied, and looked her up and down. “I suspect you might say the same.”  

“I saw your dream,” Luna admitted, because there was no easier way to say it. “I didn’t mean to pry, but-”  

Morrigan gave a hiss of a laugh. “ That is why you’ve been avoiding me so? You thought a demon’s fictions some deep insight into my past?”   

It was not the truth, but it was a convenient fiction to cling to. “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” she said, which wasn’t actually a lie, “but- of all the others I encountered in the Fade, you seemed most equipped to handle it. I doubt you needed my help to break out of your nightmare. I could not say as much for the others.”  

Morrigan’s brows arched, but there was something in the curve of her lips, the tilt of her neck, that was almost preening. “You think to talk me into your plans with flattery, sweet Seluna?”  

“It’s not flattery,” she said, because it was true, and because pretending otherwise would fuel Morrigan’s pride but not assist in gaining her aid. “It’s true, you know it as well as I do, I think. Your will, your sense of self – they brought you the closest to escaping, I think.”  

“And you?” Those golden eyes narrowed, locked on her as though peeling away layers of armour and secrets to pick apart the core of her. “You think your will was so strong it overpowered a demon.”  

Luna shook her head. “I think I got lucky. None of my memories were- quite right to be useful to it.”  

“Am I meant to be impressed by such modesty?” Morrigan queried, and Luna rolled her eyes.  

“I’m not here to impress you, or flatter you,” she said, and it was almost a relief to say it aloud. “I’m here because you’re the obvious choice to complete Connor’s ritual.”  

A line appeared between her dark brows, a single mark on that porcelain-smooth forehead. “Is that so?”  

“Wynne did not handle her demons with nearly your skill,” she said, and Morrigan looked pleased at the praise despite herself. “I can’t in good conscience ask her to put herself in danger for a task you’re far more equipped for than she is, unless she’s the only one who’s willing.”  

“So I get a choice in whether I put my life on the line for some squalling noble brat?” Morrigan retorted, but there was no real heat in her words, more surprise at being asked. “How noble of you.”  

“Do you think I’d force you to fight demons?” Luna said, and Morrigan laughed again.  

“Do you think you’re capable of forcing me to do anything?”  

“Exactly my point.” Luna folded her arms. “I can’t make you do this, nor can anybody else. I can’t think why you’d want to do this-”  

“Then why ask me?” It was strange – it sounded more genuine a question than she’d ever heard from the witch, as if she could not fathom why Luna would ask when she likely expected a refusal.  

“Because you’re the most likely to succeed,” she said again, “and because I think – I hope – that if I ask you to save the child, however convenient the alternatives may be, you’ll do it.”  

“Why?” Morrigan repeated, eyes still locked on Luna, brow still furrowed. “You ask me to go against my nature. You might as well suggest a crow guard your coin, or a bear your babe.” 

“Perhaps,” Luna said, because she was right, because she was foolish, “but if you’re a crow, you’re an honest one.”  

“An honest crow?” The idea seemed to delight her. “You speak in paradoxes, Tabris.”   

Luna held her gaze, steady and calm as she could make herself, though there was something predatory about those golden eyes that made her pulse quicken. “I think if you won’t spare the child, you’ll tell me now, for there’s little you could gain by killing him.”  

“Hmph. And you think his life is yours for the asking? You have a high opinion of yourself.”  

She shrugged. “I don’t think I’m quite that charming, but I have nothing to lose by asking.”  

She did not expect Morrigan’s hand to snake out and clasp her wrist. Her fingers were warm and callused, and long enough to encircle it at the narrowest point.   

“Then perhaps I will grant you yet another boon,” Morrigan said, with something almost like warmth in her voice. “My, but you like to rack up your debts to me, don’t you?”  

She did not like the way that was phrased, and did not want to think of the bill that would come due, but she only smiled, because to let Morrigan know she’d wrongfooted her was to add yet another weapon to her arsenal.  

“Perhaps I’m hoping I can charm my way out of them,” she said, lightly. “Or perhaps I think saving your life a time or two will even our books.”  

Morrigan laughed. “You don’t think I’ll exact a terrible price for my aid? The heart of a dragon, or your firstborn child?”  

“I think if you charge me for your aid, it will be fair value, and nothing more,” she said, and was surprised to realise she believed it. Morrigan was surprised too – for a moment, her guard dropped, and something unrecognisable flickered across her face, before the mask slammed back down again, and she released her wrist as if she did not know what she’d been doing.  

“You have a lot of faith in an apostate witch,” she said, with something strange in her voice.   

“I have as much faith in your capabilities as you’ve earned,” Luna replied, and pushed herself to her feet, with a little difficulty. She was stronger for the Fade, she knew, but her balance still felt off, as if she’d grown a few inches overnight.  

“You should add more balance exercises to your morning training,” Morrigan commented, as she walked away. “Ask Leliana to teach you those single-legged squats she shows off with.”   

Luna snorted – trust the witch to get in the last word, and to make it a criticism – but the advice did help her balance a little, even if her legs did not need the exercise given all the walking they still had to do.   

It didn’t hurt that Leliana was only too happy to assist her with the positioning for each exercise – she hadn’t realised until she’d been dragged from her home how freely affection had come to her. Her father had always been quick to embrace her, to remind her that however old she thought herself, she was always his little girl. She spent most of her time with Soris leaning against his shoulder or hanging onto his arm, and she’d shared a bed with Shianni for as long as she could remember. Now, most of the time, she slept alone, and her new companions were not so free with physical affection as she was used to. It felt childish, to long for an arm around her shoulders or a warm body at her back as she slept, and cuddles with her Mabari did not quite fill the same niche. She had enough pride remaining that she didn’t want to beg for affection, but not quite enough to shrug off Leliana’s hands correcting her posture or her balance, especially when her tent felt chill and lonely even in the growing summer heat.   

Reaching Redcliffe again was not much of a relief, despite the more comfortable accommodations. The arlessa and her brother-in-law had not become more tolerable in their absence, and there was the fitful, fractious air of a sickroom to every room of the castle, as the arl and his heir still lay sick or dying. Her father had instilled enough manners (and self-preservation) into his daughter that she could curtsey and speak soft and sweet within the suffocating, shuttered halls, but something in her railed against them. What right had Teagan and Isolde to cloister themselves in their grief for the sick as the people of the town buried their dead with no consolation or aid from the castle that had devoured them?  

Isolde, at least, she could have found some excuse for – they were shown up to the sickroom as soon as they stepped through the gate, and she was not sure the woman had moved from the chamber since they had left it. Father and son lay side-by-side in the great bed, pale and still as corpses, with only the mechanical movement of their chests to indicate they were still alive beneath the shimmering veil of Jowan’s magic.   

Almost as soon as Luna entered the room, Isolde was upon her, her bony fingers gripping her shoulders with a strength that belied her delicate frame.  

“Do you have it?” she demanded. “The lyrium, did you bring it?”  

“Yes,” she assured her, patting her shoulder, “though it was not easy-”  

“What do I care for that?” Isolde demanded, almost shaking her. “You have the lyrium, you have mages – I know you have mages - so perform the ritual now! Heal my son!”  

Behind her, Luna heard Morrigan mutter: “A thank you would not go amiss,” and the part of her that was growing numb to horror and death and suffering almost wanted to laugh at the strangeness of the feral woods-witch upbraiding an arlessa for her poor manners. But Morrigan was not the only one to take issue with Lady Isolde’s behaviour:  

“My dear Isolde,” Teagan said, taking her shoulder in one hand. “Our guests have only just arrived. At least let them wash off the dirt of the road-”  

“How much longer can my son wait?” she snapped, not looking away from Luna. Her grip was almost bruising, her breath hot on her face, and it took all of Luna’s self-restraint not to shove her away. “Do you hope he will die in his sleep, that Eamon’s lands will fall to you?”  

Teagan looked wounded by that barb, but Luna wondered if it had struck true. It was he who stood to benefit, after all, if the Arl and his heir both passed of the same illness.  

It was, to her surprise, Alistair who interceded. “Isolde,” he said, with a compassion she would not have thought him capable of, “you need to rest. We’ll conduct the ritual as soon as Jowan is ready, but when he wakes, Connor will need you.”  

“He needs me now!” she argued, but released Luna’s shoulders to turn to him. “I cannot leave him to fight a demon alone, Alistair!”  

His next movement seemed almost unreal to her – she herself could not have done it – but he reached out to the woman who had all but exiled him from the only home he’d ever known, and took her hand in both of his, as though they were family in truth rather than by the vagaries of noble lineage.  

“He won’t be alone,” he said, low and calm and gentle. “I’ll be here, and I’d never let harm come to Eamon’s son, you know that.”  

Something in Isolde seemed to break at that, and she flung herself at his broad chest with a sob, clinging to him as if he was the only person she could trust, and perhaps, strangely, he was, though she had done nothing to deserve it. He bore it bravely, though the panicked look he shot to Luna over Isolde’s head detracted somewhat from the image of stoic masculinity. Luna mimed stroking her shoulder, and behind them, someone (probably Morrigan, possibly Leliana) snorted.  

It might have been unfair to accuse Leliana of laughing in the middle of such solemnity – she used those mysterious courtly manners to extract the arlessa from Alistair’s arms, and escort her to her room. Sten had remained in the library, claiming he had little to add to such a ritual, which left the Arl’s bedchamber still crowded with the six of them. Wynne’s face was pinched with disapproval, and Morrigan’s lips were pressed into a thin line. She felt a twist of nauseating discomfort at that – had she made the wrong choice? Should she change her mind now, at the last minute?  

Alistair had slumped into the chair Isolde had abandoned, staring at the Arl’s features as though he no longer recognised the man. Illness had aged him beyond his years – his hair was white and his face lined, though his wife did not look much beyond thirty. Luna took a seat on the arm of his chair, balancing with her feet off the ground to keep out of the way of the circle of liquid lyrium the mages were painting on the floor.  

“You didn’t have to comfort her,” Luna said to him, softly. “She didn’t deserve it.”  

“Maybe not,” he sighed, “but she didn’t deserve- this, either. Nobody could.”  

Part of Luna disagreed, but she knew that it was hypocritical to despise Isolde given what her own actions may have wrought in the alienage.   

“What I meant is- you're a good man, Alistair. A better person than her, anyway.” It was an olive branch, of sorts, but it was also taking shameless advantage of his forgiving mood.  

She felt immediately guilty when he looked up at her, cheeks flushing, and it struck her for a moment how very young he seemed.   

“You really mean that?” he said, shyly.  

He could not have been more than a year or two younger than her, and the girl she’d been once would have enjoyed provoking his blushes and teasing him, but now... the gap between them felt like centuries, though she knew he’d seen as much battle and death as she had in the two months they’d travelled together. Perhaps he’d always have looked like a baby to her, this boy raised in a castle rather than the slums of Denerim, or perhaps the time that truly lay between them was the span of her wedding day.   

“No, I said it to fuck with you,” she teased, flicking his ear as if he were Soris. He screwed up his face then, like a maltreated younger sibling, and it was a relief, to be able to slide him back into that neat little box. She couldn’t flirt with a boy like that, not any more. He’d find a gentle girl to look at with such endearing devotion, and she’d... probably die fighting the Blight, like his precious Duncan intended.   

The circle was painted out now, and Morrigan stepped over the glittering lines with a dancer’s grace to take a seat crosslegged in the centre, a basin settled in her lap and the final flask of lyrium in one hand. She did not look nervous – if she ever felt it, it never showed in her face – but there was a rigidness to her posture that might have been more than anticipation.  

“We’re ready?” Luna said, glancing to Jowan. He raked a hand through his shaggy hair, looking sufficiently nervous that it might have panicked Luna if she was the one going into the Fade.  

“Almost,” he said. “It’s just...” He glanced to Alistair and Wynne with a strange look, as if seeking their support. “This will be something like a Harrowing, to enter the Fade for the purposes of consorting with demons. Precautions should probably be taken, in case...” He swallowed, tailing off, and she recalled he’d fled the Circle before his Harrowing could take place.   

“In case what?” Luna demanded, glancing between the three mages and the Templar who remained in the room. Morrigan looked as non-plussed as she felt, but the other three, the three with ties to that Void-damned Circle, were exchanging glances in a silent conversation, until Wynne cleared her throat, clearly elected the group’s delegate by virtue of age and diplomacy.  

“Every Harrowing – every ritual intended to contact a demon directly rather than merely entering the Fade – carries with it the risk of possession for the mage, with or without their consent.”  

Luna started at that, her gaze flying between Wynne and Morrigan. She’d assumed it would be a dreamlike battle or maze to be solved, not a gamble that might risk-  

But Morrigan did not look surprised any more, merely arching an eyebrow at the older woman. “Ah, and this is where you claim the right of age and experience? I’m sure a woman of your years has had many opportunities to consort with spirits of all kinds.”  

Wynne merely smiled like an experienced schoolmistress faced with a recalcitrant teenager, unimpressed but mildly indulgent. “I will take your place if you wish, Morrigan, but even then, I’d expect the same precautions to be taken.  

“Which are?” Luna demanded. “Can we please stop talking in circles and say whatever you’re all thinking about.”  

“A blade to the throat,” Alistair said, bluntly, and then, more defensive: “It’s quick and clean. Merciful, compared to- well, you’ve seen what demons can do.” He nodded to Connor, and she felt a shudder run through her.   

“Offended as I am in your lack of faith,” Morrigan said, drily, “this isn’t actually a surprise to me. Close your mouth, Tabris, before something flies into it.”  

“You knew? Then why-?”  

“I’m surprised you hadn’t thought of it.” Morrigan retorted, and she felt her face flush as she realised what a fool she had been. “You’re usually one of the cleverer ones. I know what I bargained for, even if you didn't.”  

“But I wouldn’t have-” She’d thought the First Enchanter a dotard, too weak to defend himself or his charges from the demons that preyed on them, but now she’d have put him under a thousand times before anyone she felt responsible for.   

“Too late,” Morrigan trilled, a mockingbird’s laugh creeping into her voice. “But I do have one request,” she added, lips curled into a cruel smirk.   

“Name it,” she said. Her nails dug deep crescents into her palms. She wouldn’t ask- she wouldn’t expect-  

“If anyone is to butcher me, I expect the best. The Warden-Commander, no less.”   

Luna felt the trap close around her and the trap snapped shut. Morrigan only kept smiling, kept her pinned to the arm of the chair with her gaze alone.  

Somewhere far away, Alistair was speaking: “She’s no Templar, you can’t expect her to know what she’s looking for!”  

“She received a thorough education on the faces of possession during our trip to the Circle, or did you forget that our sweet Seluna proved a more efficient killer than all your precious Templars combined?” Morrigan bestowed it like a compliment, but Luna felt sickened by it. “If I’m to risk my throat, I’ll have no other hand hold the knife.”  

Wynne, with a gentleness Morrigan would only ever hear as patronising: “Child, if you are afraid-”  

“I am not afraid!” she snapped. “I have set my terms, and it is not your place to refuse them.”  

“I’ll do it.” The words were forced out through numb lips, but they were hers. It was a cruel thing to ask, but it was fair value for the risk she was taking. “If you’re risking possession, you get to pick who makes the call.”  

Possession. She hated the word, the sick, clammy feeling it brought to her skin, but Morrigan was still smirking, patting the couch next to her as if in an invitation to embrace. Stiffly, Luna picked her way through the maze of lyrium on the floor, each line a tripwire, each glyph a pressure plate. Morrigan bumped her shoulder as she took her seat, almost playful.   

“Be gentle with me,” she said, almost coyly. “It’s my first time, you know.”  

Luna nudged her back, rather harder. “Glad you think this is funny.” But it helped, she could breathe a little more easily, even as Morrigan uncorked the bottle and poured the lyrium into the basin. It sparked blue as it struck the porcelain and eddied in quicksilver spirals, more like a living thing than a liquid.   

“Don’t sulk, it doesn’t suit you,” Morrigan said, and she snorted. “If it helps, Alistair is better-suited to assist with the messier part.” Behind her, she heard an Alistair-like gulp, as she added: “I’d say try not to stab him too hard, but I’m rather hoping you hit something vital.”  

“What-?” Luna began, and then someone- Alistair seized the back of Morrigan’s head and pushed it down into the quicksilver surface of the lyrium.  

Luna screamed.  

Chapter Text

The lyrium was like ice water on her face, in her lungs, in her veins, and it burned brighter than the heart of the sun until there was nothing else, not the bowl balanced between her thighs, not Alistair’s fingers knotted in her hair, not the warmth of Luna’s hand against her back. It swallowed up the world, and then it swallowed her with it. 

The Fade was not quite as she’d left it. The door to her mother’s hut hung ajar, shutters creaking in the wind, and pale yellow light streamed in from beyond. She’d come to with her feet dangling over the edge of the cramped loft where she’d slept her whole life, but now it was silent, and the door swung in a breeze that did not touch her skin. She took a deep breath, waited for her racing pulse to calm. The Fade reflected what you brought to it, and if she panicked, it would draw far more terrible eyes than the demon she was here to hunt. But this nightmare was not hers, and this time, she was here of her own will, and if she was sufficiently quick and clever, nothing here could truly harm her. Plenty of the tame, soft Circle mages she’d seen had passed their own Harrowings, after all, and there was nothing soft in Morrigan for a demon to press down upon. Besides, what could a demon offer her, that she could not achieve with the force of her own will and magic? 

The woods beyond the door were a strange combination of the familiar and the alien – the familiar mangrove trees of the Wilds grew twisted and tangled with the pines of the Hinterlands, and marsh gave way to mountain with little logic to it. They were oddly quiet, too – no dreamed birdsong or imagined animals, the kind of silence the forest only held when something deadly was nearby. She focussed on her breathing, slowly, steady, the only sound in the unbroken silence, as if she was the only living thing in the world. She’d dreamt of such things, when she was a girl – no Templars to hunt her, no villagers to stare, no Flemeth to be kind and cruel by turns. It had been a comforting thought, then. Why was it not a comfort now? 

As if in response, the distant echoes of voices reached her ears: the low rasp of an old man, the shrill cries of a child, tangled in a call and response that never quite managed to meet. She almost flinched as their forms emerged from the trees – pale and diffuse at first, becoming clearer, realer, as she drew closer. The child ran heedless and panicked in the dark, calling at the top of his voice for the father he’d placed beyond his own reach, a thousand ghosts of his own panic and misery trailing behind him. Flemeth would have slapped her, or sealed her voice within a jar, if she’d thought to run screaming through the dark in the hope of bringing down hope rather than her own death. 

The father was no less reckless, for all Alistair’s talk of his strategic genius – but then, it did not take much to impress Alistair. His cries echoed off the rocks and the trees that her mind had conjured to fill the void that held father and son together and yet eternally apart: 

“Connor? Is that you? Is anyone out there?” 

The Arl was a nobleman, not a mage. Likely he knew so little of the Fade that he could not imagine that he’d become trapped there, and could not understand the danger his unchecked emotion could have drawn into his prison, but even so... Whether in reality or dream, she could not imagine her own mother sending up a hue and cry if she’d mislaid her, whether she had magic at her fingertips or no. Flemeth was ever practical, and if she’d lost Morrigan, to death, disappearance, or demons, she would probably have sighed and begun scheming to acquire a new apprentice.  

“There are always desperate people in the world,” she’d told Morrigan once, “and always those ready to make a deal in darkness that in daylight they’d call unthinkable.” 

That had been the beginning to a longer story, of demons, and of mages and their children. It came back to her, as she trekked through forest so like and so unlike her own, almost in Flemeth’s own voice. 

There was once a hedgemage, she’d said, of little power and less renown, who was forced, by his lack of skill and wisdom, to live life as a lowly charcoal-burner, cutting wood for the fires of the wealthy. But even a lesser mage is still a mage, still a half-open door to the Fade, and in time, a spirit had come to him, a spirit of Wisdom, and promised him all the power and wealth he could desire, if he only gave it what stood in his garden. The man agreed too readily, tired of a life of toil and labour when he could so easily sate his desire, but he did not know that what stood in his garden in that hour was his own daughter. 

“Did he give her up to the spirit?” Morrigan had asked, wide-eyed. 

“What else was he to do?” Flemeth had replied. “The spirit had already upheld its end of the bargain – he had the spells and the power to raise a castle from stones, or an army from trees, and what was one child to that, when he could get more? He loved her, of course,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “but he had made the bargain, and it was her body or his. Perhaps the spirit hoped he would renege on their bargain, and it would get both the power it had given over and the body that held it, but he did not.” 

“Would you have?” she’d asked, “If you found the price you’d have to pay was more than you wanted to?” 

Her mother had arched a brow and fixed one cool golden eye upon her. “I do not make deals where I do not know the price I will pay,” she’d said, cool and simple, “and you should not either. This world seldom offers something for nothing.” 

“It did for the spirit,” Morrigan had pointed out, and had been punished for her impertinence when her mother snaked out a hand to pinch her hard. 

“Spirits are not of this world, child,” she’d said, reprovingly, “and this spirit was clever enough to tailor its bargain so that either way, it would achieve its end – it would enter the world whether the mage kept his word, or betrayed it.” 

The girl, of course, had little choice in this story. Even her attempt to protect herself with charms painted onto her hands had gone awry – the spirit had commanded her father to cut them off, and taken her anyway. But then, well-behaved daughters in Flemeth’s tales seldom had much of a say in anything. They were either clever and obedient, and therefore rewarded, foolish and rebellious, and therefore punished, or ciphers to be traded away at their parents’ will.  

Sometimes, she’d wondered if she was the result of one of Flemeth’s desperate deals in darkness – either because her father had agreed to share the witch’s bed, or because whoever had birthed her had, like the parents of Leliana’s Elfroot Maid, surrendered her for some boon the witch could give them. Like the mage in the story, perhaps they’d thought they could have other children, or perhaps she’d been another mouth to feed for a family who ran too close to starvation. She hoped, at least, she’d been a good bargain – that they’d gotten something more than a crust of bread or a single spell from her mother. She did not like to think of herself as worth less than either of those things. 

Connor was clearly worth much to his father. Even exhausted and flagging as he sounded, the old man called for his son in an endless, unhappy tirade of echoes. Would he still call for him when he woke, when he found out his child was not only a mage, but a blood mage? Not only a blood mage, but an abomination? She did not think so. Love seldom stretched as far in this world as it did in Leliana’s stories. It was a fleeting thing – she had too often seen a bear groan and growl over a fallen cub, only to later devour it. Arl Eamon would likely discard his son as easily as he’d once discarded Alistair, once he became a disappointment or an inconvenience.  

But though love might be inconstant or fleeting, it had made a powerful cage of the boy’s mind – the father would not leave it until he found the son, the son would not release his father for fear of losing him altogether. It was a neat, circular binding, and, if she examined it with her mother’s eyes, she could see a twisted kind of beauty to it – wherever the demon hid, it could not be using much of its power to keep this corner of the Fade sealed away, when its prisoners were practically forging their own manacles.  

For herself, though, it provided only a sick sense of discomfort – this was what sentimentality could lead to. Perhaps Flemeth had been right – for all that there had been little tenderness in her upbringing, she could not see either of them falling into a cage of this particular shape. Flemeth would not care enough to remain within it for her daughter’s sake, and Morrigan had too much faith in her mother’s own power to think she’d be lost without her help. As in the Circle, this corner of the Fade proved once again that her mother had not misrepresented the world or its nature to her – attachments like love were as dangerous as they were temporary, and she could not allow herself to be swayed by them. 

Seluna’s pendant hung heavy about her neck, and she felt a sudden urge to cast it off and away – had she not desired it, pretty bauble, dangerous trinket, and in desiring it, surrendered valuable leverage over the girl? It was a dainty thing, easy to conceal beneath her robes if she chose, and the weight of it was barely noticeable in the waking world, but now it dragged on her, chain digging in to the soft skin of her throat like a leash pulled by a careless child.  

Or, she realised, as she focussed upon it, like a lodestone or a magnet – it was not,in itself, magical, but in this place of dream and feeling, it contained a fragment of the desire she had felt for it, and was not desire at the heart of this puzzle? What could be more useful, as bait for a demon of desire, than something she herself had envied? 

She focussed on that remembered sensation, that envy, that want, as she twisted the chain around her wrist like a talisman or a charm against becoming misled. It swung free for a long few moments, and then she felt the pull of it again. It led her through the tangle of trees, through the mist and the winding labyrinth of rabbit-paths. Little by little, or perhaps all at once while she wasn’t looking, the trees at her sides fell away to indistinct shapes in the mist, and she got the sense that, if she stepped off the path that her desire pulled her along, she would fall away into nothing at all. 

The blurred edges of the world as she was it did not silence the voices, though. At first, it was merely the child’s wordless sobbing, which was- unsettling, but familiar. She’d seen aspects of the boy raging and frightened and bewildered, and speaking to him had not helped either of them then.  

She paused in her careful progress when the voice that called from the dark was her mother’s: 

“Morrigan, girl, where are you? I did not seek you here to be ignored!”  

Her pace quickened. The imitation was flawless, but if Flemeth sought her, it would not be in her dreams. 

“Daughter,” the voice came again, softer, more wheedling: “I have missed you, in your absence. Will you not come home, if only for a few moments? If only in your dreams?” 

She thought of the hut in the Wilds, its creaking walls. How small it had felt, when she’d fallen back into it in dreams. If this creature was a demon of desire, it would need to do better than- 

“Morrigan?” The voice was still low and feminine, but younger now, a little less familiar, a little more frightened. “Morrigan, I’m sorry, I should never have asked-” 

“Seluna?” The name escaped before she could bite it back, and she cringed at how quickly it had shaken her. She’d become so attuned to the girl’s presence, her safety, that her voice raised in fear bypassed her brain and hooked straight into her gut. 

“Help me,” the voice pleaded, soft and sweet and beguiling. “We couldn’t wake you- they sent me to find you, but it’s- it’s so dark-” 

The delicate tremble in her voice was an artful touch, but not a persuasive one. Seluna Tabris did not plead. She set her jaw, and forced herself to keep walking. The faint orange light in the distance was beginning to resolve into the shimmering flames of a small camp fire, and the pendant drew her towards it with a slow, steady inevitability. She felt a thrill of fear, and swallowed it down. She would not fail here. She could not. 

The figure at the fire was not quite what she expected – the tall, violet-skinned creature with cloven hooves and breasts that would make Alistair choke on nothing at all. The figure at the fire was nothing like those images was slight and silver-haired, and smiled up at her with wide, dark eyes. 

“Here at last,” Seluna smiled up at her, with catlike content. “I've been waiting for you, darling.” 

“I thought desire demons were meant to choose forms of surpassing beauty,” Morrigan said, drily. “I am not sure that I would describe a grubby, half-starved elf-maid as such.” 

“No?” she tilted her head. “But I do not choose the form I appear in. It is crafted by your own desire, and if what you desire is a grubby, half-starved elf-maid...” 

She smoothed down the worn leather of her breastplate, but now it had never been a breastplate at all – it was a low-cut tunic of shimmering blue silk, so soft, so delicate, that she longed to brush her fingers against it, to trace the delicate embroidered vines, to feel the heat of her skin bleed through-  

She folded her hands tight around her staff, and did nothing so foolish.  

Seluna’s smile broadened, though, and she felt shame at her weakness rush through her like heat. 

“Tis well, my love,” she said, softly, “Your kind cannot help what you desire, as mine cannot help but become it, and you... my sweet, you burn with such passion it is as though you have never once been satisfied.” 

The spirit’s words should not have struck a chord in her. She was meant to be stronger than that. But she thought of the lures the sloth demon had laid for her, and wondered Would it have been harder to escape its trap, if I'd ever truly known contentment? Helplessness was an old enemy, but satisfaction, contentment... She narrowed her eyes at the creature before her, still smiling false and sweet as Seluna ever had. 

“I don’t need your false promises. I need you to leave the child and his father alone, and if you will not leave of your own will, I will force you.” 

“That’s hardly a fair bargain for either of us.” Seluna’s lips folded into a heart-shaped pout, glistening in the half-real firelight as they never had in life. “I do not want to leave, and I am fairly certain you do not actually wish to kill me.” 

“What I want is immaterial.” 

“Not to me.” Her fingers were soft and delicate as the silks she now wore, tracing over the bare skin of Morrigan's wrists to capture her hands, still wrapped tight around her staff. Her touch was unbearably light and gentle. Nobody had touched her like that since she was a child. “And oh, do you want. It burns in you like you swallowed down the sun, greedy, insatiable girl.” The words emerged like praise, like sweetness, and she wanted to shrink back from them almost as much as she wanted to swallow them down and let them fill the hollow, roaring space between her ribs. “I could give you much, if you’d let me.” 

“You’re not real.” She wasn’t sure if she was reminding herself or the demon. 

The girl smirked, brushed a hand against her cheek. “In this place, darling, there is nothing more real than I am. Even you are little more than a wisp, frustrated and underfed as you are. But I have a soft spot for creatures as hungry as you."  

“You cannot give me what I want.” She could hear the weakness in her own voice, the wavering, and longed to bite down upon it. She wears her form, she reminded herself, she does not carry the child.   

“Can I not?” Her laughter was low and throaty, enticing, intoxicating. “I can give you secrets of magic your own dear mother would envy. I can give you such power that you would need no companions to complete your mission.” 

“And let me guess,” she retorted, and why now did the words come so clumsily? “the only price you’d ask would be my body, or my will, or an open door into my world?” 

“Not at all. I do not think you such a fool.” It was hard to meet those eyes, blue-violet in the firelight, and not read Seluna’s rare, blistering sincerity in them. It was hard to look on a face so familiar (made so lovely by dreaming and demonic desire) and not want to fall into another of her beautiful lies. “You will have what you desire, and I will leave the child in peace – for a time.” 

“For a time?” Morrigan prompted, sensing the trap in her words.  

“Connor has made his own bargain with me,” she said, with a helpless shrug, “You cannot ask me to surrender it entirely, when his father clings to life by my power alone.” 

“He does not look particularly lively, at least in the world I came from.” 

She shrugged, an elegant roll of her shoulders that seemed calculated to draw attention to the rise and fall of her breasts, the long line of her pale throat. “I do my best with what I am given. Unfortunately, a child like that, spoiled and cossetted as he was, gave me little to work with beyond his desire to keep his father alive and his home unchanged. You, though...” Her eyes roved Morrigan’s body hungrily. “We could do much together, you and I, if you willed it, between your desires and the strength I would draw from them.” 

“Mostly for you and likely not at all for me.” She drew back, and the demon followed like a moth after a flame, still with that terrible hunger in her wide-shot eyes. “I have seen enough abominations to know how this story ends.” 

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” the demon said, “Some might call your own dear mother an abomination.” 

“And you’d suggest I become her?” 

“I’d suggest she’s had a lifetime or more to chase her own desires. Why must you chase them for her? Play the mother or the whore to get a child she cannot bear, steal power she cannot hold? What of your power, your knowledge? Your desires?” 

“You know nothing of my desires,” she sneered, but she could not look away. 

“I know more than you are willing to admit, even to yourself. Even now, you are asking yourself why you continue to refuse. For your mother’s stories? For the sake of a child you care nothing for? For a girl who will know nothing of what you do here, and the deals we make in this place?” The spirit leaned closer still, till those stolen eyes swallowed the sky and the forest and the world around them in endless night. “Why deny yourself everything you want, for a price you will not have to pay? I could give you all of it – power and knowledge and the wisdom to wield them both, if you’d let me. I could give you endless beauty. I could make the girl who’s face you’ve given me so mad with love she’ll promise you her child for nothing at all. Or we could battle here, and if you lose, I claim your body and your power and do as I will with them.” 

She thought of the real Seluna, then, the worried pinch of her lips, the cool press of a blade to her throat. She’d never seen her as this creature painted her – cheeks flushed and eyes dark with desire – and curiosity pricked at her like bramble thorns. Despite Flemeth’s best efforts, she still had a weakness for lovely, dangerous things. 

“And how would we seal such a pact, if we were to make one?” she asked, lowering her staff to her lap. The spirit’s hands, where they settled on her waist, were the only warmth she’d ever known. 

Her lips curved into a contented smile. “I believe a kiss is traditional.” 

“Like this?” She leant closer, until she could feel the spirit’s imagined breath against her lips, the taste of blackberries and anticipation rich and heady on her tongue. She lingered there a moment longer, enjoying her soft inhale of surprise and longing- 

And then drove the blade of her staff through the demon’s stomach, and let it collapse against her with a wet, too-human gurgle. Perhaps it was a final cruelty, that the last image it left her with was those night-blue eyes, shot wide with horror and betrayal. It would remain, imprinted on her own eyelids, the rest of her life.  

Chapter Text

“Let her go!” Luna ordered, but it emerged more a shrill, urgent cry than any sort of command. Perhaps Morrigan had expected it, for at first she did not struggle, but then she began to thrash, arms flailing, legs kicking at nothing, lyrium splashing up from the basin as instinct took over and she attempted to wrench her head from Alistair’s hand, strands of black hair catching and tearing away in his gauntlets.  

Alistair shook his head, lips moving in a silent countdown. “Don’t distract me, I can’t leave her in too long.”  

“Too long?” Luna demanded, “You’re drowning her!”  

“She can’t drown in lyrium, she’s a mage,” Alistair muttered, as though it was obvious. “ Quiet. You’ll distract the others.” He nodded to Wynne and Jowan, at opposing sides of the circle they had drawn, beginning to chant in some alien tongue as they shifted through positions in some strange dance.   

The light from the window seemed to dim and coalesce around them, until they shone like twin stars on either side of the couch. The basin shone with its own crackling, blue-white light, a moon eclipsed by Morrigan’s inkspill hair. Suddenly – too suddenly – she was limp and unmoving in Alistair’s grip, and he hauled her head up from the basin until he could drop her limp and unmoving into Luna’s lap. Her chest still moved in rapid, mechanical rhythm, but her eyes were half-lidded and vacant, sparks of blue lancing through the gold. She wanted to shake her, pinch her, insult her, anything to wake her from this awful, too-still slumber. Lyrium pooled in the hollows of her face, dripped from her hair, and Luna did not dare to wipe it away.  

“Knife,” Alistair muttered, and she drew one reluctantly. Her fingers felt numb and clumsy, on the verge of mutiny, and Alistair seemed to sense it, covering her hand with his own in an attempt to hold her steady. His gauntleted hand was manacle-heavy on hers, and it took what little restraint she had left not to slap him away.  

“Let. Me. Go,” she hissed through her teeth. She wanted to scream. She wanted to stop this Void-cursed ritual and demand to know why this was the way they’d chosen to test their young mages. Bad enough they lived their lives in prison, but to have their right to live, to not be severed from themselves, hang in the balance of a ritual that seemed closer to torture than magic... But if she lost her temper, whatever chance the ritual had to succeed would evaporate. Connor would die. Morrigan... she did not want to think about what would happen to Morrigan, did not want to be complicit in sacrificing her body to the monster that held Connor in thrall. So she did not scream. She bit down on her tongue until she tasted blood, and held a knife to Morrigan’s shimmering throat, and knew that if something looked out of those golden eyes that wasn’t the witch she knew, she’d cut her throat in less than a heartbeat.   

She thought of Nola then, sweet, pious Nola, who’d braided flowers into her hair and told her she looked like a bride fit for the Maker Himself. Nola who’s prayers had not saved her from a knife to the throat from a man who cast her aside like a broken toy, like something he’d stolen and hadn’t even wanted. Nola might even have preferred it that way, a quick clean death over the bruising hands of shemlen monsters. An innocent death, no suffering, no wrenching realisation that her body was no longer her own. Nola had died before giving up her body, or her innocence. Luna had washed both of hers away in the tide of blood she’d spilt, her body a tribute to the Grey Wardens and the Blight, and her innocence... she wondered if any of the girls who’d been dragged into that villa had come out feeling like the people they had been, or if versions of each of them still lay there with Nola and Nelaros. It was not the same kind of violation as whatever process transformed a mage to an abomination, she knew that, but even so...  

What did Cyrion think of his sweet daughter now? Had he seen her at all in the dead-eyed, bloodsoaked butcher bride Duncan had dragged from the city? Would Shianni or Soris recognise the girl who’d held them when they’d had nightmares in the woman who held a knife to the throat of an ally and called it mercy? Or would she seem as alien to them as the abominations who’d once been friends and apprentices had seemed to Wynne, some strange creature wearing their Luna’s face?  

As if she could sense Luna beginning to dwell on less important things, Morrigan stirred in her lap, murmuring something indistinct. Then, horribly, her limbs began to spasm and twitch – not the dull, leaden motions of a child caught in a nightmare but jerky, mechanical movements that did not seem at all human.   

“It’s normal,” Alistair said, but his teeth were gritted. “It takes some of them this way.”  

Which ones? she wanted to demand. The weak ones? The survivors? The ones who come out changed forever, or don’t come out at all?  

It did not feel normal, lively, vicious Morrigan rendered still and pale and twitching like a dying rabbit. Luna had once thought her shapeshifting unnatural, but it was far stranger now to see her with anything less than perfect control over her body. Now she moved with the candle-flame-flicker of sparks from a bonfire, as though something unbound by the trivial concern of muscles and joints dwelt within her skin. Luna’s grip tightened on the knife, then relaxed as she let out a thin, shrilling, but all-too-human cry of pain. Luna smoothed a damp lock of hair from her forehead with her free hand and wished for magic of her own, for a spirit out of the Fade, for any power that could let her aid Morrigan into this fight she’d sent her to alone. But all she had was the knife in her hand and the eerie blue glow of lyrium-light, and it was not enough. She would never be enough.  

It was strange, a distant part of her realised, how long ago it felt since she had been truly powerless, under Vaughan’s hands, under Duncan’s orders. For all that she resented the command Alistair had placed on her shoulders, their day-to-day decisions had fallen to her, and since Ostagar, she’d come across few situations she could not resolve with a quick smile or a quicker blade. Even in the Fade, she’d not felt quite so powerless as she did watching Morrigan fight a battle she could not see, a battle that could have lasted months for all that she noticed the passage of time. Her eyes stayed fixed on her stone-still face, waiting for a sign, for anything at all. She did not notice the light slowly fade from the mages and the glyph on the floor, or from Morrigan herself, but when she heard the rustle of sheets behind her and a child’s murmur of “ Maman?”, she was slammed back into her body as if from a great height, winded and disoriented by how dark the room had become. The child was stirring, yes, and speaking with the hoarse, frightened tones of a boy rather than the shrill giggle of the demon, but Morrigan remained still as death. If she was gone- if she’d traded one life for another, despite all her moralising thoughts and promises to herself-  

Morrigan’s eyes flashed open, deep gold and almost glowing with a glorious, familiar rage. If not for the knife, and the horror of the Fade, Luna might have kissed her, so overwhelming was her relief. Fortunately, all thoughts of such foolishness were driven out of her mind by the crunch of Morrigan’s fist slamming into her nose.  

Her knife slipped from her hand, clattering to the floor, and leaving a thin beading of red against Morrigan’s skin, rather less dramatic that the gouts of blood that seemed to be pouring from Luna’s own face.  

“You bitch,” she said, glad that the hand over her nose muffled the relief in her voice. “The fuck did you do that for?”  

Morrigan stretched out like a cat then, arching her back, the picture of unrepentant grace . “The last thing I remembered being that close to me was a demon,” she retorted. Colour was flooding back to her cheeks, making her seem alive again, and Alistair had already sprinted for the door to find the child his mother. On the bed, though, she heard the soft sounds of a child sobbing, and felt ashamed that her first thought had not been for him. What was wrong with her?   

She dislodged Morrigan and moved over to the bed, but Jowan was already perched beside the boy as he buried his head against his still-sleeping father’s chest. Arl Eamon was the only sleeper left now, and even his son’s tears did not rouse him from whatever distant place Jowan’s poison had sent him to.  

Jowan himself looked as exhausted as Wynne or Morrigan, skin pale and sheened in sweat, but he rubbed circles into Connor’s shoulder, stricken grief plain on his features, as though he were Connor’s father, not the cause of his mourning.   

“She promised!” the boy was sobbing. “She said if I just let her in, I could have whatever I wanted, and I wanted him to be better!”  

“Spirits will promise impossible things, if it will open a door for them,” Morrigan said from the couch, cold but not cruel, not spiteful. “Every mage learns this eventually.”  

“I didn’t ask to be a mage!” he wailed, and something in Jowan seemed to collapse – he pulled the child into his arms and held him tight, rocking him back and forth as though he were a much younger child.   

“Neither did I,” he said, softly, “but the alternative is worse, trust me.”  

“What could be worse than this?” Connor demanded, and Luna thought of Owain, the Tranquil she’d met at the tower. How young had he been, when the Templars had taken him from his parents? How long had it been since they’d stolen what tears he could shed for them?  

“The world is full of terrible things.” She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but the words slipped out almost against her will. “Everywhere I’ve been, there is darkness and death and cruelty, and nobody seems able to fix all of it. But that’s why we have to fix what we can.”  

Jowan drew back, holding Connor gently by the shoulders. “I’m doing everything I can for your father,” he promised. “I can’t heal, but-” He glanced hopefully to Wynne, who shook her head.  

“Poisons are tricky work, even for spirit healers, and I am all but drained for today,” she said, regretfully. “I will see what I can do until tomorrow, but this may be beyond me.”   

Luna felt a shudder of exhaustion and disappointment run through her, and almost wanted to cry. She’d hoped that Wynne, with her age and wisdom, would have some magical solution to the Arl’s ailment. She’d hoped, childishly, that she and Eamon would see how far in over her head Luna was, and take over as the adults, the planners, the leaders. Now it seemed as impossible as climbing into her father’s bed to escape a bad dream.   

Her own bed, in Redcliffe’s luxurious guest quarters, was big enough that she could have shared it with Shianni and both her other bridesmaids, and still they’d each have had space to roll over without kicking each other. It was too big for Luna alone, so she was grateful that Styx, her Mabari, deigned to join her rather than succumbing to Alistair’s bribery.   

“What am I going to do, girl?” she murmured into the dog’s neck.  “I can’t raise an army on my own. What Fereldan soldier is going to obey an alienage girl?”  

Styx yipped in reply, nuzzling her cheek in what might have been affection or any soup left on her face from dinner.  

“You don’t give a single fuck, do you?” she sighed. What a glorious existence that must be, to care for so little beyond the next meal or the next cuddle. Styx would not have to inform Arl Eamon’s wife and child that he was beyond the reach of magic, and hope his heir felt generous enough to aid them anyway. Styx did not have to make a plan to save a would-be assassin from the consequences of his actions. Styx was perfectly content to have soft sheets and a warm fire, and would not waste her energy fretting over the future or worrying about crotchety witches who were probably already asleep.  

Morrigan would not thank her for the worry, she knew that well enough by now. She did not imagine Flemeth had been the sort of parent to fuss over grazed knees or bad dreams, and her daughter responded to even the slightest hint of worry for her wellbeing with scorn – she cared for nobody but herself, and would call you a fool to your face for not doing the same. Except that wasn’t entirely true any more. She supplied Luna with fresh bundles of the anti-nausea tea every other day, and watched her eat with a narrow-eyed squint, as though she could not be trusted to feed herself. She had even risked her own life in the Fade to save Connor’s, not because she cared for the boy, but because Luna had asked her to. From anyone else she would have taken such special treatment as a mark of particular regard, but with Morrigan...  

Perhaps the Witch of the Wilds had a soft spot for pretty girls or lost waifs, but it seemed more likely that Luna’s infirmity and instability were an inconvenience to her, and short of cutting her throat, the best way to tackle that inconvenience was to mitigate it where she could. Or perhaps, with her talk of debt and payment, the rendering of accounts (so human, so petty), there was something she wanted, or would one day want, from Luna, and had made up her mind to see her deep in debt before demanding it. This would have seemed more plausible if Luna had anything she thought Morrigan might want. She’d liked the necklace – she loved a shiny bauble as much as any magpie, for all that she turned up her nose and pretended to be above such things – but the witch had magic at her fingertips and a thousand skins to slip into when that of a human became tiresome, and Luna had a body tainted with darkspawn blood, a mind shadowed by misery, and nothing of her own in the world save for the clothes she stood up in. She had money now, she supposed, from the odd jobs and small errands she’d taken up on the road, but while that money would have meant everything to her family in the alienage, it seemed to mean little and less to the woods-witch. When she spoke of payment, gold was usually the last thing on her mind, and Luna imagined she might think less of it too, with such power at her fingertips.   

She did not sleep easily that night, even with Styx curled up in the great bed with her. She dreamed of the archdemon, its jaws around her middle, cracking down on her ribs, her stomach, her pelvis until she was all but snapped in half by the force of it. As her head fell back, she thought she saw Morrigan, somewhere in the distance, but when she called out for help, she did not turn around. She was consistent, even in her dreams.   

Her back still ached when a timid knock at the door awoke her, much earlier than she would have liked. It was an unfortunate beginning, made more unfortunate by the fact the knocker was timid Valena, the arlessa’s maid who she’d begged to flee on her last visit. Stupid girl, to still be in this terrible place, but Luna bit down on her tongue anyway, because the girl likely had as little choice in her own position as Luna did, and if the money had not changed that, snapping at her certainly would not do any better.  

“Valena,” she said, with a somewhat forced smile. “You’re up early. I wasn’t expecting to see you still here.”  

“Begging y’pardon, mistress,” Valena replied, bobbing a curtsey. “I did- I did go home and visit my da, as you said, an’ I talked to him, but- he didn’t want to leave. Said stayin’ to defend his home from the Blight was the least he could do when a girl my age had gone into the castle just to save me. Did he- did he speak true, mistress?”  

Luna felt her face heat. She remembered Valena’s father as a miserable bastard content to let his home burn rather than live without his daughter. At the time, she’d thought her threats had had more impact than her promises, but now...  

“I had reason to come here anyway, with all that was wrong,” she said, “but even without that, if he’d said he was worried, I would have come to check on you.”  

Valena blinked at her, eyes wide and starry and uncomfortably reminiscent of Alistair. “You would’ve, mistress? Why? I’m nobody important.”  

Luna shrugged. “Your father was worried about you. Best case scenario, I wasted a little of my time crossing the bridge and pissed off the Arlessa. Worst case scenario... bad things can happen to nobody-girls in a place like this.”  

Valena blinked at her, non-plussed. “You came up here all because my da was worried for me?”  

“I came up here because nobody else would. Even if it had only been you in danger, I probably would’ve come.” Morrigan would have hated that – she'd hated most of her decisions in Redcliffe, called them pointless or a waste of time. But here was Valena, living and breathing and bobbing curtseys until she looked like a wading bird, and she might not be here if not for Luna’s pointless wastes of time. “Everyone in trouble deserves to have someone come for them.”  

Two people came for me, once, and I could not repay the favour.   

Valena’s cheeks were flushing too – she darted another starry-eyed look at Luna, and then bobbed another curtsey. “Saving your patience, mistress, but I clean forgot why I was sent here! Lady Isolde wishes to know if you’d take breakfast with her.”  

Now it was Luna’s turn to blink, startled. “Of course, I’ll wake the others-”  

“Just you, mistress,” she said, and Luna felt a knot of distrust tighten in her stomach. What could an arlessa want from her? “She wants to thank you, y’see, for saving her boy, and for saving all Redcliffe.”  

“None of that was me,” she protested. “Morrigan went into the Fade. I didn’t even help cast the spell.”  

“Yes, but- you were the one who said you’d go to the Circle to save young Master Connor. Anyone else might’ve given up, but you-”  

“I’m not a hero, Valena,” she said, desperate to stem this bizarre tide of compliments. It was much too early to deal with- whatever this was. “I’m just- here. And helpful.”  

“Well, maybe she wants to thank you for that,” Valena said. “If you’d care to dress, I’ll take you to her.”   

Of course, Luna had nothing to wear that was suitable for breakfast with an arlessa. Even her wedding gown would likely have been shabby, even if it hadn’t been stained with blood. In the end, she wore her freshly oiled armour, and hoped the excuse of life on the road would negate the poor impression it probably made.  

The arlessa, of course, looked perfect despite the circles beneath her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks. Her overgown was a froth of pink lace that probably cost more than Luna’s home, and her hair was already half-pinned up, giving her a look of elegant informality that was probably calculated to seem as approachable as possible. Or vulnerable, perhaps – the hollow of her throat was on display, a scandalous choice for a respectable noblewoman if Luna had been anyone who actually mattered, and she did look delicate and frail in her translucent gown, something fragile and pretty and desperately in need of protection. What must it be like, to be able to pull on a cloak of fragility and demand the protection of others when danger knocked? Luna had never had that gift. Fragility in the alienage was a dangerous trait, so close to the trampling feet of the shemlen . Nola had been fragile, and they had broken her. The reminder sent a fresh, hot spark of hatred flaring through her, but she affixed her sweetest smile to her lips and swept the best curtsey she could manage.  

“You wished to see me, my lady?” She kept her eyes lowered, modest and servile, the noblewoman’s idea of a “good elf” – one who knew her place.  

“Oh, no, please sit!” The arlessa gestured to the chair opposite her own, across a table laid out with a delicate tea set of Orlesian porcelain. Luna took the seat indicated, feeling her stomach growl and lurch as she did so. Hopefully Isolde did not expect her to come with a hearty appetite. “My family owes you everything, I cannot expect you to bow and scrape like a servant.”  

Nor should you expect that of anyone, a part of her thought, bitterly. I doubt you pay your servants enough to make up for their dignity.  

“Well, you have given us your hospitality,” Luna managed, a sop to her father’s idea of politeness, and her own need for this family’s favour.  

“Such as it is.” Isolde waved a dismissive hand, as though all the luxuries of her castle were nothing to the luxuries she could provide. “It is a small thing, compared for all you have done to return my son to me.”  

“I could do no less,” she said, though they both knew it was a lie. “I could not rob a child of his life, or his mother.”  

“Nevertheless, the Guerrin family will remember the service you have paid us, and we will repay it in kind.” Always ‘service’ with these humans, never kindness, never generosity. Always debts and accounts to be settled. But she suspected that if it had been a matter of mere payment, Isolde would not have requested so intimate a meeting. The arlessa could dispense payment and gratitude from her seat in the Great Hall below, the noble lady condescending to reward her lessers for a job well done. No, this private meeting, this false construction of intimacy, this was all set-dressing for Isolde to request another favour.  

“I don’t seek favours, or payment,” she said, her stomach sinking. The tea she sipped did nothing to settle it, bitter and overbrewed compared to Morrigan’s spiced concoction that warmed her to her bones. “Only your family’s aid against the Blight.”  

“And our aid you shall have, as much of it as we can rally to our cause,” she agreed, which surprised Luna. Then her face fell, and she felt the trap close around her. “It is only... My son cannot inherit, not now the world knows of his magic. Teagan has spent more time in Ansburg than in Ferelden, the nobility know little of him.”  

“But you grew up here.” Luna recalled it from one of Alistair’s tirades about the jealous woman who’d exiled him out of jealousy – how little sympathy she’d shown, when once she had been a child forced out of her home in Redcliffe too. “The people must know you by now.”  

“They know me,” Isolde sighed helplessly, “they do not love me. To commoners, I am still the Orlesian governor’s daughter, and my father was not a gentle ruler. To the nobles, I am a cuckoo who stole a husband one of their sisters or daughters had more right to. Eamon though... he is a war hero, King Maric’s loyal friend, his judgement respected, his counsel honoured. Teagan or I could raise you a militia. Eamon could rally you an army, one to rival the usurper himself.”  

She wove a pretty illusion, but Luna could too easily see the holes in it. “My lady,” she began, careful to sound gentle, sympathetic, “I will do all I can for your family, for the love Alistair bears your husband, but I am no miracle worker. If the Senior Enchanter herself cannot heal him-“  

“He may already be beyond the reach of mortal magic, this I know,” she interrupted, “but not yet beyond the grasp of the Maker’s own blessing.”  

“What are you asking of me?” Luna said, swallowing drily. Why did it have to be breakfast? Her stomach was roiling, and it would do her cause no good to vomit all over the arlessa’s pretty overrobe.  

“While you travelled to the Circle, a scholar from a nearby monastery came to Redcliffe, to make use of Eamon’s library,” she began, and then spun a tale that sounded, to Luna’s ears, more like an elaborate con played on a desperate family than a treasure map to an impossible relic. If she could have nipped the lie in the bud, she would have, but Isolde’s eyes burned with a fervour borne of desperation, and Luna knew well that there was no persuading such a zealot without at least attempting to follow her plan.   

“And did this ‘Brother Genetivi’ give you any hint of where he might go next?” Luna sighed, hoping the answer would be no. It was, in fact, worse than that:  

“I believe he sought confirmation or something he found in our library in the archives of Denerim,” she admitted, and Luna forced herself to swallow down bile.   

“I cannot return to the capital,” she choked out, hoarsely. She could never go home again, hunted by the Arl and Loghain alike. She had brought enough horror down upon her kin. “The city is no place for Grey Wardens, my lady.”  

“But your group is not all Wardens,” Isolde remarked, shrewdly. “Perhaps you could divide your forces, send those unconnected to the Wardens to Denerim, while those of you who cannot enter the city see if Genetivi left any notes with his brothers? Alistair should be able to assist you, he spent some time there before he joined the Templars.”  

“I am not sure he is eager to return,” she said, and took a little vicious pleasure in the guilt that flashed across Isolde’s pretty features, “but if there is a chance of helping Eamon, I am sure he’ll agree.”  

The guilt was quickly replaced by a terrible, burning hope, and now it was Luna’s turn to feel a little remorseful for what she was about to do:  

“But if I am to divide my forces to chase a relic that may be little more than myth, I will need something more than promises, my lady.”  

“Anything,” Isolde swore, though when Luna told her what she wanted, she regretted her hasty vow.  

Her anger and Teagan’s combined was nothing to Alistair's, though.   

“Absolutely not!” he snapped, when she told him of her plan, and Jowan flinched back, ducking behind Melia, who squeezed his arm in an attempt at comfort. “Luna, you can’t seriously be suggesting-“  

“Why not?” She raised her hands, attempting to look gentle, conciliatory, though she did not feel either. “We need all the people we can get-“  

“People we can trust! People worthy of the Warden’s burden, not blood mages and apostates.”  

“And here I thought we were getting on so well.” Of course that was Morrigan, who had never seen a fire she did not want to pour oil onto.  

“You can’t do this,” Alistair repeated, and had he been desperate or pleading, something in her might have softened. But instead, he stepped up to loom over her, as if to move her out of his path by force, and that only made her angry.  

“Firstly, unless you’re suddenly claiming the mantle of Warden Commander, I absolutely can do this, and given that Duncan thought murderers and thieves were potentially ‘worthy’, I don’t think the Wardens have ever had a problem with harbouring blood mages and apostates.  Secondly, neither Jowan nor Melia have any intention of  performing any more blood magic, unless you count the Joining.” She’d started counting her reasons off on her fingers, but the last one she threw in was pure spite: “And thirdly, Jowan’s taken more responsibility for his mistakes than some people I could mention, which makes him a fair candidate in my eyes.”  

The silence that fell was chill and total, as if all the air had gone from the room. When Alistair finally broke it, his voice was low and terrible: “What is that supposed to mean?”  

For a dizzying moment, her tongue caught in her throat, immovable. Alistair had always seemed puppyish to her, a boy playing pretend in his father’s armour, but now she noticed how he towered over her, how years of training with sword and shield had corded his arms with muscle, how one of his hands could easily crack her skull or wrap tight around her throat. For a moment, she saw Vaughan Kendalls risen from the dead, rage crackling around him, and she felt her stomach lurch, and-  

Well, it was a humiliating way to win an argument, and a painful reminder of her dependence on Morrigan’s goodwill. The witch, to her credit, rose from her couch to gather Luna’s hair back as she retched.  

“Are you actually asking?” she said, glaring up at Alistair until he shrunk down into his more familiar, boyish self. “You truly are a dolt.”  

“Luna?” She felt his hand on her shoulder, tentative and warm but not the painful grip she’d feared. “Are you alright?”  

She wanted to flare back into cold rage, to rail against him for his foolishness, his blindness to the desperation that forced people to do terrible things. She wanted to rail against herself, against her own body for the humiliating betrayal. But what good would that do anyone? She accepted Alistair’s handkerchief and wiped her mouth as delicately as she could manage.  

“It’s the Joining, I think,” she said, trying to sound casual, but she could hear the strain in her voice. “That or- well, everything else. My da used to joke I’d start throwing up when it was the only way my body could make me lie down.” He’d told her once, when it was grief for her mother sickening her, that Adaia had been the same.  

He was immediately remorseful, which of course made her feel worse for her still-burning anger. “You should have said!” he scolded her, and she arched an eyebrow.  

“And have you look at me as you are now, like I’m some delicate noble maid in need of your protection? No, thank you. Someone fetch me a mop, I’ll clean this up.”  

It was, all things considered, not an auspicious beginning to their search for Brother Genetivi. Perhaps, in retrospect, Luna should have taken it as a bad omen.   

Chapter Text

The problem with Seluna Tabris, Morrigan had realised, was not that she was reckless, or naive, or half-suicidal when it pleased her. It was not her constant collecting of strays, the sorrows of others, or the last word in an argument. It was not even her taste in companions, for all that Alistair and her pet mages irritated her. These were flaws, true, but they were no longer her greatest flaw, now that Morrigan knew her better.   

The real problem with Seluna Tabris was that she spoke to the world with a smile on her lips and a lie in her throat, and the world in turn danced to her tune. It was not magic – magic had rules, magic was reaching through a gap in the Veil and pulling the Fade into the world, in ribbons of fire or visions of horror or shifts in flesh and form to allow her to run in the skin of another. It was worse than magic. It was lawless, impossible, ungovernable- and it worked, despite Morrigan’s every instinct that it should not.  

Her first warning should have been the bandits outside Lothering. They’d been grim, grimy creatures, likely deserters from one army or another on the run after Ostagar, and their little checkpoint on the Imperial Highway was likely lucrative for them, given the number of straggling refugee families they’d passed on the road. Their weapons were still sharp though, and naked in the morning air, making their intent plain even before their leader spoke.  

“There’s a toll to pass to Lothering now, friend,” he said, addressing Alistair with a vicious grin, as if she and Seluna were not even there. “Your coinpurse looks light, but I’m sure we can come to some arrangement-”  

Seluna’s head had snapped up then, bruise-blue eyes locked on the man in front of them. She did not reach for her blades, to Morrigan’s surprise, but stepped between the bandit captain and Alistair with a false, glittering smile. It was the first smile she’d ever seen from the girl, then, and she did not like it.  

“Brave lads, you are, collecting tolls even as the darkspawn are about to sweep down on you,” she said, condescending indulgence dripping from her lips, “and so poorly armoured, too! I wouldn’t want to have set up camp on the road they’ll be walking, but I’m just a city girl, what do I know?”  

“Darkspawn don’t use roads,” the biggest of them said, scornfully, but Seluna only tilted her head at him, as though he were a child telling her a story.  

“Really? You should have been with us yesterday. Those – hurlocks, wasn’t it, Alistair?  - were leading one of their ogres down the old Ostagar road, and there’ll be thousands behind them.”  

“Ignore her,” the leader said, but perhaps, if he’d looked back at his men, he might have been a little less cavalier. Some of them were already backing away from the elf girl and the spark of madness in those hopeless eyes, that glittering smile. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”  

“Likely not,” Seluna agreed, still cheerful, still sweet, “but I wouldn’t want to be blocking the road when they arrive. They don’t carry coin, you see, just the Blight in their veins and hate for the living in their hearts.”  

It was a bright morning, but the air seemed to chill at her words, as if a shadow had crossed the sun.   

“Look, girl,” the leader said, in a low voice, as though they were the only two people on the road, “we’re simple folk, not asking for much beyond the toll-”  

“And good for you, to so bravely keep your post despite the army’s losses,” she said, with false sincerity, “but you seem like smart men, so I’ll give you the warning I’d give anyone on this road with a will to live – take whatever you’ve already stolen, and run to the Hinterlands, or the Southern Hills, or the Dalish woods, and grow fat and happy on it, because the only thing left for you to harvest on this road is Death.”  

She’d stepped very close as she spoke, face turned up to his as if in expectation of a kiss, and it was only when the man’s eyes turned huge that Morrigan realised she had a blade at his belly. She had not even seen her draw it.   

The bandit chief had backed away from her with tentative care, and his men had gathered around him in a murmuring circle, and Luna smiled.  

“I knew you were good, clever lads,” she said, sweetly, and with her words, they were transformed- grizzled bandits to green boys fleeing a campfire story and a woman’s disdain. It was almost eerie, how she could tell the world so shameless a lie and it would bend to her will like a willow to a gale.   

She was doing it now, on the road to the monastery of Honnleath. Alistair had not liked her proposed travel plans any more than he had the proposal that he travel with the party visiting the monastery, but her sickness had brought out his chivalrous streak as nothing else had – he fussed over the girl as if she were some delicate noble blossom, prone to swooning or melancholy when she did not get her way. Worse than that, he’d become almost as protective as her cursed Mabari, practically growling at Morrigan or Melia if they dared to look her way.  

“I’m fine, Alistair,” she said, the fifth time he asked her if she needed to rest since they’d started that morning. “I’m usually fine, as long as I drink the tea Morrigan made me, or you’d have noticed before now.”  

Alistair shot her a suspicious look regardless. “And what exactly does she put in this tea?”  

“Oh, I’m sure it’s lethally poisonous,” she replied, cheerfully, “which is why I’m still up and walking around rather than retching into the gutter again.”  

Melia’s brow was furrowed – the girl was still nervous to speak up before a Templar, even one so lacklustre as Alistair: “Did the Senior Enchanter-?”  

“Yes, Wynne had a look at me before we left Redcliffe,” Seluna assured her, which was news to Morrigan, but something of a relief. If the girl had not already figured out her condition, surely the older woman would have informed her of it. “There’s no real sickness that she can find to heal, but melancholy can have such effects, and the Maker knows we have plenty to mope over if I stop to think for long enough.”  

It was a lie, but had Morrigan not known the truth behind it, she might have accepted it as easily as Melia or Alistair. Why she felt the need to lie about it rather than seeking aid was its own puzzle, and one that Morrigan was unfortunately obliged to solve in order to achieve her ends.   

“Ostagar was a great loss to us all,” Alistair agreed, laying a hand on her shoulder with great solemnity.   

Morrigan sniggered to see her shrug him off. “So was conscription, Alistair,” she said, with a brightness that almost disguised the venom beneath. Alistair did not seem to have noticed the anger just yet, though – he frowned down at her with sympathy, the barbed nature of her comment not hitting home for a long few moments. And after that, they were distracted, of course, by the woman in the road.  

“Please!” she cried out as she appeared from around a bend. “My carriage, messeres, it’s overturned-”  

Alistair stepped forward immediately. “Of course we’ll help! Lead the way, please!” He jogged ahead, and Seluna moved to follow, only to have Melia catch her arm.  

“Luna, I don’t like this,” she said, a tremble in her voice.   

Seluna squeezed her arm. “Stay back with Morrigan, then, Mel. If there’s trouble, throw up a barrier, but I won’t let them hurt you.”  

As she turned to follow Alistair, Morrigan shot the other mage a wolfish grin, and she visibly flinched. Oh, this would be fun. Alistair had half-forgotten she was an apostate, but Melia was as foolish and fragile as Leliana’s elfroot maid, or Flemeth’s disobedient daughter.  

“Poor little mouse,” she murmured, once Seluna was out of earshot. “Are you starting to wonder if the Templars might have been kinder to you?”  

Her spine stiffened – a surprise to know that she had one, but then, Seluna’s had also surprised her.   

“Do you know anything of templars?” the girl said, without meeting her eyes. “Do you know what it is to spend your life watched at every moment, as you sleep, as you bathe-”  

She squeaked as Morrigan shoved her head down, a breath before an arrow split the air where her ear had been.  

Up ahead, the woman’s allies had already moved to close with the Wardens. Alistair, caught unawares, only barely managed to get his shield up in time to avoid a blade in his side, the movements of his sword hesitant and uncertain – he was unused to fighting enemies that looked quite so human – but Seluna... Her blades were a blur of silver and red, and there was no hesitation in her, no mercy, as she stepped behind Alistair’s attacker and slit his throat neatly from ear to ear. She wheeled, then, grabbing the woman who’d lured them over by her hair and plunging her other blade into the side of her neck. Idiot girl! To grab the mage, she’d turned her back on the archer, who was even now training an arrow on her back. Morrigan was already rolling to her feet, forcing her bones to recall the shape and scent and substance of a bear, but she could not be fast enough, would not get there in time-  

There was a thunk of the arrow slamming into the wood of Alistair’s shield, raised over their heads, and then Morrigan was on him with a roar, the leather of his armour no match for the crushing jaws of the bear. She shook him until she felt the satisfying snap of his neck, then dropped him and wheeled back around to the fray. The bear did not like the clash of steel or the stink of human blood so close, but it was Morrigan who wore its skin, and she was the huntress, never the hunted. The second archer managed to fire off an arrow as she charged him, but it barely pierced her thick hide, and then she was upon him, his head sent spinning from his shoulders like a child’s top. Behind her, there were no more clashes of steel, only the harsh pants of the Wardens, seemingly finished with their bloody work. Only one of the assassins still drew breath, and he lay in a crumpled heap at Alistair’s feet, blood oozing from a cut in his scalp into his fair hair.  

Luna’s head snapped to her as she blundered out of the brush, and to her ursine senses there was something almost beautiful about her in that moment: the heat of prey-blood spattered across her skin, the adrenaline rush of a successful hunt- and then she spoke, and of course, the spell was broken:   

“Where’s Melia?”  

Morrigan huffed, and rolled herself back into her two-legged form. “I didn’t realise you required my services as a nursemaid for your new protegee, Tabris. Why weren’t you watching her yourself? And why is this one-” she prodded the unconscious assassin with her toe, “still breathing?”  

“I want to know who sent him,” she said, darkly, rolling him onto his side. “Help me tie his hands. Alistair, go find Melia. And be nice,” she added, more like a schoolmistress than a warrior maid with shards of skull still clinging to her blade.  

“You think they were sent after you personally,” Morrigan surmised, divesting the man of his weapons and healing potions. If they’d had time, she would have stripped him of his armour too, but that would risk him waking unbound, and that was not something she wished to risk, with Seluna and her babe so close at hand.  

“Me or Alistair,” she agreed, “or both of us, if this is a little love-gift from Teyrn Loghain.”  

This raised only more questions for Morrigan. Alistair, she could well imagine, inspired murderous intent in anyone who’d ever met him, but she could not imagine the man to possess any special knowledge or ability beyond the average Grey Warden or his exceptionally irritating personality. As for Seluna, the girl seemed more inclined to wriggle out of a fight with her extraordinary talent for lying than to start one, and besides, what girl from the slums had enemies who could afford assassins to hunt her down so far from her home?  

“You have a strange concept of love-gifts,” she commented, glancing around at the corpses which now surrounded them. “Do most alienage girls expect suitors to bring them the severed heads of their enemies?”  

“Do most woods-witches?” Seluna retorted, seizing the legs of one of the bodies to begin hauling them out of the road.  

Morrigan made an incoherent sound of exasperation, and moved to help her. “You know, a fireball would clean these up much more quickly,” she reminded her.  

“And leave a mile-wide trail for whoever Loghan sends to finish up the job,” she argued. “Besides, knowing you, you’d make sure to get the prisoner in there just to avoid loose ends.”  

“Loose ends are sloppy work,” Morrigan replied, and then wrinkled her nose. How like Flemeth she sounded! “You make yourself easy to track every time you stop to rescue kittens from trees.”  

“Do I, or do I make people more inclined to hide me when I need it?” she said, philosophically. “Maker, you shemlen are heavy.”  

“And you elves are clumsy. Lift with your knees, if you insist on helping. You’ll be no good to any of us when your prisoner wakes up if you throw your back out now.”  

“How old do you think I am?” Seluna demanded, but Morrigan was not given the chance to answer – the others had returned. Seluna rose from her crouch with lupine grace, her gentle smile a too-obvious lie when her mouth was smeared with blood. “Melia! Thank Andraste, you’re safe! We were worried-”  

“You- you killed these people?” Melia said, a tremble in her voice.   

“Not quickly enough.” Morrigan nudged the bound prisoner with one toe, rolling him onto his back. An elf, she noted, younger than she’d expected, with hair almost as fair as Seluna’s. “You warriors are getting sloppy.”  

“You could’ve been quicker off the ma- Mel?” Seluna never got to the end of her retort, as the little mage folded to her knees. “Mel? Are you alright?”  

“You- you didn’t have to kill them!” she stuttered, staring into space as though it was painful to look at them. “You could’ve knocked them out- there are sleep spells-” Seluna crouched, reached out to take hold of her shoulders, but the girl flinched away: “Don’t touch me!”  

“Melia,” she said again, voice low and soothing as she tried to weave her net of lies around the girl, to soothe her back into the naive child she had been but moments before, “it’s me, it’s Luna. You’re safe now-“  

Melia scrabbled back, grazing her fingers on the gravel in her haste. “No, don’t- I don’t know you!” Her eyes were wide and wild as a frightened rabbit’s, the terror of prey in a predator’s shadow, and a shudder ran through her as she glimpsed Seluna through this sheltered child’s eyes: a woman who wore gore like a queen wore her gowns was likely as fearful as she was lovely.  

Seluna was reaching for her again, to embrace or to comfort, but that seemed only to frighten her more: the girl span on her heel and fled towards the treeline. Seluna moved to follow her but-  

“Let me.” To Morrigan’s astonishment, it was Alistair who had seized her arm. “She’s panicking. You should- stay here, interrogate the prisoner, deal with the bodies. Maybe clean yourself up,” he added, looking her over with a shadow of Melia’s fear in his eyes. Perhaps he had not expected this from Seluna either. More fool him. There was a reason besides spite that Morrigan had chosen her to hold the knife.   

It was only in Alistair’s eyes that Seluna seemed to realise her own appearance, and beneath the drying blood, her face began to colour with something like shame. It did not suit her, for all that most of the time Morrigan had thought her a wan, colourless thing. She dropped her gaze to her boots, and the wild beauty that had, for a moment, captivated her, faded like mist in sunlight.   

Alistair moved to follow Melia into the trees, and suddenly they were alone, but for the bodies, and the prisoner.  

“Are you sure you meant to leave this one alive?” she queried, nudging him with her foot. “We could simply dispose of him now, before he can cause more trouble or you can get attached.”  

“I want my theory confirmed before I make any decisions I can’t take back,” she replied, still not meeting her gaze, as if to be conscious of the blood on her skin was far more shameful than shedding it.  

“That is the reasonable attitude I most admire in a captor.” The prisoner had awoken, it seemed, but if he knew the danger he was in, it did not show in his voice – low and playful, almost flirtatious, as if he could charm his way out of his bonds. “I would understand if you put me to the sword - turnabout is fair play, after all – but perhaps with two such lovely and reasonable gaolers, there can be some compromise reached.” His voice was unfamiliar to Morrigan’s ears, lilting, almost musical. She did not trust it. It dripped with honey and poison.  

Luna crouched, tilting his head with one hand so he looked only at her. His hair fell away from his face, revealing a catlike smile and high cheekbones cupped by intricate tattoos. “Who sent you?” she said, with a smile as sharp as the blade she pressed to his throat. “Tell me, and I might let you live.”  

“I do enjoy living,” he agreed, cheerfully, “and as my previous employers will not grant me such a blessing after my failure, I’ll take my chances with you, if you’ll permit me.”  

“Give me some names, and I’ll consider it.”  

“In that case, I’ll start with my own: Zevran Arainai, Zev to my friends, formerly of Antiva, currently of... wherever this charming little patch of dirt may be. Have we crossed the border to Orlais yet?”  

“It’s adorable you think playing stupid is going to help you here. I want your employer, and your patron, if you have one.”  

“You think I am adorable? Such praise, from one so lovely,” he smirked, just as if she did not have a blade to his throat- or as if, perhaps, he enjoyed the feeling of her steel against his skin. “I am of the Antivan Crows. I assume you have heard of us?”  

“Antiva’s a sea and a mountain range away from us,” Seluna said, with a frown. “Long way to travel just to see two people dead.”  

“A likely story, given that there are cutthroats on every street corner for hire,” Morrigan said, with a roll of her eyes. “An assassin? ”  

“Of the first order, my sweet. Your enemies did not underestimate your skill,” he said, his eyes and dazzling smile shifting to Morrigan, until Seluna snapped her fingers at him.  

“Eyes on me, darling. I’d hate to feel like I don’t have your full attention,” she said, her voice an unfamiliar purr. “Now, who cares so much about our little party to go to the trouble of hiring Crows to mob us on the road?”  

“You are Wardens, are you not?” He laughed at her surprise, his throat vibrating against the edge of her blade as if he had nothing to fear. “Don’t look so surprised, my dear, you have not been as subtle on the road as you might have hoped. Your Teyrn Loghain wishes to have no Grey Wardens within the bounds of his kingdom, and who am I to gainsay him?”  

Seluna snorted. “I’m not staking a claim to that piece of shit. And your Crows took his coin?”  

“Those who employ assassins tend to be very wicked people,” the assassin said. “Hence, my desire to leave their service, and take on a slightly more pleasant avenue of employment, if you will have me.”  

“I see.” Seluna pursed her lips into a heart that could be thoughtful or coy. “And we’ve immediately won your loyalty with our strength and skill, is that the story you’re going with?”  

“And your luminous beauty, of course,” he grinned, then, in a poor attempt at sincerity: “In all seriousness, there is nothing for me with the Crows now that I have failed to kill you. Death or victory is a very strong motivator until death arrives at the door, and then it very quickly becomes no motivator at all.”  

“Very sensible,” Seluna said, sympathetically. “ Such a good reason to let you into my camp so you can cut my throat when I’m sleeping. I did always want to die in my own bed, but I envisioned a far more comfortable bed, and a far more pleasant cause than a knife to the neck.”  

“A reasonable concern,” he agreed. “I would not leave me on watch alone, were I in your shoes. But if I slit your throat, who will protect me when the Crows come to clean up the loose end I have left? I doubt I could find better bodyguards even if I had the coin to pay them, which, as you may have noticed, I do not.”  

Morrigan had heard enough. She did not care for his honeyed words, his too-charming smiles, the hungry way he looked at Seluna, as if he wanted to lick the drying blood from her cheek.  

“So, you propose to join us, that we may protect you from your former employers?” she said, folding her arms. “What good, pray tell, could you do for us? As far as I can see, you are an assassin who has failed at your calling, and seeks to avoid your inevitable fate.”  

“An apt judgement,” he acknowledged, turning that sparkling smile on her, “though I would not describe the Crows as a ‘calling’ so much as an indenture, and one I am glad to finally escape.” He glanced back to Seluna, as if she was the one he truly needed to impress. Which was true, given that Morrigan had little mercy to offer him “But I have many skills beyond fighting – I have deft hands, light feet, and a quick wit. I will be a sword raised in your defence, a knife in the dark to your enemies, or a warm body in your bed, if that takes your fancy.”  

“Tempting offer,” Seluna said, which she could not mean, because she could not be such a fool. “Might I ask what’s in it for you?”  

“My life, ideally,” he smiled, and was that colour creeping into the back of Seluna’s neck? Surely not. “I would be very little use to you dead. My freedom, which I have not seen since the Crows bought me on the slave markets. A chance, perhaps, to see what my life might be, without them on my tail.”  

Of course such a tale pulled on Seluna’s soft heart. She tucked her feet beneath herself into a crouch, and reached out a hand to help him up. “Fine, offer accepted. But you don’t get your pretty knives back until we’re in a fight, and you hand them off to us until we can trust you.” The fool.  

“A fair and generous offer, from a fair and generous lady,” he agreed, springing to his feet as he pressed a kiss to her fingertips. “I will not cause you a single regret, except possibly that of a broken heart.”  

Seluna laughed. “You can tone down the charm now I’m not going to kill you. Your life no longer depends on your flirting skills.”  

“Alas for me. You seemed a lady who might appreciate a little flirtation,” he teased.   

She almost smiled at him, Morrigan was certain, but the expression died on her lips as she recalled the bodies that surrounded them. “Your companions...”  

“Leave them in the woods,” he replied, which was not what Morrigan had expected at all, after all the melodramatics of Redcliffe’s death rites. “We live as Crows, we die as Crows, we feed the crows that fell before us.”  

“Such a cheerful motto,” Morrigan said, “I’m astonished you could ever want to leave.”  

In another man, or perhaps, at another time, she might have appreciated such practicality. There was little difference in her eyes between the disposal of human and animal bodies. At a certain point, meat became meat, however many claims towards intellect it might have made in life. Now, though, she observed him with squinting suspicion – was his callousness regarding their bodies a sign that he was telling the truth, or a warning he would discard theirs just as easily?  

“You watch me with such ferocity,” he commented, as they lifted the last one between them. “Tell me, are you perhaps laying the evil eye upon me, as the seers of Rivain do?”  

She sniffed. “Northern superstition. Why would I waste a curse on you when I could rend you with tooth and claw?”  

He laughed at that, as though it had been a joke rather than a promise. “Having already spared my life, your charming commander might object to finding me shredded by claws other than her own. A curse, however, I think she’d turn a blind eye to.”  

“You think she’s my commander?” The thought was ridiculous – if anything, Seluna was her charge, a burden rather than any kind of chieftain.   

“Is that not the word you would use? Forgive me,” Again with that dazzling smile, as if it would make her forget the knives and poisons Seluna had stripped from him, “but she has a presence, no? I am sure in a day or so, I will find my own feet dancing to whatever tune she sets.”  

It did not even take a day, in fact. By the time the fire was built and the cookpot beginning to steam, he seemed almost to believe his own story of a slave-assassin longing for freedom and receiving it at the hand of a woman he was sent to slay – he was almost eager to dig the latrine and gather firewood, if it gave him more opportunity to whisper in her ear. Ordinarily, the girl gaining a confidant would have been all to Morrigan’s gain – she did not want her wide-eyed consolations or prying questions about her recent experiences in the Fade – except for the fact that she felt obligated to act as chaperone to ensure the silly chit did not end up with her neck broken at the bottom of a ravine. And that, in turn, meant she had to observe a Seluna who was again a stranger to her just as she’d thought she was beginning to be predictable.   

She’d known, of course, that there had to be something beneath the hollow-eyed, shambling girl who’d first come to Flemeth’s hut, though she hadn’t expected her to live long enough to reveal it, then. She hadn’t expected the sly smile or the glib tongue, the web of lies she could spin to twist the world to her whims, but the gentleness, the city-softness that spoke of a life unaccustomed to the cruelty of nature, that she had predicted. She folded every stray she came across into that too-soft heart, whether it was a dog or a blood mage or an assassin, and somehow none of her strays had lashed out at her yet. Morrigan could still recall the bruises she’d received the one time she’d attempted to bring home a stray of her own – a fawn she’d found, curled by its mother’s corpse. How frantically it had kicked at her ribs and her arms even as she forced a veil of magic down to soothe it. How calm and docile it had become then – it had not even struggled when Flemeth had cut its throat.  

“Clever girl,” she’d said, “That will be tender meat for the pot.” She’d tried to paint over that memory a thousand times, tried to persuade herself that the fawn had always been meant to become the dinner of something stronger, but Seluna made the childish, pointless grief she’d felt in that moment swim to the surface, like a bruise come unhealed at the sight of her bleeding heart.   

Tenderness, compassion, pity, whether directed towards her strays or (unnecessarily) to Morrigan herself, these were motives she’d become accustomed to in the girl, however alien they were to Morrigan. They drove her collection of strays, her deployment of mercy or aid where she would have handed out death, even her glittering lies were usually deployed to weave a beautiful, gentle world that charmed her marks so much that for a moment, they believed it too – believed that they were frightened children rather than blood mages or bandits, people who only needed the chance she offered to turn themselves around.   

But she could not see compassion or pity in how she spoke with Zevran – nothing so tender or gentle there. Their every exchange sparked like flint and steel, glittering smiles and quick witticisms and almost-flirtations, lively and quick and as insincere as she’d ever seen the girl. Naive as she could be, even Seluna could not yet trust the man enough to take his attempts to charm her seriously, but she seemed to enjoy them nonetheless, preening at his compliments and returning his smiles as if they had not laid his kin out for the beasts mere hours ago.   

She was not the only one disconcerted by this shift in the girl. With her ears carefully attuned to the sounds of the wild, it had not been difficult to overhear Alistair and Melia’s conversation as they picked their way towards the fire they’d built. A strange pair they made, Templar and blood mage, but apparently they were united by how Seluna’s transformation had shaken them.  

“-like I don’t even know her.” She only caught the end of the sentence, but Melia’s voice was low and raw from crying.  

“I understand how you feel, believe me. Before today, I’d’ve said- well, never mind that now. Are you sure you’re alright?” Of course a maiden in distress prompted Alistair’s seldom-used chivalry – he was so ready to believe in a woman’s weakness, a failing Flemeth had ascribed to all his kind.   

A wet chuckle. “As alright as I can be, I think? I’m sorry, you probably think-”  

“No! Not at all, it’s natural-”  

“A blood mage who faints at the sight of a little blood, it’s stupid, right? But I was never much of a blood mage, and- and I never saw anything die before, Alistair! Not even a chicken!” There was a tremble in her voice, and Morrigan could picture her clinging to his arm, pathetically grateful for his pity.  

“I remember what it’s like there,” he said, which she did not expect. “I never realised- but of course it’s a shock, isn’t it? Especially from-”  

“Someone like her,” Melia finished, eagerly.  

“I thought she was so gentle, when Duncan first brought her in,” he admitted, and Morrigan realised, with an unpleasant jolt, that she’d been as much a fool as he had. Flemeth had always told her that men were ever-willing to believe a woman weak and in need of rescue, but what had she assumed about the girl since the moment they’d first met?   

“She didn’t even want to kill darkspawn, or abominations,” he continued, “but those people...”  

“It isn’t- natural, is it?” Melia’s voice was hesitant, uncertain. “For someone so kind to kill so- easily. She didn’t even seem to realise what she’d done, like a cat with a mouse.”  

If she’d said those words to Morrigan, she would have laughed in her face. There was nothing more natural in this world than killing. But Alistair only murmured something she did not catch, because at that moment, she heard a twig snap, and a flash of pale hair vanish between branches as Seluna fled.  

Morrigan let her run – the girl had more than proven that she was not helpless today, and if she got lost, her trail would not prove difficult to follow to the nose of a bear or a wolf. Still, there was an uncomfortable twist in her own stomach as she returned to their chosen campsite. She’d become used to having the girl within her line of sight, or at least within earshot, and to let her wander off alone with an assassin around went against every instinct she’d developed over the months they’d travelled together.   

Everything about this evening set her teeth on edge, in truth, even with Zevran within her line of sight at every moment. Their campsites were usually hideously noisy – Leliana plucking at some tune on a lute, Seluna chattering to anyone who’d stop for more than a moment, Melia begging extra magic lessons from Wynne – but the silence that ruled now was far more disturbing than the ruckus had ever been. She had never liked a silent forest. It meant something fearful hunted within it, and that she should hurry home if she did not want a fight.  

Melia seemed to sense it too – by unspoken agreement, she laid her bedroll out in Alistair’s tent rather than Seluna’s, and retired to it early, leaving first watch to the Templar. Morrigan could have set up her own tent and retired before second watch, but there was that terrible quiet, and somewhere, out in the dark, Seluna, and the child she carried. Instead, she took up her own vigil in the girl’s tent, and was greeted with a string of hushed curses when her unwitting hostess tripped over her.  

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” she hissed, recalling the thin canvas walls.  

“Do you greet all your bedmates so sweetly?” Morrigan retorted. “There is an assassin in our camp, thanks to you, and your protegee has chosen to return to the familiar protection of the Templars. Or one particular Templar, in this case. Either way, I’m not sleeping alone with his knife at our backs.”  

“Charming,” Luna grunted, clambering over her to lay out her own bedroll. “I don’t suppose you saved me any dinner?”  

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not your mother,” she said, but handed her a lukewarm, greasy flatbread anyway.  

Seluna took it and chewed it in uncharacteristic silence. Perhaps she’d used up her share of witticism on Zevran, but Morrigan had the disconcerting feeling that there was something more to her silence, and that as the interloper in her tent, she was beholden to do something about it.  

“I’m surprised you let their opinions affect you,” she commented, lightly. “Mine never seem to.”  

“I listen to your opinions all the time. I just don’t often agree with them.” A long pause, then: “You’re not angry with me?”  

“About the assassin? I’m furious.”  

“About the ritual.” A heavy sigh, and a rustle as she fell back against her bedroll. “You didn’t want to do it, I asked you to- ‘act against your nature’, as you put it. You didn’t care about that kid, you didn’t want to go back into the Fade-”  

“Are you implying you forced me, Tabris?” She prodded what might have been her cheek with one toe. “You give yourself too much credit. You asked, and I agreed, for a price we are yet to agree on.”  

“They drowned you, Morrigan,” she said, and there was some emotion struggling to break free in those words, like a bird in a snare. “They drowned you, and sent you to face a demon, and I-”  

“Held a knife to my throat, as you were asked to,” Morrigan finished, and hoped cool practicality would snap that struggling emotion’s neck. “You were much gentler about it than Mother, I must say. I believe she left a scar, the first time she sent me into the Fade alone.  

Another silence, but when she spoke again, the girl seemed to have pulled herself together a little. “I never thanked you for doing it, even though you didn’t want to.”  

“I didn’t do it for your gratitude.”  

“You have a price, I know. But I wanted to thank you anyway, so- here.” Another rustling as she rummaged in her back, and then a solid leather rectangle – a book, she realised – was pressed into her hands. “For you.”  

The temptation was too much to resist – Morrigan snapped her fingers and veilfire danced through the air, illuminating the chased silver tree on the cover, and the worn black leather.   

“The symbol looks like a vhenandal,” the girl continued, “but the text... I think it’s Chasind.”  

“Where did you find this?” Her voice sounded distant to her own ears at the strangeness, the impossibility of this moment. She’d searched the whole Circle for this book, had been prepared to steal or barter anything for the secrets it contained, and now- “You’re just- giving it to me?”  

“It’s the least I can do, after you went back into the Fade for me,” she said, and the beautiful lie was there in her voice, spinning out a world where Morrigan had acted kindly despite herself, and was now rewarded not with payment, but with immeasurable kindness in turn. A world that glittered with the impossible promise of one of Leliana’s fairytales, where she could fall into this girl’s arms and kiss her peach-soft cheek and not want to bite down on the meat of her heart. A world where Seluna was not the foolish young mother, and Morrigan the child-stealing witch.  

“You- have my thanks,” she said, and hated the huskiness that crept into her tone. She had everything she could want, there was no reason for the lump that had formed in her throat. “I will study it, see if it contains anything of use.”  

“I thought-” A hesitation, and then the girl pushed on regardless: “I thought it might be Flemeth’s.”  

Unthinkable, that this girl had known what she held, and surrendered it for nothing at all. “And you’re just- giving it to me?”  

“You fought a demon for Connor’s soul, just because I asked for it."  

I fought a demon because I need you in my debt, because I need the child you carry. But she could not say that aloud, could not confess it when for the first time she felt close to gaining the girl’s trust.   

“This is worth more than any child’s soul, mage or no.”  

“Not to me,” she said, simply, “but I’m glad I could find what you were looking for.”  

“You’ve been keeping this from me since the tower,” she realised, and while she resented it, a part of her respected the girl more for it.  

“After what you said there, I didn’t want to trust you with it,” she admitted, “but today I realised...”   

Her voice trailed off into nothing, and Morrigan was forced to prod her again and then demand aloud: “Realised what?”  

“People do terrible things on their worst days.” Her voice was soft, almost an admission of guilt. “If I don’t want to be judged by my worst day, what right do I have to judge yours?”  

Morrigan almost laughed. “You think that wretched little place constituted my worst day?” A thousand better examples flashed before her eyes: the fawn in her arms, so warm, its heart beating rapid against her own, suddenly limp and still and silent. Flemeth explaining her place in ending the Blight, and the cruelty of her laugh when Morrigan had dared to ask But what if I don’t wish to bear his child? Seluna’s sloe-blue eyes, wide with betrayal, as Morrigan plunged her staff through the desire demon’s belly.  

“I think you’ve had more worst days than best ones,” she said, with certainty, without pity, and Morrigan felt the glittering lie reach out its tendrils to swallow her, “and I think the only way to trust someone after seeing them like that is to give them a chance, so maybe this is yours.”  

“You are a fool, Seluna Tabris,” she said, but that lump in her throat refused to go away.  

“Perhaps. But we’ll never know, if you decide not to make me into one.”   

The lie spread itself before her, and in one world, she knew, she fell into it, into Seluna’s arms, into the deceitful softness of trust which closed like a leash about her throat. In another, she fled this tent and this girl and this alien power, and took shelter in nature’s familiar, cruel embrace. But in this world, she took her book and stumbled from the tent into the dying firelight, and did not return until the end of her watch, when Seluna lay soft and sleeping, and the strange flames she had stoked were naught but ashes.  

Chapter Text

If Luna had hoped Honnleath would provide the pastoral peace Redcliffe had sorely lacked, she would have been deeply disappointed. No sooner had they left Alistair to investigate Genetivi’s monastery than they encountered darkspawn, demons, and a golem that showed no signs of animation despite the control rod a merchant had handed her on the Lake Calenhad Road.

“Are all your Fereldan villages this exciting?” Zevran asked, sinking a blade into a hurlock’s neck before it could reach Melia.

“No, we put on these shows especially for tourists,” she replied, whipping her own knife up just in time to block their leader’s sword. “Are you enjoying it?”

“The effects are particularly impressive,” he answered, tossing a knife past her head into something that squelched unpleasantly. “You Fereldans take these things very seriously!”

“There is something very wrong with both of you!” Melia interjected, a breathless trill from the cart she’d climbed to cast spells from.

Morrigan growled something incomprehensible in retort, and Luna bit back the impulse to intervene. Her involvement would do little good now – Melia still shied away from her when she spoke, and she could not really blame her. She saw something of herself in the younger girl, or something of the sheltered girl she’d once been, and would never be again. Likely her younger self would fear her now too, and perhaps she’d be right to. It felt almost mechanical now, to kick the hurlock alpha off the end of her blade and launch herself at the crossbow-wielder behind him. Darkspawn barely resembled people to her any more, and it was Melia who vomited when the fight was done. Between Morrigan’s tea and her own hardening heart, her own battle-sickness seemed to be fading. She didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse, but it kept her alive, and aware enough that now she was the one pulling Melia’s hair back into its braid. She still flinched away when she’d realised it was Luna who’d touched her, but it was a start.

“You get used to it,” she said, as comforting as she could manage while still spattered with gore. “I promise, it’s hard now, but-”

“I don’t want to get used to it!” Melia snapped, turning away from her. “This shouldn’t be something you just- get used to!”

Luna gnawed at her lip, glancing between her companions. She would have turned to Wynne, who knew Melia best, or perhaps sweet Leliana, but they were on the road to Denerim now, with Sten and Jowan, and Alistair was still at the monastery. Of her current companions... well, neither were inclined to lend the poor girl a shoulder to cry on. So she softened her face, her posture, tried to wipe the worst of the gore from her skin, and carefully moved closer to her.

“If we lived in kinder times, it wouldn’t be,” she said, gently, “but this is a Blight, and we are Wardens, and we get used to bloodshed, or we die.”

“Maybe I should have died then,” she muttered, but she was still trembling. “Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen to blood mages?”

“Don’t say that!” Luna snapped, and then bit her tongue – she had not meant to shout at the fragile younger girl. But she was not the only one who had spoken: Morrigan stalked up to the mage-girl with a sneer on her violet lips.

“If you truly believe that, you are a far greater fool than even I thought possible,” she growled, seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her hard. “You have, for some unearthly reason, been given a second chance to survive despite your lack of aptitude for it, and you would whinge like an infant and throw it away for what? Fear of a little blood?”

“F-fear of killing,” Melia corrected, showing more spine than Luna might have expected. “I don’t want to become-“

“What? A monster?” Morrigan laughed. “Some would say you became that the moment you were born with magic in your veins, or the moment you put it to work through blood. You are a little late to worry about monstrosity now, little dove.”

“A murderer,” Melia said, soft but defiant, and Luna stepped up behind her squeezing her shoulder lightly.

“Of course you don’t,” she said, soft and soothing, “but do you remember the first thing you said to me when we met in the Circle?”

Melia gulped and nodded, and Luna continued: “You said you didn’t want to hurt anyone, you just wanted your freedom, and that was true, in a way, wasn’t it? You didn’t want to hurt anyone, but you were willing to, if it meant getting free. I know that feeling, believe me. It’s why I recruited you.” She hadn’t realised, till she said it aloud, that it was true.

“You recruited me because you thought I’d hurt people?” Melia sounded wounded, almost disgusted.

“Because I thought you knew there were things worth fighting, and, yes, killing for. Your life, your freedom, or the life of another – you were fighting for these things when the Circle fell. Are you really going to give up now that you’re out of the tower walls? I thought you were stronger than that.”

Melia’s spine uncurled, her chin jutted out, and she yanked away from her place between them, so violently that Morrigan nearly stumbled into Luna, who caught and steadied her, to a glare from the witch.

“I didn’t ask to become this!” Melia snapped, defiant now rather than shaken. Good. Better that she still had some fight in her.

“You asked to live,” Luna said. “I saved you in the only way I could.” She wondered if Duncan would have said those same words to her, had he lived. Except she’d never asked him for her own life, only Soris’, and he had refused her, and the thought of him, the thought of that half-remembered nightmare, brought bile to her throat.

She did not expect Zevran to speak – she’d almost forgotten he was there – but when he did, his voice was soft but insistent, pulling her back to the present with words and the warmth of his hand on her back.

“Sometimes we buy our survival in the blood of another. If you’d grown up in Antiva, or Denerim, perhaps, you’d know that.”

Strange, to hear her mother’s words in an assassin’s mouth. Adaia had said that to her, once and only once, when she’d woken her stumbling in after a late night with dark stains on her clothes. Luna had not understood it then, had sobbed and clung to her, determined to keep her safe from whatever demanded such a price. She would never have succeeded, she knew that now, but she’d learned her mother’s lesson in time to preserve her own life. She hoped Melia would learn that lesson in time, too. She didn’t want to see the girl die.

Melia’s full mouth was a taut line now, lips pale with fear or anger, but she wasn’t shaking any more.

“And if that isn’t how I want to live?” she demanded.

Morrigan snorted, but Luna laid a hand on her arm, lightly, and hoped she would understand the meaning behind it.

“Then go, now,” she said, simply. “I’m not the real Warden-Commander, I can’t send men to hunt you down, even if I wanted to.”

Melia stood still, uncertain. “You don’t mean that. This is a test.”

Luna gave a hissing sigh, wishing she had more patience. Melia probably deserved more patience. “I’m not a fucking Templar, Mel. If you want to run, go now, and I’ll tell Alistair... I don’t know, that the darkspawn got you, or something.”

It would hurt him, she knew, to lose yet another Warden, even a recruit he hadn’t wanted like Melia, but he would survive. He would have to – if she wasn’t binding Melia to her own conscription, why should she trap her with emotional blackmail?

“You can go,” she repeated, almost coaxing. A part of her hoped she would run, that she’d choose the uncertainty of freedom and what innocence she still had rather than following the bloody path Luna had cut for them both. She could remember Melia as the girl who’d chosen the unknown over becoming a killer, and love her the more for how little alike they were.

But Melia did not move. Her brow was furrowed, as if trying to understand why Luna would offer this.

“You think I’m too weak?” she said, finally, like this was some twisted test Luna had set her, some strange second Harrowing.

“I think you’re naive,” she said, with what little gentleness she had left. “I think maybe you didn’t know what your freedom would cost, and now you don’t want to pay it.” Like the Elfroot Maid, raised high above the world to a kind of innocence Luna would never touch, suddenly cast down into the muck and filth and cruelty everyone else lived in. Perhaps Luna should have hated her for that innocence, but she didn’t, she couldn’t. “You don’t have to pay it,” she said, instead, to a disgusted noise from Morrigan, “not when it should've been yours to start with.”

The fight seemed to go out of Melia then, her shoulders slumping, arms over her stomach like she’d suffered a gut wound.

Luna forced herself to turn away, as if it didn’t matter to her what the girl decided. “We need to find where these things came from,” she said to the others. “An entrance to the Deep Roads here would be bad, but it’s worse if they’re an advance scouting troop from the main bulk of their forces. They shouldn’t be this far north already.” If this was part of the army, Redcliffe was likely already gone, and she’d split their forces and wasted their time for a quest doomed from the start-

“An entrance from the Deep Roads seems more likely,” Morrigan commented, “given the lack of darkspawn we encountered on the road, and the presence of this beauty.”

She patted the flank of the frozen golem, now the only remaining inhabitant of Honnleath. The creature remained as still as the stone that formed it, if it had ever moved at all.

“You think someone found it in the Deep Roads nearby?” she asked, rummaging in her overstuffed backpack.

“Tis the most plausible answer, is it not?” Morrigan was circling the golem now, examining the dull runes carved at its wrists and throat. “A shame we lack the control rod, such a thing could be a useful weapon.”

“Aha!” Luna produced what she'd been looking for with a flourish, and felt Zevran lean over her shoulder.

“A curious toy, but perhaps this is not the company for it?” He teased, and she laughed, her heart lightening despite the grimness of their surroundings.

“No, look at the runes,” she instructed, turning it so they caught the light. “I think Morrigan would kill me if I put a magical artefact to such a use.”

“You never know, she might enjoy it,” he murmured, as the witch strode over to see what they were discussing. “She seems like a woman with a lot of... tension to release.”

She elbowed him lightly, covering her mouth to suppress her giggles. She knew it was an act, a persona carefully calculated to win her favour or affection, but it had been so long since she’d had anyone to laugh with.

“What is it?” Morrigan demanded, glancing down rather than crouching.

“According to the merchant who sold it to me, a golem’s control rod,” she said, unable to disguise her smugness. “I picked it up on the road to Kinloch Hold.”

Morrigan arched a brow. Luna was starting to envy that particular expression – there was a coolly sardonic quality to it she could never quite emulate.

“And did this merchant give you the command words too, oh glorious leader?” she mocked.

Luna frowned. “Command words?”

“I'll take that as a no. You didn’t think it would be so simple as to wave a magic wand at the thing, did you? If it was, the darkspawn would have seized them long ago. But their kind do not speak, so the key to controlling a golem is two-fold – the rod and the word. The word that you do not have. You were cheated, sweet Seluna.”

Of course she’d let some shem bastard sell her a fairytale because she wanted it to be true, because after the power she’d felt flow through her in the Fade, when she’d been spirit and stone and living flame, she’d wanted just a little piece of magic she could hold for herself. A little bit of the power Morrigan, Melia, and Jowan wielded so carelessly. She cast it aside, disgusted with her own naivety.

“I’ve found your way down.” Melia spoke from a space between a tower-house and a cottage, and when Luna followed the sound, she found the girl at the top of a narrow stairway cut into the earth, framed by cellar doors that seemed to have been broken open from within.

“You’re staying then?” Luna said, trying to keep hope from creeping into her voice.

“For now.” Melia still couldn’t quite look at her, but she bumped against her shoulder like Styx displaying affection. She missed the dog already, for all that she’d sent her to protect Alistair on the off-chance there were more Crows roosting in his monastery. Luna leant back against her, and things felt a little bit better.

“I will scout ahead,” Zevran offered. “A show of good faith, no?”

“As long as none of his friends are hidden down there,” Morrigan muttered, and then, once he was put of sight, shoved Melia from behind. “After him. You aren’t a Warden yet, you’re in the least danger from an ambush from any of his surviving friends.”

“You don’t have to-“ Luna amended, but Melia silenced her with a wave and descended into the darkness below. Luna moved to follow, but Morrigan caught her arm. Her fingers were warm even through the leather of her wristguards – a lingering effect of her fire magic, perhaps?

“You are too soft on that girl,” she growled, voice pitched low in case something waited for them in the dark beyond. “She will never survive alone if you insist on coddling her.”

“Lucky she has me then,” Luna retorted, and attempted to shrug her off, but the witch held her fast.

“She will not always be tied to your apron strings, Tabris, and what will become of her then? She is no child, and even if she was, your kindness would not save her from darkspawn or demons.”

It was an old argument by now – that Luna was too soft, too gentle, too naive. Another time, she might have fallen into the familiar pattern of biting back at her with the same spite, but she had used all of her kindness on sweet Melia and if Morrigan wanted her cruelty, she would have it.

She softened her expression, widened her eyes to guileless innocence, and met her fierce golden gaze with the most terrible gentleness she could muster.

“Is that what Flemeth taught you?” she said, soft and sweet as if she spoke to a child. “That her cruelty was the only thing that made you strong? I don’t believe that, Morrigan.”

It was a small, petty victory, but there was a cruel joy to it, when Morrigan’s fingers loosened from her arm and her pretty mouth twisted from irritation to something like rage. There was nothing the proud witch would hate more than pity. They had that in common.

She pulled away before she could collect herself, and descended into the dark beneath the dirt.

At first she could see nothing but earthen walls and the beams that held them in place, but as she crept along the tunnel, ears pricked for signs of Melia or Zevran, she became aware of a defuse purplish light bleeding into the dark from some unseen exit, and the distant, muffled sound of armoured creatures moving about. She quickened her pace to something close to a run, only to almost slam into Zevran, who caught her in one arm and placed a hand over her mouth before she could make a sound.

She felt a jolt of fear at the sensation of being suddenly restrained, but then she caught Melia’s eye, burning violet in the reflected glow, and the finger she had pressed to her own lips. She tried to calm her breathing, though she kept her hands to her blades.

If she craned her neck, she could see around the curve that hid them from view. The tunnel widened beyond, forming a low chamber lit by that eerie purple light, which seemed to form a shimmering wall across the widest point. Silhouetted against it were the armoured shapes she’d heard before, and now that she was this close, she could hear their low, eerie, wordless chant, and knew them for darkspawn, with the sickening twist in her belly that knowledge always brought. Not now, she told herself, and took a swig of the cold tea in her canteen. It burned on the way down, bitter and overbrewed, but still better than bile.

A part of her wondered if she should send Melia back to retrieve the other mage, why the younger girl had not gone already, when she saw what had transfixed her scouts – the wall flickered, and for a moment she could see beyond it, to what had drawn the darkspawn’s attention – a huddled mass of people pressed back against the far wall, likely half the village, possibly all the survivors. The wall – the barrier spell, she realised – flared back to life, but the light it she’d was just a little dimmer. It was a powerful spell, but not one meant to survive a sustained assault. The next time the wall flickered, it was down long enough for two of the quicker hurlocks to step halfway through, and she felt her breath catch in her throat – had she waited too long?

The wall returned again, neatly bisecting the interlopers, revealing white bone stained with black ichor before they folded to the ground, to be trampled by their brethren eager to get closer to the warm scent of the townspeople beyond. Her relief did not diminish the creeping horror. They were only three, lacking their most powerful mage and their armoured warrior, and judging by the barrier’s dimming light, they did not have time to fetch help. Or, no, that was untrue – the darkspawn had not sensed them yet, distracted as they were by the feast the barrier concealed, but to turn back now would risk leaving the people of Honnleath to their mercy the next time the barrier fell. Fuck. She couldn’t risk it, not while the townspeople were safe behind their barrier.

She caught Melia’s eye again – they were wide with fear and indecision – and mouthed Fireball, pointing to the middle of the room.

Melia’s jaw dropped. Are you sure?

She nodded, and Melia raised her staff, beginning an incantation under her breath. The genlocks nearest the tunnel began to turn towards them, alerted by the deep orange glow, and Luna sank into a crouch, preparing to launch herself at them-

The spell went off just as the genlocks raised the alarm. The one who’d turned first was already leaping towards Luna, and she surged up to meet him, putting the whole weight of her body behind the blades raised high above her head.

They sank beneath the bottom of its breastplate with a wet squelch and a horribly human gasp, and ichor splattered her face as she rolled it off her shoulder, the stench of it mixing with the pitch-fire smell of Melia’s fireball. She stamped down hard on its neck until she felt the crunch of bone, then spun on that foot to sink a blade into the back of the neck of its sibling, who’s blade was caught on Melia’s staff.

She felt a rush of air behind her and pivoted to meet it. Just a little too slow – she felt a hot stab of pain in her thigh, and looked up into the death’s-head grin of a hurlock, its blade caught in the meat of her leg. She screamed, a guttural sound of mingled pain and rage, and drove her free blade into the gap beneath its arm, twisting it as she drove it home.

It lurched towards her as if to embrace her, a clawed hand closing around her throat, and she kicked at it with her uninjured leg, her foot clanging against its breastplate until she found something softer and lower, and it made a choked, winded sound and dropped her. Its filthy blade slid out of her leg with a sickening sound and a gush of blood, but she didn’t have time to think about that now. She stabbed at it again, wildly now, adrenaline burning like ice in her veins, and caught it in the side, between crude leather fastenings. She felt her blade slide home between its ribs like a blessing, and she heard a cruel, distant laugh as she pulled it free and kicked it to the ground.

Three down, now, plus however many lay smouldering at the epicentre of Melia’s fireball, but they were outnumbered by the creatures still standing. Melia herself had backed up into the corridor, almost to the curve, and three hulking hurlocks had Zevran with his back to a wall, never a good place for an assassin.

Where was Morrigan? Could she not hear the fighting?

No time to think of that now – no time for thought at all, only the cold, bright line of action. She could see what she had to do, see the spell that was already forming between Melia’s fingers, and knew she had to be fast if she wanted to pull this off.

She staggered gracelessly towards Zevran, slipped behind the largest of the three, which swung it’s halberd blindly to force him into the shorter blades of its allies. He was dancing around it now, but she could see the sweat glistening on his forehead. Neither of them were made for a drawn out fight.

She sunk her blade into the back of the halberd-wielder and took its place in the semi-circle before its friends could notice it had fallen.

Zevran saw her though, and surged towards the space she had made for him with a grin, just as Melia’s lightning spell sprung free, sparking through the armour the hurlocks wore and leaving them dazed and stinking of rot and roasted meat. Their confusion did not last long, but it didn’t have to – Zevran severed the tendons of the one who’d turned to face Luna as she struck down his last remaining attacker. For a brief, exhilarating moment, she thought they had the upper hand.

Then a sound rent the air and her ears and the very bones of the earth, and she felt her knees give way beneath the awful pressure of that sound. Her knives fell from her hands as she felt the overwhelming need to cover her ears from that awful, maddening sound that cut into her like a hook in her heart, and maybe she was screaming too, maybe all she’d ever been was a throat for this endless scream to tear free of-

Something knocked her from her feet then, and she landed hard on her back, the wind knocked out of her. A terrible pain bloomed in her shoulder, but worse than that was the terror – she stared into an endless black maw studded with bone-yellow needle teeth, felt the hot stench of its breath on her, and knew that her death loomed above her.

Andraste, save me, she thought, but Andraste had never come for her before, and who else could come for her? Distantly she could hear Melia screaming, and flailed helplessly for her knife, though every movement seemed to tear her shoulder apart-

Then there was a distant, animal roar, and a crack as the creature atop her was sent flying, and she felt hot tears of relief stream from eyes as brown-black fur filled her vision. Morrigan.

She tried to push herself up, only to realise that the bone blade that pinned her to the earth widened along its length, and every inch of movement she could gain was fresh agony. She scrabbled for the end, only to realise she could not move her arm. She could not move her arm. It lay at her side, limp as a doll’s, despite her will and her gritted teeth.

Zevran appeared in her line of sight, still smiling but his eyes were grim. Blood dripped from a shallow cut at his throat, but he seemed otherwise uninjured.

“Apologies, fair one,” he said. “This will hurt.”

He bore down on her uninjured shoulder and wrapped his hand around the bone-blade. He pulled, and white-hot pain bloomed from the wound and swallowed her whole.

Then there was darkness, and hot animal breath on her face, and something disgustingly slobbery dragged across her skin.

“Styx, no!” she grumbled, attempting to shove the Mabari down, but the white hot flare of pain from her shoulder jolted her from her body. She felt oddly light, untethered from pain and fear and blood and bone, and she almost wanted to laugh, giddy with freedom even as part of her wondered if this was what dying felt like.

She could not make sense of her surroundings - above her was a blur of brown and red and bone-white, that twisted and resolved into:

“Morrigan?” she croaked, then giggled, because it was absurd that she’d called out to the Prophet in terror and the Witch of the Wild had answered. “Am I dying?”

“Not if I can help it.” She bared her sharp white teeth in something that was nothing like a smile. “Little dove, get over here! I have a lesson for you.”

Melia’s anxious face swum into view. “I’m not a healer!” she protested. “Blood mages can’t-”

“What would you know about what blood mages can do, infant? You can’t channel spirits, but that’s not what I’m going to teach you.”

She lifted her hand to her face as if to smooth back the dark hair that fell about her eyes, but instead she parted her lips and bit down on the inside of her own wrist until blood dripped from her mouth, and for a moment she was so terrible – so beautiful? - that Luna felt her heart pause in its frantic, fading flutter.

“Pull from it,” Morrigan ordered, over her head. “Pretend it’s lyrium, you know there’s little difference when it comes down to it, and instead of sucking down my mana yourself, push it into her.”

"I can’t-”

“You can, you’re just afraid.” The two mages stared at each other like alleycats, and to her distant surprise, Melia did not give way at first. Then Morrigan spoke again: “Do it, or she dies, and you never repay her for your freedom.”

Melia pressed a hand over her wound, ignoring her whimper of pain. “Show me.”

The spell (not a spell, something far older than spells) crackled through her rather than the air, beginning as static on her skin before piercing it with a thousand tiny needles. She screamed, then, her back arching up off the ground, and a warm hand pressed to her sternum, pinning her back to the ground.

The pain lanced through her, chasing her nerves down to the tips of her fingers. It burned like ice, and her vision went red as her eyes rolled back. She didn’t faint, though, that was the worst of it – she could not escape the agonising creep of muscle and flesh and nerve reknitting at a rate she was never meant to be aware of. The world was wet, red pain, and she could not pull free of it, could not recall there was anything beyond it, until she was retching into the dirt.

Reality reeled around her as she forced herself back into it, grounded by the twisting in her belly and the cool hand at the back of the neck. Her shoulder itched like sailors’ pox, but she’d moved her arm enough to roll onto her side, and when she rolled it experimentally, there was only a stiff ache where before there had been blinding pain.

She wiped her mouth and glanced around her. The barrier had fallen, and the townspeople behind it were a huddled blur in a dark corner. The darkspawn lay around her, some still smoking faintly but none of them moving. To her left, Melia paused in clumsily washing blood from her hands to awkwardly offer her a canteen, which she drained greedily and then took another without bothering to sniff its contents. If she’d been more discerning, she might have avoided half-choking on the vile potion within.

“What do you put in this stuff?” she complained, and behind her she heard Morrigan laugh.

“Consider it your just reward for forcing me to save you, Tabris.”

Luna sniffed. “You were much prettier when you were saying soothing things like ‘I won’t let you die, Luna’.” Had she dreamt it, the fierceness in her voice, the strange thorny emotion that came close to actually caring? She didn’t think so – Morrigan's mouth was still smeared with blood, and there was still a hint of that wild, terrible beauty she’d glimpsed so briefly.

“And you were precious when all the lies had leaked out along with your blood.”

Luna smirked. “You think I’m precious?”

"For one so inclined to sarcasm, Seluna, you seem to have a hard time understanding it.”

“As charming as this battle of wits is,” Zevran commented, idly, “it may be best saved for a time when there are fewer panicking townspeople to reassure.”

Morrigan rolled her eyes, but Luna, remembering herself, or at least the version she could present to terrified refugees, pushed herself to her (unsteady) feet, and tried to look vaguely competent despite the fact she was still refastening her now-ruined breastplate.

Before she could even open her mouth, though, one of the survivors had thrown himself at her feet.

“Please,” he gasped, frantic with terror despite the now-quiet air, “I know I have no right to ask, you’ve already saved us all, but-”

A woman came forward, human, light-brown hair with freckles to match, and grasped his shoulders with tremulous hands, drawing him back. “It’s our daughter, Amalia,” she said, in a deadened voice. “We brought her down to hide behind the barrier, but she ran deeper into the cellar after some stray she was feeding...”

Her voice trailed off, but her expression said what she could not. If the darkspawn had broken through from this cellar, which seemed likely, the child was likely already dead.

“Please,” the man repeated, and for a moment, despite the fact he was human, she saw her own father’s face in his hollowed-out grief. “If there’s any chance she’s alive down there... she’s clever, and she knows every inch of my father’s old workshop, she might have hidden.”

It did not seem likely, but Luna did not have the heart to refuse him. “I’ll look,” she said, as gently as she could, “but I can’t promise-”

“I’ll give you anything,” the man said, grabbing for her hand. “My father was an enchanter- whatever you find down there, anything you want, it’s yours.”

“Anything?” She hadn’t expected Zevran to speak, or to settle a protective arm around her waist. “Would that, perchance, include the command words to the golem in the square?”

She could have kissed him for that. She’d almost forgotten her failed experiment with the control rod in the rush of combat, and while she’d have searched for the child either way...

“The golem? Of course!” A small, reptilian part of her mind caught a seed of eagerness in his tone, and planted it in fertile soil of suspicion. “She- it was my father’s, too, he fought with it in the Ferelden Rebellion.”

“Such a powerful weapon.” Morrigan’s voice was low and silky. “It could prove useful, if you want us to fight more darkspawn to save your precious girl. Would you really hold it in reserve?”

The man’s face hardened. “How do I know you’d save my Amalia if you already had what you’re looking for? You could be anyone-” And there it was, the distrust, the wariness – the look of a man more used to shemlen stories of elven cutthroats and seductresses than real elves. She pulled her hand away, unable to conceal her disgust.

“We are the ones who saved you all from darkspawn.” She dropped all pretence of warmth and drew back, pressing her lips into a thin line. “I didn’t think further proof of our altruism was required, but fine, we’ll go and find the girl.” She turned away, then added, reluctantly: “If we’re not out in a few hours, seal off this cellar and get out of the village. You don’t want to be here if the darkspawn come back.”

It wouldn’t come to that. It had never come to that before. She could not hear the strange, dissonant song of darkspawn at the edges of her mind anymore, but there was something else down there, familiar and unplaceable, and if the girl was down there, it might have already found her.

“Thank you,” the man said, and seemed to mean it, but it did not soothe the sting to her pride or the ache in her shoulder.

The chamber beyond was blessedly empty of darkspawn, or any other signs of life beyond the spiders that had coated the furniture in cobwebs. To Luna, it seemed a desolate, eerie little room, but Melia’s eyes were are wide as saucers.

“This is a whole laboratory,” she breathed. “Places like this aren’t meant to exist outside of Circles.”

“If that man was telling the truth and his father really was some war hero mage, maybe he got special allowances.” In the flickering light of veilfire, Luna could see disruption in the dust on the floor, the heavy footprints of the darkspawn obliterating whatever trail the child might have left, but when she inhaled, she smelled none of their rot in the air, only the damp, musty scent of an underground room shut up for too long. She could not hear the dissonant rhythm of their constant, nonsensical chant, either, and that made her a little more comfortable. She was not as sensitive to their presence as Alistair, not yet, but if they were within the next few rooms, she would feel their presence, she was sure.

She could hear... something, though. Not darkspawn, or the sounds of a child trying to be very quiet, but just on the edge of her hearing- there. Low, familiar voices, though she could not pin down the words or the speakers. Melia and Zevran could hear it too, she realised – their ears twitched, then swept back to get a better pin on the noise.

Morrigan did not seem to have registered it yet, but then, her human senses were often duller than Luna’s own, for all her sharp-eyed paranoia. She’d leant against the desk, a sheaf of notes in one hand that she scanned in the light of the veilfire in her other.

She seemed to sense Luna’s eyes on her, and raised one eyebrow. Half her mouth curved into something like a smile, pulling at the blood that still stained the corner. Luna did not reach up to trace the line of it, to wipe the smear from her skin and feel the heat of it beneath her fingers. “Experiment notes on the golem,” she explained, sweeping them and the crystals beside them into her bag. “Useful for later, if you intend to command it. What has you three twitching like rabbits when the fox is nigh?”

Melia’s brow furrowed. “You can’t hear the singing?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t call it singing,” Luna said, and glanced to Zevran as she realised they’d spoken with one voice. “More like- conversation, but I can’t quite hear it?”

“I hear nothing.” Morrigan’s eyes were narrowed as she glanced between them, as if assessing the likelihood they were making a fool of her. Apparently chances were low, because after a moment, she pressed a finger to her lips, and let the veilfire in her hand flicker and die. Luna shifted closer to her, suddenly aware of how vulnerable she would be in the dark in a body with dull, human senses, but her eyes were irresistably drawn to the one thing in the chamber that the veilfire had hidden from them – the play of light and shadow that slipped under the far door of the chamber. She inhaled again, but still, no scent of darkspawn, only the cool, damp smell of the cellar. Only the blood-sweat-fear of her companions, of her own skin. Only the sound of their breathing, and those distant murmurs, so soft, almost soothing. Only the weight of the darkness, and the warm lure of the golden light.

“This isn’t real, is it?” she murmured, mouth pressed to the shell of his ear.
“It could be.” His voice rumbled through her like a cat’s purr, like a little earthquake, like the beat of a song she could dance to forever. “If you want it enough.”

If the smell was a distant memory, the stink of ichor was far too familiar. He slumped against her with a rasping groan, and she lowered him to the ground. It was perhaps a final cruelty that even as her surroundings faded from cottage to cave, the demon still kept Nelaros’ face, or at least her memory of it. It was already dying, but that did not make it harmless.

It reached up a hand, and she felt pain score itself against her cheek, but she did not release it, could not release it, any more than she could have released the beautiful boy who’d died for a love smothered in its cradle.

“We could have been happy,” it accused, even as black blood bubbled from its mouth.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, my love,” she said, “but you died a long time ago.”

She drew her blade across his throat soft as a lover’s kiss, as a human little girl screamed for her kitty, and let herself shed her last tears for Nelaros, and the girl who might have loved him, a long time ago.

Chapter Text

Morrigan liked Shale. Or, no, liked was a childish, sentimental term, the sort of soft, sweet word Seluna would pick. She admired the golem for its acerbic tongue, its impervious skin, its capacity to endure far beyond the limits of mortal frailty. Nobody could look at Shale and see weakness, physical or otherwise. Nobody except Seluna, anyway.

She’d given her the old enchanter’s notes as a distraction rather than a source of research. She had forgotten more of magic than the elven girl had ever known, but she’d seen a flash of the pale, hollow-eyed ghost-girl in the awful, animal sobs she’d heaved over the corpse of the desire demon, and she did not wish that fragile, useless creature to re-emerge now. The notes had simply been a duty to push into her hands and bring her back to herself, while Melia took charge of the sobbing child and led her back to her parents. She could admit, if grudgingly, that the little mage had handled that particular explanation better than Morrigan could have. If it had been left to her, she would have informed the child of how close she’d come to possession, and slapped her if she’d continued her wailing. It was what Flemeth would have done in her place, but it was a relief to avoid playing her mother’s role. It would likely have attracted Seluna’s ire, or worse, her pity.

Instead, that soft-eyed pity, and the fiery protectiveness that came with it, was reserved for their new golem, for all that Shale seemed neither to want nor need it.

“It can talk,” Seluna had hissed to Zevran, likely less subtly than she’d meant to. “It speaks like a person and he just- forbade it to speak to anyone but him!”

“Such things are not uncommon,” the Crow replied, jaded but not without sympathy. “The powerful seldom prefer their tools to talk back.”

“You’d think a mage of all people-”

“Ah, you are thinking of little mages like your sweet little mouse.” Morrigan did not look behind her to the pair of them, but she assumed he gestured to Melia. “This Enchanter Wilhelm was a great man, advisor to a king, and such great men have much in common, magic or no.”

Seluna muttered a curse against ‘shemlen dogs’ under her breath that was cut off as she staggered, and Morrigan glanced back just in time to see Zevran catch her about the waist, slinging one of her arms over his shoulders. Typical. The Crow wasted little time in getting close to his mark again.

“He carved it down,” she muttered, when she regained her footing.

“And it likely killed him for it,” Zevran reminded her, lightly. “Not that I don’t share your sympathy for an underdog, but I would prefer to be sympathetic from perhaps the next town over if you truly intend to get it working again.”

“If it killed him, he deserved it,” she said, with a fierceness that should not have surprised Morrigan, but somehow managed to, “but I think if it could have, it would’ve done it sooner.”

“Perhaps the demon freed it,” Zevran suggested. “They seem to like a poetic punishment, no?”

It was such a civilised way of looking at things – punishment and reward, as if their Maker and his precious Andraste meted out the aid of kind spirits to the virtuous and the beguilements of demons to the wicked. Morrigan knew better. In the Fade, as in Thedas, there were only creatures who ate, and those who were devoured. She wondered what face the desire demon had shown Seluna, to come so close to devouring her. Clearly not a good enough illusion, whatever it had been, because Seluna Tabris would have taken any wounded, sickly creature to her bosom, and never mind if it bit her.

Shale, for example, had seemed quite inclined to bite when it creaked to life for the first time in thirty years.

“I knew the day would come when someone found the control rod,” it rasped, in a voice like a landslide, rock scraping over rock, “and not even a mage this time. Probably stumbled across the rod by accident. Typical.”

“Good morning, Shale,” Seluna replied, summoning scraps of politeness from a day of horror and somehow making a gown of them.

“Morning, it says.” In a creature capable of exhalation, that might have been a huff. “For so long I’ve lost count, I’ve played the sundial in this pitiful village square, and it thinks I can’t tell the time.”

Seluna tilted her head, the corners of her mouth tightening in a way that foretold a fit either of pique or of vomiting. Possibly both, given how her hand hovered over the flask of tea on her hip.

“You were conscious all that time you were frozen?” she said, voice bright as the edge of a knife. Morrigan would not have liked to be any member of Enchanter Wilhelm’s family, knowing what that tone prophesied.

“I suppose it could describe that state as conscious,” the golem griped, “watching wretched little villagers scurry about me, dressing me like a scarecrow as they chose. Vile.” It gave a rasping sigh, and glanced around. “I don’t suppose any of them survived? I was getting used to the quiet.”

“Unfortunately, no.” Melia flinched at this cold assessment, but Morrigan couldn’t quite repress a smirk. There was something a little glorious in the moments when sweet Seluna showed her claws. She continued: “You won’t be stuck here much longer in any case.”

“I assumed not,” it retorted, drily, “given that it has the control rod, and is new to this miserable place. Very well, what are your orders?”

“My orders?” Seluna quirked an eyebrow, as if she’d forgotten that part of her original plan in Honnleath was reclaiming the golem as a weapon. “I suppose whatever you like, provided that’s not disposing of the surviving villagers.”

It was so classically Seluna that it might have been funny, had it not made Morrigan want to shake her.

“Order it to follow us, and protect,” she hissed. “You had no problem doing that with the Crow.”

“Zevran asked to join us,” she retorted, as if he’d had much choice in the matter.

“Already I tire of its petty infighting,” the golem yawned. “Go on. Give me an order.”

Seluna wrinkled her nose, as if asked to do something distasteful. Ironic, given how frequently she played the role of commander in their little troop.

“Walk over there?” she hazarded, gesturing to the well.

The golem stayed in place, and Morrigan’s stomach twisted. They weren’t meant to do that.

There were a few moments of tense silence and then:

“...Nothing. I feel... nothing.” The golem itself sounded disbelieving. “The control rod, it’s... broken.”

Morrigan tensed, preparing for a sudden shift that would burn the last reserves of her mana for the day. The golem moved slowly, ponderously, and the bear could be faster than anyone would expect. Zevran and Melia could fend for themselves against the thing, but she could snatch Seluna up in her teeth and carry her away before any further injury could come to her or the child. She already feared for it, given how much blood the girl had lost, and if it died in the womb, in these early, fragile stages... She needed to examine the girl, and soon.

The golem did not strike out, only stared at them blankly, as if lost.

“What should I do?” it asked Seluna, and she blinked at it, stupidly.

“Whatever you like.” Morrigan had not meant to speak the words aloud, had not meant to give the thing tacit permission to rampage across the countryside, but there was something about the golem’s strange blankness, about the enormity of freedom...

“I do not know what I like.” It still stared at Seluna. “I know nothing of the world beyond this village. I know no purpose beyond what my once-master gave me here.”

It felt so strangely familiar to her, for all that it felt like a lifetime ago that she’d left the Chasind Wilds. I want to see mountains, and the sea, she’d said, back then, and now she stood in the foothills of the Frostbacks, at the dawn of someone else’s journey into the wild unknown.

“Most people don’t come with a purpose,” Seluna said, with that awful gentleness that Morrigan could not bear, the kind of softness that wore people down like sea against stone. “You have plenty of time to figure that out.”

“It has a purpose.” The golem’s glowing eyes narrowed. “It must have had a goal to put me towards.”

“I’m a Grey Warden,” she shrugged. “I’m fighting the Blight because I don’t have a choice, but the least I can do is give you one.”

It tilted its head, as if taking the measure of her. “And yet I have but two choices – go with it, or go elsewhere... and I do not yet know where ‘elsewhere’ might be.”

“If you want to come with us for now, you’d be welcome,” she said, still so terribly gentle, “and if later, you wanted to leave...”

“It could not stop me,” it snorted, with the supreme overconfidence bourne of a being made of stone.

“Exactly,” Seluna said, as if that were a good thing. “I wouldn’t even try.”

“That was a foolish offer,” Morrigan told her later, “and an even more foolish promise. Do you so quickly forget that you have enemies who have paid for your death before?”

She nodded over to Zevran’s silhouette, by the fire with Melia and the newly-returned Alistair. The latter two were still avoiding Seluna, which suited Morrigan fine. Far easier to work on earning the girl’s trust if she had her to herself, and Shale did not seem interested in posing an impediment to that. The golem had stomped away into the most open part of the clearing and sat, almost contemplative, atop a smaller boulder, which cracked beneath its weight.

“And what exactly are they going to bribe a golem with, Morrigan?” Luna retorted. “It doesn’t want money, I checked. It doesn’t eat, doesn’t care where it sleeps...”

Morrigan snorted. “I care not for your coin either,” she reminded her, “yet I have my own levers which could be turned against you by an adversary. Now, undress, I need to look over your wounds.”

Seluna raised a brow, slipping back into the tent they now shared. “Is that how you get all the girls to undress for you? Reminding them how likely you are to stab them in the back?”

“Given how often you run into blades, I’d hardly need to stab you myself,” Morrigan reminded her, following. She’d turned her back to the tent flap as she unlaced her shirt, and now slid it down to reveal the moon-pale skin of her shoulder, marred by violet bruises and the clotting crimson of her still-healing wound. It was an ugly thing, edges puckered a deep, angry red, but at least there was no longer a hole running clean through her shoulder. It was a dangerous wound even without accounting for her condition, and Morrigan needed this opportunity to check no harm had come to the babe as a result of her misadventure. “You’re lucky I know a little more than herb-lore, or you might not have survived.”

Seluna did not look at her, only lifted the silvery fall of her hair to give her a better view. “Add it to my tab,” she said, carelessly, “if you haven’t already lost count.”

“What, no scolding for using blood magic?” Morrigan asked, crawling closer to pack the wound anew. “I expected sharp words for leading your little protegee astray.”

“I didn’t know you could use blood magic to heal,” she said, which was not an explanation.

“You shouldn’t. Tis a most inefficient means of regeneration – half of every drop sacrificed is burned up to generate the mana for transference. It hurts far more than it heals, but in an emergency, it sufficed. Hold still,” she added, “this will hurt.”

She reached to cup one hand around the girl’s stomach as if to brace her against the pain, and as she was distracted by smoothing on a fresh poultice, sent a thin thread of mana rippling through her skin. Healing was not among Morrigan’s gifts, or the spells Flemeth had taught her, but she’d had a gift for scrying since childhood, and this was far simpler. She could still feel it, she realised, to her relief: the fluttering pulse of tissue that would, if her luck held, carry the soul of an Old God back into the world. Be strong, little one, she willed it, we have many miles to go yet. She bit down on the inside of her cheek, and sent a small pulse of strength to it, what little she could spare.

The girl had asked her a question, she realised, and her hummed response did not satisfy.

“Come on,” she complained, “If you're claiming the right to scold me whenever I get hurt, the least you could do is tell me what it cost to patch me up again.”

“As much blood as I could spare,” Morrigan replied, focusing on the magic she poured into the poultice, willing it to thin and flow into her blood, knit back muscle and bone and flesh. Focussing on the warmth of Seluna’s skin beneath her palm, the need to make her whole once more. “What is it to you?”

“It’s- ah, fuck, that hurts – smart to keep track of one’s debts, right?”

There was something unsettling in how lightly she said it, as if she’d recognised the steps to their dance, and wanted her turn at leading it. As if Morrigan was becoming predictable to her, a known quantity. Flemeth had warned her of this danger, but not the lurch it would bring to her stomach, the nervous shiver than ran through her.

“We were even, once you gave me the book,” Morrigan reminded her.

“And yet, you can’t seem to resist saving me. Is there a reason you’re so eager to make sure I owe you?” Again, that lightness, that carelessness in her tone, as if Morrigan could so easily be lured into giving up her secrets. In truth, some small part of her was tempted. It was the beautiful lie again – trust me, confide in me, lay your head in my lap and all will be well. It was the lie of the warm fireside, the false promise that had made wolves into dogs, and Morrigan would not be caught by it.

“Is there a reason you’re so eager to run into danger for people who value your life so little?” She’d meant it as a barbed retort, but the way Seluna glanced over her shoulder unbalanced her, as if she’d revealed something more than she’d meant to-

“Careful, Morrigan.” Her voice was soft and husky, as if her earlier screams had sweetened it rather than coarsening it. “I might start to think that you care.”

Foolish, foolish girl. “Do you think I’d put up my lifeblood as collateral if I did not?” she retorted, clambering over to examine the entry wound on her chest. “You may trust your little bloodmage with your life, but I do not trust anyone with mine.”

A soft laugh which cut off in a pained gasp – the wound came too close to her lungs to make such motion easy. “I can’t believe I’ve seen the day where you’d confess to caring for someone.” Her voice was low and teasing, which was hardly unusual, but something about the closeness of the tent, the warmth she could feel from her skin, the thread of mana that still ran from Morrigan’s hands to the pulse of life in her womb... She felt heat pool in her cheeks, and ducked her head to hide it.

“You are already making me regret such frailty,” she retorted, ducking her head to focus on the wound. The wound alone, not the slope of her breasts so close to it... Perhaps there was still some battle-madness in her veins, or perhaps this was another strand of her talent for illusions that required no magic to ensnare minds. There could be no other cause for the want that flared in her, to trace her fingers over her skin for no other reason than touching her. She knew of desire, of course, the mating madness that brought men and women close to beasts in their bodies’ desire for babes, but this... nothing in her studies of men or beasts could explain what she hungered for now. Flemeth had never given her the words for it.

She pressed her unruly hands to practical ends, and if there was a slight tremble to them, at least the wound did not require stitching. Even the clumsiest fingers could smooth a fresh poultice over the raw edges of torn skin and ensure the healing herbs packed into the wound were seeping into her blood.

“Is it really a frailty?” There was a breathiness to her voice that betrayed the pain she was concealing, the pain that had drawn her muscles taut as a bowstring and curled her hands to white-knuckled fists, and that too distracted Morrigan despite knowing how irrational it was. “Your caring’s kept me alive another day, and tomorrow, I might be the one saving you in turn. Preserving your allies is its own kind of-” Her breath hitched into a whimper as Morrigan put pressure on the wound, binding it tight with bandages once more, “-practical, right?”

“Even allies as careless as you have their uses, I suppose,” she replied, trying to match Seluna’s lightness, the warm careless tone of her teasing. It did not come naturally to her. “Despite your reckless taste in new friends.”

“Zevran hasn’t turned on us- ow- yet,” she argued, her words interrupted as Morrigan raised her arm up to circle the bandages under her arm. “You know, that might- fuck- be easier if you got closer.”

Morrigan frowned at her – their quarters were close enough already – and Seluna laid a hand on her hip, urging her forward until she straddled her lap, hips almost flush against her own, and if she’d been distracted before... Focus, she snapped at herself. Survival first. Other needs can be sated later. This was not a need, exactly, for all it flooded her veins with unfamiliar hunger, and yet...

“This is easier,” she agreed, because practically, it was – she could feel where the bandages should be now, and could pin them in place between their bodies rather than with one hand, and she was no longer distracted by whatever Seluna might read in her face, given her head was no longer at an angle to see anything beyond her cleavage. Easier to keep her like this, pinned beneath her, where she could feel the steady pulse of her heart and the rhythm of her breath, the heat of her body and the flutter of life in her belly, where she did not have to fret over another body separate from her own-

She tied off the bandage and shoved herself back trying to catch her breath. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, overwhelmed by the closeness of the tent, the closeness of another body, that seething, clawing need in her veins. She needed the quiet of the woods, of cool night air on her skin and a body not her own. She needed blood in her mouth and a reminder that she was always the huntress, never the prey. She needed to remember the purpose that this girl served, not whatever strange thing she wanted from her.

“I should- there are things I must attend to,” she corrected herself, reclaiming her dignity. Why did she feel like her dignity was at risk, when the girl was the one half-dressed and wounded? “Your shoulder will be half-healed come morning, if you do not insist on over-exercising it.”

“Right.” There was colour burning in Seluna’s pale cheeks, she realised, though she could not tell if it came from desire or pain. “Right, I’ll- sleep, I guess. I doubt anyone wants me by the fire tonight.”

Morrigan did not require further affirmation that her presence was not needed – she fled to fringe of trees at the edge of their camp, halfway into bearskin before she’d even reached the forest proper. There was a simplicity to bears, a familiarity she craved when her human body had developed urges she did not want to sate.

She’d always had a fondness for bears, even before she’d learned to wear their form. They were solitary creatures, the rare family groups formed of mothers and their cubs similar enough to her own to be easily comprehensible, lacking the complex entanglements of blood-kin and mating that tended to arise among wolves. Their courtships were short, pragmatic things, and seemed to have little lasting impact beyond the birth of cubs the next spring. They were certainly not of greater importance than survival – no bear would put another, even a cub or littermate, above their own hide, and nor should they. They were nature’s greatest predators, her favourite children, if she had such things. The greatest threat to them was others of their kind, and they behaved accordingly, distrustful and distant from all but their own cubs.

The bear understood, even if her companions did not, how unnatural a frailty this caring was. Seluna Tabris was neither cub nor potential mate, and thus there was little space for her in its short list of non-threatening fellows. The bear was not susceptible to her soft illusions and false promises, and if it did not harm her, it was only Morrigan’s will that kept her from that. There was a freedom to it, to knowing that, if need be, she could slip into another form and let the forest swallow her, and in time she would forget the strange feelings the girl had awoken in her, or find less dangerous partners to sate them. She had seen Seluna in battle too often to pretend she could ever be anything less than deadly.

Despite this, she did not look dangerous when Morrigan slipped back into their tent. She seemed slight and delicate even beneath the layers of blankets she’d piled atop herself, and when Morrigan lay down upon her own bedroll, she could feel her shivering. Without the thick pelt of the bear, the night air had struck chill sparks against her skin, and it was not much warmer within the thin canvas of the tent. Even with a fur pulled over her, a chill seeped up from the ground and into her bones, and she regretted the blood she’d sacrificed to keep Seluna’s flowing. If she froze tonight, it would be for the lack of it.

She did not expect Seluna to notice her entrance – for all that the tent was small, she had learned to move more quietly on less forgiving surfaces. The floorboards of her mother’s hut had told Flemeth all their secrets until she’d learned to step on them without making a sound. The girl did not move, or even grunt a half-asleep acknowledgement, as she slipped beneath the furs and slipped out of her clothing. She lay still and quiet, despite the shivers, even as Morrigan tossed and turned as much as the narrow confines of the tent would allow, seeking a spot where the chill of the earth did not reach her. It was only when she’d resigned herself to freezing that Seluna stirred. There was a rustle of blankets as she wriggled closer, and then the unexpected warmth of a body pressed against her back, a wiry arm slung around her waist, a forehead pressed against the nape of her neck.

She stiffened a moment, but then her body, grateful for the stolen warmth of another body, relaxed into it, even as Seluna murmured in her ear: “Shush, Shianni. Sleep now.”

The order was not meant for her, and she should have resented it. She had never shared a bed with anyone but her mother, and even then, they’d only slept together in the earliest days of her childhood or the depths of bleakest winter. It should have felt unnatural, confining even, to have another body, a dangerous body, so close to her own. But the world beyond the blankets was cold and unforgiving, and Seluna’s curves against her back were soft and warm, and her treacherous body pulled her down to the black depths of sleep before she could resist.

Battle and blood-loss must have exhausted her more than she’d expected, because when she woke, the cool light of morning was already streaming through the gaps in the canvas, and Seluna had already risen. The tent was chill in her absence, but she could not have been gone long – the blankets still held the scent of her. Morrigan did not roll into the warm hollow her body had left or bury her face in her pillow, nor did she fret over where the girl had vanished to so early in the day. She’d watched her kill demons of desire and sloth with only a knife and her own stubbornness, and no human or darkspawn assailants could snatch her from their tent without disturbing her. But as she inhaled the cool scents of morning – dew on grass, the heady rot of early autumn leaves, the cool green scent of forest herbs – she scented something closer, though faint enough it might have lain unnoticed. The dull copper scent of blood, seeping into the air from Seluna’s bag.

A chill crept into her veins, then, one that had little to do with the morning air and everything to do with the girl’s condition. She’d checked – she was certain she’d checked – that life still bloomed in the pit of her belly, that the wound she’d taken, though grievous, had not harmed the child she needed so badly to live. But Morrigan’s knowledge of pregnancy was secondhand and sketchy at best – Flemeth had educated her extensively on the mechanics of how it came about, how to ensure a child’s conception or avoid it, and she knew – of course she knew – that bleeding was never a good sign...

She was unfastening the straps of the pack before she’d come up with any further justification, hands questing for stained breechclouts or bandages, anything that would confirm what she already feared, that all her care had been for nothing-

Unexpectedly, at the bottom of the pack, her hands felt soft silk and spiralled beadwork, intricate, delicate, and nothing at all like the outsize shirts and leather breeches the girl had favoured since they’d met. She drew it out carefully, and almost gasped at what she held. A slender sheath of golden silk, made for a teenager or the delicate frame of an elf. A gown that even a noblewoman might envy, that she could easily imagine clinging to Seluna’s slender frame- but for the ruinous rents in the fabric and the gore that spattered it, transforming it from a thing of irresistible beauty to a horror.

“Put it away.”

She had not heard Seluna enter, did not register her presence until she felt her shadow fall across her, and for a moment, she felt sick, a child caught in wrongdoing. For a moment she flinched back from the girl’s cold gaze, and waited for the openhanded slap, or worse, the curled fingers of enchantment sinking into her brain. Neither came.

Seluna sank down onto her haunches, so that their eyes were level, and took the dress from her, folding it away with every sign of the tenderness that had vanished from her face. It was only much later that Morrigan would recall how her fingers had shaken when she’d touched the delicate fabric.

“We will not speak of this,” she said, and if there was a cadence of an order to her voice, for once, Morrigan did not dispute it. She did not reach out to touch Seluna’s shoulder or her cheek, did not ask where did the gown come from? Who’s blood stains it? She did not attempt to defend her prying, for all the good intentions behind it. She only sat, in the chill, stale air of the tent, and reminded herself that the chill in her bones was her own fault, her own weakness. Such was the frailty of caring for mortal things.

Chapter Text

For all that Luna had chosen the uncertain road to Honnleath, and then to Haven, and, for that matter, her companions upon it, her thoughts turned too often to the rest of their party. They were likely still on the road to Denerim, or already there, and it hurt to think of them in the city she’d grown up in without her. She’d thought she’d outgrown her homesickness, or at least put it to the back of her mind, but now it flared up again, bright as ever, at the constant reminder that they were there and she was not.

It did not help that she missed them more than she’d anticipated – Leliana's optimism, Wynne’s pragmatic kindness, even Sten’s grim stoicism would all have been more pleasant companions on the road than those that currently accompanied her. Melia still looked at her with the wild-eyed fear of a lamb scenting blood on the farmer’s hands, Alistair watched her as if she’d personally deceived him, and Morrigan...

It wasn’t as if she was unused to people snooping in her things. Growing up in a small house with two younger cousins had given her low expectations for privacy, or even for her things staying where she’d left them from one minute to the next, but there was a particular ache to that wound that she could not ignore or swallow. She’d thought they were becoming something like friends, in as much as the witch allowed herself to have friends, when she’d given her the book as a show of trust, when Morrigan had, in turn, given up her own blood to save Luna’s life. To find her rifling through her bags as if looking for evidence of the threat she posed... That had hurt more than she’d expected, and she found herself drawing back from the nascent bond she’d hoped to build, despite her attempts to smile and joke and be the charming, practical leader she’d attempted to become since the Battle of Ostagar had forced her into the ill-fitting role. It suited her even less now – at least before, despite her sickness, she’d been able to draw easy smiles from Alistair and Melia at least. though she suspected that even before the current discord, she’d have had more trouble getting a laugh from Shale than squeezing blood from a stone.

Of all the strays she’d gathered into her merry band of misfits, she had not expected Zevran to be her saving grace of late, but apparently trying to kill them mere days ago did not outbalance his inexhaustible levels of charm. After their battle in the cellars of Honnleath, she’d collapsed into her bedroll with no thought beyond her next dose of poppy milk, leaving her armour piled at the entrance to her tent. Someone had probably helped her undress and rebandaged the hole in her shoulder – she could already feel it knitting back together, the mint-cool chill of herb-magic seeping from beneath the bandages, but she could remember the day only in nightmarish flashes of crying little girls and false fairytale endings. She only knew that she’d saved the golem and that Nelaros had died in her arms once more, but with only her clumsy memory as a guide, she could not have said which was real and which was illusion.

What had been real, though, what had stuck with her, was that she’d emerged from her tent into the dizzy light of dawn to find that her much-abused hauberk had been taken from the pile in which she’d left her armour, and that the fire was already stoked to cook breakfast. Shale and Zevran sat beside it in companionable silence, the golem sorting through a pile of the glittering crystals they’d collected from her former master’s lab with obvious satisfaction, the assassin...

“I didn’t know the Crows were leatherworkers as well as assassins,” she commented, leaning over his shoulder to examine the neat stitches with which he’d patched her hauberk. It wouldn’t stand up to another blow from those strange darkspawn, but it would at least protect her from more mundane attempts at stabbing.

He glanced up at her and grinned, as if he’d been aware of her attempt to sneak up on him since she’d left her tent.

“The Crows, no, but I am Antivan, and we take more pride in our armour than you southerners seem to,” he teased, holding the repaired armour up for her inspection. “I’m surprised you managed as long as you have in this – it's three times your size.”

“Army surplus,” she explained, rummaging in Alistair’s bag for the usual breakfast supplies. If beggars could be choosers, she might have been sick of the oats and hard biscuits with which they’d been supplied at Redcliffe, but the ripe raspberries they’d been provided by the grateful survivors of Honnleath would at least add a hint of sweetness to the pot. “Elves weren’t allowed to carry weapons in Fereldan until the Rebellion, and the shems don’t like us learning. Add to that that the army’s mostly men, and the few women tend to be nobles who come with their own armour...”

“Ah, a tale as old as any alienage,” he agreed. “I am no armorer, but I could perhaps cut down the side panels and thicken the shoulder straps. It would not be much, but it would carry you over until we could find a smith more accustomed to our size.”

He was still smiling at her, and her younger self might have blushed from head to toe from the warmth of it, the way his eyes crinkled, as if she were a little too beautiful to look at directly. Of course she was older and wiser now, and she knew full well he was attempting to prove himself useful to her with his charm as much as with his skill with an awl and needle, but it made her feel a little more herself to have someone to tease and joke and flirt with. Morrigan hardly seemed to notice her flirtations, and as for Alistair, Leliana, and Melia...

For all their differences, they were possessed of the kind of naivety that would have enchanted her before her wedding, the kind of fairytale innocence that had made her love Nelaros almost as soon as she’d seen him. The girl she’d been then could have delighted in their innocence, could have tumbled into love with them as easily as she’d have made them fall for her, promised them forever and a day and meant it. Back then, she’d carried all the promise of springtime in her heart. Now she felt cold and barren as winter, and if they wanted love from her, all she could give them was a blanket of snow. Zevran, she thought, might understand that, and they’d do each other no injury, provided he was truly interested. There might be warmth there, and pleasure, but it would be a banked fire against the cold. It wouldn't be more than that. Couldn’t be more than that. So it was almost a relief that he flirted with Melia as easily as he did with her:

“Tell me, fair mage,” he asked Melia, when she began to flag on their third day of hiking up into the mountains towards the village Genetivi had marked on his map, “what do you enchanters do for fun in your towers?”

A delicate flush darkened her cheeks. “Whatever we can get away with when the Templars aren’t looking. Not- magical things,” she added hastily, when Alistair looked at her askance, though given how they’d met, Luna knew she was lying, “but they don’t like us to have parties, or- dalliances, or anything more exciting than a particularly rousing Chantry service. So I suppose the official answer is that I enjoy reading and sang in the Chantry choir when I was younger.”

“And the unofficial answer?” He grinned, slyly.

Melia returned his smile almost in spite of herself. “I know a few ditties that would turn the Reverend Mother as red as her wimple.”

“Now those I would like to hear!” He glanced to Luna, as if seeking her approval or sharing a secret. “And you, glorious leader? Don’t tell me you do not have any hidden musical talents. Even a poor Crow such as myself can carry a tune.”

Luna laughed, and thanked him silently for so easily pulling her into the conversation. “You don’t want to hear me sing, my cousins say I’ve got a singing voice like a drunken nug,” she confessed, “but I’ve always loved a dance, though I haven’t had the opportunity in months.”

“If it is going to caper like a fool, it had better not expect me to participate,” Shale informed her, drily. “I have played the role of Summerday-pole too often to ever want to witness such foolishness again.”

“Of course,” Luna agreed, with mock-solemnity, “We’ll find you some pigeons to crush instead.”

“Skulls of any kind would suffice,” Shale agreed, apparently contented by the proposal. Luna laughed at this, which of course made Melia give a scandalised little gasp and fall back to cling to Alistair’s arm again. The pair of them might almost have been endearing, if not for the fact that Luna was certain they were whispering about her and equally certain that if they didn’t pull themselves together soon, she’d have to do something about it. It would have been easier if she’d been good at uncomfortable conversations, but for all her ease in making friends, confronting awkwardness had never been among her gifts.

Shianni had always been better at that than Luna, her father, and Soris combined – when the time had come to discuss marriages for the three of them, it was she who’d baked rock buns and locked the kitchen door when they’d been lured in by the scent of baking, and she hadn’t even wanted to wed, but had felt sorry enough for her uncle to arrange the conversation regardless. That conversation had, at least, been a happy one, at least for Luna, and still she’d shied from it, reluctant to discuss her future in serious terms, afraid to hear her father suggest she was yet too wild or too childish to wed. This one would be far more unpleasant, and so she chose silence over explanations that her companions might not be want to hear.

She could have talked about it, perhaps, to Morrigan, when she’d pulled the rags of her wedding finery, but what could she say that would make the fierce, proud witch understand what had happened on her wedding day? She could too easily imagine her disdain, her resignation to the weakness she’d always seen in Luna’s heart. I’d have fought harder, she imagined Morrigan might say, or worse: Why fight at all? You owed nothing to anyone but your own survival. As if she hadn’t failed Nola and Shianni and every other elf in her alienage who’d suffered as a result of her killing spree. No, she could not have told Morrigan, so she did not give her the chance to ask. Not that she would have. The witch did not pry or accuse, only watched her with steady golden eyes, a predator awaiting a sign of weakness. Luna would not give her one.

Perhaps she should have shown weakness in Haven, or at least something akin to mercy. She’d tried, at first, but for all that the villagers were unskilled, they also vastly outnumbered her group, and in truth, she saw no reason to spare shemlen bastards who were more than happy to kill her merely for the crime of being an outsider. Or she did not see, until the late summer snow ran red with blood, and the bodies piled at her feet, and Alistair and Melia looked at her with a horror more visceral, more terrible, than even the shock they’d shown after the Crow attack.

“Luna...” Melia breathed her name, as if there were no words for what she’d done. Half a village dead at her feet, and her first thought had been picking through their possessions for any hint of why they were so aggressive to outsiders. It was, perhaps, a terrible thing, and she felt guilty, but beyond that, she was angry. Angry that they were happy to hand her the burden of command until they didn’t like the choices she made with it. Angry that she’d fought to save them as well as herself from their unskilled assailants, and still they looked at her and saw a monster. Angry, most of all, because the same blood that stained her blades coated Alistair’s, Zevran’s, Shale’s fists and Morrigan’s bear-muzzle, but it was her name they breathed in disbelieving horror.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she growled, rising to her feet. “They were trying to kill us! I was fighting to survive!”

“They were villagers,” Alistair said, as if that made a difference when they’d swung scythes and hammers with every intent to kill. “You were recruited to be a Warden, a defender of humanity against the Blight-”

“I was conscripted, Alistair,” she snapped, kicking a corpse down to free her knives. “Did your precious Duncan ever tell you what that means? Where he found me?”

“He said you were a gallows conscript-” Alistair began, uneasily, but she could not let him finish:

“And I told you I was a murderer, both of you, in Kinloch Hold!” There it was, the truth of the matter, as raw and true as blood on the snow. “Did you not hear me the first time?”

“Luna, it’s not-” Alistair’s voice cracked like a youth’s, like the child he pretended to be when he was only a few years her junior, “I know what you said, but it can’t have been that simple. We know you, you’re not-”

“Not a fighter?” she challenged. “Not a killer? Surely you’re not that blind?”

“You’re kind!” he said, with childish desperation, as if saying that would make it true. “You care about people, you save them-”

“You saved me,” Melia added, softly. “That’s not- why would you do that? That’s not what murderers do.”

She did not mean to laugh, high and cold and bitter, but it escaped despite herself. “As if you know what murderers do, little mage. For all you were willing to turn to blood magic-”

“It’s not the same!” Melia snapped, and Luna rolled her eyes.

“It comes to the same thing, when the blood isn’t yours and the bodies pile up, but you think you can look at me with disgust?” Melia’s head dropped, cowed by the force of her rage, but Luna was not sated: she wheeled on Alistair. “And you: you stood by like a kicked dog when your precious Duncan all but dragged me to Ostagar by my hair, when he fed Daveth the poison that killed him, when he stabbed poor Ser Jory rather than letting him run home to his wife-”

He paled. “The Joining is-”

“You think I give a shit about your precious Joining, your sacred Warden traditions?” It was cruel, but Maker did it feel good to be honest for once. “He killed a man fleeing for his life, in colder blood than I ever have, and you just stood there. Didn’t even try to stop him.”

“That was different-”

“That was murder, Alistair, and you know that as well as I do.” She took a breath, attempting to calm herself, but all she could smell was the stench of death that filled the streets of Haven now, and that only made her angrier. The waste of it all, to save a nobleman who’d done less to deserve Alistair’s loyalty than she herself had. “And then he was dead, and you were mourning, and you put me in his shoes and called me your Warden-Commander like I knew anything about Wardens or command, and all I’ve done since, kind or cruel, has been to keep you alive.”

She looked at him again, then, and some of the anger went out of her. He was still pale, yes, but there was something almost broken in his expression, as if she’d shattered something precious with the truth of herself.

“I never deceived you,” she said again, almost gently. “If you thought I was kind, or gentle, or tender-hearted- well, maybe I can be all those things, at times, but I never promised you that. I didn’t even promise to be a good leader.”

“Who did you kill?” Alistair’s voice was bleak, but there was still that edge of desperation, as if, if she told the right story, he could reassemble whatever fractured image he had held of her, keep believing in the gentle, motherly leader with Andraste’s own mercy, rather than the broken woman he’d forced to play the role. “If they were bad people- if they hurt you-”

They had been, and she had been, but that wasn’t the point of the story as she told it now: “I killed the Arl of Denerim’s son,” she said, and it was the first time she’d confessed it aloud. The air was snow-silent, as if waiting for the rest of her confession to stain it. “I killed him, and his friends, and every man who held a blade in his house. And I regret it even less than I regret killing anyone else who’s ever tried to hurt me, however unprepared they were.”

She nudged Haven’s Reverend Father with her toe, and he stared up at her with empty eyes, as if he still could not quite believe she’d killed him.

“I’m not asking you to like what I am,” she continued, unable, suddenly to meet the gazes of the living when the eyes of the dead stayed fixed on her, “but I need you to understand – to me, there was no difference between the Arl's son and the darkspawn, or the Crows, or these poor arseholes. Humans- people aren’t special. If something wants to kill me, and I can’t stop it, I’ll kill it. And I won’t cry over it, even if you want me to.” She would not pretend to be other than she was, not when all it had got her was their hollowed-out horror.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she almost wanted to flinch from it, as if kindness would destroy her when disgust could not.

“And what,” Zevran said, too gently, because he knew, of course he already knew, “did this Arl’s son do to you, Luna Tabris, to earn such a fate?”

Her lips felt numb, as though the words came from another: “He took what wasn’t his.”

Alistair, disbelieving, hopelessly naive: “He stole from you? What would an arl’s son want from an alienage?”

“People.” But that wasn’t explanation enough, however little she wanted to explain. “Women and girls. He had a taste for us, never mind-” She swallowed, her throat suddenly tight for reasons she could not explain, “he did not care whether we had a taste for him. So I killed him. I would do it again, if I had to.”

She had done it again, a thousand times in her dreams, but she was never fast enough. She could never really save any of them.

“Did he touch you?” She did not expect the question from Morrigan, of all people, Morrigan now in human form, still sunk in a crouch in the snow. She did not expect the barely-leashed rage in the those golden eyes, and for a moment, surprise rendered her silent. She repeated, low and deadly: “Did he touch you?”

She had not thought- she had not considered- She did not want to think of it. She did not want to know how long she’d lain unconscious in the hands of those men, or what they might have done to her, unknowing. She refused to think of it.

“Does it matter?” She felt the numb tide threaten to creep over her head again, to sink her back in to those first, worst days, at Ostagar and beyond, when her body was little more than a poppet she dragged behind her at the commands of men who would hurt her if she disobeyed. “He is dead now.”

“Tis well for him.” The words emerged as lightly as a joke, but Morrigan’s hand burned as it displaced Zevran’s from her arm, anchoring her to her body, to the moment, to the world. “Had you spared him, I’d have had a long walk to Denerim, and a long time to consider a fitting punishment for him when I got there.”

She made a choked sound at that – she could not tell if it was a laugh or a sob – and covered her face with her hands to contain it. Don’t cry, she urged herself, else you’ll undo all your work here. She swallowed, pulled her hands away from her face, straightened her spine. She was Seluna Tabris, the Butcher Bride of Denerim, and she would not be ashamed of the blood on her hands if it was the reason she was still breathing.

She did not expect Melia to fling her arms around her, or to pull back with gore smeared onto her pretty Circle robes. “I’m sorry,” she burbled, and she was weeping, which strangely made it easier for Luna to swallow her own tears. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve- I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t tell you,” she said, which wasn’t quite true, but should absolve Melia of at least a little of the guilt. “I didn’t- I don’t want to talk about it, if I can help it. But it happened, and it changed me, and- I am what I am now. I am what I needed to be, to survive.”

She hadn’t believed those words till she’d said them aloud, but now they sank in as true as the chill in the air or the blood on her skin. She was not the girl she’d been on the dawn of her wedding day, Cyrion’s girl, Nelaros’ bride, the darling daughter of the Denerim Alienage, but she was Seluna Tabris, and she had lived, and that was enough. That had to be enough.

Alistair still would not look at her. She should have expected it, really, should have noticed sooner that he’d placed her atop Duncan’s crumbling pedestal, and stepped down before the drop could hurt them both. She did not want to feel guilty or ashamed of shattering whatever version of her he’d created from the hollow-eyed wraith he’d met at Ostagar, but she felt it regardless. Perhaps, despite her complaints, despite her claims she’d never lied to him, a part of her had enjoyed how Alistair had looked up to her, had gone along with her schemes and her mischiefs without question. It had reminded her a little of how Soris had trailed after her when they were children. It had reminded her a little of home.

She’d never felt further from Denerim in those cold southern mountains. For all that she’d grown used to life on the road over the past few months, there had at least been a road under her feet for most of the journey. The paths the elderly monk led them down seemed of more use to rabbits or mountain goats than to people, and while Morrigan and Alistair seemed confident that the narrow tracks would hold them, Luna herself did not trust the slanted, slippery gravel at all, and moved as if every step was likely to be trapped. Some of them were in fact trapped, which was helpful – at one point, Zevran caught her arm to pull her back from a tripwire she hadn’t spotted, and she stumbled against his side, which was infinitely preferable to hitting the cliff face, the sheer drop, or the cobweb-thin thread which were her alternatives.

He did not seem to realise this, though, and drew away as if he might have hurt her. “Apologies, lovely one,” he said, sweeping her a courteous bow that indicated the trap she’d missed, “but I do not think landslides suit your complexion.”

It took her a moment to realise why he’d pulled away, and when she realised, a flare of unfair irritation passed through her. “No apologies needed,” she said, attempting to smile, hoping she did not sound curt. He had just saved her from a nasty surprise, after all. “I appreciated the save, and- I'm not made of glass, you know.”

Perhaps she’d grown too used to filling the boots of the Warden-Commander, but she did not think she could tolerate her companions treating her as weak or pathetic any more than she’d been able to put up with their horror.

“Glass? Of course not,” he agreed, with a smile that said – or was meant to say – he knew exactly what had passed through her mind. “I would rather say diamond: a jewel of exquisite strength and beauty, formed under pressure that might have destroyed something more fragile.”

That did make her blush, the first of all his practiced flirtations to truly strike deeper than her general enjoyment of flirting, and she sank into a crouch, shielding her face with her hair to hide her sudden girlishness. Zevran, clearly sensing a moment of weakness, went in for the kill: carefully, so carefully, he covered his hands with her own, guiding her through the process of disarming the unfamiliar trap.

“If it is quite done flirting,” Shale commented, from further down the slope, “the path is narrow, and there are some of us who would like to reach this Sacred Temple of Ash before night falls or they die of boredom.”

“Cheer up, darling, I’m sure you’d kill me before the boredom killed you,” she called back, cheerfully, and pushed herself back to her feet, throwing a smile over her shoulder that she hoped was roguish rather than bashful. “So many lovely cliffs to throw us off! I have no idea how you’re resisting the temptation.”

“With a will of stone,” Shale retorted, drily, but Luna laughed at the pun even as Alistair groaned dramatically, and for a few moments, things felt normal again.

She’d expected the cultists in the Temple, given how closely the villagers had guarded it, and they were not much more skilled than their unfortunate friends in the valley below had been, though this time, at least, her party seemed to accept that they were stuck in a fight to the death even when the death seemed much more likely to be their adversaries’ than their own. She did not expect the cold, or the thinness of the air, or how her shoulder quickly began to ache despite the numbing herbs and bitter teas Morrigan forced on her every time they had a moment’s rest. It didn’t help that, for all the embrium tea she drank, the potions to alleviate her pain made her vomit more often than not.

“If you waste any more of my herbs,” Morrigan threatened, as if it would help, “you’ll be drinking the same ones over again until they stay down.”

“I can hardly help it,” Luna retorted. She would have snapped, but for the fact her chest was still heaving and her stomach still roiling with nausea. Melia was staring at her with unguarded worry, which of course made the whole thing much more embarrassing. “They taste like a nug’s arse!”

“And you know how that tastes because?”

“Ugh.” Luna buried her head between her knees with a groan, which only succeeded in making her shoulder ache worse.

“You’ll make yourself sick again,” Morrigan reminded her, in a sing-song voice, and she reluctantly sat up again and let her poke more herbs at the wound until she could move her arm with the minimum of agony. It was, she knew, better than she deserved – she’d seen similar wounds in the Alienage once, when one of the tenement buildings collapsed. Most of the people who’d been hit by debris had died fast and painful, or slow and agonising. The one who’d survived had never had use of his arm again, despite all the midwife and the Chantry sister did to help him. She’d had magical healing, of a kind, and better treatment than any city doctor could have managed, but it was still slowing her down, and the thought of proving a weak link set her on edge almost as much as Zevran’s gentleness or Alistair’s avoidance.

At least she was not the only one injured – Shale seemed impervious to pain, but there were small chips and hairline fractures where clubs and maces had hit. She could see only minor cuts on Zevran’s face, but she knew beneath his armour there was a bruise that gave the purpling around her shoulder-wound a run for its money, and judging by how stiffly Alistair held his shield-arm, he had not escaped unscathed either. Even the mages looked a little worse for wear after two days in a row of fighting – Morrigan was almost ashen with the exhaustion of a mage pushed past her limits, and one of Melia’s eyes was swollen shut after a glancing blow from Shale’s flying fists. It would have been more comforting not to be alone in her suffering if she thought they were even halfway through whatever madness had infested the halls of the ancient temple, or, failing that, if anyone else had just painted the ancient floortiles with the remains of their breakfast.

“Do you feel any better?” Melia’s voice was hesitant, as if she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t be snapped at, but they were accompanied by a waterskin, and for that alone Luna could have kissed her if her mouth didn’t taste like yesterday’s dinner and Morrigan’s vile concoctions.

“It’ll pass in a moment,” she assured her, rinsing her mouth before drinking deeply. Thank the Maker and his Bride for snowmelt – water had never tasted quite so sweet. “You have all this to look forward to when we find other Wardens, little Mel!”

“You might not!” Alistair jumped in to reassure her, when she visibly shuddered. “I was only a little ill after my Joining, and the nightmares have never shaken me as bad as they do Luna.”

“Thanks, Alistair,” she said, drily. “Very sympathetic.”

He immediately dropped his gaze, the picture of penitence. “Sorry, I only meant-”

“I know what you meant.” She didn’t mean it unkindly, but couldn’t quite suppress the eyeroll that accompanied it. “See, Melia, your chances are at least fifty-fifty.”

“You handle it well,” Melia offered, lamely, which felt like poor consolation. Of course she handled sickness as well as she did killing. It seemed she had little choice in either.

That wasn’t entirely true, though. The leader of the mountain cultists, the self-proclaimed prophet with his wild eyes and wilder claims, he offered her a choice beyond slaughtering more of his helpless, foolish acolytes, and she was tired enough of death and battle that she was sore tempted to listen.

“Andraste has arisen,” he insisted, “in a form so glorious that even all of Tevinter could not slay her now!”

*Of course she has, because what my day really needs is the Prophet herself showing up to scold me for throwing up on her carpet. “*And the Ashes?” she said, hoping her disbelief did not show in her voice. She missed Leliana. Leliana would have understood, with the radiant charm of the true believer, how to speak to such a man so that he would listen.

“What need have you of ashes, when the Prophet herself lives once more?” he demanded.

She shrugged. “If she’s risen again, she likely isn’t using them, and there are people they could be helping more.”

“The Ashes, and those who believe in them, are nothing more than a tether chaining our Lady to this world, keeping her from ascending to her throne in the Golden City!” His fervour, combined with the wildness of his demeanour, and the swords his companions held, was not enough to convince her he was right, but he and his closest acolytes were big and human and heavily armoured, and they would be fresh, while she and her companions had already been fighting for hours, skilled as they were. There was no danger in keeping him calm.

“Can I see her, then? Andraste resurrected?” It was a stalling question, and likely one that had no real answer – his Andraste was likely the mountain, or a statue that wept tears of snowmelt, or possibly (if she was lucky) a particularly ambitious conwoman with a vision Luna could only admire.

“You’re not seriously buying this?” Alistair said through his teeth, and Luna hushed him hurriedly.

The preacher seized her hand in both of his, and it was an act of will not to pull away.

“You will see her,” he said, spittle flecking her face, “and then you will understand her power, and her will.”

He dragged her through an archway out into the open air, and she felt a swoop of fear in her belly as in front of her the ground dropped away. The light out on the mountainside was dazzling after the dark of the caverns, and for a moment, she felt dizzy, almost snowblind, off-balance despite the man’s firm grip on her wrist. Then there was an earthshattering sound – a horn, she realised, a great spiralling thing too large to have come from any animal she knew of. The blast of it, impossibly loud, echoed around the bowl of the mountains, forcing her to her knees. That scared her even more than the precipice she was so close to, but it was as well she had knelt, for if she’d been standing, the gust of wind that followed might well have knocked her from her feet.

She saw it first as a great sweep of violet, ribbed like a fan or the sails of a great ship, but impossibly fast, impossibly close, impossibly real. It was so huge it swallowed the whole horizon as it rose, till all the world was shining scales and vicious spines, and for a moment, she understood this man, and his followers, and all the drake-worshippers of Old Tevinter, because there could be nothing as great or as beautiful as this. She had heard the words high dragon before, and thought she’d understood them as the sum of their parts – as the largest form of the drakes and dragonlings she’d faced, as the breathing version of the archdemon that haunted her nightmares, but all the pieces she’d assembled could never have matched the creature that took to the skies before her.

“She’s beautiful,” she breathed.

“She is Andraste,” the man agreed, with a reverence she now understood, “and she has a quest you must fulfil. The Ashes- they must be destroyed, so that she may ascend.”

“I understand,” she said, and for all that she’d been raised a good Andrastian girl, and had learned to read from the Chant, she did understand. How could anything mortal look on a dragon and not see something at least a little divine?

The man smiled, then, and dropped to one knee, kissing her fingers. She wanted to pull away, but focused her gaze on the spiralling shape of the dragon in the sky, fierce and free and far above the troubles of the world below.

“Then our Lady’s blessing go with you,” he said, and seemed to mean it. “Across the bridge, you will find the first shrine, the Ashes, and their guardian. May you have better fortune than those who have preceded you.”

She took note of the warning hidden in his words, even as she swept him the deep, deferential bow that his kind always seemed to expect of hers, but despite it, as she stepped onto the narrow bridge that spanned the ravine between temple and shrine. She should have been afraid, or exhausted, or angry for all those who'd died for a leader who had bargained with her all too willingly. Distantly, she was all those things, but the impossible wonder she’d witnessed had swept over her, her heart was soaring on dragon’s wings. She’d been heartsick and homesick and resigned to her fate for three long months, but for the first time, all the horror of the war and the road and the Joining seemed almost worth it. The girl she'd been that summer morning, the girl who’d dreamt of being a wife and a mother and an elder of the Alienage, would never have seen a true dragon on the wing. She could never even have imagined it. But here she stood, at the top of the world, and despite everything, it was still so beautiful.

She was still lost in the wonder of it all when Alistair caught up to her, caught her shoulder, and caught her wandering mind to slam it back into her body.

“What were you thinking?” he demanded, shaking her a little, and distantly, she realised this was the first time he’d spoken to her directly since the night before, at Haven. “You can’t seriously expect me to agree to this- this-“

“Perfectly reasonable offer of knowledge and power in exchange for a fairly simple chore?” Morrigan’s tone was dry, and though she couldn’t see past Alistair’s breastplate, Luna was fairly certain that she was rolling her eyes.

“This heresy!” he snapped. “Is nothing sacred to you, that you'd destroy the Ashes of the Maker’s Bride for power? Where is your faith, your honour?”

His voice was rising, and now that she was back in her body, Luna was suddenly very aware of the wind that whipped about them, and the narrow band of stone between them and the abyss below. She took two careful steps back, out of his reach, and kept her voice deliberately low and calm, as if soothing a half-feral dog beaten one too many times.

“I never claimed to have faith or honour,” she reminded him, as gently as she could, “but I never promised to destroy the Ashes, either.”

His brow furrowed, confusion warring with righteous wrath in his usually-soft brown eyes. “But you told their leader-“

“That I understood. Not that I’d do what he wanted.” Ten more steps, and her feet would be on solid ground, and she could catch her breath again. He was still approaching, so tall she had to crane her neck, so tall he near blocked out the sun. She wished he would step back. “You know me, did you really think-?”

“I don’t know what to think, Seluna!” His voice thundered across the bowl of the mountains, echoed back and amplified as the dragon’s cry had been, and shook the marrow of her bones. “I barely know who you are any more!”

“Alistair-” Five steps, slow and stead and careful though her heart beat like a bird in the cage of her ribs.

“Stop that! Don’t look at me with those wide eyes as though I’m the unreasonable one!” He moved to grab at her shoulder again and she flinched back, stumbling a little. A pebble skittered loose beneath her feet and fell echoing into the abyss below. “You always do this-”

“I don’t understand-” Why couldn’t she breathe? Why couldn’t she fight? She’d fought before, but now the blazing anger had left her with nothing but the pounding pulse in her ears.

“You do. You slaughter people like they’re darkspawn and then spare anyone who asks you nicely-”

“I just want to live! I want all of us to live!” Was it so terrible a desire? An image of the Alienage in flames flashed before her eyes, and she did not know the answer.

“At what cost, Luna?” he demanded. Two more steps, and she could not force her feet to move. If he grabbed her now- if he grabbed her now- “What kind of Wardens will we be at the end of this, if you have your way? Blood mages and reavers-”

But alive, she wanted to say, but could not form the words. What could she say in her own defence, that would not go unheard by his shemlen ears? What could she say to make him realise how precious living was, when she’d only just recalled it herself?

“Alistair.” A slender bronze hand settled on his arm from behind, restraining him with the lightest of touches. “Please. You’re scaring her.”

He froze at that, and she did too, stunned by the truth of Melia’s words. Alistair had alarmed her on occasion with too fast a movement or too firm a grip, but she’d never been truly afraid of him until now. When he did not step towards her again, she lurched back, barely catching herself against the curving arch that marked the far end of the bridge. She clung to the cool, carved stone a few moments longer, grounding herself in the intricate patterns beneath her hand. She was on solid ground again. There were seven paces now between her and Alistair, and Melia still held him in place with her hand on his arm. He had not struck her. He had not even reached for his weapon. There was no danger, and her heart had no cause to thunder against her breastbone, her breath no cause to catch in her throat, but both seemed impossibly loud in the silence that followed.

An interminable amount of time later, Shale spoke up: “Is it intending to move, or must I move it?”

It was exactly the wrong thing to say. A high, wild laugh that had very little mirth to it unspooled from her throat before she could catch it, and it wracked through her, bending her almost double with the force of it, and then again with the pain it wrought in her shoulder, and she might have screamed, but somehow she could not catch her breath from within the grip of the unnatural, unhappy laughter.

She did not see the others approach. She did not hear the sounds of their boots against the stone, or feel the crackle of warmth from their skin as they approached or passed her. For a few long moments, she was senseless, her surroundings vanishing as the laughter and the horror and the throbbing blood in her veins swallowed her whole.

When she came back to herself, though, she was not alone. There was an arm around her shoulders, and she felt Melia pressed close to her side, holding her as protectively as she’d once been held in Luna’s own arms. There was Zevran’s voice – Zevran who’d been contracted to kill her only a fortnight ago – low and soothing now, no pretence of charm, only a soft, slow count she found herself breathing in time with. Strangest of all, there was something combing carefully through her hair, and when she glanced up to meet it, she found herself nose-to-beak with a golden-eyed crow, who cawed at her with what might have been derision or affection, before rolling from her shoulder to resolve into Morrigan once more.

“If you’re quite finished,” she said, reprovingly, with a glance to Alistair as well as Luna, “I believe we had business to attend to.”

Luna swallowed – her mouth felt sand-dry – and nodded. “If we deal with whatever the Guardian is, we can sleep in the shrine, and deal with the cultists in the morning.”

She forced herself to look directly at Alistair. He did not look near so imposing as he’d seemed moments ago – he was slumped against a displaced slab of stone, spine curved with something like shame.

“We will talk about this again,” she said, and hoped it sounded like a promise rather than a threat. “Just- not like this. I won’t desecrate the Ashes- yes, I’ve thought about the power we could gain,” she added, raising a hand to Morrigan to ward off the incoming critique, “but they’ll do more good to us – to everyone – if we leave them as they are for now. If Genetivi’s right, and they really do have healing properties, imagine what we could learn from them!” She glanced up to Morrigan, and hoped the spark in her amber eyes was intrigue rather than ire. “Desecrating them might get us whatever power the dragon’s followers think they’ve discovered, but it would destroy all our opportunities to find out what else they might do. If they can cure Arl Eamon, what’s to say they couldn’t cure the Blight, or even the Taint?” She glanced to Alistair, hoping something in the web she was weaving had ensnared him again.

“You really believe that ossified monk found a panacea for all ills in a jar of dust?” Morrigan’s look was speculative, and she knew she almost had her.

“I believe we’ll never know, if we destroy them now,” she said, and the speculation shifted to a familiar, acquisitive hunger. Got you. Another cautious glance to Alistair: “We will talk about this more, I promise. I just need you to trust me a little longer. Can you do that?”

He still would not look at her, but nodded and rose as slow and stiff as if he were the one made of stone. Shale clapped him on the shoulder hard enough that he stumbled, which might have been funny at another time, but she did not feel much like laughing any more.

“We go on then,” she informed the group, pushed herself to her feet again before anyone could ask her anything as awful as Are you alright?, and stepped from the bright mountainside into the shadowed doorway of the shrine.

She had never felt silence like that anywhere else. It lay thick as dust in the dark, narrow corridor, as if it too had been swept in with the wind and left undisturbed for centuries. To disrupt it with anything so unworthy as her footsteps felt almost heretical, and there was a thrill of trepidation to even the softest rustle of leather against fabric, for all that she heard no sign of movement up ahead.

She did not expect the ghosts – their shining translucence, their voices echoing with stories so ancient she could barely understand them. She knew the barest outlines of Andraste’s life, her calling, her glorious, terrible death, but this... she had never truly pictured the stained-glass martyr as anyone’s daughter, but the hollow-eyed human woman could have been any beggar from Denerim’s slums. She could have been a neighbour. She could have been a friend, and she reached for Luna’s hands with an achingly familiar anguish.

“Who are you?” Luna asked her, almost spellbound.

The woman shook her head, as though Luna had asked the wrong question. “I am sorrow and regret. I am a mother weeping bitter tears for a daughter she could not save.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, because what else could she say? “My mother couldn’t save me, either.”

She only shook her head, and squeezed her wrists again, that awful, unspeakable grief raw in her face. “You do not know the half of sorrow yet, sweet girl.”

If this was a mother’s sorrow, she would never know it, and she was almost glad that for all the pain the Joining had caused, it would spare her this. Grey Wardens did not have children.

“I wish you’d known less of it,” she said, and she spoke to the spirit, yes, but also to her own father, who had kissed her forehead and smiled, hollow-eyed, as he bid her goodbye, because he could not bear for her last memory of him to be of weeping.

As if in echo to her memory, the spirit laid a hand to her cheek and gave her a gentle, sorrowful smile.

“Echoes from across the Fade, of truth or memory’s sweet charade. Thought's strange sister dwells in night, is swept away by dawning light. Of what do I speak?” She recited the riddle as if it were the only blessing she could give her, but for all her kindness, all the pleading in those gentle brown eyes, Luna could not piece the words together to form an answer.

She felt a hand on her shoulder , drawing her gently back, and realised she was not alone. “Dreams,” Morrigan said, with comforting certainty. “You speak of dreams.”

The spirit inclined her head in acknowledgement, and faded to nothing more than glittering motes of dust dancing beneath a wind-eye. Luna swallowed a pang of unexpected grief at her vanishing, and focused on the hall she had guarded. Further down the hall, in the next beam of reddish light, stood a man in ancient bronze armour, in a crested helm she had never seen the like of before. Against his shoulder, he held a great sword, wreathed in flame.

“Hessarian,” Alistair breathed, somewhere behind her, and it was only then that she could place him in the half-remembered stories of her childhood – Andraste’s convert killer, the first Templar.

The spirit bowed his head, as if in shame. “I am the penitent sinner, who shows compassion as he hopes compassion will be shown to him.”

A part of her took satisfaction in his shame, but she had always hated the honoured place he was given in the Chantry’s stories. “Men like you always repent too late,” she said, coldly.

His face was hard to read, back-lit as it was, but she could have sworn he would not meet her eyes. Again, she missed Leliana with a fierce flare. She would have loved this place.

The wraith spoke its riddle more quickly than the last, as if eager to be rid of them: “She wields the broken sword, and separates true kings from tyrants. Of what do I speak?”

This time she was not given a moment to deliberate, Melia, echoing slightly, exclaimed: “But that’s a child’s riddle!” in the same moment as Zevran said: “Mercy. Obviously mercy.”

It did not feel at all obvious to Luna, but it seemed to content Hessarian's shade: he faded to dust as the woman had before him, leaving a third, more distant figure to guard the hallway’s end. Beyond and through the final spirit, she could see a great stone door, bracketed by columns on either side. Is this the Guardian? she wondered, half-swaying with fatigue, Surely the ashes are guarded by more than riddles?

She stopped short a scant few feet from the last ghostly guardian, frozen as she took in his slight figure, his pointed ears. None of the tales the Chantry had taught her said anything of her own people among Andraste’s disciples.

The elven spirit seemed to be looking her over in turn as if assessing her worth, but somehow his gaze sat easier on her than either of the humans preceding him, almost familiar – the look Valendrian had sometimes cast her, as if assessing what cloth she’d been formed of, and what she might yet do. “Children-of-my-children.” He’d chosen the oldest greeting she knew of, the kind Valendrian’s mother had used when her mind began to wonder and she could no longer tell one grubby alienage child from another. An acknowledgement that even if they were strangers, they were kin, however distant. “Do our people yet labour for shemlen masters? Do we live freely in the world beyond this temple.

She wanted to say yes, yes, we are not slaves. We have homes, we have families, we are not bought and sold as chattel any more. But she thought of her father, working long hours at an apprentice’s scanty wage for a human jeweller who’s skill he’d bested years ago. She thought of Melia, dragged from her weeping mother’s arms when she was hardly more than a baby. She thought of Vaughan Kendalls, grabbing at Shianni as if anything in the alienage was his for the taking, as if they were things rather than people. His words still echoed in her ears: If you want to dress up your pets and have tea parties, that's your business, but don't pretend this is a proper wedding.

She looked into the eyes of this ancient elf, and knew she could not lie to him, even to give him peace. “Not yet,” she said.

“Then we still have work to do.” He was still examining her through narrowed, critical eyes. “Will the two of you take the next steps on the road I began on?”

“Alas, messere, we are but poor pilgrims, not promised saviours.” Zevran swept an almost-courtly bow, glancing up at the spirit through his lashes in a practiced move that would have charmed her.

The spirit did not seem moved, but one eyebrow quirked in something like amusement. “Let us see if you riddle as well as you lie, pilgrim: ‘I'd neither a guest nor a trespasser be. In this place I belong, that belongs also to me. What do I speak of?’”

There was no moment to reason or puzzle through his words – her hindbrain seized on an answer and cast it out into the world before she could think it through: “Home. You’re speaking of- home.” Why did her voice crack on the last word, on the verge of a sob?

A sad smile curved his lips. “I dreamt of a world where our people would have a home of their own, with no masters to rule them. May your children be born into that world, as it has not yet come to pass.”

He tapped two fingers to each of their foreheads before he faded, and she felt a strange rush of magic run through her as the door to the next chamber now stood ajar before them. She let Zevran take the lead, scanning for further traps, as she blinked back tears, but when she stepped through, she would not have noticed if Andraste herself had stood in judgement, because there, in the chamber’s centre, stood:

“Shianni?”

Her little cousin turned to greet her, unsmiling. “Who else? It’s good to see you, I suppose.”

She knew, she knew that it could not be real, that this could not be her Shianni, and yet if this was an illusion, it was a perfect one. Shianni in her best dress, her hair still beaded for a wedding that would never take place. When she’d last seen her, that dress had been rent and bloodied, but whatever strange magic had created this guardian had not been quite so cruel.

“Life’s been good to you out there, hasn’t it?” The false Shianni paced around her in a circle, and she felt almost ashamed of the muscle and fat she’d built up on her journey. Few in the Alienage ate as well as she had, of late. “Even the humans respect you. Do you think of us, at all? Do you remember where you came from?”

“Every day, Shianni,” she said, with a desperation she did not realise until the words had already escaped her. “When I wake up in the morning, when I lay down at night-”

“Do you remember, or do you just want to go home?” she demanded. “Do you think of it at all, what happened to us, to me? You’ve moved on, past the horror of that night, haven’t you?”

No! she wanted to cry. No, I could never forget it, I could never forget what they did. But already she could not recall what colour Nelaros’ eyes had been, and the night itself had dissolved into a hellish parade of images rather than coherent memory. When Morrigan had asked if they had touched her, she could not recall. A blessing nobody had given Shianni.

“I envy you,” she continued, softly. “You got out, Lu. You moved onto do brilliant, beautiful thing, things I could only dream of.”

“Just killing,” she said, her voice small despite the echoing walls of the chamber. “That’s nothing to what you’ll do for our home, I know it. You- you were always the brilliant one, Shianni. The brave one, the one with the fire in her heart.”

If her words reached Shianni at all, it did not show on her face, and it near broke her heart, for all that she knew it was half a dream. “Do you regret it, though?” she demanded, the question Shianni, with her grace, her kindness, would never have asked. “Do you regret that you didn’t come soon enough to save me?”

Shianni would never have thrown that bladed question at her so harshly, but Luna could still tell her the truth she would have told her cousin, if she could. “I wish I’d been faster that night,” she said, “but that wasn’t in my power. What I regret- what I regret most is that I wasn’t there afterwards. That I couldn’t hold you when you had nightmares, or make you laugh, or make sure you never felt afraid again.” She reached out for the spirit, took her hands in hers, because she might never see Shianni again, and this might be the closest she could come to making amends. Because the one thing Shianni had asked of her was to not be left alone, and Luna had failed her there. “I didn’t get a choice in leaving you,” she said, softly, “but if I get the chance, I’ll come back, and tell you this properly.”

She could not have explained what happened next, afterwards. Shianni reached out, laid a hand over her heart, and for a moment, it was warm and real and they were together once more, as they’d always been, as they were supposed to be. And then the world tilted, and she felt the weight of grief and guilt melt away to nothing as the false Shianni did, as the past had alraedy done, and she knew she could not change what had been with mourning. She could only change the future, and before her, now, there were the Ashes – the key to a thousand futures, if the stories were true. The key to saving Arl Eamon, and, if Alistair spoke true, perhaps the rest of the world.

She felt a new weight on her, though, as she glanced around and saw her companions in similarly dazed states, as if they’d all only just emerged from their own visions. Against her chest sat a mirrored amulet, and as she lifted it to examine it, she saw, not only her own face reflected, but the girl she had been, Luna of the clever hands and dancing feet. She could see Adaia in her smile, Shianni in the set of her jaw, her father in the soft, dreamy blue of her eyes. She let it fall, took up the urn in her hands, and carried the past with her, into her future.

Chapter Text

A part of Morrigan was fascinated by the ancient shrine in which they’d set up a makeshift camp. For all that it was dedicated to a faith she neither believed in nor cared for, it was a site of ancient magic, ancient knowledge, and the part of her mind that was ever-hungry for such things longed to unpick the secrets from every stone and whispering spirit.

The rest of her, though... The stale air prickled on her skin, and it felt as though even the cloying grey dust resented her presence, for all that it had welcomed Seluna as sweetly as the trap welcomed the mouse. She’d known spirits could steal the faces of the long-dead, but still it had disconcerted her to see them still trapped in the roles of people who’d died centuries ago in the name of a madwoman’s prophecies. She wondered if, had they failed in the contest of riddles, the next entrants to the shrine would have encountered spirits bearing the faces of her companions, or her own.

Shale alone seemed unimpressed by their surroundings. The others seemed fascinated by the shrine hollowed out of the mountainside, whether from piety, curiosity, or a desire to avoid awkward conversation. She could hardly blame them – she found most conversation awkward, but a far more skilled talker would struggle to come up with an elegant way to strike up a conversation with Seluna after her recent revelations. Melia was tracing the worn carvings of the walls while Alistair knelt at the great brazier, hands folded in sanctimonious prayer, the perfect Templar soldier. Even Zevran was quiet for once, but he was half-shadowing Seluna’s footsteps as she set up their meagre camp in the small chapel, taking what opportunities he could to brush his fingers against hers and murmur things that pulled laughter from her lips and pink into her cheeks.

“I hoped that leaving the village would free me from witnessing such spectacles of fleshly lust,” Shale complained, from the doorway. “Disgusting, is it not?”

“We can drop you back, if you’d like,” Seluna offered, with poisonous sweetness, and Shale made a sound like clattering rocks.

“It would have to chip off my limbs and bury them first, and I do not think it has such persistence.”

“Mm, but you make a career in masonry sound so tempting, Shale,” she retorted, and smiled when Zevran laughed.

Morrigan narrowed her eyes. Flirtation was all well and good, but a dashing rogue sweeping Seluna off her feet could prove more dangerous to her plans. Most males of all species she’d seen had little interest in their own offspring, let alone those of other men, but she could not take the risk that Seluna’s pretty lies might make a father of an assassin, that she might weave them into an illusory family to shelter her babe when it came, rather than pressing it into Morrigan’s hands with relief or resignation. She would have to intervene if they grew any closer, but how?

This would all have been easier if Seluna had been a man, easy to control, to seduce, to manipulate. Men were simple creatures, according to Flemeth, but she’d never spoken of women like Seluna, women with silvered tongues that wove words into collars and could persuade you to slip your head into them. She did not know what to do with such a woman, and a part of her suspected Seluna knew that, and tailored her lures accordingly.

She was watching her now, a furrowed line between her brows, but when she realised she’d been caught, she widened her eyes with suspicious innocence, and raised a hand to hover over her shoulder.

“Could you take another look at this?” she asked, and despite sensing the deception, Morrigan’s treacherous curiosity was piqued. “There’s a rainpool in one of the other rooms, and it would be good to get it clean while we have the chance.”

“A wise thought. There may be some hope for you after all,” Morrigan teased, and the girl quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Are you getting fond of me, Morrigan, dear? That was practically saccharine.” She rose from her crouch by the small fire, stretched a moment, and led the way into the small side room she’d indicated.

The magic which steeped the central chamber lay lighter in this one, but it possessed its own kind of enchantment – the pool in the centre caught the pale silver of moonlight in its bowl, sending scattered reflections dancing across the walls. It was so lovely that she paused in the doorway, but remembered herself, and pulled it closed behind them, shutting out the noise of their companions and the amber light of the fire.

Seluna seemed to relax a little as the door was closed, some of the tension slipping from her body as she shrugged off her cloak to reveal the worn ceramic urn she cradled. Strange, that such a plain, unlovely thing sat at the heart of all this magic, but she held it as if it were the most precious thing she’d ever touched. She was not wrong, either – the magic that emanated from it seemed to crackle in the air like the sky before a thunderstorm, almost bursting with the potential it held.

“I said we should test it,” she said, voice hushed, “but I’m not sure Alistair would approve, so let’s keep it between us, for now.”

“Alistair is the basest of hypocrites,” she sniffed. “One would think he’d prefer us to test the efficacy of these Ashes before using them on a dying man.”

“He’s pious,” she said, as if that were a defence, “and besides, I think his relationship with the Arl is more... complicated than he’d like to think.”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow, “And you do not share his concerns that we are – what were his words again? - dabbling in heresy beyond our comprehension?”

“You don’t dabble in heresy, you practically bathe in the stuff,” Seluna teased, then, more sombrely: “and I... I suppose, till today, I never thought Andraste was any realer than the Elfroot Maid. A story to help people remember how they ought to behave, not- not a person.”

“And now?” she prodded, though her hands itched to reach for the Urn and feel its power for herself. “Don’t tell me this place has made a convert of you.”

“Convert’s a strong word.” But she ducked her head, as if embarrassed to continue: “It made the stories feel realer, somehow, but- I think even if Andraste was real, she’s hardly using her ashes from wherever she is now, and if they can help people... it’d be a waste to leave them here.”

Morrigan rolled her eyes. “Of course you’d have a sickeningly altruistic reason for this. I suppose the opportunity to heal your shoulder was not at all an additional motivation?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to remind you of the practical advantages to testing this beforehand,” she retorted.

“And you’re not worried about what I’ll do with whatever knowledge this experiment provides?”

Seluna pursed her lips, then leant forward and deliberately set the Urn down between them. “You’re always so determined to remind me to distrust you,” she complained.

*You are far too trusting. “*Merely looking out for your best interests,” she replied, smoothly. “You are far too willing to put them last.”

“Says the woman I’m- how in debt to again?”

“At last accounting? At least your life’s worth.”

She snorted. “So very little, in that case. I think you got the losing end of that deal.”

“It depends. We have yet to see the bounty Loghain has placed upon your head.” She reached for the Urn with tentative hands, hoping her eagerness did not show in the tremble of her fingers, the acquisitive hunger of her eyes. “Your life might be worth far more than you think.”

She felt the power surge through her almost as soon as her hand made contact with the rough-fired clay – a cleansing fire that sought to purge . Instead she pried the lid open to reveal-

Fine, colourless dust, more like powdered sugar than true ash. For a moment she felt a little disappointed – something with such a powerful aura of magic should have been more interesting to look at than a clay pot full of dust, but then the moonlight hit it, and it glittered like shattered crystal, veins of light running through it like Mythal’s Veil through the southern skies.

“So beautiful.” It was a relief that they were Seluna’s words and not her own. They suited the elven girl better, the guileless upturn of her mouth and the night-sky-glitter of her eyes. “Are they really- can you tell?”

“If they’re the ashes of your precious Andraste? Unlikely, unless she had bones of purest lyrium.” Though in truth, even lyrium did not shine like this. “I suppose you’d object to using too much of this for testing its properties?”

“We need it for the Arl,” she said, with more reluctance than Morrigan had anticipated, but we could at least test it, right? See if it really does have miraculous healing properties?”

“We should begin with something more minor than that shoulder wound, though,” Morrigan said, because she’d not sacrificed pints of her own blood to stanch the bleeding only to infect it with some strange new form of lyrium that poisoned her more quickly than the taint in her blood. Before Seluna could interrupt with an unhelpful question like What are you doing? or Stop that!, she drew her athame and made a neat, shallow cut along her wrist.

“You didn’t bother with that last time,” the girl commented, eyes fixed on the blood beading against her skin with an unreadable expression, something almost like hunger. She felt an unaccountable heat rise in her cheeks, as if she’d reminded them both of something indecent.

“Last time, I lacked a free hand to draw the blade. It took a remarkable amount of pressure to keep what remained of your blood in your body, and nature gave us teeth for a reason.” Delicately, she moistened the tip of one finger with her tongue and dipped it into the glittering dust. She felt it tingle against her skin like a thousand tiny sparks of flame, not quite hot enough to burn. As she smoothed it over the wound, though, the heat intensified from tingling warmth to white hot, and she lurched forward for a moment, dizzied by it.

She righted herself quickly, but not before Seluna had caught her shoulder with one hand. She was surprisingly strong for her size.

“Did it work?” she asked, leaning closer to inspect, and they both looked down at the skin of her wrist, glittering with mica but as whole as it had ever been. More so, even. It was almost unnoticable, but where the wound had been was not simply healed, but perfected, erasing freckles and scars alike where they intersected it.

“What Mother wouldn’t give for something like this,” she murmured. Not simply immortality, but invulnerability. “The power its bearer could wield...” It was beyond imagining, but if she could unlock its secrets herself... she need never be helpless again, she realised, never subject to Flemeth’s mercurial moods. With the power of the ashes, and an infant god at her knee...

Seluna herself was gnawing her lip, eyes shadowed. “Perhaps they were left here for a reason.”

“Does the reasoning of people long dead matter so much that you’d deny us a tool to end the Blight, and save our own lives in the process? They believed they had lain their prophet to rest, all well and good, but you said yourself her ashes might do more good in the world beyond.” It felt childish to take such a moralistic line of reasoning – good and bad seemed infantile, arbitrary labels that her companions applied to actions more based on their own discomfort than on any objective truth about the world.

“And if we fail? If Loghain gets hold of these, or- or Flemeth-”

“Would you prefer to take the risk of leaving them here, where Loghain could easily find them?” she reminded her. “The trail of corpses we left will not have been difficult to follow, Seluna.”

Her cheeks coloured: apparently the jab had struck true. “I thought fighting for survival was ‘the only natural choice.’”

“The killing bothered me less than the lack of subtlety,” she retorted, coolly, “but don’t tell me you intend to leave them in the hands of zealots so keen to destroy them.”

“Leliana would say they belonged with the Chantry,” she hedged. “They’re meant to be Andraste’s servants, aren’t they?”

“You’d know better than me. I found all her moralising about the Chant horrifically dull, truth be told. Besides,” she added, scanning her face for a reaction, “Leliana is not the one making this choice.”

There it was, again, the corner of the lower lip gripped between her sharp little teeth. Strange, that such a prolific liar could be so easy to read, but then, perhaps Morrigan had begun to learn her tics, after so long on the road.

“There was a Chantry sister who came out to the alienage sometimes,” she said, quietly. “She was- kind, in her way. Taught a lot of us to read, came back despite getting her pocket picked most visits. She was there the day the Arl’s son came.” She paused, swallowed, then: “She tried to help us.”

“If this is your attempt to convert me-”

“Shut up,” she said, tersely, and Morrigan felt the chill she’d felt the first time she’d mentioned that same Arl’s son settle into her bones. “I wasn’t finished. She tried to stop him, a holy woman, one of Andraste’s favoured- and he kicked her aside like she was nothing.” She swallowed, gazing down at the ashes with too-familiar bleakness. “And nothing happened.” A chill, distant laugh. “There was no bolt of lightning from the heavens. The Maker did not strike him down for his impiety. Nothing happened.”

“This does not surprise me,” she said, though some small part of her was tempted to take her hand, pull her back into the present and out of the dull haze of memory.

“It wouldn’t, would it?” She sniffed and turned her face away, so that it was hidden behind the veil of her hair. “One of the other girls kept praying even so, hoped there’d be some divine intervention to save us. We were good girls, you see, said our prayers, obeyed our parents- it didn’t matter. It didn’t save her.” She glanced up, met her eyes, and the rage in them was the closest it had come to the surface since she’d lost her temper at Haven. “They cut her throat, and no holy power stopped it. So to find out this place- these Ashes, they’re real, they’re proof miracles can happen-”

“They’re magical,” Morrigan corrected her, “not miraculous. They only prove what you already knew, that magic exists in this world-”

“But not for people like me,” she finished, folding her uninjured arm over the sling. “I never wanted it back then, but after the Fade... I don’t know how much you remember, but I had magic there, Morrigan. I could shapeshift, I had such power...” She trailed off, and there it was again, that strange, hungry look. “I wanted it. I still want it, but...”

“But?” she prompted.

“The things I’d do for it- the things I’d trade for that kind of power, make me suspect I’m the last person who should be trusted with it.”

Morrigan sighed, disappointed yet again in her myopic view of the world. Flemeth would never have suffered such childish notions to survive in a woman of her age. “You speak of worthiness as though there is some great scale that determines the worth of souls and assigns fates accordingly, but I think we both know the truth – power falls into the hands of those born into it, and those strong enough to take it. If you are not the former, you must become the latter if you wish to survive.”

“I’m surprised you’re still so invested in my survival, in that case. You’ve seen enough of me by now to know how little power I have to offer, and I doubt that’s going to change.” Seluna attempted to fold her own arms, and only succeeded in making herself wince.

“You’re certainly not making a case for your hidden power here,” Morrigan agreed, “but now we’ve established the ashes can heal, we can put them to better use that self-inflicted injuries.” She gestured to her shoulders, and Seluna awkwardly fumbled at the laces of her shirt, one-handed, until Morrigan, as usual, grew impatient, and took over, sliding her shirt down to reveal the stained bandages around her shoulder, the grubby fabric of her breastband, and the freckles that trailed from her shoulders to the slope of her breasts. With care not to damage the joint further, she untied the bandages once more and inspected the wound for infection once more.

Seluan wriggled uncomfortable. “Can you hurry this up?” she complained, “It’s cold in here.”

The squirming was almost adorable, and the request made Morrigan want to punish her just a little. “The wound should be clean before we apply the ashes,” she said, which she wasn’t sure was true, but infection was not worth the risk.

The girl shuddered. “Are you sure we can’t skip it this time? Wynne never has to worry about infection.”

“The old woman is an improbably gifted spirit healer for one so committed to the Circle and its strictures,” she retorted, “but this is not spirit healing, and as I said, I have very little interest in killing you while you’re still in my debt.”

“And if I happened to get out of it?” Seluna quipped, discarding her shirt altogether.

“You’d still lack the teeth to be a threat and the meat to make a meal,” she told her, with a wolfish grin that made Seluna laugh despite herself. “You’re safe from me, at least for now.”

“But not from that awful soap you make,” she grumbled, which was rude, given how many years of study had gone into identifying the herbs most likely to prevent infection.

"As if the tallow-fat stuff you picked up in Honnleath smells any better.” She wiped the blade of her knife clean, then carefully scored the bandages until they fell away into strips of stained gauze.

The wound was still an ugly one, for all the pink promise of the flesh that had begun to knit back together at its edges, and it was a miracle, if one believed in miracles, that it had missed the bones of her shoulder, her heart, and her lung. Like the bandages, it too was stained green with herbs, and beneath them, red and black and blue with the bruises and seeping blood that surrounded it, but there was something almost like satisfaction in seeing how it had healed under her hands. And it had been... convenient, a useful excuse to cultivate the girl’s dependence on her magic, her knowledge, the careful work of her herbalist’s hands. It had been useful, too, to be able to check on the child as often as she checked on the wound. Now she would have to find a new excuse to examine her regularly, if she still wasn’t willing to discuss her pregnancy.

There was an odd twist of something like guilt in her stomach, as if she’d managed to disgust even herself with her clinical pragmatism. She’d known, of course, the liberties nobles were willing to take when they thought they would suffer no consequence. Flemeth had often told her how such people might be used to her own advantage if they believed her weak or willingly seduced, but she had not thought- the less-than-willing victims of the powerful had been an abstract concept to her then, people weaker or less ruthless than her. Not real people, like herself or her mother. Not like Seluna. And if the child in her belly was nothing more than a reminder of what had been done to her-

Then she’ll be glad you will take it off her hands, her mother’s voice reminded her, and she could not explain why the thought repulsed her so. Her own practicality had never disgusted her before, but now she repressed a shudder, and did not know why.

Seluna shuddered too, as she carefully swept her washcloth around the edges of the wound, revealing the dark bruising still vivid on her moon-pale skin. Morrigan paused, allowing her to catch her breath, but she shook her head.

“Keep going,” she breathed, eyes squeezed shut.

“It will be over soon,” she said, the reassurance falling clumsily from her lips, but apparently it was enough to calm her at least a little: her breathing became a little less ragged, and she did not shake when the cloth swept across her skin a second time, though she did let out a soft whimper. It was strange to realise that she would miss this a little in the coming weeks – Seluna soft and pliant beneath her hands, still luminous even without the lies that flowed from her lips in other company. There had been something almost comforting about the ritual of bathing and rebandaging her wound every evening, and she could not recall when last the touch of another’s skin had been something she’d wanted. Flemeth’s hands had been soft once, and comforting, until she realised that all the comfort she received from her mother came with a price attached that she would not know until later. But to touch Seluna like this, as a healer, accrued no debt on her end, and so she could enjoy it without worrying what it would cost her.

It was almost too soon that the wound was clean and ready for their experiment, though Seluna likely did not think so – her arms were wrapped tight over her breasts, and she was shivering a little as Morrigan set the cloth aside.

“Are you ready?” she asked. “It will burn as it heals. You may scream.”

“It can’t be worse than it was at the start,” she said, though her chattering teeth undercut her boldness a little. “Just give me something to bite down on.”

“Such bravado,” Morrigan mocked. “I did not realise I was treating Alistair’s wounds.”

“Should I be hurt, given how you feel about him?”

“Only if you wish to play the fool for my amusement, which I would not recommend. You are far more entertaining to me as you are.” She glanced down at the line of unscarred flesh on her own wrist that the ashes had rebuilt, and recalled their cauterizing heat on her skin. “You should lie down before I apply them, though. On your side, as you’ve been sleeping.”

“Should I get a pillow?” she asked, reaching for her shirt, but returning to the room might raise questions Morrigan was happier avoiding.

“No need,” she said, quickly. “I’ll have a better angle if you lay your head in my lap.”

She giggled, as if there had been something amusing rather than practical about her suggestion. “Well, that’s something a pretty girl’s never had to ask me twice.”

“Do ‘pretty girls’ often request such things from you?” she asked, a brow raised, which only seemed to intensify the giggling.

“Oh, often,” she said, running her tongue across her lower lip, but before Morrigan could fully connect the topic at hand with to the lewd gesture, she’d rearranged herself on her side so that her head rested against her thigh. More seriously, she asked: “This alright?”

She’d held animals like this before – goat-kids and rabbits, and once the unfortunate fawn she’d carried home. It should not have been so very different to have another person’s head rest against her knees, especially not Seluna’s - she’d helped her dress for days now, and in the growing chill of autumn, she’d often woken to find the other girl curled around her like a shell around a nut – and yet- There it was again, that clawing, alien want, to card her fingers through that silvery hair and pull on it till she whined, to bite down on the pale column of her throat until it bruised violet or blue, to curl up in the hollow of her ribcage and feast on her soft, sweet heart.

“It’s fine,” she said, hoping that the moonlight above them hid her expression well enough. “Lie still, and try to stay quiet.”

Seluna obligingly bit down on the wad of fabric and willow bark Morrigan pressed between her lips, and braced herself. They’d taken all the precautions they could, but Morrigan was still holding her breath as she dipped four of her fingers into the glittering dust and smeared it across the shorter exit wound at her back.

The reaction was almost instantaneous – she went rigid, a muffled wail emerging from within the fabric, and Morrigan clamped her free hand over her mouth to prevent the others hearing.

“Be still,” she reminded her. “It will pass, as all pain does.”

She curled into a tighter ball, but could not prevent Morrigan smearing a second handful of dust over the diamond-shaped wound on her chest. She did not scream this time, only whimpered and shook like a frightened rabbit, and some long-buried part of Morrigan surfaced long enough to pity her, to smooth a hand through her hair as if she was an animal in pain, to hold her safe and firm until the burning passed and she was still again.

Her face was drawn when Morrigan swept her hair aside from it, mouth taut with pain, but it softened slowly from pain to confusion as her eyes fluttered open and she spat out the wad of cloth.

“That was...”

“All the pain of a long healing crammed into a few short moments,” she said, which was more of a theory than a proven fact, but Seluna did not need to know that. “Unpleasant, yes, but the results speak for themselves...”

As Seluna pushed herself upright, she traced one finger across the starburst of new-healed skin at her shoulder. Like her own, it was flawless, unmarked by scar or freckle, but it was softer, too, more like a child’s, perhaps.

“How does it feel?” she asked, and watched her carefully extend and flex her arm, raising it above her head and winding it in a circle to check its mobility.

“It’s good,” she said, with less certainty than Morrigan would have liked. “Better than it’s been since Honnleath. Better than it should be – I was expecting it to be weak, after the sling, but it’s-”

“A miracle, no?” she teased. A bloom of pink had come back into Seluna’s cheeks when she’d traced a finger across the starburst scar, and it was still spreading, down the column of her throat and almost to the edge of her breastband, and this was not what Flemeth had spoken of when she’d talked of the purposes of seduction, but if it worked for men- if it could keep Seluna close and trusting and soft and pliant-

She leant in and pressed her lips to the elven girl’s, eliciting a squeak of surprise and a soft, pleasing gasp. She would have done more, entangled her hand in her hair and held her in place, but she drew back, a line between her brows.

“What is this?” she asked, a little breathless. “I didn’t think you wanted-”

“A warm bed, and someone to share it with? I’m only human, Seluna, dear, and these nights lately have been so cold-”

They were the right words, she knew that, the words that, with the right kiss, the right breathless, artful moan, had lured a hundred, perhaps a thousand men, to warm Flemeth’s bed, but they did not seem to affect Seluna. Her eyes were wide, not half-lidded with lust, though her breath still came in quick, sharp pants.

“And that’s all you want?” she said, suspiciously. “Just warmth, and pleasure?”

She leant back on her elbow, arching her back as seductively as she could. “You could, if you wished, consider it a way to work off your debt,” she offered, voice low and teasing, as if she’d always intended the debts and favours she’d accrued as a game of flirtation, the way Zevran intended his ‘help’ with things Seluna could easily manage on her own.

It did not have the effect she intended – the girl snatched up her shirt and flinched away from her, a hand hovering above her blade. “No,” she snapped, low and deadly. “I won’t- not like this.”

The rejection should not have stung. Morrigan was a Witch of the Wild, as powerful and as lovely as ever Flemeth might have been in her prime. It should have been easy, more than easy, to persuade anyone she desired- anyone she needed- to warm her bed. It was what she’d been raised for, after all. And yet, that soft, sharp no rang in the air like a blow yet to strike.

“Not like this?” she echoed, voice turning sharp and cruel despite all Flemeth’s instructions on the right way to smile, the right ways to coax and cozen. “I thought you wanted no more debts between us.”

“This isn’t- I said no, Morrigan.” She scrambled back on the stones, pupils shot wide with- with fear, Morrigan realised. The same animal terror that had overtaken her on the bridge, when Alistair had come close to threatening her. Fear was no bad thing, fear was a weapon her mother wielded with surgical precision, she’d even envied her skill at invoking terror with little more than a glance or gesture, but this- this was not what she wanted, she realised. She did not want to see herself reflected as monstrous in Seluna’s eyes, another incarnation of the Arl’s son who’d hurt her and paid with his life. Even if whatever passed between them could never end happily, she never wanted this.

“I heard you,” she said, trying to imitate the gentleness that seemed to come so naturally to the girl. “I won’t- nobody will touch you against your will, even me. I simply- it was a bargain offered, nothing more.”

She remained in her corner, skittish and wary, even as she shrugged her shirt on over her breastband again. “Why is everything a bargain with you?” she demanded, the familiar refrain now choked with fear or grief or anger that she could not make sense of. “Why can’t you just ask me for what you want?”

There were a thousand reasons she could not ask, and yet, none she could explain in this moment, and for all her pretence at gentleness, she was at heart a sharp-toothed thing. “Do you think Shale fights for you for love of liberty alone, or that Alistair watches you like a starving pup because you fed him once? Do you think your precious Zevran offers to warm your bed out of the kindness of his own heart? There is nobody innocent here, Seluna, do not blame me alone because I am honest in my dealings.”

“Don’t- Whatever I do with Zevran is none of your concern.”

“Until he drives a knife through your heart-”

“He’s had plenty of opportunity for that! Is it so impossible he might simply enjoy my company without making some ridiculous game out of it?”

“Do you think I value myself so little or pity you so greatly that I would make you an offer for a deal I’d get no pleasure from?” she snapped, a thousand unwanted, human emotions cluttering her skull where the clean, pure line of animal need should be. “What other reason would I have to kiss you, little fool?”

“I don’t know.” Seluna’s voice was low, now, and she sounded suddenly exhausted. This was not how it was meant to go. She should have melted into the kiss, or pulled back raging and glorious to argue with her before kissing her again. She was not meant to be afraid, or angry, or drawn with exhaustion. “I don’t know whether you want my company, or to keep me under your thumb, whether you want a friend or a toy, whether you want to keep me alive because I’m your ally or because as long as I’m in your debt, you think I belong to you. I don’t know whether you want me, or want to manipulate me, and I’m tired of trying to figure that out when I don’t think you know. Decide if I’m a person, or a playing piece, and let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”

She rolled to her feet and stretched with that boneless grace that came so naturally to her, and left Morrigan to the moon-pool and its reflections, and such was her turmoil that she did not realise the girl had taken the urn as she’d passed until long after she’d slipped away.

Chapter Text

Luna did not know if she was imagining the sensation of eyes on her skin when she returned to the central chamber, her shirt still hanging loose from her shoulders, her hair in disarray, but she did not particularly want to check. If she met any looks, knowing or not, she was fairly sure she’d flush scarlet, and she didn’t much want to answer any questions that might raise. She barely wanted answers to the interrogation her own mind was subjecting her to.

That witch. She hadn’t been happy, exactly, to spill the truth of her past so clumsily to her companions, but there had been something freeing in shedding the illusions Melia and Alistair had cast about her, in being seen almost as herself again. She hadn’t been happy about being nearly assassinated either, but Zevran’s presence too made her feel a little closer to the girl she’d once been. With him, at least, she could play at flirtation, without risking the complications that could arise from entangling hearts and bodies with a romantic like Alistair or Leliana (like she had once been herself), or the humiliation that was the outcome of half of her attempts to flirt with Morrigan.

It had been a game to both of them. Or it had felt like a game, at least, tossing innuendos and stolen glances and brushes of hands on skin back and forth. Despite his offer to warm her bed, she hadn’t really considered going further than flirtation. She hadn’t wanted to. Since her wedding, since her Joining, her body had been something she’d dragged behind her, a puppet at the best of times, a shambling corpse at the worst. She could remember being vain of it, hedonistic even, dancing and fighting and fucking for the sheer pleasure of feeling her heart race and her muscles move, for the joy of catching admiring glances and luxuriating in them. Flirting with Zevran had reminded her of some of those pleasures, bright sparks of warmth in the chill of the mountains, but this…

After- everything, she hadn’t really imagined bedding anyone again, for all she’d made light of it. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Wardens were meant for, even if she weren’t a fugitive or a widow or a murderer. She’d swallowed down darkspawn blood, and even with all Morrigan’s teas and potions, she could still feel the corruption roiling in her belly, the dissonant chanting when they drew near. She couldn’t imagine the woman she was now as desireable, or capable of desire, or- she hadn’t been able to. Despite how easily (and frequently) she’d brushed off Luna’s attempts to flirt, Morrigan had not kissed her like she was undesirable.

It would have been easier if she had. If she could have brushed off the almost-chaste brush of their lips as the bargain she’d presented, or a new means of manipulation, Morrigan would just be another shem eager to take advantage and then discard her. It would have been no more than she’d expected, and she’d hardly denied it when pressed.

A means to pay off your debt. She should have expected the words, they fit with everything Morrigan had ever shared about her own nature — she was a creature of bargains and deals, and she never thought to ask for anything she wanted when she could use leverage to demand it. It was not in her to lie or to truly dissemble, either — if she did not want to discuss something, she would simply leave the conversation rather than come up with a convuluted cover story. And she’d said she wanted a warm bed and Luna’s debts paid off in full with her body. But that kiss…

It had been hesitant, delicate, like the first fall of snow — an uncertain brush against her skin, a question in search of an answer, not a demand or an insistance. If she hadn’t known Morrigan, she might have mistaken it for a first kiss altogether, which… surely not. She could not have been that sheltered.

And now she had a new puzzle she had not asked for and should not be dedicating so much of her time to solving when she should be preparing for their descent from the Temple. They had a hoard of cultists and a literal dragon at their door, and she was mooning over a kiss from a woman she was fairly sure didn’t like her above half. It was like been a giddy girl again, though Morrigan could hardly bring her worse luck than the first girl she’d ever kissed, if only because she had so little left to lose.

Marianna had been human too, pretty and dark-haired and quick-witted enough to spar with. She’d also been the daughter of the master jeweller her father worked for, and while the kisses themselves had been sweet, their consequences had not. They’d been careless, foolish, and it had lost Luna her chance at an apprenticeship, and almost lost her father his job. She could still recall the crack of Master Aldwin’s hand against her cheek, how for a brief moment her vision had flashed with stars, and how Marianna had only blushed, looked at the floor, murmured yes father, no father, as if Luna was something to be ashamed of. She’d kept her dalliances to the alienage, after that. She hadn’t wanted to be anyone’s secret shame.

“I would offer a penny for your thoughts, my sweet, but my coinpurse remains in your keeping.”

She looked up to see Zevran settling into the bedroll beside her own, smiling warm and bright and bizarrely uncomplicated for a man who less than a week ago had tried to kill her.

“Consider it a tax for failing your contract,” she retorted, and he laughed softly.

“Someone has soured your sweetness, I see,” he said, “and I cannot imagine it was your little mouse, or our statuesque Shale, which leaves… well, I suppose Alistair has done more than enough to frustrate you this day, but somehow I do not think that would keep you from your well-earned rest, given that you have been at odds with him for days now.”

She sniffed. “Would you like a prize for your deductions?”

“I’ll accept coin or kisses,” he smirked, and she poked her tongue out at him as she flicked a sovereign in his direction. An unthinkable amount of money, to the girl she’d been once, now flicked into his hands as a prize for a joke well-timed to pull her out of her mope.

“In all seriousness,” he continued, pocketing the gold, “I saw you disappear with our scornful sorceress. Did she… displease you?”

The insinuation in his voice was not what brought heat to her cheeks, nor, for once, was its correctness. Far worse, it was the note of care that crept into his words that made her flush and look at her hands, picking at a loose thread in her blanket.

“Nothing happened,” she said, quietly. “It was- please don’t look at me like that.”

She felt his hand cover hers, and squeezed her eyes shut like a child, not wanting to know what she could see in his face. Bad enough to be so blind as to end up in this situation again, but to be pitied-

“There would be no shame in it, if anything had happened,” he said, with an infinite, terrible softness. “At least, not for you to feel. If she hurt or frightened you, even by mistake-”

What would you do? she wanted to ask, Unarmed and a prisoner as you are?

Instead, she said: “No, I wasn’t hurt, or frightened,” and realised only as she said it aloud that it was true. She’d been surprised and confused, and then embarrassed and angry, as much at her own reaction as to the kiss. She might have pushed Morrigan down regardless, but in the moment, she’d been more afraid of how she felt things tumbling out of her control than she had been of the witch herself. “Morrigan doesn’t scare me.”

“You are braver than me, then, perhaps,” he teased. “She looks at me as though she would tear me apart with her teeth, which I would object to less were I not aware she would likely be a bear at the time.”

She laughed, but there was a note of honesty in his voice she knew she should not trust, but could not help believing regardless. “She can be fierce,” she agreed, “but I think if she were going to hurt me, she would have done it already. She doesn’t have the patience to wait this long.”

Then again, if she’d thought about Morrigan kissing her at all, she might have thought the same thing. Her predictions were clearly off when it came to the witch.

“She seems to have taken her time to decide she wants you. Some might call her deliberation a little foolhardy, but then, perhaps she did not expect competition.”

She glanced up then, surprised, and realised his eyes were fixed on the curve of her mouth, his head bent close to hers at an angle that might have invited a kiss, and her pulse, only just recovered from Morrigan’s closeness, her lips on hers, reminded her once again that she was very much alive and it had been a long time since anyone had kissed her. In the dying embers of the fire, his tattoos curved around his cheekbones like wisps of shadow, forming a bright contrast with his bronzed skin, his golden hair. He was beautiful. He was nothing like Morrigan, or Vaughan Kendalls, or Nelaros, and it was too easy to imagine closing the distance between them, to capture his lips with her own, and use his hands to reclaim her skin as her own.

That was what jarred her from the moment, from the sudden, feverish rush of lust she’d half-forgotten: she’d shied from Morrigan because she didn’t want to be used, a debtor providing pleasure in payment for her own life, and she could not- she liked Zevran, despite (because of) his smiling deceptions, his eel-slick slyness that she could never entirely trust. Assassin or prisoner or ward, she couldn’t take what he offered if he still believed, on some level, he had little choice than to offer it to her.

She drew her hand back, raised it to cup his cheek, and Maker, she was surrounded by unfairly pretty people. His lips were a little parted, his eyes wide and dark with something she could convince herself was desire, and this was absolutely all Morrigan’s fault for putting the thought of kissing into her head in the first place.

“I told you your life didn’t depend on your flirting skills,” she reminded him, and why now was her voice husky and warm when she’d meant to reassure him? “You don’t have to keep playing this game.”

“No? You are not enjoying it?” He turned his head towards her hand, pressed his lips to her thumb, and desire ran through her like a jolt of lightning, like the raw mana Morrigan had forced into her veins to keep her heart beating, and she pulled her hand away as if stung, but knew the colour in her cheeks betrayed her.

“I’m not going to use you like that,” she told him, careful to keep her voice soft.

“Even if I wanted to be used?” He did not move to touch her again, but she could almost feel his gaze on her skin, tracing her cheek, the curve of her neck, the laces of her shirt. “There are far worse fates, than to share the bed of a beautiful woman.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Shame that beds are lacking on the road, as is privacy. And you did try to kill me fairly recently.”

He grinned, unrepentant. “Ah, but I did not know you then. Now, I am a wiser man, if a hunted one.” He reclined onto his side, a deliberate de-escalation she appreciated even as her body longed to clamber atop him and take what he offered so freely. “Think on it, sweet Luna. I will not pester or pressure you, but if you find your bedroll becomes cold and lonely, know it does not have to remain so. You have suffered enough pain since first we met, I think we both are owed a little pleasure, if you wish it.”

She took his cue, settled down into her blankets, and gave him a last, tentative smile before rolling onto her side, facing away from him. She never thought she’d miss the scanty privacy a tent could offer, but now, when for the first time in months, her skin was singing out for the touch of another… Sleep would not come easily, she already knew, but she feigned it nonetheless, willing weight into her weary limbs, trying to slow her fluttering pulse, her fevered skin. Closing her eyes only seemed to sharpen all her other senses: the scratch of rough wool against her skin, the clinging smoke from the dying fire mingling with the snow, the snuffles and rustles as her companions moved in their sleep, the occasional rasp of stone-on-stone as Shale adjusted its position from where it kept watch.

In the relative quiet, the soft creak of the door to the moon-pool room was like thunder, and she found herself far too aware of the soft treat of Morrigan’s feet as she crept into the room. She held perfectly still, hoped her breathing was soft and even enough to pass for slumber. If the witch had returned for another confrontation, she did not want to drag out that particular dirty laundry for the rest of the party to see, not when her position as unelected leader already felt on thin ice. So she stayed still and silent, and gave no sign she heard the murmured conversation that the vaulted ceiling carried to her ears.

“It has finally emerged from its sulk, then?” That was Shale’s low rumble of a voice, as soft as stone shifting on stone could be. “I wondered if it had abandoned us entirely.”

“What would a golem know of sulking, pray tell?” Morrigan’s voice was sharp-edged and irritable, which once, Luna might have called her usual state, had she not learned to read more closely into her guarded moods.

“Plenty. My former master was an expert on the subject. The swamp witch has much in common with him: the arrogance, the air of cruelty. It would control everything if it could, make the whole world its puppets.”

“I see why your former master forbade you speech. Clearly you know little of how to use it effectively.”

“Did I strike one of its fragile nerves? Delightful! Though I suppose it was hardly a challenge — is it, perhaps, feeling a little more vulnerable given that the elf-warden has begun to cut its strings?”

“I- that is no concern of yours!”

“No, but it is an amusement. I enjoy seeing arrogance brought down a peg or five. I hope to see it brought lower.”

Something twisted in Luna’s gut at that — a guilt she did not feel she owed, given that Shale almost echoed her own words. It would have been easier if she’d felt smug satisfaction at Morrigan’s proud, controlling nature being picked apart by a harsher tongue that hers, but- she couldn’t quite manage it. They all had little enough these days, and sometimes she thought Morrigan had had very little to call her own but for her pride and her body. Was it really any surprise, in retrospect, that her advances were late-blooming and clumsy?

For all that the kiss had been confusing, and her words cruel in her usual spiky way, she’d seemed sincere enough in her promise to ensure nobody touched her against her will. Thinking of it now, a little calmer, took her back to the gore-soaked streets of Haven, where the truth had poured out of her in a flood she hadn’t been able to hold back. Zevran had understood her immediately, Alistair and Melia had been stunned, but Morrigan- Morrigan had been angry, not at her weakness, but in her defence. For all that the witch had confessed to caring for her after her injury at Honnleath, she hadn’t really expected that.

Morrigan admired strength and prowess and cleverness, but perhaps she’d been given little opportunity to care for anyone before. If Luna was the closest thing to a friend she’d ever had, let alone a bedmate who would be around more than a night, it was no wonder her approach was so awkward, though she doubted, somehow, that the sorceress would care to be told that to her face. She’d fallen for the icy, cynical facade, and forgotten that for all Morrigan’s vast experience of the wild, she’d been an outsider to the lives of most of the mortals she’d observed.

This… complicated things, of course, whether she was right or wrong. And she could be reading far too much into the other woman’s behaviour. Her first thought could be the correct one: she could have tried and failed to sink another hook into Luna’s flesh now she was a little less dependent on her care, or seen her as a convenient bedwarmer to be discarded once they went their separate ways.

If she could just talk to her rationally- but of course Morrigan would snarl and bare her teeth if she implied she might be fumbling in the dark. She’d have to take time, and care, and disentangle herself from the web of emotions Morrigan had caught her in, but- she could do it, of course she could do it. She had to, if she wanted to figure out how far she could trust the witch next time she found herself vulnerable. It was the only practical decision to ensure the party’s harmony, and had nothing at all to do with her still fever-burning skin, or the tempting beauty mark that sat just above Morrigan’s upper lip. She had far bigger problems than stolen kisses to worry about, and it would do her good to remember that.

Problems, for example, like smuggling her party and the Ashes they carried out of the Temple. She didn’t know how big a role the urn played in their magical nature, but she didn’t want to find out that they lost their power when removed from it and waste something that could heal so many people. If the cultists searched their bags, it would be hard to conceal, but she could at least muddy the waters by constructing an appropriate scene of desecration. There were other reliquaries, after all, and while it was probably heretical to use the remains of one of Andraste’s disciples to cover her own tracks, she saw little point in pleasing an absent Maker at the cost of real lives.

“We could’ve fought them,” Alistair muttered at her shoulder, as they left the mountain temple behind them, and began to trace their route back down to Haven. “They’ll kill any other future newcomers, if it comes to that.”

Luna rubbed her temples. “I thought you wanted me to kill less people, Alistair.”

“Villagers, not- violent heretics.”

“If the Chantry want to send a holy army up here to battle them, they can handle that.” She glanced up at him, and realised that beneath the grim set of his jaw, the anger in his features warred with a familiar guilt. “I can’t undo what we did in Haven,” she offered, “but I really don’t want to kill more people who aren’t actively trying to kill us.”

He sighed, shoulders slumping, and despite the bulk of his armour, the broadness of his shoulders, he was a boy again, and half his anger sparked from hidden shame.

“I know,” he said, “and- I know I was in the wrong yesterday, for scaring you, at least. Mel- talked to me about it?”

Her head snapped up at that. “Melia? Since when do you take her advice?”

His cheeks flushed at that, and she realised she may have hit on something he’d really have preferred her to leave unnoticed.

“She- we talked a lot, after- the Crows. And again at Haven. After I found out about the Harrowings, I knew I couldn’t be a Templar, but I didn’t think-” He shook his head, a different sort of anger creeping in to mingle with the guilt, “She said they were always watched. Even in the baths. That- some of the men would joke about it being their favourite duty. I never realised-”

“You wouldn’t have known,” she said, with all the gentleness she could muster for him. “You were raised noble, and human, and a man, and you’ve got those big shoulders and that massive sword.”

“I should’ve known,” he muttered, looking down at the toes of his boots. “I- Isolde wasn’t kind to me, when I was a boy. Because I was a bastard, because people tought I was Eamon’s son- I thought I knew all about how powerful people kicked at those weaker than them.”

She shrugged. “There are always things we don’t know till others tell us. I never thought being a noble bastard could be difficult, but then, I always had a family who wanted me around. You’re learning, right? That matters.”

“Shame I’m not a quicker learner,” he offered, with a wry grin, and then: “I am- sorry though, for scaring you yesterday, and any other time I didn’t notice.”

She wanted to say you don’t scare me, you’re just a kid, but she’d proven that was false already, with her panic on the bridge. She wanted to offer him some kind of comforting illusion, some pretty lie about how he was one of the good humans, the kind ones, because he looked so serious, so mournful, and it did not suit her image of him at all. But all she could offer him was: “You don’t need to apologise. You didn’t know.”

“I should’ve thought,” he insisted, “and I won’t do it again, or- I’ll try not to. I just… got used to thinking of you as the scary one.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Me? The five-foot nothing elf with a knife?”

“Hey, I’ve seen you with that knife!” he retorted, “But I meant- you can talk to people.”

“So can you. You’re doing it right now, in fact.”

He nudged her with an elbow. “You know what I mean. They- respect you. I respect you.”

“Does this mean you’ll stop arguing with me?” she teased, and he rolled his eyes, and the air between them felt a little clearer than it had before.

If only her other companions were so easily managed. Morrigan still kept her distance, possibly to avoid the awkwardness, which Luna could not in all honesty complain of, but without a reason to join her solitary fire, it was harder to act on her instinct to observe. Some space was likely best for the both of them, but it nagged at the corners of her mind like a loose tooth, or a puzzle she did not have all the pieces to solve.

She was distracted, too, by Alistair’s slip about listening to Melia — now she was no longer caught up in her own thoughts, she could see that he walked beside her more often than not, offering an arm to help her over the more rugged terrain, or sweeping his cloak over her when it began to rain. How she blushed like a maiden and pressed herself closer to his side, or how, whenever she found a new wonder of the world beyond the Circle’s walls, he was always the first name she called.

It was adorable, in a bittersweet way, but it was also… uniquely frustrating. It drew attention to the hunger beneath her own skin that Morrigan had awoken, and at odds as they were, she didn’t particularly want to dwell on the kiss her thoughts refused to let go of. For all that Alistair claimed she was persuasive, these days her face felt like glass — as though anyone who looked closely could read the stain of a kiss on her lips, in the blush of her cheeks, could read her hunger in the vagueness of her eyes and the tilt of her head.

Zevran in particular could read her too well. When they set up their next camp, he volunteered to overlap his watch with hers, and, once the others had retired, poured her wine from a skin they’d stowed away in Haven.

“It is not exactly Antivan’s finest,” he offered, “but it will do.”

The taste was rich and heady, though not as sweet as the honeywine they’d served at her wedding, and she could see why the wealthy wanted to keep such luxuries to themselves. Even in the tin cup of her mess kit, it glowed from within like some rare jewel.

“Is this the part where you drink me under the table and then assassinate me?” she asked, only half-joking.

He smiled at her, eyes crinkling at the corners, and the lazy warmth in his expression sent sparks flickering beneath her skin.

“Not at all,” he soothed her. “If I were planning to assassinate you, I would wait until I had more plausible deniability than a watch shared between the two of us could provide. Besides, your stone guardian is a more than capable chaperone, I suspect.”

“Mm, so this is out of the goodness of your heart?”

“More out of self-preservation. If you are the bulwark between myself and the Crows, I would prefer to ensure you are a steady one.”

She tapped the side of her cup with a soft tink. “Because wine is well-known for making a girl steadier on her feet.”

“Not in the first instance,” he allowed, “but we do not have enough for either of us to drink to excess, if we are sharing, and besides, you hold yourself too tightly.”

She blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

“You are — ugh, the Trade Tongue is an ugly one — too close-wound. Like a spring in a trap. You have been waiting so long for the next fight that your joints, your muscles, they are locked up.”

“It’s served me well so far,” she pointed out.

“True,” he agreed, “but it takes a toll, does it not? I can see the aches and pains in how you carry yourself, in how you stretch out your back, your shoulders, your legs… if you survive this Blight, you will not wish to carry those pains with you, yes?”

She arched a brow. “I didn’t know they trained Crows as healers.”

“They do not,” he said, “but those of us who wish to live to thirty learn quickly how to care for our bodies in a career that treats them harshly. Did the Wardens not teach you this?”

“You know I’m barely a Warden.” They were still high enough in the mountains that even with the fire, the night air was chilly, and she shifted close enough that their sides pressed together, the warmth of his body bleeding through their camp clothes. “I suppose you have some useful advice on- unwinding?”

“I could provide advice,” he agreed, “or, perhaps, if you would prefer, a demonstration?”

She could have blamed the wine, or the cold, or the treacherous hunger lingering beneath her skin, but in truth, she blamed Morrigan when she succumbed to temptation and kissed him. She tangled her fingers in his golden hair, traced the curve of his cheek with her palm, and tried to let his clever, practiced mouth erase any thoughts of wild black hair and lips that tasted of blackberries and burning air.

Chapter Text

It was a small mercy, after the humiliation of the kiss, that Seluna was not completely avoiding her – she still thanked her courteously whenever she retrieved game or venison, still shared her own offerings of flatbread or hard-tack softened in stock. She still requested more packets of embrium tea when she ran low, though the herb was scarce so high in the mountains, and allowed Morrigan to treat her injuries with no complaint or attempt to conceal them. She returned to bedding down in her own tent, and no longer plagued Morrigan’s fireside.

For once, she behaved like the travelling companion Morrigan had, if not hoped for, at least imagined tolerating – and Morrigan hated it. They had not been friends, before, and she did not miss whatever had passed for friendship in Luna’s eyes – she did not need the elven girl’s empty-headed chatter, her false flirtations and pretty lies – but now her solitary fireside seemed too quiet. The Mabari, great slobbering lump that it was, was no substitute for Seluna’s strength at her back, the reassuring thump of her heart and the echoing pulse of the child when she reached out a thread of scrying to it. She was accustomed to solitude, she’d missed it deeply when she’d been forced into close quarters with her travelling companions – so why did the blessed quiet feel so empty, now that she had it back?

It was cold comfort that Shale and Alistair were a little outside the circle that the three elven party members had formed. The golem cared little for the company of others, unless they provided opportunities for it to sharpen its tongue, but Alistair... she did not like to think of herself on the same level as Alistair, boorish and foolish in equal measure. She liked even less how this new-formed trio often left him in her company.

“Trouble in paradise?” he asked her smugly, the second night Seluna retired to join Melia in her tent rather than Morrigan.

She jabbed at the fire with the metal tip of her staff, sending a flurry of sparks upwards. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, nothing.” He did not take the implied dismissal she offered, instead taking a seat on a stone at the opposite site of the fire and sprawling out as if to make as great an annoyance as possible. “Only that you and Luna don’t seem to be bedding down together any more.”

“So not ‘nothing’ in that case. I would say I’m surprised you noticed where any of us slept, but I suppose the emptiness of your own bed must give you a particularly keen interest in everyone else’s.” She kept her own focus on the book in her lap, though it was slow going – she spoke Chasind as well or better than she did Trade Tongue, but she’d mostly seen it written as trail signs. She knew the alphabet, but sounding out the words like a child grew tiresome quickly.

He snorted, though she’d intended to be cutting rather than amusing. “Oh, sheathe your tongue, witch, I came to offer commiserations, not mockery.”

She rolled her eyes. “Consider them offered and rejected, and be on your way. I need neither your company nor your pity.”

He grinned as if he’d won a point in their argument. “Ah! So you admit there is something to commiserate!”

“I admit nothing of the sort!” she snapped, slamming her book closed. “And if Seluna and I had quarrelled, your advice would be the last I’d seek to remedy that. You’ve hardly spoken since Haven, barring the occasional accusation of heresy.”

There was a silence that gave her a brief, forlorn hope that he’d take the hint and leave her to her brooding, which he immediately crushed wiht his next words: “Did you quarrel because you keep calling her Seluna like a Chantry schoolmistress?”

“Like a- no! I call her Seluna because it is her name.”

“Seluna, you little fool, why aren’t you leaving more people to die, Seluna” he mocked, in what she assumed was a mockery of her own voice. It did sound stiff and stilted in his imitation, she realised, more like a crone about to give her a scolding than a woman of her own age. Was that how she sounded to the girl? Was that the root of their quarrel, or did it run deeper still, to whatever she’d glimpsed of her true motives? “You can just call her Luna. Everyone else does.”

“Shale does not,” she pointed out, which was hardly an argument in her favour, “and as for ‘everyone’ - Melia knew her as an infant, when I assume the name Seluna was longer than she was tall, and you and Zevran are so close to illiterate that I assumed names of three syllables were simply beyond you.”

“Hey, my name has three syllables,” he objected.

“And can you spell it?”

“You are cranky tonight,” he observed, as if his presence had ever made her anything less than irritable. “Would it help if I told Luna that you’re sorry for pulling her pigtails and desperate to be friends again?”

“We were not friends, Alistair.” Friends were for children and fools. A Witch of the Wilds was complete in her own company, and needed no other. “We are allies, as we always have been, and if I needed someone to speak to her on my behalf, it would not be you, given that you’ve barely managed to open your mouth in front of her without tripping over your tongue.”

“Ouch.” He rubbed his arm theatrically. “I’d be wounded if that wasn’t blatantly obvious to everyone in the camp, including me. I know I need to get back into her good graces somehow. I thought helping you out might be a start. For some reason she actually likes you.”

“She also likes assassins, blood mages, and that stinking dog,” she retorted, ruffling the ears of the stinking dog in question, “so let’s not pretend she’s a great arbiter of taste. She was even fond of you, ‘for some reason’.”

“’Was’ being the operative word, there, I get the point,” he acknowledged. “I know I haven’t always done right by her-”

“Understatement.”

“I know, but not the point. I’d never have thought something like- that had happened to her.” He could not say the word, she noted, which irritated her more when she realised her own mind preferred to elide it. She prided herself on looking the truth of the world in the face, not shielding it behind euphemisms and pretty lies, but somehow, she could not put the idea of Seluna into the same sentence as kidnapped, perhaps raped. Such things happened, of course, to the weak and the vulnerable, to those too foolish not to make the best of the situation they’d found themselves in, but somehow, she could not look at Seluna and think any of those things, and she could not identify whether the flaw lay in her image of the girl or somewhere in her own internal logic.

Alistair continued: “She’s always been such a fierce little thing. Even before the Joining, she took to killing darkspawn like she was born for it.”

“And yet somehow you did not think she’d taken to killing men just as easily?” she said, forcing her mask back down with an effort. “It was obvious to me when first I saw her that something had shaken her to her core. I simply saw no reason to pry into it until she saw fit to tell us.” Is that true, she wondered, but did not say, or was it easier to ignore it rather than consider how the child in her belly came to be there, or if she’d prefer to be rid of it, given the option? Would she have offered then, if she’d known the truth, if she knew it for certain now? She did not know, and worse, did not know why that thought repulsed her.

“Yeah, sure, you’re the Witch of the Wilds, possessed of deep insight and knowledge, and I’m an idiot swinging a stick around, but you looked as surprised by her story about the arl’s son as I did, so clearly you didn’t see everything coming.” He looked down into the flames, kicking a loose piece of wood back towards the centre of the fire and causing a small mountain of embers to collapse into a caldera. “Maybe none of us saw her clearly before.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded. It was one thing to admit her flaws to herself, quite another to have them laid bare to Alistair.

He snorted: “Admit it, Morrigan, you thought she was as useless as me until we got to Lothering. And I thought... I don’t know what I thought. I just wanted a family, and she was- there, and a Warden. I thought, sister, sister-in-arms, it amounts to the same thing, right?”

“To be fair to her, Alistair, I have never thought anyone as useless as you,” she said, but something in his words hit home. “A sister, you said?”

He nodded. “I was meant to have a sister- an older one, on my mother’s side,” he added, irrelevantly, “but she left for Denerim when I was a baby. I never knew her, or my mother, and Luna’s- nice. Or she was nice to me, at least, and I thought-” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“You thought that, in the absence of your father figures, you’d make her into sister and mother and Warden-Commander all in one go?” she finished for him. “I’m surprised you did not propose to her as well, ‘twould have been convenient to make her your wife along with all the rest.”

“Don’t be disgusting,” he said, without heat. “but you’re seriously saying you don’t think you did something similar?”

“Have I ever previously admitted to any similarities in our behaviour?” she sniffed, looking into the flames. It had been easier, when she’d thought of the girl as weak and simple, when she’d thought keeping her alive long enough to birth the child sufficient payment for taking it afterwards. It would be easier now, if she could keep thinking of her as the vessel for the rebirth of a god, rather than silver-soft curls and sloe-blue eyes and bloody, bright defiance in the face of a world that sought to break her.

She’d thought it would be so simple at first, to keep treating her as chattel. Most of the mortals she’d observed from afar had seemed more like animals than thinking beings like herself, like her mother. But now it was too easy to look at her and wonder if, had she been following Flemeth’s original plan, her mother would have treated her much the same when she returned with the promised child in her womb.

She hadn’t told her what she expected until almost the moment of her departure. She’d been half-frantic, gathering her meagre possessions in preparation for a journey she could not truly picture the scale of. She had not realised Flemeth had left the Wardens outside on guard until she felt her breath against her ear.

“You have questions, girl, do you not?” she had said, with the rare, expectant tone that promised answers to some, if not all of them. “Best ask them now, before you are too far away for my old ears to hear them.”

“Am I to understand that you won’t be keeping a close eye on my journey, Mother?” she’d retorted, and then cursed herself for wasting a question that could easily be answered a lie.

“You may understand what you wish. I’ll have enough to do with keeping myself from the darkspawns’ claws, without wasting mana scrying on you from so far away I will not be able to intervene in what I see,” she replied, as if it had been a stupid question to start with, which it was. “I suspect what you actually want to know is why you’ll be travelling with them rather than with me.”

“It had crossed my mind,” she said, choosing her words with care. “Surely they are too weak to stop an entire Blight without assistance from an ancient power?”

“And they shall have it,” she replied, tartly, “because I am sending them you. You will keep them alive, and in return, they will give you a child.”

Her bag had fallen from her hands. She could still recall how they’d felt in that moment, numb and trembling. “A child? Mother, have you lost what remains of your mind? You say I am hardly fit to feed myself, and yet you wish to make a mother of me?”

“You need not raise it,” she griped, “merely carry it, given that I am past the best years for such things. The man looks suitably hopeless and needy, it should not be difficult.”

“For him, perhaps,” she’d muttered. “What if I do not wish to lie with him?”

“Don’t whine like an infant, girl. We are living in a Blight, and we must all do things we might not wish to in order to end it.” She tsked, lizard-like, disappointed but unsurprised. “What will you come out with next? That you do not like him? That you wish some great romance before you will do what must be done? I did not raise such a fool.”

She'd felt a little ashamed of herself, then, as if she had revealed some inherent foolishness in protesting rather than asking the important questions: “Why so eager to be made a grandmother? I thought puling infants were among the many reasons we do not go among the mortals.”

She smiled broadly, revealing long, sharp teeth. “There is the better question. The child you bear will have little in common with the squalling village brats you’ve seen before."

She had explained then, about archdemons and ancient gods, and her part in returning them to the world. She had spoken as if she was handing Morrigan some great and sacred duty, a task she’d trust to none but her own daughter. She’d pulled a narrow band of gold from her own withered finger, held it up to the light to show Morrigan its design for the first time – thin metal wire wound with strands of silver and black, her own hair and her mother’s.

“Wear this,” she’d said, “and know that if your life is in danger, I will come for you. Grown and troublesome as you are, you are still my daughter, and I would have you survive this Blight.”

It had been the closest thing to sentimental her mother had ever been. If it had been a lie, it had been very like one of Seluna’s: painting a world so beautiful that her longing to believe it did half of Flemeth’s work for her, one where they were equal collaborators in a plan to forever change the world. She had wanted to believe it, still wanted to believe it, and knew that her very longing made it less likely to be true. And yet, if it was all a lie... it turned her stomach to think that her mother might see her the same way she’d seen Seluna – a puppet sent out to do her bidding, a vessel to carry something she could not or did not wish to bear herself. A bucket in a well – a useful tool, even a necessary one for continued survival, but not a person.

It was strange indeed to realise how unpeopled her world had been once – she'd observed other humans, of course, in their villages or their tribes, but they had not truly seemed real in the way that she and her mother were. Seluna, though, Seluna with her swift-shifting moods and her sharp-edged secrets, her soft heart and spun-sugar stories, her bruised-sloe eyes and cherry-sweet mouth... she could not be anything less than real, almost intrusively so. She’d paid close attention to her at first for the sake of the child, but the babe was still more idea than reality and somehow that thread of constant awareness had tangled into a snare, and she was caught in it, caught in her.

It was ridiculous, given the dangers they faced on all sides, given the secrets she carried, given the knowledge she had yet to uncover, that she should find herself in such a tangle, and yet, as they picked their way down through the Frostbacks to the Hinterlands, the snare pulled tight at the most inconvenient of moments. The quiet in her tent at night, when for a little while there had been teasing chatter. The chill in the mornings, where she’d grown used to the warmth of another body. The distant cackle of her laugh from a comment Morrigan had not heard. All useless, foolish distractions from her work, and all impossible to ignore! She knew she ought to be prying her way back into Seluna’s good graces, but every time she tried to come up with a beginning to that conversation, she felt as awkward and tongue-tied as a child caught in wrongdoing. Flemeth had instructed her on seduction, yes, even provided her with examples she longed to forget, but her targets had always been men blinded enough by lust or illusion or pride to be easily tricked. None of Flemeth’s short-lived lovers had pulled away from an embrace to talk philosophy. Did that mean it had been a bad kiss, or simply a bad moment for one? Such questions were useless to her, but that did not stop them buzzing around her head like flies around an open honey jar.

Perhaps Flemeth had been right about her. Perhaps she was a fool, not fit for life beyond the walls of her cabin. She’d thought herself, if not above such base instincts, at the very least, their master. If she’d had little control of how she’d lived under her mother’s thumb, she had at least been master of her own body then, rather than subject to its whims. She’d been curious about others before, but those were passing fancies, easy to discard once curiosity had been sated or distance put between her and the object of her desire. But Seluna had refused to sate her curiosity, and was as impossible to ignore as she was to truly avoid in a party as small as theirs’.

Redcliffe might have been a respite, but for their reunion with the half of the party who, with fair weather above and roads rather than rabbit-tracks beneath their feet, had managed to arrive back at the castle in disappointment a day before their group had returned with the Ashes. Sten had chosen to remain at a small camp outside the village, to keep an eye on Seluna’s second, more troublesome blood mage recruit, but Leliana and Wynne embraced both the Wardens and then, with a little more reluctance, Melia, and when Seluna introduced them to Zevran and Shale, there was a glow of victory to her features that set Morrigan’s stomach cartwheeling from her place outside their little circle. She might have sloped off to join the Qunari for an evening’s quiet, but the crowd of guards and servants were eager for any chance to celebrate, and they were all swept inside on a tide of almost-frantic anticipation. She did not like it. For all that she’d enjoyed the concept of festival days when she’d observed them from afar, the air in the castle prickled with the nervous energy of its inhabitants, and she felt their eyes on her almost as a pressure on her skin, as if they wished to swallow her whole by looking alone.

Wynne, with her prim-and-proper Circle manners and most improper spirit magic, handled the healing at the arl’s wife’s request – she seemed to find the old woman a reassuring presence, which Morrigan resented given that she, not Wynne, had gone into the Fade to save her precious boy. She resented it more when Seluna produced the Urn and placed it into her hands rather than Morrigan’s, as if she did not remember the feeling of rough ceramic under her fingers (the way Seluna had placed something precious and dangerous in her lap as if trusting her was second nature rather than a dangerous risk). It wasn’t as though it was a betrayal of a secret they’d shared, but a part of her still hated both the echo of what might have been and the pointed reminder of what wasn’t.

Still, the arl was healed, at least enough to open his eyes and croak out a few sentences to his family and to Alistair, and she’d thought- she'd hoped that that would be the last of it, that she’d finally manage to retreat to the quiet of the woods and take on a form that did not know the name Seluna Tabris. She was not so fortunate, of course. Wynne and Alistair remained in the upper keep with the Arl and his family for some secret purposes of their own, but with the kitchens and wine cellars thrown open, the rest of the castle turned to revelry, and she was hungry enough after a day’s travel not to refuse an easy meal.

An easy meal turned out to be an understatement. The people of Redcliffe had pulled together the best their meagre harvest had offered, and after the meagre rations that hunting, scavenging, and looting could provide, it was a feast almost beyond imagining. A whole hog was roasted over the great kitchen fire, and glistening meat and crackling fat were carved off it in fat slices and piled atop thick slices of white bread drizzled with stewed apple. Twisted rolls flavoured with honey or northern spices she’d never tasted before were handed out seemingly at random, never mind that in the villages at the edges of the Wilds, such things would have cost a labourer their day’s wages or a thief their hand.

Barrels were rolled out and uncorked, someone had given Leliana a lute to play, and still, wherever she looked, there was Seluna, half-drunk already on laughter alone, begging Leliana for songs from Denerim or slipping sweets to grubby village children, dragging hapless victims into a makeshift circle dance or spinning on her toes, arms flung wide, like a sycamore seed on the wind.

Morrigan herself had devoured her dinner almost as soon as it was put into her hands, and took advantage of her ‘hero’s’ privilege to grab a second helping when her stomach still rumbled, accompanied by a flagon of rich red wine that glimmered the same colour as the jewel at her throat. It was stronger than the smallbeer and watered-down ale they’d been served in the few taverns on the road, and sweeter too – she could see far more easily how one might get a taste for such a drink. She’d finished all but the crumbs on her scarf and the dregs in her cup when Seluna finally accosted her, eyes bright and cheeks pink, and the smell of oversweet honeywine hanging on her breath.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she accused, with a pout.

“No more than I do anyone else,” she retorted, which was not entirely a lie.

“Of course.” Seluna folded her arms. “Maker forfend you ever admit to being lonely.”

She laughed at that, she couldn’t help it. “Your precious Maker forfend it indeed, the Wilds would have been an unhappy place to grow up if I’d craved the company of other humans.”

Seluna tilted her head, leaning closer. “Really? You were never lonely out there at all?”

She wanted to push her away, to shield herself somehow from that too-perceptive gaze. She wanted to say whatever would keep her at this distance, just within arm’s reach, but not close enough for her absence to echo on Morrigan’s skin.

“At times, perhaps, I was lonely,” she said, because it was a small weakness to confess, a small stake to risk on reeling the girl back in, “I could observe the beasts and the birds, but they knew I was not of their kind. I sought out other humans on occasion, but a world like your Denerim, full of people and buildings and- things- was all foreign to me.” Why did her tongue stumble over the words? Why did it feel like those sloe-blue eyes saw far more than the illusion Morrigan wished to weave? “If I wished companionship, the Wilds were full of life. If I spoke, ‘twas to trees.”

A mocking smile danced around the corners of her lips. “And did they speak back to you?”

“Don’t be foolish.” She rolled her eyes. Of course her first instincts was to mock what she did not understand. “The first time I crept beyond the Wilds, I remained in animal form, watching the strange townsfolk from afar.”

“You didn’t try to speak to them?” Seluna asked, and when she stared at her blankly: “I might have, when I was a girl. My mother always said I’d befriend a bear if it stayed still long enough.”

“As well you were not the one raised in the Wilds, then,” she retorted, and it felt good to spar as they'd used to. “You are far better use to me uneaten.”

Did she imagine the flicker in the smile, the twist of displeasure in the lips? The room was dark and crowded, and she stood with her back to the fire, it was impossible to tell if it had been her expression or a trick of the light and the wine clouding her mind.

“But we weren’t talking about me,” she said, smoothly. “You really didn’t talk to anyone the first time you left the Wilds?”

There was some game the girl was playing here, some deeper ploy, but without more information, Morrigan could not determine what she thought she could get out of this interrogation.

“My mother taught me well to be wary of outsiders.” An image flashed before her eyes – the golden mirror she had so admired, shattered to pieces. “Perhaps not well enough, to begin with,” she amended, “but I proved an apt pupil in the end.”

“That sounds like it didn’t end well.”

“A trite observation, but not inaccurate.” She gazed past Seluna at the crowd of people in the hall, ruddy and riotous and refusing to cease in their celebration. The scene felt almost familiar – the warm circle of firelight, the twisting, sweating bodies it lit, the thrumming music that caught them in its rhythm- and herself, always outside, looking in. Always alone. “Did I want to speak to those strange folk, then? No, Mother had never made the world outside the Wilds, or the people I might find there, appealing, and she’d made it clear that even if I had, they would not have taken to a wildling like me. But I wanted...”

She refocussed her eyes on Seluna, the firelight gilding the silver of her hair. She wanted. “There were beautiful things there too. A noblewoman, if you can credit it, gold and silver in her hair, a gown that shone like stolen starlight... She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I... I did not want to speak to her, but I wanted to keep a piece of that impossible wealth and beauty for myself.”

Seluna did not speak, only watched her with those jewelbright eyes. She could almost see herself reflected in them, a slim, dark shadow.

“I took something small, something I thought might go unnoticed. A gilded hand-mirror, inlaid with jewels. I hugged it to my chest as I carried it home, and thought myself so very cunning.” She could not swallow a bitter laugh. “What a fool I was.”

“Not a fool,” Seluna said, softly. “A child.”

“A foolish child,” she scoffed. “Flemeth was furious, of course. I had not come into my full power, but I’d risked discovery for a pretty, useless bauble. I had to be taught a lesson, of course. She shattered it in my hands.” She could still remember the shock, that something that seemed so lovely, so city-tame, could draw bright lines of blood from her hands. She’d been left to tend her own wounds, so that the lesson would stick, and she’d carried the scars on her palms and her wrists until fresher wounds had covered them up. “I was heartbroken.”

Seluna took one of her hands now, tracing those more recent scars. “And she was cruel.”

Morrigan shook her head, snaking her hand out to grasp her wrist tight, wiry muscle covering delicate bone. “You don’t understand.” How could she understand? “Flemeth was right to break me of my foolish fascination. Beauty, love, companionship – these are fleeting. Survival has meaning. Power has meaning. Without those lessons, I would not be here today. They made me what I am.”

“And do they serve you still?” Seluna’s fingers brushed her own wrist, hovering over the point where her pulse thrummed in her veins.

“How could they not? I am still an apostate mage. The darkspawn are yet undefeated. No, there is much that remains.” The warmth of another’s touch on her skin, that was fleeting. That too would pass. “Perhaps I was lonely in the Wilds, but that was how it had to be. If I ever wondered what might have become of the girl with the golden mirror... such fantasies have no place in reality.”

She expected Seluna to pout, then, to argue a place for softness, for the kindness she lionised in every other situation. She did not expect her lips to curve into a lovely, shattered smile.

“We are what the world has made of us,” she said, “but tonight, we don’t have to be lonely.” Was this how it worked, then, this strange dance she’d failed to learn as a child? An exchange of wounds or vulnerable spots, and their fragile bond was repaired? It made little sense to Morrigan, but the story of the mirror was an old wound and a small sacrifice, to have Seluna smiling at her again.

She stepped back, but kept hold of her hand, as if to pull her up from the bench. “Dance with me?”

Morrigan had not expected to laugh, either, not so soon after recalling that particular memory, but laugh she did, and shook her head. “Me? Dance? I am not a trained bear, and besides, I do not know the steps.”

“We could learn them together?” she offered, dropping her hand. Apparently she would not be compelled to make a fool of herself.

“Or I could allow you to make a fool of yourself first and learn via observation?” she retorted. Perhaps, now they were back on easier terms, the nagging itch her absence had left would dissipate, and things could go back to the way that they were. She could keep the girl at arm’s length, close enough to touch, not close enough to bruise.

Seluna rolled her eyes, but her crooked smile was almost as it had been before the disastrous kiss. “You’ll do as you wish, of course,” she said, “but you don’t have to do it alone."

“I did not-”

“Of course,” she said, with a wink, and then she was gone into the crowd, whirling away like a shooting star across the muddy dark of the crowd. Nothing had changed in the noisy, crowded hall, but perhaps the wine had reached her blood, or another log had been thrown on the fire, because now its warmth seemed to reach her and soak through her, and the idea of remaining to observe a little longer did not feel quite so unpleasant. As Seluna had said, she knew now she could survive in isolation, but tonight, she did not have to be alone.

If she was content as an observer, Seluna seemed in her element in the centre of things. For all her pretensions to ignorance, she spun from hand to hand like a leaf on the wind, twirling into a partner’s arms and then out of their reach with teasing, tempting steps, hips swaying to the beat of footsteps on floorboards as if she was born to it. She was everywhere, like smoke or music or flickering firelight: mock-serenading Leliana, spinning Melia in giddy sycamore-seed-circles, goading Alistair until he lifted her to onto the tabletop where she danced above the crowd like some frivolous, airy spirit of Mirth or Celebration. Lit from behind by the blazing fire, her outsize shirt was almost translucent, and the curves of her body were banded in gold and amber. She moved with the same grace that made her so lethal in battle, and for a time that might have been an eternity,

She slipped out when the noise became overwhelming, before the secondhand warmth of the party became sticky rather than soothing. She need not have worried. Any remaining conviviality was quashed abruptly when she stepped into one of the outer corridors to hear the ragged breathing and soft, wet sounds of a lovers’ embrace. Perhaps, if she’d been a little cleverer, she might have turned on her heel and taken another path. Perhaps, if she’d paid more attention to her companions, she might have been part of the tryst, rather than an interloper. Either way, she should have seen it coming. She should not have frozen for a moment in shock, to see that Seluna had caught herself a Crow, and was making quite a meal of him.

She’d pinned him against the wall, her head buried in the side of his neck as his own was tipped back to the torchlight, lazy pleasure easily legible in his face, in the soft gasps and quiet moans she seemed to elicit when her lips or teeth found a spot of particular tenderness. Before she could turn on her heel and- leave in a more dignified manner than fleeing, his brown eyes fluttered open and he turned that contented smirk on her.

She had nothing to be ashamed of. Walking through a corridor could hardly be called intruding. Her cheeks did not seem to know that, though, heating like a gormless maiden’s, and her feet seemed leaden, as if they’d forgotten their purpose. She could not even have pulled her gaze from his – not that she would have, why should she let him stare her down? - but she could not avoid noticing how his hand tightened on her waist, or the words he mouthed as he looked her over. She only caught ‘share’, but that was enough to free her from her paralysis.

She turned on her heel and left them to their tryst, swallowing a strange, choking feeling she could not name. She did not care where the elves chose to spend their nights. She did not think of the golden mirror, and how beauty might be transient, but the scars it left were not.

Chapter Text

“You seem different.” Leliana had perched on the end of her bed, folded legs supporting a tray of coffee from Denerim and pastries left over from last night’s festivities. Zevran had slipped out of it a few hours before the castle awoke, but the blankets were still warm and rumpled, and for the first time in too many months, Luna felt almost content. The coiled-spring tension in her muscles, the space she'd felt growing between her bloodstained skin and battle-weary soul, all of it had been burned away in the heady rush of lust and satisfaction, and she revelled in the familiarity of the sensation. Her body had been reforged into a weapon under the twin hammers of Loghain and the darkspawn, but it was good to remember she’d not lost the pleasures she’d known before the war came for her – good food, strong drink, a beat she could dance to, and someone eager to please her in her bed at the end of the night.

“Am I glowing?” she teased, sweeping her hair back from her shoulder in a dramatic gesture. “It’s nothing serious, Leliana, just good fun. You don’t need to duel him for my honour or fetch the nearest Reverend Mother, I promise.”

Leliana laughed, and she’d missed that sound, the merriment that seemed to come more easily to her than to others of their group, despite the shadows that lurked in her eyes when she thought nobody was looking. “Wicked girl! I did not mean- well, perhaps I was a little curious,” she amended. “How was he? He treated you properly, I hope?”

She rolled her shoulders, stretching out muscles which she’d not put to such pleasurable purposes in some time. “The Maker blessed him with deft hands and a clever tongue,” she said, slyly, and cackled when Leliana blushed. “I am well-satisfied, I promise.”

Better than well – she was happy. For the first time in four months, her body felt like her own again – something she could take pleasure in rather than a half-dead thing she dragged unwilling through the world. Perhaps bedding Zevran Arainai was far easier than it should have been, given that not a month ago he’d held a knife to her throat, but if seduction was as much a Crow’s tool as his blades, he must have been a far more diligent student than she’d ever been.

He’d taken her hand and let her drag him into the dance with no need for words, and had made her breath hitch when he spun her in against his chest and brushed his lips against her throat.

“You know you’ve already seduced me once, right?” she’d gasped, when they were face-to-face again. “You don’t need to keep going.”

She’d enjoyed his flirtation, of course, all the accidentally-on-purpose brushes of his skin against hers when disarming a trap or setting up camp, but while she enjoyed the knife’s-edge thrill uncertainty brought, she had not forgotten that warming her bed had been one of the first offers he’d made her. She wanted no half-willing or dutiful bedfellows.

“You wound me,” he murmured, lips warm on the shell of her ear as he pulled her in close again. “Seduction is an art, in Antiva, and you expect me to leave you unwooed the first night we might share a bed rather than a pile of blankets?”

She giggled, then, half-giddy from wine and heat and the thrum of music in her veins.“You made good use of those blankets, if I recall right.”

“Oh, I did? I feared you might be seeking out another partner this night.”

She spun just out of his reach, to make him chase her, to hide her face from his in the whirl of her loose hair and the firelight. “Jealous?” she teased, and gasped with delight as he caught her hand and spun her close again.

“Never jealous,” he said, voice low and warm and tempting against her ear. “Curious, is all. She did not seem the type to- provide all you desire.”

“Oh, and a week or two make you an expert?”

“I would not dare to claim anything so foolish.” He caught her hand, raised it deliberately to his lips, inhaled as if it smelt of perfume rather than sweat and smoke, and pressed a kiss to each of her scuffed, bruised knuckles. What was she to do after that? It had been so long since she’d felt, not needed, but desired.

He had smelled of leather and clove oil, tasted of the finest brandy they’d stolen from the Arl’s cellars, and he kissed her with the same hunger that clawed within her own breast: the frantic need to remind their bodies that they still lived, still breathed, and could still take pleasure wherever it was found. She did not taste petrichor and ash on his lips, there was no crackle of potential magic when his hands slipped beneath her shirt to skim her ribs, her breasts, only the warmth of callused skin on hers, and it was familiar, it was easy, it was good.

He kissed her as if it was a dance or a sparring match, a way to learn her by heart without the inconvenient interruptions of words. Not as if he wanted to keep her in place, pinned beneath him. He’d been quite happy to let her take the lead, to let her push him against the wall and trace her lips along his skin, learning the tricks that drew laugher or moans from his lips. He’d tangled his fingers in her hair as she’d bit down on the delicate skin of his throat, dug her nails into his hips, his back. I was here. I made these marks. I’m alive, we’re alive.

Morrigan would not have been so content to be the canvas beneath her fingers and her mouth. Morrigan would have left her own marks in turn, and Luna could not stomach being subject to anyone else’s will. Not when she’d only just burned the thought of her own body, still and pliant and empty beneath strangers’ hands, on the pyre of lust she’d built with Zevran’s kindling.

She could not say any of this to sweet, blushing Leliana though, for all that she suspected the other woman knew far more than she pretended, so instead she stretched like a contented cat and settled into the familiar pattern of giggling girl-talk. It was almost like being at home with Shianni and Nola, though Nola would have blushed and stuttered far more than Leliana, and Shianni would have flicked her ear and called her a hussy with teasing affection.

Perhaps, in the month they’d been separated, she’d forgotten how perceptive the bard could be, though: “It’s not just the man, though, is it, or the Ashes? You found something else, up in those mountains. You are- more yourself, perhaps, than you have been since first we met.”

It was strange – she knew the change Leliana had mentioned, had felt it fall across her like the shadow of a dragon’s wings, but still she wanted to know how such a change in her heart had altered her outward seeming. “What do you mean?”

Leliana looked her over, nibbling thoughtfully on a pastry. “When first we met... forgive me, but I thought you more in need of a Chantry sister’s consolation than my aid in battle. You seemed more like a shadow than a person, for all your skill with those blades. Now... you’ve remembered who you are, or discovered who you’re becoming, and you seem the happier for it. It suits you.”

She returned her smile, curling her knees up to her chest. “I’m glad you think so, at least. Alistair’s still not sure.”

She waved a hand as if to banish the very idea of Alistair from the room. “Of course he is uncomfortable. He is little more than a boy, and a motherless one too.”

It was unkind, perhaps, to giggle at that, but she did anyway. “Half the time, I’m not sure if he wanted to bed me or lay his head in my lap and be told how brave he’s been,” she confessed. “I didn’t plan to disappoint him, but...”

“It was inevitable,” Leliana dismissed. “He was raised by men, then monks, then Templars. You could have been the Bride of the Maker herself and still you would not have been enough to survive falling from the pedestal he put you on as the first woman to speak to him for more than a few minutes. There’s no malice in his nature, but innocence or ignorance can do as much damage.”

Perhaps Leliana had the right of it, there. As odd as it felt to describe sly, sharp-tongued Morrigan as innocent, there had been something desperate in that kiss, as if it was the only way she knew to keep her in place. She’d felt it in how her hands on her waist and shoulder had clawed into her skin, the way her teeth had dug into her lip – not repulsive, exactly, they’d still left her breathless and flushed – but demanding, a new lure the witch had thrown out more from the desire to keep her from seeking out others than the desire to have her for herself. At the time it had angered her – for all the fragile threads of friendship and trust that had bloomed between them, the wounds she’d taken in Denerim had still been raw, and she’d seen another shemlen eager to stake a claim on her body whether out of desire or loneliness.

When her temper had cooled, though... she thought of what she’d seen of Flemeth, her harsh, dismissive bark that sometimes echoed in Morrigan’s voice, her casual cruelty. She'd thought of how little Morrigan seemed to know of towns, or people, despite her cleverness and her hunger for knowledge. She’d thought of the plants that sometimes grew in the damper cellars of the Alienage, their pale, spindly stems, the way they clawed for even the distant promise of light. Despite the unwelcoming soil she’d been planted in, Morrigan had grown, and if she’d become thorn and bramble, perhaps she’d had to, in order to survive. Perhaps she knew no other way than to cut and kiss by turns, but where would she have learned anything else, if she’d never had a friend before?

Even for Luna, though, who’d grown in the close-planted soil of Alienage dirt, who was used to entangling her roots with a hundred close-knit kinfolk who in other circumstances she might not have chosen, Morrigan could be a thorny tangle to befriend. She’d snuck out of the castle at some point during the party, which was hardly unusual for her, but the promise of a breakfast she did not have to scrape together herself had not lured her back.

This, of course, meant Luna had the dubious pleasure of dining with the Arl and his family without an ally to voice the thoughts she would not dare to. It was one of the most awkward meals she attended, and that included the foggy memories she had of the travellers’ rations Duncan had half-forced down her throat on the road. Not that she’d intended to starve herself – she hadn’t had much room in her then for intent – but everything had tasted like dust and ashes then, and she’d had no appetite from it.

The fare she was served now was finer of course – tender lamb stewed with carrots and rich, cheesy dumplings – but though the ingredients were no doubt finer, the company left a far more sour taste in her mouth than eating roast hog in the kitchen with celebrating servants and villagers. The Arlessa smiled vacuously and asked her meaningless questions about her travels into the Frostbacks, the Temple of Sacred Ashes, anything to avoid making eye-contact with Alistair, who’d been seated next to her. Luna did not know the best way to phrase ‘I had to kill a lot of people to fix the mess you made’ for polite society, so she fielded her questions to Leliana instead, asking for news from Denerim that might interest the nobility at the table.

“All bad, I’m afraid,” Leliana said, delicately slicing a dumpling in half to wipe the gravy from the rim of her bowl. “Loghain is gathering his allies in the capital, bribing those he thinks he can win easily with titles or land and executing those few who dared stand against him to his face.”

“But that is tyranny!” the Arl exclaimed, which it probably did seem like to him. To Luna, it seemed much the way humans in power had always treated those beneath them, but nobody had asked her, and if it took the responsibility of stopping the Blight off her shoulders, she’d have smiled and told pretty lies to the Arl and his idiot brother for at least a week. “Surely they know he betrayed Cailan in order to seize the throne in his daughter’s name?”

“He blamed the Wardens for misleading him, of course,” Luna said, regretting the mouthful of stew she’d taken when everyone seemed distracted. It was depressingly underseasoned, but perhaps nobles had particularly weak stomachs. It would explain all the poisonings in Denerim Leliana seemed to know a little too much about, “and who is there to gainsay him? Anyone who might be suspicious is likely already on a pike or too clever to point fingers without someone to stop Loghain lopping them off.”

“Eloquently put,” the Arl’s brother said, drily. Luna smiled sweetly as the memory of the terrified villagers’ wails rang in her ears, and tried not to think about putting a knife through his hand, “but we take your point.”

“That’s why we need your help, Unc- Arl Eamon,” Alistair corrected himself, and despite their quarrel, Luna’s heart hurt a little for him in that moment. For all she was lost to her family now, she could at least still claim them as her own. “The Bannorn respect you, you’ll know how to make them see-”

“If Loghain is a tyrant, my husband has no more power to ‘make him see’ than any other man,” the Arlessa protested, covering his hand with her own, “and he is barely recovered from an illness that almost took his life! You cannot expect-”

Luna’s stomach was writhing more noticeably than usual, as if something within wanted to claw its way out. She took a swig of Morrigan’s potion, and hoped it would pass soon.

“We cannot expect him to rally Ferelden to the Grey Warden treaties?” she asked, widening her eyes. “Alistair led me to think there was no man of greater honour in the land than Arl Eamon, but of course, if your ill-health has taken such a toll-”

“It has not,” the Arl snapped, shrugging off his wife’s hand, and it was perhaps unkind in Luna to take some satisfaction in that, “but what you ask is not quickly achieved. If I am to rally the Bannorn, it must be with utmost secrecy, and it will take some time. And if we are to rally them in the name of the Warden treaties, they must be given pressing reason to step up.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Because darkspawn overrunning their lands and devouring their children isn’t enough of a reason to do something about it?”

“In my father’s day, or King Maric’s, that would have been enough. The nobles who ruled then knew what it was to fight for the land we call our own – they'd had to, to reclaim it from Orlais. But their children, and their grandchildren, they’ve grown soft and lazy, and they do not think war will come to their doors again. Present company excepted, of course, dear boy.” He glanced to Alistair with a look of something like pride, then, and Luna could see his ears redden at even such patronising praise. “If we wish the human rulers of Ferelden to do their duty, they may need to be shamed into doing their part. You already have the aid of the mages and the Templars, but that is one small, isolated hold. The elves, though, and the dwarves of Orzammar... to show that the other races of our nation will do their part with or without us should shame my countrymen into action, if my word alone will not.”

Leliana glanced at Luna then, gnawing her lip, and she knew that the question she had not dared to ask would be answered now, whether she liked it or not. She almost wished to cover her ears, or hide under the table like a child, for all the good it would do her. What had happened to her family, to her alienage, in the tremors she’d left in her wake, was beyond her power to prevent or remedy, but knowing about it would still be a knife to the belly.

“The elves of Denerim’s alienage are even now locked behind guarded gates,” Leliana admitted. “The Teyrn says it is for their own protection, to prevent another purge, but nobody may enter or leave. I suspect the same measures have been applied in Amaranthine and Gwaren – even if they would help us, I suspect your people may be beyond our reach,” she said, to Luna alone. She felt her hands curl reflexively around her cutlery, though there was nobody to lash out at here, no ropes or chains to cut away, only the dull, distant horror that no news could be as bad as the worst she’d anticipated.

She swallowed, though her mouth felt drier than dust. “Even if we could, it would be little help,” she said. “My people weren’t even allowed to own weapons, let alone practice with them, until the rebellion. My mother-” she coughed, took a sip of her drink, it did not help, “my mother fought among the Night Elves in the rebellion, but there are precious few of her comrades still alive now.” Humans did not care for reminders that they had not won their freedom alone, that theirs was not the only blood shed for the Theirin throne.

“And those that do live likely still feel some loyalty to Loghain, he was their advocate once, after all,” the Arl said. Luna bit her tongue rather than argue – if Loghain had once had any good will with her people, he’d burned it long ago when they’d once again been the first to starve in times of famine, the last to be fed in times of plenty. In Denerim, they could not even join guilds – her father was still an apprentice in his fifties, for all that his work far outshone his ‘master’s’. He’d made the wedding band she twisted around her finger now. “No, child, I was not speaking of your people, a wise thought though it was. I spoke of the Dalish of Brecelian. They have as much or more to lose if the Blight creeps north, and they never surrendered their arms to dwell within alienage walls.”

Child. The word alone set a red mist drifting before Luna’s eyes, and for all that he was an old man, and sickly too, Luna wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“I am not a child, to be sent chasing another fairytale,” she said, setting down her knife so she would not be tempted to use it. “I am the woman who saved your village, your castle and your son. I freed the Fereldan Circle from the grip of demons, and I retrieved Andraste’s Ashes to save your life, all so you can sit here and talk down to me like I’m some ragged urchin in need of your wisdom? I don’t think so.”

Alistair laid a hand on her arm, “Luna-”

That penetrated the haze of anger. He’d not touched her, or spoken to her directly, since their disastrous argument on the bridge in the mountains, out of shame in his own actions or lingering disgust for hers. But he was looking at her now, with pleading, puppyish eyes.

She gently removed his hand. “I appreciate,” she said, with forced, venomous sweetness, “that it might not come easily to speak to an elven woman as an equal, but as a man of such famed gallantry, I’m sure you’ll put in at least a fraction of the effort I have to bring this conversation to pass.”

There was a fraught, horrible silence, and for a long moment, Luna was certain she’d destroyed all chances of an alliance with Redcliffe in order to soothe her own petty pride. This was why she needed Morrigan. It was easy to be the calm one, the reasonable one, when she knew someone else was seething too, if for different reasons.

Then the Arl let out a tired, creaking laugh. “Well, that’s put me in my place,” he said, and she relaxed a little, though Alistair was still taut as a drawn bow. “I did speak out of turn, you are correct, but the Dalish are no fairytale, not that you’d have any reason to know that. King Maric encountered them in Brecelian during the war, and in gratitude for their aid in his hour of need, he gave them sovereignty over their forest. Not that it hasn’t been challenged in later years, but- regardless, they have as much or more to lose in a coming Blight, with no fortifications to hide behind, and they may remember the Warden treaties far better than we have – I know Duncan had friends among their Keepers, and recruited from their number.”

Luna felt her shoulders slump then, a bone-deep weariness creeping up from where a night of celebration had tucked it away. “So we’re to travel to Brecelian and Orzammar while you- write letters to friends?”

It had been foolish, she knew, but part of her had hoped, childishly, that when the Arl was healed and back on his throne, she could set this burden aside, and leave Alistair and his woes in the hands of his capable foster-father. That was what Arls and thrones were meant for, carrying the burdens too heavy for little people like her. But then, when had anyone important ever taken a load from her shoulders or bade her rest when she was weary? She’d had more kindness and consideration from an assassin, an apostate, and a Witch of the Wilds than she’d ever had from any noble.

“To arrange a Landsmeet is no small thing!” The Arl’s brother jumped in, quickly. “It will take time, and negotiation-”

“And of course,” the Arl added, “there is still the matter of who will sit the throne once the dust settles. Loghain claims to act for his daughter. We must have our own candidate.” He looked to Alistair, who had frozen midway through chewing on a dumpling, and paled to ashen grey.

“No,” he said, “you can’t mean-”

“You are Maric’s son,” the Arl reminded him, and from the hush in the air, it was the first time those words had truly been spoken aloud, “Cailan’s brother. His only heir, given that he and the Queen had no children.”

“But- but I don’t want to be king!” It was a petulant, childish outburst, and Luna almost choked as she tried to suppress a laugh.

“It’s as good a reason to call a Landsmeet as any,” she said, as diplomatically as she could without giggling. “We’ll nail down who we actually want on the throne later, but that’s not actually my problem.” She rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand, wishing she’d dedicated more of the previous night to actually sleeping. “Brecelian it is, I suppose. What’s one more legend to squeeze in before Satinalia? I don’t suppose you’ve got a secret map to the last griffin roost here too?”

There was, unfortunately for her aching feet, no secret griffin map, but the road to the Southern Hills was thick enough with refugees that it was easy to move for Brecelian under the cover Wynne provided of the respectable Senior Enchanter, her apprentices, and her strange collection of bodyguards. The roads were full of strange travellers in these times, and their party attracted little notice, aside from Wynne’s pauses to heal the injured and the ailing. Morrigan, of course, objected strenuously to such frequent pauses, but it earned them enough good will on the road that Luna was a little less worried about word of their passage reaching the ears of Loghain’s loyalists.

If nothing else, the golem drew far more attention than the elf and human Grey Wardens that his spies were likely still seeking, and Luna herself bore little resemblance to the grim, grey girl she’d been at Ostagar. A summer on the road had freckled and tanned her skin and corded her limbs with muscle, and Morrigan’s hunting had filled her out with curves a human might envy. Alistair was more difficult to conceal, but here Zevran’s Crow training came in useful – it took more persuasion than work to stain his blond hair reddish with dye, and if she came away from it redhanded, it was, for once, more entertaining than gory.

“I don’t see why you’re not dyeing your hair,” he grumbled, as she rubbed the henna into its roots. “I don’t know how you manage to get around so sneakily with that mop on your head.”

It was the most normally he’d spoken to her since the Temple of Sacred Ashes, and she’d learned enough of Alistair in their months together that such good behaviour should be rewarded.

“You can help with mine while yours is setting, if it cheers you up,” she said, “but if Loghain finds us because he hears rumours of a glowing orange elf on the Imperial Highway, I’m blaming you.”

“If you don’t, Morrigan will,” he said, morosely. “I don’t know who pissed in her potions at Redcliffe, but she’s been even grumpier than usual since we left, which I didn’t think was possible.”

"Mm.” Luna could not meet his eye, or Zevran’s, for very different reasons. The assassin was biting his lip to suppress laughter, and if she met his eyes, Luna was not sure if she’d join him or flee the scene.

“As radiant as you’d look in amber, I suspect you may have a point. Discretion has its place in a spy’s work, after all.”

“We aren’t spies!” Alistair objected, and was aggressively hushed for his troubles. “We’re the last defence of humanity against the darkspawn! Not- sneakthieves and murderers. Present company excused, of course.”

“Consider yourself excused,” Luna said, with more mildness than he perhaps deserved. “Try not to look so miserable. When we wash this out, you might be almost as pretty as Leliana. What do you think, Zevran, darling? Could we pass them off as siblings?”

Zevran stepped back, looking at Alistair with a mock-critical eye. “I fear our fair bard has far too much of Orlais in her manners and bearing. Yourself, though... with the hair, and Alistair’s more... delicate features-”

“Hey!”

“Would ‘pretty’ be better? You cannot ask me to describe our sweet Seluna as ‘handsome’ or ‘rugged’ merely to appease your manhood.”

“I’m sure my fragile ego would survive,” Luna interrupted. She could not face another argument on the road after the hundred petty quarrels Morrigan laid at her feet, or the odd, disappointed looks that Wynne shot her whenever they happened to have something like privacy. “Take the compliment, Alistair, before you wound my feelings too deeply.”

“I am not ‘pretty’,” he grumbled, but took the pot of paste and began to clumsily smooth it over Luna’s scalp.

“I meant only that we might pass off any similarities between you as a matter of shared blood, which, in a manner of speaking, they are,” Zevran said, taking over with far more skilled hands. He carded his fingers through her hair to rub circles into her scalp, and despite the chill in the air that whispered of autumn’s approach, she leaned back into his touch with the lazy stretch of a cat into a sunbeam. His hands seemed to smooth in colour and ease pains she’d been carrying for so long she hardly noticed them any more. She wondered, idly, if she could persuade him to use those same skills on her aching back when they retired that evening.

She was unwillingly drawn back to reality by a noise of discomfort from Alistair.

“So, as the prospective brother of the lady in question-”

Luna batted one eye open to glare at him. “What?”

“I just- this doesn’t seem proper.” His ears were reddening again, she noticed, with interest, and that was enough to pull her back from thoughts of more pleasant purposes she could turn Zevran’s clever hands to.

“We’re not in Redcliffe Castle any more, Alistair,” she reminded him, trying not to laugh. “I don’t think anyone else out here is clinging to noble ideas of- propriety.”

“Maybe so, but- look, I’m not going to be the kind of brother who lets people take liberties,” he declared, and reminded her so much of Soris that it nearly choked her.

“Of course,” Zevran said, seriously, “I will restrict any liberties to one of you only. Anything else would be most improper.”

Alistair attempted to swat at him. Zevran dodged. Luna only barely saved the bowl of dye from tipping down her back, and restored order by threatening to pour it over both of them.

Later, when Luna was still wringing the remains of the dye from the dripping mass of her hair, Alistair said, more quietly: “I was supposed to have a sister, you know. Or- my mother had a daughter when I was born, I mean.”

Luna blinked at him. “The Arl didn’t keep you together?”

He shook his head. “He said she didn’t want to stay in the place where her mother died, and well- I can hardly blame her for that, and it’s not like I could have missed her, I was only days old myself. I just used to wonder...” He trailed off, gazing into the distance until Luna nudged him.

“Wonder what?” she prompted.

He shrugged. “What she was like, I suppose. Or, no, I wondered- what it would have been like. To have family who weren’t keeping me around out of duty. To have a sister.” He snuck a glance at her, and she determinedly did not meet his eye. “I guess, when we met, I hoped... I hoped she’d be like you. Or you’d be like her, I don’t know. A sister-in-arms is a kind of sister.”

“But I wasn’t the kind of sister you imagined,” she finished for him, because of course this boy with his soft, innocent eyes and his big, naive heart had imagined a sister like a princess in a story, like the Elfroot Maid or pretty, helpless Isolde in one of her gentler moods. Not an alienage girl with blood on her hands and no honour left to defend.

“That wasn’t your fault.” He swallowed, kicked a stone out into the stream, watched the ripples spread. “Morrigan was right. I saw what I wanted to see in you, and got angry when you were- you.”

“If it helps,” Luna said, gently, “I’m sure you’d have been a good brother. Plenty of girls would love to have you sticking up for them.”

“I- I hope so,” he said, looking down at his boots. “I don’t think I made a good start with you.”

“Lucky you have until we get to Brecelian to sell it then,” she teased, ruffling his damp curls. The red did make them look more alike, she realised, and the way his hair curled around his ears now drew attention to the way they stuck out, almost tapering to points far softer than her own.

“Not long now, then,” he said, and looked at her nervously. “And- after?”

“And after,” she agreed, solemnly, because a cover story was a small lie, because he seemed so young and so fragile it would have been cruel to refuse him. Because she missed the web of family she’d been born into more each day, and if she could steal a little piece for herself out here, that could not be wrong.

If she’d hoped for a quiet evening to spend in her tent (or in Zevran’s), she was perhaps always going to be disappointed. Melia hurried up to her with panic in her wide, dark eyes, and a frantic flush in her cheeks.

“Luna,” she began, clinging nervously to her arm, “can I- speak with you?”

“You’re speaking right now, Mel,” Luna replied, thinking longingly of the warmth of the campfire and the dinner awaiting her then.

“Privately, I mean,” Melia elaborated, towing her towards the edge of camp to whisper: “I need- do you have any rags? For- you know.”

Luna blinked. Of all the things to not have noticed- “...No,” she replied, slowly. “My courses stopped after the Joining."

Melia stared at her. “You don’t think-”

She shook her head. “No, Mel. Wardens can’t have children, at least according to all those I’ve spoken to. And even if they could, I haven’t done anything that could result in them for months.”

“But- I thought you and Zevran-?”

She smirked. “Come on, surely you picked up at least a few hints from those dirty ditties the Chantry sisters didn’t know about?”

“Luna!” Melia hissed, but she was giggling despite her crimson blush.

“Try Leliana,” she advised, “or Morrigan has bloodmoss in her healing kit, if you’re willing to brave a lecture.”

“I will,” she said, quickly, but as soon as they moved back towards the fire, she scampered to Wynne’s side. Odd, but then, Luna had no idea if or when human women stopped their bleeding, and the older woman was at least a familiar figure to ask. Strange that she hadn’t gone there first, but that was none of Luna’s business.

She spooned out her stew from the pot that Sten had begrudgingly set to boil, and settled on a log to sop it up with the bread they’d bartered for from another group of refugees. It was a little stale now, but it was still delicious variety in contrast to the hard trail biscuits and gamey rations they’d been reduced to in the mountains. Almost as soon as she was comfortable, she felt a brush of fingers in her hair, and tilted her head to see Zevran had appeared beside her, and was winding a strand through his fingers.

“Fair girl with flame-red hair,” he murmured, in tones that implied he was quoting a poem, and she laughed and rolled her eyes.

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only those who laugh as prettily as you,” he retorted, and pressed a bold kiss to the corner of her mouth.

She could taste the Antivan brandy she’d bartered for on his lips, hanging in the air between them like a memory of the warmth they’d shared, and she leant into it for a moment before the jeers of her companions pulled them apart.

“Later,” she promised him, and blew him a kiss as she abandoned him to first watch, sauntering back to the privacy of her tent.

Her tent, neatly pitched, but dark within. Her tent, not empty.

She reacted on instinct. A sharp blow to the stomach to double her victim over, then a leg over the hip to pin them to the ground. A knife pressed to where their throat should be, and then-

Green veilfire flared to life, revealing Morrigan pinned beneath her and a shallow line cut into the pale skin of her throat.

“Andraste’s tits,” Luna gasped, sheathing her blade. “You idiot, I could have killed you!”

“You could have tried,” the witch retorted, wriggling upright with a grace that implied she could have gotten out of Luna’s grasp at any point, had she wanted to. “I would not have permitted such foolishness.”

“For someone who wants me to be wary of assassins, you are incredibly casual about getting stabbed.” Luna adjusted to sit cross-legged, no longer straddling the other woman. “I thought you got all your complaints out of your system when I picked up my tea.”

“Clearly my warnings about the dangers of assassins did not stick,” she sniffed, and snaked out a hand to Luna’s own throat before she could slap away, pressing her fingers down on a fresh bruise. A crackle of healing magic rippled through her skin. Luna winced back from the ember-crackle-sting of it, but the witch’s hand remained on her throat a second too long, making a point that might have been threat or promise. Despite herself, despite her resolution, Luna felt her pulse quicken beneath the light touch,

She’d never been more grateful for the weakness of shemlen eyesight. She leant back on one elbow, attempting an air of disaffected cool despite the heat that flared in her cheeks. “Come on, Morrigan. Surely you aren’t jealous.”

It was petulant, and more than a little catty. It was also, unfortunately, very funny, after the games the other woman had played with her, to see her pout and fold her arms like a teenager caught in an obvious lie.

“I simply question your judgement in choosing to bed a man who’s loyalties are so easily swayed. From the Crows to Loghain, and from Loghain to you... I would not be surprised if you found him in Alistair’s bed, if the fool happened to hold a blade to his throat.”

Luna could not help but laugh at the thought of poor Alistair’s reaction. “I’m sure Alistair wouldn’t know what to do with him if he did find him there, but if Zevran has an interest in that quarter, I’m not going to stand in his way, as long as he doesn’t break the poor boy’s heart.”

Morrigan’s nose wrinkled. “I am beginning to reconsider my estimation of your intelligence, Seluna.”

Always Seluna, like a Chantry sister or a guard, like someone of high rank putting her neatly back in her box. “Luna,” she corrected, sourly, which was a mistake – it was always foolish to let Morrigan know she’d hit a nerve, “and I’d think not succumbing to petty jealousy would earn your admiration rather than your disdain.”

“You miss my point by design, not by ignorance!” she snapped. “Has he truly seduced you to the point where you’ve lost all reason, or are you so desperate to slake your lusts you’d bed anything, even a man who will give you neither loyalty nor fidelity? You cannot believe he loves you, little fool, and if all you sought was a warm body in your bed, you had better options!”

The words hit her like a blade to the back. Chill rage flooded her veins, and for a moment, she wanted to seize the woman’s shoulders, shake her hard, demand to know why she thought one kiss made it any of her business who Luna chose to spend her nights with. But with anger came clarity – she could see, beneath Morrigan’s cruelty, a wound to her pride that the witch would not forgive easily.

“Perhaps I choose to ‘slake my lusts’, as you put it, with someone who calls me sweeter things than ‘little fool’. Perhaps he’s fallen so madly for me that we plan to marry at the next Chantry we pass.”

“He has not-”

“Perhaps,” she continued, talking over her, “I prefer to fuck people who can answer simple questions like ‘do you see me as a person or something you own’. Sound familiar, Morrigan? Got an answer-”

“Of course I see you as a person, you imbecile!” Morrigan interrupted, with more heat in her tone than Luna had ever heard before. “How could I not, when you refuse to act as nature compels you to, when you stick your hand into the fire again and again despite knowing it will burn? How could I not, when your incessant chatter reshapes the world in a way a blood mage would envy? How could I not, when your company is the first I’ve preferred to my own?”

She covered her mouth as the last words emerged, but it was too late – Luna had heard them clearly, and the raw, aching loneliness in them cut through her rage to the soft heart beneath.

“Morrigan,” she said, as soft as she could make herself. “You know we don’t have to be lovers to be friends, right? You know I’d still care for you-”

It was a mistake. Softness was always a mistake with Morrigan – she could only ever see an underbelly and strike with claws unsheathed.

“You think I care for your affections?” she sneered. “I simply wished to observe how little value you placed on your body, to offer it up to-”

Luna slapped her then. It was more to silence than to hurt her, but there was something victorious in Morrigan’s eyes as she raised a hand to her cheek, as if despite the blow, Luna had proved something true about her nature that she’d been waiting for for a long time.

“It is not your place,” she growled, “to value what is mine.”

Morrigan laughed, a bright bitter caw, her hand still raised to her cheek where Luna had struck her. “Please, Luna, we are women. There will always be someone willing to place a value on our bodies. Our only right is to set the price of our choosing.”

She shoved herself up into a crouc and wheeled for the door.

“Did Flemeth teach you that?” Luna called to her back.

“Did your mother fail t-Ow?”

It might have been a good retort, or at least the beginning of one, had Morrigan had the night-vision to see Luna’s leg snake out between her own to trip her. She landed hard on her backside, the wind knocked out of her before she could finish. Luna pressed a foot down on her ankle, just hard enough to promise pain if she moved.

“My mother,” she said, with all the poisonous sweetness she could muster, “taught me my body was the only thing I’d always own entirely. And she taught me to put a knife through the throat of anyone who disagreed with that. I’m sorry,” she added, moving her foot just enough to release her, “that your mother didn’t teach you the same, but I think you’re capable of learning, so this is your second chance. You only get one.”

There seemed to be no rejoinder to that. Morrigan scrambled from the tent in disarray, and Luna watched her shadow against the firelight with something that was not quite satisfaction. It should not have been satisfying to have Morrigan pinned beneath her, or to feel her hand at her throat. It should not be satisfying to push on her bruises and knock her off-balance.

The girl she’d been on her wedding day, the girl with flowers in her hair and a heart that could still believe in storybook love, she would never have wanted this. She’d have stolen Alistair’s heart, tumbled head-over-heels for Leliana’s soft-spoken fairytales, played cat-and-mouse with Zevran until she was the one caught. She’d always been sharp-tongued, but she’d never taken such pleasure in wounding another before, and it sat sour in her belly, even as she knew Morrigan likely had no such compunctions about cutting her down when they sparred. She knew she was not that girl any more, had folded her away with same tenderness and regret she felt for the wedding dress that no longer fit her, but the woman she was becoming – she was a terrible stranger, and she was not yet sure she was ready to look at her own reflection.

There were no mirrors when they entered Brecelian, though. There were rushing brooks and clear, limpid pools, but the dappled light that made it through the tangle of leaves did not lend itself to reflection, and Luna was glad of it. For all the wild beauty of the mountains and Hinterlands, the chill majesty of the Korcari Wilds, the deep, green never-quiet of the woods dug its roots into her heart long before they found the Dalish. There was a sense of lively activity to the air – deer flashing between trees, birds quarrelling in the branches above, squirrels chasing eachother to steal nuts to hoard for the winter.

It was almost like the noisy chatter of home, the constant stream of bickering and flirting and life that the city had meant to her. It had been the steady background beat to her entire life, and she’d never known to miss it until she’d been dragged away. The sounds of the woods were not the same, exactly, but the sensation of thrumming activity, of a thousand lives running in parallel to her own – that was familiar, and she loved it almost to the point where she thought she could see why some of her childhood playmates had chosen the chance for this life over the familiarity of the alienage. Perhaps they’d found a kind of peace here they could never have found in Denerim. At home, they’d gathered around a single ancient tree for their festivals and their mournings. In this place, near every tree seemed as ancient as her beloved vhenandal, and almost as beautiful. It was almost enough to make her wonder if the Dalish might have the right of the matter.

That impression was not strong enough to carry past meeting the Dalish themselves. She had not expected to be greeted like a long-lost daughter, or even a particularly welcome guest, but the narrowed eyes and muttered ‘flat-ear’ hit her like a gutpunch, knocking the wind from her sails and the charm from her smile. She realised, as Zevran took over from her, that somehow she’d still expected them to see her as one of their people, as she might have them. Apparently, this was not so.

“Your ways are not our ways,” their Keeper explained, as he invited them into his araval for a steaming cup of tea. It was very different to what they drank in Denerim – the herbs they used tasted cool and green, refreshing rather than warmly spiced – but still a little soothing after the shock of the brusque welcome they received. “You know this, of course, but not the whole of it – the elves of the cities have often been used as spies against us or weapons to control us. Sometimes, you come to us as outcast children seeking a home, and our fires always welcome you, but at others, your people have been quick to side with the shemlen over the Dalish if it gained them some opportunity. And, forgive me, you do not seem like a lost child to my eyes.”

She might have found his tone more condescending, if he had not reminded her so much of Valendrian – a leader who’s love for his people was only outweighed by hard-learnt caution, the coldness he’d had to learn to keep them safe. She could respect a man like that, even if it did not make her like him more.

She inclined her head. “You’re right, I didn’t come here for sanctuary. I came to ask you and your clan to help us fight the darkspawn, but based on the number of injured I’ve seen, it looks like you have your own troubles.”

She’d expected a more mundane tale of cruelty and violence, a purge similar to those inflicted on her own home. Shemlen barbarism was an old song to her now, after all. She did not expect vengeful spirits and magical curses that spread like contagions. Perhaps that was her own folly – the Dalish themselves had seemed almost a myth to her, with their moon-pale halla and their graceful aravels. In the stories she’d heard as a little girl, they’d spoken the language of the trees, and the forests had gladly risen in their defence, but of course, this was no story, and even in Brecelian, it seemed her people were not welcome.

Something about the idea of the curse turned her stomach, despite her teas and her attempts to breathe deeply. She had not cared for how the spirits and demons she’d encountered in the Fade had toyed with the minds of her companions, and the idea that they could turn the very bodies of their victims against them, transform them into weapons against their own loved ones... It was almost viler than Connor’s army of corpses sent back to haunt their families. At least it was less likely that the dead of Redcliffe were still trapped in bodies which had become weapons turned on their homes. The werewolves, though... She’d thought she’d known rejection when Ylva had handed her over to the guards, but that was nothing to being hunted down by her own people.

She wasn’t really listening, then, when Wynne began to talk to her as they set up camp in the part of the glade the Dalish were willing to share with them.

She didn’t even realise she’d been asked a question until she glanced up to see the older woman looking at her expectantly. “Hmm? Sorry, I was- thinking.”

“Of course,” Wynne replied, but there was an edge to her tone that implied she was losing patience. “You carry many burdens, for one so young, but it is not a weakness to share them with others, if they become too heavy or too dangerous to carry alone.”

There was a point she was trying to make, Luna was sure of it, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

“I know, and I appreciate all you’re doing for us already,” she said, because it seemed appropriate. “I’m sure we’ll... need your healing in days to come?”

This was apparently the wrong thing to say – the older woman pursed her lips as if she’d bitten into a lemon.

“Really, child,” she sighed, as if disappointed in her. “If there was ever a time to come clean, it’s now. You cannot think it sensible to risk contracting a curse-”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Luna said, drily, “but I don’t think anyone’s ever stopped a Blight without taking a couple of risks.”

“That may be so, but you’ve been- fortunate so far, in the injuries you’ve received. This curse though, in your condition-”

“My condition?” Luna raised an eyebrow. “I know every Warden dies of the Blight eventually, but I don’t think I’m quite at my Calling just yet, despite the nightmares.”

Wynne took hold of her shoulder, gazing down at her in a way that made her feel more like a miscreant teenager than the Warden-Commander she was pretending to be.

“Seluna,” she said, gently, “I understand that this is a strange and frightening time, and that your position is hardly ideal, but you cannot keep denying this much longer. You’ll have to tell the rest of the group eventually.”

Luna stared at her, uncomprehending. “Tell them what?”

“Tell them about the child, of course.”

The world began to blur at the edges. “The what? Wynne, I- I don’t understand.”

But she did understand now, the pieces falling together with far-too-perfect clarity. The nausea that dogged her heels. The fatigue she’d been battling for months. Even Melia’s ill-timed question about rags. All symptoms she’d attributed to the taint in her veins were actually- were actually-

“I think I need to sit down,” she said, and then suddenly, she was already on the ground, her breath coming in quick, sharp gasps as she felt the shadows of her companions fall around her.

She could still hear Wynne’s voice in her ear, so calm, so terribly calm. How could anyone be calm right now, knowing what she knew?

“You poor child.” Her voice was softer now, kinder, her hands gentle on her shoulders. “Breathe in, then out. Slower, yes, that’s good.”

“I can’t- it can’t be- Wynne, tell me you made a mistake, please, this is just a mistake-” She wasn’t sure who was babbling low and frantic, and she almost wished someone would shut them up. She was the only one allowed to panic right now.

The babbling stopped abruptly when Morrigan slapped her, and stunned her back into her senses.

“Hysterics are not helpful to anyone, least of all you and your- child.” She stumbled over the last word, as if she could not quite fit her mouth around it. “You truly did not know?”

“You knew?” She glanced between the three mage-women, who glanced at each other in a look that was all but confirmation of their conspiracy. “Ev- did everyone figure this out but me?”

A gauntleted hand clapped down on Morrigan’s shoulder, pulling her back and out of view. “I think,” Alistair said, with forced calm, “we’d all appreciate some explanations about now.”

Luna, foolishly, waited for someone else to announce it. It took her longer than it should have to realise everyone who could have was staring at her.

“It’s me,” she said, blankly. “I’m- oh, sweet fucking Maker – I'm pregnant.”

Those words did not belong in this place, in this world, to the version of her with Blight in her veins and blood on her hands. They belonged to the bride with flowers in her hair and a glowing future unrolling before her. She was a murderer now. She was a monster. People like her were not meant to become mothers.

She did not expect Alistair to wheel on Zevran with an expectant glare, but it was almost funny how quickly the Crow held up his hands and backed up.

“I may be a cad, but I am a responsible one. I swear, this is not my doing-”

“Of course he had nothing to do with this,” Morrigan said, scornfully. “I’m sure he’ll swear to anything you like that he never so much as looked at the girl.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Melia said, softly, “but-” she glanced to Wynne, who nodded, “this has been- going on for longer than we’ve known Zevran.”

Of course it had been. The only man she’d bedded carelessly was- was Nelaros. The beautiful boy who’s face she only half-remembered now, drowned beneath a tide of blood she’d shed to avenge him. Of course it was Nelaros, it had to be Nelaros, because anything else was-

She crushed the thought down ruthlessly, folding her hands over her treacherous belly. The narrow band of gold she’d taken from his body still gleamed on her finger.

“Duncan said-” Why did her voice sound so soft and childish to her own ears? “he said that Wardens couldn’t have children.”

“Don’t,” Alistair corrected her, with utmost gentleness, “not- can’t. It’s unlikely, but not- not impossible.”

She could barely remember. There was so much, now, that she could not remember. She’d been so stupid. Ignorant as any village maiden, despite considering herself so worldly-wise to the ways of suffering. She’d grown so accustomed to thinking of her body as barren, blighted land since the wedding, since the Joining, that it had seemed impossible for anything to take root there, and yet- something had. She felt hot, wet tears seep down her cheeks, but could not muster the strength to wipe them away.

Another hand on her shoulder as Zevran crouched beside her. His voice was gentle, warm, the voice of a friend, not a lover. “If you do not want this- if this was forced upon you, there are potions any Crow knows, simple poisons-”

She shook her head.

Wynne looked between them. “Luna-”

“I said no,” she snapped. “Even- even if I wanted to, it’s too- too far gone now.” She counted the months in her mind, though now they seemed like a lifetime. She’d meant to be married on Summerday, and now they were halfway through Justinian. Five months already gone, almost halfway through before she’d even known. If she survived, she’d be a mother by next summer. The thought seemed so wildly improbable that she wanted to laugh, but caught herself before Morrigan could slap her again.

Zevran was frowning. “We could still try-”

“Are you deaf as well as foolish, or simply determined to finish the job Loghain paid you for?” Morrigan was examining her nails as if the conversation bored her, but there was some tension that had faded from the line of her shoulders, as if a burden she’d been carrying was lifted. “Seluna is correct. The amount of any contraceptive she’d have to drink at this stage would be tantamount to poisoning herself and hoping for the best, and by the time we could heal her magically without risking healing the child, it might be too late. Besides which,” she added, glancing at Luna, “she said it was too late to be rid of it, ‘even if’ she wanted to. Which I believe implies she does not.”

She truly hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. She hadn’t been thinking at all. But for a Warden to have a child was unlikely but not impossible, and this child, this impossible child, had taken root in her despite all the odds against it, despite the poison she’d drunk barely a month after its conception. She’d spent so many months thinking of herself as half a ghost, or the shambling corpse of the girl who’d died on her wedding day, the girl who should have been buried with Nelaros, when all along, the proof that she was still alive had sat sleeping beneath her skin. And even without those selfish, foolish reasons to keep it... Nelaros was dead. His parents had sent their golden son off to wed a stranger’s daughter, and he’d died for her in that unfamiliar city. This was the only child he’d ever have, the last remnant of a boy who’d been too loyal, loved too quickly, and died too young, and that too was worth preserving, wasn’t it? As long as she could live to see this through. And she had to live to see this through.

“Morrigan’s right,” she said, which seemed to surprise the witch almost as much as it pleased her. “I’ve had to give up everything else to stop this cursed Blight. I won’t- I refuse to give this up too.”

It was the most foolish decision she could have made. It was the only choice left to her. Duncan had forced her to give up her own life for his precious Wardens, but she’d be damned to the Void and then claw her way out again before she’d let them take her child too.

Chapter Text

It was not, in retrospect, the ideal way to reveal Seluna’s little secret to the group. Not that Morrigan had really considered an ideal way for the truth to come out, but then, she’d always imagined that that would be the girl’s decision rather than her own, and would therefore be more... tailored to her own preferences.

It was obvious, looking back, that she hadn’t known what grew under her skin, for all that Morrigan had assumed her ignorance was another of her well-crafted deceptions. She’d told herself that she was clever enough at least to know her own body – animals always seemed to manage – but some foolish part of her still felt a little guilty that she’d left it so ill-guarded that the old mage had dragged it into the light. It was Seluna’s secret to tell at a time of her choosing.

Though it would have been easier, Flemeth whispered at the edges of her mind, if she’d remained ignorant. No sense giving her time to make plans – or to develop an attachment to the thing.

Perhaps she should come clean now, reveal the fate the Grey Wardens would fall to and how she might prevent it. Perhaps it would be easier to persuade her while that earth was still disturbed and easy to dig into. Perhaps it would be easier, if there were no more lies between them.

Even if she’d wanted to, that evening was no time for it. Leliana and Melia hovered at either side of her, holding her hands, cooing soft comforts or condolences into her ears, and Morrigan had no such sweet words to give her that were not more lies. And tonight, at least, she did not wish to give her more lies, on top of the latest burden to settle atop her shoulders. They could all see it in the hunch of her shoulders, the exhausted curve of her spine, the grim determination with which she gazed into the fire. Zevran had made himself scarce, which was just as well, because Alistair looked fit to kill him, or anyone else he suspected had a hand in Seluna’s condition.

Only Shale and Sten sat outside the defensive circle that had built around the elf, their usual stoicism only a little shaken by the revelation of the evening, though they did not speak at a volume Morrigan could catch until Wynne helped the girl to her feet and steered her towards a tent for the kind of healers’ examination Morrigan realised she was ill-prepared for. She’d been told, in gory detail, the symptoms she should expect when she’d conceived the child, but her assumption had always been that Flemeth would be there to act as midwife. She knew little of the work that she’d have to undertake from the outside, and she realised that hole in her education would have to be rectified, and quickly.

“I cannot believe it is breeding,” she heard Shale mutter (in as much as the golem could mutter). “As if the world were not already too full of its small, squishy kind, she wishes to add to the noise and the mess?”

“It is- poor organisation, to allow a warrior to carry a pregnancy at a time when they are more needed in battle than the birthing bed,” Sten agreed, quietly. “Such a thing would not be permitted, under the Qun.”

“I would not say the Blight is an ideal time to bring a child into the world,” Leliana said, diplomatically, “but if this is her only chance, and it is her will and the Maker’s, we can hardly claim better judgement.”

“That is the error in your faith,” Sten replied, less an argument than a statement of fact, for all her offended little gasp. “Under the Qun, a child with- her strength, prowess and guile would be an asset, but of far less immediate concern than a blade in her hand.”

“And if that isn’t what she wants?” Melia asked, picking at a loose thread in the seams of her robes, now threadbare and worn where but a few months ago they had been pristine. “If she’d rather be a mother than whatever the world needs of her?”

“The world seldom gives us what we’d rather, little mage.” The bitterness in her own voice surprised her, but then, the words were almost taken from Flemeth’s mouth. In the end, it would not matter what Seluna would prefer. Beneath her sweetness, her foolish attempts at altruism, her city-bred manners, she was an animal of the same kind as Morrigan, all teeth and claws and ruthless desire to survive. She might prefer to keep her child, perhaps, but in the end, she’d choose the option she could live with, and they’d both walk away satisfied.

“It might for her.” Alistair leant forward, poking at the fire. “Maker knows that it owes her some happiness by now. Maybe- maybe this is a blessing, something to make up for everything she’s lost.”

She snorted. “You truly believe your god would call a babe in the middle of the Blight a blessing? You made a far better argument for tearing down his throne than any Tevine magister, idiot.”

She might be selfish and cruel, but she was not a hypocrite. She would not pretend that the existence of this child was a boon to anyone but her. Seluna would suffer through the risks and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth, all while fighting her way through a world that seemed to want to kill her at every turn, but it was Morrigan who’d emerge triumphant with a god reborn in her arms. She could give her little reward for such thankless work beyond her own survival, but at least Morrigan would not feed her sugar-sweet lies of what a blessing her ordeal was.

“There is something almost poetic to it,” Leliana said. “If it were a song or a story, I could almost agree with you, Alistair. The reality of it seems less... fortuitous, I will admit, but I’ve seen Luna work miracles before, at Redcliffe, and Kinloch Hold. If anyone can make a miracle of this situation, I believe it is her.”

Alistair made an irritable noise. “Well, she shouldn’t be doing it on her own. I can’t believe that- assassin managed to sneak off somewhere.”

“It is, I am told, what assassins do best,” she said, drily, and received a glare for what she thought had been a fairly good joke.

“Does he care nothing for her honour?” he demanded, to the group at large. Everyone was suddenly very interested in staring into the fire, which was almost as amusing as the outraged propriety that reddened his ears. “Any gentleman would have married her before the nearest Chantry sister as soon as he heard-”

“I don’t know which is funnier – you describing the Crow as a ‘gentleman’ or the idea that either of them had any thought of marriage.” She folded her arms, eager now for the familiar ground of a battle with Alistair. There was no misplaced guilt here, only the thrill of an easy victory. “Interesting that you’re so concerned for her honour, but haven’t yet offered her your hand, when you are a far more likely candidate to have fathered her child.”

She was almost certain that there was no chance of such a thing – the girl she’d met in the Korcari Wilds had barely seemed to realise she had a body, and even once she’d come back to herself, had shown little interest in Alistair as a man rather than as an overgrown child she’d been lumped with – but it was fun to see him turn crimson and stutter as the implication switched his brain off altogether.

“I- we- she- we never-” He took a large swig from his wineskin and reordered his words: “If she does me the honour of accepting my hand, I’ll- for a sister-in-arms, it’s the only right thing to do.”

The silence that followed was one of the most awkward Morrigan had ever witnessed, and she’d been part of some pretty terrible ones during their trip to the Frostbacks. It was broken when Melia let out a sort of hiccuping squeak, pushed herself to her feet, and rushed off to her tent. This set off a chain reaction – Leliana followed the little mage into the dark, Alistair took on an expression not unlike Seluna’s Mabari when shut out of her tent, and Shale let out a cackle like a malevolent avalanche. Morrigan might have laughed too, if only from the malicious joy of having truly set the cat among the pigeons, but she’d not seen this particular threat to her plans coming.

She folded her arms, hoping to disarm the threat with scorn before it could truly become dangerous. “Don’t be foolish,” she said, coldly. “When the child is born with pointed ears, or dark hair, the world will call you cuckold, and I doubt you have the strength of will or affection to bear such shame for long.”

His hands curled into fists. “You know nothing of my honour, witch. I owe her- I owe her this, at least.”

He owed her more than the dubious worth of his hand in marriage, in Morrigan’s estimation, but that was neither here nor there. She had enough wisdom now to know she knew little of the value Fereldans placed on marriage. What would it be worth to Luna, she wondered, to have a father for her child, and his powerful protectors as her family? Redcliffe Castle had not been to her taste, exactly, but she knew too well the comfort and beauty wealth could provide, and she did not think the girl foolish enough to reject them without a thought.

“You owe her nothing,” she lied, “at least for this. Astonishingly, you did not have a hand in making this particular mess.”

He stood up to his full height, as if that would intimidate her into silence. “You think I care about that?” he demanded. “She was right, before. She’s spent enough time carrying burdens I should have shouldered, and cleaning up messes that aren’t hers. I can at least help her with this, if she’ll let me.”

He stormed off, then, and she was left with the golem, the Qunari, and the dying fire, and somehow, she could not quite meet anyone’s eye.

She was awoken the next morning by noisy bickering, which, strangely, brought as much relief as it did annoyance. If Seluna felt well enough to quarrel, the news hadn’t thrown her off balance quite as badly as Morrigan had feared. No, not- feared, exactly, but there had been some concern there. It would have been unhelpful if the girl had retreated to her ghost-pale blankness after all Morrigan had had to do to coax her back into the world.

The Seluna standing armed and armoured at the centre of the ring of tents did not look ghostly in the least – she was brilliant with anger. It flushed her cheeks and set her copper-dyed curls to dancing like flames. Morrigan had always preferred her like this, particularly when that anger was turned on someone else, and most of all because now it was turned on sanctimonious Wynne, of all people.

“-not an invalid!” she had snapped, foot tapping with impatience. “This changes nothing until I say it does.”

“You cannot be serious.” Wynne was rubbing her temples as if facing a particularly recalcitrant student, an attitude which would not help her with Seluna. “The danger to you, to the child-”

“If this little monster survived the Joining, I’m pretty sure a curse won’t be an issue,” she retorted. “Besides which, I’ve been fighting with a passenger this whole time, and it hasn’t been a problem.”

“Yet,” Wynne emphasised, “but it will be soon. It’ll affect your balance, your joints-”

“And I’ll figure out a way to manage it. There are only two Grey Wardens fighting this Blight, I can’t exactly afford to put my feet up and eat bonbons for the next seven months!”

That was an oddity she hadn’t considered – there were few elves as far south as the Korcari Wilds, but it made sense that, with their longer lifespans and smaller frames, their children might take longer to grow and to birth. Another wrinkle in her plan, but she’d have to work around it.

“Seluna,” the mage said, adopting the patronising tone of ancient wisdom that would have made Morrigan shake her, “I know that this will be an adjustment-”

Luna snorted. “You know? I’m sorry, I didn’t think you were old enough to be having kids during the Fourth Blight, but maybe I’ve underestimated your skincare regimen.”

“I wasn’t,” Wynne said, with irritating softness, “but I did bear a child in the Circle, in my youth. It is no easy thing, to carry a babe under your heart and know it will be taken from you before it is even weaned. I suspect, if the Wardens return from Orlais, they will recommend a similar policy. I- I would not see you subjected to such pain.”

Of course such a sob story was all that was needed to melt Seluna’s soft heart. She opened her arms and embraced the older woman, gentle as any mother, while Morrigan pursed her lips and silently queried the truth of the story.

“I’m sorry,” she said, warm and fierce and lovely. “That should never have happened to you. But if you’re right, and they’ll try to take this child from me, I’ll need to be ready.”

“You mean to hide?”

“To fight,” she said, low and deadly and determined in a way that chilled Morrigan near to the bone. “This might not be the future I wanted, but I’ll be damned to the Void before I let anyone take anything else that’s mine.” The last word was almost a growl, and she saw the animal in Luna’s skin again, that starveling, half-feral thing, and thought about how close she’d come to death, the one time she’d strayed between a bear and her cubs.

The narrow rabbit trails and thick brush of Brecelian did not lend itself to a large group, so Morrigan was not surprised that Luna selected a smaller group to accompany her deeper into the woods, nor that she was included in it, along with Leliana and Wynne. Zevran had not reappeared in time to join them likely by design, and though Alistair objected strenuously, she refused to let either of the more heavily-armoured warriors accompany them.

“I’d like to at least try to avoid fighting any of the infected, if I can,” she said, stubborn as ever, “which will be harder if I have the two of you clanking around after me.”

“And I think we’d all like you to avoid fighting altogether, but you haven’t been great at that so far,” Alistair retorted.

“Are we certain the Dalish will be worth the trouble they’re putting us to?” she muttered, and then, when the bickering pair turned to stare at her: “’Tis only logical to wonder how much use a clan of sickly elves will be against the darkspawn, if they cannot manage a problem in the forest they know best.”

It was the wrong thing to say, she knew it almost as soon as it escaped her. Callousness had never won Luna’s favour, and predictably, her full lips thinned and her eyes flashed with anger.

“Really, Morrigan? I know you’re a bitch, but I thought better of you.” The words should not have hit like a blow, but somehow they stung more than the slap she’d given her two days before. Violence was a language she’d spoken all her life – Flemeth had tossed out slaps and stinging curses as easily as insults, and far more rarely than compliment – so why did Seluna’s disappointment, of all things, make her feel like such a wretch? Her cheeks were flooded with fiery heat, and for the first time in the four months she’d known her, she dropped her gaze to her boots, allowing her the victory.

“I did not mean-”

“That my people are not worth saving? That we’re weak and disposable because we don’t have your shemlen constitutions?”

“But you’re not-”

“Not sick right now?” Luna stalked closer, her eyes blue-flame-burning. “And what about when we first met, when I could barely eat or keep my food down? Was I not worth your time then? Was I not worth saving?”

She did not wait for a response, turning on her heel and heading back towards Alistair- or she would have, if Morrigan had not caught her wrist.

“You fought, at least,” she said, voice pitched low. “You tried to survive, despite the world giving you little reason. What are the Dalish doing, aside from hiding in their tents and sending you to solve their problems?” She might have had selfish cause to give Luna her aid, but at least she’d given it freely. The Dalish had given her nothing but work to do and as many sidelong looks as any of the humans in their group, for all her sweet civility.

Luna made a sound of disgust then, and pulled away from her. “I’m sick of shemlen who think we aren’t worth saving,” she muttered, then, more loudly: “Alistair, you can have Morrigan’s place. She’s volunteered to help the healers with the injured. Either we’ll get lucky and she’ll cure the curse, or she’ll miraculously develop a conscience.”

“Seluna- Luna-” She did not know what argument she might have made, what plea for understanding she might have allowed to escape her. It did not matter. She’d already left.

In Luna’s absence, of course, there was nothing compelling her to help the healers. It certainly wasn’t altruism or concern for the careless hunters that drove her to gather what elfroot remained within easy sight of the camp, or to take over the making of poultices from healers less practiced in making them. It was simple pragmatism – she needed to regain the girl’s trust, or at least her favour, and if this would persuade her that she was a reformed (or at least reformable) character, she would not shy from the work.

The Dalish herbalist knew more of the local herblore than she did, but she’d had months of experience in battlefield medicine now, and knew well how to prevent infection and keep as much blood in a body as possible. More importantly, perhaps, she was not yet exhausted from days of tending the sick, and while she was not yet trustworthy enough to leave unsupervised with the injured, the herbalist was persuaded that her burly young apprentice was more than capable of keeping an eye on a single human, and stopping her if she got up to any mischief. It was as well she’d left her staff in her tent – they'd have been far less trusting if they’d realised she was a mage.

She was no spirit worker, but the curse was close enough to her own magic that it itched at the edge of her consciousness. A spell of skin-slipping, of transformation, it should have been child’s play to unpick it, but whenever she reached out with a thread of mana, it slipped through her fingers, more like smoke than anything tangible. The one time she caught it and pulled, her patient had let out an earsplitting scream, and her little guard had trotted over to ensure she wasn’t sticking pins into them or something equally ridiculous.

“I applied too much pressure to the poultice,” she lied, widening her eyes innocently. “Are they alright?”

Of course this meant she had to listen to a five minute lecture from a youth on the best way to apply a poultice, but her smiling and nodding and ignoring how he eyed her cleavage seemed to lull him into a more trusting mood.

“You know the flat-ear well, then?” he said, then: “Sorry, the- city elf? The one who does not wear the vallaslin?”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow. “And what is it to you if I do?”

“I just- I knew they weren’t like us, but I never thought I’d see an elf travel with a human before. Zathrian barely lets humans into the camp, aside from the Wardens, sometimes.” He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly embarrassed. “It’s not- I don’t think it’s unnatural,” he offered, “at least, no more unnatural than any other Warden business.”

She snorted. “I do not think either of the Wardens I travel with care much for your thoughts on what is ‘natural’, but I’ll give them your blessing all the same. ‘Tis not natural to wear clothes, to cook your food, to tend your sick, but I have watched your people do all three.”

“Yes, but- look, you’ve helped our people, and Sylaise knows Lanaya needed better help than me, but most humans would sooner see us in the earth than walking upon it. It’s fair strange to see an elf not just travelling with humans, and of her own will at that, but giving orders?” He laughed, shaking his head. “Things must truly change quickly among shemlen, I suppose.”

I killed the Arl of Denerim’s son, for taking what wasn’t his. It had seemed only natural to her, that the powerful took from the weak without caring who they hurt in the process, but she had not truly considered how cruel that nature might seem to those the world deemed disposable. Or perhaps, rather than considering it, she’d crushed it down, to the small, hollow space in her ribs where weakness sat and was ignored. She did not want to consider how the snare might feel to the rabbit, or the knife might feel to the fawn

“They are not changing quickly enough,” she said, roughly, looking away from the boy’s wide green eyes. “If you’d asked her such things, she’d likely tell you to enjoy living among your people. I know she misses hers.”

It was easy, while her hands were busy, to forget that somewhere in the woods, Luna might be fighting for her life without Morrigan’s claws and teeth to guard her. It was easy to ignore the occasional distant howl, the shudders it sent through all the camp, the way it made the wounded patients twitch and whine as if hearing a summons they could not answer. She did not like to see how they wept afterwards, as if they knew their bodies would not be their own for much longer. The thought repulsed her. She did not like the thought of another creature growing within her skin, puppeting her from within. It had been the part of Flemeth’s plan that she’d hated the most, in retrospect – the surrendering of her body first to Alistair, then to the child they would conceive.

My mother taught me my body was the only thing I’d ever own entirely, Luna had said. For all Flemeth’s lessons in self-reliance, she’d never taught her that. Every scar, every flaw in Morrigan’s nature, she’d treated as cracks in her own reflection, to be sanded away or hidden accordingly. But then, her mother had taught her plenty of things that Luna’s had never learned, and she still had more to teach her.

The afternoon was quieter than the morning – wounds had been cleaned and dressed, and relatives came by to feed or comfort or weep noisily over their injured loved ones – and Morrigan finally had the time and privacy to make a real start on studying Flemeth’s grimoire. Now that she’d mastered the ancient form of Chasind she’d chosen to write in, the translation had become a simpler matter, but the text itself was a disappointment.

She’d hoped, childishly, for a true spellbook, a map of Flemeth’s power, and the path she herself could follow to match or surpass it. She should have known better – it could not have been heavily warded, as Luna had picked it up without losing her hand – but still she’d wanted to believe that some shred of the secrets her mother kept was finally within her reach. But it was not a spellbook. Rather, it was some strange combination of journal and experimental record, but her subject was no spirit or spell.

Instead, it was a record of the rearing and education of an apprentice – a daughter, like Morrigan herself. She’d heard tales of other daughters of Flemeth, of course, from Zevran and Leliana as well as from the Chasind near her home, but any hedge-mage with a drop of Alamarri or Chasind blood in her veins might well claim Flemeth for a mother if she thought her charms might sell better. In truth, she had not been able to imagine any other presence in the cottage she and Flemeth shared. For good or for ill, her world had, for so long, consisted of only the two of them. She had never wanted it to be otherwise, never imagined the potential to live any other way. The dull, muted little lives of the village children she observed were nothing to her own wild liberties, and those with siblings did not seem to revel in their presence. A sister would only have been competition for knowledge, for food, for Flemeth’s rare moments of affection or praise.

And yet, this tome in her hands was proof that, for Flemeth, there had been other daughters, once, other voices piping in the cottage kitchen, other mouths to feed. Annis, Ceridwen, Nicnevin. Where had they gone, those other girls? Why had Flemeth never spoken of them? Their chapters came to a close, but the book made no mention of why, or what had happened to them, and once a new daughter appeared, the previous was hardly mentioned, except in comparison. She wondered if, somewhere in her mother’s cottage, there was a similar ledger on her, comparing her temper to Nicnevin’s or her skill at transformation to Ceridwen’s, just another link in the chain of daughters Flemeth had adopted and then vanished, for a replacement child to uncover someday. The thought turned her stomach, but she could not abandon her book now – she made a final round of checks on the patients and retreated to the greater privacy of her own party’s tents.

It had been some time since she’d last sought peace and privacy in the branches of a tree, but reading of childhoods so uncannily like her own made her feel like a girl again, and sent her scrambling up into the canopy, seeking the tranquillity only ancient boughs could provide. It was by far an easier place to read in the dying light of the sun. The reddish rays that did not reach the forest floor were far easier to catch so high up, and the noise and distractions of the camp seemed suddenly far from her.

Yavana was the last daughter the book chronicled, and, to its author, the least satisfying. In Flemeth’s eyes, she was wilful, defiant, violent even – too reckless in her passions, too thoughtless in her pursuits – and she could not help but hear Flemeth’s cool, dismissive words in her mother’s own voice.

I do not think her will greater than mine, she had written, but her impulses and her passions are a danger. It will be difficult, I think, to find a new vessel, having gone to the trouble of raising one, but I cannot risk the plan to a contest of wills with the girl. No, I will cut her loose, to go her own way. There will be other, more suitable vessels, though the one I now inhabit grows more uncomfortable than pleasing. Twenty years or so is not so long to wait, when the alternative is so much more dangerous.

Other, more suitable vessels. Vessels. The word circled her head and coiled around her throat like a serpent, refusing to let her go. Not daughters, then, not apprentices, not fellow Witches of the Wild. Vessels, like jars to pour herself into, when her current body became too frail for her taste. What did it matter, what that jar had once held? It would be Flemeth, as every other skin she’d worn had been before.

Her fingers felt numb, suddenly clumsy. The narrow band of gold her mother had slipped onto her hand the day she’d left, the sentimental reminder of home, burned like ice upon her skin. She slid it off her trembling fingers and tucked it into the spine of the book she’d been so eager to read. A small, childish part of her wanted to throw both her mother’s mementos into the flames, to pretend she had never read it, never been so foolish as to believe Flemeth possessed a single hint of maternal sentiment, but Morrigan had never been one to take solace in make-believe.

Her mother, then, was not her mother, any more than a potter was a mother to urns, or a farmer a mother to lambs. She had raised her, taught her, fed her... but all in service to one day becoming her. The thought of carrying a child within her body had sickened her once, and that was a temporary ceding of her will to another’s. How much worse, to surrender herself to another with no promise of eventual freedom or release, only of rearing another girl to take her place? The thought choked her, half-wild with horror, and she could not think past the nightmare of it. To feel herself bed men at Flemeth’s command, under her will. To bear children, perhaps, and know they’d be reared to the same fate she had been. It made her want to scream, or to slip into bearskin and rage and ravage the forest until she felt strong again in her own power. It made her want to vomit, and if she’d ever thought Luna weak for her sickness, she did not think it now. The thought of it – of men pressed against her body, their hands on her hips, her thighs, while she could do nothing but watch through her own eyes and silently scream-

She could not keep seeing the images this revelation had forced into her mind. She could not bear this knowledge alone. They might have quarrelled, perhaps badly so, but she’d learned Luna’s game of a wound for a wound, and surely this blood would satisfy her thirst.

She’d known, distantly, that the party had returned, that Luna was among them. She’d heard the noisy bickering from her perch, and assumed that anyone capable of arguing at such a volume was likely uninjured. There was no such raucous argument now, but still Morrigan slipped through the branches in search of her quarry. Perhaps it would have been quicker, if she’d descended, but- she could not bear to be seen as she was. She did not want to know what the others would read in her face.

She did not spot her cloud of flame-bright hair by the fire, and there was no sign of a lit lantern in her tent. She had not sought out the Dalish again in her endless thirst for more people to help. Nobody seemed to fret at her absence, but in this moment, it felt like a hole in the world, and Morrigan could not explain why.

She caught a glimpse of light through the trees, of gold-and-copper, and the relief that bloomed in her breast was so utterly disproportionate that for a moment, it blotted out the all-consuming horror. Luna was unharmed, though stained with dirt and blood, and perched at her side, on a protruding lip of rock, was Zevran. Her stomach sank, and she ignored it. Too many parts of her body were developing opinions she did not care to listen to right now.

“-not think you would be worried,” Zevran was saying, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “That was my miscalculation, I suppose, but it is also why we must speak.”

“Because I’m worried?” There was the usual tinge of irony in her voice, but something more brittle beneath it, something fragile. Luna was not meant to be fragile. “Or because of- this?” She gestured to her midriff.

“A little of both,” Zevran admitted, and her shoulders slumped, even as he laid a gentle hand on one of them. “Come now, cara mia, I don’t think either of us expected what we have to last forever.”

She swallowed, but her voice still sounded thick and wet. “Perhaps not,” she agreed, “but it would’ve been nice if it could have gone on a little longer.”

“It would have,” he said, “but things are as they are. You have greater concerns now, I think, than who will be warming your bed, and I- I do not wish to make you any promises I cannot keep.”

“I never asked you for promises,” Luna said, a note of petulance creeping into her voice. “I never asked you for anything you didn’t offer me first!”

“You did not,” he agreed, “but you are brave, and fierce, and you would be so very easy to make those promises to, do you understand? And perhaps, were matters different, I would make them gladly, and if we broke each other’s hearts later, well, that is the risk all lovers run.”

“So what’s changed?” she demanded, though from the slump of her posture she already knew the answer. Foolish girl. Why was she always so determined to hear the words that would break her own heart?

He took her hand in his, laid it gently over her stomach. “This has. Soon you will be a mother, and, I hope, a good one. But I would be no fit father for your child, and we both know it. I barely recall my life before the Crows, and there is precious little there I would wish to pass on to anyone’s child, yours least of all.”

“I never expected-”

“I know,” he said, so soft, so kind. Morrigan wanted to claw his eyes out anyway. “But if there were more between us- I would wish to, and I would fail. And I do not particularly relish my failures.”

A wet sniff. “Could’ve fooled me.”

He tilted her chin up, traced a finger along her cheekbone. “You, tesoruccia, are the exception to every rule. Which is why we will end this, here and now, while we can still part as friends, rather than in a year or so where you’ve come to loathe my roving ways and all that is sweet becomes bitter.”

A little laugh, one of the saddest attempts she’d heard in her life. “I can’t imagine loathing you.”

“I’d like to keep it that way.” He leaned in, pressed his lips gently to hers, and then drew back. He rose to his feet, and left her there. He did not look back.

Morrigan counted to sixty five times over before she gave in to the nagging urge that still thrummed in her veins. Perhaps it was not the best time, perhaps it would never be the best time, but she needed Luna, and in this moment, Luna did not need to be alone. That would have to suffice. She raised her arms and felt her cloak of feathers fall about her, tumbling forward into raven’s form. She landed neatly beside her in the space Zevran had departed, and let out what she hoped was a comforting croak.

“How much did you hear?” Luna’s voice was clipped and cold, but there was still the thickness to it that would have betrayed her tears, even if Morrigan had not witnessed them. Her face – what she could see if it – was flushed, behind the fall of her hair.

“Enough,” she admitted, shrugging back into her own form.

“Come to gloat?” She could only see the curve of her lips beneath the veil of her hair, thin and taut as a wire.

“No, I-”

“Why not?” she demanded, and for once, Morrigan did not have an answer for her. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You never liked him, never liked me with him, and now it’s over and you get to be right.”

What was she to say? No, I came for your pity, your pragmatic advice. I came to lay my head in your lap and weep like an infant, like Melia. She could not confess such weakness, not now. Not ever.

“What of it?” She could not quite meet her gaze, but that made no difference. “As you said, ‘tis over now, whatever either of us might prefer.”

She’d been a fool to seek out the girl at all, to think that anyone could help her carry the truth she’d uncovered or set her feet on the right path. She shoved herself to her feet and moved away, leaving Luna to her tears and her hopeless, fruitless rage.

She did not expect the hand that closed around her wrist, or for Seluna to yank her back around to face her. “Is that why you’re here?” she asked, something unfamiliar and malicious glittering in her wide blue eyes. “To the victor go the spoils, right, and now he’s finally out of your way, I’m meant to fall into your arms like some idiot girl in one of Leliana’s stories?” She batted her eyelashes theatrically, though they were still clumped into points by the tears she’d scrubbed away. “Please take care of me, Morrigan, I’m helpless without anyone to warm my bed.”

She stalked closer, movements as slow and graceful as any mountain cat, and Morrigan instinctively stepped back once, twice, until her back hit a tree, and if she moved further it would be clear she was fleeing, and- and she did not want to flee. She was not afraid of Seluna Tabris, but there was something almost magnetic about her strange, predatory grace, the vicious glitter of her eyes and teeth.

She folded her arms, returning her false smile with an unimpressed sneer. “You are not fool enough to believe I meant all that, are you?”

“I thought I was your ‘little fool’,” she purred, low and vicious, and this was not the playful, teasing maid who’d flirted and danced with Zevran, a clawless creature used to getting her own way with her silvered tongue alone. “Isn’t that how you like me best? Sweet and soft and stupid, ready to run to the first pretty lie or warm body I’m offered?”

There was barely a step between them now – she could smell the sweat that still clung to her skin, the embrium on her breath, the earthy scent of the dye that clung to her hair. She was close enough to touch now, close enough to count the freckles on her nose, the points of glittering light caught in her night-dark eyes.

“Isn’t this what you wanted all along?” she murmured, sweet and deadly, the gore-stained girl she’d seen on the road to Honnleath now stripped of her illusions and her masks and all the lovelier for it. If she’d pressed a knife to Morrigan’s throat in that moment, it might have felt like a worthy death. Better her throat laid open to Luna’s blade than forced to hold Flemeth’s words in place of her’s. Better to die on the altar of Luna’s true face than to live in a body no longer her own.

Instead, Seluna leant forward and up, and tangled her fingers in Morrigan’s hair, dragging her down into a kiss that had nothing soft or sweet or pliant to it. She kissed like Morrigan was the last thing she’d ever taste, and she was going to devour her, hungry and demanding and fierce as flame on tinder, and Morrigan could only return the kiss with equal hunger, equal demand, or succumb to her utterly. It was every battle they’d ever fought, as allies or enemies, played out in the press of their bodies, the tangle of fingers in hair or digging into skin hard enough to bruise. She could feel the soft curves of her breasts and belly through the thin linen of her shirt, and it was not enough – she slipped greedy fingers beneath it, questing for the warmth of scar-rippled skin.

Luna growled at that, as if she’d broken some unspoken rule of the game, and bit down on her lip, drawing it between her teeth until she gasped with the mingling of pleasure and pain, the lyrium-burn thrill that ran through them both. She dug her fingers into her hip, pulling her closer still, half-hoping her fingers would leave a mark she could press them into later, a tender spot for her to toy with and draw more sweet sounds from her lips. She wanted- she wanted, with raw animal need, that emerged as half a whine as Luna’s lips released hers only to ghost along her neck, to trace the path of her pulse and bite down hard where it met the skin.

This was not how she’d imagined this, when she’d permitted herself such an indulgence at all – Luna soft and pliant and pleading, at the mercy of her fingers or her mouth or her magic. This was far better, this battle of skin against skin, where Luna’s quick, clever fingers slipped beneath the silk of her robes to ghost along her ribs until she pinned them in place with her elbow, demanding more. This time she would not be placated with half-measures or distracted by moral quandaries. She had her now as she’d always wanted her, stripped bare of lies and morals and pretty pretences at civility, an animal with claws and teeth and needs to match her own, and still it was not enough.

“I want-” she began, but she did not need to continue. Luna understood the clawing need that scratched at her skin, the desire that pooled in her belly, as if their bodies were one and the same. She slid a thigh between hers. The smooth leather of her leggings pressed again the delicate skin of her inner thighs, the warmth of her skin just barely tangible beneath, and the pressure, the texture it provided as she ground against it through her smallclothes was everything she needed and not nearly enough. The bark of the tree at her back scraped as she pressed back against it, but it did not matter, nothing mattered as long as she had Luna’s hands, Luna’s mouth-

The night air was chill on her skin as Seluna stumbled back from her, lips swollen and eyes shot wide with the hungry desire that roared now in Morrigan’s breast to grab for her, to pull her back in and rip that too-thin shirt from her shoulders to reveal the skin beneath. She raised her hands between them as if to show she was unarmed, as if to make peace, as if peace could ever be preferable to what they’d had but moments before.

“I shouldn’t have-” she began, with that low, apologetic tone that Morrigan could not stand.

“Should not what?” she retorted, seizing her raised arms by the wrists, forcing her muscles to tense beneath her fingers, forcing her to meet her gaze rather than looking at the ground. “’Tis as you said: I got what I wanted all along.”

“And what I want does not matter?” she demanded, yanking her wrists free.

Morrigan could only laugh, disbelieving. “Do you truly think me blind and unfeeling, to cast such illusions over me now? You did not seem to me so unwilling when you kissed me.”

“I did not mean- Andraste's tits, Morrigan, I’m not-” She inhaled through her teeth, as if deep breaths could disguise the fevered flush in her cheeks, the way her gaze lingered on Morrigan’s lips, on the shadows between her breasts. “I’m not going to use someone because I’m angry and heartsore. I’m not that kind of person.”

“You are, though.” Morrigan caught her chin lightly in one hand, forced her to look up and meet her eyes, enjoyed the way her blush deepened, as though there was something far more intimate in the meeting of their gazes than the entwining of their bodies. “You wanted this, angry and heartsore or no, and I did too.” It had been so briefly perfect, the moment they had collided in a tangle of anger and lust and hungry need, it had let her recall that for now, her body was her own to use and to glory in. “Do not make one of your Andrastian sins out of lust and willing desire.”

“This isn’t about sin,” she said, stubborn as ever, but she did not move away. Her hands flexed, as if resisting the urge to settle back on Morrigan’s hips, where they belonged. “This is about- the person I want to be.”

“As opposed to the person you are?” she retorted, tracing her cheekbone with the fingers of her free hand, admiring how the lightest touch now could make her almost shudder with desire. “You may want to be sweetness and light to half the world, but I see what it costs you, and what lies beneath.”

“A killer?” she demanded, “A murderer, a monster?”

“An animal,” she corrected, “as all of us are animals. You hunger for survival, for food-” she traced her fingers across her mouth, then lower, to the wiry muscles that corded her arms, “for safety,” across her shoulder to the space beneath her collarbones where her heart fluttered, “for the strength of a pack around you,” to cup the curve of her breast through the worn fabric of shirt and breastband, “for mates who see your strength and match it.” Her eyes were half-lidded now, her body curving towards Morrigan’s despite whatever shreds of restraint still held her in place. “Save your sweetness for those fools who are too afraid to understand the truth, but save your teeth and your claws for me. I will not turn them away. If you’re going to use someone tonight, use me.”

She could have pulled away, then, stumbled back and fled back to the circle of warm firelight, to the girl she pretended to be for the sake of their more delicate companions. Instead, she remained rooted to the spot, her face tilted up to Morrigan’s like some pale night-flower. Her breath, half-caught in her throat, made small clouds in the chill of the air. Then, almost tentatively, she reached up to tangle her fingers in Morrigan’s dark hair, and there was no more need for words between them.

Chapter Text

Luna was not avoiding Morrigan, exactly. They spent enough of their evenings together, bodies entangled in the close confines of their tent, for anyone to suspect that they might be at odds. Her friends, she knew, did not approve – Wynne watched her with concern, Leliana with disapproval, but Zevran seemed relieved that she was not pining after him, and she was a little surprised herself to realise that that was true. There had been an easy compatibility between them, a shared language of hedonism and lust, but in truth, they’d never quite trusted each other enough to open up their hearts as easily as they did their bodies.

With Morrigan, it was different though. Not because of trust, exactly – she did not know if the witch was even capable of trust as she knew it – but because of the sharpness of those honey-gold eyes. Whenever they focussed on Luna, she felt as though they stripped her to her bones, until the twitching, fearful muscle of her heart was laid bare beneath that hawklike gaze. The vulnerability was almost unbearable. Easier to keep her distracted, to keep her eyes closed or hazy with pleasure, rather than to let her look too deeply. She did not want to see herself reflected in Morrigan’s eyes, the claws and teeth the witch so desired, for all that something in her purred in satisfaction when she let the mask of sweetness fall.

There was a relief in not needing to be gentle, in not biting her tongue, but a part of her did not like how easy it was to bite down on the delicate skin of her throat, her breast, her thigh, though Morrigan was not shy about leaving her own marks in return. The witch loved to leave a bruise beneath her armour that she could press on later when they were in company. There was a release to it beyond the pleasure, something unique to the marks and bruises and sharp edges that clashed against each other, but all the same... a part of her wondered if Morrigan would ever have asked her for softness, for kindness, if she’d wanted it. If she could even imagine how kindness without pity might feel.

Morrigan had said use me, and Luna had, burning away the sting that Zevran’s rejection had embedded in her heart. She had not loved him, and she did not feel qualms, exactly, about lying with people she did not love, but- she did not use her lovers. At least, she had not, until last night, until she had lost herself in the pleasure of being desired so eagerly, so desperately, and by Morrigan of all people. Those lovely, wild smiles and moans and catlike purrs... She could have had anyone, and she wanted Luna, city girl with blood on her hands and horror in her past and a child in her belly- she could not think of such things.

She did not want these thoughts to gnaw at the edges of her mind when she had far more pressing concerns. She did not want to fret like a foolish girl over who shared her bed or what grew in her belly, but still, the thoughts crept in, rat-like, through the gaps that idleness left her. She’d always been like that, prey to all her least favourite imaginings whenever her hands were empty and her body was still. It was why her mother had taught her to fight so young – far better to put her excess energy to use in learning to defend herself than letting her wear a hole in the floorboards. So now she stayed in motion as much as she could, throwing herself into mapping the woods as soon as her friends awoke, and into Morrigan’s arms when night crept in and she’d run out of armour to clean and weapons to sharpen. Easier to keep moving that to let herself stop even for a moment – she feared, if she stopped, the dull grey horror that was all she recalled of the time between her wedding morning and waking in Flemeth’s hut would creep in at the edges of her vision.

There were too many similarities between that time and this. Ever since Wynne had too-kindly explained her situation to her, as if she were some naive Circle apprentice who did not know where children came from, a wall of glass had come up between her companions and herself, as if, though she still travelled with them, still led them, what she experienced now was something none of them could truly understand. Even Wynne herself, wise, practical Wynne, had admitted as much.

“Of course I’ve delivered more than my share of children,” she admitted. “Situations like yours are hardly uncommon to us in the Circle – there's little else we can do with our time, and many mages see little point in marrying when the whims of the Templars or First Enchanters could see you transferred an ocean away from your spouse with little chance of reuniting – but I have to admit, I’ve never tended an expectant parent with such a... rugged lifestyle before.”

“Blame Loghain,” she said, with an uneasy shrug, “or, no, better, blame the Warden who recruited me. If only he’d left me back in Denerim, this little monster might have given me a stay of execution.” She was trying to sound careless, but the hand she rested over her stomach felt self-conscious, unnatural.

“Little monster, indeed!” Wynne had laughed, but it had been an uneasy sound. “You’re sure you’re not ready for a more thorough examination?”

“There’s not time,” she lied, “but Morrigan seems to think things are progressing as they should be.”

“Morrigan is- no spirit healer,” Wynne pointed out, “and I doubt she’s served as midwife before.”

“I know,” Luna said, “but she’s a gifted herbalist and- it's easier this way, at least for now. I’m not sure I’m ready for- all that.”

It was not quite a lie, she could tell herself. She did not feel quite ready for Wynne’s particular offer – to show her the child’s heartbeat, perhaps an image of how it grew within her. She did not want to be rid of it, she knew that much, but she wasn’t sure her tenuous grip on the present could withstand the reality of it.

It was not quite a lie, but after learning of the werewolves, the Circle and its demons, all Morrigan’s tales of Flemeth, who was, if not an abomination, something like one... Luna could not bring herself to trust spirit magic, even from a mage who seemed as calm and down-to-earth as Wynne. Or, no, she might risk herself, if it kept her and her companions alive, but the child... she’d likely already infected it with the Joining’s poison. She could not bring herself to endanger it further with something so mutable, so dangerous, something she understood so little, when it was still so dependent on her for everything. She’d seen what demons could do to children already born. She did not want to lie awake wondering what they could do with a tether to a child still growing within its mother.

She’d spend too much time lying awake anyway, if she wasn’t careful to exhaust herself by dusk and rise with the sun. It didn’t feel natural to her, but then, very little felt natural, these days. It was another creeping reminder of that blurred grey time of half-captured memories – the life, the body she’d just reclaimed as her own, ceded to an invader far subtler than the Blight had been.

That was unnatural, too – when she could bring herself to think of the child at all, it was more often an inevitability or an invader than a joyously-anticipated arrival. A mother- a good mother, at least, was supposed to feel a fierce, aching love for her child even before she held it in her arms, or even a deep grief on bringing something so precious into a world so broken, as Andraste’s own mother had spoken of. Not resignation, and certainly not resentment. But in the past five months, she’d been reshaped, by hands not her own, into a victim, then a Warden, then a leader, and it was hard not to feel another’s hands reshaping her once more into a mother, and to resent that latest reforging.

She could have been rid of it, of course. She was not a fool – even without Zevran’s well-meant offer, she knew plenty of the half-safe poisons her people used to prevent or undo conception, and if she’d been in a state to think of such things, she might have used them on the long, miserable road to Ostagar. But now, such a poison would have to be strong indeed to rid her of a babe at near half its term, and for all that her life was not what she’d imagined, she did not want to end it that way. She’d seen too many of her neighbours, the kind, the frightened, the desperate, bleed out because a tea was brewed too strong and taken too late. It was a slow, ugly death, and she wanted none of it. Better to go out with blades in her hand and Duncan’s stupid Warden motto on her lips than to die like that, an animal in a trap gnawing off a limb. She’d rather In death, sacrifice than nothing at all.

That wasn’t what had stopped her, though it was the only reasoning she could have admitted without embarrassment. She’d known from the moment Wynne spoke it into reality that she would not be rid of this child, by her own will or anyone else’s. It had survived the brutality of the Arl’s son, of the Joining, of the countless battles she’d fought before and since. It sat in her belly with the leaden weight of inevitability, the knowledge that this was the only child she was ever likely to bear, and that she’d regret its loss more bitterly even than all else the Arl’s son and the Joining had taken from her. Those choices, at least, she had not surrendered of her own will. So she clung to this one, despite her resentment, despite her exhaustion, and spurned her friends’ attempts to make her talk rationally about it.

Alistair, surprisingly, was the worst. Either he’d taken her words in the mountains far too much to heart, or his foolishly noble ideas of honour and chivalry had eclipsed his common sense. His romantic streak had always been poorly hidden, the more so since Melia had joined their number. On the road to Haven, in those awkward days when the two of them had been avoiding her, it had not escaped her notice how carefully he’d watched her on those narrow mountain tracks. Her fine leather buskins from the Circle were better suited to a scholar than to any kind of travel, and they had made her clumsy on the rough, icy stones, but he’d always been at her shoulder to catch her if she slipped and set her, blushing, back on her feet. She’d taken to clinging to his arm after a while, more like a damsel in a storybook than a fearsome, wicked bloodmage, and that had left him stuttering and blushing for at least the week that journey had taken them.

It was not a surprise, then, when he’d brought her to hear Athras’ unhappy tale of his beloved Danyla, either slain by the wolves or fled to join them. The Dalish hunter had looked drawn and resigned to his grief, a look that was now painfully familiar to her, but Alistair’s eyes were so wide and puppyish that even if she’d had little enough heart to refuse the maybe-widower's request, she couldn’t have done so in front of the former Templar.

“She could be alive out there,” he said, with awful, fragile hope. “Even if she’s a werewolf, she’s still his wife, right? What’s a little extra hair or a mouthful of fangs in the face of true love?”

“I’ll tell Morrigan you’re coming round on her, then,” she teased, because she could not bear to reveal her pessimism in the face of such hope, but added, more carefully: “but if Athras isn’t so open-minded...”

“He asked us to find her,” he retorted, bottom lip jutting out. “He said that if Zathrian lied, it was to keep him from following her.”

“People say a lot of things when they’re grieving,” she said, as gently as she could manage. “That doesn’t mean he’ll actually do it, when the hammer meets the nail.”

This tempering of expectations only increased his pout. “If she’s alive, his honour demands that he stand by her, no matter what. It’s what I’ll- what I’d do, for my wife.”

She should have seen the warning signs in that correction, but she’d had other concerns then. There was something unsettling in how the werewolves fought, even in their first encounter the day before. It had been a strange encounter – a conveniently-fallen tree had split their party in two before the wolves even attacked, and when they did emerge from the mist, it was for quick, glancing attacks at first, more disorienting than mauling. Stranger still was their choice of prey – even without Morrigan’s knowledge of animal behaviour, she knew it was odd for them to hunt armed humans on their guard when there were half-tame herds of halla grazing nearby.

She should not have been surprised when the wounded werewolf spoke. She should have known better, after all the strange and terrible things she’d seen.

“Please,” it- she growled, through pants of pain. “Help. Listen.” The strange, stilted speech tore from a throat no longer formed for it, but Luna could understand it well enough that she could not deny it, even to herself. A part of her – the soft part, the gentle part – wanted to sink to her knees and open her arms to the creature, wounded and afraid as it was, but she knew well the strength of those vicious jaws, and stayed just out of reach.

“What happened to you?” she said, though the creeping chill in her bones whispered that she already knew.

“I am cursed,” she gasped, “turned- into this creature. It- it burns me, makes me- hungry, so hungry! The werewolves, they- they took me in, but I- I had to return, I had to!”

“Why did you have to return?” Luna pushed, and the sound that answered was half sob, half howl.

“Love,” she whimpered. “Love, and- and hunger.”

“Danyla,” she realised, a leaden feeling settling over her. “I’m so sorry. Your husband sent us.”

“Athras?” she panted, “He lives, you- you have seen him, my clan?”

“He lives,” she comforted her. “He would be searching for you now, if the Keeper allowed it.”

Another awful howl-sob. “You must- take him a message. Tell him- tell him I love him, tell him I am dead and with the gods. Peace- you must give him peace, and me as well. End this now, for both of us.”

“Please, Danyla.” She sank into a crouch, which provoked an odd flutter of protest in her stomach, and held out her hands, peace-making. “I know it hurts, I know you’re suffering, but just- just a little longer. If we can kill Witherfang, the curse will be broken. You can go home again.”

“You- do not understand,” the wolf roared, an awful animal scream, and half-lunged for her, barely catching herself in time. Luna fell backward and barely caught herself on her palms, scrabbling for balance. “Not- much- time. The hunt- the hunger is too strong.” Another laboured breath. “Strike, now, lest I strike first.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” she pleaded. “He loves you. We- we can find a way to fix this-”

There was a flash of movement then, of a wall of grey-brown fur launched at her. She tried to dance back, but there was something off with her balance and she knew even as she spun that she would not be quick enough, could not be quick enough-

A flash of pain across her cheekbone. A silver-bright gleam of metal. Danyla’s howl trailing off to a whine and then a gurgle. She fell back and was caught by the familiar warmth of Morrigan-the-bear, but Danyla was still airborne in a soaring leap that carried her onto the point of Alistair’s sword. She embraced him, arms wide, like a lover, and fell limp against him, her great head against his shoulder.

Someone wailed “No!”

Luna realised it had been her, and, too late, clapped a hand over her own mouth. Despite all the lessons the world had tried to teach her, a part of her had still hoped that there was a way to bring one more lost soul home. When she pulled her hand back, blood had trickled across her fingers, but when she touched her cheek, the cuts were shallow scratches when they could too easily have been a killing blow. The knowledge made her want to wail far more than the pain of any injury.

Alistair had taken hold of her shoulders, the metal of his gauntlets digging in despite his efforts to be gentle. “Are you hurt?” he demanded, “Is it the baby?”

She blinked at him, stupidly, baffled by his concern for her. “No, she- she didn’t want to hurt me. She just wanted to die, I think. She sacrificed herself, rather than- rather than let the curse hurt her people.”

She had not been that brave, when it had been her turn. When the guards had come to the alienage, she’d thought silence would be enough to protect her, to protect all of them. She had not had Danyla’s courage.

Alistair looked pained, for some reason, then raised unwilling fingers to clumsily wipe her cheek. She hissed in pain as he accidently pressed on the fresh cuts. “Oh, Luna. Sometimes- sorry – sacrifice is necessary, for the greater good, right?”

“In death, sacrifice,” she parroted, numbly. It was the first thing that came to mind, despite how she’d hated it when she first heard it. The words seemed to steel something in him, turning his usually-boyish features unexpectedly solemn and grim. For a moment, she could see the king that Eamon wanted to make in the boy who’d followed her, and she felt a strange flash of protectiveness. This face did not suit him.

“Speaking of-” He swallowed, nervously. “I suppose now’s as good a time as any for- has Zevran spoken to you yet?”

She stared at him blankly. “About-? Oh, right, the kid. Yes, we- ended things. It was for the best.” Of course he hadn’t been paying attention to where she’d slept last night. Why would he? His concerns were usually with Melia.

“He ended things? Of all the lecherous, honourless- Well, if he won’t do the right thing, one of us should.” His armour creaked in complaint as he awkwardly knelt at her feet. “Luna-”

“Don’t-” she began, with something like desperation, but of course that didn’t stop him.

“Look,” he said, crossly, “one of us has to do the right thing! You’ll be showing soon, and- do you want to marry me or not?”

She folded her arms. “I could ask you the same question. Do you want to marry me?”

There was an odd, chuffing sound behind her, and Luna realised that Morrigan, still a bear, was laughing at her. At least someone was finding this funny – Luna could only see the blood that still wept from Danyla’s cooling body, pooling around Alistair’s knees and the toes of her own boots. Would she ever be free of it?

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said, stubbornly.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Luna, come on,” he insisted, reaching for a hand she did not extend to him. “You know this isn’t about what I want, it’s about my duty to you – your honour, your child. Doesn’t he deserve a father?”

She snorted. “Alistair, you’d be the first to think I have any honour left to save. I’m an elf and a convict from Denerim’s worst slums.”

“You’re a Warden,” he corrected, as if that was by far the more important role, which to him, it likely was. “Your honour is the Order’s now.”

“That-” The stench of blood was overwhelming now, unbearable. “That’s very sweet, but the Order’s only the two of us now.”

“All the more reason to-”

“All the more reason for you to focus on the threat to the world as we know it rather than whether some shemlen bastards will call me a knife-eared whore in a month or so. A ring on my finger won’t stop people like that. Besides,” she added, “your Arl would kill me if I waltzed back into Redcliffe with your ring on my finger and a plan to put an elven bastard on the precious Theirin throne his sister fought for.”

His eyes widened. “Eamon wouldn’t-”

“Eamon wants you to be king, whether you like it or not,” she reminded him, and tried to ignore his wounded expression. “That’s not going to happen if you swan into Denerim with an elven convict for a wife who’s already eight months’ gone with a child that isn’t even yours.”

He glared at her. “That poor werewolf sacrificed her own life to protect her people. What kind of man do you think I am, that I wouldn’t sacrifice a throne for the honour of the only other Warden in Fereldan?”

“That would be a sweeter sentiment if I didn’t already know how little you wanted to be king,” she retorted.

“Luna-”

“No.” She folded her arms, stepping back. “I appreciate the thought, Alistair, I really do, but even if we were madly in love, I wouldn’t stick my neck into that noose for the sake of shemlen propriety.”

“They’ll think it’s my child anyway,” he said, balefully.

“Let them. They’ll be the fools, when it comes out with green eyes and pointed ears.” And it would, she reminded herself. If there was any chance... No. That had been Shianni’s horror, Shianni’s nightmare to recall. For all the nightmares she could lay claim to, that had not happened to her. She would know. She would remember, even through the haze of blood and rage that surrounded that day.

She extended a hand to him and leant back to help him to his feet. “Go wash off the blood in the stream,” she said, patting his shoulder with deliberately sisterly affection. “We can keep watch.”

“You’re not even going to think about it?” He did not sound heartbroken, which was a relief but not a surprise, but he did sound wounded. “You know I wouldn’t have offered if I hadn’t meant it.” Not true, she suspected, but she’d allow him the lie this once. “And- I do think your child deserves more family than just you. I- It's hard, having no kin to claim you.”

She sighed, squeezed his arm. “You’re putting the cart before the horse a little there, I think. I need to survive the next seven months before I can worry about who’ll help me raise this child, and even then... I’m not without kin, or friends. I’ll manage, and there are plenty of other ways you can help me without dragging me before a Reverand Mother to say vows neither of us would actually mean, and both of us would likely regret. Go wash the blood off, and- and we’ll all feel the better for it.”

He pulled away and stomped off towards the river, still clearly frustrated with her, but at least he had given up on arguing any further.

Luna turned back to Danyla’s cooling body, crouching beside her to lay her out neatly on her back, arms folded over her chest. She did not know the rituals or the words the Dalish might say over their dead, but she was here, and mourning, and that would have to be enough.

“I am sorry,” she murmured softly, to those glassy yellow eyes, “I wish I’d found a better way.”

A snap-crackle of bone shifting against bone, and she heard Morrigan’s voice behind her. “You need not look quite so mournful. You did all you could for her, more than most would have, and at least her death was dignified and relatively painless. I am not sure she could have asked for more.”

Luna sniffed, not looking at her. It was easier, somehow, when she was in animal form, to behave as she usually did, as though the skin of a bear or a raven would somehow dull her insight rather than enhance it. She tried to keep her tone light, and knew she was failing miserably. “You picked a poor time to get over that jealous streak of yours.”

Morrigan laughed, which gave her some little hope she’d succeeded in concealing her pointless, useless tears. “What reason have I to be jealous of Alistair? ‘Twas far more amusing to watch you handle his proposal, and you are far more skilled at such delicate work than I.”

“Mm.” She gulped down a mouthful of bile as she leant over Danyla to close her glassy eyes. This close, the mingling smells of blood, wolf, and rancid meat were almost overpowering, and she wanted to give the woman the hero’s funeral she deserved. She’d died rather than being driven to harm her people. She deserved better than the forgotten grave that was all Luna could provide. “So you wouldn’t have minded if I’d said yes?”

“That, sweet Seluna, would depend entirely on your reasons.” She felt Morrigan’s hands on her shoulders, moving her aside. “If you wed him for power and the promise of a crown, that at least I would respect. If you’d been wooed by the ghastly sentiment of his proposal...” She gave a Shale-like shudder, “Let us say I would have thought the less of you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Luna said, drily, bending to gather branches and dry leaves to act as kindling despide the protest from her passenger. “Maker forefend anyone dare to fall in love in your presence.”

“Come now, Luna. Neither of us are fools or innocents. You know what love is.” There was a silence, as if she expected agreement or argument, but, getting neither, she continued: “Love is weakness. Love is a cancer that grows inside and makes one do foolish things. Love is death. This one found that out the hard way.” She gestured to Danyla, and Luna looked away.

“You think she was weak, for loving her people?”

“I think love killed her far more surely than the curse did. Had she been willing to choose her own life above theirs, she would not be as she is now.”

Luna shook her head. “Being hunted down by her own people even as a curse drove her to hunt them in turn was more than enough to drive her half to madness, I think. Love was what gave her the strength to cling to her own nature long enough to- to say goodbye to her loved ones before she could turn on them.”

It was a strength Luna herself knew she did not possess. For all that she liked to pretend the girl she’d been, the blushing bride with blossom in her hair, was as far removed from the woman she was now as summer from winter, she knew that it was a pretty, comforting lie, one that made it a little easier to survive in a skin that seemed to fit her less and less. If she’d truly been the innocent she pictured that girl as, she’d have died like sweet, naive Nola, with a prayer to the Maker on her lips and hands unmarred by blood. Instead she’d let herself turn as Danyla had refused to – she'd killed and killed and, when given the chance to walk away, she’d killed again, and her family, her home, had likely paid the price of her wrath.

“And what was her nature worth,” Morrigan asked, quietly, “if it did not ensure her survival?”

That kind of questioning was why Luna had been avoiding her, at least when she wore her human form and wasn’t distracted by more pressing diversions. Give me your teeth and your claws. If there was a monster within her, that was what Morrigan really desired, and while there was relief in loosing it around her, there was also a tangled knot of shame she could not unpick.

Love is weakness. Love is death. There was no real defence she could throw up as a shield against such words, when there was an ugly truth to them. Love had killed Danyla, as surely as the curse or Alistair’s sword. For all Luna’s pretty words to Alistair about vows meant from the heart and love so mad and foolish it could destabilise a kingdom, she knew what had drawn her to Zevran and Morrigan, lovers with sharp edges and sealed-away hearts, rather than Leliana or Alistair with their softer, kinder natures. Whether she’d loved Nelaros or only the idea of the life he’d promised, she could not let an imagined future dig its roots into her heart again.

She missed the hope those dreams had brought, of course – she wasn’t made of stone – but she remembered the raw agony she’d felt as those roots had been torn out, the way she’d felt herself crumble without those fragile bonds, loose earth with nothing to bind her into a greater whole. If she had to be stone to keep those roots from carving her open again, she would be, however hard it ran against her nature and her desires. For all that she sometimes ached for Morrigan, who’d never known such softness at all, she also envied her a little – how easy it seemed, for her, to remain untouched by the burrowing tendrils of sentiment she so scorned, or at least, to ignore them until they withered and died in her breast.

She wanted – Maker, she wanted – to let those roots burrow into her again, especially here, especially now. For all that most of the clan seemed to pity or scorn her by turns, for her ignorance of their culture and history, for the way she still called on the Maker and Andraste rather than their gods, for her rough Denerim accent that mauled the few words of the language she could manage, there was something painfully tempting about being surrounded by her own people again after so long. She’d grown too used to travelling among humans, forcing herself to fall into their rhythms, their preferences, rising late and retiring early to accommodate their poor nightvision, and always, always remembering the advantages of height and strength they had over her. She might have forgiven Alistair for their arguments at the Temple, but she could not forget how easily he might have overpowered her, if she’d been taken unawares.

So however strange or unwelcoming the Dalish might seem, she could not quite bring herself to despise them as she suspected some of them might despise her. Morrigan could not stand it, she knew, to see her speak sweetly and bow and scrape with all her pretty city courtesies, but even being in the camp brought back a little of the girl she’d once been, Denerim’s darling Luna, the heart of the alienage, the girl who might have been hahren one day. Perhaps it was the clawing fear that crept up her throat when she thought of the babe, but she wanted her people around her, not just her allies.

She liked the halla-keeper, Elora, who resembled her charges in her grace and the unearthly wisdom in her dark eyes as much as the antler markings which branched over her pale brows. She might have liked her even without such virtues, because of all the things she had discovered in Brecelian, she might have loved the halla the most. They reminded her of her mother’s stories, of knights and heroes who quested upon the backs of the great white deer and even spoke their language. Elora had smiled, gentle rather than mocking, when Luna had delicately asked her if there was any truth to the stories.

“Would that we still had such gifts, but no. We communicate to the halla in our own ways, ask them to share their milk and pull our aravels, but we have lost even more of the tongue of beasts than we have of the language of Arlathan.” She sighed, then, glancing out across the makeshift paddock where the halla grazed beneath the watchful eyes of the hunters. Luna followed her gaze and realised that one of the deer was tethered apart from the herd, held in place by a halter around its throat that tied it to a tree far from its companions. Despite the abundant greenery around it, it seemed thinner and underfed compared to the others, ribs visible beneath its bone-pale hide, but still it strained weakly against the rope that held it, rolling dark eyes fixed on the shadows at the edge of camp. Dark brown lines of dried blood stood out against her flank like scars on the face of the moon.

“Why is that one tethered?” she asked. “They usually come and go as they please, right?”

Elora nodded, her own dark eyes downcast. “Usually,” she said, “they are our companions, not our chattel. But this one... she was the only survivor of a werewolf attack, and I fear she has taken the infection. I cannot calm her, or even get close enough to check on her injuries. It was all I could do to restrain her, and after that... I could not get near her again.”

Luna could understand her caution – as lovely as the halla were, they were still wild things, with heavy hooves and antlers that could bruise or gore. She did not know what strange impulse made her ask:

“May I try?”

“Do you know animals, then?” Elora sounded surprised, which made sense, because Luna was not at all sure the answer was ‘yes’.

When she’d left Denerim, the only creatures she had passing familiarity with were stray cats and feral dogs, and the ornery goats Alarith kept out behind his shop that provided most of the milk and cheese in the alienage. But she’d spent months now traversing the wilderness, listening to Alistair chatter about the dogs and horses he’d known in Redcliffe, and Morrigan’s rare, laconic revelations on the natures of wild things, and, watching the halla, its panic, its wild desire to escape the halter that bound it, she realised she knew more than she’d first believed. She could see how it shied up onto its hind legs whenever Elora came near, how it let out a scream-like cry as she flinched back from it, and realised that the fear of someone so familiar was only making it more panicked.

“A little,” she said, which wasn’t a lie, not really, but she was still surprised when Elora stepped aside, allowing her through the narrow paddock gateway.

“Treat them as honoured companions, not wild beasts, and they will respond in kind,” she advised.

Luna straightened her back, took a deep breath, and stepped in among the halla, head respectfully bowed.

However slowly and delicately she moved, a part of her expected the herd to shy away from her, to wheel and flee to the furthest edges of their pen, or to turn on her with antlers lowered and far sharper than the horns of those goats she remembered the force of too well. Instead, they parted before her as she moved between them, as if she were Elora or simply another deer moving among the herd. She was close enough to brush her fingers against those soft, pale hides, though she still had to be careful where she stepped – she came up only to their shoulders and they were not exactly careful about where their great hooves fell.

The injured halla was at the far end of the paddock, still straining towards the trees. Luna could see now where the harness, however carefully made, was digging into the thin skin of her neck as she dragged against it, throwing her whole weight against the rope that held her fast. It was a wonder she hadn’t choked herself yet, but her struggles were clearly exhausting her.

“Let’s see what's panicking you, pretty girl,” she murmured, voice low and gentle, like she was trying to soothe a weeping child. “See, it’s alright, Elora sent me. You know Elora, don’t you? Yes, I know she tied you here, and I don’t think you like that, but she sent me to help you.”

The stream of soft chatter seemed to soothe something in the beast, so she kept up a steady stream of nonsense as she drew closer. She did not think the halla understood her, exactly, but she’d seen Elora talk to them before, and the sound of gentle voices was likely familiar. She still strained against the rope, and her eyes still rolled till the whites were visible, but she did not shy or kick out at her as she drew closer.

“Brave girl,” she crooned, “so brave, I know, and you must be hungry too. Are you hungry? I think I have something for you...”

The apple in her pocket was bigger than her fist and redder than blood, and she’d been saving it for her breakfast, but now she held it out to the frightened, starving creature, a peace offering, a promise. I see you, I know your fear, I haven’t come to hurt you.

It was hard to avert her gaze, to look only through her lashes as the halla snaked out her great head and lunged for the fruit, but it was necessary. She did not want to risk spooking her again when it had taken so much trust to get this close.

“Ssh, it’s alright,” she murmured, raising a tentative hand to brush the velvet of her nose. She felt the halla’s hot breath on her hand, but she did not pull away, only nuzzled at her palm. “Let’s see what we can do about your side, hmm?”

She was not a herbalist, but this close, she could see beneath the dried blood the shiny pink of healing skin, and she could not see any signs of infection. The halla was much livelier than the infected hunters she’d seen Morrigan tending to the day before, and besides the blood and the panic, she could see little sign of illness in the creature.

“You’re alright, aren’t you, sweetheart?” she murmured. “You’re just scared. Scared of the wolves?” No, that didn’t make sense – she still strained towards the forest, not away from the treeline where the werewolves lurked. “No, you miss someone, don’t you?”

She could see it now, in the ripple of her tensed muscles, in the frantic roll of her eyes. She thought of Danyla, and she knew the answer to Elora’s worries. With a deep breath, and a prayer to the Maker she only half-believed, she cut the tether free.

The halla lurched forward then stumbled, knees buckling as she fell to the ground, as if her battle against rope and harness had been the only thing keeping her standing. She pushed herself to her feet, took a tentative step forward, but her legs were trembling, and she collapsed again.

“You need to eat, sweetheart,” Luna chastised her, gently. “You can’t save whoever you’re missing if you can’t run.”

The deer let out a whicker that she assumed was protest, but accepted the handful of long grass Luna presented with queenly elegance.

“You’ll be alright,” she soothed, and rose from her crouch, back aching a little from holding the position for so long. “We’ll find your friend, I promise.”

“She’s alright,” she told Elora, vaulting the paddock fence to stretch the pain out of her back. “Not infected, anyway. I think she lost someone important to her in the attack, though – another keeper, maybe, or her fawn?”

Elora’s eyes widened. “Her mate,” she said, with a certainty Luna envied. “Of course, we haven’t seen him since- Thank you!” she interrupted, remembering herself. “I’ll send out a search party as soon as we can, or- if you find any injured halla, you can let me know where to find them, and I’ll- thank you!” she repeated, and then, unexpectedly, threw her arms around Luna’s shoulders and hugged her tight. “Ma serannas, da’len.”

“I- you’re welcome?” she said, suddenly feeling small and foolish. “I’m- glad I could help.”

She slipped away, unsure why she suddenly felt so strangely overwhelmed, but did not hear Zathrian’s approach until she felt the Keeper’s hand on her shoulder.

“You did well, to help Elora,” he said. His gaze was cool, measuring. “I did not think you had it in you, child of the city.”

This brought Luna back to herself, and she gave her most dazzling smile. “Like the city, I’m full of surprises,” she replied. “Some of them are even pleasant ones.”

“Hmm.” Luna might have expected another insult from the old man’s raised brow, but instead, he said: “Perhaps our people’s roots are not so withered in you as first I thought.”

It was, in fairness, still a backhanded compliment, but it was better praise than she’d received from any of the Dalish but Elora before. Her other successes were more limited – Lanaya, the clan’s First, was courteous and even welcoming, but clearly saw little difference between her and the humans she travelled with. She was an ally, but not part of their clan, not Dalish, not even truly an elf.

That was one of Sarel’s lines. For all that she loved a good story, and listened with every sign of eagerness to whatever tales he deigned to share with her, she could not quite suppress the simmering loathing that brewed beneath her skin whenever he looked at her with something between pity and disgust.

“Even your name is foreign to us,” he’d said, mournfully. “Seluna. A Tevene name, not a note of Elvhenen to it.”

“It was my grandmother’s name,” she said, with all the mildness she could muster, “and her grandmother’s before that. And as far as I know, both of them were at least elven enough to pass it on to me.”

“And a slave's name first.” He shook his head, as if in abject pity, which annoyed her more even than his determination to make her feel inferior.

“A god’s name, too,” she corrected, to needle him, “and even if it was only for my ancestors, I don’t see why I should be ashamed of them, any more than you are of yours.”

He looked down his nose at her. “My ancestors lie buried in the Emerald Graves, the last defenders of the Dales.”

“Good for them, that they had the freedom to choose to fight and die for their home,” she retorted, “but I’ll still honour those who had no freedom and still fought and lived and loved their children despite that.”

He stared at her. “You cannot find honour in being the daughter of slaves and collaborators.”

She shook back her hair, dismissing him. “When the shems stop setting up shrines and statues to honour conquerors and slavers, I’ll reconsider it. Till then, slave or not, my grandmother is still my grandmother, and I will keep bearing her name, to honour the fact that one of my ancestors decided that their daughter might be called a slave, but she was still worthy of a divine name.”

“Ignore Sarel.” Once again, she hadn’t heard Zathrian approach, but then, the Dalish were used to moving softly through the bracken in a way that neither she nor Zevran could quite match. “Many of us fear you’ll charm our youth to flee for the cities.”

She could not help but laugh at that. “One look at an alienage would send them right home to you, I can promise you that.”

His dark brown eyes were unreadable in his pale, angular face, almost foxlike in his scrutiny. “It did not send you running to the Dalish. We would have taken you in, if you’d come to us without bringing trouble in your wake.”

It was offer kindly meant, but it drew a lump into Luna’s throat all the same, because this place was beautiful, and these were her people, or as close as she could come to them, but this was not home, any more than Ostagar or distant, mysterious Weisshaupt.

She inclined her head. “Your home is very beautiful, but- you have a whole forest, here, and we only have one tree.”

He tilted his head. “What is your meaning?”

It was difficult to put it into words, but she tried anyway: “I’ve seen a little of your ways, and your gods, and they are beautiful to me, as your forest and your aravels are beautiful. I’m not sure you would say the same, if you visited my home, but- I would not exchange the one for the other, if I had the choice. I would not exchange the vhenandal I grew up beneath for all the trees in Brecelian.”

“It is where your roots lie,” Zathrian said, with something like understanding, “for all that the wind has blown you far from them.”

“I miss it every day,” she admitted, “but I don’t think your children would see the beauty in it that I do.”

“No?” He raised a brow. “You do not think the lure of steady walls and food you do not have to hunt or forage for yourself has its appeal?”

“I think that even a palace far away from my people would feel like a prison, after a while.”

“We could be your people, if the Blight ends and you yet live.”

She hadn’t expected that hand to be extended, that offer to be made, and that pricked tears from her eyes despite her desire to let her heart calcify within her. For all she knew she could not settle among the Dalish, learn their language and take root beneath their trees, there was a part of her that wanted to accept that offered hand more than anything, to let herself be pulled into the heart of their clan, to become something like the girl she had been once, too long ago. In this moment, in the warm light of the autumn morning, Zathrian almost looked like her father. She could almost be his daughter, if she took his offered hand, if he let him welcome her into his clan.

“That’s- very kind,” She swallowed, though her voice still sounded thick and tearful, “but I think I’d be more trouble than I’m worth, and- too many of your clan would not want me here.”

Zathrian’s hand was warm on her cheek, and gentle, sweeping away an escaping tear as though she was a little girl again. “You are still the blood of Arlathan, whether you remember it or not, da’len,” he said, “and whether you choose to take it or not, you and yours will always have a place among its children.”

She’d forced a smile, then, repeated some sweet lie or witticism to cover the wound that Zathrian had opened by accident. She did not think the Keeper had meant to deceive her with kindness, but she could only think of Danyla, and the other hunters who would never be welcomed home to their clan now. She could see beauty in the way the Dalish lived, in their language, their songs and stories, in their brightly-painted aravels, but she could also see the walls they built to protect their way of life from the taint of outsiders, and for all his kindness, she could still feel the chill of exclusion from the warmth of their hearth. She suspected that even if she took his offer and settled among the clan, she’d always be a stranger to them, Denerim accent thick as harbour silt on her tongue, face bare of the vallaslin that marked devotion to their gods.

But there was beauty here, and kindness too, sprouting like bluebells in the dark embrace of the green canopy above. An embattled beauty, to be sure, but worth saving nonetheless, whatever Morrigan believed. It had turned her stomach a little, how casually she’d suggested leaving the Dalish to their fate, but then, the Dalish, or at least their Keeper, had done that to those of their own who’d been infected by the curse. Perhaps there was little they could do, and the thought of sending out hunters to battle wolves that could speak with the voices of their loved ones was an unfathomable cruelty, but even so... There was something too familiar in Danyla’s tragic tale, and it tore at her heart a little, to see another so changed she could never return to her home again.

But for all its faults, this had been Danyla’s home, and she had loved it. So when the faint, dissonant hum of darkspawn woke her, she was out of her bedroll and on her feet in moments, shrugging her breastplate on over her shirt and wriggling into her leggings.

“What?” Morrigan grumbled, from somewhere in her heap of furs that served her as a bedroll.

“Darkspawn,” she said, fastening her knife-belt to her waist. “Get up. Wake the others.”

Alistair was already outside his tent in the dying embers of the fire, struggling to pull on his own more complex armour. She helped him with the buckles at his shoulders, elbows, wrists and sides, hands made quick by the familiarity of the work and quicker by panic.

“We don’t have time for this,” she said, when his torso at least was protected. “Wake the others, get them armed. I’m waking the camp.”

The dissonant hum of the Blight in her blood gave her no clue of true distance or direction, but the gradual rise in intensity told her that they were growing closer, not in a charge, but with slow, deliberate stealth. She could follow that song into the dark, it taunted her, get an idea of their numbers, pick a few off from outside the range of their milky-eyed vision, but unless she could kill them all, the survivors would come upon a sleeping camp, and do as they would with the Dalish before they could do more than wake and scream.

She did not go to Zathrian first, though she knew it would not win her any favour with his people. She had not quite forgiven him for concealing that the werewolves retained their speech and their memories when he set her to hunting them, and it had seeded doubts in his judgement. Instead, she went to Lanaya, his First, and then, at her instructions, to each tent and aravel that contained a hunter and their families.

“Darkspawn,” she said, and then, raising her voice over questions and argument: “I don’t have time to explain how I know. If your children are big enough to climb, get them into the trees. The little ones...” Her hand strayed to her stomach. “Put them in slings carried by the non-fighters, tie their cradles high in the branches, anything to keep them out of reach. I don’t want any non-combatants on the ground, you understand?”

“But- our homes, our supplies-”

“You can rebuild, if you survive. You can find more food, or trade for it. You can’t bring back your dead.”

Sarel had seized her shoulder then, shaking her. “Winter is coming, you flat-eared fool. There is no more time to gather food!”

“Then you guard it!” she snapped, “While I actually preserve your precious way of life!”

The camp was in uproar – there was no way the darkspawn could think that they’d ambush them now, and the hum which had risen to low, wordless chanting fragmented and fell away into a low buzz again. Had she seen less of them in battle, she might have hoped that the darkspawn had realised a clan roused and readying for battle was a far less tempting target than a clutch of sleepers guarded by only a few watchers. But she knew the darkspawn, had learned them from Ostagar and their numerous encounters on the road, and from the fragment of their nature that still crept through her blood, and she knew that, once they had scented living creatures, they did not surrender their prey – they fought to the death.

“Hunters, spread out!” she ordered, raising her voice above the din of the crowd. “Surround the camp, and raise the alarm when you sight them!”

Where was Zathrian? This was his job, however little she trusted him with it, and Lanaya had gone to rouse him once she’d explained the situation.

“But our families-”

“If you’re unarmed, help with the children, any children,” she said. There were so many children among the Dalish, far more she would have expected from the Alienage, where most families could only afford to keep and rear one or two, and where disease, hunger, and human cruelty made their survival risky. “The hunters are keeping you alive, you do the same favour for their kids.”

When the hunters still seemed reluctant, she began to move among the clumps of families, pairing unattached adults to a child or two or three, assigning older children to younger siblings, until the non-fighting parents got the idea and began to arrange things among themselves and the older children began to scramble up into the branches of their own accord. They were all moving too slowly, there was not enough time, she could not be everywhere at once-

“What now?” Alistair jogged up to her, armour clanking, followed by the rest of their group in various states of half-asleep and partially-armed.

“Mages, get to setting wards on the trees to hide people. Yes, that includes you, Morrigan, don’t argue. Jowan, do what you can or feed mana to the others. Leliana, figure out the best places to post archers, and get people there. The rest of you... spread out with the hunters on the ground. Tell them what you can about fighting darkspawn. Raise the alarm if you see them first.”

“Understood.” Sten gave one of his odd salutes and turned, giving the signal to the rest of them to scatter. As she departed, she caught the start of Wynne walking Melia and Jowan through the casting of a simple ward, and she felt the first catch of fear in her throat as the chant rose again at the back of her mind. They were not ready- there was no chance they’d be ready-

She broke into a run, catching up to the perimeter the hunters were beginning to form. They’d already split into two ranks, spears ahead, archers behind, like she’d seen at Ostagar. The same tactics would not work here, though – there was no open ground for a hail of arrows to fall upon, no high-walled fortress to provide a vantage point-

The archers knew better than her, though. At some signal she did not catch, they began to scramble, squirrel-like, up into the branches, but it was too late. The shambling silhouettes had begun to separate from the shadows of the trees. The hunters raised their spears.

A cry went up: “Na din’an sahlin!” and she screamed as they charged forward, into the darkspawn rank:

“Hold the line!”

She’d never seen so many of the creatures in one place, not since Ostagar. It might have been the shadows and the flickering torches they carried, but there seemed to be hundreds of them, far too many for their thin line of spears to hold back until the archers got into the trees. She moved between them in a soundless, shadowy dance, plunging her blades into throats and thighs and unguarded backs, spots that ensured a quick death or immobilisation and allowed her to move on to her next target swiftly, but it was not enough, could not be enough-

The arrows fell just beyond the line of spearmen like a blessed rain, soaking the earth with black ichor. The air rang with darkspawn screams, and for a moment, the hunters froze, startled, like Luna had once been, by how like people they could sound, in death.

“Hold!” she called, “Let them come to us!”

Because they would, she could feel it in her veins, their gnawing hunger, their hatred of everything that did not stink of their rot. That hatred she’d drunk to turn back on them, to hold the line against them. And they would hold the line – the first wave of darkspawn had fallen so easily, there could not be so many more, even in a large scouting party-

She felt it first as a chill in her veins, before she realised the spearmen around her were crumbling to their knees. Darkspawn magic. She’d felt it once before, in the Tower of Ishal, but then she’d crumpled, and Alistair had struck the final blow. Now, she was the only one left on her feet, as the hunters around her collapsed to their knees, blood seeping through their pores to leave a crimson sheen on their skin. Around her, she could see the fallen darkspawn begin to stir, fresh boils and stringy tendrils of rot blooming to cover wounds and stanch bleeding. The one nearest her began to reach out for its spilled entrails, to gather them back into the gaping wound of its belly.

Move, she willed herself, move. And she could still move, though it was slow and stumbling, every muscle cramping, every inch like wading through a river in flood, but move she did, against the tide of magic that longed to drive her to the ground and into it. It took every inch of her will to keep moving, and still it was not enough.

I’m not strong enough, she realised, her muscles trembling. She wanted Alistair’s shining-steel strength, a barrier between her and the weapons of the world. She wanted Zevran, quick and sparkling-sharp at her back to guard her when the darkspawns’ blades rained down. Most of all, she wanted Morrigan, irascible, implacable, fierce and wild. She would charge down this tide to its source and rend it apart, not stumble blindly like a child in a nightmare.

But she was alone, and so forward she stumbled, though her lungs burned with the effort and her skin felt slick with blood-sweat, because soon the Dalish would be dying around her, and she was the only one who could stop it.

Fifteen feet, fourteen feet now between here and the glimmering purple flame of the Emissary’s staff. She forced herself to think through the pain, the terror, the strange, magical exhaustion. She could not be quick, but if she could at least be quiet...

Her time mapping the woods had not been in vain. She could move near-silently now through the dried leaves that littered the forest floor, and whatever sounds she did make, the darkspawn mage’s nonsense chant covered. She could circle it, slipping from shadow to shadow, until its back was to her. Its arms were outstretched, the ragged edges of its cloak fluttering like some hideous tribute to the archdemon’s wings, but finally she’d slipped out of the range of whatever strange spell it was casting, and she forced her aching muscles into one last, agonising burst.

She threw herself forward, kicking off the trunk of an ancient oak to launch herself into the air, knives raised to strike. She could not miss, she knew her arc was perfect-

At the last possible moment, it turned towards her, mouth still gaping mid-chant. She saw, too late, how it leant towards her, cracking its staff into the side of her head. Pain flared through her, and her vision swam as the iron-tang of her own blood hit her nose, mingling with the darkspawn-ichor-rot where her right-hand blade had lodged in its shoulder. Her vision was swimming, the old wound in her shoulder screaming at the full weight of her body hanging from it, but she could not let go, it would kill her if she let go, and she wanted to live with desperate animal need. With the last of her strength, she kicked up off of its thigh and threw her left hand up, driving her knife into the hollow space between its collarbones and up through its throat. Its skin gave way too easily, spongy and swollen with living rot, and she almost screamed as her hand followed the path of her blade and was swallowed by black ichor and too-giving flesh and bone. The muscles of its throat seized and spasmed around her hand, then stilled.

She did scream when it let out a horrifying death rattle, and collapsed, boneless, on top of her, face buried in her neck in a bizarre parody of a lover’s embrace. She fell with it, tangled in its limbs, and something hit the back of her head with another sharp crack. She could feel the weight of it bear down upon her, the stench of blood and rot thick in the air, but none of it seemed to matter as the swimming in her head cast her somewhere dark and distant, far away from her inconvenient, disobedient body. The shadowed leaves above her swam in dizzy patterns, and, as the darkness swallowed them all, she could only think Well, at least now I won’t have to worry about the baby any more.

Chapter Text

Love is weakness, she’d said, mere hours ago. Love is a cancer. Love is death. If this awful, clawing sensation was anything like love, she had spoken the purest truth she’d ever known. She could feel it in her now, rising up like bindweed to choke her, and she wanted nothing more than to tear it out by its roots, because what good could it do? It did not make her stronger, did not make her fight more fiercely than her own desire for survival. This- not love, she was not so far gone as that- this panic, this heady desire grown out beyond its bounds – made her weak, distractable, made her turn her head at every scream or cry. Is it her? Is she safe?

Of course Seluna was not safe. She was a Grey Warden, and this was a Blight – she would never be safe until it was done. Never before had storing her hopes for freedom in a body not her own seemed so foolish, so fragile. If she was hurt beyond magic’s capacity to repair, if some harm had come to the child... She would be back to Flemeth’s original proposal, which each day grew more sickening to her. She could lie with someone she was not in love with easily enough – bedding Seluna had been a delicious diversion, and one she was eager to repeat – but now, to cede or share rule of her own body, even for an inconvenience as temporary as a child, even for so great a power as an infant god... No, better to leave such messy, vulnerable work to Seluna, who seemed almost too eager to sacrifice herself in the name of rescuing every kitten in Thedas that happened to find itself in a tree.

The Dalish were not kittens or foolish villagers, though, they had their own hunters, their own warriors, that their leader had decided not to risk on this fool’s errand to hunt spirit-touched creatures determined to defend their territory. Not because they were incapable – she watched them cut down the darkspawn as she stayed behind their ranks, firing out Arcane Bolts and Fireballs where necessary to thin the ranks, and they fought ably and well – but because the Keeper would much prefer to risk do-gooding outsiders than members of his clan, and who was she to blame him for that? In the moments after the battle when she’d realised she could not hear Seluna among the many raised voices in the dark, crowded camp, she’d have sacrificed him and every one of his clan to see her striding through the camp with blood in her hair and that blazing, battleworn look she wore after every fight. But she did not come, and everywhere she looked, she could only see the void left by her absence.

“Where is she?” she demanded of Alistair, of Zevran, of Melia. “You were meant to be watching her back.”

Morrigan was meant to be watching her back, had been since she’d first realised that Luna’s body was the key to her freedom, and the girl had grown too used to it, dependent on Morrigan’s claws and teeth and magic to cover for her reckless nature.

They were not helpful. Alistair, predictably, blinked stupidly and only said: “She sent me to the eastern perimeter,” as if that mattered at all compared to the fact she was not here now.

Zevran, with a smile that did not reach his worried eyes: “I believe the lady herself would tell you she is quite capable of watching her own back. Have you spoken with the hunters from the western boundary?”

She did not want to speak to any more useless mortals, none of whom seemed to understand her question well enough to answer her.

Melia was the worst, and it was only Seluna’s softness for the girl that saved her from a slap she would not forget. “I thought she was with you?” she said, high and sweet and utterly, utterly stupid.

“If she was with me,” Morrigan bit out, “I wouldn’t have come to you, would I, little mage?”

“I know, I just thought- you two are always watching each other!” Melia argued, and Morrigan wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. “I’ll find Wynne, maybe ask some of the hunters she took with her-”

“No time.” The words emerged as half a snarl, feral and vicious, and a part of her was grateful that if this strange, unnatural fear had made her weak, it had not, at least made her tame. “I’ll find her.”

West, Alistair had said, so west she went, as fast as clumsy human feet could carry her in the panicked crowd of the injured, the dying, and the useless. If Luna had been here to corral and nag at her, she might have paid attention to the screaming, wailing horde that surrounded her now the attack had passed, but Luna was not here, and that was all that mattered. She could move faster in bearskin, track faster as a wolf, but those forms would only slow her down in this crowded, noisy place that stank of mortal blood and panic, and she hated them all for it, in that moment, for being loud and messy and mortal and in her way. Beasts would not tolerate such weeping and wailing over a fight once it ended, let alone a fight they’d won, but mortals of all kinds seemed unable to resist such a display, and it maddened her, to see energy and exertion go into milling around without aim or plan when they could be being useful, or, failing that, staying out of her way.

The western perimeter, as Alistair had described it, was a charnel house, ranks of darkspawn still in the noisy process of dying intermingled with the bodies of their killers, glassy-eyed and stained scarlet with blood-sweat. Some of them might still have been breathing, but Morrigan did not care to check. Their faces were not familiar, and even if they had been, they would not remedy the panic that clawed at her now. She did not see Seluna among the fallen, no flash of dye-bright copper against the mingled blacks and browns and greys of the battlefield, shot through here and there with bright, bloody red where the moonlight made it through the canopy. It would have been a relief, but for the fact that if she could crawl, she’d already be up and ordering people around, dragging them into her fantasy world where everyone worked together and they all survived the night to drink together in the morning. If she could speak, she would be yelling out for aid, or to separate the wounded from the dazed or exhausted. But all the noise in the woods came from the camp at her back – the woods ahead were eerily silent, not even a whimper reaching her too-human ears.

That was when she saw it, that spark of unnatural violet fire, the dying flicker of magelight in a staff no longer fed with mana. Seluna, with her magpie-eye for anything sparkly or magical, would have been drawn to the light like a moth to a flame. She knew it even before she saw the splash of blood-stained copper caught beneath the darkspawn mage’s arm, but still she felt the bindweed noose of fear grow tight as she dragged the corpse aside by its arm. There she was, beneath it, still and pale as a corpse herself, eyes half-lidded, a slick halo of blood seeping into the bright copper of her hair. Such unnatural stillness, a moth swatted from the air by cruel, careless fingers.

Her breath was caught in her throat, and for a moment, she could not move. Instinct had always been her greatest drive - in a fight, or its immediate aftermath, it carried her forward on a tide of adrenaline. Now though, in the eerie quiet, the awful stillness, she could barely summon the thin thread of mana needed to check if her heart still beat. The moment she felt it connect might have lasted a century, but all she could remember of it was the echoing silence before she felt, faint and tremulous, the vibration of a pulse. The relief crashed down upon her, nearly buckling her knees, before she recalled her true purpose, and spooled her scrying out a little further – and yes, there was that second pulse, as strong as she’d ever heard it. It should have been her first priority, but then, she’d grown used to thinking of preserving the child and the mother as one and the same thing, and until it was finally born, they would remain entwined.

But Seluna did not stir as she knelt beside her, or react to her own name, spoken into the too-still night air. She reacted a little when Morrigan raised the veilfire to her face, turning her head away with a wordless moan, but this revealed a new horror – a clump of skin and hair remained behind on the sharp-edged, bloody stone that had left a faint crater in the back of her head.

This was far worse than the wound to her shoulder, which had missed her organs in favour of muscle and bone that took more easily to her brute-force means of healing. This... this was delicate and complex, and would require someone with access to spirit magic she had never possessed.

If it had been anyone else, anyone less vital to her plans, she might have risked her patient rather than her pride. At least, that was what she would tell herself later, when she was reduced to a glorified lamp, holding veilfire aloft in the makeshift infirmary while Wynne carefully pieced Seluna’s skull back together. In the moment though, she’d yelled for the old woman as she might have called down Flemeth in her place, and might have taken whatever punishment her mother had threatened in exchange for the healing she herself could not provide.

When she’d broken her own skull, she’d been thirteen, and the break had been trifling – a mere crack from falling from a tree headfirst. Flemeth had not scolded her, at first, had put her to bed with warm broth and a hand to her forehead, and she’d thought, then, that she’d escaped punishment. She’d been wrong, of course. Her mother had marked her bedpost with a glyph of paralysis, and she’d been trapped in her bed for three days, unable to move, unable even to scream.

You might have died, Flemeth had said, afterwards. Better you have a taste of it now than make a meal of it again.

Of course, there was no punishment this time, beyond the horror of watching, useless, as the old woman took her place in ministering to the girl she’d put so much effort into keeping alive. She smoothed her fingers over the dent in the back of Seluna’s skull, separating out fragments of bone from shards of flint beneath the cool green light of veilfire.

Melia hovered at her shoulder. “Is she...”

“She’s alive,” Wynne confirmed, “at least for now. No damage to her neck or her spine, which is a promising start, but there’s swelling in her brain that I don’t like.”

“So fix it,” Morrigan demanded. Easier to demand than to pay attention to how the shadows jumped as her hand shook. Easier to focus on Wynne’s failings than her own.

“It’s not that simple-”

“Isn’t it? You’re a spirit healer. Heal her.” It would have been easier if Wynne had snapped back at her. She wanted Wynne to snap back at her, with the familiar venom she’d drunk in with her mother’s milk. She knew how to spit her own venom in return.

There was nothing she could do against the horrible, pitiful softness. “We have done all we can,” Wynne said, gently, “Her life is in the Maker’s hands now. She’ll wake, in the next day or so, or she will not wake at all, but in the meantime, we can make her comfortable, and pray.”

She did not want to trust her future to the Maker’s hands or to Wynne’s. Her future, tucked away in Luna’s body, nestled between her hipbones, beneath the skin that still held the marks of Morrigan’s greedy fingers and teeth. She’d thought, in those heady moments, that marking her would be enough to keep the world from touching her, a ward marked onto her hips and thighs and belly by will alone. But marking her as mine was not enough, could never be enough. She could be snatched from Morrigan’s clutches as easily as the mirror had been taken from her clumsy, childish fingers, and she would break just as irrevocably. The thought curled her hands into fists, nails cutting red crescents into her palm. She was meant to be better than this, above storing her plans for the future in anything as fragile as hope, anything as vulnerable to alteration or another’s whim as a body not her own.

She had a solution for this, of course. Seluna had pressed it into her hands with her summer-sweet smile, and now it sat heavy in the base of her bag. She hadn’t touched it since the night before last. She hadn’t wanted to think of it, then, the forbidden knowledge scrawled between its pages, and what that information meant for her, last in the long line of Flemeth’s daughters, the latest vessel intended to receive the mingled soul of the ancient abomination who had called her Mother.

If she believed every lesson Flemeth had taught her in her upbringing, what she chose to do was only natural. The first law obeyed by all living creatures was that of their own survival – eat, or be eaten. What was this, but an extension of that rule? If Flemeth’s own survival demanded the creation and devouring of five daughters, a hundred, a thousand, what of it? The bear did not count the salmon that filled her belly and kept her fat and thriving from one winter to the next.

The only difference, she’d told herself, was that she’d assumed her mother had looked at her and seen another bear, a cub, perhaps, a one-day competitor, but a creature of the same kind nonetheless. She’d never imagined herself the doe-eyed prey, the rabbits they reared in small, stinking hutches, soft and fat and innocent to the fact that they would one day stock the witches’ stew-pot. She’d thought of herself and Flemeth as the only real people in a world populated by dull, drab imitations, closer to livestock than they were to truly living. She had not realised that to Flemeth, she might as well have been chattel herself, and something within her revolted at the thought.

She could escape it, though. She could escape this whole tangle of a quest she had not asked for, companions she did not like, the nightmarish anxiety of leaving her hopes dependent on another. She could even, probably, escape the fate her mother had planned for her. She might hunt Morrigan all her days, but would she ever think to seek her within Seluna’s skin? It would not be difficult – the ritual was the only magic the book had offered her, but its steps were painted on the back of her lids when she closed her eyes. In her current state, the girl might not even have the will to fight her. It could even be called a mercy – nobody would miss Morrigan, if she slipped away from the camp now, but if Seluna opened those sloe-blue eyes once more, they’d toast to her miraculous recovery for days, and never think about who might be looking out from behind them. They would be happy, and Morrigan might be happier in Seluna’s skin than she ever had been in her own, wound into the heart of their little group rather than hovering grimly at its edges.

True, there would be the many discomforts and dangers of pregnancy in childbirth, now resting on shoulders Morrigan wore rather than shielded, but wouldn’t that be its own kind of blessing? It would free her from the nagging sense of dependence on another, give her the perfect control over her plans that wilful, stubborn Luna would never quite allow her. If she could not preserve her mind, she could at least preserve her beauty, keep her body warm and cared-for and tended to in ways that she never had.

True, she’d have to contend with the Blight in her veins, but once she’d sloughed off the skin she’d been born into, how difficult could it be to discard another, once she’d found a second suitable replacement?

It should have been an easy decision, a quick, ruthless cut to the throat of the fawn. Nature’s first rule was survival, and she’d bound hers up with Seluna for far too long. She could cut that cord now, quick and easy, free herself from the bindweed that had grown up around her since she’d set her bedroll down beside hers’. She should be happy to have such a simple solution provided to her – if Seluna never woke, it was hardly even a moral quandary to consider, just a simple equation of practicality and survival. She could not explain, even to herself, what stayed her hand.

Perhaps it was some foolish sentiment that clouded her mind, a remnant of one of Luna’s lovely lies, or the memory of her lips ghosting across her skin, her sharp white teeth biting down with a vicious hunger to live despite all her pretended sweetness. Was this what sex did to people, then, why Flemeth had always warned her against it except as a necessary evil? Was she as vulnerable to this particular weakness as every pining villager she’d ever laughed at as a girl?

No. She liked Seluna well enough, and better than most, but she was not so far gone as to spin some great romance out of a single night of warmth and pleasure. If they never repeated the experiment, she’d regret it, but she wouldn’t sink into the sort of maudlin despair that seemed to attend the lovelorn. When they parted ways, she’d miss the warmth of their shared blankets, the cackle of her laugh at a snide aside, but it would not be the lost-limb sensation that Leliana’s saccharine ballads so loved to dwell on. Seluna was simply the closest anyone had ever come to befriending her, and the fact that her absence would sting at all was, perhaps, more evidence that she’d let her get too close already, and would be better off severing their entanglement before anything as messy as mourning could creep into it.

Except- she remembered the chill anger that had flooded her whenever she’d spoken of the first man she’d killed, the Arl’s son. He took what wasn’t his. It was, she knew, the root of Luna’s wilfulness, the rage that flared up whenever anyone laid a claim to her beyond friendship or mutual desire, perhaps even the root of her refusal to rid herself of the child when the opportunity was offered to her. My mother taught me my body was the only thing I’d always own entirely. But that hadn’t always been true for her, had it? The Arl’s son had come to her like a conquering army, and he’d left her ever-watchful of her borderlines, of what little remained of her autonomy after his and the Wardens’ occupation of what she’d been promised was hers alone. Would it have been easier for her, she wondered, if her mother had been more like Flemeth, reminding her that her body, her beauty, was a tool like any other, to be deployed to manipulate or achieve her goals? If she’d seen the Arl’s son’s assault as an opportunity to turn to her own advantage?

The thought should not have turned her stomach. She had not been reared to such frailty, such weakness in the face of what was necessary. But even months ago, even fresh from Flemeth’s harsh lessons, even with as little knowledge of the wider world as Leliana claimed to possess, even with Alistair’s objectionable traits being those of his nature, not his looks, the thought of her body surrendered to a lover she did not desire had repulsed her. That repulsion had been the start of it, the cold, inexplicable anger that had overtaken her at the thought of unwanted hands on Seluna’s skin.

But what line could she really draw, between the hands of a greedy nobleman pawing at her body, and her own fingers probing her mind, settling into her skin, wearing her smile and her sloe-blue eyes as if they were a dress to borrow and return at will? What would be the difference, really, between her imagined claiming of Luna’s body, and Flemeth’s goals for her own?

No difference at all, she realised. They might not call it a rape, those Circle mages with their fine Chantry words for it, possession, abomination, but it amounted to the same thing, or worse, and for all that she cared little for the morals and strictures that mortals used to order their little world... The idea of unwanted hands on her skin, an unwelcome soul in her body, had horrified her. It did not feel less horrifying, to imagine that same fate befalling Seluna at her own hands, her own soul.

That was why, she realised, her first thought on finishing Flemeth’s book, on understanding the nature of the ritual, had been to run to Seluna, to pour out the whole before her. She’d known, somewhere within her, that the other woman would understand the nature of the violation, and her horror at the thought of it. She’d imagined the steel that would have crept into her eyes, the disgusted twist of her lips, the cold anger in her voice. Seluna would never imagine subjecting another to this fate, had never permitted it to stand in Redcliffe, in Honnleath, even when she might have benefitted from it. For all that at the time, Morrigan had dismissed it as her usual reckless do-gooding, she could see it now – that fine, bright thread of empathy that connected her actions, that made sense of the behaviour she’d once considered nonsensical. Of course she’d wanted to lay this horror at Luna’s feet, to watch her take up her blades again, this time in Morrigan’s defence.

Seluna, she knew, would be horrified at what she was considering, disgusted, even, but it was not even the thought of her imagined reaction that stayed Morrigan’s hand, that kept the book tucked safely away in her pack. It was the knowledge that her reaction was mirrored in Morrigan’s own roiling gut, her own revulsion from this particular deed. If Luna, who, despite her sweetness, her reckless altruism, placed her own survival above the mercy she was so fond of, would feel this same horror... perhaps Flemeth’s perspective was the unnatural one. Perhaps the lessons she had drunk in so readily were as much about keeping her alone as they were keeping her alive. She was not a social animal, she did not crave community, but perhaps, if she’d had even one other being she might call a friend, animal or human, she might have seen the bars in her cage as clearly as they now appeared to her.

Be alone, be friendless, you do not need such soft mortal comforts. Nobody will love you as I do, and if they claim to, they are fools taken in by passing fancies. Your body is a tool, a weapon, a vessel for a child or for a soul, does it truly matter which? Your body is not your own, your will is not your own-

She would never have said she trusted Flemeth. She knew well her mother was capable of lying to her, and she’d never thought of herself as ignorant or naive enough to fall for her lies, biddable and obedient enough to follow her to the altar and lay down upon it. But how could she have known the shape of the cage she’d been raised in, the way it chafed at her skin, until she saw it reflected in another’s eyes? Until she’d tried to press Luna into it, like she was a goat or a fawn or a rabbit, and instead received bared teeth and sharped claws and No, I will not bend to your will. She’d thought her a tame creature, or a feral city beast, but now she wondered how Luna saw her – a cage-reared crow, who thought she knew the whole of the sky? At least Luna had known a violation when it had been marked upon her. Could Morrigan have said the same, before the scales fell from her eyes?

Perhaps it was some cruel joke, how she’d tallied up her favours to Seluna to carefully keep her bound by debt and obligation, when the girl who now lay insensate before her had done her the greatest kindness she’d ever know. It was a debt she might never repay, should not want to repay. It was a bond of obligation Luna could weave around her neck and pull upon when she chose, if she woke, if she knew. It was a secret Morrigan should carry to her grave, too easily used against her. And yet, without Seluna on the other end, without her unwitting hand to act as a counterbalance... it would too easily become a noose, binding her to a corpse or worse, to the idea of a girl she’d half-invented from scraps of memory and Luna’s own beautiful lies. Given enough time, enough of Luna’s reckless plans, she might rework the balance in her favour again. But for that, she needed her to wake, to be careless and foolish and heedless of her own safety in pursuit of whatever she set her heart upon. She could not remain on the pallet bed, still and serene as a sleeping princess in one of the fairytales Leliana spilled into her unhearing ears.

“Wynne says it will help, talking to her,” she said, too sweetly, when Morrigan glared at her. “She may yet hear us. We must give her something worth recrossing the Veil for, no?”

“That is not how the Veil works,” she snapped, but the bard ignored her, plucking out a familiar pattern of strings on the lute Luna had carried back from Haven for her. She’d played it last in the smoky hall of Redcliffe Castle, where Luna had asked her to dance, and she’d said I don’t know the steps. It was useless, she knew, to dwell on what might have been, but still, the tune made her imagine the world where she’d taken her hand, where she’d been the one dragged out into the corridor and showered with kisses that tasted of honey instead of blood. She did not wish to think of such things, so she shoved herself to her feet and made to leave.

“You don’t have to go,” Leliana called after her, and then, more softly: “She’d want you to stay.” Which of course meant she might as well have been barred from the healer’s tent – better to cede the territory to the bard altogether than let her think she’d exposed a softness she could later exploit.

Returning to her tent was a mistake – none of Luna’s warmth lingered in the blankets and furs, but the scent of her still hung in the air, as if she’d slipped out for a late night walk, as if she’d be back any minute. It was sentimental in the extreme that the thought, or rather its impossibility, made her eyes burn and a lump swell in her throat, for all that she’d never been inclined to fits of childish tears. She wanted to look up from the book she was not truly reading to see her, silhouetted in the doorway, the dappled sunlight making a fiery halo of her hair. She wanted- she wanted, as if the revelation had reopened old wounds, hollowed out the brutal lessons of time and nature and left her a child again, cut open to the world, with room for hope to sink its parasitic roots into her. It should have been beautiful – Luna would have had the words to make it beautiful – but instead it was a horror near as cruel as possession might have been. She did not know how to respond to softness, even in herself, without biting down on it. She gnawed it it now, like an animal in a trap, as if she could dull the pain by severing herself from the point of weakness. Stupid, soft-hearted, sentimental-

“Morrigan?”

She did not answer, at first, when the old woman spoke her name. She did not want anyone, least of all the Circle mage who thought herself so worldly-wise for a woman raised within the confines of a tower, to see her in such a state.

“Morrigan, I know you’re in there, dear. These tents have thinner walls than I’d like, at my age.”

She snorted, despite herself. Clearly the old bitch was spoiling for a fight as much she was, if she’d sought her out for conversation.

“Your pity is as unwelcome as it is unnecessary, old woman. Save your comforting words of Alistair, I’ll have none of them.”

The shadow on the tent flap moved, and there was a rustle of fabric without accompanying footsteps, as if she’d sat down rather than accepting the dismissal.

“Alistair and Melia are comforting each other, and I suspect would not welcome help from me there.” A note of humour in her voice, as if there was anything to laugh about today. The idea of it only made her angrier, lit the oilspill of misery within her into a flare of warm, vivid rage.

“Of course they are,” she said, sweetly. “Melia’s your darling pupil, isn’t she, blood magic aside? Of course she’d slip her neck back into a Templar leash as soon as one was offered to her. I only hope it doesn’t choke her too quickly, unless that was what you were hoping for? I know both you and Alistair wished her dead from the first moment we set foot in your accursed tower, for having the nerve to even dream of freedom.”

A huffing sigh from outside of the tent, as if the old woman already wearied of the conversation. Good. Nobody had asked her to come over and poke at her.

“You have a barbed tongue, Morrigan. What drives you to speak so of others?” Her tone was reproving, disappointed, as though she was a wayward apprentice refusing to learn the simplest of lessons.

“I owe you no explanations,” she retorted. “Did I even once request your guidance?”

“I had hoped you might. I know you cannot heal as I do, and that it costs you sore to ask aid of anyone. I could teach you, if you had a mind.”

“You think I am fool enough to meddle with spirits, after seeing what fine work they made of your precious Circle?” She laughed, cruelly. “You think I envy your nature as an abomination, dependent on a concept as fragile as Faith? You think I want your magic, when it could not even- it could not even-”

Why did her voice catch in her throat and stutter? Why was she choking on words that anger had pulled from her so quickly, so clearly? Why even now did the vicious, verdant vines climb her throat to choke her?

It was worse, that Wynne did not leap into the gap her stumbling words had left, that she did not take the opportunity to lash out in turn. She had wanted a fight, but now she felt as though her foot had skidded off the edge of a cliff, and she could not look down to see whatever dwelt within the void that reached up to swallow her. It was crueller, Morrigan thought, to leave her fumbling than it would have been to push her over the edge entirely.

Of course, Wynne’s next words could not have been a more calculated shove, and they sent Morrigan flailing into empty air. “She’s awake. She’s asking for you.”

She felt herself fall, and what lay within the abyss was far crueller than despair. It was nothing but sweet, poisonous hope, lovely and deadly and pale as bindweed petals.

Chapter Text

They told her, later, that she’d been unconscious the whole of the day, and that she’d first woken around sunset. In truth, Luna recalled very little of those first few hours of wakefulness, when Lanaya and Wynne had bustled about her trying to keep her from slipping back into the sleep that had nearly killed her. She didn’t have the heart to tell them that it was the first time in near six months she’d slept without nightmares.

What she did recall came in flashes and snippets. The sound of a lute, plucked softly, somewhere nearby – a familiar tune she’d danced to once, she thought. Melia’s tentative fingers smoothing something that smelt of rosemary through her tangled hair. Morrigan’s voice, husky and oddly soothing, telling her some meandering tale she could only half-recall.

“I hope you don’t expect cooing and fuss and sweet words from me, little fool. You know I never have any to spare.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Morrigan,” she’d retorted, but her voice had sounded sleepy and slurred to her own ears. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

She’d laughed at that, an inelegant, enchanting snort. “Only because if you’d had the nerve to die of something as mundane as a bump to the head, I’d have dragged you back across the Veil to kill you myself. ‘Twas only a cracked skull, ‘tis not as though you keep anything vital up there.”

She’d pouted at that, sensing a joke at her expense, but her thoughts were too foggy and scattered to identify it. “You’re making fun of me,” she accused.

“I? Never!” Morrigan had retorted. “If you continue with such unfounded accusations, I shall leave you to your other callers. You have plenty of willing handmaids, I need not play the part.”

For some reason, the threat had actually frightened her, as if, once she was alone, she’d find herself back on the forest floor, pinned down by the weight of the darkspawn atop her. She’d flailed out a questing hand, clung to her wrist like a child. “No,” she’d ordered, though it was really more a plea. “Stay. Talk to me.”

“Hmph. Of what do you wish me to speak, as you are giving the orders?”

“A story,” she’d demanded, “Even Flemeth must have told you stories. All mothers do.” Her own mother had told stories to rival Leliana’s, beautiful stories of adventure and heroism. “I need them,” she added, a spark of cunning dancing between her addled thoughts, “to tell the baby later.”

“I doubt the stories my mother told me will be the kind of things you’d want to tell a child.”

“Why? There are worse people they could turn out like, than you.”

It was likely a trick of the dim, distant firelight, but she could have sworn that something had darkened Morrigan’s cheeks, in that moment, before she turned her face away and it was gone.

“Ridiculous girl. Very well, a story you shall have.” She crossed her legs, drawing Luna’s still-captive hand into her lap.

“In the beginning, when world and Fade were one, before the Veil was cast over the sky, there were the forests – the roots that bound the land together, the branches that held up the sky and breathed the clouds into the air. They grew strong and green and powerful, and knew neither fear nor sorrow nor weakness, only the slow, green secrets that their descendants still pass between their bows.

“Then came the first winter, and the sun they loved abandoned them, and the cold shrivelled the leaves from their branches. Now, the leaves that fall are drab, dead things, but back then, when the earth was still thick with magic, the first leaves to touch the ground became animals – the smallest quick, scampering rabbits and deer, the swiftest wolves and wildcats, and the greatest of all became bears.

“And the birds?” Luna had asked, rolling onto her side, her cheek resting on her palm.

“They were formed from the leaves that never touched the ground at all – those the wind caught and swept away never left her, and their children still bear her company to this day. Do you want to listen to the story you requested, or merely interrupt me with questions?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, chastened.

“You are forgiven for now. Now, beneath the canopy of the boughs, the animals were sheltered from the worst of the winter, but this was the first winter, and even now, ‘tis not a kind season for wild creatures. The bears hunted the deer, and the wolves hunted the rabbits, but they were thin, scrawny creatures, more bone than meat, and hardly worth the hunt it took to catch them. They grew mangy and weak, and perhaps they thought that the first winter might be their last.”

She paused dramatically, violet painted lips curved into a smile.

Even through the haze of confusion, Luna knew her cue. “But then?”

“But then,” Morrigan echoed, “they saw the first fire, and the first elves who sat around it, roasting roots in the coals and frying bread on the hot stones.”

“Like parathas,” Luna had meant to think the words rather than speak aloud, but from Morrigan’s smile, she’d failed to.

“Perhaps. And with their warm fires and the food, the elves lured the rabbits close, and then the halla, guiding them to the greenest shoots and the places where roots could still be dug, and when they grew fat and lazy, they slaughtered them, and cooked them over the warm fires that had drawn them in.”

She probably should have expected that – it was a very Morrigan sort of twist – but she still made a plaintive noise at the betrayal, and Morrigan, unexpectedly, smoothed her hair back from her face.

“Hush. Once the story is over, you’ll be able to drink more willow-bark tea, and perhaps they’ll let you sleep. Now listen.

“The rich smells of meat cooking lured the wolves of the woods close to the fire’s warm light, and they were lean and hungry things, desperate enough to steal a child, or even the bones from the midden, if that was all they could get. But the elves were canny – they offered not just bones, but the finest of the meat, until the wolves too were fat and lazy, content to lie by their fires and let collars and leashes be tied around their throats. They became dogs, and the wild became a stranger to them.”

But they were happy, Luna thought, and tried to cling to the small comfort that provided – the image of the elves and their wolves curled by their fires, like Styx, or like herself and Morrigan – a wild creature curled around her for the warmth of a shared fire. She liked that idea, that maybe a thousand years ago, an elven girl and a wild witch had curled together as they had in her tent, those long, chill nights on the mountainside.

But the story was not yet finished: “But even with their bellies full and the wolves of the forest bent to their will, the elves were not yet satisfied. They sought to bend the greatest of the forest’s creatures to their will, and, with cunning and magic and meat, they lured the hungry bear to their fireside.

“’Brother,’ they said to the bear, ‘Will you not sleep on soft, fragrant hay like the rabbits? Will you not rest by our fire like the halla? Will you not feast with us like the wolves?’

“But the elves did not realise that even with all their guile and their good food and their magic, not all wild things of the woods were theirs’ for the claiming. The bear ate them up, every one of them, even down to their bones, and the woods were quiet again.”

Luna hummed, satisfied by the story’s ending if not pleased with it. “Did your mother not know any nicer stories about elves?” she wondered aloud.

“My mother doesn’t know nice stories about anyone,” Morrigan had retorted, and that had, in the moment, struck Luna as so unutterably sad that she’d almost wept from it.

“My mother taught me nicer stories,” she said, and reached for Morrigan’s hand again. “I’ll tell you them, later.”

“You can spin me all the pretty lies you like, once you’ve drunk your tea.”

“Aw, you think my lies are pretty?”

“Almost as pretty as the liar herself.”

She must have slipped into a doze soon after that – the rest of the night was a half-remembered blur, overwritten with the warm glow of firelight and Morrigan’s fingers tangling with hers. Perhaps that was only a dream, an imagined softness to counterbalance how harsh the world had been to her, but she enjoyed it anyway, turned the memory over in her mind for the simple pleasure it had brought her. Perhaps the witch’s heart was not quite so hardened as she liked to pretend, or perhaps – and this was vanity, but wasn’t she allowed a little vanity? - she’d cracked the ice that held it a little. Maybe it was only a temporary thaw, but she’d take what she could, in the shortening days before winter truly came.

The first thing she could really remember, after the bloody haze of battle and healing, was the Keeper’s visit to her bedside. She must have slept, at some point, because she remembered waking to a gentle, callused hand smoothing her hair back from her forehead, and, muzzy with sleep, had murmured: “Da?”

He’d laughed at that, but somehow the sound tore at her heart. “Alas, no, though from what my clan tell me, I should be proud to call you a daughter of mine. Without your warning, the darkspawn might have killed us in our beds.”

She blinked, heat rising in her cheeks as the fog in her head began to clear and she recalled where she was and who she was speaking to. “I- It’s what the Wardens are for, you don’t need to thank me,” she said, attempting to sound gracious and diplomatic, and failing on every count. Beneath the blankets she’d been stripped to her shirt and her breechclout, which didn’t help with her general sense of embarrassment. “But if it gives you more reason to help us...”

“It gives us every reason to help you, however we can,” he said, solemnly, taking her hand between his as though making a vow. His skin felt papery and fragile, as if at any moment it might break to pieces, “and I swear, as soon as our clan can move again, you will have it. Unfortunately...”

“The wolves,” she finished, flopping her head back against the thin pillow with a wince. It did not hurt, exactly, but the skin where her wound had been still felt tender and oversensitive, a bruise pressed on lightly, though Wynne had insisted that aside from the missing swathe of hair, it was as good as new, and (according to Morrigan) better than she could have hoped for. “You still need us to get rid of them.”

She wasn’t sure how Zathrian expected her to manage that just now, when her legs felt as unstable as one of Elora’s newborn halla, but doubtless the request was coming.

“I- The hunt for Witherfang remains an unfortunate necessity, yes, but you must have time to recover to, and as you do...” He hesitated, then lowered his voice: “My clan already owe you a debt, given how many of us you saved by organising our defences. We cannot begin to repay it until we are free of the curse, but we can give you some of the training that should have been your birthright.”

Perhaps it was the head injury, or the antiquated patterns of his speech, but she couldn’t make out his meaning. “My- Thank you, but I’m not sure what you mean?”

He squeezed her hand, with an almost-paternal affection that sent discomfort crawling up her spine. She was still piecing together her memories of the past few days, mussed by sleep and injury, but the weight of distrust in her stomach was not shifted by his sudden warmth towards her.

“You have proved by word and by deed a true daughter of Arlathan since you came to us,” he said, and smiled as if he were bestowing a crown upon her head, a blessing a girl from a Denerim slum could not imagine. “There are skills you would have learned long ago, if you’d been raised among us, but you are here now, and if you are willing, we will teach you the skills that let us live in harmony with the forest and its creatures – most of them, at any rate.” He smiled, then, as if making a joke, and she’d returned it with the most guileless sweetness she could muster.

“Thank you,” she repeated, and tried to mean it, tried to swallow the part of her that rebelled at the idea of being judged as worthy of the secrets of the Dalish despite her city-bred roots, as if her people were really less elven, less deserving of their history, than the wandering clans. “I would love to learn whatever you can teach me.”

That, at least, was not a lie. After the darkspawn attack, the already-subdued energy of the camp had become even grimmer, and the boundaries bristled with hunters both visible and hidden within the branches or the brush, but most of them greeted her with, if not quite Zathrian’s affection, far more warmth than they’d shown to her before, which she supposed was the only perk of nearly dying for their cause. She was still less steady on her feet than she’d like, and was banned from ‘getting into trouble’ for at least the next two days, but it was almost worth it to feel a little closer to home than she had before.

“Head injuries are dangerous,” Wynne had cautioned her, “and spirits cannot heal your mind as easily as they can your body, however much they might wish to. The magic I used was powerful, and will have burned through much of your reserves of energy, but you are young and strong, and should recover well.”

“And- the baby?” The words still felt unnatural on her tongue, more like a lie she was trying to sell to the world than a truth of her own body. She’d thought, before the battle, she might have felt it move a time or two, but perhaps that had been wishful thinking. She hadn’t felt it move since she’d awoken.”

“Your child will be well.” There was nothing soothing or sentimental to Morrigan’s voice, and that relaxed her, a little – Morrigan would not tell her pretty lies to keep her calm and steady while she healed. “The ward I placed upon it is intact, and should protect it from harm despite your penchant for running into danger?”

“The ward?” Luna had been surprised to hear Wynne echo her words, equal astonishment in her voice.

Morrigan had rolled her eyes and waved a dismissive hand. “Of course. When I realised your condition, and your utter lack of self-preservation, it was the obvious decision. A safeguard, at least until you decided what to do with it.”

“That’s- thank you.” She looked down at her hands, oddly touched. “So, no fighting?”

“For at least a week,” Wynne said, firmly.

“But-” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, trying to adjust her estimate of the date, “we’re already halfway through Kingsway, and if we want to get to Orzammar before winter sets in-”

“Do you think us all as incapable of surviving without your wisdom as Alistair and Melia?” Morrigan interrupted, a quirk to the corner of her mouth. “’Tis but a wolf. Leave the hunt to us, and take your lessons from the Dalish. I have heard their knowledge is rarely offered to outsiders, but they seem fond enough of you now, and you are clever enough to put that fondness to good use.”

So, when the hunting party gathered in the mornings, Luna bade them goodbye with only a little reluctance – the Dalish camp was no longer so uncomfortable a place to be, now that they’d opened a space at their fireside to her, and it was nice to feel part of a community again, even if only temporarily. Even if it did press down on the hole in her heart that still called out like a child for home.

The shine that Zathrian had taken to her obviously helped, so she tried her best to play the wide-eyed, dutiful pupil. Despite her lingering suspicions, she could not pin anything sinister to his interest in her, at least. If he watched her when he thought she did not notice, it was with the half-familiar look she saw now whenever she pictured her own father’s face – a man looking at a child he could not save, that he had only just realised he could never have saved. And that knowledge made her feel guilty for suspecting him at all – it felt almost like taking advantage of whatever secret grief he held, for all that his offer of training had been freely made.

She’d had little cause to know much of animals, in Denerim. A jeweller’s daughter, lucky girl that she was, had little opportunity to tend to chickens, goats, or pigs, like many of her friends had as children. She’d left saucers of milk and scraps of leftovers out for the alley-cats, and sprinkled the crumbs of her breakfast onto the window-ledge to feed the scrappy city pigeons, but she’d never really considered herself a natural with animals, for all that, according to Zathrian, it was in her blood:

“Ghilan’nain, Mother of the Halla, created all the beasts of this earth, and for this, she was beloved by Andruil, who loved nothing more than the thrill of the chase, the hunt and the kill,” he told her, as they leant against the fence that bounded the hallas’ paddock, “but it was in Andruil’s nature to seek out prey and to slay them, and to teach her children, the People, to do the same, and in Ghilan’nain’s to avenge the deaths of each of her creations, laying terrible curses upon those who dared to hunt her creatures.”

Luna wrinkled her nose. “So much for romance.”

He laughed. “Gods do not love as mortals do, da’len. It is in their nature to be drawn to those who reflect what they lack – destruction and creation, the self alone and the community as one – and when they come together, marvels are created. Thus, to win Ghilan’nain’s heart, she and Andruil struck an accord – she would sit as a goddess at her beloved’s side, among the Evanuris, and in return, the people who now worshipped her would kill only in the name of their own survival, for food or for protection, never harm her beloved halla, and treat all the beasts of the wood as their brothers and sisters.”

Those words, at least, were familiar: “Elora said something like that,” she said, eagerly. “She said the halla help because you ask them to. They understand your- the Elven language?” she corrected herself, unwilling to bring up the sticking point of her heritage when she was so close to unlocking the first of his secrets.

“Not quite.” He vaulted the fence with surprising agility for a man of his age, gesturing for her to follow. “These are the secrets of Ghilan’nain still left to us,” he said, lowering his voice as she grew closer, “and you must not share them with anyone who does not understand our ways, not even your own child.”

Her hand strayed unconsciously to her belly, willing the creature within to squirm. It did not. “I understand.”

He inclined his head, continued: “The halla were her most beloved, so we know the most of the ways through which she spoke to them, but there are others that may prove more useful to you.”

They began with the halla, though, loveliest and least lethal of Ghilan’nain’s children, though the sharpness of their hooves and their great branching antlers made it clear that ‘least lethal’ did not mean harmless. Elora showed her the herbs to pluck, their pale golden leaves and branching white stems, how to crush them between her fingers until the great white deer trotted over to sniff at her fingers. She showed her how to approach them, slow and calm, to speak soft and low to lure them closer, to never look at them directly, even when looping panniers across the narrow ridge of their spines. How to approach a wild thing as a friend, an equal, rather than a predator.

It was not easy to be still, to be calm, to be gentle, when the past few months had honed her to a knife’s-edge of running and fighting and fleeing. She had resented that shaping, that transformation, even as it had saved her life over and over again, but here, in this quiet woodland place, it did not seem quite so irreversible. She had once been the girl who left crumbs for sparrows, who’d learned kindness from her father as quickly as she’d learned her mother’s blades. She was the woman who’d extended a hand to her irascible Witch of the Wilds, and kept it held out even when she hissed and bared her fangs, until she bandaged her wounds and curled up in her blankets. She was the daughter of Adaia and Cyrion, of Denerim’s alienage and Arlathan’s forests. She was what survived despite the horror, despite the darkness, as everything in Brecelian survived despite darkspawn and curses and shemlen cruelty, and she finally understood Zathrian’s stories of ancient elves who called spirits and beasts their brothers and sisters.

It was the closest thing she’d felt to magic since she’d walked in the Fade. The air did not crackle with power, her body did not ring with the endless possibilities that brewed beneath Morrigan’s skin, but- it was almost like coming home, like a loose thread woven back into an old coat. Like recalling that her blood still flowed despite the Blight it carried, that she still lived in this world, and had a place in it. How could it be anything but magic, when the shyest of the halla gnawed at her sleeve, or a half-grown wolf-pup licked her entire face?

“I thought you would take well to our training,” Zathrian commented, as, with reluctance, she watched the small family of true wolves vanish back into the trees. “An elf without her clan is as unhappy as a lone wolf or herdless halla, but at least now, when you leave us, you will be able to call Ghilan’nain’s children to your side.”

“I’ve had a good teacher,” she said, inclining her head in an almost bow. “Though I suppose all your hunters learn these skills?”

“Those with the talent,” he agreed, “but I have not taken a pupil since my own daughter. You do not quite have her understanding, but that is only to be expected, given your- upbringing.”

There was that look again, like he was looking through her to some other woman, his daughter, perhaps, or the girl she might have been but for the Denerim silt that flowed in her veins. Condescending, perhaps, but Luna could not find it in herself to be angry at him for it – he seemed to know no other way to be kind to her, and he was, she knew, trying to be kind.

She did not like to think that such a man would intentionally deceive her, after all the kindness he’d shown her and the knowledge he’d shared. Perhaps he did not know that the werewolves still retained some fragments of their former selves, or perhaps Danyla had only been able to speak because she was still part-way through her transformation. It was easy to think of a thousand reasons why he might not know that the werewolves could communicate, but that did not quite make her discard her suspicions, only to fold them away until further evidence was gathered.

She’d been excited, that evening, to see if her friends had learned more of the werewolves when they returned, but the mood in their camp was far from celebratory, which was becoming an irritating part of their current routine. Of course, in a party of their size, there would be disagreements and even quarrels, but in the moment, they’d always seemed easy to smooth over. Not so, now: every evening at least two people seemed to fling a new dispute into her lap. Alistair complained Jowan wasn’t pulling his weight in a fight or in camp, Wynne claimed that outside the confines of the Circle, the younger mages had become lazy and taken on bad habits, Leliana had tired of being caught in the middle of whatever issue had split the party down the middle, and of course, nobody had anything good to say about Morrigan. This was not news – Luna was well aware of the witch’s sharp tongue and love of setting cats amongst pigeons – but it was becoming particularly apparent that to her friends’ minds, wrangling her had been Luna’s responsibility, and nobody was particularly excited to stick their hand into that particular beartrap.

“You could have stayed in camp with me, you know,” Luna attempted, as she smoothed one of her poultices over her bruised and bloodied back. “I’m sure there are spells you could learn from Zathrian, and the things he’s shown me about animals... it’s like how you talk about them, knowing their moods and their feelings, what scares them and what comforts them...”

“I’m sure I’ve never spoken so of ‘moods and feelings’,” Morrigan sniffed, and Luna pressed down just a little harder on a bruise until she gasped. “Such things are trifling, and beneath my notice.”

“Much like the edge of cliffs, apparently.” She’d been injured while ranging ahead of the group, and a loose patch of gravel had sent her careening down a steep slope into a ravine. She’d been lucky the worst of it had been a few scrapes – if she’d broken a bone, even in animal form, she would have struggled to climb out, and been easy prey for the werewolves that still eluded them. The thought sent a twist of worry through her belly, and as she smoothed the bandages down over the wound, she pressed an impulsive kiss to the back of her neck, and to her lips when Morrigan craned her head around to look at her.

“Fine,” she taunted, as she drew back, “I suppose you’ll have to find out what I’m learning when I join you tomorrow, if it’s too beneath you to listen now.”

Morrigan’s lips curled into a predatory smile, and she chased Luna’s light, teasing kiss with a second, a third. “Unfair, Luna, my sweet,” she purred. “You know well I love all the noises you make when you’re beneath me.”

At which point Luna allowed herself to be distracted, and there was no more conversation until the sun rose.

Morrigan pursed her lips as Luna pulled on her shirt and breeches. “This seems like an ill-starred plan. You have rested less than a week.”

“Worried, dearest?” Luna teased, which of course soured her expression even further. “Wynne said it would be fine.”

Wynne had technically given six days as the minimum rest she’d allow her to take, between the head injury and her condition. Perhaps she’d hoped the boredom would encourage Luna to seek her out for more advice on pregnancy and childbirth, as the only member of their party with any experience of either, but Luna still could not quite bring herself to make the child real yet. She was still startled whenever the notion of it crept into her thoughts – she wasn’t quite ready to feel its heartbeat or see whatever strange lumpen fruit it resembled at so early a stage. She knew that sooner rather than later, that particular scab would have to come off, but not now, not yet. Not when she was only just starting to feel like herself again. She had months to learn to be a mother, once she’d put her own head back together.

Still, for all that she was skirting the line of the healer’s advice, Wynne was positively beaming to see her prepared to join them.

“Your quick recovery is as much a blessing as me as it has been to you,” she teased. “Our companions have become a pack of unruly children in your absence.”

“Alistair is always an unruly child,” Morrigan said, with a smirk, which made him sputter until Melia squeezed his arm.

“I think you’re very worldly,” she comforted him, which probably would have meant more if she’d spent more than two months outside the walls of Kinloch Hold since the age of six.

“You see what I have had to put up with?” Zevran groaned. “They are not even good at flirting. In Antiva, we’d put these two out of their misery before they could shame their families.”

“I think they’re sweet,” Leliana contributed, as Shale made a gravelly gagging sound.

“I think you’ve all been having way too much fun without me,” Luna interrupted, folding her arms. “Now, who’s up for a horrible walk in the woods where we’ll definitely be attacked by cursed werewolves?”

In the end, she took Shale, Wynne, and Leliana with her, though of course Morrigan refused to be left at camp ‘after what happened last time you were left without appropriate supervision’. They left the rest of the group to burn their excess energy on bickering or guard patrols, though she suspected that only Sten would take the latter over a day of comparative rest. Perhaps taking out so large a party had been a mistake – it was hard to move with any subtlety with a group of their size, especially given that the wolves knew the terrain of Brecelian far better than they did, and perhaps they’d been misdirected or misled by the mists and tangled pathways of the forest.

Today the weather was clearer, though, one of those bright, crisp autumn days that set the leaves above them aflame and made steam-clouds of their breath on the air. Dragon-days, her mother had called them, when she was a child, and she thought it suited them – the endless, burning blue, perfect to take flight into.

She should have known better than to let herself slip into idle fancies – perhaps Zathrian’s training had made her cocky, because she’d barely ranged ahead of the group at all when they found themselves surrounded.

The werewolves emerged from the shadows of the trees more like shaggy-coated ghosts than any natural creatures, their low, loping forms moving soundlessly through the bracken.

Luna rested a hand on her blade, but did not draw it. “I see you,” she said, and hoped it did not sound like a threat. “Come out, and we can have a civil conversation. I don’t want to fight you, if there’s another option.”

Her hand tightened on the hilt when the largest of them bounded closer to her, pressing its great brindled nose almost to her face before rearing up onto its hindquarters to tower over her.

“Ha!” The exhaled syllable was a rush of hot, stinking air into her face, but she did not flinch. “The Dalish do not even come to make us pay for their attack themselves. They send a city-elf, of all things, to do their dirty work for them, to put us in our place.”

“Well, that’s a conversation at least,” she said, lightly, her heart pounding against her breastbone. Never had she been more grateful to have Shale at her back – aside from Sten, the golem was the only one of her friends who could hope to match these creatures in size alone. “We can work towards ‘civil’. I’m Luna. What can I call you?”

“You speak to Swiftrunner,” he growled, and a distant, curious part of Luna wondered how these creatures gained their names – she could not imagine a human or an elf called Swiftrunner, but then again, the Dalish had thought her own name an oddity. “Turn back now, city elf. Tell the Dalish you failed, and flee.”

“Thank you for the warning,” she said, voice still low and calm. Dangerous animal or dangerous person? She could not tell how deep the change had run with these creatures, and she did not want to offend them either way. It could not hurt, surely, to crush a stem of fenfelan, wolfweed, between her fingers, smearing them green with its juices. “Anything else?”

He made a surprised, half-snorting sound, as if he hadn’t really anticipated the conversation getting this far, which was honestly reasonable – Luna was still resisting the urge to run screaming. Either that, or he’d caught the scent of crushed leaves on the wind – his ears, which had been pinned back, began slowly to uncurl as his nostrils flared.

“Tell them we will gladly watch them suffer the curse that has plagued us for far too long!” he demanded, “We will watch them pay!”

“Useful information, but I didn’t actually come here to make anyone pay,” she replied. A part of her wondered if she should raise her hands from her weapons, make herself look smaller, less threatening, but she remembered how quickly Danyla had turned, and she could not risk it. “I just want to talk, I promise. You have a grievance with the Dalish, but I’ve only heard their side of it.”

“Then Zathrian did send you!” he snarled. “He wishes only our destruction, never to talk!”

“Well, I’m not him,” she replied, trying not to let frustration creep into her tone. The werewolves, echoing their leader’s growls, seemed angry enough for all of them. “Like you said, I’m a city elf, not even Dalish, and I love talking and would rather not destroy anything today. Blood is a nightmare to get out of my hair, I can’t imagine what it must be like with fur.”

Swiftrunner blinked at her, apparently silenced by the irresistible logic of this statement. “It is- not easy,” he said, eventually.

Morrigan sniggered. Luna kicked her shin, and tried to repress her own smile.

“Zathrian tells me you’re mindless killers who have hunted his people without mercy. That’s clearly not true, so either he’s mistaken or he’s lying, and that gives me a very good reason to talk to you, if you’ll let me.”

He grunted. “I cannot speak for all my kindred. I must seek the Lady’s counsel, and if she will accept your request to parley. Await her judgement here, if your tale is truthful, and we will return for you.”

He wheeled and vanished back into the trees with no further words, and Luna shuddered at the breeze of his passing, the air displaced by that great, hulking form. She still felt their eyes upon her – the whole forest bristled with their presence – but she could now at least turn her head to mouth a question to Leliana: “Parley?”

“Negotiate,” she clarified. “This is good, they are at least considering we might be telling the truth.”

“Oh, good.” Luna felt a dizzy swoop of fear in her stomach. “Diplomacy. Something I’ve had so much time to practice.”

“I would hope so,” Morrigan commented, “given how much you love to talk.”

“If you don’t like my talking, Morrigan, you’ll have to come up with sweeter ways of shutting me up,” she retorted, which drew an eyeroll from Wynne, a choked giggle from Leliana, and a faint blush of rose into Morrigan’s pale cheeks, “but while you figure those out, I’ll keep this up – it seems to be working.”

The crackle of snapping twigs and dried bracken heralded Swiftrunner’s return – perhaps he felt no need to be silent now he was no longer tracking them. Again he bounded closer, until he was almost nose-to-nose with Luna, and inhaled.

“Tell me again what you have come here for, city elf,” he demanded, as if he could smell lies upon her skin, or hear her heart pounding beneath it.

“I came here to bring enough peace to this forest to let it stand against the Darkspawn,” she said, and hoped every word of it rang true.

A low rumble, not quite a growl. “You are with child. This is no place for you.”

Apparently, her body was now the whole forest’s business. “Neither is a Blight, but I didn’t have much choice about either.”

“This is our home,” he said. “This is where we learn our names, and are beloved. This is the place we will defend to our deaths. Do you understand this, city elf? Do you understand that this forest does not belong to you, or your kind?”

In the Chant she’d grown up reading and singing, the Maker had created all the world for his favourite children to use as they saw fit, but it was, strangely, Zathrian’s teachings that came to her now – all wild things are kindred to us, whether they remember it or no.

“I understand,” she replied, bowing her head. “I didn’t come here to conquer. Enough blood has been shed beneath these branches in recent months. I only wish to understand, and to help, if I can.”

“Then you will come with us, city elf,” he declared. “You will parley with the Lady, hear her tale, and abide by her wishes, if you can. “

And if I can’t? the foolish, sharp-tongued part of her wanted to demand, but, of course, she already knew the answer to that. If she couldn’t find some form of compromise with Swiftrunner’s Lady, they would tear her to pieces, baby or no baby. In their eyes, she was an intruder, perhaps even a spy, and her chances of ending this day with no more blood on her hands lay in their gift. She hoped, however unlikely it might be, that she could find some path to peace in Brecelian that did not ask for death as its due. Despite her battle with the darkspawn and the horror of Danyla’s death, she’d found some measure of peace in the forest, and she did not want to sully it with bloodshed.

She moved to follow him, her friends trailing in her wake, as usual when she committed to an impulsive, possibly insane plan, but one of the other werewolves circled behind her to cut them off.

“The Lady will speak to the city elf,” she growled, “and no other.”

Morrigan answered her growl with a low, guttural sound that should never have come from a human throat.

Shale’s objection at least came in words: “Your ‘Lady’ wishes to speak only with our squishiest mortal? Suspicious.”

Leliana was more diplomatic: “As you said,” she said, sweetly, “our friend is young, unfamiliar with your forests, and with child. Would you let a- packmate of yours be taken away alone, and by strangers, if our positions were reversed?”

Luna reluctantly lifted her hands from the hilts of her blades to fold her hands innocently over her stomach, trying her best to look small and fragile. It seemed to work, or something in Leliana’s speech had shamed Swiftrunner: his ears drooped, he lowered his head, and for a moment, looked like nothing so much as Styx when she’d buried a bone in Luna’s bedroll.

“You may follow as far as the entrance to our den,” he offered, an almost-compromise. “If she is harmed, you will hear it from there.”

“You could leave one of your own with us,” Morrigan offered, with nightshade-berry sweetness. “As a guard, or- a token, of your good will.”

A low growl ran through the pack that surrounded them, but Swiftrunner did not raise his head. “You propose to take a hostage.”

“It seems only fair, as one could argue that you have two.” The words sent an odd shudder through Luna, as Leliana’s words, distant and impersonal, had not.

“A fair bargain, witch.”

“I would not say so, wolf.” She smiled, showing all her sharp white teeth. “I do not know you can provide a hostage as valuable as our sweet Seluna., so I will add another term to our contract – should any harm come to her, at your claws or your Lady’s, you will think your current curse a mercy beyond imagining.”

There was no reason for that to make her breath catch in her throat, to make tingling heat rise beneath her skin, to make her fingers curl into grasping claws of want. Morrigan loved any excuse to terrorise something that looked bigger and scarier than she was, and Luna was, in this moment, both the perfect excuse and in no position to rein her in without looking weak in front of the pack.

There was only one way to salvage her pride from the ruin of her blushes – she fell into step with Morrigan as the werewolves began to herd them through the thick, amber-clad trees.

“So, I’m valuable to you now?” she grinned, hoping the blush had not reached her cheeks yet. “I didn’t realise our friendship had reached such a crucial stage, darling. Should I have gotten you a present? A bracelet, perhaps?”

“You are already making me regret my clumsy choice of words,” the witch retorted, but there was an upward quirk to the corner of her mouth that should not have been so tempting. “I have invested much of my time and magic into keeping you alive, am I forbidden to value my investments highly?”

“Would you describe me as ‘precious’, perhaps? ‘Treasured’, even?”

“You are a blithering fool,” Morrigan informed her, but now the pink was creeping into her cheeks and Luna felt the thrill of the tables turning. “I cannot believe that the future of Fereldan depends on your negotiation skills.”

“That would carry more weight if you hadn’t once said you trusted me with the world’s future.”

“When the other option was Alistair! The context to that comment was highly relevant!”

It was so easy to forget, when sparring with Morrigan, the tension that should have hung in the air, twisted her belly into knots. Not so when they approached, not the mouth of a rank, overgrown cave, but a set of worn, stone steps descending into the earth, flanked by great, vaulted pillars on either side.

Luna swallowed. “This is the place?”

Swiftrunner nodded. “The sacred halls of the Lady lie below. There is no turning back now – we cannot let you spread word of this place to our enemies.”

She took a deep, steadying breath, twisted the band on her finger. “I’m ready. Let’s meet your Lady.”

The halls beneath the earth were quiet, sepulchral, lit with an eerie green light that filtered down through moss and ivy. Morrigan would have known what it was, would have murmured in her ear about ancient elven temples that dated back to the days of Arlathan. Zathrian might have talked for hours on what this taught him of the history of Elvhenan before it fell. Luna felt small, insignificant, utterly the wrong feet to walk within these hallowed halls, but she straightened her spine and raised her chin. If demons and darkspawn and all of Denerim’s shemlen bastards couldn’t cow her, what was the Lady of the Forest to that?

A literal, actual tree spirit, apparently – her skin was birch-bark pale, with the spirialling eye designs that marked such trees, and her hair glowed with every vivid, impossible colour of the leaves in autumn. She was of a height with the werewolves who clustered around her like bodyguards, but when she pressed a kiss to Swiftrunner’s forehead, he folded into her arms like a long-lost child finally returned to a mother’s embrace, folding down onto his haunches to rest his great, fierce head against her hip. Even from there, he was still of a height to glare down at Luna, at the foot of the dais, but she looked past and through him, and met the ancient, infinite eyes of the Lady of the Forest.

“I bid you welcome, mortal.” Her voice was the creak of branches stirred by the wind, something far older and more alien than the spirits of Desire and Sloth and Faith she’d encountered. But of course, those were young spirits, born of quick, mortal emotion. The Lady was something far older – a spirit of the slow, primeval feelings of ancient woodland – and there was nothing mortal in her at all. “I apologise on Swiftrunner’s behalf for the rough welcome you have received. He struggles with his nature.”

“A-as do we all, Lady.” She had not meant to stutter, for her breath to catch in her throat, but she could not help it – she saw, reflected in those ancient, green-black eyes, every mistake she’d ever made in fear or rage or violence, and a part of her was certain that the Lady saw them too.

“I offer my children help, and guidance, where I can, but I do not command them.” Luna doubted this, from the way the werewolves tracked her every movement as though she were the moon crossing the sky, but perhaps, to a spirit of such age and power, to command the will of mortals meant something very different to their freely offered obedience. “You have questions, I am sure. You know Zathrian did not tell you the whole truth, or you would not have agreed to parley with me.”

“How do you know what he has not told me?”

“Because you have not raised a blade against my children since you first learned they could speak. Because your first words to Swiftrunner were a plea to parley, rather than a battlecry. You were not told that my children were more than ravening beasts, and once you knew, you sought to speak, rather than fight. You know a truth is being hidden from you here.”

“If that’s the case,” she said, as boldly as she could manage, “then you know you don’t need to talk in circles to get me to listen to you. What’s at the root of your war with the Dalish? Why begin attacking them now, when they’ve passed through this forest for centuries without invoking your ire?”

“Zathrian,” she said, simply. The name sank into her belly like a stone, because she knew it was true, and she knew, whatever story the Lady told, it would break her heart a little to hate him, when he’d tried to hard to welcome her despite himself. “He is the root of the curse that we suffer, that his own people suffer. He alone is its’ undoing.”

She told the story, then, in that slow, rasping voice, as if she had witnessed all that occured beneath her branches. Of Zathrian’s clan, and the shemlen who’d attacked them. Of his son, tortured and slain, left in pieces for his father to gather one by one. Of his daughter... It was a too-familiar story, and the horror of it grabbed at her like rough hands on the delicate silk of a wedding gown- no, that was Shianni, she reminded herself, you were lucky, you were safe. She was alive, her child was Nelaros’, and Shianni... Shianni had always been cleverer than her, and had never wanted children. She would be alive. She had to be alive.

“And your- children want forgiveness for this?” she demanded, half-strangled with rage and disgust, the real and the remembered. “You think that’s even possible?”

“Is it not?” The spirit tilted her head, those alien eyes more curious than offended. “I would forgive Zathrian, for the cruelty he inflicted on me. I offered him no harm, no cruelty. I sheltered his people and the Alamarri alike beneath my bows, fed them my fruits, let my fallen branches warm their fires. Still he summoned me, and bound me to a form not my own. Was this not violence too, in the name of the vengeance he wished to wreak?”

And what could she say to that? It was true. A violation committed in the name of justice, of vengeance, was a violation still, and she could not defend it.

“Those who killed Zathrian’s children are long dead, now,” the Lady of the Forest continued, as though she knew Luna could not answer her. “It is their children, and their children’s children, who suffer now. We have begged Zathrian to lift the curse every time his clan has passed through our lands, but he has ignored us. He will ignore us no longer.” Her voice deepened and rang through the hall, the howl of the wind in a true storm, and every wolf in the ancient temple howled with her, until Luna stood alone at the centre of a maelstrom of echoing sound, and felt her bones tremble with the prey-fear of every creature ever hunted by night.

“I had hoped,” the Lady said, “that love for his own people would move him, where mercy did not, but it seems his lust for vengeance has only grown with the years the curse has granted him.”

Luna exhaled, still shaking, as the pieces fell into place. “You say this happened hundreds of years ago – the curse is what’s keeping him alive?”

The Lady inclined her head. “And Witherfang, too. They are bound, by his great working, and only his hand, his will, or his death will undo it.”

She could feel the plan pulling itself together, settling onto her shoulders like the weight of stone above her head. She swallowed, though her mouth felt dry, her tongue clumsy. “And if the curse is lifted- however the curse is lifted – you’ll leave his clan alone?”

“That is all we ever sought,” Swiftrunner growled.

The Lady laid a gentle hand between his ears, as if to soothe a fretful child, and he leaned into it, closing his great, lambent eyes. “His own people will be cured as ours are. Everyone will be content, if Zathrian can be persuaded.”

Or killed. The Lady did not have to say it – those ancient eyes knew death as an old friend, as familiar as the seasons’ turn. Luna knew what she meant, and inclined her head.

“I’ll speak to him,” she said, because how else could she respond? She could fight the wolves and the Lady, perhaps even win, but this victory would be a hollow one, and she knew it. If she’d ever intended to take that route, she’d have cut their throats before they could ever start talking to her. She’d have given Danyla the death she’d begged for without even the chance to say goodbye. “I can’t promise how he’ll answer, but- I'll speak to him.”

“Good.” The Lady of the Forest leaned down from her dais then, from the cluster of furry bodies that surrounded her, and touched one long, branching finger to her forehead, like a benediction. “Go with my blessing, child. I can offer you nothing else.”

This time, she moved through the temple alone, the sea of werewolves parting before her, some with heads bowed, others with wary, watchful eyes. How many people had Zathrian sent to bring him the heart of Witherfang? How many people had made the promises she had offered, only to fall at this last hurdle? Had the old man who’d so patiently taught her the ways of the woods buried them here, beneath the Lady’s great trees.

She should not have been surprised, when she reached the foot of the stairway, to see Zathrian at the top of it, silhouetted in the doorway with the last of the evening’s light behind him. It was the inevitable end to this story, after all. He’d merely hastened it.

“And here you are already, da’len,” he greeted her, and she could hear the smile in his voice – still kindly, still paternal. “You carved me a safe path through the forest, and for that I thank you. But I do not see the heart of the wolf in your hands.”

“We had a little chat, the Lady and I. She cleared up a few parts of the story you left out.” She wanted to sound bold, fierce and confident, but she could see and hear no sign of her friends, and fear was snaking up her throat to choke her. The thought of Wynne and Leliana, cut down in the depths of the woods, with no Chantry sister to perform their last rites, of Shale, bound by magic once more to endless slavery, of Morrigan- Morrigan- Morrigan-

“They were not yours to know,” he said, posture stiffening. “You have already had more of our secrets than any elf not of our clan in centuries. Would you now demand more from us? Will you take and take and take, as the shemlen take, as the wolves take? I thought better of you, da’len, but perhaps you are as selfish as the rest. Perhaps you and your friends deserve the same shallow grave.”

His staff began to glow, the amber light of the setting sun entwining with the deep green light from below, and she knew she’d run out of time.

She lurched forward, taking the steps two at a time, but instead of drawing her blades, she grabbed at his hands, kneeling at his feet like a supplicant, like a child, like the perfect pupil she’d pretended to be, when she’d indulged his ramblings to steal his people’s skills for her own selfish survival.

She looked up at him, her eyes as wide and pleading as she could make them. “They- they told me of your daughter. Would you tell me about her, if it is not too painful?”

The glow of magic in his staff faded. He looked down at her, blank and bewildered, suddenly an old man again, paper-skinned and fragile. “Why do you ask?” His voice was guarded, but she could hear the pain it was damming in. The stone walls of the stairwell echoed it back to her, until she could see the shape of the wound in him that no magic could ever heal. The wound she’d seen in her own father’s eyes, the day Duncan had dragged her out of his arms.

This, at least, was not a lie: “Because you’re the only one still living who can remember her as she was, not just- what happened to her. Someone else should remember that too.”

He did not move out of her way, did not give her a glimpse of her friends or the open sky beyond him, but he too folded at the knees, crumpling to sit on the stairs before her, her hands gathered in his lap.

“Her name was Shielani,” he said, in a voice that held every one of his hundreds of years. “She was fierce, and bold, and beautiful, and- when she loved, she loved with her whole heart, keeping nothing of it for herself. She loved everything in this forest, from the birds to the pools to the twigs that caught in her hair. And-” His breath hitched, “and it took everything from her, this place and its people, until all the light had left her, and finally-”

He choked on something like a sob, and the part of her that was still her father’s daughter, that looked at him and saw kind-hearted, dutiful Cyrion Tabris, who’d mourned her mother every day but rose every morning for the three children who’d needed him, longed to embrace him, to provide whatever small comfort she could in the face of such fathomless grief. But this was not that story, and that was not her part in it. She remained on her knees on the stone steps, though her back ached with the angle she bent at to look at him.

“I know,” she said, soft and sweet and childlike. “I know the rest, you don’t have to tell me. My father-” She swallowed. “My father has a similar story he could tell, and if he could have, he’d have done as you did.”

This was a lie. Cyrion Tabris could not bear to keep chickens for meat, or to put kill-traps out in the kitchen in winter. Her mother, though... She had been very small when the last purge had come to the Alienage, when Soris had come to live with them, but she could still remember the cold wrath that had crept across her mother’s features – she saw it too often in her own.

It was the lie he had wanted, though – his gaze darkened, his grip on her hands became iron. “You- Lanaya said you were with child.”

She dropped her gaze. She could not quite bring herself to confirm his suspicions aloud, but she knew that her silence would be confirmation enough. People so often believed what they wished to, not what they heard.

“Fen’harel veren gerahnen.” The curse was ancient, and she felt its meaning in her bones, though she did not know the words. “That such things still happen, after so many years... what is the point of it all, da’len? I have laid down every ward, cast every curse, laid low all my enemies, and yet- still, I find myself here, where I began, looking down at another girl I did not save.”

Shianni. She could see her little cousin before her now, not the pale, glowing ghost of her, but the bruised, weeping girl, her best dress in tatters, her arms drawn tight across her chest. She knew the feeling too well, and sent it through her fingers as she squeezed his bony hands in hers.

“It doesn’t have to end the same way,” she said, softly. “She doesn’t have to be remembered for her suffering. If this curse is broken, it will be Shielani’s name they whisper, her mercy, her justice. Isn’t that what she deserves?”

She met his eyes, then, and she could see the ancient wisdom there, the ancient pain. She could also see how worn-thin the skin beneath was, bruise-blue with a weariness she knew in her bones.

“You know what breaking the curse will take, don’t you, girl?” His words cut through all her illusions, all the pretty stories she’d spun around them, and exposed the core of her, the truth of what she knew she was asking of him, what she had pretended not to know. His hands tightened around hers, drawing her to her feet as he rose to his full height.

She could not lie, not now, not like this. “I do.”

He sighed, and even before he moved, she felt the life begin to rush from him. “Then I leave my last curse to you, da’len. Nuva vunlanas esha’lin esahn lan na ir’tel’sasha.”

“What-?” He would never answer her half-gasped question. He leant forward to embrace her, and she felt his lips on her forehead as heat bled out across her breastbone. For a moment she braced for the pain that followed a stab-wound, but the blood that stained her breastplate was not, for once, her own. Zathrian folded against her, then slumped back against the steps, the crack of skull on stone echoing around her. Her dagger jutted out between his ribs, his hand on the hilt, but there was a distant, knowing smile on his lips. She did not pick it up as she stumbled past him into the dying sunlight, did not recall its existence until far later. A knife was nothing, compared to what she had wreaked with words alone.

She would learn later, what Zathrian’s words had meant, the dying curse he’d meant to lay upon her. At the time, though, it did not matter. Nothing mattered, beyond the blank horror on the faces of her friends.

Chapter Text

Morrigan had thought herself clever and wary and cunning as the oldest fox in the woods, that despite her magic and her guile, she’d noticed Luna’s skill in spinning pretty stories for the danger it was. Like the fox, she’d thought she knew the shape of the trap well enough to pull the bait from its jaws and escape unscathed, with a warm bed and pretty bedmate into the bargain.

She saw Luna emerge from the dark, pale as the moon and bathed in blood, with the words - words, no magic, no teeth or claws - that had killed a man still tumbling from her lips, and knew that she had wildly underestimated the danger she had brought into her bed.

If she were an ordinary mortal, she knew, she’d be mirroring Wynne and Leliana, slackjawed and pale from the horror that they had overheard. But she was Flemeth’s daughter, and she had been raised from birth to know power when she saw it, to take it between her fingers and wield it as viciously as any curse she’d ever learned. And this- this was a power her mother had never taught her, though she wielded it well enough – to spin a web of death from words alone, an illusion so irresistible that its victim made it prophecy.

Perhaps it would not have worked on anyone less uniquely broken than the Dalish Keeper, but that it had worked at all was a beautiful, fearful thing. Perhaps this was what Leliana felt in her dreary stone chantry, this sense of nameless power far greater than her own. Perhaps it was as well that she was already on her knees when Seluna emerged from the crypt beneath the earth, because they might have buckled at the sight of her, lovely and inevitable as sunset, bathed in blood like some empress of old Tevinter.

Because she might have run to her to lick the blood from her skin, to set her hands on her waist or her hips and revel in the power she held between them. Because for the first time, her name made sense on Morrigan’s tongue – sweet Seluna, one of a thousand names for Urthemiel, the ancient Tevine god of beauty, craft, desire, and moonlight, and in this moment, she was worthy of worship.

It would have been a mistake, she knew, as much as it galled her to owe her salvation to the dead sorcerer and his Glyph of Paralysis that even now sent cramps spiralling through her thighs and calves and shoulders. Tears streamed down Seluna’s cheeks, drawing thin lines of cleanliness in the blood that painted them.

She waited, stupidly, for Leliana or Wynne to go to her first, with their usual soft words and soothing noises. That was their role in the group, to soften and smooth over in the subtle human ways she had never mastered. They did not move, as if the spell lay upon them still, or Luna’s magicless enchantment had caught them too in its web.

After a few moments of eerie silence, broken only by Luna’s soft, sniffling sobs, she forced herself to her feet, stumbling slightly on legs still knotted with lingering cramps, and moved to her side.

“Is it done?” she asked. “You’ve made your peace?”

She nodded, managed to choke out: “It’s over. The curse is broken.”

“Then you’ve done what you had to, at a slighter cost than we might have paid.”

This did not stem the flow of her tears, but it seemed to break whatever had rooted her to the spot: she staggered forward and buried her face in Morrigan’s shoulder, grasping her with the painful desperation of a drowning victim.

There was nothing natural about this embrace, none of the animal desire they’d fed upon of late. It was an act of will to raise her own arms to return her clinging embrace, to stroke her hair and make soft, meaningless sounds to stem the flow of her tears. It was almost unbearable – if anyone else had clung to her with such need, she would have lashed out, but this was not anyone else, and here was the power she’d lusted after but moments ago, contained within the circle of her arms, needing her.

She’d always imagined that to be needed would feel like a binding, another obligation, but this- there was something almost pleasurable in this, the warmth of the woman in her arms, the power, like she was the great dragon they had seen in the mountains, and Luna a treasure safe within her hoard. Despite her strength, her ferocity, the blood that still soaked her, in this moment Luna was small and delicate, all her power contained within the circle of her arms. Her heartbeat and her child’s tucked beneath Morrigan’s own, close enough that she needed no magic to feel their presence, and for one sickening moment, if she could have kept her there forever, she would have.

The moment passed, of course, as all fragile, lovely things did. They returned with the news to the Dalish camp, Luna clinging to her arm where the path was wide enough, and Morrigan allowed it, because something about that moment lingered, even after its death, and, more importantly, because if she’d swatted her off, it would have taken them perhaps five times as long to get back to the camp. She’d recovered enough, by then, to spin a pretty-enough lie for the Dalish that her scrubbed-clean armour could not reveal, even if the echoing silence from Leliana and Wynne might have confirmed any suspicions that there was more to the story than her fairytale of duty and loving sacrifice.

Luna took it hard, of course – it was a familiar pattern with her now, she was never truly comfortable with her power once she realised it set her apart from others. That was the danger, Morrigan supposed, of being a creature born for pack or herd or shoal. She had become so accustomed to seeking camouflage among others of her kind that she sought to conceal everything that made her extraordinary, a robin pretending to be a drab little wren.

Her nightmares grew worse as they began to travel north-west, towards Orzammer and the deep halls of the dwarves. Too often Morrigan would wake to the soft shaking of silent sobs, and she would sigh and roll Seluna into her arms, tucking her beneath her chin to feel for the twinned heartbeats within her, until the weeping stopped and she slept again. Sometimes, she’d pause in her sobs, and look up at Morrigan with a bewildered frown, as if she’d forgotten who’s bed she shared.

“Why are you being so kind to me?” she asked, once, when Morrigan raised her fingers to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“You’re delusional,” Morrigan had replied, pressing her lips to her cheek to taste the salt that lingered there. “I am never kind.”

“Then why are you still here?” she demanded, her hand curling against the nape of Morrigan’s neck despite the anger in her lowered voice. “You hate dealing with weeping and wailing and messy, impractical emotions.”

“That may be so,” Morrigan agreed, because it was true, “but I can tolerate a little mess for the sake of so warm a bed and so pretty a bedmate. The nights already grow too cold to sleep alone.”

She ran her thumb along the girl’s cheekbone, feeling rather than seeing the tears that had ceased to fall in the dark.

“Of course,” Luna sniffed. “Your concerns are, as always, the practical ones.”

“Would you prefer me softer, more easily bruised?” Perhaps, another night, those words might have emerged with her usual sharp spite, but it was hard to bring a chill into her words when she was surrounded by the warmth of furs and Luna’s weight resting against her chest. “Someone like Leliana or Wynne or Alistair, someone you must hide pieces of yourself from because they are not strong enough to handle the whole of you?”

She did not say someone like Zevran. She did not want to bring the Crow’s name into their shared blankets, to ask if, had he been willing to stand at her side, Luna would ever have kissed her. It was not jealousy – she was not some nagging, shrewish alewife – but she did not want to be anyone’s second choice, least of all Luna’s. She did not want to think that when she pressed her down into the blankets, it was someone else’s lips her bedmate imagined.

Luna’s wet little laugh allayed those fractious thoughts, at least a little. “Is that really what you think? That they’re weak, rather than smart enough to know a monster when they see one?”

Morrigan knew monsters well. Plenty of people would – had – called her one, for one reason or another: witch, apostate, shapeshifter, barbarian. Even if she did not claim the title herself yet, she was a monster’s daughter, it was only a matter of time before she took on her mother’s role. She herself would not have called sweet, sloe-eyed Seluna a monster, but she could see the roots of it in her, in her vicious determination to survive whatever the cost, in the bindweed threads she’d looped around Morrigan’s neck without even seeming to know the power she held, in the beautiful, poisonous lies she could spin. She could see how the weapon she’d made of her words had cut through those illusions long enough for Leliana and Wynne to see the blood-and-bone beauty beneath, and how they’d turned in fear from the gore-stained glory that could never fit into their small, Chantry-stunted minds.

“Is a monster such a terrible thing to be?” she said, instead of giving voice to such ridiculous sentiment. “You once told me we are what the world has made of us.”

She felt Luna soften, muscles of her back going slack against the arm Morrigan had looped around her waist.

“You were listening to me, that night?”

“I’m always listening to you. I just do not agree as often as the other sycophants in our little conspiracy.”

Another reluctant giggle that almost slipped back into a sob. “You keep listening, though, for all that you keep pretending you don’t even like me.”

“If I was pretending to dislike you, little fool, I’d be doing a piss-poor job of it now.” She wound a curl of hair around her finger and tugged on it gently to prove the point. “Besides, your nightmares wake me too. It is in my interest to ensure we both sleep well, and if exhausting you is what it takes-”

“So pragmatic, Morrigan.”

“Would you have me be otherwise?” She’d meant the question to sound as it had before, a mocking joke at the expense of their companions, but the warmth, the softness, had gone to her head like strong wine – the words fell from her lips as blind and vulnerable as newborn rabbits to a fox’s jaws, their fragility unbearable even in the quiet, dark confines of their tent.

It would almost have been easier if Luna had laughed, mocked her for her weakness – that was familiar, that she could live with.

It was far worse that Luna leant up on her elbows to gaze down at her, her eyes reflecting what little light came through the canvas until they glowed eerie and bright as any nocturnal creatures. “No,” she said, low and fierce and horribly sincere. “I would not have you be anything other than what you are. Not when-” She cut herself off to kiss her then, fierce and breathless, as if to seal the words they had exchanged back into the silent caves of their mouths.

But Morrigan would not be satisfied with this, could not be satisfied without the usual balance of their game – a wound for a wound, a scar for a scar. She rolled the other woman onto her back, pinning her down to prevent her stealing another kiss before she answered, however tempting the pout of her lips might be.

“Not when?” she demanded.

Luna’s eyes glowed like twin lanterns, like the ghost candles that led foolish travellers to their deaths.

“You’re the only person I've never managed to scare. Leliana can barely look at me now. Zevran-“ She swallowed, looked away, and Morrigan wondered if, had there been more light, she would have caught a blush on her cheeks at the mention of the man who had, less than a month ago, had her place in her bed. “He was trying to make me laugh, I think. He said that I would have been the kind of Crow to give Talons nightmares. Talons – assassin-lords who buy children as slaves and torture them into living weapons, and he thinks they'd be scared of me.”

“High praise indeed, from one of their least successful recruits.” Morrigan leant down, until she was almost nose-to-nose with the girl, until she could almost feel the moth-wing flutter of her breath. “Do you want me to tell you he was wrong? That you are meek and mild as a lamb, and that he and the others are fools to see the danger in you. I will not – I am not so good a liar.”

Luna’s wrists tensed beneath her fingers, testing her grip. “So you agree with him,” she said, low and dangerous and far too tempting. “You think I am as much a monster as the rest of them.”

“I think,” Morrigan said, digging her fingers in, forcing her to listen, “you are asking the wrong questions. So you are a monster? This world is full of monsters. My own mother is one, and we have met far too many on our travels to pretend they are as rare as you claim. Perhaps there would be less of them, if someone like you gave them something to fear.”

Luna had broken her grip then, pulled her down and kissed her with hungry, fierce desperation.

“And you still want me?” she demanded, when they broke apart for air.

Foolishly. Pathetically. “What do you think, little fool?” She retorted, and gave her the answer she sought with her hands and mouth until, exhausted and sated, they slept again.

They would not think ill of Seluna forever, for all that she moped like they might. Sooner or later they would need their leader again, and they would fall back into whatever beautiful lie of hers they favoured the most – the dutiful sister, the brave, tragic Warden, the silver-tongued trickster girl fighting giants and coming out on top.

But for now, they were cowards, and Luna was hers, and she did not know any form of desire that was not acquisition or selfish, so why should this be any different? If they did not want Seluna’s company, Morrigan would not fight to share her, though something about the way her gaze lingered on conversations and glances she was excluded from made something ugly coil in her belly.

She did not like that sensation, any more than she enjoyed the bindweed noose that had clasped around her throat during Luna’s convalescence. Their dalliance was meant to be banked warmth against the growing winter chill, momentary pleasure to stave off the pain of battle or memory, and another hook in Luna’s too-soft heart. These feelings were neither pleasurable nor warm, unless it was the unpleasant, prickly heat of midsummer in Kinloch Hold, far from the cool air and midnight sun of the Wilds.

It should have been easier, to have her isolated, dependent on Morrigan for company as well as warmth and food. There was no way that she wouldn’t come to trust in her plans and her rituals when the time came, with nobody else to cling to. She’d been worried, before, about the threats posed by Zevran and Alistair, if they chose to play father to Luna’s cuckoo-child, so why did Luna’s loneliness provide no relief from the discomfort in the pit of her stomach. She wanted the girl to herself, like a dragon’s treasure, like a bear’s kill, she did not weep for the easy chatter they were both now excluded from, so why did the soft sadness in those sloe-blue eyes scrape against her skin like bramble briars? She wanted to kiss it away like a smear of blackberry juice, or distract her with teasing and mockery, and Seluna was ever-willing to be distracted, but her smiles faded too quickly, like footprints in river-silt, and that should not have mattered to Morrigan.

She should not have cared at all, or, failing that, taken pleasure in the greedy desperation that was now hers alone to revel in, but she could not be content with that alone. Frustratingly, she found she wanted all of Seluna, the blackberry-sweet with the bitter sloe, her smiles as well as her glorious, terrible wrath. She could make her smile, of course, and gasp, and beg, but she could hardly shove her up against a tree and push up her skirts every time she looked unhappy – there were too many miles between Brecelian and Orzammar for such indulgence, however tempting it became.

Still, Luna tired a little more quickly these days, and for all her coldness, Wynne watched her like a hawk for any sign of fatigue, so there were plenty of opportunities to steal her away while she was meant to be resting and return her pinker-cheeked and merrier than she had been before. She was not discrete, perhaps, but then, she saw no reason to be – she was no Alistair, to limit her desires to longing looks and flowers tucked into Melia’s dark hair.

Still, perhaps if she’d been a little more circumspect, it might have saved her from one particularly awkward discussion with the person she was most eager to avoid.

Zevran was quick enough to avoid the staff she swung at his face when he crept on her, and it did nothing to impact his irritating smirk.

“Such ferocity!” he marvelled, as if she’d been trying to impress him. “But if I had been your lady-love, she might have been less than pleased.”

“I think you may be feverish,” she retorted. She folded her arms, hoping that the gesture looked cool and composed rather than as wrong-footed as she felt. “Alistair or Leliana might brag of ‘lady-loves’, but I have never been inclined to such disgusting expressions of sentiment.”

He laughed at that, rather than accepting her put-down for the conversation-ender it was. “Maker, but you are a fiery one! It is no wonder you’ve taken my place in our lovely Luna’s bed so quickly.”

His words were light and playful, and they set her teeth on edge to the point of biting. “Jealousy does not suit you, Crow,” she taunted, and wished that the thought did not turn her stomach. If he had changed his mind, if he were willing now to offer Luna all the pretty promises he’d once told her he could only break...

“No jealousy here, at least on my side,” he smirked, and damn him to the Void, but she believed him, and hated it. “We parted as friends, and it is as her friend I come to you now, to request a boon from a Witch of the Wilds.”

He swept her a ridiculous bow more fit for one of Leliana’s fairytales than for the scrubby copse of trees they were gathering firewood in.

“A boon.” She folded her arms. “Did your stories tell you that those are not freely given?”

“Of course, fair Morrigan. I am not in the business of expecting something for nothing – I ask you for a boon, and in return, I have some advice you may find worthwhile.”

Now that she could laugh at. “And what advice could you have that might be of any use to me?”

Zevran’s smile sharpened, a wicked glint in his eye. “You know much of magic and the wilderness, it is true, but I suspect I may know more of the arts of romance and seduction, given how closely they twine with my usual trade.”

“Now this I have to hear. Go on, regale me with your wisdom.”

The smile fell from his lips, and she had a sudden sense of a trap springing shut around her. “Good. Now I have your attention: you behave like a youth with his first woman, all passion, no tenderness. This may charm her now, but eventually, she will tire of you if you have nothing more to offer her, no head upon which to lay her shoulder when she is tired, no stalwart arm about her shoulders when she weeps.”

She stared at him, almost too baffled by the idea of him offering her advice to be offended. Almost.

“You do not know what passes between us,” she said, coldly, and hoped the uncomfortable heat she felt had not reached her cheeks, “and ‘tis not your concern, either way.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, the mask of geniality returning too quickly to be anything other than false, “but I see how you look at her, and how she looks at you.”

“And how, pray tell, does she look at me?”

“As she always has – with longing, and with fear.”

“I have never made an attempt on her life.”

“And yet, does she unburden her heart to you? Her nightmares, her fears, her hopes? She does not fear you will kill her, Morrigan, but she does fear that you will bite down if you ever see her weakness.”

Why are you being so kind to me? Why now did those words echo in her ears, unhelpful, unwanted?

“I do not demand the contents of her heart, and she has never asked for mine,” she retorted, and hated that it felt like a lie. In truth, if Luna offered her heart on a platter, Morrigan would devour it whole, in order to keep it forever, even once they’d parted ways, less out of affection than out of greedy, childish, selfishness, a desire to never let anyone take a treasure that might be hers. “Not every dalliance requires such niceties, or do you think birdsong a twittering exchange of sentiment?”

He actually rolled his eyes at her. Flemeth would have turned him into a toad for such insolence. It was unfortunate that she could not yet make so great a transformation stick – he'd likely make quite a pretty toad, and she would have preferred croaking to his attempts to advise her.

“For once, my advice extends beyond the romantic and the homicidal – you look at her as if she is the only friend you have ever known, and I think you wish to keep her by any means necessary.”

His words hit her with all the delicate precision of a knife between her ribs, and she wanted to spit blood or venom into his handsome, smiling face. “You know nothing of what I might wish.”

“I know more than you might think. The Crows have an old story about women like you.”

“You know what I think of your foolish stories.”

He smiled, without humour. “Listen anyway. They say, in the days of Old Antiva, when hearts were blacker and Crows crueller, they would raise their most beautiful recruits on a diet of poison.”

“And I assume they died quickly and unpleasantly, and everyone else lived unhappily ever after?”

“Nothing so kind. Each would be fed a careful diet of poison and antidote, until she grew immune to the toxins that flowed in her veins, every part of her, from her lips to the smallest of her fingernails was as deadly as the poison she had been reared on.”

Morrigan wanted to mock him for believing in children’s stories, but she knew too much of nature’s own strangeness to discount the tale in its entirety – there were birds in the Wilds that even her mother freed if she found them in her snares, keeping their feathers to carve into poisonous quills that Morrigan was forbidden to touch.

She did not interrupt as Zevran continued: “They would send these girls, these poison princesses, to the beds of kings and queens, great lords and greater monsters, and in the morning they would be found dead, without a mark upon them, barring the kiss that killed them.”

She heard the meaning behind his little parable well enough, and it repulsed her, despite its accuracy. Perhaps because of its accuracy. She did not like the picture it painted of her – her deadliness poured into her from birth, rather than a part of her own nature, her choices. Just another daughter of Flemeth, another vessel the ancient witch had shaped to hold her venom.

She turned that venom on him now, shaping her lips into a dismissive sneer: “Let us not speak in riddles. Let me guess, you are worried about the threat I pose to sweet Seluna’s tender heart? That you will wake of a morning to find her cold on the hillside? ‘Twould be almost endearing, if it were not so hypocritical – remind me, which of us tried to kill her first?”

He tilted his head, and she realised, to her mortification, that he looked disappointed in her, like she had failed some kind of test she was meant to draw from his ridiculous, impossible story.

“I used to feel sorry for those poison princesses, when I was an apprentice,” he said. “All that strength, all that power, but the price they had to pay for it, to never let another close enough to touch them... it is not a life I would have wished for.”

Her spine stiffened. “I don’t need your pity, Crow.”

“You do not have it,” he retorted. “Those girls in the story were children, or little more than children, as the Crows prefer their recruits. You are a grown woman, and if you want to let somebody close enough to soothe their hurts, you can stop eating poison whenever you like.”

He swept her a mocking bow and gathered up his firewood, abandoning her in the ragged copse of trees. It was only as he vanished that she realised, affronted, that while she had listened to his story, he had stolen the kindling she had gathered for her own campfire. She might have stormed after him, demanded he return what he had taken from her, but it would be embarrassing to raise such a childish squabble before the rest of the group. She did not feel she had come off the better from their strange conversation, and she did not know how to win the kind of game he wished to play with her. Worse, she could not afford to lose, if the stakes they played for were Luna and the child she carried. Perhaps she could win against him in a battle of wills and seduction – Luna had not yet complained of her company – but she had an animal’s instinct for avoiding any fight she could, and the girl’s heart and bed were not meant to be contested territory.

They did not, at least, feel contested when she stepped out of the trees to find the object of her foolish worries before her.

“There you are!” she smiled, catching up her hand with a strange, unfamiliar curve to her lips. No, not unfamiliar – it had simply never been directed at her before. There was humour to it, something that might have been mischief in a woman less deadly, and a strange, soft affection, as if they were a pair of village girls caught up in some innocent scheme. “I wanted to show you something.”

“You seem overpleased with yourself,” she teased, though something in the sudden shift of her mood left her prickling with suspicion. “Have you finally ceased to fret over what a pack of fools think of you?”

She laughed at that, which was more suspicious still. “I took your advice,” she said, to Morrigan’s surprise – she did not recall having given it. “I- retrod some ground we covered in the mountains with Leliana and Wynne. I think we understand each other better now.”

Another spark of hot, uncomfortable emotion flared behind her breastbone – anger, she thought, or- no, protectiveness. Strange, and stupid. There was nothing to protect her from here.

Still, the first words that came to her lips surprised her: “You did not owe them anything, least of all that.” She could still recall too easily the raw wound in her voice that the tale of her conscription had opened, and selfishly, she did not wish to see it again.

Seluna shrugged off her concern, as if the wound mattered not at all, but there was a strange curl to her lips – somehow, Morrigan’s needless anger had pleased her.

“I know,” she said, twining her fingers through Morrigan’s own, drawing her closer, “but it made things easier. It might have made things earlier from the first if- if they’d known what I was from the first. But you knew from the start, didn’t you? And it never scared you, what I am, what- what I can do. What I’d done, before we met.”

Only half of that was true. When they’d met, she’d thought Seluna weak, fragile, doomed. To be proven wrong, so often, so vividly... that was likely half the attraction she felt to the girl, the lure of the unexpected, the unpredictable. But she knew this was not what the girl wanted to hear, and she wanted to keep her close, not pour her heart out before those wide blue eyes.

“I have always seen you as you are,” she lied, and then, cupping her cheek: “I would not wish you otherwise.“

Luna leant into her touch, her skin peach-soft under Morrigan’s hand, and for the first time, she did not feel the impulse to bite down on that softness before rot could claim it from her. She wanted to hold it between her fingers, admire it a little longer, keep it for herself, a soft, secret, lovely treasure that she would never have been permitted, beneath her mother’s roof. When Luna kissed her beneath the shade of the red-gold trees, there was softness there, too – for the first time, she veiled her teeth, did not bite down, and Morrigan- Morrigan did not press the advantage as she should have. She let herself follow the elven woman’s lead, let herself slip just a little into the beautiful lie of her, where softness was not weakness and tenderness more than the sensation of a bruise.

When she drew back, they were both oddly breathless, and Morrigan almost wanted to laugh, that a kiss so innocent had the power to undo them so. She felt lazy, contented warmth blooming beneath her skin, and Luna’s cheeks glowed soft pink, prettier than any maiden in Leliana’s stories.

“What did you want to show me?” Morrigan asked, allowing her hand to fall from Luna’s cheek to her waist, just barely skimming the curve of her breast as it passed. Zevran was a fool, and she a fool by proxy for giving his word any credence. What passed between Seluna and herself was more than enough for both of them.

“Come with me,” she said, in lieu of a reply. “I learned some things from the Dalish. I think- I think you’ll like them.”

Another time, perhaps, she would have had a hundred barbed witticisms for the credence she’d given the beliefs of the wandering elves, but in this moment, the beautiful lie still clung to her skin, and if their knowledge had pleased Seluna, it had to be worth hearing.

She led her deeper into the scrubland, away from their camp and the road, and only then did she let out a strange, mournful howl, which reminded Morrigan of nothing more than-

“The werewolves?” She frowned at the other woman, examining her suspiciously for any signs of lengthening teeth or sprouting fur, but she seemed as much herself as she’d ever been. “I would have noticed if the curse had come upon you.” Even aside from her injury, she’d seen enough of her bare skin since they’d left the forest to have noted any bite marks.

Seluna’s lips parted in a silent laugh, but she kept her voice low and soft, as if trying not to startle an unseen listener. “No, not them. Wait a little, and you’ll see.”

She knelt on the ground then, rubbing a herb that her mother had called wolfs-ear between her fingers almost absentmindedly, and after a moment, Morrigan imitated her.

“Are you planning to explain what you wish to show me at any point, or are you delighting in taunting me?” she murmured, leaning close to her.

“You thought you had the monopoly on mystery and secrets?” she teased, eyes glittering.

“Me? I would not be so foolish. You’ve sprung far more traps than I.” For a moment, a flicker of discomfort passed across Luna’s features, and she added: “’Tis quite beguiling. It keeps me ever-curious as to your next surprise.”

Something relaxed in the line of her shoulders, then, in the curve of her smile, and that look of relief was familiar, now – the belief that Morrigan saw her as she was, and was unafraid.

She glanced past her shoulder, and nodded into the trees. “Look,” she breathed, into her ear. “Here they come.”

The first sign they were not alone, besides Luna’s words, were the eyes, glowing eerie, reflective green in the shadows of the trees.

“What-” she murmured, but Luna hushed her: “Just watch. You’ll scare them.”

The wolves emerged from the woods slowly, bent low to the ground in a predator’s lunge. Morrigan rolled into an instinctive crouch and threw up a barrier around them both, but Luna’s hand on her arm arrested her.

“Wait. Do you trust me?”

“What sort of foolish-?”

“I asked if you trust me. Yes or no?”

Morrigan did not trust anyone, but she knew in her bones that to say as much now would break the fragile net of trust that she’d begun to spin about the girl, and she could not permit that. Swallowing her fear, she let her barrier fall.

The largest of the wolves, a great frost-furred female, mother and perhaps grandmother to the pack who surrounded her, was the first to draw close. It was Morrigan’s impulse to growl, to mark her territory, hackles raised. It felt like the height of carelessness, of naivety, to let city-bred Seluna take the lead in approaching a wild creature, and she watched her approach the wolf on her knees with that bindweed noose tightening about her throat. Those teeth- those great snapping jaws-

Seluna extended a hand to the wolf like a lady expecting to receive a kiss. Her hand was barely half the length of the creature’s snout, and Morrigan waited with baited breath, a barrier spell half-cast on her tongue. She waited for the snap of those great jaws, the scream, the scarlet flash of blood.

Instead, the beast lowered its head, inhaled the scent of her green-stained fingers, and then – impossibly, uncannily – nuzzled at her fingers like Styx in search of a treat. The grandmother-wolf's approval seemed to break whatever spell had held her children back – they gathered around the elven girl little by little, investigating her with noses and tongues as she laughed and spoke to them in a low, gentle voice, and Morrigan felt her gorge rise as she realised what a fool she had been, even as Luna herself looked over at her with bright, laughing, lovely eyes.

“You said you didn’t get close to the beasts of the wilds,” she said, still in that low, soft voice. “I thought I’d give you the chance now. The fenfalen, the herbs smell good to them, it tells them we’re friends.”

Friends. That would be the word she’d use, wouldn’t it? It was always the word mortals used, when they took a wild thing and warped it into something servile and soft and unnatural, something useful to them. She’d thought herself so clever, the cunning fox, the spider weaving her web of trust and affection, but she had never seen the trap Luna had built for her so long ago. She had let herself fall into the beautiful lie, grow soft and comfortable in it, if only for a moment, even as the bindweed tightened around her neck. She knew its true nature now – not a noose, but a leash, held so lightly she did not notice until she saw it looped around the throat of another wild creature lapping so eagerly at her dainty, callused fingers.

She’d thought herself the seductress, the child-stealing the sorceress, the great and terrible bear at the end of the story ready to eat up the unwitting maiden. Now she knew she was only a wolf begging for bones at her fireside, a unicorn who’d allowed herself to be bound by a maiden’s ribbon and lies of purity, and it choked her, the raw hatred that rose up in that moment, the resentment and the fear: How dare she seek to make me tame, make me hers?

Worse though, than the fear, than the sickening hatred, was the knowledge that ran beneath it: for all that now she saw the truth of Luna Tabris, she did not want her any less.

Chapter Text

Luna might have blamed Orzammar for the distance Morrigan was keeping from her. Maker knew she hated the city enough to blame it for any number of ills. She’d heard stories, as a child, of the fabled halls of the dwarves, the city built into the mountain’s heart that never truly slept. It had seemed like a place of impossible wealth and magic, where lyrium flowed like water, and the jewels and precious metals that were her father’s livelihood were plucked from the earth’s heart more commonly than the turnips that grew in their scrubby patch of garden. And there was wealth beyond imagining in the halls of stone beneath the earth, in the glittering passages of the Diamond Quarter, rubies and emeralds scattered across the merchants’ tables like children’s trinkets. There was magic, too, in the workshops of the mysterious enchanters, in the dark, silent halls of their Shaperate, in the deep, abiding memory of their Stone that made a bittersweet contrast to the fragmented myths the Dalish had passed down to her.

But Luna was, at her core, a daughter of Denerim’s alleys and slums, accustomed to walls of wattle and daub and creaking wood, and halls of stone had never held safety for her. She’d felt it first when she woke beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Kendalls villa, had heard its echoes in the towers of Redcliffe and Kinloch Hold, but it returned with a vengeance as the stone swallowed the sky – the sinking sensation that she’d been buried alive.

She knew Morrigan felt it too. She saw in the rigidity of her spine, in the hunted look in her eyes – she was a creature of forest and moorland, and Luna had seldom seen her happy under any roof built by mortal hands. She could easily have blamed the unfamiliar city ground for her coldness, her anger, but in her heart, she knew that the strangeness had started earlier, on the road.

It had been small things, at first, easy to shrug off. They had not been lovers, or even friends, for long, despite the intensity of their time together. Luna had enough experience to expect a period of experimentation, while they figured out their roles and their preferences in relation to each other, and she suspected that Morrigan’s prior entanglements were far less numerous or lengthy than her own. It should not have been odd, then, to have her suddenly shift from playing the explorer on the undiscovered territory of Luna’s body, to coming upon her like a conquering army, wringing pleasure from her until she was past exhaustion, until she ached or wept or begged for reprieve. It was not- unpleasant, to be the object of such single-minded focus – Luna had never been one to complain of an attentive lover – but whenever she moved to return her ministrations, with her fingers or her mouth or even in the press of their bodies, Morrigan shoved her down onto her back again, refused the offer to attend to her own pleasure with a curt dismissal that brooked no argument.

Not that Luna would have argued – the witch was as much within her rights to set the terms of engagement on their encounters as she herself was – but she knew it was not for lack of desire. The confines of the tent were too close, and her own senses too attuned now to the other woman’s body, not to notice when Morrigan sought out her own release while she believed Luna to be sleeping, once their encounters were done. Perhaps, she’d told herself, Morrigan had discovered a particular delight in wringing such overwhelming pleasure from her that she didn’t require it to be reciprocated, but it did not align well with their earlier trysts, when she’d been eager and greedy for everything Luna could give her, almost more than she’d wanted to reciprocate it.

She was not even entirely certain why the change bothered her so much – physically, at least, it benefited her alone, and were their positions reversed, she doubted Morrigan would have given it a second thought. For all that they were lovers for now, they were not in love, and Morrigan had made it quite clear that she preferred it that way. Luna could not disagree with her. The world was ending, she could never go home again, and for all the healing she had done, she still feared the next blow to her heart would be mortal.

Perhaps that was why still she could not acknowledge the child within her as more than a hypothetical, a chance at a future rather than an inevitability she should be preparing for. To let herself hope for something so fragile, so uncertain, so dependent on the treacherous soil of her own body... It would hurt too much. She could not allow it.

Morrigan, though, was a different matter, impossible to ignore even if Luna had wanted to. Even outside the privacy of their tent, she smouldered with some unspoken rage or resentment or jealousy, some great burning anger that could not be satisfied until Luna lay boneless and beyond exhausted within the furs of their tent.

She’d tried, as delicately as she could, to broach the matter, but that was far from easy when Morrigan clearly did not wish to discuss it.

“Are you not satisfied already?” she’d mocked, a brown arched. “I thought you said you could take no more, but if you misspoke-“

“No!” Luna had held up a hand to fend her off, playful but determined. “I already cried mercy, I swear, I’m exhausted, but- are you happy? It’s been weeks since-“

Morrigan waved her off, another curt dismissal, but Luna felt again that simmering heat burning from her skin as she turned away, so that only the creamy skin of her back was visible.

“Have I not surrendered enough to you?” She muttered, and the resentment in her tone hit like an unexpected slap. Luna yanked the furs around herself and rolled onto her side, swallowing down the strange tangle of emotions she could not name.

“In what world is letting me lead for once surrendering?” Luna demanded. “You wanted this!” Then, with a rush of nameless, senseless horror: “You wanted this, didn’t you? This isn’t-“

She did not know what she would have asked in that moment. She was not given the chance. Morrigan had lunged at her, feral in her sudden hunger, coiled around her like a dragon, an arm wrapped tight across her bare stomach.

“Of course I want you, little fool,” she’d growled, scattering scorching kisses along the line of her throat, but Luna was exhausted, and still stinging from how suddenly she'd turned on her.

“Don’t distract me!” she’d snapped, shoving her elbow back until it dug into Morrigan’s stomach. “I’m trying to talk to you!”

“Are you ever content when you aren’t using that silver tongue of yours?” the witch retorted, lips brushing the shell of Luna’s ear in an attempt at seduction that for the first time, she rebuffed. She shoved off the arm that encircled her to roll away and sit up. Morrigan let out a disgruntled huff, like a child denied a favourite toy.

“For someone who loves to talk as much as you do, you can't stand an actual conversation, can you?” She curled her knees into her chest, and noted, with reluctance, the motion came less easily than it had only a week ago – her breasts and belly already took up more space than she was used to, though likely the change was not so noticeable to anyone but her.

“What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?” Morrigan demanded.

“You tell me to use you and then speak of surrendering as if I’ve taken anything from you that wasn’t freely offered!”

“And haven’t you, little thief?” Her voice was low, seductive even, but that did nothing to hide the anger that roiled beneath, the anger that Luna had sensed coming off her in waves. “Or must you still play the innocent and claim you have no idea what you have taken from me?”

“Morrigan, if I’ve hurt you-”

“As if you could,” she sneered. “I am not some foolish village maiden-”

“Then stop behaving like one!” Luna retorted. “Andraste’s tits, I know you hate asking for help, but surely I’ve done enough at this point to prove I’m on your side!”

Something passed across her face, then, a dark and melancholic cloud momentarily eclipsing the blaze of her anger. “You do not know what you say.” Her voice had softened, not with forgiveness, but with some grim acceptance, as if she’d considered explaining herself and concluded that Luna could never understand. She leant forward, and, carefully, deliberately, brushed Luna’s hair back from her face, staring deep into her eyes as if she wished to unpick her seams and read some secret truth in the bones of her heart. “You do not even know what you do, more’s the pity. Think no more of it, I have been the fool this night.”

“Morrigan-”

“I said think no more of it!” she snapped, and flung herself down among the furs, pulling one up to her chin. Tentatively, now, Luna unfurled, curled around her like a bud around a blossom, ran a cautious, comforting hand through her dark hair.

“You know you can use me for things other than sex,” she said, as gently as she could manage. Perhaps it would be easier, if she put it in words she knew Morrigan would not find repugnant. “You told me once that refusing to accept help when I needed it made me a poor travelling companion.”

She’d hoped- it did not matter what she had hoped. Morrigan had let out another huff, and then, in the ultimate refusal to brook further conversation, shuddered once and transformed into a bear. As conversation-enders went, it was effective – hard to argue with several hundred pounds of brown fur, sharp teeth, and claws as long as her forearms. Even harder given that the bear, unlike Morrigan, did not have the vocal chords to respond to her words with anything other than a spinechilling growl.

She’d used this trick more and more often, as they followed the road back up into the mountains, and in truth, the autumn air was chilly enough that Luna was often glad of the extra warmth. There was something almost pleasing, too, in sleeping safe between the bear’s great paws, like the farmer’s daughter who’d married a bear-prince and been carried away to some kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon. In the luxurious softness of her brown-black fur and the thrum of her great heart, in the knowledge that despite the claws and teeth, she slept safe and sound against the belly of the beast. She did not say these things aloud to Morrigan, though. For all that the witch had pretended to shrug off their quarrel, Luna could still feel that quiet resentment radiating from her in moments where she thought herself unseen, tamped down a little by Luna’s apparent ignorance, but far from extinguished. A part of her – a small, spiteful part – did not want to give her whatever satisfaction that might provide.

She still wanted to help soothe whatever thorn had caught in Morrigan’s heart – she could not help herself, she still thought of the witch as a friend – but not at the cost of getting bitten again. If Morrigan would only tell her the problem- but of course she would not. Even after so many months, getting her to reveal anything close to a weakness was like pulling the teeth of- well, a bear. A particularly ornery bear. Perhaps, if they were still on the road, with the ordinary concerns of hunting and hiding and the occasional battle their only worries, it might have been easier to watch and wait with the patience Zathrian had taught her, but the thought of the old man (who in her dreams still wore her father’s face, and still died by her blades). But Orzammar did not sit well with either of them – too alien to Morrigan, too familiar to Luna. It widened cracks that might have been hairline fractures to unbridged chasms. Another time, she would have patched those fractures, bent herself to bridge the gaps, but Morrigan’s fits of temper had tried her patience even before Orzammar tried it further.

It was wealthy, and magical, and beautiful, and yet everything she saw reminded her of Denerim, not its remembered warmth and bustle, but the rot that ran beneath the gilt and the glitter. Would-be kings fought their battles with words in the halls of their Assembly, and the commoners, the ‘casteless’ bled in the streets for them and were swept away like trash. Poor girls dressed as rich women hung out of windows and leaned at the gates, making eyes at the noblemen who passed.

“The Whores’ Guild does well here,” she’d commented, thinking of the girls she’d known who’d gone to work at the Pearl or its less salubrious sisters, guildswomen in good standing. She might have joined them, in another life, if her father had not been so eager for her to marry.

One of the girls (she looked so young, for all that she couldn’t have been Luna’s junior by much), arched a cynical brow at her.

“Whores’ Guild?” she sneered, revealing teeth capped with gold. “We’re not Dust Town sluts, knife-ear. We’re honest girls, virgins all, ready to bear noblemen strong and healthy sons.”

Something sick twisted in her belly, and she covered it with her hand. “And then?” she asked, unable to summon venom for a girl who looked no more than fourteen, even if she did look at her as though she were a simpleton.

“And then we’ll be concubines,” she said, as if it were obvious. “We’ll be rich, our families too, we’ll live in the Diamond Quarter and never want for anything at all.”

She could feel fingers tangled in her hair, hot breath on her face. Show the pretty bride a night in a real bed, you’ll never get her out of it.

“Better a whore with her own house and money than a caged bird in a palace,” she said, her mother’s words falling from her lips, the harshest truth Adaia had ever told her. “They’ll take all you have, those nobles, and cast you out when they tire of you.”

The girl snorted, rolled her eyes, which only made her look like more of a child, for all the richly-dressed men that passed were eyeing her like she was a woman grown. She did not see a sharp-faced little girl and a cluster of leering, moneyed youths, all strangers. She saw Shianni, bruised and weeping, and Vaughan Kendalls, crawled out of his shallow grave, and felt a low growl creep into her throat-

“Luna?” She blinked, and saw Leliana’s hand wrapped lightly around her arm. “Are you well?” Are you in control? she knew the other woman meant, had meant too often, since Brecelian, since Zathrian. For all that they’d come to a better understanding on the road to Orzammar, she still sometimes looked at her as if she were a hair-trigger trap to be disarmed.

“I’m fine,” she grit out, shaking her off, and then, remembering herself, took a deep breath, tried to smooth a mask of calm over her features. “I just don’t think I’m the person to talk round the would-be kings. I had a hard enough time with the Guerrins, but you managed pretty well.” She looked from Leliana to Wynne, affecting a wide-eyed innocence that did not quite cover her sudden, seething rage. “Could you go to each of them? Figure out what they’re like, what their support to stop the Blight will cost? I’ll ask around their servants in the Commons and Dust Town, figure out what they’re actually like, and who we want to throw our weight behind.”

They glanced at each other, some unspoken concern flittering between them, and she forced a smile. “I just don’t want to say something I’ll regret,” she added, which was not technically a lie. She had had a hard enough time holding her tongue around the gilded, useless nobles of Redcliffe, and they hadn’t faced her when she’d already been half-drowned in memories she still could not fully recall. She did not want to know what she’d become, if the would-be kings of Orzammar hit a nerve to close to whatever she did not wish to remember.

In the end, they were persuaded – Leliana went to the Aeducan prince, with Zevran a slim black-and-gold shadow at her shoulder, and Wynne went to Harrowmont, a reluctant Sten playing bodyguard.

Luna turned back towards the market stalls of the Commons, ears pricked for gossip, to see that the rest of her party had already scattered among them. Morrigan had been drawn to a stall that shimmered with lyrium-bright weapons, Melia and Jowan following in her wake like ducklings, her eyes bright with greedy curiosity. Luna might have followed – she was irresistible like this, lit from within by her hunger for knowledge – but for the anger that still seethed in her belly. She did not want to soften just yet, to become soft and forgiving, to begin to bridge the chasm between them. Let the witch come to her for forgiveness, for once.

Instead, she browsed the stalls of jewellers while she waited, homesickness blooming in her chest like the ghost of an old wound – her father would have had so many questions for the craftsmen about their materials, their tools, the methods that let them set shining, polished silver beneath clear, unbubbled glass to make the clearest mirror she’d ever seen, gilded and jewelled and shining like the sun itself in the dark of the city. She’d never had the patience for his craft, and the shem who owned the shop had taken against her, but now she wished, more than anything, that she’d learned enough of it to bring some of the secrets of Orzammar home to her father, if she ever saw him again. She examined the jeweller’s wares with fascination, but the mirror kept drawing her back. It was lovely, ornate, and half-familiar, as if she had heard of it in a story, or a dream.

She did not notice Alistair trailing behind her until he let out a polite cough, a hand hovering above her arm. She felt a brief rush of affection for him, then – since their argument on the bridge at the Temple, he’d always been careful not to touch her without permission, not to loom over her or scare her.

“Do you think Melia would wear this?” he asked, running a finger along a thick collar of twisted red-gold.

“I think she’d look lovely in it, if it didn’t cost us three years’ rent,” she teased. A paltry sum now, given the money that seemed to flow in with every battlefield she picked clean, but still difficult to imagine spending on something they couldn’t eat, wear, or fight with. “These are prettier though,” she advised, tapping a nail against a set of long, sharp hairpins, shaped into glittering stars at their ends. “Useful too. She could kill a man or pick a lock with them if she needed to.”

Alistair wrinkled his nose. “I’d ask if you think that’s likely, but I know the sort of lives we live. I just thought- she deserves something pretty, doesn’t she? I know she misses the comforts of the Circle, but she never complains.”

Of course she doesn’t, Luna did not say. She knows the gilded bars of that cage too well, and does not want to surrender her freedom now she’s finally won it.

“She’s a sweet girl,” she said, instead, looking at him sidelong as she counted out the king’s ransom that the lovely mirror cost. “I hope you’re treating her well.”

Alistair flushed an endearing scarlet. “I don’t- I mean, I wouldn’t presume-”

Luna laughed, not unkindly. “Come on, Alistair. It’s the end of the world, and I’ve seen how you look at each other. You’re really telling me you haven’t-”

“Luna!” he hissed. “Not now, not here!”

Luna glanced at the mages, still deep in conversation, and seized his arm, drawing him into a nearby tavern and ordering them both a drink, because clearly this was not a conversation to be had sober.

“Oh no,” she told him with a grin, “we’re talking about this. I’m not having you and Mel breaking each other’s hearts because neither of you have bedded a friend before.”

He slumped over the table, burying his head in his arms. “It’s not- I don’t want to just bed her,” he said, muffled into his arms. “I'm not- Arl Eamon raised me better than that!”

Luna ruffled his hair. “That’s the downside to your noble sensibilities, then. We don’t hold with such scruples in the alienage.”

He looked up at her then, peeking over his folded arms. “Did you mean what you said, before?” he said, sounding suddenly, horribly young. “You really think that Eamon would- would've-?”

She sighed, then. She knew that the gap between their ages was not so vast, that not long ago, she’d been young and innocent and flushed with first love, or something like it, but in this moment, she felt unfathomably ancient, as if she’d been born older than Alistair would ever be.

“I don’t know,” she began, to soften the blow she was about to land. “I barely know the man, and I know- I know he raised you, that you trust him.” She paused, picking out her words to strike as gently and cleanly as they could: “Did I ever tell you that my mother fought alongside your father, back in the days of the Rebellion?” She knew she had not, had let this small fragment of shared history lie dormant, where it should have stayed buried.

His head snapped up. “My father- you mean King Maric?”

She nodded. “I doubt he would have remembered her, I don’t think they ever spoke, but- she fought among the Night Elves, under Loghain Mac Tir.”

“That snake,” he growled, as she knew he would.

“I know,” she hushed him, “but that’s not the point of the story. The point is- there weren’t many secrets in an army that small, especially among the elven recruits, whether they were soldiers or servants or camp followers.” She swallowed, lowered her voice, though it was unlikely any of the dwarves currently on the off-shift cared very much for surface gossip of a long-dead human king. “And it was no secret at all that the king had- a taste- for elven women.” The words felt sour on her tongue, raising memories she’d sooner forget.

Alistair could sense them too - for all his naivety, he could read whatever darkness crept across her face well enough, and looked sickened to his stomach: “You mean he-”

“I don’t know,” she said quickly. “I don’t think- my mother never mentioned anything like that.” But would she have, if she’d known? Luna had only been nine when she’d heard this story, and her mother might well have filed off more than a few of its sharper edges. “But he had a mistress,” she said, “an elven woman, named Katriel.”

He stared at her. “Eamon never mentioned anything about-”

“Why would he?” she shrugged. “Noblemen keep elven mistresses all the time. It probably didn’t seem like it mattered to him.” And it’s hardly the sort of story noblement want their sons to learn from.

“But it mattered to your mother?”

She nodded. “To all of the elves. The Rebellion, it wasn’t just about changing who held the throne, for them. There were promises made-” Some of them had even been kept. For all the darker parts of alienage life as she’d known it, her parents had known darker times still. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that back then, the rumour wasn’t just that he had an elven mistress – they say he was in love with Katriel, that he might have married her.”

Alistair’s gaze sharpened, as if he was beginning to understand the threads of this particular tale. “But he married Queen Rowan, Eamon’s sister instead.”

She hadn’t known that particular tangle in the story, and it added a new shade of darkness to the tale she had not previously realised.

“That was later,” she said. “This isn’t that kind of a story, Alistair.” Political engagements and deaths by broken hearts were pretty tales for noble children. Alienage girls learnt darker stories. “She said it was after the second Battle of Gwaren. Katriel rode to Amaranthine and back to bring Maric reinforcements, and she went to him as soon as she returned.” She paused, feeling the words catch in her throat. “Nobody saw her alive again.”

Alistair frowned. “A lovers’ quarrel isn’t-”

Luna could not repress a bitter laugh. “I said nobody saw her alive again. My mother looked for her, when she didn’t come back to join the other elves to celebrate. She found her body on a midden outside of town. The king’s beloved, cast out like so much trash, to be forgotten.”

He blanched, turning ashen beneath his golden tan. “You can’t mean-”

“I don’t know what happened to Katriel,” she said. “If my mother knew for certain, she never told me. But I know she was never mentioned again in the king’s presence, and nobody was ever tried or punished for her death. I know the picture that paints.”

Alistair could not meet her eyes. “I don’t- I don’t want to believe you.” His voice was thick with grief, with the shattered pieces of something that might once have been precious to him.

“I know,” she said, softly. “Like I said, I don’t know for sure it’s the truth. I don’t know if it’s anything more than a warning passed from mother to daughter. But I know when elves end up in the beds of human nobles, and I know Melia didn’t have her parents to warn her of that.”

“You think-” He swallowed, then buried his head in his arms. “Maker, you’re right. It’s impossible, isn’t it? I should never have thought-”

Impulsively, she reached out, took his hand in hers. “Not ‘impossible’,” she said, as gently as she could manage. “Just- dangerous. I don’t want either of you to get hurt.”

He looked up at her, and she could feel the gap between them shrinking, his innocence cut away by her carefully chosen words. “Luna, she’s a mage- a former blood-mage. I’m a Templar, trained as one, at least. We can’t- the day we met, I would’ve killed her! I wanted to kill her, without a second thought for who she was, what had driven her to it- You know one of the recruits was threatening her? Said that- if she didn’t- he wanted-” He snatched his hand away, as if he could see blood on it. “I don’t want to be- that kind of man. I don’t want to be my father’s son.”

She could see the guilt, raw and bruised across his too-young features, and hated that she’d put it there.

“Knowing that is a start,” she said, gently.”Most nobles don’t even get that far.”

He blinked at her. “That’s why you won’t meet with Aeducan and Harrowmount – why you’ve been snooping around Dusttown. It’s why you hated Redcliffe too, isn’t it?”

She sat back in her seat, eying him with something akin to pride. She’d never imagined the boy she’d met at Ostagar learning to read her so well. “You can learn a lot more about someone by how they treat those in his power than from what their equals think.”

He swallowed. “And what have you learned about me?”

She didn’t have an answer to that, but she tried to smile at him anyway. “That you don’t want power over anyone at all. You didn’t want to be a noble, or a Templar, or a Warden-Commander, or a king.”

“I thought you were tired of cleaning up my mess and shouldering my burdens,” he said, with a wan smile.

“There’s that noble upbringing again,” she teased. “You can work on that, though, if you’ve got the will. You weren’t born to guard the Circle or fight the Darkspawn, or even to wear incredibly shiny armour.”

“No,” he agreed, “but- I was born my father’s son. If what your mother told you is true- how do I overcome that? I’ve spent my whole life wanting to avoid his shadow, and now...”

“It’s only a different sort of shadow,” she reminded him, “one you can avoid by being a different sort of man.”

“You really think that’s possible?” he said, fingers tightening on hers, a child seeking comfort from someone older and wiser (Luna did not feel older or wiser, not anymore). “Isn’t the whole point of a legacy that we carry our parents’ glories and burdens? You said your mother was a warrior, you really don’t think any of that lives on in you?”

“You’re talking like a noble again,” she reminded him. “My father is a jeweller - an apprentice, anyway. Shemlen bastards won’t let him join the guild. He’s spent his whole life making beautiful things that have never hurt anyone, and I’m his only child. I’ve no skill at bringing beauty into the world, only death, you’ve seen that.” She hesitated, then spoke aloud a truth she’d tried to bury on the road to Brecelian: “Besides, you are not only your father’s son.”

He stared and her, uncomprehending, and she held up the mirror beside her own face, reaching across the table to trace the bridge of his nose, the scarred edges of his ears that disappeared beneath his thatch of hair. The faint similarities between their features that whispered of the elven blood that flowed in his veins, that Zevran had spotted, and that Luna had deliberately forgotten. She did not want to think what Arl Eamon would do, if it came out that his claimant to the throne, his precious foster son, had the blood of slaves as well as kings flowing in his veins.

His breath emerged in a soft rush, as though she’d struck a blow into his stomach. “You think-?”

“I think,” she confirmed. She’d been so used to thinking of him as human due to his stature, his strength, the easy way he moved through the world, but if he’d grown up in the alienage rather than a castle, would she have looked twice before calling him kin? “Your half-sister went to Denerim, you said? Maybe she lives near the alienage. Maybe I know her already.”

“Maybe Eamon sent her away so nobody would know about- about my mother.” It was almost a relief, to hear him voice that thought aloud. “Maker’s breath... if she’d taken me with her, we could’ve grown up together. I could’ve known Melia before, I could’ve...”

“We both could have had different lives,” she said, gently, and swallowed the thought of Nelaros, who’s hair had been the same spun-gold as Alistair’s, who’d looked at her with the same innocent wonder and lust that Alistair now turned on Melia. “But we are as we are, and what you want- it's not impossible, Alistair. It’ll be hard, dangerous, maybe, but if it's worth it-”

“She’s worth anything,” he said, with a fervour she believed despite herself. “Any danger, any difficulty – she just- I think she deserves better than me. What if I am nothing more than my father’s son, than a failed templar? What if all I can do is hurt her?”

“Love hurts people all the time,” she said, and Morrigan’s words echoed in her ears like a revelation from the Maker himself: love is poison, love is cancer. Perhaps, to Morrigan, the first flush of affection had come not like a bloom, but like a thief. Perhaps that was the root of her roiling resentment, the wrong she could not speak of and would not forgive Luna for. “All we can do is hope that it helps us heal, too, and leave our lovers intact enough to recover when we part.”

“What if there is no parting?” he said, with a glint of that childish hope in his eyes. “What if we’re lucky, and somehow, we get it right?”

She thought of her parents, of her father’s quiet, endless grief, of Nelaros. Oh Alistair, there’s always a parting. “Then they’ll sing tales of your love from here to Tevinter and I hope I’ll be invited to dance at your wedding.”

He choked at that, blushing like a boy again, and she was glad to see a little of his innocence still remained after the story she’d told. She smiled as she tucked the mirror away carefully, knowing now why she had bought it.

Morrigan might well be right – love and beauty were fleeting things, and might well fade with time, but she had experienced so little of either in her life. She deserved this small piece of beauty, something she could hold and admire, something that Flemeth could not snatch from her fingers and shatter. She deserved to want things that did not fit into her plans, or her mother’s, to hold them in her hands, to treasure them as long as she had them. She deserved to know that wanting was not, in itself, a weakness. It was a reason to keep living, despite the horror, despite the dark that pressed at the edges of their fire – at least, it was reason enough for Luna. Perhaps, in time, she could show Morrigan that there was a use to it, too.

Chapter Text

“The Deep Roads? Andraste’s tits, you cannot be serious!” Luna was glaring at Alistair and Leliana, which made this a very pleasing situation in which to be Morrigan. She’d been the subject of many of Seluna’s glares of late, which was far from enjoyable, even if, at least on a pragmatic level, it was better than the smiles and softness and sweet, pretty lies that had near poisoned her. She still felt the tangle of bindweed about her, but at least when Seluna was angry the poison did not taste so sweet.

“The Assembly is at a deadlock,” Leliana reminded her. “The sole thing anyone in Orzammar can agree on is that it would take a Paragon to break it now.”

“Then they should have thought of that before they let her wander off into the fucking Deep Roads!” Luna snapped. “There’s a reason they call the only people down there the Legion of the Dead, and it’s because you only end up there if you wish you were already buried!”

“Seluna-” Wynne tried, but her schoolmistress tone glanced off Luna’s temper like an arrow off a barrier spell.

“What?” she demanded. “We need their help against the darkspawn? Against Loghain? This city’s barely holding itself together, they need us to find a dead woman to solve their noble nugshit succession crises, and you think they’ll have anything left for us after all that?”

“And the difference between this and that awful forest is-?” Shale attempted, sounding bored.

“It wasn’t the fucking Deep Roads!” she snapped. “This place is already bad, and now a bunch of rich squabbling bastards want to send me to die in a Void-damned hole?”

“People survive the Deep Roads,” Alistair offered, “King Maric went down there twice and came out alive. Duncan too-”

“Oh, well if Duncan did it-”

“Enough, Lu.” It was Melia who’d spoken up, surprising everyone enough to shut them up. “None of us want to go down there, but it’s where the darkspawn are coming from, and even if we don’t find Branka, we might be able to find something to help us slow them down.”

The silence continued. Luna’s cheeks flamed scarlet. Melia gnawed at her lip, glancing around anxiously

“Fine. Maybe you have a point.” Luna folded her arms, glared out at the tavern crowds. “But without a guide or a map, this is a suicide mission, and we still have an archdemon to kill.”

“We can work on that,” Leliana soothed, “but in the meantime, perhaps you should rest while you can? You have been- out of sorts, of late.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, using the gesture to conceal the glare she shot at Morrigan, as if Seluna’s mood was her sole responsibility.

Alistair, solicitous and foolish: “Yes, and in your condition-“

Luna set down her tankard with a definitive thunk. “I am capable of having feelings unrelated to pregnancy, Alistair.” She shoved her chair back with a scrape that could have been thunder in the quiet she had created, and swept up the stairs to the sleeping quarters of the inn.

“Well,” Melia said, into the silence, “that could’ve gone better.”

Morrigan laughed aloud at that, and then quickly regretted it as the eyes of the group fixed on her. “What?”

“You should talk to her,” Alistair said, which immediately made the idea fifty times less appealing.

“I do not see why it falls upon my shoulders,” she replied, with a languid stretch. “’Twas not my suggestion that angered her.”

“Because if she bites you, it’s yesterday’s news,” he sniggered, and she jabbed at him with a brief static shock of magic until he squealed like a day-old piglet, and Melia pouted at her.

“Because,” Sten corrected, grimly, “she is a keg of gaatlok, and for all your flaws, saarebas, you know how best to handle her.” When the group stared at him blankly, he clarified: “Black powder that explodes when it burns. It can sit still and inert for years at a time, but as soon as a spark nears it...” He raised a fist, flicking his fingers outward, and Alistair shuddered in agreement and understanding.

“Unless you think you cannot soothe your lover’s temper,” Leliana added, with poisonous sweetness. “If such a thing is beyond your- skills, I am sure Zevran or I could-”

The manipulation was blatantly obvious, which unfortunately did not make it less effective. “I do not see how you could hope to intervene, given that this hare-brained scheme is of your invention,” she said, looking down her nose at the redhead, “but I see I will get no peace if I remain among your company, so I will bid you good hunting, and good night.”

The upper rooms of the inn were some of the most luxurious she’d seen, built for wealthy merchants from the surface, with beds that scaled accordingly, and water piped up from hot springs hidden somewhere between the earth. She could hear the water running now, as she let herself into Seluna’s room.

“Morrigan?” she heard, from behind the screen by the fire.

“You are growing more perceptive by the day,” she called back, peering around it. Seluna was half submerged in the tub set into the floor, mounds of heavily-scented foam rising like snowdrifts around her. “I shall have to consider new potential pet names for you. Little bat, perhaps, for your sharp ears.” She tweaked one, lightly, as she sunk to the floor at her side.

“Hardly,” Luna retorted, “You’re the only one who never knocks.”

“As if you do not delight in my company.” She ran a finger lightly along the flattened upper edge of the ear between her fingers, until Seluna leaned into her touch like a cat, like she was the tamed thing and not the girl with the golden leash in her hands. It was easier, when she was like this, soft and pliant beneath her hands, the way she’d once imagined her in the snow-pale light of a mountain temple. Never mind that her treacherous dreams hungered for the girl in the forest with firelight in her hair and a kiss like a brand against her mouth, the girl who had shoved her back against the bark of a tree and met her like a rival, like an equal. This was easier. This was safe.

“I’d delight in it more if you’d make yourself useful.” One delicate hand emerged from the bubbles to hand her a thick bar of soap. “Help me with my hair? If they’re sending me down to the Deep Roads to die, I want to go down looking like myself, not with cheap dye in my hair.”

She might have bridled at that, refused to play servant to the elven girl in her bath, but there was that tempting softness, the pink that the heat brought to her skin, that lulled her and lured her close once more. She’d missed the moonspun silver of her hair, too, and she did not see why she should be denied it any longer. She shrugged off her outer robe and set to work, running her fingers through Seluna’s thick curls and rubbing circles into her scalp. She tried not to think of how Seluna’s hands had rubbed the same patterns into the heads of the wolves as they’d rolled around her feet like dogs, even as the dye turned the water the colour of rust, or old blood.

“I doubt anyone intends for you to die in the Deep Roads,” she said, tugging a curl with reproval. “Your waifs and strays can hardly survive without your company.”

Luna sighed heavily, leant back into her hands, the first time she’d pursued her touch since their quarrel on the road. “I feel half-buried already, down here in the dark.” Her voice was soft, an edge of confession to it that Morrigan had learned to recognise, now – their old came, the exchange of wounds and bruises that allowed them to be vulnerable.

“I thought you would be excited to return to some form of city,” she said, curiousity overcoming her. “Is this place so unlike your Denerim?”

She shook her head. “It’s too like Denerim. Or, no. There’s a rot here that I saw in Denerim, it runs deep through their precious Diamond Quarter, however much gold they want to cover it with. Nobles who take whatever they want and leave the poor to pick up the pieces or bleed out when they’re done. It’s vile.”

Morrigan thought of Redcliffe, where even in death, the villagers had risen at their young lord’s command. “Such things happen everywhere – the strong devour the weak, and the cruel and heartless live long, healthy lives. This I seldom need to remind you.”

Luna reached up, a wet hand folding over her wrist. “Not everywhere,” she said, with a strange ache, “not always. I wish- I wish I could’ve shown you my home, as it was before- before he came. It’s not beautiful, or wealthy, it’s crowded and loud and stinks bad enough to sicken the Maker come winter-”

“No wonder you are so enamoured of Dust Town,” she teased. She expected to be splashed, or perhaps scolded for her callousness. She did not expect Luna to look over her shoulder, to train those sloe-blue eyes upon her.

“That’s exactly it, though,” she said, as if Morrigan had understood her perfectly, without meaning to. “Dust Town is- it's the Alienage with no vhenandal.”

“Vhenandal?” Morrigan tasted the word on her tongue – its roots were elven, but it was not one she’d read in Flemeth’s ancient books, or heard among the Dalish. “What is that- ‘heart-tree’?”

“The Tree of the People,” she said. “They grow in all alienages, at least, that’s what they say. They’re all cuttings from the great forest of Arlathan, to remind us that even when we were slaves, we sprung from the same roots.” She dropped her gaze, fingers trailing along the rim of the tub. “You probably think that’s the height of foolish sentimentality, but when I was a little girl, it was the only real tree I’d ever seen. I used to climb it – we all did – hang flower chains from its branches on Summerday, put lanterns up there on Solstice... No matter how bad the year was, however hard things got, it was there year after year, watching over us, as it has ever since we’ve been city elves. Through slavery, through purges, the vhenandal has watched over us, but it’s also seen every birth, every child’s game, every- every wedding.”

It did sound foolish, and sentimental too, but somehow, she could not bring herself to say so. “You miss it,” she said, instead.

“Every day,” she sighed, sinking deeper into the water to rinse the bubbles from her hair. It swirled around her like mist, and clung to her skin when she rose like rivulets of liquid lyrium. “Dust Town’s very like the alienage,” she said, pulling her fingers through her curls now to dislodge the last of the bubbles, “but with no vhenandal – no heart-tree, do you see? Those people have less than we do – their home doesn’t even have a heart to call its own.”

What of it? Morrigan wanted to say. If her own home had had a heart, it was Flemeth’s - ancient, cold and rotten, with little love in it for her. Or, if her mother loved her at all, it was not enough to spare her, or let her go free. Even a beloved cup or bowl was, at the end of the day, only ever worth what it could hold. But something in those eyes – sloe-blue, bruise-blue – caught her tongue and held it, and at the back of her throat, she tasted bindweed, rising up to claim her again.

“You pity them,” she said. It was an effort to move her tongue at all, to keep her eyes fixed on Seluna’s rather than following the spirals of her hair as it clung to her throat, her collarbones, her breasts... “They will not love you for that.”

She laughed then, soft and bitter. “You’re probably right. I do pity them. At least in Denerim, the shems were cruel to us because we weren’t of their kind.” She traced her finger along the line of her ear, mirroring Morrigan’s gesture. “It was a stupid reason, but it was a reason to them, at least. The casteless... what sets the nobles apart from them, but for an accident of birth? Nothing, and they know that, or they wouldn’t take them into their homes and their beds when their well-bred daughters and wives don’t give them the sons they crave!”

She rose from the water, then, like a mermaid cast up from the deep, and for a moment, Morrigan felt vines coil around her throat as she saw her for the first time, naked in the firelight, and felt heat and hunger mingle in her belly, despite her certainty that at least in the moment, Seluna would not take such a distraction well. Then she seized a towel and began to roughly scrub the water from her skin, and the spell was broken.

“This place makes me sick,” she said, anger roiling beneath the softness of her voice, “and if I could- I'd be tempted to leave it for the darkspawn. Let the nobles squabble for power until there’s nothing but ash for them to reign over. Why should I care what becomes of Orzammar, when it cares so little for its people?”

Morrigan laughed, matching her softness. “Now you begin to sing my song, my sweet. What was it you told me, when first we were in Redcliffe? That I could leave, whenever I willed it? That is still true. We could leave, if you willed it, head north to some port-town and take ship across the ocean.” She did not mean it, only said it because she knew the girl would refuse, but for a moment, she could see the beautiful lie of it as if Seluna had painted it herself – the deck of the ship, the wind mingling their hair together, silver and black, as it swept them far from demons and darkspawn and her mother’s plans for them both. But the child still grew in Luna’s belly, and the Blight still bloomed in her blood, and she knew, even as it shimmered before her, that the vision was impossible.

She knew it even before Luna said, shakily: “You don’t mean that. You’re saying it because you know I’ll say no.”

She could not resist the lie even as she knew, they both knew it was impossible: “Am I?”

Luna looked down at her then, where she still knelt beside the tub, and it would have been easy, so easy, to guide her to sit on the edge of it, to push her legs apart and breathe wordless, heretical prayers between her thighs until she cried out with sounds sweeter than anything her precious Chant of Light held- and she did not, and did not know why she remained knelt at her feet as if held down by vines or roots or some strange spell she had no words for. She did not know why, in that moment, she wanted Luna to push her a little further, to pull her to her feet and say Come with me, then, to test her fragile, beautiful lie until it frayed to pieces. It was a foolish, impractical thing to want – fleeting and feather-soft, compared to the power of an infant god in her arms. She wanted it still, and the want for it tangled about her and held her knotted in ropes of bindweed.

The spell was broken when Luna leant down, carded a hand through her hair like a benediction, like a blessing, let out a soft, aching sigh, then gave her a false smile that glittered with something like mischief.

“I got you a present,” she said, and caught her hand, pulling her to her feet. “I was going to save it for later, but- if we have to go down there, there might not be a later. You should have it now, enjoy it while you can.”

She blinked at her for a moment, still half-caught in the strange spell she’d cast on herself. “A present?” she echoed, and it was an effort to force mockery into her tone. “And what, pray tell, will you demand of me in return?”

She shrugged, looking as helpless as Morrigan felt, beautiful liar. Drops of water shimmered in her hair, clung to her bare shoulders like jewels. “Only that you understand its meaning.”

“Always a catch with you.”

She pulled her to her feet, looking up at her through silvered eyelashes. “Maybe because you’re always looking for them,” she retorts, tracing a line down her throat with a single fingertip until her fingers twined around the andrastite pendant, held it up to the light. The first collar she’d foolishly allowed the girl to wrap around her throat, and still, she had not removed it, despite the price she’d unwittingly paid by letting her close enough to fasten it. “Come,” she says, tugging on the pendant, lightly, “Let me show you.”

Part of her wanted to snarl, to shove her onto her back and remind her she was not mistress here. Some deeper, more treacherous part of her wanted to lean into her pull, to surrender to whatever terrible, sweet thing Seluna would demand of her, to curl up by the hearthfire of her warmth and lay her head in her lap and forget the savage songs of the wild. She wanted it, wanted it so terribly that it sickened her. She could not, she knew, surrender to this and remain who she was.

She did not know what she might have chosen, given a few more moments of temptation. Luna released her pendant, rearranged the towel to better cover her breasts, and pulled her over to the bed. For a moment, she expected-

She did not know what she had expected. Not the weight of metal and gems, cool between her palms. Not the shimmer of glazed silver reflecting the candlelit room, reflecting her own shadowed face and the curve of Luna’s shoulder. Perhaps the mirror of her childhood had been encrusted with emeralds rather than rubies, been decorated with winding vines rather than geometric knots, but in this moment, they were one and the same, as if, somehow, she’d reached through time to snatch back her treasure from Flemeth’s grasping hands.

“It is... just the same,” she breathed, tracing her fingers across her own reflection, along the winding coils of gold that made up the frame, around the ruby-chip flowers that decorated the back. “I cannot believe you found one so like it. I know not what to say.” She looked up, into those shadowed, sloe-blue eyes, and for a moment, she felt stripped bare, all her layers of armour peeled back to expose the girl with the mirror she’d tried to bury that night in the woods, and she did not know whether she wanted to weep from the joy or the horror of it.

“Say ‘thank you,’” Luna said, low and sweet and teasing and impossible, it was impossible she did not know what she had done, the havoc she had wreaked with her careless present, “and say you’ll think on what it means.”

She ought to hand it back to the girl with quick, uncaring hands. She ought to smash it to pieces as Flemeth had before her. She was her mother’s daughter, after all. She had to be Flemeth’s daughter, to be cold and uncaring, to be the witch who survived all the cruelty and coldness the world threw at her and grew stronger for it. She had to be the witch who stole the babe from its cradle, rather than the vessel to carry a child and a soul not her own. And yet-

She did not realise her hands were shaking until Luna covered them with her own, so gentle, so tender despite the calluses and scars that rent them.

“Morrigan?” she said, and there it was again in that voice – that bruise-soft tenderness that should never have been meant for her, that softness that begat tameness that begat death. “Is it- too much?”

She reached up a finger, brushed something from her cheek, and Morrigan realised that inexplicably, tears had escaped her eyes. Impossible. She had not cried since- since- since she’d cut her hands on shards of mirror-glass.

“This is weakness,” she said, her voice harsh and low. “This- it is driving me mad.”

“Morrigan-”

“No.” She snatched the mirror back and curled around it, drawing away from her as if burned. “I warned you, did I not? We have been chasing foolish, fleeting things, and yet you wanted this!”

“And you didn’t want this?” Luna’s voice was still soft, which was the greatest cruelty. If she’d raged, if she’d snapped- those were familiar responses, those she could handle. She could not bear to be looked at, looked through, with a softness that exposed all her most vulnerable parts. “You want to stop now?”

“Yes. No. I do- I should.” The words escaped her in a muddled flurry, stumbling over each other. Yes, I want you. No, I don’t want to stop. I should want to stop. I need to stop. How much more of this softness, this tenderness, could she bear before it broke her? Her mother had prepared her well for the world’s cruelty, but she’d never been taught how to escape a web spun of soft words and kindnesses, of pleasure and beauty and hands ever reaching for her own. “I cannot,” she finished, and that was the worst weakness of all – that she lacked even the strength to free herself from this enchantment, that once again, she required Luna to cut her loose. “Release me,” she said, and it emerged more plea than order. “Tell me you wish to end this, make me believe it-” She could, she knew, if she tried – Luna's lies could make anything truth as long as they spilled from her lips. “Please. I will be- grateful.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It is what I am asking for!”

“Is that what you want?” she repeated. Morrigan could not bear to look at her, but felt the mattress shift under a new weight as Luna stalked closer to her. “Or is it what you think is necessary?”

She could flee. She could shift into bearskin, or a spider’s form, anything that would put the distance she needed between herself and the unnatural emotions that roiled within her. She could still escape the heady heat of the room, the scent of soap that still clung to Seluna’s skin, the wanting that they inflicted upon her. Still, she stayed curled around her mirror, and the bindweed wrapped itself tighter around her. “Does it matter?”

When Luna moved, it was flicker-fast, pushing her onto her back and pinning her there with her hips, with her hands closed around her wrists, with those sloe-blue eyes burning through Morrigan’s own. “It matters to me,” she said, as soft and sweet as if Morrigan were not her captive, “It matters very much.”

It was the sweetest, softest refusal, and Morrigan hated her for it. She surged upwards to kiss her bruisingly hard, biting down on her lip until blood spilled hot and rich into her mouth.

“You selfish, miserable bitch,” she snarled into her ear, as Luna wiped fresh tears from her cheeks with infinite, tender cruelty. “You will regret this.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, and kissed her again with her bloodied mouth, as Morrigan’s freed hands dug marks into her hips.

“I will regret this,” she murmured, into the hollow of her mouth.

“Perhaps that is how it must be.” Luna drew back, her towel discarded now, her bare skin gilded by the candlelight. “Tell me to stop. Tell me to leave. Tell me that’s what you want, and you’ll have it.”

Morrigan looked up at her, the damp spirals of hair that clung to her shoulders, to her throat, the lush curves of her breasts and hips and belly, marked by delicate lines of scarlet and silver where she had grown and changed, the silver starburst scar on her shoulder that marked where Morrigan had once poured out her own blood to save her life. She knew what she should say, what the wise and cunning witch of story would say.

She breathed the only words she could find: “I want you,” and hated herself for them, even as Luna, true to her word, gave her everything she asked for, and more besides.

She hated herself more the next morning, when she woke to find Luna coiled around her like a dragon around its hoard, and she did not even have the strength to draw away from her. The mirror lay on her bedside table, reflecting her failings, her folly, the pale, freckled curve of Luna’s spine, and whatever meaning she was supposed to find within it, she could not divine it.

Chapter Text

The entrance to the Deep Roads looked exactly as grim as Luna had expected – a gaping maw that devoured every speck of light that entered it. The statues on either side were almost as grim as the guards that glared up at her now, reviewing the seal she’d brought them with narrowed eyes. They looked like they wanted to let her past about as much as she wanted to go, and honestly, she couldn’t blame them. If the Legion of the Dead themselves had brought no word of Branka in months, what chance did a mouthy topsider have? But she couldn’t say that, of course – not after Melia had so neatly put her in her place in the tavern, and then proceeded to find a guide for them while she sulked.

The fact that the proposed guide stank of the alehouse and spent more time explaining his marital woes than the perils of the journey did not counterbalance the maps and notes he brought with him, or the knowledge of written Dwarven that the rest of their group lacked. Still, she did not trust him – he didn’t seem like a man accustomed to keeping secrets, but his brash roar of a voice, the stink of ale that clung to him, and his greedy, grasping hands... It all reminded her too much of things she wanted to keep buried, especially here, in this endless tomb of stone that sealed away every Warden the darkspawn didn’t get first.

She bounced on her toes, tried to focus on the guard-captain’s monotonous drone – if she missed something important, they might not live to regret it. There was no reason for her heart to already be pounding, her breath to quicken in her lungs-

Morrigan’s hand settled on her arm, the soothing chill of a barrier washing over her, and she relaxed into her grip, glancing at her for reassurance. Morrigan was not looking at her- had not looked at her since they’d woken in the same bed at the inn, since Luna had pressed a kiss to her cheek, and that sent a flare of guilt through her to war with the anxiety. If she’d pushed too far, made her say too much- but that was nonsense. Morrigan was hardly the prisoner of anything but her own desires, and she’d made those desires quite clear for months. Then again, she’d hardly be Luna’s first partner to enjoy the thrill of the chase more than its ending, and if she was having second thoughts now...

If she was having second thoughts now, that wasn’t for Luna to worry about. She knew she had bigger concerns than who warmed her bed, with the Deep Roads yawning open to swallow her, and yet... And yet, these were small and easy concerns to absorb her. These were perhaps within her power to alter, through charm or guile or being the first to run before she could get her heart broken. Whatever waited beneath the earth was far beyond her meagre skills.

She was pulled from her ruminations by the sounds of a scuffle behind her, and she wheeled, hands flickering to the blades at her belt, but this time she saw no hooded assassins, no hired thugs prepared to drag them before Bhelen or Harrowmont or whoever was vying for the throne today. She saw only a dwarven woman, blonde hair streaked with grey, dressed in travelling clothes that had seen better days.

“Mistress Filda!” the captain growled from behind her, “We have discussed this, you cannot-”

“Please!” The woman - Filda? - shook off the guards who had tentatively seized her upper arms, and Luna expected her to bolt past them, but instead- instead she flung herself down at Luna’s feet and wrapped her arms tight around her knees. “I only wished to speak to the topsiders!”

Everything was moving far too quickly: the guards approaching to pull her back, Shale reaching out to seize the back of her neck, Morrigan’s lips parted with a spell half-spoken. In the moment, Luna did the only thing she could think of, and sank to her own knees.

This close, she could see the deep, familiar lines that grief had carved into her face. She’d seen them in her own father’s, but Cyrion had never allowed his tears to overflow into the creases they’d worn where his daughter could see. Filda was weeping, though, her words emerging half as sobs as she dug her fingers into Luna’s forearms.

“I’m here,” she said, as calm and gentle as she could make herself. “I’m listening. What do you need?”

“My son,” she gasped, “my boy, my only boy- they took him on an expedition into the Deep Roads and- they say he killed someone, they say he ran off into the Roads, but he wouldn’t, not my Ruck! He was- he was always a good boy!”

“Mistress Filda,” the guard tried again, “we all understand your grief-”

“You understand nothing!” she spat at him, but the look she turned on Luna was purest desperation. “You understand, though, or you will.” She pressed a hand to her belly, and the shock of it, the strange sense of violation, made her almost nauseous. She flinched back with a shudder, and heard, behind her, Morrigan’s warning hiss. She forced a smile she hoped would pass for understanding.

“I- understand,” she said, though there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide. “I promise, if we find any sign of your son, I’ll- I’ll let you know.”

Filda’s shoulders folded then, as she collapsed in on herself in mingled grief and relief, the sense of finally being heard.

“Thank you, Warden,” she said, with a fervent gratitude that was almost as uncomfortable as the hand to her belly had been. “May the Stone keep your memory for this- and your child’s, too.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Luna warned her, as she pushed herself to her feet, and pulled Filda after her, “but- I’ll see what I can do.”

She swallowed, watched the woman make her way back through the ranks of guards that had parted around her. Yet another reason she couldn’t turn back. Maker, she wanted to turn back. She remembered, faintly, Alistair’s stories of the Calling, the fate that awaited all Grey Wardens one day. This place would be her tomb, one day, if he was right, and she’d never felt less ready to be buried alive.

“It’s alright to be scared.”

She glanced up, and was astonished to see Jowan walking at her side. They’d scarcely exchanged more than a few sentences since she’d recruited him. In truth, she had no idea what to say to him. All very well to tell Melia to run, but Melia hadn’t been the one to poison an old man and throw his son into a demon’s path. Jowan’s choices had been limited – she knew that, it was why she’d recruited him – but she found it harder to drum up the same sympathy she felt for her childhood friend. Perhaps it was simply that he was a stranger, and Melia was still the kid she’d taught to climb trees. Perhaps it was because he’d escaped the Circle’s clutches only to turn around and imprison Connor and his father within their own minds, however unintentionally. Either way, when he spoke to her now, she felt a twinge of guilt – she did not, she suspected, deserve his kindness. She had tried less with him than even Duncan had tried with her. Certainly less than she’d tried with Melia, who she still half-regretted recruiting at all.

“It really is,” Jowan repeated, as she blinked up at him, still unable to form the right words. “I’m scared all the time. It’s why I ran from the Circle, why I poisoned the Arl-”

“And this is meant to make me feel better?” Luna said, a brow raised.

“Well, you’re still a person, Warden-Commander or no. And you’re- expecting. That’s scary enough, even without the Deep Roads.”

She made a face. “Don’t say it like that. I don’t even want to think about it yet.” She still had eight months to go. She could avoid the matter a little longer, couldn’t she? She could pretend this was all happening to another woman who just happened to be standing where she was.

He sighed, “I didn’t think you would. People seldom do, in the Circle, but it happens all the same. It’s not- I don’t know what you’re going through, but I know the kind of scared you are. Animal-in-a-trap scared, gnaw-your-own-leg-off scared-”

“Don’t-” Luna exhaled sharply, tried again: “I can’t think about it.” If she let herself look at it, if she acknowledged it at all, it would swallow her whole. Even now she could feel its claws at the door she’d sealed it behind. “I know you’re trying to be kind,” she tried, “but- this isn’t going to help.”

Too late, she saw something close off behind his eyes. “Of course. I- I understand.”

“It’s alright to be scared,” she attempted to correct herself, but she could see her words sliding off him like rain on glass. “Maker, especially down here. I just- I've got to be the leader, right? And if I panic, we’re lost.”

“I’ve never seen you panic,” he said, a distant expression crossing his features, and she remembered again how little time they’d spent together, how little attention she’d given him in comparison to Melia. Had Duncan treated her the same way? Loathing still burned in her belly whenever he crossed her mind, but even in her half-shadowed memories, she could see him at her side by a fire on the long road south, though whatever he’d said had been burned from her mind by rage and grief.

“I’m scared all the damn time,” she confessed, as quietly as she could. “I just- put that away, so it's easier for the rest of you.”

He stared at her, then, as blankly as if she’d told him she was planning to cut the Deep Roads open to sleep under the stars again. “That’s not- I don’t know how you can do that. I’ve never been able to do that.”

Of course you haven’t, she did not say. Her home might have its flaws and its tragedies, but she’d loved it and her family enough to be brave for them even when she couldn’t be brave for herself. Her mother had put a knife in her hands and taught her to defend herself, but her father... her father had given her the strength to hold a younger child in her lap and whisper a story or make up a game even when she wanted to cry herself. The Circle did not raise its children to fight for their home, or to hold each other, and in this moment, that seemed its greatest cruelty.

“It’s a skill,” she said, instead. “It can be practiced, learned. None of us were born knowing it. Some of us were given more opportunity to learn than others.”

“Right.” He still looked uncertain, and even in the half-light of the torches, she could see his throat work as though he needed to summon to courage to say something. “You managed it though. That’s- that’s a start, right?”

“Right,” she echoed, his uncertainty creeping into her voice. He was looking at her as if there was something else he wanted to say, but she did not know him well enough to read it in his face yet. She let the moment hang for a few moments too long, and when it passed, his face closing over it like a soft-shut door, she forced some easy chatter from her lips about the Temple of Sacred Ashes and his thoughts on her home of Denerim, and tried to shrug off the uneasy sensation of guilt in her gut. With so many people in her care, perhaps it was natural that one would slip her notice for a time, but it did not feel natural, or right, to have ignored someone following her lead for so long.

The Deep Roads were a realm particularly well-suited to macabre musings. There was little to distract her from her own troubled thoughts – the path stretched out ahead and behind in endless darkness and cavernous silence, broken only by the occasional skittering of unseen feet that made them pause, shudder, and, inevitably, Luna and Zevran would scout ahead to see if there was trouble. Between their stealth and their better night-vision, they were the obvious candidates, but it was a little strange to be forced back into their prior proximity after a few weeks of decorously avoiding each other outside of group settings.

They couldn’t chatter or flirt when scouting out danger ahead, of course, which should have made things easier. It didn’t. It drew too much attention to the ease with which their bodies moved in perfect synchronicity, a silent, partnered dance. She did not like to compare her lovers – it never struck her as particularly fair to any of them – but the easy understanding that seemed so eager to regrow between them was a sharp contrast to her current entanglement. She and Zevran, for all their faults and their walls, had always understood one another, two liars who saw each other’s game and had decided to play along for their own amusement.

She and Morrigan, though... She could still feel the delicate bones of her wrists beneath her fingers, the press of her hips as she pinned her to the bed, the agony in her voice when Luna had forced her to admit I want you. It had felt like a victory, in the moment. Now it ached like a slow-healing sprain she hadn’t noticed in the heat of battle. Not I love you, not even I need you – Morrigan had treated even speaking of her desire, her choice to be in Luna’s bed as a painful admission of weakness.

It made sense, in a way – giving her the mirror may have been as much cruelty as kindness, a reminder of the door that she chose to leave unopened, whether from Flemeth’s teachings or from fear of the horrors love could bring with it. The latter was even reasonable – hadn't she herself avoided flirting with Alistair and Leliana, for fear of taking hearts too perfect, too fragile, to be fairly substituted for her own? Hadn’t she understood all too well Zevran’s gentle rejection, the way he’d said you would be so very easy to make promises to? She knew why Morrigan kept that door sealed, and was there not something cruel in scratching at it, begging to be let in when she knew well that on her side, that door might well be barred forever?

Morrigan had asked her to be ruthless, to be cruel. She’d wanted a lover for teeth and claws, not gentleness, and Luna was finding more than enough ruthlessness within her nature to satisfy her. It would be unfair, too, to call herself unsatisfied with their arrangement. Morrigan had promised her no more and given her no less than Zevran had, after all, and had been more than willing to fill the gap he left in her arms, in her bed. She’d never even spoken to her of the child, aside from when Luna brought it up first, begged her for a confirmation of its survival she still wasn’t sure she’d actually wanted.

Their whole relationship was one of closed doors, and it wasn’t Luna’s place to open them. She didn’t want to open them. No, that wasn’t true. She wanted to pick Morrigan’s locks, roam through the halls of her mind and uncover the treasures and monsters she held within them, and that- that unsettled her. Zevran had never made her feel so at war with herself. He was her mirror, she knew him in his lies and his labyrinths. Wanting him had been easy. She hadn’t needed to know him for it. Wanting Morrigan- wanting to know Morrigan – hadn't felt like a snare until it was too late to escape.

She didn’t want it to feel like a snare now, as Morrigan pulled the pins that held her curls into braids, carded through them with her fingers and then with a comb, dug her fingers into her aching scalp until she could almost have purred from it. If she could simply cut through the ropes that held her- if she could simply let go-

Then she would fall, and perhaps she’d land back here, in her body, Morrigan’s warmth at her back, her fingers in her hair, her lips pressed to the back of her neck somewhere between affectionate and possessive. Perhaps she’d land somewhere soft and comfortable, somewhere she could stretch out the aching muscle of her heart that she’d kept crushed like her wedding dress in the centre of her chest. Perhaps, in time, she’d even feel safe enough to unpeel the armour she wore beneath her skin and let herself feel truly soft again.

But this was Morrigan, she remembered, even as she settled her head in her lap and gazed into the fire. Morrigan who saw softness and bit down, not even with malice or cruelty, but with a predator’s instinct.

“I find I prefer you like this,” she mused, one hand fisted in Luna’s hair, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to be half-threat or demand. Her voice was cool, distant, threading tension through Luna’s shoulders that she tried to brush away with a joke:

“Exhausted? Quiet, for once?”

Morrigan hummed, as if choosing her words carefully. “Predictable. I can hardly lose track of you, when you are in my lap.”

Part of her wanted to turn her head despite the hand in her hair, to dig her teeth into the soft, pale flesh of Morrigan’s thigh, to prove herself every bit as wild as Morrigan claimed to be. Instead, she smiled up at her, baring all her teeth:

“You worry about losing me often, darling?”

“Not when you intentionally make mockery of my words.” She tugged on her handful of hair to make her point, and Luna pinched the tender skin of her inner thigh in vengeance until her leg jumped and they could settle again, grudges appeased. “Is it so strange to you that I prefer you where I can see you? I know well the trouble you can cause to those who lose track of you.”

“Ah, I see. This is an elaborate means of keeping a close eye on me lest I decide to vex you?”

Morrigan laughed. “Perhaps.” A silence that was almost soft fell between them then, and when she spoke again, it was with that familiar sense of biting down: “Perhaps you would be safer, if you believed that.”

“More riddles?” She would have rolled to sit upright, but Morrigan kept her in place with that hand still in her hair. “Go on, tell me – how would believing that make me safer? We’re in the fucking Deep Roads, darling. It doesn’t get much less ‘safe’ than that.”

Morrigan’s breath hissed through her teeth. “I did not mean- I meant,” she clarified, impatient, “that you place too much trust in vessels unfit to hold it.”

“Ah. This again.”

“You are still not listening to me.” Morrigan released her hair, gripped her scalp in both hands, rubbed circles hard enough to almost hurt. “Perhaps if I put it in a language you can understand: Once, a witch’s daughter found an orphaned fawn in the woods, half-starved, easy prey for wolves. She could easily have left it there but-” she paused, shook her head, as if disappointed in her fictionalised younger self, “for some reason, she could not.”

“She cast a calming spell over it, one to make it mild and biddable, and carried it home to her mother, a far greater mage. Perhaps she wished to impress her mother with her new control of magic, her cleverness. Perhaps, some part of her felt- pity for the miserable creature, and hoped her mother would aid it.” She said the last with thinly-veiled disgust, but now, Luna could see the roots of it, the poisoned seeds from which it had grown.

“What happened?” she asked, softly, though she already knew the answer.

Morrigan’s lips curved into a bitter smile. “Her mother, of course, was a far older and more powerful witch, and centuries had hardened her heart against such foolishness. She cut the fawn’s throat, and congratulated her on a good day’s hunting. So all such tales end.”

“At least the ones Flemeth taught you.”

Morrigan’s fingers stilled. “I know no others,” she said, stiffly.

Luna reached up, covered her hands with her own. "I promised to teach you others," she reminded her. "You're not bound to becoming what Flemeth wanted of you."

A bitter laugh. "You cannot know that."

Luna turned her head, pressed a kiss to Morrigan's palm. "I know you're here," she said. "I know you're watching my back by day, and holding me close at night. I wouldn't trust you enough for that, if I thought you were only what Flemeth had made of you."

"Little fool. You should not trust me at all."

She rolled upright, irritated now. "I'm not the helpless fawn in your story, Morrigan. I think we both know that."

"That was not the point!" Morrigan snapped, and then took a long inhale, as if, for once trying to prevent her temper from running away with her. "I am- ill-suited to caring for others, even when I wish it otherwise. I will hurt you."

"I'm not so easily bruised, Morrigan."

"That is not what I-"

Their heads jerked up almost in unison, voices silenced by the distant skittering beyond the circle of firelight. Luna rose, quick and quiet, tracking the sound as best she could with narrowed eyes.

"Wake the others," she murmured. "I'll scout ahead."

Morrigan's lips pressed into a thin line. "Do not-" she began, and then corrected herself: "Stay out of sight, at least."

Luna squeezed her hand once, and crept out into the dark, following the distant, dissonant chant that had echoed in the back of her mind since she came beneath the earth.

She did not like caves at the best of times, and the Deep Roads were turning a dislike into a loathing with astonishing speed. Sound carried wrong in these places - the stone muffling or carrying it far beyond its normal range with little logic to either. Tunnels shrank to narrow crevasses she could barely squeeze through, then burst out into caverns big enough to hold her alienage three times over. There was no sense to them, no logic, and she could never be certain if the next twist held another endless hall of stone or twenty deepstalkers waiting to pounce.

This time, the sight was far more fearful than deepstalkers - a cluster of hulking hurlocks, gathered around something small and whimpering that, even from here, looked humanoid. Luna sighed, breathed a silent apology to Morrigan, and threw a stun grenade at the back of the nearest one.

It stunned the one she hit, which was fortunate, because it was close to the size of an ogre. The others, though, seemed to shake it off more quickly, and wheeled to face her. She could see the milky film of their eyes, hear the dissonant mumble of their voices, and she backed up a step, pressing herself behind a stalagmite. If she could lure them into turning and looking for her…

Footsteps echoed against the stone, accompanied by low growls and the faint whimpering of the prey she'd distracted them from. She could almost smell them now, the rot and filth that clung to everything they touched, the rasp of their breathing-

There were sounds from the camp too, but they seemed very distant as the first of them came into view. It was a squat, misshapen thing, dragging itself forward on bubo-covered knuckles.

Turn your head, she willed it. She'd fought enough of them to know they could smell a trap coming, but if they thought she was hiding, and frightened, they'd chase her back towards the others.

As if it could catch her thoughts from the air, it whipped around to meet her gaze. She was already poised to run, one hand shoving away from the wall, but the sight of its face near froze her to the spot. It looked her over, head to toe, and then, horribly, unmistakenly, it smiled before it lunged at her.

She threw herself forward, the tip of her blade cutting a shallow line into the leathery skin of its belly. As it skidded past her, she wheeled and shoved it hard, so it hit the cave wall with a crack, and then she was running, and hoped the rest would follow. She could hear feet pounding against the stone behind her, grunts and shouts, and she was back in the alleys of Denerim, and some idiot shems had decided to play at rabbit-hunting. They never tried that twice, at least with her.

She was halfway to the camp when she felt a hand in her loose hair, wrenching her back. She let out a scream of rage and terror, and stabbed backwards until she heard a gurgling groan and the hand in her hair went slack. She stumbled forward, but she knew it was too late before she even felt the club swing into her shoulder with an ugly crunching sound. Her left arm went limp, and she cursed even as she launched herself upward, driving the point of her right-hand blade into the gap in the breastplate beneath the creature's arm. Stinking ichor spurted across her face, but at least it dropped the club, barely missing her head as she ducked out of the way. There were still five of them left, though, and they were forming an ever-tightening circle around her.

Come on, Morrigan, she prayed. How long had it been since she'd last prayed, since she'd had any hope anything would answer?

One of them swung wildly for her, and she danced back, but not quick enough - they hadn't left her the space for that. There was an ugly ripping sound, but no pain, and for a moment she felt relief, until she realised that the strap of her breastplate and shoulder of her shirt had been cut away, exposing the dark-blooming bruise on her left shoulder.

That's going to be a nightmare to fix, she thought dizzily, and wondered when she'd become so bold that taking on five darkspawn alone no longer frightened her.

But of course, she wasn't alone - she was never truly alone, any more. She felt a barrier flare to life against her skin, and heard, behind her, the bear's roar. She returned the hurlock's death's-head grin, and raised her blade once more.

The fight after that was almost trivial - Morrigan bowled two of the remaining five over, taking them to pieces with teeth and claws. Luna took down a third from behind, where it had knocked poor Jowan onto his back, and Melia - little Mel, her first recruit, the blood mage who'd cried at the sight of blood - curled her fingers and sent one to its knees with a gutteral scream. Sten's greatsword took out the last one, sending its head spinning from its shoulders into the dark, and only then did the pain win out over the adrenaline. It blurred the world around her, and everything lurched as she folded to her knees. Distantly, she felt hands on her shoulders, and she screamed at the brush of fingers on the bruise, and Morrigan's voice in her ears - the words distant, meaningless over the pain - shifted from low and reproving to a panicked call for aid.

Then a bitter potion was forced between her lips, and Wynne's eyes glowing with blue fire above her, and the pain was burned away by the rush of magic through her veins, and Morrigan was shaking her again.

"Little fool," she hissed. "You could have been killed!"

"Could have," Luna agreed, dizzily. "Wasn't."

Morrigan let out a low, animal sound, and then their lips collided, and for a moment too long, Luna allowed it, dizzy as she was with adrenaline and magic and the echoes of pain that had not quite faded. Then the witch drew back, spots of colour appearing in her cheeks like flowers on snow, and Luna realised two things at once. The first, and most important, was that whatever- whoever the darkspawn had attacked, they were probably far more injured than her. The second, which was, in all honesty, a foolish thought to preoccupy her, was that Morrigan had never before kissed her in front of any of the others, and for some reason, that made her cheeks heat up like a girl's, for all that she'd hardly been discreet in her couplings before.

"They were hurting someone," she said, rising to her feet with an experimental roll to her shoulder. It still ached a little - it always would - but it was nothing to the pain she'd felt but moments before, and she'd still be able to fight with it, which was all that mattered, really. "I- we should check on them. If they survived, they'll need help."

Morrigan gripped her arm so tight it was almost painful. "We is correct. I am ill-inclined to let you out of my sight again, given your gift for finding trouble around every corner."

Melia was helping Jowan to his feet, but she glanced over her shoulder to nod in agreement. "I'll come too," she offered, dusting off his robes in a gesture that felt oddly familiar to Luna, "if you're alright, Jowan?"

"It's only a scratch," he replied, shrugging her off with an eyeroll that reminded her of Alistair- no, Soris, she reminded herself. A brotherly gesture, shrugging off an older sister's fussing. "Give me a potion, and I'll be fine."

She handed him a vial, and he moved over to follow them back down the passage, close to Luna's other side in case she stumbled.

"You're sure you're alright?" he said, quietly.

"I'm fine, Jowan," she reassured him. "I just want to see if our new friend is too."

"You know it's likely you simply came across the darkspawn devouring one of their own?" Morrigan reminded her, and Luna rolled her eyes.

"I know, I know, rescuing kittens from trees, but let me at least try and help?"

"I have never successfully prevented you," Morrigan said, drily.

She worried, at first, that whoever she'd rescued was dead, but as they moved closer, she could see something moving, in the dim depths of the cave. It was bent over one of the darkspawn corpses she'd left in her wake, and she froze, a chill seeping through her. As if it could sense her eyes on it, its head snapped up, and she saw a flash of green as the torchlight caught eyes that lacked the milky film of darkspawn. The creature - the person? - skittered off into the dark. Too small to be a darkspawn, she thought, but there was something familiar about its odd lopsided gait.

"Wait!" she called after them, and pulled away from her friends, breaking into a run. "We don't want to hurt you!"

"Get away!" a harsh voice called back. "There's nothing for you here! You'll bring the dark ones back, you will! They'll crunch your bones!"

The words were almost childlike, though the voice was not, and she shuddered at the thought of any child being left down here in the dark. Still she moved closer - darkspawn did not talk, and that meant this was a person. A frightened, angry person, half-mad perhaps from darkness and isolation, but a person even so, and did she not know what such madness could be like?

"The darkspawn are gone," she called out. "We killed them. Did they hurt you?"

"Yes… no… Go away!" There was confusion in the voice, and fear, too. She could make out a figure now, pressed close against the cave wall, small and malnourished and uneven in its posture, as if a bone had been broken and healed poorly long ago. "Thieves and topsiders come for my treasures, my claim…"

Luna thought of the hermit in Brecelian, then, his terror at losing the few things that were precious to him far outweighing any desire for company or companionship.

"I'm not here to steal, I promise," she said, as gently as she would have to a frightened child. "Won't you come out and talk to me?"

"Only talking?"

"Only talking," she promised, and, as the veilfire-light from behind her grew, she saw him step into the circle of it, and it took all her strength not to flinch back. He wasn't a child, but he was young, as far as she could tell with dwarves - beard still short and sparse, the hollow look of an underfed youth still clinging to his face, and his eyes were wide and fearful - a person's eyes, not a monster's. Darkspawn did not speak. But- Maker, he was the closest she'd seen to one. He moved with their shambling gait, his skin had some of the swollen green putrescence of rot, and when he reached out to touch her hair she very nearly flinched back. She might have, if he hadn't been the first to retreat at Morrigan's throaty growl from behind her.

"Pretty girl," he said, something sad and broken in his voice. "Pretty hair, pretty eyes. All silver and lyrium. You won't hurt me? You won't steal my things?"

He could have been sitting on a treasure trove, and she still would not have touched it. "I won't," she promised. "Just- tell me about you. How did you come to be here?"

"I was… it was five years ago, six perhaps. There was a city, but I don't remember it anymore, only the dark, and the dark ones. They won't notice you if you're quiet, pretty girl, if you eat of their flesh. Do it. You'll live…" He sighed, wistfully, "though maybe not so pretty after that."

"I'm Luna," she said, because if he called her 'pretty girl' one more time she thought she'd retch. "Won't you tell me your name?"

"Ruck," he said, and she felt her heart drop out through her stomach. "Not as pretty a name, but I'm not as pretty as you."

"It's alright," she said, though it wasn't alright, nothing would ever be alright again. Mistress Filda had said… Mistress Filda had said… "You're from Orzammar, aren't you? Your mother, her name's Filda-"

"No!" he snapped, and this time she did flinch back, and Morrigan slipped between them like a shadow.

"None of that," she hissed, until Luna squeezed her shoulder.

"Please, let me-"

"No," he repeated, and this time it was almost a sob. "No warm blankets, no pillows, no stew or soft words. I don't… I don't deserve good memories."

"Of course you do," she said, and reached out to touch his shoulder, but this time he was the one to flinch away.

"You don't understand," he growled, "how much crueller the dark is, when you remember there was light once. She does not know what I was, what I did- I was very, very angry, and then he was dead, and they would have sent me to the mines, but- but then she would know!" He stared up at her, and she could not tell if his expression was pleading or angry - his half-melted features seemed to hold both at once. "Everyone would know."

"She's your mother," Luna said, remembering the woman's desperate fear, her willingness to come down here if it gave her the slightest chance of seeing her son again. Would she do that for anyone at all? She could not imagine it- even now the child in her belly felt like a figment of her imagination at the best of times, and an interloper at the worst, and either way, she could not bring herself to face the reality of it. Could Filda face the truth of her son, if she saw him like this, not the sweet boy she remembered? "Don't you want to see her again."

"Don't think about it," he muttered, "Can't think about it. It gets better. Once you eat… once the darkness is inside you, you stop missing the light as much. But you know that, don't you, pretty Luna? I see it, the dark in you."

Behind her, she felt Jowan shudder and gasp, and try to smother both. She felt her stomach twist at that, one hand flying to her mouth. "I'm a Grey Warden," she said. "It's- it's not the same."

She didn't want it to be the same. She didn't want to see Ruck's slow decay in her own features, his sickness in her veins, in her child's veins… Maker, what was she doing, bringing it into the world to emerge already corrupted by the filth Duncan had forced down her throat?

"Is it?" He looked her over, thoughtful. "Maybe for now. Not for always, though. The dark will call you eventually, and the singing…"

She shook her head, tried to focus on anything but his words. "Your mother," she said again, "You- you should tell her you're alive, Ruck, you should find her, she- you have a home with her, if you want it!"

Someone should get to go home again. Filda should see her son again, should get to love him, even if her own father might never get the same gift.

"No," he said, again. "She cannot- she remembers a little boy, a boy with bright eyes and a hammer in hand, and- she cannot see this! Swear- promise me you won't tell?"

How could she refuse him, when he threw himself at her feet with such desperate terror, when she could remember, distantly, her father's pallor and fear when she'd stumbled back to the alienage, Shianni in her arms, blood on her wedding gown? He had not known her then. He might not know her now, and she… she was not nearly so changed as Ruck.

"She loves you," she said, again. "Would you- would you rather she thought you were dead?"

"Yes!" he said, so quickly her heart ached. "Yes, tell her you found me rotting in some crawler's web. Not- not this. This is not a life she should ever think of."

She wanted to say No, go home, you still have one, you are still loved. That's worth more than you know. But what did she know of Ruck's life, or his family? What did she know of Orzammar? The guards at the great doors might kill him on sight. She might have, too, if she hadn't known darkspawn so well. Who was she to tell him what the limits of his mother's love might be?

"You could travel with us?" she offered, and again, he shook his head.

"The dark ones will find you eventually," he said, with sorrowful certainty, "and they will eat you, or worse, or you will eat them, and become… I want to remember you like this. One last pretty sight, in the dark."

"There might be others," she said, gently. "You're not dead yet. There- there might be other pretty sights in the world, even for you."

He took her hand in his, then, pressed his lips to it. They felt slick and oozing, the kiss of something already rotten. "Don't say that," he said, sadly. "Hope is the cruellest thing of all."

He disappeared into the dark, and only then did Luna scrub the stain of his mouth from her hand onto her ichor-stained breeches, until her hand felt raw and red from the friction. She felt herself shake, and it was only when Jowan- Jowan, of all people - pressed a handkerchief into her hand that she realised it was with silent sobs.

"How could he not want to go home?" she murmured. "He- he has a family. His- his mother loved him so much…"

Morrigan made a quiet scoffing noise, and stepped away from her, back towards the camp. She might have been hurt by that, but she only felt a twinge of sickening guilt: of course such talk would hurt her irascible witch, and of course she would never confess it, even to Luna.

Jowan likely spoke for both of them when he said, quietly: "Not all families are as happy as yours might've been. My parents- they were quick enough to give me up to the Circle, when they knew what I was. My mother couldn't look at me, when the Templars came. Love has limits."

"It shouldn't," she said, and her hand settled over her stomach. "When you bring someone into this world, you have to love them, whatever they become."

She thought of Filda, still at the gates of the Deep Roads, five years after her son had gone missing, and Isolde, weeping at the bedside of her demon son. Surely neither of them had expected their child to come back unchanged. They had only wanted them to live.

He sighed, and, tentatively, took her arm. He'd never touched her before, she realised, and there was something so terribly kind in the gesture she almost wanted to cry more, because what right did she have to his kindness, when she'd ignored him so long.

"I know you said you don't want to think about it," he said, carefully, "but- for what it's worth, of the mothers I've met, I think you'll be one of the better ones. When I met Lady Isolde, I thought- well, for all her faults, I couldn't imagine any mother loving an abomination, but she did. But you- you didn't even know Connor, and you went to hell and back for him, and for that woman outside the Deep Roads. If you'll do all that for people who aren't even your children… I think you'll do better than most, when it comes to it. And at least there'll be no Templars waiting at the door, to take the child from you. There's- there are worse starts people've had in life than that, Blight or no Blight."

She felt the sobs burst from her then, all the tears she hadn't shed for herself, for her child, since she'd found out they existed, and Jowan flinched back from her:

"I'm sorry, did I say the wrong thing?"

"No," she gasped, muffled through his handkerchief. "No, that was… everything I needed to hear. Thank you, Jowan."

He smiled at her then, in the dim light of his veilfire, and for all his harrowed, hang-dog features, he looked almost a boy again, barely older than Melia or Alistair, and she thought, if he could still smile at her like that, perhaps she had not done so badly by him after all.

The next day, he began to cough. The day after, he stumbled as he walked, swaying on his feet, and she cajoled Shale into carrying him, just until he felt better. On the third day, he began to cough up black ichor, and Luna realised she had made a terrible mistake.

Chapter Text

"It's the Blight." Alistair's pronouncement of the obvious was grim and solemn, but for once, even Morrigan lacked the heart to mock him for it. The greyish tint of infection was already seeping into the skin around the crescent-shaped bite on his shoulder, and his breathing was laboured.

Wynne smoothed his hair back from his face, an oddly tender gesture, from a woman who'd been half his gaoler since he'd joined their number. “Poor child,” she murmured, and Jowan clung to her wrists with both hands like a little boy in the clutches of a nightmare.

“There must be something you can do,” he begged. “There must be herbs? Magic-?”

He broke off, then, into a coughing fit that spewed black ichor between his fingers.

“Spirit magic,” Luna continued for him, looking to Wynne expectantly, but the older woman was already shaking her head.

“I may be able to arrest the course of his sickness for a time,” she said, gently, “but I know of only one remedy.”

“The Joining.” Alistair’s voice was bleak. “I don’t have the ingredients, the chalice…”

“But you know them!” There was a terrible hope in Luna’s voice, in the light burning within her upturned face. The kind of fire that she’d seen catch in the hearts of bandits and villagers and nobles alike, the false belief she could spread like a fever.

“Duncan said it required archdemon blood-”

“Normal darkspawn blood worked fine for me!”

“Yes, but we had mage-wardens, then, and lyrium-”

“We can find lyrium-”

“We’re meant to be finding Branka!” Oghren shouted from somewhere at the edges of the group. She shot their guide a venomous glare, but he was either too foolish or too foolhardy to notice. “We don’t have the time or the supplies for distractions.”

Once, Morrigan might have echoed his words. A part of her still did, and it was base hypocricy to be the one to silence him, but there was something half-mad in Luna’s wild blue eyes, and to argue with her now… to argue with her now would be to risk losing her.

So she narrowed her eyes at the dwarf, and murmured: “You can keep quarrelling, if you’d like, but you’ll struggle when your tongue rots away.” He opened his mouth, eyes narrowing with irritation, and she raised a finger: “Before you tell me I cannot do such things, consider whether you really wish to find out.”

He paled at that, as she knew he would. Men like him were all bluster until they faced a threat they couldn’t hit.

Luna had not even seemed to notice the interruption. Alistair had hauled her to her feet and away from Jowan, and they were talking in low, feverish voices.

She only caught the end of Alistair’s words: “-going to end well,” and Luna’s answering snarl: “So you want me to give up?”

“I’m just saying, he might suffer less if-”

“If what? We put him out of his misery like Duncan did Sir Jory?”

“It’s the merciful option-”

“It’s the coward’s option!”

“Give us till our next rest.” Their heads snapped around to stare at her, Alistair astonished, Luna lit from within by that mad, foolish hope. “We have lyrium, and royal elfroot. The other ingredients are deep mushroom, and darkspawn blood, correct?”

Alistair frowned. “You’re not supposed to know-”

Luna kicked him in the ankle. “Yes,” she said, quickly, “and if a Grey Warden can’t find a darkspawn in the Deep Roads-”

“Deep mushrooms should not be impossible to find, either,” she said, daring Alistair to disagree. “Perhaps there is no saving the boy, but trying will waste us little time.”

He looked from her face to Luna’s, and she wondered if his petulant desire to quarrel with her would win out.

Luna seemed to sense it too: she took his hands in hers, eyes wide and entreating, and Morrigan felt a flair of jealousy she knew was unwarranted. “Please, Alistair,” she said, gently. “Let me at least try. If I’m wrong-”

“He’ll suffer for longer.”

“He’ll be dead either way. At least let’s give him the chance to live?”

He sighed, shoulders slumping, but Morrigan could see that Luna’s awful, burning hope already had him in its grip.

“We can try and find some darkspawn,” he agreed.

Luna released his hands and turned to Morrigan. The desperation in her eyes was all-consuming —- it swallowed what little torchlight the cave held.

“Can you look-?”

“For you, little fool,” she sighed, and, with resignation, pressed a kiss to her brow. “Good hunting. Alistair-”

“I know,” he grumbled. “I’ll bring her back in one piece, or you’ll make me into soup.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she sniffed. “You’d poison us.”

She turned away, only to feel Luna’s hand on her arm. “Take Melia with you?” she said, soft enough that Alistair did not hear. “If this gets ugly…”

“You want to make a Warden of her, little fool. You don’t think she should see what the alternatives could be?”

She shook her head. “Not- this. She’s been through enough, hasn’t she?”

A mad idea, that the girl abducted and perhaps raped by a nobleman required less sheltering than a Circle-reared magelet, but then, Seluna was all contradictions.

“I will take care of your little mouse,” she agreed, “if you swear you’ll take no unnecessary risks. Let Alistair earn his keep, for once.”

Her lips curved up into that wicked smile that coiled around her heart like a serpent. “Worried about me, Morrigan?”

Always. She swallowed the answer down, tried to forget the thought had ever flickered across her mind. A foolish notion. She worried for the child’s safety, for her future, and that of the world, for her independence-

She worried that one day she would wake to a tent that held only the scent of a girl she’d lost forever. It was perhaps a small and selfish thing, in comparison to the fate of the world. A foolish thing, even, given the ropes of bindweed that entrapped her. But she’d tasted losing the girl in Brecelian, and failed to drive her away. Still, she could not help covering the fingers on her arm with her own, clinging to the warmth of her for a few final seconds, before she vanished into the dark.

Melia’s hands on her arm were less welcome - clammy rather than warm, cloying rather than entwining, and they’d barely walked a few minutes from camp before Morrigan shook her off.

“You can’t see in the dark!” Melia protested, and Morrigan rolled her eyes, summoning veilfire between her fingers.

“I will manage without you clinging to me, ridiculous child, as I always have before. Cease your fretting and focus.”

“On what?” Melia put her hands on her hips, an affectation that reminded her so much of Luna that she almost wanted to laugh. She was half-giddy with it. “You’ve barely told me what we’re looking for.”

“Deep mushrooms,” Morrigan reminded her, “and they’ll grow wherever there is damp or rot to feed them, so that is what we’ll seek.”

“Delighful.” Melia began to pick her way down the sloping floor of the cave, eyes on the slippery rubble beneath their feet. Perhaps that was what gave her the courage for the question Morrigan did not expect: “Do you think this could save him? Jowan, I mean.”

She blinked. She could not recall the last time Melia had asked her opinion on anything, given her usual optimism. “Does my opinion matter overmuch to you? I am hardly an expert on Warden matters.”

“Alistair thinks he’ll die. That he’s dying already.”

“That is the inevitable progression of the Blight. The Joining will only spare him for so long - five years, perhaps, or ten.”

“That’s still better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“I suppose ‘tis preferable to the quick and painful death he would suffer without it. I am surprised you ask me at all. You usually take Seluna or Alistair’s words as your truth. Difficult, is it, when your lover and your hero quarrel?”

“That’s not- how can you be so cold?” Melia’s eyes were wide and wounded, heart too-visible, too close to the surface. She was always so fragile, that was what Morrigan could not bear. Her Circle walls had made her grow up soft and weak and vulnerable, and now she walked the world with her heart outside her ribs, and wept over every falling sparrow. “Jowan could be dying, and-”

“And would my weeping and wailing and making a spectacle of myself heal him?” she interrupted, before Melia could find the words that might crack the ice in her heart. Seluna would have found them already, would have left her raw and bleeding with a scant sentence, but then, even Luna knew that there were times when cold-hearted action was far more useful than painful, pointless feeling. A low tremble ran through the stone wall at her side, as if the earth itself echoed her anger. “Think before you speak, mouse! There will be plenty of time to weep if the worst happens, but we have very little to save him, if that’s still what you wish.”

Melia’s full lips pressed into a harsh, narrow line. “I don’t know what Luna sees in you,” she said, bitterly.

“The feeling is mutual, believe me. I would have left you for whatever fate your keepers decided for you, given how ill-suited you are to life outside their care.”

“Why even bring me along to find your stupid deep mushrooms, then? If you’re so strong, so good at working alone, why take me with you?”

“Seluna requested-”

“Oh, of course, if Luna asks for something, you’ll do it. Is it because you’re scared she’ll realise what a monster you are, or because you’re planning to tally up the bill she’ll have to pay you before she can leave?”

“She knows what I am.” For all the complexities their- entanglement brought, that was the relief of it: for all Flemeth’s lessons on the deceptions men expected of their lovers, Luna had known all her sharp edges long before she’d taken her to her bed, and had never expected false sweetness or feigned tenderness from their embraces. It sometimes frightened Morrigan a little, that the rare moments of tenderness they’d shared had been easy to play at, that they scarcely felt false at all, when it was Luna she whispered them to. All those months of fussing and fretting over her every injury had taught her caring by agonising increments, and even now, she was not entirely sure it had been a useful lesson, given the mess such feelings made of Melia.

“I don’t believe you.” Melia’s arms were wrapped tight around herself, as if Morrigan’s words had wounded her somehow. “She isn’t- she cares about people-”

“Perhaps she puts on a good front for children like you and Alistair.” She was growing impatient now, and the girl’s voice was high and tremulous — it would bring the darkspawn down upon them if she did not quiet soon. “Or perhaps caring for so many exhausts her to the point where she retires to the arms of one who cares little and less for the rest of the world. She cares for you, enough to give you work beyond fretting yourself to pieces over a man you cannot heal. Do not repay her care with childish tantrums.”

“I’m not a child!” she snapped, and her voice bounced around the walls of the narrow tunnel, drawing another rumble from the stone around them. “I don’t need chores to keep me busy-”

“Surana-” Morrigan tried to warn her, a useless hand outstretched, but she need not have bothered. The barrier the girl threw up could have held off an army, with her rage behind it, and it knocked Morrigan into the wall with a clatter- and then the darkness swallowed her as collapsing rocks rained down over their heads. Morrigan tried to throw up her own barrier, to take shelter beneath a shield of raw power, but spirit magic had never been her greatest strength, and even with all the mana in her veins poured into it, it flickered and died beneath the heavy weight of stone, lasting only long enough to carve out a hollow in the earth barely large enough for her, even curled into a ball like a woodlouse, or a babe in the womb. She scrabbled at her waist, attempted to pull a lyrium potion from her belt, but with the press of stone and earth against her back, her shoulders, she lacked even the space to raise it to her lips.

Do not panic. Idiot girl, do not panic. Flemeth’s voice was loud in her ears, slowing her breaths to conserve what little air she had. She swallowed down the urge to flail out for any sign of weakness in her prison, and moved slowly, deliberately, seeking open air as she felt for the last reserves of her mana. If she had enough for one final shift, the bear was far stronger than her frail mortal form, and she could shake free of the earth that had entombed her like it was leaf-litter.

Breathe, Flemeth urged her. Nobody will come to save you, weak and foolish as you have been, so you must save yourself. The thought of Melia, barely an arms-length from her when the roof came down, flickered across her mind, and was quickly dismissed: if Morrigan herself was trapped, there was no chance that the frail Circle flower was in any position to offer aid. Luna might- but Luna was far away, in a darker, more distant set of tunnels, fighting for her life and for Jowan’s. Even if she knew, she could not come to her aid, and what could she do, anyway? Her strength lay in her quickness and her charm, not in the kind of might or magic that would shift the rocks that pressed down the weight of a mountain upon her.

So it was Morrigan alone, as it had always been. As it always would be, for all that she’d let Luna’s lovely illusions swallow her whole for far too long. If she’d simply refused, sent Melia to seek out the deep mushrooms alone-

There is no purpose to thinking on what might have been. There is only what is, and that alone may be your death if you do not focus. She had mana. She had will. She had the bear, stiring close to the surface as it always did when it sensed a threat. There was no reason to succumb to the fear that clawed at her. She simply had to follow the familiar thread of the shift, let herself sink into fur and claws and the vivid world of scents and tastes that her mortal form could never entirely comprehend. It would be easy, and the bear- the bear would not fear as she did.

The shift was usually quick, but this time, seconds seemed to stretch to agonising minutes, as every tiny change in her cramped little tomb became a world-shaking transformation. At first they were all to the good — brushes of air through cracks in the rubble, areas of give against her hide where her skin had found none — but the earth’s reprisals were swift and harsh. Destabilising the sides of her hollow only brought more rubble raining down upon her back and shoulders in greater force.

The bear was strong, but it was nothing to the weight of the earth above her. Even as she flailed and roared, she found herself crushed down into her body again, bones cracking, air forced from her great lungs until they were small and feeble and human again. Her ankles were pressed beneath her hips, her head pinned down to her knees, one hand raised as the last feeble barrier between her fragile skull and the stone above her. Her other arm was pinned beneath rough, heavy stone, and though she did not feel any stone or dirt entrapping her fingers, the relief of freedom was a far distant second to the bone-deep agony when she attempted to move them. She screamed, and then cursed herself for wasting precious air. Her arm was broken. Her arm was broken, and she was trapped beneath a mountain of stone, and she would die down here, alone, unmourned, unremembered, as Wynne (as Flemeth) had always predicted.

Morrigan. Morrigan. The last thing she would hear was Flemeth’s castigations of her foolishness, of her ignorance, of her soft, weak heart that had lead her to this tomb-

But the voice was distant, muffled, high and sweet rather than low and rasping. “Morrigan?” it- she repeated. Melia repeated, “Can you hear me? Are you- are you alive?”

She made a sound that might, had she been in a position to form words, emerged as The dead seldom scream, little idiot, but emerged mostly as a strangled, agonised grunt, and Melia gave a high, fluttering sigh in relief.

“I’m here,” she said, unnecessarily. “You got the worst of the fall, but- I can see your hand, it’s pinned under a boulder, but it’s out.”

I can feel that, she wanted to retort, but even if she could speak, she would not have risked Melia leaving now. Fear had been terrible, but hope was an awful, clawing thing, and she felt like a child, biting back the urge to wail Don’t leave me. Dying alone might have been bearable, had she not been presented with another option.

“I- I think you had the beginnings of the right idea, before,” she continued, and Morrigan felt the brush of fingers against her own, and flexed against them, the pain of touch nearly drowned out by the assurance that she was not alone. “You might be able to get out of there if you can shift again, but- maybe into something small, this time? There are some gaps I think a mouse could get through, or a beetle?”

She might have laughed at that, but for the agony. She’d never paid much attention to small, crawling things before, creatures that lacked teeth or claws or sharp stings. She’d never thought them useful, before, and now… now that ignorance would kill her, even if she had the mana to transform again.

“Can’t,” she managed to rasp, as Melia repeated her question with twittering urgency. “Tapped.” Were she a little more selfless, she might have urged Melia to flee the tunnel before it swallowed her too. Were she a little more selfish (a little weaker) she might have gripped her hand with the last of her strength and begged her to stay with a childish panic, and Melia, unlike her mother, unlike lovely, ruthless Luna, was soft enough to risk her own life for such a pointless cause. Melia’s fretting would not save Morrigan, any more than it might have saved Jowan. The world had chosen the cruelest way to teach Morrigan its purpose: the fleeting, selfish comfort of falling into the dark with a hand still caught in hers.

“You have- wait, no, if you could reach your lyrium, you’d be out already. One second-” The warm hand on hers withdrew, and she was alone in the dark, in the cage of the earth, and despite herself, she made a plaintive, animal noise she would have been ashamed of, if terror had left any space for shame between her ribs. “It’s alright, I’m still here, I’m- I’m not going to leave you.”

There was a note of alien steel there, a courage she had not realised Melia possessed. Borrowed, perhaps, from Wynne or Luna, but courage nonetheless, and in this moment, Morrigan was strangely comforted by it. Melia was not afraid, Melia-mouse, Melia still half a child pretending at womanhood, and if Melia wasn’t afraid, she could take courage from that too.

“I’m going to try something,” she said, with that iron calm, and then Melia’s fingers were on hers again, wet with the sticky heat of blood. “If I can lend you some power, enough for one last shift, can you try? Something small, something careful, I know it’s hard, probably harder than I can imagine, but please try.”

The shock of power flooded up her arm before she could even agree, sending a surge of life through her agonised, shaking form, but even now, her brain could not quite keep up with Melia’s words. Something small? Something fragile, easy to catch, easy to hurt, when she was already so vulnerable, so tiny compared to the weight that pressed down upon her? To make herself weaker was to practically ask for the next blow, whether from an angry stranger or a wild animal or her mother’s ruthless hands. Flemeth had raised her to be strong, self-sufficient, unbreakable. But now, pinned beneath the stone, her strength had failed her, her body felt half-broken already, and as for her independence… she was clinging to the faintest thread of magic Melia’s blood could provide, and to her hand with equally desperate need. She would die, inch by painful inch, if she could not learn whatever lesson Melia’s distant words were trying to teach her, if she could not learn a path to survival beyond her own strength of will alone.

Alone. Her whole life, she had been alone, to one degree or another. She’d thought she preferred it to the noise and meaningless chatter other humans could provide. But now she clung to the warmth of Melia’s hand, the sticky heat of her blood, the pulse of another heart in time with her own, and she remembered the childish desires she’d set aside when she first learned the limits of her shifting — the warmth of the pack, the shimmering synchrony of the shoal. The bright-buzzing harmony of the hive, a thousand bodies sharing a single mind, a single purpose. Was this something like that, this sudden sense of another’s heartbeat, her dependency on their survival? This sense of a single shared life, a survival dependent upon each other? She could drain Melia dry in her body’s frantic hunger for magic, and still the girl did not let go of her hand, only held it tighter, despite the pain, and Morrigan…

Morrigan closed her eyes, and thought of bees. Their tiny, black-and-golden bodies, moving over each other in purposeful patterns. The neatly-ordered honeycombs of their home. The sweetness of honey, of humming, of a home defined by the bodies of a thousand identical sisters, a home she could not imagine, that she had to imagine, to construct upon the fragile foundation of Melia’s hand in hers. The diffuse spread of her mind and body across thousands of smaller forms, weaker alone but what did that matter when they were never alone, a thousand minds and bodies moving together as one?

The darkness, the damp, all were unsettling to her new senses, created for the world above, but some of her bodies could sense the air currents from the cracks in the prison, from Melia’s frantic movements, and it was the work of moments to assess which gaps a narrow bee-body could slip through, and to trickle out of her prison in small, buzzing streams to settle on the walls, the ceiling, on Melia’s robes.

Melia herself was making a lot of noise that the bees were not really equipped to process and understand, but it took some time to reassemble herself into her human form again, and when she managed it, the exhaustion and pain she’d left behind crashed down upon her with the weight of stone, and she crumpled to her knees. Melia was kneeling too, and when she pressed her forehead to Morrigan’s in wordless, shaking relief, for once, Morrigan did not pull away. She was alive. They were alive, Melia’s heartbeat a reassuring echo of her own.

After a few moments, she realised how foolish she must look, and drew back, rising to her feet, but when Melia slipped under her unbroken arm to help her stand, she did not pull away. Every part of her ached, and she could taste her own blood in her mouth. For once, she was grateful that when they returned to camp, Wynne would be there, with a healing touch that would wash away her injuries far more quickly than herbs or poultices could, but first…

“The deep mushrooms,” she said, voice a little slurred from pain and exhaustion.

Melia blinked up at her owlishly. “You can’t-”

“I owe you,” she said, though she was swaying slightly, “and time is of the essence. I have poultices-”

“You have a broken arm. Probably more than one broken bone, looking at you-”

“And your friend has the Blight!” she snapped. Melia’s eyes widened with hurt, and she swallowed down the bile of the rage that close followed the horror of dependence. She wanted to shove the girl away, but collapsing alone seemed a poor way to celebrate her survival. “You helped me,” she said, simply. “Let- me help you. I can rest when this is done.” One way or another. She was not Luna. She did not cherish hopes of Jowan’s chances of survival, especially given how long he’d hidden his condition for. But if they could perform some kind of Joining, it could at least prevent the same fate befalling Melia, and that would be more than worth it.

The collapse had slowed their progress, and pausing to apply poultices and swallow potions slowed it further. Melia tied a scarf into a makeshift sling, and tucked her arm into it with all the care she could muster, shrugging off Morrigan’s muttered curses with the best grace she could manage. They made their slow, limping progress back towards the ruined city, and sought out the old cisterns and drinking fountains that appeared in the occasional square. The deep mushrooms they found were tiny, shrivelled things, clinging to the cracks in empty fountain bowls, or sprouting like pale fingers from the grates that covered drains, rather than the thick, meaty clusters she had hoped for.

“Will they be enough?” Melia asked, brow furrowed.

“They will have to be.” In truth, she did not know if they would suffice — if even their best efforts to recreate a process that had taken the Wardens years to perfect would cure rather than kill — but it was a chance at survival, and that was all any of them could offer Jowan now.

He was worse when they reached camp again, she could tell from the grim line of Wynne’s mouth, before she even saw how the black of the Taint had crept up the veins of his throat to blacken his lips. His grey eyes were faded now, washed out by a film of white, and Melia sank to her knees beside him, tangling their fingers together as though they were children, murmuring soft, soothing things Morrigan would never have had the words for.

She should have been busying herself with her herbalism kit, grinding the mushrooms to a wet paste mingled with the crumbled leaves of royal elfroot. She should have been building up a fire to heat a cauldron or an alembic. She should have been doing a thousand useful, practical things, but the next step seemed to slip through her fingers like water, like her thoughts, like the sharp-edged agony in her arm, her bruised and scraped shoulders. Time was sliding sideways, and she could not keep up with it, only curl into a ball on her bedroll and shake silently, waiting for the pain to pass. It always passed, in the end, or it would as long as she could endure it.

She had broken her skull before. She still remembered the jarring, echoing pain that had rung through every chamber of her mind. This was not as bad, and so it should have been bearable. Survivable, even. She should have been splinting it already, tucking it into a sling, mixing a poultice to encourage the bone to regrow. She should have- she should have-

She should have been doing anything other than curling into a ball like a child, biting down on her tongue to keep from crying out, but perhaps she’d left a part of her behind when she’d shattered beneath the stone into a thousand pieces, bourne aloft on shimmering insectile wings. She did not feel like her true self, the Witch of the Wilds, proud and unbreakable. She felt small and exhausted and carved out from within, as if she had burned through some essential resource she’d never previously tapped dry. Will, perhaps, or spite. She could go a long way on spite, but how could she feel spiteful or angry, when Melia had stayed with her despite her anger, and the threat of the roof caving in, when a part of her still ached to be a thousand fragments and finally complete? There was nothing left to her now but pain and weakness and-

And warm hands on her shoulders, then cupping her face, forcing her to look up into Luna’s endless night-sky eyes. Her face was pale and blood-spattered and still, somehow the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She said something, but her voice seemed to come from very far away, or from deep beneath the earth. She repeated herself, and Morrigan hummed in response, leant into her hands, the only warmth in the world, and almost crumbled when she pulled away and wheeled, calling out for someone else. She turned back, glanced down, and Morrigan realised she’d clung to her sleeve like a child, the rough leather of her bracers solid and real beneath her fingers, a reminder that she was alive, as free as anyone could be, not entombed in a narrow cave of stone.

She would be disgusted, later, by such weakness, such desperation, but she could almost have wept when Luna pressed warm, bloody lips against her forehead, and murmured, soft in her ear, “I’ll come back, I promise.”

Then she was gone, into the dark beyond the lantern light, and there were the distant sounds of an argument before cooler, more practical hands wrapped around her broken arm, and the cold, bright light of spirit magic rushed through her, burning away the pain, burning away the world.

She thought she heard her mother’s voice, before everything faded to white: “Foolish girl. Why did you not say you were hurt sooner?”

Strange. Flemeth had never shown such concern for her before.

Chapter Text

The cup in her shaking hands was a rough tin camp mug, nothing like the great silver bowl she’d drunk from at her own Joining. Distantly, she could hear Melia’s soft sobs, the dull, repetitive thud of Alistair's hands pressing on Jowan’s chest. The hollow silence where the tired young mage’s breathing should have been. She’d known it was a risk, of course she’d known, but- but a part of her had grown distant from the horror of her own Joining, from watching Daveth choke on his own blood, Jory run through on Duncan’s blade. She’d thought him a monster, then. She felt no better than him, now. She’d promised Jowan hope, a chance at freedom, and brought him down into the dark to die.

She knew she should be comforting Melia, somehow, helping Alistair force life back into the heart that the Blight had stopped, fetching lyrium potions for Wynne, but the older mage had already sunk back on her heels, her face drawn tight with sorrow and resignation. It made her look far older than her fifty years, a terrible counterpoint to Jowan’s slack features. The fear and sorrow that had furrowed his brow, carved downturned lines into the corners of his mouth, had left him with his last breath, and now he looked peaceful, serene, so terribly young. She couldn’t imagine feeling that young again, but perhaps that was what death did: it erased the lines life had left on a person, leaving only their empty, unburdened shell.

It would have been comforting to believe that, but in this moment, she could only see the void behind Jowan’s frightened grey eyes, the tears in Melia’s, the guilt in Alistair’s that she knew mirrored her own. There was no evidence of a Golden City there, of Andraste’s tender embrace for her lost children. There was only the space where the Maker had turned his face away, and if she could have torn Him down for that alone, she would have.

But she could not tear the heavens open to demand answers for why Jowan had ended up dead before he’d had the chance to live. It was a stupid thought, when she did not even have the power to save him, only to bring him down into the dark to die, and offer a poison named ‘hope’ in his last moments. She was half-tempted to pour it away, but what then? Would she regret it, when the Blight took another friend from her, and she’d thrown away their last chance at salvation?

Alistair had given up, now, had shaken his head with weary sorrow. Melia had turned away from the body and into his arms, her head buried against his chest, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. He met Luna’s eyes over her head, a question in them that she could not answer. She could only turn away too, tend to her own unearned grief and guilt. What could she say to him, when he’d presided over her own Joining, where two innocent men had died as the price to force poison down her throat? When they’d both known this could happen, and, like Duncan before them, pretended that this time, it would not. This time, they could save someone.

“Your hands are shaking.” Leliana was crouched between her and Jowan, now, gently prying her fingers from their tight grip on the cup.

“Should they be steady, after what I’ve done?” She half-wanted to shove her out of the way, to fix her eyes on Jowan and never look away, as if by sheer force of will she could make him breathe again. Another boy’s death on her hands, black hair instead of gold, grey eyes instead of… green? Nelaros’ eyes had been green, she was sure of it, but now his face was shadowed, turned from her, as Jowan’s would be far too soon. His blood would stain her hands forever, and one day, she would not even recall his face, and was that not a monstrous, unnatural thing?

“You should drink.” There was a different cup in her hands now, one that held something piping hot and stinking of brandy from either Oghren or Zevran’s personal stash. She wondered what Leliana had bartered for it, or if this sudden loss had pushed everyone out of their familiar patterns.

“What’s the point?” she muttered. “So I can pull myself together enough to force that fucking poison down your throat, or Melia’s, or Morrigan’s? So I can be a leader again, when we’ve all seen how following me ends?”

“Any leader will take you to the grave eventually. Some sooner than others.” Leliana sighed, glanced back to Jowan. “I will not tell you you have made no mistakes — I fear you would not believe me — but there is one thing, I think, that Jowan would tell you, if he could.”

“Another divine revelation? Now?” It was small, and petty, and cruel, she knew, to needle at Leliana’s pure, innocent faith, but some part of her railed against even the idea of a Maker who’d provide revelation without mercy, who’d dare to command his children without embracing them. Better, perhaps, that there was no Maker at all. “Don’t preach to me about what Jowan would want now, I as good as killed him! Maybe as good as killed all of you, by dragging you down here-”

“Would you have tried to force us down here, had we refused to come with you?”

She knew it was a rhetorical question: they both knew she was not that kind of ruthless. It did not assuage her guilt, even as Leliana continued: “We are not children, Luna, and no greater power compels us to follow you. I of all people know-” She swallowed, and Luna was shamed to recall Leliana had known Jowan far better than she had, with the months they’d spent together on the road to Denerim and back, “I know that when you choose to obey an order, to put your trust in a leader, you also choose the consequences, even if you do not know what those will be. I told you before, of Marjolaine, after Brecelian-”

She could hardly forget, even now: the conversation stuck like a burr in her heart, for all that it had cleared the air between them: the darkness that had crept across Leliana’s face, the moment she’d seemed almost unrecognisable — the bard, not the sweet Chantry sister. The shadow she’d severed from her feet, creeping back to coil around her again at her former mentor’s return. “You said I reminded you of her.” That had stung, for all that she could not deny the resemblance.

A bitter smile, ill-suited to Leliana’s sweet, oval face, crept across her lips now: a flicker of the woman she’d been, before she’d reshaped herself into the Leliana she thought she knew. “You still do, in some ways. She always could talk anyone into anything. She told me once that a good commander should use her people ruthlessly, and I begin to think that she was right, but- I think a great commander should care for her people, and use them ruthlessly nonetheless. How else can we trust in you, than to know you would mourn us if we fall, and carry on with the mission regardless?”

She gulped, an inelegant, snotty sound. “What an elegant way of telling me to get off my arse and stop crying.”

“There will be time to mourn, but not here, not now. Morrigan is still injured, and there is still the matter of the Joining to consider.”

She glanced up at her. “Will you take it?” she said, bluntly. “Knowing the potential effects? I wouldn’t hold you to becoming a Warden for true, afterwards, but if it kept you alive down here…”

“I fight at range,” Leliana reminded her. “Even in these tunnels, we haven’t yet found a darkspawn that could get the drop on us. And if we keep our wounds clean and patch them up quickly, it’s a risk I’m willing to take. But it is a risk I am taking, Seluna. Do not put it onto your shoulders. You carry enough there already.”

She swallowed. “Will you say that when it’s your veins rotting from within?”

“Will you hold against me what I say when I am dying? No? Then do not presume to hold it against yourself.” Leliana squeezed her shoulders. “Mourn the dead when you can, but now the living need you.”

That had been what she’d done before, after Nelaros, even after Adaia. She could not allow herself to fall into a fog of broken grief if someone else needed her more than the dead. It had taken Ostagar, and Alistair’s vast, frantic grief, to pull her from its grip after Ostagar, and before that… before that, of course, there had been Soris, her little cousin who’d lost two mothers to her one.

And soon, at least in theory, there would be a child of her own, clinging to her legs, and the living would always take precedent over the dead. It still sickened her to think about it, for all that she’d been given all the choice her circumstances could allow. Even now, she could not bear the thought of yet another fragile, dependent creature, who would love her, and who she would not be able to save.

That was the future, though, a hypothetical she could not bring herself to dwell on. Leliana was right. There were too many fragile, dependent creatures in the present to justify such self-indulgence.

“Melia.” She raised her voice, let it carry above the sound of her soft sobbing, hoped it sounded like a commander’s. “I’m sorry for Jowan, truly I am, and I wish we had more time, but I don’t know that we’ll have the chance to even try this again. If you want to-” Insane words, who would want to drink darkspawn blood, given a true choice? “If you’re willing to go through the Joining, it has to be now.”

From the circle of Alistair’s arms, Melia wheeled to look at her, and for a moment, for all their different features, she saw herself half a year ago — that same resentment, the silent demand: Is there no time for grief?

Perhaps Duncan had thought then, as she thought now, that there was no time for grief or sorrow, when there were decisions to be make, when there were still lives left to save. She could not ask him, now. She did not even know if she could forgive him, with the gift of his perspective. She only knew that Melia was still living, and she could give her a chance, however slender, to become something more capable of surviving the darkness at the heart of the world.

“Melia…” Alistair said, softly, and, with sudden, unexpected revulsion, Luna wrenched herself upright.

“I’ll see if anyone else will take me up on the offer,” she said, roughly, around the lump that had congealed in her throat. “We might have to stretch what we have left among you.”

It would be no more pleasant an offer to make to her other companions than to Melia, but in the moment, anything felt better than overhearing whatever awful, tenderly-meant aphorisms Alistair would offer his beloved as counsel on the Joining. Would it be worse if he advised her against it, reminded her of the years, the children, the future she’d sacrifice if she joined his order, or if he’d truly learned so little from her own drink from the Wardens’ bitter cup? She didn’t know. She only knew that whether she was confronted with his ignorance or his hypocrisy, she would not have forgiven him for either, and so she could not hear whatever soft sentiments slipped between them. Such things were not meant for her, anyway.

Zevran, like Leliana, preferred to take his chances with the Blight: “If it comes for me, cara mia, I would only ask a quick death upon your blades. You showed me such mercy once. I do not think it is so cruel a thing to ask, a second time.”

That made more pointless tears prick at her eyes until she blinked them back. “Why is it,” she demanded, trying not to sniffle pathetically, “that everyone I’ve slept with lately has told me to kill them in an emergency?”

“Because you wear gore so well, of course,” he teased, and she managed a strangled, watery chuckle that barely escaped her lips before dying. “It is good to laugh, even now,” he said, a little more gently. “We live in Death’s shadow, but still, we live, Luna. You will not honour Jowan by burning your laughter on his pyre.”

They could not burn him at all, down here, or even scratch a grave out of the stone beneath their feet. It seemed yet another dereliction in her duty, that she’d spent so little time with him, that she’d defended him so poorly, and that now, she could not even lay him to rest as he might have preferred.

Oghren and Sten were pulling apart the rubble of the neighbouring building, laying out what stones they could easily move into a rough ring, the beginnings of a second firepit they did not need. As she drew closer, she realised she’d been mistaken: it was an elongated oval, rather than a circle. Not a hearth, but a coffin.

“Don’t even think about offering me that Blighted nug-piss,” Oghren said over his shoulder, at her approach. “I saw what it did to your mage. I came down here to find my wife, not to play Paragon’s Spit with darkspawn blood.”

Sten, though, turned to look at her, and in a single step, he was close enough to still her shaking hands, encompassing them and the cup with a single one of his own. “The saarebas followed your lead, and you did what you could to preserve it,” he said, and she realised, with distant misery, he was trying to offer her comfort too, in his own strange way. “Every sten must bear the weight of loss twice as heavily as the glory of victory, or we would become unfit for our purpose.”

He would know, she realised. His Beresaad, the people she’d seen him smile and joke with in the eerie green light of the Fade as he never had in reality, had been slaughtered by the darkspawn on a mission he had commanded. If anyone could claim to understand…

“I never thought I was fit for this purpose,” she said, quiet, choked.

“That is because you are bas,” he reminded her. “In these lands, it is believed that your birth determines your purpose. Had you been born under the Qun, this might always have been your role, and it would sit the lighter upon your shoulders for it.”

“Does death ever sit lightly on anyone’s shoulders?”

He looked down at her, his face shadowed in the dim lantern-light, and then, minutely, shook it. “It should not. The body may survive the loss of a limb, but its absence will always be felt. But this is your first command, and one death in half a year, against impossible odds, is not the failure it feels in this moment.”

“We were lucky.”

“We were well-led. We are well-led. And if you believe this ‘Joining’ will make me a stronger weapon against the enemy we face, then I will drink it without hesitation.”

She swallowed, dropping her gaze to the murky liquid in the cup. “You put too much trust in me. He put too much trust in me.”

In one careful motion, he pulled the cup from her hands, and she barely had time to steady it before he took a deliberate sip. From what felt like a thousand miles away, she saw his eyes roll until only the whites showed, and he swayed like a great tree about to topple. For a moment she feared he would fall, but before she could cry out to Oghren, to anyone to help him, he had righted himself with a grimace.

“Not the most pleasant thing your lands have to offer,” he said, “but it will make me stronger, so I will endure.”

He was so calm, so unshaken, as he returned the tin mug to her cupped hands, stooping slightly to meet her eyes. He said nothing, only fixed her with that cool, steady gaze. Her shoulders ached with the weight of that trust in her judgement, her leadership, but she could not shrug it off or deny if. Of all her companions, Sten’s confidence in her leadership had always been silent and steady, his rare criticism linked to battle strategy or tactics.

She had not realised the faith that took, until this moment. She had not realised how much trust she had put into his silent support, how little she could doubt him, even now. He seldom spoke at all, but when he did, he left no space for uncertainty. She could well believe that once, before he’d lost his people and his soul, he’d been a far better commander than she could ever hope to become, and the knowledge that now, he placed his faith in her…

Leliana had been right. She could not waste any more time mourning the men she’d failed when there were still living people depending on her.

Melia was, in the end, the only other to accept the draught they had sacrificed so much to make, for all Luna’s pretences at offering her other options.

“I will never go back to the Circle,” she said, with a steel Luna forgot she could muster. “If it got me free of the Templars, I’d drink deathroot itself. The Wardens might not be freedom, but it’s the closest I’ve come since they took me.”

She did faint as Luna had, a moment of gut-wrenching terror, but while she writhed in terrible, fitful visions, Alistair only smoothed her hair where his shoulder pillowed her twitching head.

“If the Joining kills, it’s quick,” he said, with a calm that reminded her he’d witnessed the ritual more times than she ever wanted to be privy to it. He’d handed her the cup, after all, and left it with her to pass on to Melia, to Sten. She understood, in this moment, why he’d been so desperate to hand her the command that should have been his. For all that she’d invoked the Right of Conscription to save what lives she could, it was a cruel compromise to offer anyone, and if she’d had another choice to offer Melia…

But she didn’t have another choice, and they all knew it. If Melia had wanted to spend her life running from the Templars on her heels, she should have escaped their company long before they reached the Deep Roads.

Everyone else refused the cup, and for the most part, she could not find fault in the choice she’d have made, six long months ago.

For the most part. Morrigan… Morrigan’s was always going to be the hardest refusal to accept.

It was cruel enough that it was too easy to imagine her in Jowan’s place, black blood bubbling upon her lips, her breath coming in hitched wheezes until it fell silent forever. It was crueller to see the price she’d paid for the potion that had killed him, marked out in yellowing bruises on every exposed inch of skin, and know how close she’d come to losing her for something that might not have saved anyone at all.

“It is not as though we have not faced darkspawn together before,” the witch reminded her, voice rough-edged with pain and fatigue that all the elfroot they could spare was not enough to mend. “I did not sicken then. You fret to little purpose.”

It did not feel like little purpose, with Jowan’s body lying cold in its makeshift crypt, with darkspawn in every shadow, with the world above already fading to a distant, golden memory compared to the endless darkness of the roads beneath it. Fear felt too close to prophecy in such darkness, and she could not quell the frantic pulse in her throat, the desire to wrap her fingers around Morrigan’s shoulders so tight they left their own bruises, a secret sign that she was still breathing and bleeding. That she was still Luna’s.

“I don’t want to lose you.” The words escaped her fatigue-numbed lips before she could bite them back, too close to confession, to the kind of emotion she knew would scare her skittish lover away again. “Is that so hard to believe? I look at Jowan and- and that could have been you, but you think my fear is to little purpose?”

Morrigan’s smile was sharp enough to prick fresh blood from her bruised and battered heart. “I warned you this would go poorly for both of us. Is this where it ends between us, then? Your focus is best left undivided.”

“No.” The exhalation was something close to a gutpunch, an inevitable, pained sound. “How many times do I have to tell you I want you beside me before you believe me? Do you think that if I stopped bedding you now, it would hurt less if I lost you?”

“I am not yours to lose. I am not one of your strays or foundlings, to be tamed and gentled until I hide behind your skirts-”

There it was, that skittish, animal nerve in her golden eyes, the instinct that pulled her away whenever Luna most wanted to hold her close. Not this time. Not after losing Jowan.

She wrapped her fingers around Morrigan’s wrist, a reminder of her presence that she could not ignore.

“Maybe you’re the one who’s captured me,” she said, low and even. Morrigan’s eyes flew wide, and she glanced away, as if ashamed of whatever raw emotion showed on her face. It didn’t matter. What was the point of masks and games and pretty lies, when life beneath the stone was so fragile, a candleflame lit in a place the sun had never reached. “Do you think I could keep walking this road, without you?”

“You walked it long before you knew me, unknowing.”

“I was a dead woman walking before I knew you. You were the first thing I wanted, after I thought I’d lost the knack of wanting itself. I-” Not I love you. There was no space for love, in their tangle of desire and desperate survival instinct, but- “I need you, Morrigan. Not just your magic or your wit or your strength, but- you.”

“Disgusting,” Morrigan said, and kissed her like her words were sweeter than honey.

She held her carefully, that night, no longer willing to press down on the bruises that marked how close she’d come to death, like she was as precious and fragile as the mirror she knew was carefully wrapped in the base of her bag. It did not come naturally to either of them, but tonight, pain was too close to the surface to make a game of pushing each other to its edge.

The camp was silent, her companions either asleep or feigning it as best they could, when she felt Morrigan’s hand card through her hair, the kind of small, tender gesture she seldom made when she knew they were both awake.

“Little fool,” she murmured, “if you fear my loss so terribly, let me soothe your fretting.” She took her hand, slid something with the texture of skin-warmed metal onto her hand. She felt it click into place, just above the wedding ring she had never removed, the ring Nelaros had never had the chance to give her.

Her eyes fluttered open, her lips parted to say- something that would have made Morrigan purse her own lips into that perfect flower of disapproval.

“Do not take this for a love token,” she said, as if pricking a foolish bubble of hope. “If we are separated, and you are hurt or in danger, this ring will tell me, and draw me to you.”

“And you?” she pushed. “How will I know if you are hurt, if you need me?”

Morrigan’s hand stilled in her hair a moment, and she wondered if she’d pushed too far, placed too much pressure on a tender spot when she’d wanted to be gentle, to be comforting and comforted all at once.

“If the ring grows cold upon your finger, you will know my heart is faltering and my magic is weak. But as long as it remains as warm as your own skin, you need not fear for me.”

“I will anyway,” she murmured. “What was it you said? That this was driving you mad? I will never not fear for you, when you are far from me, when I know I could lose you, and perhaps you’re right, that is madness. But I don’t think anyone sane would have ended up here.”

“Perhaps not.” Another lapse into silence, and she might have assumed that Morrigan had fallen asleep against her shoulder, until she said, almost tentatively: “You do worry for me. Strange. I expected it to feel simply… constraining.”

“Has nobody ever worried for you before? Your mother said… something about looking after you, when we left? That you were most precious to her?”

A soft, bitter laugh. “I’m sure it was something of the kind. Luna- Seluna, you mean it, when you say you worry for me? That you… wish me safe?” It was the closest to assurance that she’d ever asked for.

She kept her eyes closed, suddenly too conscious of their closeness, of the strange vulnerability in her voice, of the opening she was leaving for a rejection that might wound her.

“Always, Morrigan,” she replied, simply, and something twisted in her gut at the words, at the soft realisation that she might be the first to tell her this and not mean to make a weapon of it.

She’d left a gap in her own guard, though, because Morrigan’s next words hit her like a blow:

“Then I need you to kill Flemeth.”

She did not expect the word that escaped her like the gasp that chased a gutpunch. “Yes.”

“I… expected you to have more questions.”

Luna felt something twist in her stomach again, some writhing, disgusted rebellion of her body against her heart. “She’s your mother,” she said, with all the vehemence a whisper could hold. “If you want her dead, she has failed you in enough ways to have earned it.”

Morrigan kissed her then, raw and clumsy and desperate in a way she’d never been before, teeth clacking against teeth, hand splaying against her cheek in the dark, until they found each other again. Then, Luna could kiss her every blackening bruise with the gentleness she had never been given, the gentleness she should have been owed. She would never claim it in the light of day, but here, in the endless dark beneath the world, Luna could treat her with care, with tenderness, as if she were far more precious than any of the jewels she coveted.

She could be gentle with her, and try, as she touched her, not to think of how many pieces she would carve Flemeth into for treating her own child with such callousness that she thought love a cancer, and tenderness a bruise. She could try not to think of the child in her belly, try not to promise it I will not fail you so terribly. She still could not bear to face the thing that grew inside her, that would claw and nag at and need her for so many years, and was that not already failing? What kind of a mother wished to deny her child even after it became obvious, even after she’d refused to rid herself of it? Had Flemeth felt Morrigan in her belly as an invading army, and sought to reclaim her skin with lovers she’d slaughtered come morning?

She didn’t know if she was any better than the woman she thought a monster, that she’d sworn to kill for no greater crime than hurting her daughter. She couldn’t know. But she could let Morrigan bury her face against her shoulder, and weep silent and furious and desperate into the darkness, and scatter kisses into her dark hair as if she could fix anything at all. As if, for one night, she could be lover and mother and friend, every kind and tender thing that Morrigan had been denied all her life, that she no longer believed she wanted. As if for one night, she could be enough, to fill all those hollow spaces Flemeth had carved out within her own child, and make the woman she’d become whole again.

Chapter Text

When Morrigan woke, still aching in every part of her body, she’d half-forgotten the whispered promises she’d wrung from Luna. They lingered at the edges of her mind like the fog of a fever dream, burning away beneath the sun of wakefulness. Then she raised her hand to her face, felt the absent space where her mother’s ring had sat, and the misty fragments resolved into crystalline clarity, edges sharpened by pain and embarrassment she’d been too exhausted to register in the moment.

She’d meant to ask someone for this favour eventually, of course. She’d even known that Luna was the most likely of all her companions to grant it, save perhaps Shale, who might have accepted the task purely for the joy of killing. She had never imagined blurting it out as a messy, emotional plea, like a child begging for a lamp to keep the dark from her bedside. Even when she’d been a child in truth, such tactics had never served her — she had not been a wide-eyed, winning little creature like Melia Surana still seemed to be — and as she’d grown…

As she’d grown, the few times she’d seemed to receive something from another, there had always been unseen strings attached. A pretty bauble or sweet pastry from a merchant’s stand in return for a kiss or a grope of her flesh. A drink in a tavern for the expectation of her company, for an hour or for the night. Every begrudging moment of care she’d ever received from her own mother, to be paid back with interest by her body when she was grown.

Luna had kissed her, after she’d agreed, but they had not been stolen kisses from half-willing lips. They’d been feather-light brushes against her hair, her cheeks, her bruised shoulders, small touches offered up like flowers or healing balm, gifts that demanded nothing but her acceptance, like the necklace, like the mirror. Like the promise of her freedom with no other weight placed on the scales, no sacrifice on her part. It felt too easy. Nothing, even the softness of Luna’s breast beneath her cheek, had ever been that easy before. There would be a trap, somewhere, a snare, or a noose about her throat that she did not foresee, in her blind desperation to cut herself free of Flemeth’s web. There was always a price. She simply hadn’t seen it yet.

But they left the ancient thaig, and the shallow grave cut into the rock, and no price emerged from the dark, or from Luna’s tight-pressed lips. She was uncharacteristically quiet, as they moved back into the narrower passages of the Deep Roads, following the strange, skull-like signs Oghren claimed had been left by the Legion of the Dead. They were scraped out of the oily black mold that had begun to creep up the walls, as though the darkspawns’ rot was reclaiming the very bones of the world. A cancer creeping out from its heart, killing the world by inches as it had killed Jowan.

They could all feel it, that slow, sticky seep that grew thicker with every step they took into these roads that had long been left for the darkspawn and the dead. That should have been left for the darkspawn and the dead. Morrigan had never been one to jump at shadows, but every breath or brush of fabric seemed to echo far too loudly in the suffocatingly close corridors, a reminder that these roads had not held the living for centuries. Even the distant shrieks and skitters of the deepstalkers had fallen silent. It was unnerving. She’d never known such endless, hungry quiet. In the most desolate corners of the Wilds, in haunted Brecelian, in abandoned Honnleath, there had still been rustling branches and distant birdsong. Here there was nothing but the sounds of her companions, and she was beginning to flinch at every cough or yawn or gasp, magic crackling beneath her skin like a storm gathering on the horizon.

She was almost itching for a fight, for the moment that storm broke. What she received in its place was far worse.

Melia, soft, sweet voice breaking the suffocating silence for what felt like the first time in what could have been days or weeks in the unchanging, sticky darkness: “Leliana? Is that you?”

“De quoi parles-tu, cherie?” The Orlesian grated against Morrigan’s fraying nerves. It belonged in elegantly-appointed drawing rooms where soft, foolish women like Isolde and Leliana exchanged pleasantries while they slipped poison into each other’s tea, not in the rotting heart of the world, where no words wrought by mortals could ever come close to filling the stinking silence.

“I thought-” A rustle Morrigan mentally matched to the thought of Melia shaking her head sharply. “It’s nothing. I probably imagined it. Jumping at shadows.”

“What did you hear, Mel?” Luna’s voice was calm, casual, perfectly level. Morrigan distrusted it immediately.

“Nothing important,” Melia repeated. “Just- I thought I heard someone singing.”

Another silence fell upon the group, the suffocating kind filled with the deafening not-sound of ten people and a mabari listening intently. Morrigan heard nothing at all. This was not a comfort.

Zevran broke the silence, first with another rustle of skin against cloth — a hand on her arm, perhaps, or her shoulder, if he felt particularly bold, away from Alistair’s jealous gaze. Then: “I hear nothing, pipistrella. Are you certain-?”

“She’s right,” Luna interrupted, still in that too-calm tone of a woman who’d locked away her fear until a more convenient moment to free it. “I hear it too.”

“Darkspawn,” Alistair murmured, a weight in his voice she had never really believed him capable of until now. “More of them than I’ve ever sensed in one place before. Like-”

“A thousand choirs all singing a little offkey,” Melia finished for him, a strange, dreamy quality slipping into her voice. “Was it always this loud for you?”

“Not until now.” At her side, she felt Luna shift from foot to foot, her hand brushing between them as she wrapped her arms across her stomach. “This is- different. There’s something wrong down here.”

“Why doesn’t it feel wrong?” A note of fear had crept into Melia’s voice, but it did not drown out that strange, half-dreaming quality. “Why does it feel like something- calling me?”

“Lights ahead,” Zevran said, and they all fell silent before Alistair or Luna could offer their newest recruit an answer.

Morrigan felt Luna draw away from her side, joining Zevran and Leliana towards the front of their party, and resisted the strange, foolish urge to cling to her arm, to hold her close, safe within the circle of her arms, as she’d so briefly felt when Luna had held her and promised her her freedom. This was a familiar pattern — their scouts taking the lead as the rest of them readied weapons and spells for whatever nightmare was to come. There was no more to fear in her absence now than there had ever been. And still, inexplicably, Morrigan feared for her — that cloying, choking bindweed sensation that had become all too familiar of late, the worse for knowing it was shared and reciprocated.

Was it some strange, slow-moving Blight she’d contracted, when first she’d dared to share Luna’s bed? Flemeth had never warned her the disease could be so contracted, but then, Flemeth had never warned her of such things. She’d had plenty of sage wisdom to pass on regarding the dangers and uses of men, but women… perhaps even Flemeth, ancient and creative in her wisdom and her cruelty, could not have conceived of a woman like Seluna Tabris. Perhaps that was the secret that would allow Luna to slay her where Morrigan could not — that same impossible trick of her nature that let her call wild things from the woodland, and tell stories so sweet that the world itself danced to her tune, placed her beyond even Flemeth’s schemes and prophecies?

It did not place her beyond the Blight in her veins, though, if she heard the Calling along with the other Wardens. Alistair had already moved to the front of the group left behind by the scouts, Melia only a step behind, as if they were drawn by some invisible string to the source of the sound, despite all good sense in the world suggesting they turn back, avoid it.

“Where would we go?” Oghren said, gruffly, when she raised the issue. “The last branch we saw was two rests ago, and the Legion didn’t mark it.”

“That does not mean your darling wife neglected the road less travelled,” she pointed out, but there was only the impatient click of the beads in his moustaches impacting as he shook his head.

“If anyone saw my Branka, or a sign of her passage, it’ll be the Legion,” he insisted.

Always, she was my Branka to him, an oddly possessive turn of phrase for a man who’s wife was his social superior, from what she’d gathered back in Orzammar. There was always a note of pride to it too, as if, by dint of their marriage, all her glories and accomplishments had been transferred to him. She did not care for it, could not imagine anyone enjoying such presumption from a paramour, let alone a spouse. Luna may have bound her up in ropes of bindweed, but she had yet to stake such a claim to her as that.

My Morrigan. It sounded cloying even in her head. It sounded like the kind of thing her mother might have said — a claim in the guise of affection. She might have taken it, once, devoured it like a starving animal permitted a crumb from the master’s table, but she knew better now. She knew that if her mother cared for her at all, she loved her the way the Blight loved the rich earth — a filthy, unwholesome thing, incomplete and unsated until it had devoured its object whole.

But she need not think on such things much longer. Soon, Flemeth would be dead, and Morrigan… Morrigan would never be an object or a vessel again. Luna could carry the reborn god to term. Morrigan’s skin would finally, finally be her own.

The thread of her thoughts was abruptly severed when they reached the tunnel’s end, where the cavern walls collapsed up and out into the infinite dark. Except the dark here was not quite infinite — there was light here, blooming up from below.

At first, she assumed the dull red glow emanated from a stream of molten rock. She’d seen the hot, stinking liquid put to brilliant purpose, lining and warming the streets of Orzammar with dazzling golden light, and it would have been remarkable to see its source. But then she came closer to the edge, the lip that curled from the tunnel’s maw to the head of another impossible stone bridge that spanned the cavern, and realised she saw, not a river of golden light, but a moving forest of ember-bright torches, packed so thickly that they seemed to melt into a single brilliant glow.

And beneath the light of the torches, there were the darkspawn: the hulking shadows of ogres, the swift, slight shadows of genlocks, the violet-lit staves of their emissaries and the skittering movements and shrill cries of the shrieks, casting spindle-legged shadows which climbed the far wall to tower above them all. It was no wonder their scouts had moved no further. Even without the eerie song of the darkspawn ringing in her ears, Morrigan could scarcely bring herself to move any closer to the fearful sight. Logic vainly insisted that the bridge was far above the heads of even the ogres’ horns. Her most primal instincts knew only fight or flight, and neither could save her from the army pouring through the fetid abyss below.

“So many,” Alistair murmured, as Melia breathed: “But where do they come from?”

Luna had braced herself against the slick, oily surface of the cavern wall, rubbing her temples. As Morrigan rested a hand on her spine, she leant into her side, and murmured, as if for the two of them alone: “What’s calling them?”

She spoke her question into the dark, into the echoing void before them. The answer came before the last word had fallen from her lips, and Morrigan discovered she’d never truly known fear until it rose from the abyss on half-rotten wings.

The wind hit them first, and might have swept them from the ledge, had she and Alistair lacked the presence of mind to pull their more diminuitive companions back from the brink. After uncountable days in the eerily still air of the Deep Roads, the rush of air should have been a blessing, but for the stench of tar and smoke and decay it carried with it.

The shape that chased it was impossible to comprehend at first, glimpsed as it was in hellish, half-lit hints of scale and fang and supperating wound, a creature at a scale beyond even Morrigan’s wildest imaginings. She’d seen the high dragon that roosted among the peaks of the Frostbacks, and it had been a majestic sight, but a comprehensible one. A beast of shimmering scale and gossamer wing, but a beast nonetheless, and Morrigan had known beasts all her life. The thing that swept past them in the dark was nothing like any beast she’d ever encountered.

Its scale alone was beyond anything she’d ever imagined — she’d thought Redcliffe’s Great Hall a room of unnecessary proportions, but the Blighted dragon could have filled it twice over and still spilled beyond the walls, filling the castle with the rot that seemed to multiply across every inch of its skin in an unending web of ulcers, boils, and sores that wept thick, black ichor into the the void below.

The archdemon alit on the bridge before them for only a moment, but Morrigan would never forget the wet death-rattle that ripped free of its throat to shake the cavern’s walls, the flare of violet fire it sent up to the screams and whoops of its dreadful army below. Nothing in nature or in magic should burn that colour, and yet, she saw it rise, a brilliant beacon from another world, and she could see why the men of Old Tevinter had once called it a god.

Urthemiel. Once it had been the god of beauty, of shining palaces and poetry and art, all the pretty things that had had no place or purpose in Morrigan’s life until Seluna had heaped them into her lap and said You deserve beautiful things. You deserve to be happy.

There was nothing left of its beauty now. There was only the Blight in its purest, bloodiest incarnation. This was the terror that toppled empires, that gave the Grey Wardens all the power they wielded. This was the sickness that had eaten Jowan from the inside in a matter of hours. This was what dwelt under her sweet Seluna’s skin, bloomed black beneath every lovebite she’d ever bestowed, every mark she’d left on her to stake a claim, however small, to her lover. No matter how many marks she left, the Blight had had her first, would devour her whole in the end, leave her as hollow a shell of herself as the ghoulish dwarven boy she’d begged to return to Orzammar at her side.

She’d been such a fool. She’d known, in theory, that the Archdemon existed, that it must be slain, in order to end the Blight. But she’d seen Luna kill monsters before: hurlocks and ogres and demons of rage and desire, and she’d thought: An archdemon cannot be such a fearful thing. They have died before.

Now it was before her, she could not imagine how anyone had ever summoned the hubris to even attempt to slay the previous archdemons. Their venture suddenly felt as hopeless, as foolish, as a nest of fieldmice attempting to slay a bear. The only thing they- that anyone could do, in the face of an undead, undying dragon-god, was to run, and hide, and hope to any god or spirit kind enough to listen that it would not find you.

But Luna could not run from the Blight that bubbled in her veins, and would not run, even if Morrigan begged her, while there was still the slightest hope of something left to save. And if Luna stayed and fought, whether she won or lost, she would die, without the ritual. Without the reason Flemeth had set Morrigan’s feet on this path to begin with.

She’d known there was no happy ending, for a Warden and a witch. This was not one of Leliana’s fairytales, where heroes found happiness and endings were never bloody. But now, facing their true foe for the first time, she felt like a child who’d finally had the truth of the world revealed to her wilful, disbelieving eyes. She’d let herself fall too easily into Luna’s lovely lies, where she could have softness and beauty and protection, all the foolish, frivolous things her mother had told her a thousand times were fictions, were not for girls like her.

She had thought herself worldly-wise, but she’d let herself believe they could continue as they were for another week, another month, an endless infinity of shifting camps and shared blankets. Reality roared on the bridge before them, wreathed in violet flame. This was the inevitable end of their story, the black maw of death waiting to swallow them whole or rot them from within. What price would she pay, to cut both of them cleanly from its belly?

The part of her that spoke in her mother’s voice whispered the answer she hadn’t wanted to hear until now: Anything. She hated it. It was true.