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laurelsofhighever · 1 year ago

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Fandom: Dragon Age: Origins Characters/pairings: Alistair x Cousland Chapter: 8/? Rating: T Warnings: None Fic Summary: The story of the Fifth Blight, in a world where Alistair was raised to royalty instead of joining the Grey Wardens.

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Lightning crackled, and between its wicked, lashing tongues something stalked her. Whispers in her mind. An old woman with dirty hair and golden eyes leaned over her. Was this waking? No. A dragon – the woman was the dragon. Things clawed in the dark at her feet, the roots of vining laurels that twined around her body, cut into her skin. She snarled as she ripped at them with calloused hands but the growth was rotten, disintegrating in her fingers. One drove into her shoulder like a needle into cloth and still the rest grew, choking, twisting, closing over her mouth –

Rosslyn woke with a gasp of air. The jolt sent a blinding stab of pain through her shoulder that receded into a duller agony, and she fell back to the pallet with gritted teeth, eyes scrunched shut to bear it. After a moment, a cold, wet point shoved against her arm, a snuffling weight whining at her to move.

“Good dog…” she croaked, searching for Cuno’s bulk with her uninjured arm.

This time when she tried to move, a pair of thin hands pressed against her bare skin to guide her back down. They felt like her mother’s. For a moment of vertigo, she tried to work out why that thought clenched like fist around her heart, until the memory of flames and blood reared in her mind’s eye, with her mother’s shadow framed against the kitchen door as Duncan dragged her towards safety.

Grief did her no good. Her eyes opened on the wattle-and-daub walls of a small room, not a traditional Ferelden roundhouse but a square design that might have been Chasind, unadorned and thick with the scents of dung, smoke, and the bittersweet tang of the herbs hanging from the rafters. She had been stripped to bindings and breeches, but the surge of panic quieted at the sight of her armour piled neatly against the chimney breast on the opposite wall, with the Cousland sword propped over it as if standing to attention. The fire in the hearth sulked in its embers and licked its heat against her face.

“Where am I?”

“Safe, child,” answered a gravelly voice. “Or, safer than you were.”

Amusement rang in the sound of it. Following the gentle urging of the stranger’s touch, Rosslyn turned her head to find the old woman from her dream, gaunt and hollow-boned, with a thin slash of a mouth and eyes yellow and sharp as crab apples. The sight somehow bolstered her, and with feeling creeping back into her limbs memory came too, the grey dark of the tower and the smoke-obscured battlefield below, the gabble of the darkspawn, a flash of agony and then bronze, bronze eyes pleading with her not to go into the dark.

“Alistair –” She brought her hand to cover her brow. “What happened? Where is he?”

“Taking out his fretting on the woodpile, the last I saw,” the old woman replied with a huff.

He’s alive. She tried to sit up again, but the movement pulled at her shoulder.

“Do not be so eager to undo my good work, girl,” her attendant warned. “You are in the Wilds, and will not suffer for another moment of lying still.”

“The Wilds?” It would make sense if this was indeed a Chasind hut, but the vast territory couched at Ferelden’s feet was nigh-on unmapped.

“I plucked you and your companion from the tower.”

“It was swarming with darkspawn.”

The old woman waved an indifferent hand. “Unimportant.”

For a moment, Rosslyn considered. Loghain’s desertion, the king and the Grey Wardens, the awful feeling of the horde itching at the inside of her skull, all of it like a dream. The voices had receded now, silent like an emptied hall, but the revulsion still crawled in her stomach. And the dragon…

She glanced sideways to her rescuer as she stroked Cuno’s ears. The woman’s age fit her like a mask; there was no frailty in her movements, and a faint aura of power hung over her, like the vastness of the sky on a clear night. When she was little, her father had told her stories of witches who lived in the Wilds, had even said once that Maric had met one briefly after Queen Moira’s death, and it was written in the earliest pages of the Cousland Book that it had been Flemeth herself who had torn down the walls of Bann Connobar’s fortress and left Sarim Cousland standing in the ashes to prosper.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Names are pretty, but useless,” came the reply. “Besides, one of your blood should know me well enough.”

“You are Flemeth, then.” For a third time Rosslyn rose, curling up to save the strain of torn muscles, and this time she made it to sitting, though she had to hunch over and cradle her injured arm with a dizziness that left her short of breath. After a moment she managed to flex her fingers, but the movement felt weak – too weak to heft a shield. Still concerned, Cuno whined and dropped his head to her knee.

“The army lost the battle, didn’t it?”

Flemeth nodded, her voice heavy. “The darkspawn were too many, and the reinforcements did not come. Those that remain are scattered and retreating as best they can.”

The rage awakened by the news did not burn as she thought it would. Instead, it sank to the pit of her stomach like a glob of molten iron dropped into a pool, quenched into a hard ball by the cold.

“The king?”

“He died in the rearguard.”

She closed her eyes, her sigh deep and marrow-weary. Everything was wrong. She had to find Alistair, to talk to him. Now that the business of sitting up had been done away with, her ears caught the regular, dull thud-and-clatter of metal cleaving wood. Another wave of nausea threatened as she pushed to her feet, spots dancing before her eyes, but Cuno brought his broad head under her hand to steady her, and she managed not to fall. Flemeth pursed her lips but did not intervene.

A new, female voice, rich and sardonic, interrupted the rhythmic chopping of wood as Rosslyn hobbled closer. Alistair muttered something indistinguishable in response that made the woman laugh.

“And tell me,” she mocked airily, “when you are finished turning all our store into splinters, will you take the axe to the rest of the Wilds and give them the same treatment?”

“Am I supposed to just sit on my hands and wait?” he demanded. “I can’t just do nothing, not when…”

“You might prepare for your departure, or perhaps a bath? ’Tis my understanding that kings are supposed to take care with their personal hygiene.”

A pause. “I’m not the king. I wasn’t meant for the crown – I don’t want it.”

“The people of Ferelden will doubtless be grateful,” the woman replied as the sound of chopping resumed. “’Twould seem they already have enough to worry them.”

“Listen, you have no – Rosslyn!”

The axe slipped from his hands as she flinched into the brittle winter sunlight, the metal head a dull thump against the ground. With barely an instant to brace herself against the cold that raked against her feverish skin, she was swallowed up in his arms, the whisper of her name by her ear as he pressed his cheek against her hair, every muscle tensed as if he suffered a mortal wound. Somehow, he had managed to miss her injuries; his strength took the weight off her shivering limbs, so she did not pull away. Despite the icy air he had stripped down to a simple linen shirt that had soaked through with sweat, and the scent of smoke and iron clung to him, rank but real; the fabric twisted under her fingers as she buried deep into the crook of his shoulder.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he breathed.

Something fluttered behind her ribs, but she dismissed it. Blood loss. The concern of one as good as a brother. Behind him, the dark-haired woman who had been talking with him narrowed yellow eyes, her tanned arms crossed over a scrawny frame barely disguised by her layers of hide and crimson-dyed wool.

“I’m sorry about Cailan,” Rosslyn murmured, closing her eyes against the scrutiny.

A shudder ran through him, and he shook his head in lieu of anything he could voice. “It doesn’t seem real. We ought to be dead on top of that tower.”

“Do not wish for such things so easily, boy,” Flemeth scolded from the doorway.

“I didn’t mean…”

As Alistair pulled back to argue, he glanced down, his eyes widening in realisation at Rosslyn’s state of undress. His hands leapt from her bare skin as if shocked, colour climbing hot into his face. Flemeth had brought out a blanket, which he snatched with an apologetic grimace to drape around Rosslyn’s shoulders. More tired than amused, she wrapped it closer with her good arm.

“I told you not to worry so much, did I not?”

“I’m grateful, of course,” he stammered. “Very grateful. But why us? If Cailan had been saved – or the Warden-Commander – then –”

The witch cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I am sorry for your grief, but it must come later, in the dark shadows before you take vengeance, as my mother once said. You still have your duty, and it must come first.”

To Rosslyn, the subtle emphasis on the word felt pointed. A Cousland was bound by duty, she had always been taught so, but in making her a grey Warden Duncan had stripped her of her name – and in so doing, forced her into another sort of compact entirely. Alistair twitched at her side as if wanting to reach for her, but the action halted before it began, and instead he clenched the fist, steeled himself, and straightened. It hurt, but in the way of an old injury troubled by cold weather.

She forced a breath. “What happens now?”

“The battle at Ostagar has bought you time,” the witch replied. “But the full might of the horde has not been defeated. It has always been the duty of the Grey Wardens to unite the lands against the blights.” She arched a brow. “Or did that change when I wasn’t looking?”

“I am only one grey Warden,” she retorted. “Barely. We would need an army to defeat the horde.”

Flemeth levelled a steady look at her, as if she could see the kernel of defiance, the shadow clinging to the memory of her father on the pantry floor and her mother poised with arrow nocked in the doorway, which snaked into her ear like a breath of cold wind. The Wardens were dead; no one remained to keep her in the Grey, no one who could execute her for desertion. The weight of the Warden’s Oath hung around her neck, untouched. Rhodri had explained the custom of sealing the blood of the fallen into a locket, to carry the sacrifice of those unlucky enough to not survive the Joining, and when he had handed her the dainty silverite pendant it had taken almost more strength than she possessed not to fling the barbarous trinket into the fire.

Daveth would have tutted to see her thoughts now; it rankled that a common thief might think her dishonourable. But then the last sight of Ser Jory’s face swam into her vision, the way the light left his eyes as his wife’s name gasped through bloodied lips, and her mouth curled. The Grey Wardens had no honour in the first place.

“Arl Eamon won’t stand for it,” Alistair said. The conversation had gone on without her. “He wasn’t at Ostagar – he still has all his men. And he’s Cailan’s uncle, a respected voice in the Landsmeet.” Something desperate wriggled in his voice. “We should go to him, let him know what Loghain has done.”

“What creeps upon Ferelden now is a threat greater than any one man can pose,” Flemeth warned. “Your priority must be the darkspawn.”

“But how do we fight them? Redcliffe won’t be enough on its own, and Highever –” He swallowed, glanced sideways at Rosslyn.

“The treaties,” she realised, and turned to both of them. “The Warden who took me into the Wilds said that they once had treaties that can demand aid from the other races during a Blight, but we couldn’t find them.” A darker thought took root. “And who’s to say if Orzammar or the Dalish would even honour such oaths anyway.”

Flemeth snorted. “They will honour the treaties because they must, and because I will give you what you were searching for.”

“You took the treaties?”

“The seal wore off long ago, I protected what was contained within,” she replied, offended.

“Then we’ll take them,” Alistair declared. “And we’ll get our army.”

“Someone will need to lead it,” Rosslyn pointed out. Her voice was quiet, but he flinched from it nonetheless and shoved a hand through his sweat-darkened hair.

“If we get that far,” he said.

Rosslyn hunched further into the blanket but let the blot of cowardice go. Perhaps, once, it would have been her concern, but he had been lost to her the moment she drank from the cup, and though the knowledge left a bitter taste in her mouth, like medicine it offered strength as well.

“So you are set then?” Flemeth asked. “Ready to move against the Blight?”

Rosslyn glanced up to the sun, low on the northern horizon and not yet at midday. “What choice do we have?”

“There are always choices,” came the mocking reply.

Across the small yard, the young woman who had been talking with Alistair let out a scoff. “Only for some of us.”

“Do not complain, girl,” the old woman snapped. “You have been itching to get out of the Wilds for years, here is your chance.” She turned to Rosslyn and Alistair, dropping the edge of biting humour that had clung to her manner thus far. “It has already been decided. Consider it repayment for your lives – I’m giving you Morrigan, my daughter, that which I value above all in this world.” Another scoff from Morrigan went ignored. “Without her, you will surely fail, and you must succeed.”

“Then we should start as soon as we can.”

“Are you fit to travel yet?” Alistair asked. His hand flexed towards her elbow, but the gesture cut short before he could touch her.

“As long as weight is kept off the injury, yes,” Flemeth answered for her. “Morrigan knows spells to speed the healing.”

“She’s a mage too?” He frowned. “Outside of the Wilds that will make her an apostate – it could be a problem.”

The witch canted her head to the side. “If you did not want the aid of us illegal mages, perhaps I should have left you on top of that tower.”

“… Point taken.”

“You need not fear for my safety,” Morrigan interrupted. Unlike her mother’s dry mockery, hers rang with glee, a songbird instead of a crow. “I am more than capable of outwitting those brutes the Chantry keeps leashed to its service.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “that attitude isn’t going to draw any attention at all.”

Her lips thinned. “I suggest a village north of the Wilds as our first destination,” she said to Rosslyn. “’Tis not far and you will find much you need there. Or if you prefer,” she added, with a pointed look at Alistair, “I will simply be your silent guide.”

Years of lessons in court etiquette schooled Rosslyn’s expression into one of indifference, shrugging off the bite in her temper caused by the now-pulsing ache in her shoulder.

“A silent guide is no good to me,” she replied levelly. “And you’re right that we’ll need supplies.”

“Then I shall gather my things,” Morrigan replied with a condescending nod.

She slunk away behind the hovel and in watching her go Rosslyn failed to notice Flemeth’s exit as well, silent as mist. Alistair watched her.

“We need all the allies we can get,” she told him, before he could complain.

“No, it’s not… Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I’m difficult to kill.” The wry edge in her voice held too much bitterness to pass as a joke, but one corner of his mouth tilted up all the same. He inhaled, then let go the breath. A wren called from the thicket beyond the clearing, a sharp chit-chit like a pair of marbles clacking together.

“Eamon will know what to do,” he said. “He’s one of Cailan’s oldest advisors.”

“Not his anymore,” she replied, as gently as she could.

He flinched. “Don’t do that. When we were in the tower…” He shook his head. “It wasn’t me they were following. None of this is supposed to be happening.”

She thought of the whisper that had snaked deep through her flesh as the darkspawn blood burned down her throat, her vision doubled on an image of blackened, crooked scales and a maw of sword-sharp teeth dripping poison. The weak sun faltered behind a creeping bank of cloud and even wrapped in the thick wool of Flemeth’s blanket a shiver grasped at her bones. Her injury throbbed. She held her tongue.

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