#<- sort of. i made him a codex entry

[calicostorms]

hi. hello. um. for the codex prompts- 1, 4, 6, 12, 13 for meraad. thank you ily

1: a conversation overheard about your oc

[Conversation between two Inquisition scouts]

How odd— did you see that qunari the other evening?

The one with the beard? What's so odd— he looks like any other oxman.

Yes, him. I heard he has a wife and is flirting with that Tranquil gardener.

Truly? Maybe he doesn't know they can't feel like us.

Rumors have it that they have kids together, too. A shame for his poor wife.

4: a letter from your oc to their love interest

Codex: Inquisition Agent's Letter

[A letter found in the rotunda in the Skyhold garden. Its written in functional, blocky script on basic Inquisition stationary and smells heavily of elfroot and embrium]

Kadan,

All is well. We have at last been sent somewhere warm and dry. All of our mercenary band should return in good spirits with a heavy tan. If all goes well with the next mission, we will return within a week from your receiving of this letter.

I have packed enough sun balm for those who forget theirs more often than not. I often find the constellation of draconis (or that's what the southerners call it— I am unsure how to translate the Qunari word for it) and imagine you are likely still gardening high in the mountains while we rest. The sunsets here are much faster than further south.

You would like it here far more than I do, I suspect. The weather is closer to your home than mine and the dry heat does little but cause me irritation. The creatures here, however, have been fascinating. Some look like a very small, spiky dragons and are called varghests. I have enclosed a sketch of one such creature which I observed for several hours yesterday.

I look forward to returning to you when this mission finishes and am missing you greatly. Shaye and the rest pass on their well wishes as well.

Yours,

Meraad Adaar

6: someone describing a time your oc helped them

Codex: Archer's Unsent Letter

[A crisply written but rushed letter on brown parchment dated for the 3rd of Harvestmere. It is unsent and occasionally dotted with small spots of moisture]

Hi Fanora,

Sorry for the lateness of this letter, things are hectic here. I joined up with the Inquisition recently have got put right to work. I'm doing ok; it's an honest job and pays more than hunting my kills in the forests ever did. I'm getting paid the big bucks now to shoot down all manner of weird beasts, human, animal, or in between.

Last week I joined a Qunari mercenary band that works for the Inquisition on a dragon hunt of all things with a couple of other agents I've become friends with, Amund and Sidony. Well, I don't think Sidony likes me so much, but she's like that with everyone. I think. I almost got injured but one of those qunari we traveled with pushed me out of the way just in time for the dragonling to miss me and my bow!

I got hurt a little, but that qunari was watching out for me most of the time. Maybe his name was Meraad? I should ask the Ambassador to thank him for me if she can find out who he is. The rest of the injuries are just scrapes.

I hope your Clan is well, even if they never wanted to take me in. I'm using what you've taught me for good now. I miss you.

Dareth shiral,

Hall

12: your oc overheard while drunk: skipped, I can't think of anything atm

13: transcript for an interview with your oc: skipped, I have a separate interview thing I'm working on for him already

[northern-passage]

[ID: a banner graphic showing the open water of the sea. The water is dark and choppy, with a gray, overcast sky overhead, and fog obscuring the horizon. Text at the center of the image reads: “The Nothern Passage, Chapter 2: Part 1.” Above the text is a vector of two swords crossed in an X.]

The Northern Passage has been updated!

01.10.23: The first part of chapter 2 is now available to play over on itch.io. This includes the Blackwater route only. To access the new content, ensure that you choose to stay in Blackwater rather than leave for Highfell. Saves should work - though I advise you to still keep a save at the end of chapter 1, since any later updates to chapter 2 will require you to play from the start of the chapter again.

Along with the new content, various edits include:

The companions will now introduce themselves with their pronouns, as well as various other characters - Branwen, Mal, Hawkell, etc.

Edited the input process for hunters that use no pronouns. This should help clean up any clunky sentences where the companions talk to/about the hunter as well as allow for the hunter to properly introduce themself with just their name.

A new codex entry on Magic.

Alchemists can now choose to have hand tattoos (though the continuity for this has yet to be fixed).

New content warnings include animal death. This is only in one path, and it is avoidable, relying entirely on the player choosing whether it happens or not.

As always, please feel free to message me here with feedback or if you run into any typos, errors, or bugs, and I’ll work on getting them patched out for you all as soon as possible.

Play it here!

Project Intro | FAQ | Patreon | Tip Jar

Notes under the cut.

Going into chapter 2, there are going to be a few inconsistencies to be aware of, mainly when it comes to the combat - I’ve overhauled how it works, as well as made some adjustments to the magic and alchemy specializations. I’ve wanted to keep my primary focus on chapter 2, so I have not gone back in to make the more extensive edits to the earlier fight with the wraith, so please just bear with me for now! It’s on my list of things to do - it will either be the next update, or the one following the Blackwater part 2 update.

There also may be some inconsistencies around Duncan, and the way the characters talk about him. I’ve been working a lot on Duncan to make him a bit more interesting, but again, just like with the combat it’s just not something I’ve gone back to edit in the earlier chapters just yet.

And finally, the codex and character page have not been updated (aside from the Magic entry). There are a few other new codex entries visible, however they are currently empty. The codex as well as the character page have been frustrating me for a while, and I’m trying to figure out exactly what it is I want to do with them... so for the time being, the relationship statuses on the character page are going to be inaccurate, though your displayed top trait should still be accurate. It won’t lock in until chapter 3, but you can get an idea of what you’re trending towards by checking the character page. I still plan to add the hunter’s physical description to that page as well, I know a lot of you have been asking for it, and I promise it’s definitely something I plan to add once I sort those pages out.

Otherwise, I just want to say thank you all for your incredible patience waiting for this update! I’m very excited to finally share it with you :-)

[shift-shaping]

How many of these wolves are actually 'dreaded'?

The Dalish and wolf statues go hand-in-hand (hand-in-paw?). All the way back to Origins we see depictions of wolves sitting outside Dalish camps, warning them that Fen'Harel is always lurking about to tempt them with Evil, or something. We also find these handsome beasts outside of and at the entrance to various elven temples and fortifications (see: Lost Temple of Dirthamen, Suledin Keep, etc.), as well as looming over the entire region in the Exalted Plains.

When asked about the ubiquity of wolf statues, David Gaider had this to say:

You have to remember that the Dalish honor Fen’Harel just as they do the rest of the elven pantheon — they simply do so differently. Statues/shrines to the other elven gods would be found within the clan’s camp, while a statue of Fen’Harel would be placed outside the camp, facing away. There’s no point in lugging around that statue with them if it wasn’t still a way of honoring him. Work backwards, and you’ll see a version of that in the Dales when the elves still ruled there. Monuments to Fen’Harel would still exist, and would be far more common outside of the settlements than within them. Or it was one of the placeables that the artists made for their “elven complement”, and they only had so many and thus had to use it often. Take your pick. :) EDIT: I should point out that the Dales regions were Sheryl Chee’s handiwork, and it’s entirely possible there’s a completely different lore reason for the wolf statues which has nothing to do with Fen’Harel (despite my assumption). If so, she’s the one who would know, and not I.

Okay, cool. So based on all of this information, which is documented on the DA wiki, I assumed that all of the wolf statues we see are depictions of Fen'Harel. But now I'm replaying DAI, and I got this codex entry (Knight's Guardian) in the Emerald Graves:

Traveling through the Emerald Graves in the Dales, one will see dozens of carven stone wolves. The Dalish call these the Knights’ Guardians. In the days of elven Halamshiral, wolf companions walked alongside Emerald Knights, never leaving the side of their chosen knight. Wolf and elf would fight together, eat together, and when the knights slept, wolves would guard them. The statues were erected in memory of their unbreakable bond. —An excerpt from In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar by Brother Genitivi

Maybe Brother Genitivi is just wrong? It feels like a pretty specific thing to be wrong about, but codex entries are meant to be subjective. There is no obvious difference between the wolf statues in the Emerald Graves and the wolf statues anywhere else in Inquisition (maybe for technical reasons). So what is going on here?

Brother Genitivi is wrong; these are actually depictions of Fen'Harel

Gaider is wrong, as his edit allows; many of the wolf statues we find outside the Emerald Graves are actually depictions of Knight's Guardians

Both are sort of right; only the wolf statues in the Emerald Graves depict Knight's Guardians, the others depict Fen'Harel. Maybe the wolf statues in the Emerald Graves are supposed to have a different look, but don't due to technical/development reasons.

I think it's easy to forget that the elves have had two nations by the time of Inquisition: Arlathan, which we talk about more often in part because Solas, and the Dales. We know about how the current Dalish (and to some extent alienage) elves feel about Fen'Harel, but what about the original Dalish elves? The story of The Courser and the Wolf, as relayed by Merrill in DA2, is relatively recent, speaking of clans and Keepers. When did the Dalish turn their back on wolves? What did the original Dalish elves think about Fen'Harel and the other members of the elven pantheon?

When did all of the wolves become dreaded?

[sanshofox]

Ok, so after a lot of going through the lore again to remember all kinds of dragon age facts (because let’s be honest…it’s a huge and complex kinda lore with lots of details and also lots of riddles) and watching/reading lore theory stuff, I guess I kinda have my idea that is the course of events, what caused solas to create the veil. So please skip if you consider this as kind of a spoiler. I try to keep it as short as possible.

How red lyrium came to be is still unknown. If artificial or natural is a big secret, but we know that there is the abyss or void where it lingers and the forgotten gods are kept. It never came into touch with the outside world until the elvhen gods (old gods) started to meddle with it.

The elvhen gods were always described as smth pristine and sophisticated, but throughout the games you see and read stuff that predicts otherwise. Could it be that the red lyrium corrupted them over a long time and then made them hunger for more power (as described in inquisition and also a description that as an example fits i.e. for meredith and her red lyrium corruption)?

My guess that it all started with ghilannain becoming part of the pantheon through relations with andruil. She is too often mentioned in inquisition and content outside the video game series as to not be an important key part in what transpired. She is a scientist of sorts, creating all sorts of new stuff and when you read through codex entries, the book „tevinter nights“ or look at the murals in inquisition and other tidbits in DLCs it sounds more like she was a mad scientist without morals or ethics, creating various monsters and thirsting for more. Murals showing creatures and elvhen slaves in red colors being transported to what is assumed: ghilannain. What if she needed red lyrium for her experiments? There is a dwarf in the games that says that through red lyrium he created his best weapons. But did she start it or get corrupted first?

We know of a story within the games that andruil hunted for the forgotten ones in the void and came back crazier each time. Got an armor made from parts of the void (red lyrium of course) and brought plague to her lands. The other gods started to fear her, so mythal ambushed her and took her powers and knowledge where to find the void and peace came back. But did andruil enter the void just for the hunt? Or did she bring ghilannain some from one of her journeys as a gift? Doesn’t matter how but both were close to each other and it somehow transferred, driving ghilannain slowly insane.

Two other elvhen gods often mentioned outside of andruil and ghilannain are dirthamen and falondin. Dirthamen depicted with what seems to be ghilannain in some murals. Dirthamen also being the twin to falondin. So maybe a accidental chain reaction in corrupting them. Solas doesn’t speak kindly of neither of them. So we can assume that these four were involved in mythal‘s killing, as solas said „hungry for other elvhen gods‘ power“, due to red lyrium infection. But why did mythal get rid of andruil‘s power, but not ghilannain‘s then? It was mentioned that ghilannain lived far apart from other elvhen and deep underground. I guess that is how she and her corruption managed to go unnoticed for long. Killing mythal was described as smth like treachery and an order. So maybe one day ghilannain was under suspicion and she in her paranoia ordered mythal’s death (by presumably dirthamen?). Or these four corrupted elvhen gods conspired together.

Then we all know what happened: Solas acted out of revenge and created the veil. But what if solas caused the true red lyrium blight? Ancient texts and murals show elvhen and/or elvhen slaves fighting a war in times of the elvhen pantheon. If Solas alone fought with an army against the elvhen gods to be free of their tyranny he wouldn’t have a chance. So what if mythal once told him of the void and he up and used red lyrium as a weapon himself against them to have a chance(that for example could be for one why he created the red lyrium idol??)? Causing a wide field of corruption. Him realizing what is actually happening and then closing off the rest of thedas from this corrupted area by creating the veil. We have three different scenes in inquisition indicating this:

1. cole questioning solas wanting to do the right thing and not knowing and solas acknowledging this sadly like „I was young and stupid“

2. corypheus saying to the inquisitor that there was no golden city but instead only corruption and emptyness

3. solas apologizing to mythal/flemmeth saying smth of the sorts of „I slumbered for too long and now it can‘t be contained anymore“ As if he knew of the blight and wanted to wake up earlier to have more time to find a solution

My guess for it to get this far is, because of their powers it took longer for the elvhen „gods“ to be corrupted so they couldn’t and, ultimately when fully corrupted, wouldn’t realize what red lyrium entails. It was talked about more than once in dragon age lore that dragon blood cured someone from blight. But when we see corypheus‘s dragon or the archdemons it can still happen, but lower. Which also would explain why yavana protects and raises dragons (also her needing alistairs blood to raise them because maric‘s bloodline has dragon blood in it because of some historical figure. So alistair killing yavana may have fucked up the cure for the future.)

In their hubris they thought it would be just another tool to serve them. From all we know red lyrium was smth unknown in that time.

[thedragonagebigbang]

Bang Creator Interview: Tumblr: @teamdilf  |  AO3: Missjlh

The Collaboration period has begun! In these quiet months before works are due, we want to foster a sense of excitement, camaraderie, and celebration among our participants. To that end, all participants were given the option of a formal interview by our mod, Dema, or an informal “ask-game” survey. We hope you enjoy getting to know our phenomenal creators as much as we have!

Q&A with Missjlh

Who was your first DA protagonist?

Iris Lavellan! I’d been relatively new to roleplaying games when I first picked up Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the ones I’d played previously focused more on exploration than character development. I was so pleasantly surprised by the opportunities to interact with the companions, and the world at large, and how often I was able to do the roleplaying part of the game. 

With only the knowledge of the Dragon Age universe that I got from the little blurb about Dalish elves in the character creator, I’d decided that Iris would probably only romance another elf. I also roleplayed her as a more antagonistic character to those around her than any other character I’d roleplayed in a video game or DND before then (tough because I mostly played the goodie two-shoes sorts!). It was an interesting challenge to play a sort of character I’d never played before, and sometimes make decisions that were in-character for her, but not the sort that are conducive to making friends with certain members of the inner circle. 

She romanced Solas, and I was captivated by him, the vibe of their relationship in general and the tragedy of it. It really hooked me and got me invested in the universe at large. I do wish I’d read the codex entries a bit more thoroughly in-game because the after-credits stinger where Solas’ true identity left me scratching my head a bit until I looked it up, but once I read the implications, I was even more hooked on their doomed love story because the notion of Iris spending a year walking with an ancient god by her side, teasing/bantering with him, and falling in love with him only made the story even better in my books.

When did you start writing fanfic?

I was 13 and wrote my very first fanfic in a notebook that I still have hidden away somewhere in my home! My first published fanfic came when I was 15. My first foray into writing fanfiction as an adult came in late 2019, but I didn’t start writing in earnest until the early days of the pandemic in 2020. The world was a scary place and I’d found myself doom scrolling, so I started writing to keep myself off social media, and then I never stopped!

How do you come up with titles?

This is where I tell on myself and admit that my method for coming up with titles is chaotic a good 90% of the time: five minutes before I hit ‘publish’, with my fic/first chapter ready to go in AO3, I sit there and ponder what the title of my fic should be. To be clear, I write a lot of long fics - 75k plus works and I always draft them nearly in-full before I start publishing. I have a plethora of time to decide on a title! 

Do I? LOL no. Sometimes, a flash of inspiration comes to me (always late at night; usually when my partner is coming to bed and wakes me up when the bedroom door opens) and I come up with a title in advance. Those are precious baby unicorns in my list of AO3 works.

[3gremlins]

i'm certainly not a deep dive lore master or anything (i super appreciate the people who are tho. like that's one of my favorite ways to consume lore, have other people tell me about it <3 ), but i haven't seen anyone else mention about Ghilan'nain and the halla. here's my maybe crackpot theory :) (or maybe not, idk i sort of assumed everyone thought this too but i haven't seen it mentioned in evanuris discussions that i've come across at all) (ill try to cite what sources i remember off the top of my head but i haven't done a full replay in awhile)

since the reveals about Ghilan'nain making monsters out of people (in tevinter nights mostly, i'm not up on the comics), I've always kind of assumed the halla WERE also once people. Like twisted into the beautiful deer and the way the dalish care for them is wrapped up in that, like they vaguely remember that the halla were once their loved ones (the way the dalish worship only partially remembered bits of who the evanuris were). We also learned from Trespasser that the Evanuris were fairly cruel and enslaved their people (and also presumably USED the elves for a variety of unsavory things) .

Also we do get the new versions of the halla in the horrors of hormak story like Ghil was iterating on a previous idea (as all artists do, like okay sure the pretty deer were nice, but what if i added more INSECT? XD)

The way the dalish refer to the halla has always been a little off to me, even for a sacred animal. They're more integrated into the clan- they're not a separate entity to be worshipped or revered. Afaik they don't ever eat or kill halla on purpose* (which does fit with some sacred animals in certain cultures for sure, but it feels more personal with the dalish somehow? most cultures where there's a sacred animal you don't eat, it's because it's special to a particular god).

from inquisition: "The first thing you must understand about the halla is that they are not our servants. They are not our pets. They are our brothers and sisters"

While they are heavily associated with Ghil, they're not really part of her worship, they're kind of separate from it (as far as we've seen). You have halla keepers/herders in dao but they're not really shown in the other 2 games- mostly the whole clan seems to care for them communally).

I believe merrill mentions (in da2 i think?) that without the halla, the dalish are nothing like the clan can't survive without them, they're so integral to their culture. Obviously this is partially how they move around and they're particularly suited to pulling the caravans through deep forests etc, but maybe there's something more to it.

They've also littered lots of bread crumbs of bits of dalish culture that the dalish have pieced together that we now know to be incorrect (or at least not the whole story)- the fenharel statues, the vallaslin, the evanuris themselves, the veil etc.

These are all half-remembered things- they remember that they were important/related to certain gods, but not why or how (as solas mentions in ambient dialogue "the dalish remember fragments of fragments")

there's also the codex entry on ghilan'nain in dai with the story andruil turning her into the first halla and leading Andruil back to the hunter who hurt her (tho she'd previously cursed him so it def feels like there's more to that story than the parable lets on)

"And since that day, the halla have guided the People, and have never led us astray, for they listen to the voice of Ghilan'nain"

i've seen a couple people point to this story as evidence that maybe andruil made the halla instead, tho we know that Ghil was making monsters for Andruil specifically to hunt so I think it could go either way? Maybe it's both.

The evanuris also feel a bit greek god inspired, and Andruil ofc has parallels in Artemis directly. Who was also always turning people into deer and things, so that could support an Andruil making people into halla theory instead. It could even be slightly less nefarious than Ghil making monsters, perhaps Andruil would turn favored subjects into halla as a warped "reward". ( <- i have no evidence for this outside of that one story but it is an interesting thought). Or maybe also to hunt them, could see that being a thing.

This would still explain why the Halla are so attuned to the dalish particularly (and vise versa) and also give some more of that good crunchy HORROR reveals to their interpretations of the past.

Either way, I think there's SOMETHING going on with the halla and I hope we get some more dalish culture reveals with the Veilguard a bit ( even if it's just in supplemental material that comes out with it or like a codex entry).

*halla leather *is* used as a crafting material in dai but this might be separate (gameplay vs lore). in dao, if Elora's halla has to be put down, she only gives you its antlers (which would probably have been shed naturally anyway since they're fairly deer-like). If you attack/accidentally kill the golden one in front of the exalted plains dalish in DAI, i believe they did attack you on sight (but that might also have been a bug, i remember that quest being tricky- like if the wolves or rando bandits attacked & killed the halla, inky still got the blame) ** I'd also love to see Merrill again like all of the events in DAI/DATV would be her jam like I just want to hear her thoughts/have her geek out a bit even when the world is ending (i have limited hope we will tho, since she was written by mary kirby T.T tho she also wrote varric and we still have him around so idk maybe)

[shuttershocky]

Finished the FF16 demo and while I had a decent time with the combat (don't believe the internet though this is hardly DMC level of combat don't expect that sort of depth) I found—to my horror—that I did not care about anything that was going on in the game.

Nothing about its setting felt remotely interesting, none of the characters are any fun to watch, I cannot tell you a single personality trait of any of the cast members. FF15 ran circles around 16 personality wise in its first 5 minutes where you just push a car with the bros than 16 did in 3 hours of its demo. Every character can be boiled down to "some guy with a thick british accent".

It takes itself so seriously, and not in the charmingly hammy way Final Fantasy takes itself so seriously. There's blood and gore and heaps of Clive saying "Fuck!" and two pairs of characters that almost fuck so you know it's all adult and this ain't your mama's Final Fantasy back when they would censor Barrett by having him say "sh't", but shit dude you gotta give me a reason to care first and playing through all that while also reading every lore entry in their big codex that you can check anytime during cutscenes* never gave me a reason to care.

I don't like any of this. I'm pretty damn easy to please (I mean, I'm a fan of FF15, you don't have to be a very good or even finished game to please me) but this was some PGR vibes the way I was satisfied with the combat but was completely uninterested with the world and story no matter how much I tried to pay attention.

It's obviously very competently made. The accessibility options are especially impressive: you can customize SO much from getting a slowdown dodge prompt to actively dodge attacks yourself even with bad timing to just autododging and autocomboing if you really can't do real time combat, to having visual indicators for sounds from behind the camera if you are hard of hearing, to having a dedicated button telling you where to go in case you forget, there's a lot of good stuff in here. It makes my apathy with the game all the more frustrating.

I'm pretty disappointed. I really wanted to see a singleplayer story made by the FF14 Shadowbringers creative team, since I keep hearing it's peak FF but can't play it for myself, but this did not excite me even a little.

I suddenly appreciate FF7R more now. I got to hand it to the weird Destiny ghosts I was too busy getting mad at them to ever actually get bored.

* actually kind of a rad idea btw. Getting to press a button and get an explanation in case you don't remember who this guy in the current cutscene is is a really good feature for working adults that can't really play through a game straight and remember every detail.

[redlyriumidol]

Something that I think would be fun in dreadwolf:

Kind of a naval/pirate-y thing. Perhaps we travel between locations via ship and ISABELA is the captain/naval advisor/involved somehow. In DAI you find a codex entry written by her about the raiders, of particular interest is Ianto, who is mentioned recurringly:

The one you should really watch out for is Ianto. They call him the "Talon," the "Terror of Llomerryn," but most often, "That Crooked Bastard What Might Kill You in Your Sleep." Slavery, murder, torture... nothing is too much for Ianto. He'd traffic in souls, if he discovered a way to extract them from people. In fact, I'm sure he has some Tevinter cronies working on that right this second. I'm sure there's coin to be made in stolen souls somewhere. The Imperium, probably.

So there's some potential involvement with Tevinter, which suggests this plotline could appear at some point in da4. He's been mentioned since DA2 which makes me think his reign of terror is a plot point they want to pick up at some point.

You find this entry when talking to Varric about the DA2 companions, but Isabela's the only one that prompts a codex entry. Of all the DA2 companions I think the most likely to appear is Isabela, because it seems like she's been set up for an appearance since dai- she's an admiral so she's now in a position of power.

In Tevinter Nights we see the involvement of the Lords of Fortune (a Rivaini faction), the Antivan Crows, and obviously the Qunari who have at this point invaded Tevinter, as we know they have unparalleled naval power. All of those elements are implied to be involved in the next game, as well as obviously Tevinter- Minrathous, where we'll be spending a lot of time, is also a port city.

I think it's possible there will be some sort of naval element to da4 and if so I think it would be amazing for Isabela to be a sort of "advisor", or the admiral of your fleet, perhaps with a "war table" mechanic similar to the one in ac4 where you send your fleet off to do things. I doubt we'd get to control ships like in black flag, I just think it's a likely method of moving around the wider map (rather than trudging across the country)

Mostly I just want Isabela to appear :(

[shivunin]

A Golden Bell Hung In my Heart

For Kat (@star--nymph)—happy birthday! When I was trying to think of what to write you, I couldn’t think of anything more fitting than, well…this. (And here is the AO3 version, cus it's loooong) 

I’m sure you know where this is going by the title, but if not I pose the question: What if Amalthea had been the one to define what her “self” was? What if Lír didn’t have to let her go after all? And, of course—what is the point of immortality if you don’t get to choose how to spend it?

I hope I’ve done your loves justice and that this is coherent. Thank you for trusting me with them, my dear, and again—happy birthday!! May it be ever better than the last. 

"Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart; I would tear my body to pieces to call you once by your name."

—The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle 

“Ghilan'nain's curse took hold, and the hunter found that he was unable to hunt. Ashamed, the hunter swore he would find Ghilan'nain and repay her for what she had done to him. He blinded her first, and then bound her as one would bind a kill fresh from the hunt. But because he was cursed, the hunter could not kill her. Instead, he left her for dead in the forest. And Ghilan'nain prayed to the gods for help. Andruil sent her hares to Ghilan'nain and they chewed through the ropes that bound her, but Ghilan'nain was still wounded and blind, and could not find her way home. So Andruil turned her into a beautiful white deer—the first halla.”

—From Codex entry: Ghilan'nain: Mother of the Halla

“Unicorn, mermaid, lamia, sorceress, Gorgon—no name you give her would surprise me, or frighten me. I love whom I love…You have no power over anything that matters.”

—The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle 

There was no sense in hunting within the bounds of the silver halla’s forest. 

Everyone knew that. The great halla’s forest was a protected space—peaceful, enchanted, even sacred, in its way. A hunter would find no quarry there, nor a tracker prey to flush beyond its boundaries. 

The forest’s trees and glens rang with the songs of birds, its grounds and bushes thick with the creatures of the wood. What sport they might make of each other went unmonitored, for even in such a place it was not the right of any creature to dictate the nature of another. The creatures might fall to tooth and claw, for that was their nature; almost none of them fell to arrow and sling, nor knife and spear. 

The streams of the wood ran with clear water in the spring and summer, thickening and hardening in the fall and winter until their surfaces were smooth as glass and just as transparent. The leaves on the trees were beautifully green, untainted by spore or rot until the moment they turned yellow or amber or brown, then drifted away to the forest floor. The berries grew thick on the bushes, and the halla and scampering creatures grew fat on the fruit. Winters were harsh, but there seemed always to be just the right sort of underbrush to huddle beneath for warmth, just the right sort of outcropping in the cliffs to make one’s den. 

On calm nights, the wind itself seemed made of song. When it played over the branches and leaves of that place, any human who’d been allowed so far might hear flutes or violins instead. A fanciful idea, perhaps, but anyone who spent the night within its borders would have difficulty denying the truth: that the land itself had its own music, even beyond the sweet songs of the birds in the trees. If one listened carefully, if one had a true enough heart, one might even hear it. 

The statues had been there longest. The owls, the great stags with their proud heads, the watchful wolves—they’d stood on the walls of ruins even longer than the trees. If they’d been possessed of memory, they might have recalled a time of blood and screams, a time when elves had fallen by the score and had never risen again. A thousand years gone and more, those days, but the statues might have remembered. 

There were other things they might have known, too. They might have remembered a time when the great halla who’d dwelled there had trotted past the dens of the bears without a second glance, when she’d sang of water over stone, of tree roots reaching deep, of the ponderous pace of the years. Most critically—the statues would have been able to tell the animals who dwelled in that wood that the silver halla who wandered the wood now was not the same as the one who’d once guarded these borders.

No; despite the peace of the forest, despite its prosperity and harmony, it was a different creature who stepped in the bracken and trotted through the streams now. Her body was—to her occasional, distant discomfort—much the same as the one who’d once stepped lightly over the undergrowth. The same strong legs carried her forth, and the same twisting, silver horns graced either side of her brow. For this creature, all was much as it had been for her predecessor. But her heart—

Her heart bade her slow when she saw the bear cubs tumbling down a hillside, their watchful mothers nearby. Her heart ached with a wound no balm could ever heal when she saw the swans gliding upon the lake, pair by pair, their little cygnets gliding along in a line behind them. When humans made their careful way into the wood, bowing their heads before taking careful handfuls of berries from the bushes or curling bark from the willows, the silver halla found herself lingering just out of sight to hear their voices, to listen to the sounds of their laughter. 

She’d heard laughter like that once. It had been deeper, though; she was certain of it. Laughter, the flash of gold on crimson in the sunlight, and—

Gone. 

Whatever it was, it was gone now.

When she sang, she did not sing of the forest, whole and hearty around her. She did not sing of slow growth through the soil and the earth. Instead, she hummed the tunes of humans and elves, love ballads and lullabies and laments alike until she could not hear the songs that the woodlands sang around her.

The land was peaceful, calm, and whole. 

And Eurydice dwelled there profoundly, completely alone. 

|

Before

It seemed like the whole world was full of sunlight for the Commander and Inquisitor since the birth of their daughter. 

The two of them spent most of their time in her quarters, for it had only been a week and Eurydice still needed more rest than usual. Little Psyche was a source of fascination for both of them, for all that she spent most of her hours sleeping. There—the little curl of her mouth. Could that be a smile? Or—when she waved her hand, was that her reaching for her mamae’s curls? 

But, for all that they were cozy and happy in their rooms, they could not stay there forever. Nor would they want to; with Corypheus so newly dead, there was plenty of cleanup yet to do. There were experiments she’d put on hold in her workshop, and small mountains of paperwork in Cullen’s office to sift through. 

And then there were the gifts. 

They’d poured in from everywhere, piling higher and higher until Josephine had, somewhat desperately, sectioned off part of the great hall for their keeping. Unfortunately for the happy parents, some of the gifts were useful, so they could not simply get rid of the lot without checking. It would be painfully inconsiderate to ask poor Josie to look through them and send her thanks in their stead, so in the end the task fell to Cullen and Eurydice. 

There were bright spots: a little cloth wrap sent by one of the western Dalish clans, intended for carrying the babe comfortably on one’s back; well-cured leather from the farmers of Redcliffe made from the wolves who’d once hunted them, some of it cut into neat strips for weaving. One of the mages’ groups had even sent a small orb which, when touched, illuminated the walls with swathes of stars that perfectly matched the nighttime sky. When Eury had touched it, Psyche had been in her arms. The little one had reached for the swirls of color, making a soft noise that might have been wonderment, and Eurydice had been hard-pressed to do anything but set it aside to keep for her. 

Most of it was utterly useless, precisely the sort of things nobility sent to each other to garner social capital: ornate rocking chairs it would hurt to sit in, teething rings of ivory and gold, a cradle with so many gilded faces on it that it was sure to give any child nightmares, and on and on. These things, they were more than happy to record and rid themselves of by whatever method seemed quickest. Useful metals were melted down for reuse, books on the care and keeping of children were foisted upon the keep’s librarian, and the fussy infants’ clothing was unstitched and put back together in new shapes for more practical purposes. 

But—they still had to sort through it all. 

Cullen stood on the sidelines now, unarmored and unarmed, Psyche snuggled into his shoulder. Eury pressed one last kiss to their daughter’s cheek, her eyes closing for a moment at the contact. 

Maker, how he loved her; it still took him by surprise sometimes, as if  his love of her was a force that knocked him breathless to the ground. It had been a wonder to watch her grow round with their babe; it was a wonder now, every day, to watch her be a mother. As he had many times since he’d first seen their daughter cradled in Eury’s arms, he thought how painfully sweet it was to hold something so soft, so breakable, and know that she depended on you utterly. To know that the whole glory of her life still lay before her, every possibility untested, all of it yet new and fresh with no mistakes nor faults to mar its potential. 

“Let me know when you’re ready to trade,” he told Eury, catching her mouth with the briefest of touches. It would be too easy to get caught in each other, even now. If he let himself hold on to her, he would never want to let her go and there was still plenty of work to be done. 

His love nodded, her mind plainly elsewhere. She stroked a hand over Psyche’s curls and stepped into the hills and valleys of the gifts sent for the Inquisitor’s first child. 

“How is the little one this morning?” Josephine asked, stepping up beside him and smiling at the babe pressed to Cullen’s shoulder. 

“Quite well,” he said, smoothing a hand over Psyche’s back, “She slept all night, so Eurydice did as well. It was much needed.”

“I am not surprised,” Josephine said, “It is a tiring thing, to have a newborn. I remember when my Mama had Yvette that not one of us slept easy for what felt like a month. We threw a party for the family the first time she slept through the night. A very quiet one.”

Cullen chuckled, eyes still following his beloved. Eurydice sidestepped an ornate statue of what looked like an irate toddler and flicked the hem of her skirt to the side just before it would have been caught on the edge of a surprisingly realistic rocking horse. 

“Yes,” he told Josephine, “My youngest sister used to cry constantly when she wasn’t held. I would carry her up and down the hallway until she calmed just to give my mother a break. Thankfully, our Psyche seems to sleep well so far.”

Josie chuckled and adjusted her grip on her writing board. The smell of breakfast cooking began to drift up from the kitchens, and Cullen’s stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in quite some time. Amongst the gifts, Eury held up a loose, soft-looking dress and tilted her head consideringly before tossing it in the direction of the things she wanted to keep. 

“Our Inquisitor seems to be recovering well,” Josie went on, bending her head to jot something down on her topmost page.

“She is,” Cullen said, watching as Eurydice considered an ornate, beribboned box. 

“Motherhood suits her,” Josephine said absently, and her quill scratched over the paper. In Cullen’s arms, Psyche stirred, making a soft noise of protest. 

“Shh, shh, shh,” he murmured, rocking her slightly, and she subsided against his shoulder. 

How soft she was, and how warm; he’d forgotten how boneless infants seemed, how vulnerable and fragile they felt to hold. Perhaps the effect was magnified now because she was his own. Cullen did not know; but holding her now woke a fierce, protective streak in him. He wanted to clutch her tight and shield her from the world, nearly as much as he wanted to wrap her in layers and layers of soft things to keep her from every sharp edge and bumpy road. 

Foolishness. 

It was foolishness, he knew that. To remain static and unchanging was to cease being truly alive; no amount of protection could save her from the world. 

Eury fiddled with the ribbons on the box, then drew her ever-present dagger from the small of her back and slashed them away. Cullen smiled fondly, still rocking Psyche, and watched as she finally lifted the lid and took the contents out in her left hand. 

It happened so quickly. None of them could have stopped it, no matter how much Cullen told himself otherwise later. 

As soon as her hand touched the twisting silver horn  in the box, it lit with the light of a thousand noons. Its light was white, harsh, and as soon as it lit the room it was impossible to look away. Eurydice’s mouth was open in a silent scream, lit from within by that horrible light. Cullen willed himself to move; willed himself to step forward, to draw the sword he wasn’t holding, to call up powers he no longer held to end whatever spell held her in its grip. 

He could do none of those things. His blade and armor were upstairs still, tucked out of the way. His strength had drained away with the last of the lyrium, and he could no more Purge this spell from her than he could spread wings and take flight. 

Stuck. Helpless. Vulnerable—he could do nothing to protect the woman he loved, and she was right there. 

Beside him, Josephine stood frozen as well, and he couldn’t tell if Psyche was breathing in his arms—Maker, if she was—she couldn’t be—

As his thoughts turned desperate, as he tried to turn his head to look, the light dragged his love into the air as if pulled by a rope at her waist. Eury went, her head turning barely, barely toward him, those lovely violet eyes as wide and desperate as his felt. 

As if she needed him; as if she was asking him to help her. 

He couldn’t move; couldn’t even take a breath.

The light dripped from Eurydice’s skin and hair, stronger and stronger until it hurt Cullen to look at it. When it had coated her entirely, something changed—he did not know what—and the light cast a different shadow on the wall: a halla, horns weaving backward from its head in spirals, shining with that same merciless light. 

And then she was gone.

Everything, from the moment she touched the artifact to the moment it fell to the ground, dull and lifeless, lasted only seconds. Cullen knew this only because, as the horn thudded against the stone of the great hall, the ribbons cut from the box finally, softly, finished drifting to the ground in a coil. 

All was still.

Psyche, at last, sucked in a breath and began to cry. 

|

The ground below was damp and soft. When the silver halla first struggled to her feet, the earth gave away beneath her and she sank in slightly into the welcome forest floor. She stumbled, righted herself, and panted into the cool air for a moment. Her breath rose from her in a mist, visible against the dark trunks of the trees around her. 

She stood in a forest. 

Why that surprised her, she did not know. It was her forest after all; she knew that as well as she knew…well. 

Not her name. 

As well as she knew that up was up and down was down. 

Something was…strange. She could not hold it in her mind, but there was something not right. For a moment, the halla stood frozen, ears pricked for any sense of movement. 

The wood was still around her. Only the trunks of the trees stood dark against the expanse of white, the snow settled into drifts and hills over the forest around her. She stood in a curiously bare patch, the earth under her feet soft as mud in springtime, the snow melted away in a clean circle. Not right; it did not seem right. 

There were no sounds, no skittering movement. No birds flapped their wings, and no other halla darted past near-invisible in the snow. The silver halla wanted to…reach for something. Strange. But how she might reach, she did not know. Her legs were strong and good, but they were not meant for…whatever they wanted to be doing. Twining with…something. Tugging at…something. 

She did not know.

A shiver worked its way under her flank; the halla flicked her tail to work it out, then stepped delicately into the woods. Soon enough, she blended in with the ice and snow, save the faint glimmer of green that twined around her front left hoof. 

Eventually, all that was left to signify her arrival was the circle of bare earth. When the snow began to fall that evening, soft and downy as cotton, even that much was gone.

|

Two Weeks Later

“I can’t,” Cullen said, knuckles braced on the desk, head hanging low, “I cannot leave her. Not after what…she needs a parent.”

“Of course,” Josephine said, gripping her writing board, “It is your—”

“Not of course,” Dorian said, slashing his hand through the air, “There is no choice—and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. Did you make a vow to the Inquisitor or not? I cannot seem to recall.”

“Do not—” Cullen began hotly, but cut himself off at the soft noise from the cradle beside his desk. Psyche had been restless ever since her mother’s disappearance—which Cullen understood well, because he felt much the same. She’d finally fallen asleep only moments before these two had walked in, because that was how his luck had fared since Eurydice had vanished. 

He bent over the cradle now, but she was not quite awake; only frowning slightly, one hand curled into her own hair. Cullen ran a hand over his face and turned back to the other two. Josephine stood near the desk, poised as ever, and Dorian paced on the other side of the room. 

The problem, as they’d just explained, was this: 

Tracking spells no longer worked on Eurydice. 

Oh, they were no phylacteries—she would never have allowed it—but there were spells to be done with hair, for example, that should have given some direction. And—nothing. They’d used her sister as a focus for a spell next—something which Aegle had taken part in with her usual cheer—but this, too, had not given them enough. They needed more. They needed someone who’d known her more recently, who could focus their thoughts on the essence of her. For that, there was nobody more fitting than Cullen. 

“I cannot leave her,” he said more softly,

“I know you are not a gambling man,” Dorian said, planting his hands opposite Cullen on the desk, “But consider your odds. If we do nothing, she remains lost, possibly forever. That kind of magic is powerful—and I know of nobody who can counter it. If you come with us, we might yet find her. The Inquisitor is a powerful mage; she may have knowledge of the Dalish that I do not. If the spell continues to affect her, that is. We’ve no confirmation of that now, of course.”

At this, Psyche began to cry. Cullen turned at once and lifted her into his arms, automatically falling into the soft, bouncing rhythm that soothed the worst of her cries. 

“Shh,” he said, “Shh, shh. It’s alright, darling; I have you. I have you.” 

Cullen pressed his cheek against her head, murmuring soft nonsense until she calmed again. He would need to call the wet nurse in soon enough; Psyche was due to eat, and he could not hold onto her forever. 

“Consider,” Dorian went on, and Cullen knew at once from his tone that whatever he said next would hurt, “What she will think about this when she’s older. What will you tell her about her mother? Will you tell her that you did everything in your power to bring Eurydice back? Or will you tell her that you abandoned her, alone somewhere with none of her allies to support her? Vanished by some foul magic that none of us know, lost, perhaps captured?”

“That’s enough,” Cullen murmured, but Dorian wasn’t done.

“Will you tell your daughter that you gave up on her mother?”

“That’s enough,” Cullen said, sharper, and Psyche made a soft noise of protest into his shoulder. 

The Commander turned away from them, pacing toward the window that looked out over the valley below. The snow was blinding down there, its covering complete. There might have been nothing under it; there might have been rivers frozen over, or hard stone, or homes and lives lost a thousand years ago. The Frostbacks were like that; they did not give up their dead. They held their mysteries close. 

Out of sight of the others, Cullen reached under the bottommost layer of clothing, drawing a locket from around his neck. He did not open it. Looking at the picture inside only hurt him now, Eurydice’s face detailed with exquisite care, her expression beautiful and at peace. He held it not as a remembrance, but as a reliquary, as if praying to some distant god for guidance. The metal warmed in his hand, and his pulse thrummed harder where the locket pressed hard into his skin. 

In the end, he…he couldn’t allow her to wander out there, lost and alone. Not when he knew their child would be safe here. 

He had to take the chance—that she could be found, that he could bring her home, that they might yet raise their daughter together. Dorian was right to say that there had never really been a choice at all. 

“Alright,” Cullen said at last, turning from the pitiless landscape below, “Give me today to prepare myself, to hand the most urgent matters off to others, and…”

“She will be cared for with the utmost attention,” Josephine said, stepping forward at once, “Please, allow me to handle it. I will prepare an appropriate list and you can approve it; her aunt will, of course, remain with her at all times, and when she is not nearby I will be. There is nothing to fear; she is safe here.”

“Thank you,” Cullen said, his attention already divided. Half of him was somewhere far away, his thoughts on his vanished love; the other half dwelled on the soft shape against his shoulder. 

The daughter he would soon be leaving behind. 

Abandon one by leaving; abandon one by staying. No; it was no choice at all. 

“Leave me,” he said, “to my preparations. We’ll leave at dawn.”

Dorian nodded sharply and turned on his heel at once. Cullen did not watch him go. He sat instead, the weight of the world pressing down on him all at once. 

“She will be safe here,” Josephine said again, already writing furiously on her board, “I guarantee it.”

“Thank you,” Cullen said again, but he hardly heard her words at all. 

|

When the party rode forth the next morning, Cullen hung back an extra moment to kiss his daughter’s sweet forehead, to brush her wealth of curls away from her face. He lingered a moment longer than the others, just holding her, trying to make it last as long as he could.

“Be safe, darling,” he told her, as if she had any power over such a thing, “I…love you more than the entire world, and so does your mamae.” 

The locket was in his hand again, though he did not recall pulling it from where it rested over his heart. He hesitated, then lifted it over his head. When he would have handed it to Aegle, Eurydice’s sister shied back. 

“Keep it,” she said, “Keep it. It’ll be luck.”

“I—” Cullen spoke around the tightness in his throat, “She should know what her mother looks like. In case…”

“There are plenty of court portraits,” Josephine said, “Of both you and the Inquisitor. Should something happen—be assured that she will know precisely who her parents were.”

Cullen’s hand drifted back to his side, the long chain dangling in the frigid winds of the mountains. 

“Every day?” he said, “You’ll show her?” 

“I will,” Aegle said, adjusting her grip on her sleeping niece, “I will, every day. Promise.” 

Cullen nodded, because words were beyond him. He drew the chain back over his head and let it slip soundlessly back beneath his tunic, where it was safe. 

“We’ll be back soon enough,” Bull said, striding the other direction, “She won’t have time to miss you. You’ll see.”

Cullen nodded, already turning toward his own mount—but he had his doubts. 

Whatever had happened to her—it would have no easy ending. This, he knew all too well. 

|

The silver halla happened upon the den one bright morning, when the sun on the snow refracted rainbows into the cold air. Her steps were sure and careful in the powder, but when she rounded a certain corner she saw them: 

Two older bears, a mother and father, fat for the winter. They were curled around babes—one, two, three little cubs, curled safe and warm between their parents. They did nothing; it was too early for them to wake and go foraging. 

She stood silent for a long time anyway, watching and watching and watching, until the sun fell over the horizon and she could see them no longer. 

|

Several Months Later

Cullen couldn’t count how long they’d been traveling. The days had blurred together very quickly, each one so like the next that it seemed pointless to count. If he thought about it, thought hard, he might have found the answer—but it grew harder to think the longer they searched. It seemed that by now, the four of them had seen Thedas in its entirety, from sea to mountains, from forests to plains. They’d been cordial at first, then grouchy, and after the months of searching they’d all settled into a sort of weary, companionable rhythm. 

In the morning, the four of them rose quietly and packed up their night’s camp. There was usually something hot to drink and something simple to eat for breakfast. None of them were at their best this early in the morning—frankly, Cullen didn’t know how the Inquisitor had stood traveling with them all that time—so after several increasingly heated arguments they’d agreed to spend their pre-travel adjustments in silence. 

After that, when the mounts were loaded with gear and the campsite was cleared of belongings, Dorian would do his spells and Cole would do…whatever it was Cole did. Searching through the Fade, perhaps. Then, if they could get a direction from either Dorian or Cole, they’d turn themselves that way—sometimes backtracking for miles, sometimes heading in an entirely new orientation—and when they or their mounts were too tired to go on they would make camp and settle in for the night. 

The morning this routine finally changed, Cullen waited beside his mount while the mage worked. Bull leaned against a tree nearby, finishing a letter to update the ones they’d left behind. The raven to carry it waited on Cullen’s shoulder, preening its wing feathers, a loose string hanging from one foot.

“What do you think, Knight? Is it a lucky day?” Cullen murmured to his horse, his back to the mage. 

He dreaded the moment that he would see Dorian’s head bow in resignation. He didn’t want to see the look on the man’s face when he turned to tell Cullen they were traveling without a course again today. Instead, he kept stroking his gloved hand over the horse’s neck, leaning into the warmth and solidity of it. For a moment longer, he could pretend that today would be the day, that all would at last be well. 

Let it be today, Cullen hoped silently, squeezing his eyes shut. If he tried very hard, he could still feel Eury beside him, could still see her as she’d woken that last morning. Her hair had been in a mass, drifted over one shoulder and splayed over the pillows, her expression peaceful in the early morning light. Their daughter had been curled into the crook of her arm, equally serene. They’d been beautiful, the two of them—perfect. And then—

“Yes!” Dorian shouted behind him, and Cullen spun around, his recollections set aside for the moment. 

“What?” he barked, “What is it?” 

“We’re close,” the mage said, cupping an orb of violet and green light in his hands, “And I’ve made it stable—we should be able to track this to the source very soon.”

“How soon?” Cullen asked, gripping the reins tightly in his left hand. Cole stood there, too, his face tilted down and away so his face was hidden.

“We might expect a day’s travel until we reach her, maybe two,” Dorian said, flicking a stray lock of hair from his forehead, “We should be close enough to search visually once we’re within the range.”

“Maker preserve me,” Cullen murmured through an abruptly tight throat, “I—thank you. Thank you.”

“Well, what’re we waiting for?” Bull boomed behind him, causing one of the other mounts to shy back, “Let’s go!”

The raven shot into the air with a rustle of black wings, the scrap of white on its ankle visible for only a moment before it passed into the trees and was gone. 

|

The wood itself was always loud, but the silver halla walked in silence. 

The forest was her charge. As any other creature that needed care, it was finicky, fussy, needing the halla’s constant attention lest it fall to ruin. She could hear the trouble like a low hum in the distance—poachers, rot, and such—and she made her way in its direction quickly whenever something was amiss. Hunters could be run off; those too foolish to leave fell to her horns and hooves. 

They were better as food for the forest, anyway, she might think absently before trotting away again, their bodies splayed and lifeless behind her on the soft earth of the forest. 

One memorable afternoon, she happened upon a hare trapped in a cruel snare. The wire loop hung from a low branch had caught its neck as it ran along its path. The snare gleamed silver from the recesses of its fur now. The more it struggled, the tighter the snare wrapped until it was choking, gasping for air, its wide feet kicking feebly against the soft earth below. The silver halla watched it in sorrowful silence until the creature’s eyes finally filmed over, for she did not have the means to free it. Breaking the branch would not have let it go; it would still have been trapped, snagged on another branch somewhere else down the path unless someone with careful hands had come upon it and twisted the loop free. She was the only witness when its body went lip, when its legs stopped kicking at last and its soul left its body behind.

When the hunters came back for its body some time later, she made very certain they knew better than to try that again within the bounds of her forest—if they made it back out again. 

It would be hard for them to leave after she’d broken some of their pieces in return. But this, unlike the rabbit, was not her problem.

Yes—there was much she could do for the creatures who lived there; some things, few as they might be, were beyond her. 

The snare was one. The cottage was another. 

There was only one of its kind built within the bounds of the wood, and she didn’t see it until the thaw was well underway, as if the snow itself had hidden the house beneath. It stood near the northern edge, closer to where most of the humans were. It must have been there for an age, for its whitewashed walls had long since fallen prey to storms, the pale covering flaking away in large patches that littered the forest floor around the outer walls. Its thatching was in disarray, the tightly-bound reeds now home to any number of birds and rodents. 

Curious, the halla peered through the time-worn windowsills and holes in the brick of the fireplace. She saw little of the insides; told herself she ought not care. Whoever had once put it here, it was clearly better used as a home for the forest creatures. 

Except. 

Except she kept coming back anyway, circling the clearing around it, admiring the strength of its walls, the surprising evenness of the wooden floors within. There was even a shed tucked up against the main structure, and to her sensitive nose it smelled faintly of herbs and magic. 

She…did not know why she liked that smell so much. 

The cottage was her one indulgence, her one concession to selfishness. She wished only that she had some means to see the rest, to put it back as it had once been, to walk those even floors and lay down in the shelter of its damaged roof. 

But why she might want such strange things—that, she did not know. 

|

Their quartet reached the wood that night and camped on its outskirts, Dorian rightfully arguing that searching around in an unfamiliar forest in the dark was too foolish for words. Cullen chafed at the delay, though, pacing along the boundary long after the others had begun to make noises about turning in for the night. 

“Hey,” a deep voice said behind him, and Cullen spun on his heel. 

“Yes?” he snapped, then sighed, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“’s alright,” Bull said, waving a hand the size of Cullen’s head, “Here. Message from Josie.”

“Is—” Cullen began, already reaching for the letter with his heart in his throat, but Bull was shaking his head again. 

“All good. Just an update,” he paused, surveying Cullen’s mussed hair and shaking hands, “Be up a little more if you need something. Almost there.”

“Almost there,” Cullen echoed, and the letter crinkled in his hand. 

Bull nodded once more, then strode back to the campfire, his steps improbably near-silent. Cullen took a deep breath, tucked a finger under the wax seal, and opened the letter. 

Commander Cullen, it read, 

Before I address other matters, I must begin by informing you that your Psyche is in good health and progressing beautifully.

Cullen paused here, eyes squeezed tightly shut. After a moment, his lungs reminded him that they still needed breath. Shakily, he sucked in air and went on:

She is beloved by everyone who sees her, and she now ably flips from front to back. Though she struggles with the reverse, I and her aunt are confident she will continue to learn. She is certain to inform passers-by of her every thought and seems most perturbed that none of them quite seem to understand her yet. We are careful to show her the court portraits of her mother and yourself daily—

“Maker,” Cullen said with feeling, sucking in a sharp breath and turning his face to the sky. 

The faint wind cooled the tears on his cheeks until he scrubbed at them with his sleeve. One hand found the locket on its chain, tucked under his shirt where nobody else could see. Since the day he’d lost his Eurydice, he touched it often—though he still hadn’t opened it again. He was afraid to; as if her expression might have changed to one of accusation. He had left their daughter behind, after all.

It was not fair. Not fair. 

None of this should have happened; had Eurydice not given up enough? Had she not sacrificed her role with her people, time with her family, her own eye for all of Thedas? 

Had they not suffered enough? And now they must miss every milestone of their young daughter’s life. Had they missed her first laugh, her first smile? Would she even know his face when he returned to her?

More importantly—would she know Eury’s?

Above him, the moon sailed on, serene through the night sky. Clouds had gathered along the horizon, puffy and white, silver where the moonlight touched them. He’d looked up at that moon every night since she’d vanished, wishing he could know for certain that wherever she was, Eury could see it, too. Whenever he stopped for long enough, the questions crowded in: was she safe? Was she hurt? Had she been confined somewhere, locked away from the air and the sky? 

But now, as every other time he’d asked himself those questions, he still had no answers. Only the wind and the stars and the cool light of the distant moon above. 

And the little sketch Josie had tucked into the letter of a small, round face and two tiny, pointed ears surrounded by a fountain of curls on either side. 

By the Maker, if there was any good left in this world he would make damn sure she would see them both again.

|

When the silver halla dreamt, it was often of a strange, brilliant figure shaped like one of the People but formed of light instead of flesh. In the dream, she sat amongst the trees and the halla lay her head upon the light-woman’s lap. Her horns ought to have eviscerated the woman, ought to have pierced her in a dozen places, but they never did. 

“You have seen much pain,” the woman would say in these dreams, one hand stroking along the halla’s neck, “You have known betrayal and abuse. You have felt pain beyond your years. It is calm here; it is quiet. There are no demons nor voices calling when you would not answer. You are safe now—safe from everything. This is what you were meant to be—where you were always meant to go.”

It seemed to the halla that this was not right, that the information was somehow incomplete. In the way of dreams, she never knew precisely why she thought so. She just lay still and let herself be comforted for hurts she neither felt nor remembered.

Each day she woke again, lifted her head, and began her daily wanderings. 

Each night she lay down her head and felt a deep, sourceless sense of grief and dissatisfaction that no manner of dream could lift. 

No—regret. That was the name for it. 

The halla felt regret. 

She prodded at the feeling as one might a bruise, feeling for its boundaries and origins, but to no avail. 

Perhaps it, like the loneliness, was simply something she was meant to feel. 

|

The trees were tall and dense. They did not welcome outsiders. 

As the days went on, it became more and more clear that the forest itself was alive, knowing in a way that did not fall neatly into any category of magic Cullen had yet seen. After days of brambles that seemed to spring up directly in their way, branches near-falling on Dorian when he tried to use his tracking spell, and Cole’s somewhat ominous pronouncement that they weren’t all welcome, Cullen had begun to despair. 

Now, with a headache pounding at Cullen’s temples, the four of them faced a racing river. There was not supposed to be a river here. No river entered nor exited this wood on the map, though there was meant to be a lake somewhere further in. And yet—here it was, and no bridge with which to cross it. 

Eury was somewhere on the other side. Dorian’s spell, before it had been broken by a falling tree limb, had been clear about that.

Cullen crouched, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment and trying to think around it. There could be an easier fording place elsewhere on the riverbanks. They might split up, search for a better place to ford it further down- or upstream. They might cut down a tree or section off one of the downed trunks to make a simple bridge. Or—

“Cullen,” Cole said in a strange voice, and Cullen turned his head to look at the boy.

“Yes? What is it?” Cullen said. 

“The wood doesn’t want us.”

“Yes,” Cullen said, frowning, “I’d divined that for myself, thank you. Now, we need to—”

“No,” Cole said, shaking his head and coming closer to crouch at Cullen’s side, “It doesn’t want us. Wrong, too much metal; push it out, like a splinter under skin. The river is a wall.”

“Metal—What…?” 

Ah; yes, perhaps that was it after all. He’d heard of such places before—places that had a mind of their own. The Blackmarsh, the Korcari Wilds, the Brecilian Forest—and there were some things such places did not tolerate. 

Cullen pushed to his feet, ignoring the usual wave of dizziness that followed. One hand reached for the buckle at his shoulder. 

“Here,” he said, catching Bull’s eye, “Take this for a moment.”

It was quick work to remove it all, for he’d long practice donning and unlatching all his armor. The Qunari took it with a look of understanding, and none of them stopped Cullen when he shouldered his pack and waded into the shallow end of the river. 

Cullen’s boot stretched over the water for a moment. He steeled himself, took a breath, and set it in the white foam of the rushing river below.

To his shock, the racing water stilled. The foam gathering along the top of the water drifted gently, piling up until it made a sort of path through the center. In the smooth, still water, he could see a clear reflection of the tree’s crowns, the small patches of blue interspersed amongst the green. He could see his own face, drawn and unshaven and haggard. 

Cullen swallowed and waded on until the water was at his knees, then mid-thigh. He hoisted the straps of the pack higher to keep it from the wet and strode on, ignoring the drag at his legs, ignoring the reflection in the water, until at last his feet met the damp rock of the other side. 

“I think—” he began, turning, but his words were lost in the roar of the river as it sped up again behind them. 

The others tested the waters as he had, but it would not let them pass and it would not let Cullen return. It seemed that they had come as far as they were going to come. 

The rest of the journey must be his and his alone. 

At last, Cullen swallowed, pressed a fist to his heart, and turned away. His pack was a heavy but reassuring weight at his back. The forest echoed with sudden birdsong around him, and the sun shone brightly between the gaps in the canopies above. 

Maker, he prayed silently as he stepped into the clear path between the trees, let her be near.

|

It was almost eerie the way the forest seemed to part for Cullen now that he’d left his weapons, armor, and traveling companions behind. 

The ease of it left him uneasy, jumping at shadows, wary over every rustle in the bushes even after it became obvious that the wood was improbably full of wildlife. Birds winged from every bough, some in colors he’d never seen on such a creature. He saw glimmering eyes in the distance at night more than once. After one day’s fruitless searching, he returned to his camp to find tracks all around the fire. Cullen slept in the trees after that, careful always to pack up and hang his food when he was gone. Something told him he’d have very little luck with hunting here, even if he were equipped with something he could use to hunt. 

Uneasy as Cullen was, he never really felt like he was in danger. Nothing growled in the dark; nothing hunted him in the bushes. For all that the forest was technically located in Ferelden, there were no signs that the Blight had ever touched this place. He saw signs that other people had been here recently, but as far as he could tell none of them remained. At least, in his days of searching he never heard or saw someone else. 

Still: it was a beautiful forest, and edible roots and berries seemed plentiful enough. If Cullen hadn’t been searching for the lost love of his life, he might even enjoy himself. But…well, as matters were, he felt guilty for every beauty that he saw, as if even the potential for enjoyment took something away from the seriousness of his search. In recompense, he doubled down: less sleep, more walking, even when it was by the light of the crystal Dorian had passed off to him before he’d left. 

On one such evening, Cullen held the crystal aloft, peering into the darkness around him. He was fairly certain he knew the way back to his makeshift camp. This direction was simply the only one left that he hadn’t searched yet. If he just went a little further—

A tree root in the path; his foot caught on it unexpectedly and he launched forward, then down, down, down. There’d been no rain, but the bank he rolled down was slick with newly-wet mud anyway. By the time he reached the bottom, he was all but coated in it, and dizzy and sore besides. As he rolled the last few feet and stared, dazed, at the sky, he let go of the crystal lighting his way. It slid away in the bracken, still lit. 

Briefly, before he gave in to the dizziness that fogged his mind, Cullen could have sworn he saw a…halla, standing over him, its horns glimmering silver in the intermittent moonlight. 

And then all was dark. 

|

It wasn’t that the halla had never seen a human up close before. She’d seen plenty: gatherers with lowered eyes and upraised palms, backing slowly away; hunters she drove away and those she left broken in the bracken and earth. 

In all her days, she’d never seen one quite like this. 

The human’s face was lit in the flicker of the stone he’d held. He was pale, dark under the eyes, with muddy golden hair. She saw little of his eyes, for he closed them almost as soon as she stepped closer, but what she had seen reminded her of the soft underbark of a pine tree, beaded with sap in the sunlight. 

Strange; another of those odd urges she could not shake. She wanted to touch his hair—but carefully nudging it with her nose did not seem to satisfy the urge. What did she want?

Why did it distress her to see the creature lying at the bottom of the slope like that, limbs askew? He reminded her of that poor snared rabbit, kicking and kicking until the wire finally cut its neck. 

She did not like that. 

No; no, she did not. 

So instead of turning away, as she so often had, she stepped closer and made a choice.

|

Cullen woke on the forest floor. 

For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. A raindrop hit his cheek, filtered from the overhang above, and when he blinked it all came into focus: a grey day, but it was day now. He lay half-under the shelter of a large, flat shelf of granite. The cold wall of rock pressed against his back, and when he shifted he found himself supported by a bed of leaves and vines. What…?

You were injured, a painfully familiar, rough voice whispered. Cullen sat up, immediately knocking his head against the rock above. 

That was unwise, Eurydice’s voice went on, cool and disinterested and agonizingly dear, your head does not need more damage, yes? Yes. 

“Eurydice,” he gasped out at last, eyes still squeezed shut, one hand bracing against the earth and the other pressed to his aching head. 

A pause. 

Rest now, the voice said, a note of command in its tone. 

A note—but not one he heard aloud, Cullen realized. However the voice was speaking, its words were whispered directly into his mind. The old fears crept back again; that this was a demon somehow reaching into his thoughts to give him what he wanted most deeply. Would he betray himself by giving in just because it sounded like his…his…

“Eurydice?” he said again, and opened his eyes.

A creature stood before him, silhouetted against the grey of the day beyond. It was a halla; he knew that at once. But where bone-white horns ought to curl back from its head, it bore a different set. They were silver, as if they’d been dipped in metal or mercury, and even the faint sunlight seemed to trace them with exquisite care. Along the creature’s foreleg, there were traceries of green. At first, Cullen thought that it might have stepped through undergrowth of some sort, but then he looked closer. 

The green pulsed with a faint, near-inaudible hum that Cullen knew very well. He’d slept beside that hum. He’d held it to his lips, against his skin. That was the Anchor; he’d stake his life on it. There was no fabricating something like that. And her eyes…

Violet, beautiful deep violet, shining faintly when she blinked. 

Those were Eurydice’s eyes. He knew them better than he knew his own. 

“Eurydice?” he said again, and slid from beneath the granite shelf, “Eury—it’s me. Don’t you remember…?”

She didn’t. He could see she didn’t. 

The halla cocked her head, silver horns winking in the light. 

You will not heal if you do not rest, she said, If you walk away, I will not follow you.

Cullen’s hands curled into fists at his sides, the abrupt fear and anger and relief twisting inextricably in his chest. 

She was here; she was gone. He’d found her; she was lost to him. 

Beyond all that—Maker, his head ached. He could barely think past the throbbing.

Rest, she said again, and—well. There seemed to be no better choice. Still watching her as if she’d vanish when he took his eyes away, Cullen settled back into the hollow made by the granite and lay on his side. 

|

Eurydice was gone when Cullen woke, but his head had stopped aching. Rather than try to find his camp again, he stayed in place, neatening the little alcove for lack of anything better to do and then performing his usual stretches in the sunlight when she still hadn’t returned. 

She arrived in the glen at last sometime around noon, judging by the height of the sun, when Cullen’s stomach had begun to grumble badly. He was just beginning to consider trying to forage in the berry bushes just past this little clearing when she broke through the trees on the other side, trotting into the light and surveying him with a tilt of her head. 

You are still here, she said, Are you in pain?

“I—no,” Cullen said, throat tightening at the sound of her voice, “No—I am quite well.”

Then why do you remain?

“I…wanted to offer my thanks. And—offer to help you, if I might.”

She tilted her head the other way, the sharp points of her horns catching the sunlight. Cullen ignored them and focused on her eyes. 

“There must be tasks you need help with,” he said, for he’d had some time to think about how he might stay near her, “I—I would be glad to offer my service. Surely…surely having hands would be of use to you? I would be glad to assist, however you may need it.” 

For a long moment, he thought she might simply choose not to answer him at all. Then, she huffed and began to trot away. 

Come, then, she said, there are things to be done, yes? Yes.

Cullen swallowed hard, straightened his shoulders, and strode after her.

|

The halla still dreamed, but sometimes the words were different. 

This night, the light-woman stroked her flank and spoke in the gentle tone of a mother correcting a wayward child. 

“Do not trust a human,” she chided, and the halla wished for nothing more than to not be touched, though she could not lift her head or move away. 

“He is not meant for this place,” the woman went on, “He upsets the balance. You do not need any help he can offer; you are better off on your own. You have been doing quite well so far, have you not?”

For the first time, the halla, dreaming, wondered: 

Who is she? And, Why does she tell me what I should do? I know what I should do. I do not need her help. 

When the dream ended, she did not send the man away. There were things—specific things—that she wanted him to do. But…perhaps she would not start with those. Perhaps she would watch him first, to see what he would do. 

Yes; yes, that was wisest. 

First, she would learn more; then she would ask. 

|

Cullen knew when he was being tested. 

There were simple tasks: move this rock here or there for the snakes to den under, drag this branch closer to the river so it doesn’t start too large a fire, put this little bird back in its nest before it’s trampled. He performed all the tasks without complaint, searching always for some hint that she still knew him. Two years ago, he would have thought himself mad for playing errand boy for a talking forest creature, let alone believing that said creature was the mother of his child. Now, though…

Now, he did as she asked simply for the pleasure of hearing her speak to him again. 

He thought often that he should go back to the others, explain what he’d seen, but then what? Could he guarantee that she would still be here when he returned? 

They’d searched for too long for him to walk away now. So he stayed instead, did all she asked him, and lived for the next time he heard her voice—distant as it was.

At last, perhaps a week after he’d woken under the rock shelf, Eurydice nudged him awake and indicated he follow her. Cullen rose, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and trailed behind. It seemed that the forest itself moved for her, or perhaps it was simply that she knew the wood so well that she could easily pick a path between the trunks and bushes without needing to consider where she was going. 

There is a place, she told him after over half an hour of walking, It is near the edge. You can fix it. 

“What?” Cullen asked, for he’d expected another trivial task. 

The halla looked back over her shoulder, one delicate hoof raised. After a moment, she turned away and carried on. 

It is an important place, she told him, a note of impatience in her voice, A good place. A…house. It is broken, but it is good. You can fix it. You are a human. Use your hands.

“I…” he bit back the refusal, the explanation that for all his youth growing up at a farm he didn’t clearly remember how to make major household repairs. The explanation would mean little to her, though. He knew enough to know that much. Instead, he took a deep breath and continued:

“I will do what I can.”

|

The cottage might have been lovely once, at the top of a low hill with the forest laid out around it. There was a bit of a meadow, too, with tentative flowers tucked her and there amongst the tall grasses. A stone path still led up the hill to it, and the stone steps seemed intact. 

That was the best he could say for it. 

The walls were falling apart; he could see daylight through them in several places. The roof was missing large sections, and what remained was patchy at best. A large section of the fireplace had fallen in, and when he stepped inside the floor reeked of animal droppings and rot. On the fifth step, his foot went through. 

At first glance, he would have said it was hopeless, except he walked outside and found Eurydice, dancing back and forth in an attempt to look inside again. When she turned her violet eyes upon him again, there was only one answer he could give. 

“I’ll try,” Cullen told her. 

So he did. 

|

There was much to be cleaned from the dwelling. The silver halla drifted back periodically to check on the human. He fashioned a broom from twigs and things and cleaned it all out first. That was the boring part. But the rest…

She liked watching him. Sometimes, he grew angry and shouted at the wood and the paint. Sometimes he sang. Sometimes he did nothing at all; only lay on his back before the damaged building and watched the sky above. At night, when the stars came out, sometimes she came and watched with him. That…made sense, somehow. Seemed right. 

“Do you remember a time before this forest?” he asked her on one such evening. She sat with her legs folded beneath her several feet away, just in case. When the man spoke, the hart tilted her head his direction. 

What do you mean?

“Before you came to be here,” he said, his face lit only by the moonlight, “Do you remember what it was like?” 

There was no time before the forest, she told him, puzzled, There is nothing to remember. I have always been here. I am the forest.

He seemed to consider this in silence for a time, but he spoke again at last. His voice was odd; crumbling, like old clay.

“Have you tried?” he asked, “To remember?” 

Why should I? I have everything I need. I am happy.

She hadn’t spoken false, but the words didn’t sit right with her. The halla shifted uneasily, flicking her tail to the side, shaking her head as if casting off the touch of an insect. 

I am leaving, she said abruptly, and trotted away into the woods. 

The man didn’t call after her. 

|

At long last, the cottage was clean and dry. Now, the floors had to be patched and repaired in places. Water had soaked into the corners, expanding and rotting the wood in turns. Whole sections had to be ripped up and replaced—and Cullen wasn’t certain at first if he could trust the timber and tools that simply turned up one day, set neatly beside the front door. 

So: floors, which he must then sand and finish. But before that, he must do something about the roof—for what was the point in fixing the floors if they might be rained on again before he could get to them? So, then, the roof, and then the floors—and the stairs, of course, to the small second level. 

Maker, he was glad the foundation was solid, that the bones were good. He’d no idea what he might do if he had to shore it up from beneath, if he had to replace the studs and struts or patch a cracked foundation. At least he could count on the fundamentals. 

|

“Do you know where all this comes from?” the man asked the halla one day. His foot nudged a board, laid to the side of the door. 

The halla glanced at it, then turned her attention back to the man. He was fascinating, with his curling golden hair and his strange fingers and ears. Sometimes he waved his hands when he talked, and sometimes his face turned paler or pink or red in the sun. It made little sense to her, but she could not shake the feeling that if she just kept watching him she would come to understand it all in time. 

From me, she told him, and he looked at her with surprise. 

“From you? But how? You don’t carry them here.”

No, she said impatiently, I told the forest how I want this place to look. It brings the things for me. 

“But the forest can’t build it for you,” the man said, looking at her for a moment and dropping his eyes, “That’s why you asked me.” 

He did that often, too—looking away. She did not like it. She wanted to keep looking at his eyes.

Yes, she said, Yes. When will you be done?

The man sighed and ran a hand back through his hair. The curls were pressed back for a moment, then sprung back into shape again. The halla watched them intently, as if each coil held a secret she might yet unravel. 

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

|

Eury came to watch Cullen sometimes, and despite his hopes she never seemed to see him as anything more than an intriguing distraction. There was no sign that she knew what they’d been to each other or what they’d left behind at Skyhold. There was no sign she had much personal interest in him at all.

Until one day there was. 

Cullen was resting by the side of the house, sipping from his water. The thatching was near-done, and thank the Maker for that. He’d move on to replacing some of the boards on the stairs and…

What is that? Eury asked. 

Cullen started; he hadn’t heard her arrive. Well, he rarely did these days. 

“What?” he asked, and she inclined her head to his arm, where he’d been toying with his braided leather bracelet.

“Ah,” he said, and the grief struck him out of nowhere, as it often did. He swallowed around the lump in his throat and toyed with the cool bump of the bead at the end. 

“It was a gift,” he said, “Someone I care for a great deal made them for me. I’ve more in my pack.”

He’d packed nearly all of them when he left Skyhold. He’d taken several from the hilt of his sword before leaving it with the others, too. It had seemed…wrong to leave them behind. Wrong, when he needed every piece of her that he could hold. 

He had left a few, though—the ones without beads. For Psyche, he’d told Josephine, who’d taken them from his hand like they were made of crystal or porcelain instead of worn leather. 

Eury watched closely while he fetched the rest and even deigned to come closer to inspect them up close. 

They are very neat, she said after a moment, doubtfully. 

There was something odd about her voice, and it took Cullen a moment to place the tone. She’d sounded like that before, he thought. When she was unhappy with how one of her gifts had come out, when she wasn’t sure if she should give him yet another to wear on his wrist. 

“They are good luck,” he told her, and when he held one out she didn’t move away, “I…could give you one, if you’d like?”

She looked like she might shy away at that, so he kept himself carefully still. If he moved an inch, he thought she might bolt at once. One minute went by, and then another. A breeze blew through, cooling the sweat on his clothes. 

Yes, she said at last, Yes. 

Cullen moved closer than she’d allowed him yet, moving very slowly. She tilted her head his way and he marveled at the shine of silver on her long, braided horns, at the graceful slope of her neck. It was horrible, what had been done to her; and yet, it did not seem horrible to look at her now. She looked like moonlight given form, like art that breathed and moved.

It seemed wrong to tie the bracelet off around her horn; too much like some kind of harness. He wove it into the base of the horn instead, tying only the ends together so it wouldn’t fall off. She allowed this maneuver and only shook her head back and forth when he finally stepped away. 

Thank you, she told him gravely, and darted off for the forest again. 

But—but she’d nudged his arm first. She’d let him touch her. 

And so—there was still hope. 

|

The forest was well, but the silver halla was not. 

Something was wrong. 

She did not know what. She did not know what. 

She visited the human fretfully, watching him from a distance for a time. The roof was finished, and the work moved inside. She did not like this. How could she see him if he was hidden away? 

Yet she could not determine why this bothered her. Why losing sight of him caused her to creep closer than she’d meant to, to peer through cracks and windows at the man. 

Why did she care? Why did she want to look at him again, to hear the sound of his voice? Sometimes she could hear him singing from a distance and the sound of it made her want to wail in grief.

Something was wrong and lost, and she couldn’t find it; she couldn’t even name it. But he…

He made the hole seem smaller somehow. 

So she kept coming back. 

|

The stairs were solid enough to trust, though Cullen despaired about the color of some of them. He supposed there was no way to properly match wood this old, but the lack of evenness bothered him. Ah, well; there were more pressing things. Repairing the fireplace, for one, and that was a chore. Filling in the worst of the cracks and holes in the walls—yes, that too, and fiddly work it would be. At least he could move his things inside and sleep under cover when it rained. 

One evening, he lay outside looking up at the stars as he often did. There was a rustle in the bushes and she was simply there, all at once, as if she’d appeared to him from nothing. Cullen didn’t react; he’d learned it was best not to. 

Where did you come from? she asked him, Before you were here. 

There was a focus to the question that made him turn his head. 

“I was…at Skyhold,” he said after a moment, “I…used to lead an army.”

Used to; that stung, even though he knew he would never have been able to stay without her there at his side. 

Skyhold, she said, and nothing else. 

That night, she slept just outside the front door. When he couldn’t stop checking to see if she was still there, Cullen took his bedroll outside and curled up only a few inches away. 

This…wasn’t quite what it had once been, but it was still her, and they were still here together.

And…even if she was gone when he woke, he’d still spent the night close to her. Cullen would count it as a victory. 

He needed every victory he could get. 

|

The time before. 

That was the problem. She’d known it for a lie when she’d told the human she was happy, but there had been no question in her mind that the rest was true, too. 

But—there was a time before the forest. She remembered arriving here, so she must have arrived from somewhere. 

But where?

The silver halla pondered this question for a long time. She even returned to the spot in her earliest memories, though it looked different in the spring than it had in the winter. 

The dissonance troubled her, fretted at her mind, and she spent more and more of her time at the cottage to make the thoughts go away. The questions seemed less pressing when she watched the man work, filling in the cracked walls with white clay that had appeared in a bucket one morning. They began to speak to each other during these hours.  

Even stranger, she began to enjoy it—an alien sensation, that, to crave the sound of someone else’s voice. 

Why are you doing that? she might ask him, and he might find a window to peer through for his answer. 

“If I don’t close up the holes between bricks, the heat will escape,” he might say in response, or, “I am tired. I am sitting down to rest now.”

Or, one sun-drenched morning when she’d wandered into the glade to find only the sound of him breathing inside, labored and heavy:

“I cannot work today,” he told her when she made her presence known.

Why? she asked, peering through the hole where a door ought to go. Her horns made it so she could not look entirely inside, but she tried anyway, until the sharp ends scraped along his new doorframe. 

“I am not well.” 

He seemed unwell—or, at least, he seemed like he wasn’t himself. His face was even paler than usual, almost as pale as her coat, and the pleasant flush of exertion he usually had about his cheeks was gone. He looked wet, too, golden ringlets sticking to his forehead, the collar of his tunic dark and damp. 

She did not ask what was wrong. She had little understanding of such things, and even if she did it seemed…wrong to ask, especially when he looked so dreadful over it. 

Can you reach the door? she asked, and the point of her horn carved another new line on the lintel. 

The man made it at last, stumbling toward her and crawling when his feet would no longer cooperate. When he reached her at last, she bent her head and bade him hold on. Surely it would be better for him to rest in the light; it offered the forest creatures comfort to curl up at her side in pools of sunlight. Perhaps it would be the same for him. 

Indeed, he did seem to rest easier once he’d curled up along her flank. After a time, his hand curled into the longer fur along her neck, and the silver halla found to her surprise that she did not mind his touch at all.

Odd, that this should feel so perfectly natural; odd, that she felt the urge to tuck the hair back and away from his face. How would she even do such a thing? She hadn’t the fingers for it. 

She considered this while he slept, when he murmured fevered words in his sleep: 

“Eury,” he said, and “No,” and, most bewilderingly, “Psyche.” 

That last word revolved over and over in her mind, fixing itself in place. She could not think around the word; it took up all the space, frightening in its intensity. She might have run if he hadn’t been lying bent over her flank, but instead she lay in place, stiff, trembling, frightened of the word that would not stop resonating in her mind. 

Psyche. Psyche. Psyche.

What did that mean?

|

Eurydice stayed away for days after he recovered from his bad spell. 

Cullen blamed himself; how could he not? But he went on working even so, taking more care to rest when he could. If he had a dizzy spell and fell from the roof, no amount of comfort from her would put his bones back together. 

The back of the fireplace was finished at last, solid as he could make it, smoothed over along the back with more clay in case there was a crack he’d missed. The walls inside were a mess; he’d need to scrape the old plaster off in places where moisture had gotten under the first layer, and after that he would have to reapply a new layer. Exhausting; but at least the bottom floor had walls of wood, so only the top would need the work. Strange—that a cottage in the woods would be constructed thus. He wondered who’d once lived here, so long ago. 

So Cullen scraped the plaster, applied new in place of old, neatened up the corners, painted the walls that needed painting—alone. He felt her absence keenly after so much time together; but he knew Eury. She would come back to him when she was ready. 

He spent the warm nights lying in the grass outside, staring up at the stars and wishing himself in two places at once. 

Eurydice always came back to him. He had to have faith in that even now, no matter how hopeless it seemed.

|

“My poor child,” the dream woman said to the halla, and this time the halla did lift her head, did pull away when the woman tried to lay her hands upon the halla’s fur once more. 

“My poor child,” the woman of light said again, “You are disturbing things best left alone. You are like the rabbit, thrashing against the snare. The more you fight it, the more it will hurt. Do you not see? You are meant to be here. You were always meant to be here. You marked yourself for me long ago, did you not?”

No, the silver halla told her, You are wrong. 

“Am I? You have wished for this your whole life, or you would not be here. Are you not free? Are you not fast enough to get away? Strong enough that none will touch you? Free of petty concerns and arguments, of foolish requests and all the noise of those creatures and their cities? I have given you the gift that I was given, long ago; the gift of freedom. Will you spurn it now? Will you throw it aside without a care?” 

The halla took a step back, then another. 

She didn’t have an answer. Didn’t know. The woman kept speaking of…a time before the forest. So—the man was right; there had been something before. 

“Do not leave what you fought so hard to find,” the woman pleaded, and for the first time the halla peered past the light and saw her. She had horns of her own, skin that was both fur and not-fur, eyes that were both eyes and not-eyes, hands that were bound and free at once, fingers and hooves at the end of her wrists, a face that was a halla’s face and the face of one of the People simultaneously. She was there and not-there, light and not-light, and the harder the halla looked the less she felt she saw. 

When she woke, rain poured over her. She stood, shook herself, and turned at once for the cottage. 

She may not understand—but she wanted to. And there was one person she knew she could ask. 

|

What is Psyche? 

Her voice was abrupt, and Cullen dropped the paintbrush as soon as he heard it. 

“Eury!” he said, and winced; she wouldn’t answer to that name. Or—she hadn’t before. It had to have been at least a week since he’d seen her, though it was hard to keep track of time here. It slipped through his fingers in a way that didn’t seem entirely natural—but then, it was hard to tell when he had his bad days. How much time was passing? He could not say.

What is Psyche? she asked again, and Cullen leaned out the window on the upper floor to look at her. 

“Where did you hear that name?” he asked, fingers curling hard around the wood. 

She shook her head, the silver winking in the light, the bead on the leather band in her horns throwing a flash of red amongst the rest. 

It is a name? Whose? one silver hoof dug at the soft earth, leaving a deep divot behind, Whose? 

“Our…my daughter’s,” he told her, and cleared his throat, “Psyche is my daughter.”

There was a sound, then, a pained cry that came from her throat and not her mind, as most of her speech seemed to. She wheeled around and raced away without another word, so quickly that the forest swallowed her in seconds. 

Cullen, alone on the second floor of the house, bowed his head and felt the weight of time on his shoulders. 

How long would he spend here, hoping that repairing this cottage would somehow bring her back to him? How long could he hope? This magic was beyond him, far beyond him. He could never imagine wanting to leave her side, to leave her behind.

 But…but his daughter needed him, too. She deserved to have both parents. If both could not return, she deserved at least one. Maker, that much at least, when he would rather give her the world. 

“A little longer,” he murmured to himself, taking the paintbrush from the floor, ignoring the splotch of paint it left behind, “I’m so close. The walls, the cabinets in the kitchen, and then…”

And then, he acknowledged silently, there would be more. He couldn’t help himself; he wanted to make it right, and fixing a cottage was a poor stand-in for bringing back his beloved. 

But—for the moment, at least, rebuilding this place was all he could do. 

A little longer, at least; and Maker let that be enough. 

|

A dream, a nightmare; she could not tell which: 

It was bright; perhaps too bright. She ached from somewhere in her midsection and her head, but this did not seem to bother her. A soft noise roused her at once, and she sat up, lifting hands with fingers on the end, pushing away thick grey curls that hung from her own head. Another soft noise, and she lifted a soft bundle of blankets into her lap. 

(It did not trouble her, in the dream, that she had hands and hair and such. She knew them, and they were hers, and that’s all that mattered to her. The rest was irrelevant.)

There was a little face in the blanket, and a wealth of curls which acted as a frame. It had two tiny, pointed ears, a perfect little nose, and soft, plump cheeks. The sun shone brilliantly through an open door somewhere to the side, and the light of it played along the babe’s golden curls. Someone touched her back, and it was expected, wanted, comforting. The warmth of a hand she had chosen to welcome; the soft, incomprehensible murmur of a deep voice she both knew and did not know, all at once. 

And the little babe tucked into soft blankets, held safe in her arms. 

Psyche. 

|

Cullen was shocked to find that she’d come back to him the next day. He paused midstep, peering out the great round window in the largest bedroom. She waited below, circling the little cottage, plainly waiting for something. 

Waiting for him. 

“Good morning,” he told her when he reached the bottom. She turned to look at him, for she’d been walking away, and approached very slowly over the meadow flowers and grass. 

...Good morning, she said after a long moment’s consideration, I have questions.

“Ask them,” he said, taking a step closer, “I will answer as best I can.” 

She did not shy back from him. Instead, she bent her head until they were nearly eye to eye. 

Your Psyche, she said, Tell me about her…mother. 

Cullen sucked in a sharp breath. His heart seemed to pause in its beating before picking up speed quickly, and he clenched his hands at his sides. 

“What about her?” he asked. 

Eurydice considered him for a moment. 

What…was she like?

“She’s fiercely loyal,” Cullen said at once, “Strong. Beautiful. Clever. Curious…Fascinating.”

The halla shifted uneasily, and there was…something in the tilt of her head that abruptly reminded him painfully of how she’d been before. He took a step forward.

“I miss her terribly,” Cullen said before he could think better of it, “I think of her every morning when I wake and every night before I fall asleep.”

Perhaps that was enough. Or—he thought, his heart hammering against the inside of his ribs, maybe he should keep talking. She’d been speaking to him more often of late; maybe talking was the key.

He…he might as well try.  

“When I close my eyes, I dream of the day I lost her.”

One more step.

“Do you…do you ever dream?”

She took a step back just as he might have brushed his fingers against her neck. Cullen froze in place, hand still outstretched. For a moment, they looked at each other. The woods around them went quiet.

Yes, she said, and took another step back, But I do not want to anymore. 

This last was said quickly, as if she was trying to get the words out as quickly as possible. Without saying any more, she turned and bolted, the sunlight rippling over the silvery-white fur for only a moment before she made it to the shadows of the trees again. 

Gone. Gone. 

Cullen’s hand dropped to his side. 

After a moment in the sun, his head bowed, he turned around again and strode into the house. 

He had things to set right—and no time to feel sorry for himself. This much he could do, so he would do it. 

But he owed their daughter more than groundless hopes. Soon, he would need to pay up. 

But not today.

He did not see the pale shadow amongst the trees, watching, watching, still and silent as the trees themselves.  

|

When she opened her eyes that night, the halla was in the same glade in which she usually saw the woman of light, but the figure was not there. The silver halla turned and turned, hemmed in by trees on either side, her horns catching on low branches until she must wrench them free over and over again. 

She woke moments later, sides heaving, and crept back to the dark cottage on the edge of the wood. 

The man was snoring inside. She could hear him through the big, round window on the second floor. The halla listened for a moment, ears twitching at the rhythm of his sleep. At last, she lay in the meadow outside the front door. She did not sleep again, but listened to the soothing rumble until dawn broke over the treetops again. 

Do you dream? He’d asked. 

Only once, as far as she knew, that had actually mattered. 

|

That night, when Cullen stood in the meadow to watch the sunset, she came to him. 

“Hello,” he said. She regarded him solemnly. 

“Ah—did you need something?” Surely she’d come for a reason; Eury would not have needed one, but she did not remember that she was Eury. 

Cullen did not try to move closer. He just stood, and waited, and hoped. 

She came closer, each step as deliberate as a note played on a lyre. 

Something is wrong with the forest, she told him when she got closer. Cullen straightened, reaching for a sword he no longer wore. 

“What is it?” he asked, “Can I help?”

She angled her head, her eyes wise and distant. After a long pause, filled by the birds in the trees and the last sunlight splayed over the treetops, she spoke again. 

There is something wrong, she said, I do not know what. I want to stay.

“Oh,” Cullen said, and his hands fell loose to his sides, “Well, I…Of course. It’s your cottage, isn’t it?” 

She did not answer this. Instead, she settled herself beside the door and stared at him. 

“Right,” he said, “Right. Let me get my water and I’ll join you.”

|

The night was vast and deep and neither moon hung in the sky. 

The halla regarded it all as if from a great distance, the wrongness stirring again in the back of her mind. The human sat to her right, resting against the cottage wall. He’d spoken earlier, but she hadn’t taken note of the words; now, the wood seemed too loud, though the wind had stilled in the leaves and the night creatures did not call any more than they usually did. 

Her eyes were good, but they saw little in this darkness that felt infinite and deep. The jangling in her ears intensified, no matter how she twitched them to dispel it. It was too loud; the quiet was too loud; she needed—

Say something, she told the human, who startled like a hare in a bush. 

“Ah,” he said, leaning forward with a rustle and peering at her, “What should I say?”

I do not care. Something. Sing. I like when you sing. The night is too—

The halla cut herself off; to say would be to admit some weakness. She waited, though, picking out the shape of him in the darkness. He shuffled closer. 

“Do you care what I—”

No, she interrupted. 

The man sighed and took a sip of water. Then, he took a deep breath and began to sing. 

She’d heard little of human songs. Or—she’d thought she had. But this one sounded familiar. The halla shifted closer to him, the soft words filling her ears, driving away the dark of the night and the discomfort in her heart. By the time he was done singing, she’d moved closer to him and settled herself against his side, careful to keep her horns out of the way. When the tune died out, he cleared his throat again. 

“Another?” he asked. 

He smelled pleasant; like leather and clean skin. 

Yes, she told him, and he sang again. 

The halla closed her eyes in pleasure at the sound, relaxing for what felt like the first time in her life. After a long, long tune, he set a hesitant hand on her forehead and stroked the fur there. It did not bother her; it was not unwanted. His hands were gentle, light, nothing like the ones in her dream. 

Much to her surprise, when she fell asleep she had no dreams at all. 

But she woke with her head in his lap, and that was far too much; the halla bolted into the forest before she could think better of it, and the soft cry behind her did not halt her steps. 

|

Cullen built the cabinets for the kitchen, fit them in snug and neat beside the intact fireplace. He woke one morning to find glass windows leaned against the side of the house, and installed them with only a few minor incidents. The shattered glass was easy enough to clear from the floors, at least.

It looked like a home now. It had seemed like spring in the woods when he’d first seen this place, but now it seemed…well. The flowers had not been anywhere this thick on the ground then, nor as lovely. It was odd how much time had passed, how little time it seemed at all. 

But time had passed. Time would continue to pass; he could not stop it.

One morning, Cullen woke and trudged downstairs to see what the forest had left for him this time. He found only four pieces of wood and a small pail of nails there, and puzzled over them for a moment before he realized what they were. 

A simple rectangular box, its shorter sides ending in curved pieces. A cradle—the forest had sent him a cradle. As if by finishing the house, the forest had decided he ought now furnish it. 

How cruel, to see it and remember all of their hopes, all of their wishes for their little one. How cruel, to look at the pieces of it and remember that his daughter had been left behind—with family, perhaps, but left nonetheless—and he couldn’t even remember how long he’d been away from her. He might have been fixing this cottage for an age; it might have been only a month. He could not say. 

Cullen sat on the small set of stairs leading to the house for a long time, elbows resting on his knees, his head in his hands. 

At last, he carried the pieces inside, nailed them together with care, and gathered up his waterskin. 

It was time to send a letter—long past time. 

He could not be forever split between the forest and Skyhold; there was only one solution he could see.

|

The man was gone. 

The silver halla didn’t know when he’d left. It must have been when she’d been on the other side of the wood, watching a swan and her cygnets drift over the water. She’d lost track of time, and when she’d come back…

She hadn’t needed to look. She just knew. 

He was gone. He had left her. 

She hesitated for a long time, her ears pricked, her eyes trained on the pretty cottage. He’d done well with it, from what she could see. The walls looked sturdy, the roof was watertight—as they’d discovered during the last storm—and the hearth could happily hold a fire without causing the rest of the house to go up in a blaze. 

It had only seemed worth it to ask him to do this because it was a special place. It was still special, whole and beautiful against the green of the meadowgrass and the yellow and pink and blue of the flowers. But it was also…empty. Empty. 

For many hours, the halla paced around the cottage, trying to make sense of the emotions that crowded her chest and mind, hammering against the inside of her skull when there was nowhere for them to go. 

No matter how she tried, she could not understand. 

At last, when night fell, she curled herself up by the front stoop and allowed her head to droop low. Maybe…if she could not find him here, in the cottage he’d put back together, perhaps she could still find him in her dreams. 

|

Cullen strode through the forest with speed, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He passed the rocky overhang where he’d first seen Eurydice again. He ducked past trees where he’d once slept, retreaded paths he only half remembered, and at last he reached the river again. 

It all looked exactly the same as it had the last time he’d seen it. Even the other three—somehow, they were still camped on the other bank, in more or less the same state he’d last seen them. Strange; he’d expected them to return to Skyhold and take up their duties again. But he could hardly complain when their presence made his task so much easier. 

The moment he set foot in the river, it calmed for him in a path straight across. Cullen blinked, then cleared his throat. 

“Thank you,” he murmured, hand absently reaching for the hilt of a sword he hadn’t held for months and then dropping to his side. Nothing changed; nothing responded. He waded into the water even so, eyes trained on the far bank. 

He wasn’t sure when he felt the change; perhaps it was only his imagination. But sometime between lifting his first foot onto the riverbank and lifting his second, there was a sensation like a…snapping against his skin, like something breaking loose. Cullen grunted at the feeling, and the dizziness that accompanied it, but shook it off. 

“Done already?” Dorian asked, standing from the camp and frowning, “That was far too quick—did you find a path? Something more from us?”

Cullen blinked, fighting back a moment’s disorientation. 

“What do you mean? It’s been months. I’ve been gone for…what do you mean, ‘done already?’”

The other three looked at him. Cole clasped his hands around his knees, then tilted his head to speak. Cullen could not see him past the hat and all the hair, but his words were gentle enough.

“Time can move faster and slower; you don’t decide. We don’t decide, either. It’s the trees that know, and the forest.”

“Yeah,” Bull said, watching Cole, “I don't know what that means, but you’ve been gone for two days. We haven’t even got a messenger back yet.”

“Two days,” Cullen repeated, then raked a hand through his hair, “Two days. Right. Right.” 

There was no time to think about the implications of this now—that there was, apparently, a forest that existed out of time in the middle of Ferelden, that nobody had thought to explore or record it until now. All of that was rather decidedly not his problem. 

Cullen turned again, eyeing the river. It rushed on and away into the woods, as fast and uncrossable as ever. What if…what if it wouldn’t let him through again? What if he’d lost his only chance to…

To what? Remind her of what had been? Would it not be cruel now, to show her what she’d had before she’d touched that gift? When he had no way of turning her back to what she’d been before?

Was it not enough to bring their daughter to her? At least then she might still be able to watch her grow. Cullen, for his part, would much rather spend the rest of his life in a cottage in the woods with a Eurydice who did not know him than in Skyhold with only her memory.

“I need to send a message,” he said instead of voicing any of these questions aloud. 

They would not have the answers anyway.

|

When the silver halla slept, her dreams taunted her. 

They were pain, the arc of steel cutting into her eye, hands dragging her by the hair, huddled alone in the earth; they were joy, the swooping feeling in her chest while she stood with her hand on an unfamiliar wooden door. 

“Was it not all too much to bear?” the woman asked her in the dream glade. The halla wheeled around, looking for her, but there was nothing to see; the clearing was empty, and the voice came from everywhere.

“Is this not better in every possible way?” she went on, “Does it not make more sense? All of that messiness, all of that pain and uncertainty; you can leave it behind. He left you, did he not? So let him go. You might yet live forever, little one. Be happy with what you’ve been given. It is more than most can begin to comprehend.”

The halla—Eurydice, she remembered all at once; her own name was Eurydice—shook her head as if shaking off the voice. Her silver hooves dug furrows in the ground, the green-laced one ringing with a strange song with every blow. 

“No,” she said, and struck at the encircling with her hooves once, twice, and—

|

It took Josephine and Aegle only a few days to reach them along the king’s road. How strange it was that the path they’d taken had dragged them back and forth across the country for months when the journey was really only three or four days by the Imperial Highway. 

The days waiting for his daughter seemed to drag on and on. Cullen spent most waking minutes pacing back and forth before the river, wondering if he should have left the forest the way he had. Surely he should have told her what he was doing. Surely he should have explained. 

He knew why he hadn’t, though; it would have been far too painful for her to tell him she didn’t care if he stayed or went.

When he wasn’t worrying, he was planning: How could he get Psyche safely across the river? How would he find Eurydice again? Could they arrange for a supply to feed the babe while he sought the cottage again? 

By the time they rode up through the woods, he’d planned and planned again, accounted for every possible obstacle and concern between him and his beloved Inquisitor. 

He hadn’t accounted for how he would feel when he saw his Psyche again. 

She was riding with Josephine. He’d been very specific when he’d left, once it had become clear that they wouldn’t be finding Eury without his presence. Either Aegle or Josephine was to remain with her at all times; it would be all too easy for anyone with a grudge to take or hurt her and, by extension, the Inquisitor and their organization. So, when the small party came to a halt, he knew exactly where to look. 

She was still so small; so perfect. But she’d grown in the months he’d been gone, and he saw the flash of one hand over the sling as she reached beyond the confines of the cloth. 

“Here is your Papae, little one,” Josie said, even before she’d greeted the rest of them, and lifted the babe to hand him. 

For a moment, he stood frozen, as frozen as he’d been before he’d taken her the first time. What if he’d forgotten how to hold her? What if she didn’t remember him?

But Psyche turned her head and met his eyes, and when she lifted her hand she was reaching for him. 

All at once, she was in Cullen’s arms and he was clutching her to his shoulder, eyes squeezed tightly shut. 

“I’m so sorry, darling, I’m so sorry,” he was saying, his eyelids not quite managing to keep the tears from his cheeks, “I didn’t mean to be gone so long, I swear it; Maker forgive me, I did not mean to leave you.” 

Psyche made a little hiccup against his shoulder and cooed, one hand with its tiny, sharp fingernails curling into the collar of his tunic. For a long time, Cullen held her just like that, ignoring the voices of the others in the distance. 

Nothing else really mattered; only that he had her safe again. 

Only that soon enough her mother would, too.

|

Cullen was tall enough, strong enough to carry Psyche over the water without getting her wet. He couldn’t seem to stop talking to her, little as she seemed to understand. Her eyes peered up at him with keener interest than she’d had before he left, and he wanted, all at once, for her to know everything. 

Her eyes—those were different, too. When he’d ridden away from Skyhold, they’d been the undifferentiated blue that all infants had. He’d told Eury that he’d hoped they would be like hers in time, shining with the violet he loved so well. Now, they were like his own eyes looking back at him, warm and brown like sunlight on a tree branch. When he would stop periodically to rest, he would marvel at them over and over. 

How strange it was, how wonderful, to see a piece of yourself in someone else and find that you loved it after all. 

The forest let him pass without any trouble, though it was much quieter than he remembered. Again, he passed his old camps, the ways he’d wandered looking for his lost love, the overhang where she’d tended him, and…

And the cottage, right where he’d left it. 

Cullen paused just before the trees broke to the green meadow beyond. It all looked much the same as it had when he’d walked away a few days prior, save one major difference. 

Eurydice lay beside the door, curled up and sleeping. She still looked like a halla, with horns of silver and one green-vined leg. The bracelet she’d woven for him was still twined around one horn. Unlike other mornings when he’d woken to find her resting by the front door, flowers had grown up and around her, stark contrasts against her silvery-white fur. She seemed almost like a statue there, a statue that nature had grown up around and accepted as one of its own. 

But she was no statue; she was the love of his life, the mother of his daughter, and he would not give her up to the forest. Not while he still had breath in his lungs.

Cullen leaned down to press a kiss to Psyche’s forehead, then straightened his shoulders and at last strode across the meadow to the cottage where Eurydice waited. 

|

“This is a battle you cannot win,” the woman of light told Eurydice, who struck again and again at the borders that held her, “You are fighting yourself, poor creature. Can you not be content with the peace you’ve been given?”

And, when Eurydice continued to ignore her:

“It hurts me to see you like this, so full of desperation. Be still—calm yourself—”

“You speak too much,” Eury snapped back, and a branch cracked free from the encircling briars, “Too much.”

“You are only hurting yourself,” the woman said, from the trees and the earth and the sky, “Do you not remember the rab—”

“The rabbit died because I do not have hands. I do not have hands because you took them. Stop talking.”

The voice was silent for a moment, and more branches broke free. 

“You could be at peace. Why do you not wish for peace?”

“I wish to make my own choices,” Eury said, and though her limbs were shaking and weakening, she struck out and snapped one more branch free. 

A hole opened in the undergrowth. 

A hole through which she could see the man walking through the meadow before her, an infant cradled in his arms. 

Psyche. 

Her Psyche.

No; she would not be held any longer. Not here. Not by this being, whatever she was. Her daughter was right there and Psyche needed her mamae; Eury needed to leave now.

“Why do you not wish for the companionship of the wood? Why do you not wish to be amongst kin, amongst those who would understand you?”

“I wish to be my own self,” Eury said, and the hole widened before her. 

“Why do you not wish for strength? For freedom? When such concerns only drag you down, only trap you where you would not be.”

“Eurydice?” there was her name, called gently through the space she’d made in the trees and thornbushes, “Eurydice, love; wake up.”

“Freedom?” Eury said, and at last it was enough: she could fit through, push through to the other side, “I am free.”

And—all at once, she was.

|

Cullen knelt before Eurydice, he on one side of the circle of flowers and she on the other. He did not know how to wake her; in the old stories, it might be done with a kiss. Given the circumstances, he thought it might be better to call gently from a distance. He was holding something fragile and precious, after all; best he not surprise her too badly. 

“Eurydice?” he called, and settled Psyche more comfortably in his arms, “Eurydice, love—wake up.”

To his shock, she began to glow. It was not the harsh, merciless light he’d seen in the great hall all those months ago. No. This was a softer light, the gentle glow of the moon on a dark and cold night, the light that guided one home through inhospitable lands. It was the light one saw through one’s window on waking from a nightmare, the light that brushed aside the cobwebs of unfriendly sleep. 

As she glowed, she changed. The fur melted away, blowing gently in the wind like dandelion fluff. The horns fell bloodlessly aside, one to her left, and one to her right. When it faded away, as gently as it had come, she opened her eyes. 

Cullen might have thought, given the gradual change and the light, that it would be a gentle awakening. He would have been profoundly incorrect. 

Eurydice sat bolt upright, her eyes wild, her hands already reaching for him. 

“Psyche,” she said, “Where—where—”

“Here,” Cullen said, because he could no more deny Eurydice her child than he could choose not to breathe, or not to love her wholly. Eury leaned past the encircling flowers, snatching the babe up in her arms, and cuddled her close, her face twisted with pain. 

Maker; what was there to say? What was there to do? What time they’d lost could never be retrieved. 

“I’m…sorry,” he managed after a moment; for what could one say to such pain? He’d failed her, in not finding her sooner, in not preventing her from being taken from them in the first place. They’d lost months with their daughter, both of them; they’d lost all of the first changes, precious moments they might have lingered over together. 

“I should’ve,” he began, choked, but she had none of it. Eurydice reached for him, too, and dragged him against her free shoulder with an iron grasp. 

“Cullen,” she said, pressing his face into her shoulder, and he gave a gasp at the sound of his name on her lips, “Cullen, ena’vun, my ena’vun; You are here. You found me; you came back.”

Words were beyond Cullen for a moment. He didn’t even bother to try searching for them. He just pressed his face into her shoulder and wept, too overcome to bother with anything but holding her just as tightly and making sure Psyche wasn’t being pressed too hard between the two of them. 

They stayed just like that for a long, long time. Cullen lay half-across the crumpled flowers, Psyche already rested sleeping against her mother’s shoulder, and Eurydice held them both as tightly as she could. 

Whole, together, and free. 

|

Eurydice’s memories of Psyche were still foggy. She could not remember what the babe had been like before; had her eyes been so clear, so bright? Had her fingers been so clever, her ears so sweetly and faintly pointed? 

She did not remember, but it mattered little at the moment. They sat among the flowers now, Psyche laid over her knees, and she traced the babe’s features over and over again with her fingertips. The touch at her nose made the infant sneeze, her tiny face screwed up with surprise, and Eurydice laughed when the babe did. Joy spread across her face like ink in water, and the sight of it warmed her. She had been so cold for so long; it was a relief to let it all melt away.

She was loath to let go of her daughter for even a moment; holding her felt right, filling the hole in her heart immediately and perfectly. There were pieces of her mind that remained fragmented, trapped in some other body with its other, graceful limbs. As long as she held Psyche, none of that mattered. This body had hands to stroke her hair; this body had arms to hold her, and a lap to set her in, and a mouth that could smile. That was all that mattered—and the longer she held the babe, the more the broken pieces found new ways to fit together. 

Yes; this was her body. The other one was hers, too. It did not matter that the two ideas did not agree; she could make them both true. 

What mattered was the sun on her skin and Psyche’s, the way the babe seemed determined to stuff fistfuls of her mother’s hair into her mouth. 

What mattered was the soft noises she made as she waved her hands around, as if trying to explain something very important to Eurydice. 

What mattered was that Cullen was here, too, leaning against her side and watching them both with a smile on his tired face. As if this was all he’d wanted—as if he, too, was content. 

As if he, too, knew that this was home.

|

Much, much later when the stars were spread across the sky like a comforting blanket, Cullen stepped back from checking on Psyche in her cradle. Eury, lying in the grass, held out her hand to him. 

It was hard to stop touching even now; setting their daughter aside to rest had felt like too long apart, even if she was only a few steps away. Neither of them had really wanted to put her down, but they’d badly needed a few moments just to hold each other without checking to make sure Psyche hadn’t rolled off down the hill or stuffed a handful of flower petals in her mouth. 

When he lay down beside her, Eury rolled onto her side and into his arms, sighing faintly. Cullen laced his fingers together, holding her against him, savoring the familiarity of the sharpness at her hips, the weight of her head on his shoulder, the waves of her hair flowing over his shoulder yet again. 

“You’re here,” he said, because he couldn’t help himself. 

“Yes,” she said, and he could feel the tickle of her eyelashes against his neck. 

They lay in silence for a moment, the rise and fall of his chest matching hers. 

“It is still there,” Eury said after a moment, and he tilted his head to look at her, “The other one. I did not undo the spell. I did not want to give it back to her.”

Cullen tilted his head to look down at her, and she angled hers to look up at him. 

“She should not have given it to me if she wanted to keep it for herself,” she said, “I can still be the other one if I choose it.”

“But…” Cullen frowned, “But—would you forget, as you did before? Would you…you wouldn’t…”

“I will not leave,” she told him, “If I go, I will come back to you.”

“I believe you,” Cullen said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around the concept, deciding at last to think about it later, when his mind was not in a fog, “I…suppose it is like being able to change shapes, as some mages do.”

Eurydice hummed in agreement and squirmed even closer, the arm across his chest tightening. 

“We will come back here someday,” she said, “It is supposed to be ours, this place.”

“Is it?” Cullen considered this for a moment, “I suppose it does feel that way, doesn’t it? Like you and I were meant to find it.”

Earlier, when the three of them had stumbled into the house, he and Eurydice half-distraught, the cottage had seemed almost to curve around them, comforting and solid. He’d written it off as another quirk of this strange place; the wood that had always seemed alive in its own way. Perhaps what he’d felt had been more than the forest’s usual strangeness after all.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, squeezing her as tightly as she was holding him, “Yes. We’ll come back, someday. Together.”

“Together,” she echoed, and lifted her face to be kissed. 

The wood sang around them, a song they might have heard more clearly if the world hadn’t already seemed full of each other. Only a few steps away, little Psyche, curled in her father’s mantle, supported by the cradle he’d built for her, dreamed of warm arms and purple eyes that shone with love. In the distance, cygnets huddled on their parents’ backs to drift sleeping for the night. The trees rustled with the life of the night creatures, while the creatures of the daytime sought their dens and burrows for the night. 

The statues of owl and halla and wolf, overgrown and tucked amongst the ruins, might have been able to tell that this had all happened before, in its way. They may have been able to speak of loves found and lost, of a cottage built for a family once before and now again. Perhaps they may even have told the story of one transformed ages before, of the creature who’d once found freedom in four legs instead of two, of fleet feet and the emotions—or lack thereof—that only immortals can feel.

But statues, as we know all too well, do not speak, nor do they tell tales. 

That is for the living. 

And Cullen and Eurydice’s tale was far from over.

~The End~

[ephemeronidwrites]

if you're still doing the OC codex entries. "your OC talking about your favorite quest" for vrenika, please

Oh, those will be open forever, or until I go through them all for all the OC's I have (whichever comes first). Feel free to hit me up whenever / ifever you'd like to see another one.

That goes for every one of my (five) followers, btw, as well as anyone who happens to wander lost into my writeblr and is curious just what the f*** they've stumbled into.

14: Your OC talking about your favorite quest

(I shocked myself—and also made myself a liar—by somehow knocking out this one in, like, an afternoon. So treat the other one as a freebie that no one asked for?)

An unopened letter found in an abandoned, derelict property in Kirkwall’s Hightown, languishing out of sight behind a broken, dust-covered statue in the foyer.

Fenris,

I know you’re busy with your own issues these days, and I apologise for bothering you with something outside of your concerns, but you’re the only person I could think of who could give me advice about something like this.

Now that they’ve gotten some of the cleanup out of the way, it seems they’ve decided to have the funeral for Saemus next week. They’re giving him full Andrastian rites.

You don’t know him, not beyond his name and face. I’m aware of this. To be quite frank, I’m not even sure how well I knew him.

What little I do know about Saemus tells me this: he would not want his body turned into public theatre like this.

I’ve already been to Elth the Grand Cleric about this and she assured me that the Chantry will treat his memory with “the utmost respect” and “all the dignity due his station”, but the thing is… I know that was the very station he absolutely loathed.

And she refused to talk about Petrice. I can’t shake the idea that if it wasn’t for what that Petrice did oh, what’s the use of writing about it here?

I don’t know if you even want to help, given the way you feel about If you don’t, I’ll understand. But I am at my wit’s end about this and I’m grasping at straws here.

If it was just a matter of me taking matters into my own hands, I’m used to that sort of thing. I took over things after my father died. After Mother died. I mean, sure, I fucked it all up in both those cases, but those were my mistakes to own. My family, my people. I can take responsibility for my own mistakes. Or try, anyway.

I can’t take that risk with Saemus because he’s not mine. But I also can’t give up on him because he has no one else. No one knew him better than I did, except his qunari friends. And they’re all dead at my hands. So now it’s fallen to me to remember Saemus as he really was as I think he would have wanted to be remembered and… I don’t know what that all would mean, and I don’t know how to even start going about knowing.

Again, you have no reason to be dragged into any of this. But you’ve spent time among people who are… sort of like the Qunari? I’m not sure what exactly all that involved for you, but I do know you know a whole lot more about their tongue and any rules they might have around this sort of situation than I do.

Please, help if you can.

I would have come to ask you in person but the last… oh, I don’t know, six times I came by the townhouse you weren’t there. If you’re not going to be there, or show up to Wicked Grace, at least smear some slaver blood on my door within the week. Or whatever else is convenient for you. Just some kind of sign to let all of us know you’re still kicking.

(Yes, even Anders, I promise you. He’ll draw fuel from his seething hatred of you. It’s healthy for him. You know how he is.)

Hoping you’re safe, wherever you are,

Vrenika

P.S. I just realized after writing out this whole thing that you might not be able to read it all. But I gave myself hand cramps writing it, and the ink’s just finished drying, and if you come over to tell me (correctly) what a massive idiot I am that’s exactly what I wanted from you anyway, so here goes nothing.

[perahn]

Jade memed me

Last song: I turned on music to keep me company while I answered this and got ‘Kingdom Dance’ from the Tangled soundtrack.

Last show: Having been raised as a non-practising Trekkie, I have been slowly working my way through. I am currently in the second-last season of Voyager, and haven’t decided where I’ll go from here.

Last movie: So there’s a production of Sweeney Todd coming to the Sydney Opera House, and I asked my family who wanted to come with me to see it. My youngest sister is usually my partner for musicals, and she’s in, but Mum wasn’t sure. So we watched the filmed version with her to give her a taste (with the appropriate caveats, like ‘wish they had stronger voices for this’ and ‘they went and cut the best songs, seriously, it’s like they had no respect for the audience and their ability to follow polyphony’). Anyway now Mum is planning to come too, and I’m glad.

Currently watching: As above!

Currently reading: ‘Tajore Arkle’, by Jackie French. This was a childhood favourite that I thought was out of print and probably doesn’t even exist outside Australia. It’s the world, the author explains, that she did her daydreaming in until she was fourteen, and it shows: not all of it works, but it’s evocative: red sand and grey dust, stone quarries, no water except that which seeps out between the rocks, sweetened by algae, and little other food save that same algae. Long ago, the inhabitants ‘projected’ themselves to Tajore Arkle from Earth, mistaking it for a much more hospitable world... but they survive, and only the Pastseers of the Mountains remember stray flashes of what used to be.

Current obsession: Honestly, and with some shame... despite being elbows-deep in a codex entry I really should catch up, Things Are Happening to Khem and the party, at the moment I have been putting myself to sleep by working out what to do about my Pathfinder paladin’s not-quite-yet-beloved. She’s fallen pretty hard, but technically they’ve only spoken about three times, so she’s not sure how he feels, and asking him right out about it might be coming on a bit strong under the circumstances, PLUS she’s just made some very powerful enemies who like collateral blackmail damage, so despite how much I dislike ‘woe is me, I cannot tell you I love you because it would make you a target’ it might actually be the only sensible thing for her to do, UNLESS he seeks her out first in which case she’d have to be honest, BUT I don’t know if the DM is going for it and it isn’t the sort of table to check out of character. So mostly I’m just running hypotheticals and enjoying it very much.

[deflare]

Day 13 means a visit with the XIII Legion, the Ultramarines!

We March for Macragge!

The XIII Legion drew its initial recruits from the populations of people who were particularly hostile to the nascent Imperium. Interestingly, the result was extremely disciplined and loyal soldiers; something about the process of creating them rendered them fiercely loyal to the Imperium. They came to be known as the War-Born for how they were reforged by their legion. 

While the XIII was scoring its early victories, their Primarch was forming an empire on his own. Roboute Guilliman landed on the Roman-themed planet of Macragge, a relatively sophisticated world, where he was adopted by a prominent local leader. Through shenanigans, he wound up taking over the planet after his adoptive father was murdered, and made the planet prosper. When the Emperor rolled in and met Roboute, he basically said, “Hey, you’re doing what I was doing already; keep it up, son.”

Guilliman was one of the least physically imposing of the Primarchs (which, admittedly, still makes him Real Strong), but he was one of the most intelligent. His skills lay in administration and empire-building. His legion conquered a huge empire, many planets of which were allowed to be ruled from Macragge. This new vassal empire became known as Ultramar, and their champions the Ultramarines. It was and still is, generally speaking, one of the nicest places in the Imperium to live. By the start of the Heresy, the Ultramarines were the largest legion by a fair margin. This is thanks to a combination of their stable geneseed, their large recruitment base, their low casualties from not getting thrown into meatgrinders, and possibly due to absorbing Marines from the two lost legions (the II and the XI, whose fates were purged from Imperial records).

Like several of the stronger loyalist legions, the Ultramarines were out of position to do anything useful during the Horus Heresy, instead forced to defend Ultramar from a surprise attack. For a little while, Guilliman assumed Terra was already lost, and set out to make Imperium 2.0 with his brother Sanguinius in charge; then they found out Terra could be defended and quietly deleted the whole thing from history.

Once the dust had settled, Guilliman found himself as the leader of the Imperium. He was the one who reorganized the legions, breaking them into chapters with a strict structure*; something like half of the new chapters came from his own Ultramarines. His regency would be cut short by a battle with the traitor Primarch Fulgrim, whose poisoned blade forced Guilliman into suspended animation. He’d be decanted 10,000 years later and put in a suit of life-support armor. And let me tell you, he’s not wild about how much the Imperium has fallen apart in his absence.

The Ultramarines are the Space Marine’s Mario. They seek to perfect all elements of warfare, and thus master none. They’re the most dedicated to following the tactics and strategies listed in the Codex Astartes, to the point where it makes them rather inflexible. This urge has been shaken up by Guilliman’s return, and his patient/frustrated explanation that it was a book of advice, not a holy text.

On a meta level, Ultramarines are the Space Marines. All of my entries have sort of tip-toed around today, as it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Ultramarines to how Space Marines are sold by the company. They’re the poser-boys of the setting. They have more books and special characters than any other chapter, and almost every Space Marine model is painted Ultramarines blue on the box; they’re a simple, nice-looking color scheme that are good for newbies, and their chapter symbol is one of the easiest to freehand. They don’t have a lot of special rules or flavor because they are the flavor by which all other Marines are defined. Some people really hate the Ultramarines as a result, feeling like they take up too much space in the story that could be better spent on other chapters. In my opinion, they’re not wrong, but also Ultramarine Hate gets pretty tiring itself.

Still doesn’t mean I’m painting up Ultramarines, though. That’d just be basic.

Edit to add: The red helmet on this model indicates that he’s a sergeant, the leader of a squad of Space Marines.

*How are Space Marines organized, anyway?

The answer varies. The Codex Astartes has a clear layout of how things should work, but quite a few chapters have tweaked their organization with new unit types and formations, or just ignore it entirely. Things have also gotten weird with the introduction of the Primaris marines and their unique unit types, which don’t fit neatly into the categories laid out in the Codex.

Classically, though: A chapter of Space Marines has 1,000 soldiers, organized into ten companies of 100 marines. The first company is the veteran company, full of the most experienced soldiers. Companies 2-5 are the standard front-line battle companies, and Companies 6-9 are the reserve companies, focused more on training and on reinforcing battle companies as needed. The 10th company is the scout company, which is special; it’s the first company that newly recruited marines serve in, gaining experience to move up to one of the more specialized companies.

Companies have a number of squads under them, organized into three general flavors. Battleline squads are your standard-flavor Space Marines, armed with basic weapons and some special support weapons. Close Support squads are the ones designed to go toe-to-toe with the enemy, often armed with chainswords and jetpacks. Fire Support squads are loaded up with heavy long-ranged firepower. The battle companies have a mix of the three squad types; the reserve companies, meanwhile, specialize in one of the three.

Every company also has its own vehicle pool and officer cadre. On top of that is the Chapter Command, the chapter-wide leadership positions and the tanks and spaceships that are attached to companies as needed. Looking at it, I’m pretty sure the “1000 Marine Limit” only works if it’s applied just to infantry squads, while officers and pilots don’t count. But who can say, the whole thing is fundamentally silly (1,000 soldiers isn’t a lot for a single battlefield, let alone for major military forces as narratively important as a Space Marine chapter).

It’s worth noting that this is all true if the chapter is working optimally. War does not make for optimal conditions. Marines are constantly dying, leaving units under-strength and opening positions for scouts to get promoted into. Companies can’t always deploy in such a way that they support each other as the battle/reserve company setup calls for. A particularly nasty campaign may leave one or another company badly savaged, requiring time to build back up; if that company is the scout company, the chapter may be in real trouble until they get a new wave of aspirants.

There’s a final important component to every chapter, which goes uncounted and unsung: The human support staff. Often called ‘chapter serfs’, ‘thralls’, or ‘menials’, every chapter has thousands of non-transhumans who crew their spaceships, maintain their gear, and otherwise perform the many logistical tasks needed to keep the chapter fighting-fit in the field. For every Space Marine in the field, there’s a troop of serfs who take up a lifetime of toil to make sure they can keep fighting.

Master post here

[elvesofnoldor]

only in hades game do you have the shade of achilles, telling you, the son of hades, how to do a mini rpg romance with your childhood best friend thanatos, the embodiment of death, who by the way has the fashion sense of a hot topic employee and the temperament of a emotionally constipated college student.

 Time and time again im amazed by this game’s unlimited potential in being a tumblr shit post. 

[sapphim]

Legacy DLC - Cut Content

This one goes out to the anon who asked about some entries in the Legacy talktable~ Remnants of two quests that were cut from the DA2 Legacy DLC. First up:

Gorathan’s Gold / X Marks The Spot

codex entry: "Gorathan's Gold" (zz_cod_hst_gorathan)

From the Dwarven drinking song "Gorathan's Gold." Lyrium armor and silverite shield Tincture of lovin' to make ladies yield A magical vault filled with treasures of old, But best of all will be Gorathan's gold! Gorathan's gold! Gorathan's gold! I'm gonna find me great Gorathan's gold! Hero of Blights Pride of Kal Sharok But the best thing about him, his gigantic (everyone drinks)

codex entry: Gorathan's Gold (cod_hst_gorathan_sharok)

Lyrium armor and silverite shield Tincture of lovin' to make ladies yield A magical vault filled with treasures of old But best of all will be Gorathan's gold! Gorathan's gold! Gorathan's gold! I'm gonna find me great Gorathan's gold! Hero of Blights Pride of Kal Sharok But the best thing about him, his gigantic (everyone drinks) —From the dwarven drinking song "Gorathan's Gold"

untitled codex entry (zz_cod_ltr_treasuremap)

The dwarves' treasure map shows a series of doors marked with a certain sigil. These must be opened in the correct order before the main tomb door will open.

much of the audio from the following two conversations can be heard on youtube.

drk000_xmarks_carta_dwarf

Carta Dwarf: Son of a nug! Watch out! Carta Dwarf: Aaah! Sodding darkspawn! I never seen 'em like this! Carta Dwarf: Help!

Carta Dwarf: You didn't have to do that for us, stranger. But I'm sodding glad you did. Carta Dwarf: I'm going back to the surface. If I wanted to die fighting darkspawn, I'd have joined the Legion, not the Carta. Hawke: [Why were you down here?] Did the Carta send you down for something? Carta Dwarf: Sent us to die, most like. Hawke: [There's no way out.] You won't be able to get back to the surface. Carta Dwarf: Sod that! I'll dig my way out. I got no interest in being food for darkspawn. Hawke: [You don't look tainted.] Are you from a different Carta? Not the one that's trying to free Corypheus? Carta Dwarf: Look, the buggers here may have some strange fetish for drinking darkspawn blood, but I'm just in it for the coin. Carta Dwarf: We came for the treasure of Gorathan Sharok, hero of Kal Sharok. Carta Dwarf: If you want, take our map. It's supposed to activate the magic in this place, but all it did was attract darkspawn. Carta Dwarf: I hope it serves you better than it did us. I'm going home. Isabela: I've heard of Gorathan Sharok. Every few years, some pirate crew gets it in their heads to ditch ship and go spelunking. Isabela: He was some ancient dwarven hero. Complete crazy, from what they say. Tried to hide his fortune from the darkspawn. Varric: Gorathan Sharok? Really? The Carta's usually more interested in extorting protection payments, not chasing old legends. Hawke: What legend? Varric: Gorathan was king of Kal Sharok during the First Blight. Before he died, he hid his wealth away, to keep it from his enemies. Varric: Half the young bucks in the Warrior Caste try to make their name by finding where it's buried. Hawke: A treasure map, huh? I wonder what it leads to.

Carta Dwarf: What did those blighters do the door?

drk000_xmarks_party_barks

Sebastian: I don't see any way to open it. There must be a switch. Sebastian: Why do they always put those as far from the door as possible? Sebastian: For convenience, they might occasionally hide one nearby...

Varric: Well there's something you don't see every day. Fenris: This is someone's idea of a joke, isn't it? Anders: What sort of magic is this? Bethany: What's doing that? Are you feeling all right? Aveline: That's a little unexpected. Isabela: That can't be healthy.

Isabela: Huh. What do you know? Looks like the map was accurate. Anders: Well, well. X marks the spot. Aveline: This location is marked on the map. Be careful. I don't know what we'll find here. Bethany: This map is amazing! I wonder who made it. Varric: Here I figured they were as full of shit as the rest of the Carta. There's really something to this treasure map... Sebastian: This looks like one of the doors marked on that map. But what are we supposed to do with it? Carver: Looks like this location's marked on the map. You really think we're going to find treasure? Fenris: (Scoffs) Magic. I say this map is more likely to lead us into a trap than to treasure. Hawke: I guess I'll just have to see where this goes.

Hawke: What do you know? I hope this map can be trusted. Isabela: What's wrong with this place? Why don't they have one decent, regular lock to pick? Isabela: No, it's got to be all magic and glowy lights... (Spits) Varric: Hawke, let me just say I'm glad you're the one doing all the experimenting. Hawke: There must be something around here...

Isabela: If this contains the treasure of Gorathan Sharok, I owe some dead pirates a lot of money. Isabela: What do you think's inside? Isabela: Rumor says his cache contains everything from lyrium armor to potions of eternal youth. Isabela: My favorite rumor was the lyrium-based aphrodisiac. But I suspect that was just how Tyrol got his men to go along. Varric: Who knew? The treasure of bloody Gorathan Sharok. If I were a proper dwarf, I'd be all reverent or something. Fenris: Time to find out if there's any truth to these stories about hidden treasure. Carver: You think we'll find anything in here? Or just more traps from this madman? Bethany: Someone went through a lot of trouble to hide this treasure. Aveline: And now we find out if there's anything here, or if he just wanted to lead treasure-hunters on a merry chase. Anders: There better be something worthwhile in here. Sebastian: This is why people should burn their dead decently. Not leave them lying around to be possessed by who-knows-what.

Coded Letter / COH?

Unlike the Gorathan's Gold quest above, which has a decent amount of content, there's very little available for this other quest. There's one possible plot file that might have been meant for its codex entry (cod_ltr_coded_letter) but it's completely blank, so I can't even guess what it might have been called. The only files that allude to its existence are two sparse conversation files.

drk000_party_barks_coh

Fenris: What? Can you not read it? Maybe it's in code. Carver: Is that written in code or something? Bethany: That doesn't make any sense. Do you think it's a code? Aveline: That must be a code. Who would write so much nonsense? Isabela: What the—? Is that some kind of code? Sebastian: That must be a code. Some kind of letter-substitution cipher? Varric: Whatever that says, they didn't want just anyone reading it. A code, you figure? Anders: It's a Grey Warden code. I've seen it used. But they never trusted me enough to teach me the cipher. Hawke: It's in code.

Isabela: Hey! That looks like a cipher. Maybe for that code we found? Sebastian: That looks like part of a cipher. Let's see what that letter was trying to hide. Varric: Well, lookie here. This may help break the code on that letter. Fenris: More writing. Is this a part of that code you found? Carver: Part of the cipher. That should help us figure out what was in that letter. Bethany: The cipher! That should help us figure out what's in that letter. Aveline: Maybe this will help us decrypt some of that letter. Anders: There we are! Now we can figure out what the Grey Wardens were trying to keep secret. Hawke: Looks like a piece of that cipher I need... Hawke: And another piece of the cipher. This should make things clearer.

Hawke: Jarmaine Ohela...

drk600_jarmaine_coh

Jarmaine: You are no Wardens! Anders: Beg pardon? Varric: Let me guess. Jarmaine Ohela. Pleased to meet you. Aveline: I think that's him! Sebastian: He's here! Bethany: I think that's him! Carver: That's the blood mage! Fenris: The blood mage. In the flesh. Isabela: So glad we got to meet like this. Jarmaine: You will all die!

Jarmaine: You are no Warden! Jarmaine: You will die!

DRK600 is Riannon's Floor of the tower, which in the completed DLC contains the power nexus puzzle to obtain the Regalia of Weisshaupt, if Hawke sides with Larius. Considering that DRK700, Daneken's Floor, contains the same puzzle and reward if Hawke sides with Janeka, I wonder if they realized early on that they had overscoped and essentially just ended up cutting a floor's worth of content.

Anyway, looks like we'll never find out what the wardens were trying to keep secret. RIP Jarmaine Ohela whoever the fuck you are

[c-is-for-circinate]

Ok, Hades gameplay reaction time!

(Because I have been terrible this quarantine year about posting thoughts about stories I've been invested in, and I'm really enjoying this game, and I'm playing basically blind and I have theories, and what is tumblr for if not recording those things to look back on later.)

I love this specific kind of fantasy/speculative fiction, that straddles the line between 'allegory clearly designed to explore a real-world issue' and 'the themes of this reflect real-world issues but also everything is times one million for drama and setting's sake'. I love it so much. Because, look, this is a story about a teenager/young adult trying to gather up the skills and resources and help he needs to escape his controlling, possessive, emotionally abusive father's house. That's it. Strip away all of the trappings, and that's what the story is about. By comparison, I think about Star Wars. (I love Star Wars too.) That's also a story about a dysfunctional fucked-up family dynamic. But that family is fucked up because dad went on a magic-corruption-induced killing spree, and his twin children were separated at birth to be raised in seclusion with the intention of someday taking him down, and look, that's cool, but it's definitely not how people actually are. All of the dysfunction in that family is an outgrowth of the fantastical setting, which means it is fantastical dysfunction. It can occasionally mirror or remind us of real-life interactions, but it's a fantasy. Which is great and fun to watch and very comforting and so on, but I don't necessarily want that in every story, and I love Hades because it is not that, at all. When you extend out the basic 'kid trying to escape his toxic home environment', Hades is the story of Zagreus trying to get out with the help of his dad's estranged, complicated, wealthy and powerful family, who are absolutely part of the reason why dad is Like That in the first place, and may not be any more reliable in the long run but who he needs right now. And his stepmom and teacher, who love him enough to help him leave, unconditionally and supportively (ask me how many feelings I have about 'look, Hades can't hurt me for helping you, don't worry about me, I am going to take care of you and that means helping you get out of this house' coming from an adult authority figure, ask me). And his dad's employees, who like him but also have to fear the old man's wrath, and walk that line in different places the best they can. And stepmom's long-estranged parent, because this is a story about families and how they split apart and come back together. And all of that is so real, so grounded in actual, concrete, this-is-how-humans-work family dynamics. But it's also individual. The story works so well because Hades isn't just a silhouette of the controlling asshole father; he is clearly The Way He Is for reasons, complicated ones, good and bad alike. The Way He Is has details, particularities, paperwork, a dog he pretends not to love and rely on. He is specific. Nyx and Achilles are specific, not just generic kind stepmom here to be a trope inversion and cardboard cutout teacher. Nyx has backstory and personality of her own, Achilles has a complex history, opinions, a missing lover, and they BOTH have very particular relationships with Hades that aren't just boilerplate script. Yes, there's abstraction there, you meet these characters in brief visual novel-esque three-line conversations over the course of dozens of escape runs, of course there's abstraction--but there's the very real sense that all of these people have nuance, have good and bad days, that they've made choices to be who they are, even if we don't know what those choices are yet. And, like Star Wars, some of the ways in which this story is so specific rely entirely on the fact of the otherworldly setting! I've seen stories that go the other way, that try to use their setting entirely as window dressing, and they end up feeling so flat I can't even remember them right now because they don't let the environment lend complexity and nuance to their characters at all. The environment these characters live in matters. The absolute control Hades exerts over his surroundings is a divine power. The fact that everyone Zag runs into, for or against him, is either immortal or immortally dead, changes how the react to

one another and to the situation at hand. The shape of his attempted escapes (gauntlet combat with a variety of legendary weapons) might be an allegorical construct of the genre, true, but it doesn't work in any sort of real-world setting where there exists the possibility of authority figures above or aside from Hades and his extended fucked-up family. That's part of why the family is so fucked-up in the first place. But these changes still fit well within the realm of, 'yeah, if you took this extremely real-life dynamic and added these factors to it, I can envision people doing this thing'. I can envision these specific people doing this thing. They add to the specificity of these characters. Letting them be influenced by their unreal surroundings makes them more real. So hell yes for good storytelling!!!!

I'm still relatively early in the game (by which I mean I'm like thirty runs in but only just got past Meg for the third time, because I am not good at this game, although in my defense it's only the seventh video game and second button-mashing game I have ever played in my life so there's that), but I'm starting to develop suspicions about Persephone. Because, look, outside of Persephone's absence from the underworld, this story knows its Greek mythology, uses it, revels in it. And there is some kind of mystery still shrouding Persephone leaving in the first place. She left a goodbye to Cerberus in her letter but not to her own son. Nyx has warned Zagreus multiple times not to let the Olympians know she's his mother. He literally never even knew she existed. That's complicated! Add to that, Persephone left--the exact thing we are trying and failing to do again and again and again. She left with one note, which means either she managed a one-shot speedrun out of the entire realm or she had some other way to leave, because if she'd washed up in the Styx pool to plod back to her room and try again, she wouldn't've needed to leave the note in the first place. And, you know, she's Persephone. Really quite famous for leaving the Underworld! Also quite famous for being forced back. So. I'm wondering if Zagreus, so conspicuously absent from her goodbye, has something to do with it after all. Six pomegranate seeds condemned Persephone to six months, half a year, half her life. I wonder if a child that's half of her her constitutes a fitting trade instead. Which, of course Hades would be even more resentful and dismissive and cruel to the kid he got in place of the wife he loved (who he chased away by being cold in the first place). Of course Persephone would have difficulty saying goodbye to her son in those circumstances. It would make sense. The tricky thing here is how the Olympians fit into it, because I also suspect the rift between Hades and Zeus sprang from Persephone's departure. And yet, if the Olympians never knew Zagreus existed, let alone that he's Persephone's son--how can he count as payment into the deal in their eyes? So in that case, what does Zeus think is the justification for Persephone leaving, after the pomegranate thing? Or are we just not doing the pomegranate thing at all? It would be a shame to lose it entirely, out of a story that really seems to enjoy the myths it's playing with. And there should be something complex here, something more than simply 'mom fucked off and left because dad sucked and now I'm following her because same'. It feels more complex than that. 'Mom and dad had a baby to try and save their marriage, it didn't work, but when mom left she had to leave me behind because otherwise dad would have gotten the cops and her extended family involved' feels more right, while still just as grounded in reality as the story has been so far.

I sort of want to write some meta about how each of the six legendary weapons corresponds to their original divine wielder, but I haven't unlocked all of their codex entries yet (look I am very bad with ranged weapons in this game ok, I am working on it), and I still need to think about the details. Aside from, of course, fuck yes of course Hestia's the one with the railgun. Leave drama and elegance and traditional weaponry to her brothers and sister (Demeter, who knows how to get her hands dirty, gets a pass). Hestia is out here to get shit done. With a grenade launcher.

[m-m-m-myysurana]

WIP Wednesday

Ok I got tagged by @blarrghe like at least 2 weeks ago to share a wip. (I’m sorryy!) I am notoriously bad at this sort of thing. So anyway it is actually Wednesday for me now and look who has a WIP to share!! 

This is a snippet which will, in some form or another, make it into my long fic, A Cage We Share eventually. But it insisted on being written right now ty! Kept me up last night until it was out on the page. First rough draft of course so be kind ;)

Neria and Zev spend an evening in the Dalish camp after resolving the conflict between the Werewolves and the elves. 

A Night to Remember, (1500 words)

It was like no performance he’d ever seen. The singer was not dressed in any elaborate costume, nor did he even hold himself above the others, instead he sat close to the fire and sang into it. There were no instruments backing him up, though he did not seem to need it, his voice rang out clear and strong. Some sang or hummed along softly, harmonies and echoed lines fading in and out around them. From the cadence and verse, it seemed to be a story. Zevran recognised the name of one of the elven gods, though he could not pick out enough words to make sense of it. Neria’s eyes sparkled in the firelight as she listened with rapt attention. 

“What does it mean?” he whispered.

Neria looked over and smiled softly before leaning in to whisper next to his ear, “It's the Charge of Andruil. My father used to sing it. I don’t know that I’ll be able to translate it with much grace, but I can try.” 

Zevran nodded, and she settled closer to him, leaning her head on his shoulder. He kept very still, as if any sudden movement might scare her off. He felt more than heard her low words as she echoed the song. Her translation was spoken, not sung, but her voice was no less beautiful for lack of a melody.

“Remember my teachings, Remember the Vir Tanadhal: The Way of Three Trees That I have given you.

“Vir Assan: the Way of the Arrow Be swift and silent; Strike true, do not waver And let not your prey suffer. That is my Way.

“Vir Bor'assan: the Way of the Bow As the sapling bends, so must you. In yielding, find resilience; In pliancy, find strength. That is my Way.”

More voices joined in, and soon it seemed the entire camp was reciting the verse. Not every voice was as strong or beautiful as the first, but together in harmony it did not matter. As the sound filled his ears, an emotion he could not name expanded in his chest, swelling until he felt it might burst right out of him. 

“Vir Adahlen: the Way of the Wood Receive the gifts of the hunt with mindfulness. Respect the sacrifice of my children Know that your passing shall nourish them in turn. That is my Way.

“I am Sister of the Moon, Mother of Hares, Lady of the Hunt: Andruil. Remember the Ways of the Hunter And I shall be with you.” *

When the man finished, and Neria had echoed the last line, there was no polite applause or bows taken as Zevran had expected. A moment's silence passed, in which Zevran felt sure everyone would hear how wildly his heart beat. Then a drum was struck behind him, and he startled, whirling round to face it. The man pounded the drum a few more times, then began a rhythm that had many quickly cheering and standing. Neria stayed where she was on the log they were sitting on, so he remained with her. She twisted around and watched, delighted, as more of them joined in, bringing out more drums, tambourines, bells and fiddles, something that looked like a lute but wasn’t quite, and instruments he had no names for. Others joined in with the voices, not singing any particular lyrics he could pick out, just adding to the ever changing melodies with their voices. People started dancing, forming circles around the fire, and soon the camp was thrumming with the music so that even his heart seemed to beat to the rhythm. 

Neria swayed her head from side to side, eyes gleaming as she clapped along. Zevran stood, grinning as he held his hand out toward her. 

“Shall we?” 

“Oh, but I haven’t danced in years!”

“Shocking! I think it's time we remedied that, don’t you?” 

Neria laughed and let him help her up. He had not even had time to release her hand before a woman had his arm and was pulling them both along toward the dancing. With little ceremony, she broke a space between two dancers who, once they realised what was happening, very happily made space for the three of them. The dancer’s movements didn’t cease once as they attempted to join the circle, and the ensuing chaos created much laughter. The woman wrapped Zevran’s arm around her shoulders and wrapped her own around the woman beside her. A taller man wrapped his arm around Neria’s shoulders and Zevran shifted his arm under her arm and around her waist. 

Zevran had danced before, many times, though it had been nothing like this. Most dances in his country were made for two people, even in groups the dancers were in pairs. And of course most of the ones he had learnt had a focus on romance and seduction. These movements were made not in any effort to appear graceful or attractive, and indeed he was neither of those things right now. He stumbled over his feet many times as he attempted to copy the steps. They seemed to constantly shift and change, he would only just begin to pick up on one set of movements before they had moved on to another. Neria laughed, stumbling nearly as much as he did. She, however, seemed to pay no attention to what her feet were doing, instead her eyes were up and her head thrown back, as if she were simply feeling the music. 

It took him a while to realise the voice closest to him was hers. He had never heard her sing before, her voice was low and soothing and sweet like honey. Something glimmered on her face, reflecting the dancing light of the fire. Tears? Once he noticed he could not tear his eyes away. This was the happiest he had ever seen her, and yet she was crying. It confused him, but he did not dare interrupt. 

Soon the circle broke apart, though the dancing did not cease. He and Neria were separated, and he was guided through a sort of weaving dance. Each person he passed linked arms with him and spun before sending him off to the next person. This continued until he was quite dizzy, laughing as hair flew out of his braids. 

Then suddenly it was Neria who was swinging with him. He knew the next part meant he had to let go, but he didn’t want to. So he held on, using their momentum to throw them out and away from the fire. Neria screamed with laughter as they whirled, spinning wildly until they were some distance from the other dancers. 

He wrapped his arm around her waist, bringing her closer as he slowed them down. When they’d finally stopped, Neria’s grin was wide and open, and both of them breathed heavily. Their noses nearly touched, and couldn’t help but remember the last time they were so close. Heat flushed through him unexpectedly, and something sparked in her eyes, a look he recognised from that night. They were out in the open, the whole clan could see them if they looked the right way, but he couldn’t care less. He dared to lean into her lips and was delighted when she responded with far more enthusiasm than he’d expected. There was a loud whoop followed by whistling and laughter, but Zevran did not want to pull away to see if it was aimed at them.  

The kiss was clumsy, all teeth and breathless laughter, but in that moment he wouldn’t have had it any other way. She pushed her hands into his mess of hair, destroying what remained of his braids, and he tugged at her waist until their bodies were flush against one another. Her foot caught on something, and she stumbled, falling against his chest. He was still so dizzy that they both went over. He caught himself before they hit the ground, and managed to lower them down, almost gently. Neria lay on his chest, wide eyed for a moment, but then she burst into a fit of laughter, rolling off of him and onto the damp leaves. He couldn’t help but join in. 

After some time their laughter faded as they focused simply on breathing again. Neria looked up at the sky, and Zevran followed her gaze. Framed by the clearing in the tall trees, clouds had parted to reveal a glimpse of the night sky. For a second he was taken back to the time he’d spent stargazing with Talisen and Rinna, out on the roof of their tiny, crumbling apartment. Those nights were always accompanied with so much cheap wine that his memories of them were hazy and faded. This night he hoped to keep clearly in his mind for as long as he lived. 

“Thank you.” Neria whispered the words so quietly, he wasn’t sure he was meant to hear them at all. 

He turned his head to look at her, watching her breath rise and fall as she stared up at the stars. A soft smile tugged on her lips, and her lashes came to rest on her cheeks as she closed her eyes, more peaceful than he had ever expected to see her. 

No, he would not let this memory fade.

*The song was adapted slightly from this codex entry about Andruil.

You can read about the beginning of Neria and Zev’s relationship here! <3