#me puts both sun and lion and wild boar in this post as like some weird flex i guess

[godraet]

she's positively radiant, the moon maiden. and she's as enthusiastic as ever. yuri had been like that since childhood- wanting to live up to her duties-

i want to be like my mother, she'd told him once- she'd danced and had brought a brief period of rain. not more than about five minutes, but it had still been incredible. he had never once seen anyone summon rain, certainly not by dance. i want to get stronger, she'd said, that's why it only rained a little now...

the memories are fond. of the girl he was certain was a princess. the one from the far-away land. the one who was like the moon, where he had been born to become the sun- and while they had been apart, they had kept in touch. writing of their lives, of their duties. so, it was no surprise to him when she spoke of seeking the blessings of the gods.

he did not mention the power of the sun that had burned itself into his flesh. he knows her insecurities. so with her, he acts like a stubborn but (hopefully) likeable emboar at his worst, and a respectable prince at best. he does not act as the sun and lion- he worries that will be too much. she's got enough to deal with. maybe one day he'll let her know.

for now, he takes note of the ring on her right thumb, noting the phoenix-god's power radiating from it, before a smile comes to his features. bright, like the sun. familiar and warm, because of course it is. they've known each other for quite a time, and he'd become rather invested in having her in his life. a true friend if ever he had one- ❝ i never doubted that you would pass, yuri- you've worked so hard, so of course you passed! ❞

a pause, then, as he takes note of ... well... it must've been a little rough. ❝ but, it looks like something else tried to stand in your way- you overcame it, but it would be rather wise if those injuries are tended to before you run off to get pass your second trial. ❞ the words are followed by a soft laugh- warm and low. ❝ i have just the potions to help with that, if you'll allow it. ❞

"Gaaaaaaaaaannn!!! Look, look, look!" She showed off the ring glowing with a fiery power on her right hand thumb. "I did it! I passed my first trial!" ╱ @moonkssd

[sky-scribbles]

The Shape of the Soul - II

Continuation of my Dragon Age daemon AU, this time for the DA2 companions (barring Varric, because in this AU, dwarves don’t have daemons.) Inspired by this post, which is incredible and should be read. For those of you who’ve already seen this on DeviantArt, I’ve done some rewriting because I wrote this a while ago and I felt like it could do with some tweaking.

Origins/Awakening version here.

~

Carver Hawke

They know him, the people of Lothering. Brianna makes them know him.

She refuses to take a form that isn’t fearless. Lion, great bear, boar, wolf, bronto – whatever his older sibling’s daemon becomes, Brianna becomes something larger and stronger, and Carver’s chest swells with pride. She’ll bring him out from his family’s shadow. She’ll become a creature no one could look away from, prove that he’s more than just the little Hawke.

When she lets him down, when she settles into the form of a black and gold Anderfels shepherd dog, he feels like pounding the walls of the world and screaming. She feels his resentment, and flattens her ears and bares her teeth. And Carver knows there’s something wrong if you’re fighting with your daemon, that you should never be angry with your own soul, but he is, he’s angry, so angry.

It’s not just pride. It’s not just that he hoped for a daemon who’d make sure he could never be overlooked. His anger isn’t because he thinks Brianna got it wrong. It’s because he’s afraid she got it right. Dogs are servants’ daemons. Dogs belong to footmen and farmers and labourers, people who slink in the shadows of others, and whenever he looks at Brianna he feels despair well up inside him because that can’t be his life.

So he refuses to be a dog. He marches away to Ostagar.

And there, in the soldiers’ camp, the knot of doubt and anguish in his stomach unravels. Because Brianna romps and play-tussles with the other soldiers’ daemons, and his comrades-in-arms grin as Carver thumps her flanks and ruffles her ears, saying he should be proud of her, that having a dog-daemon is a good sign. Smart, they say, loyal, Fereldan to the bone. That night, he sleeps with an arm draped over his daemon and a smile draped over his face. The resentment he felt when she settled feels so distant it might as well have never been. He's not little Hawke here. He’s Hawke, and Brianna is his daemon.

Then Loghain retreats when the beacon is lit, and everything is gone.

Kirkwall. Brianna slinks at Carver’s heels, not because she’s a servant’s daemon, but because of Bethany. She bristles now when anyone but Carver goes near her, raises her hackles and snaps, and he doesn’t try to calm her. He’s little Hawke again now, and he’s snarling on the inside too.

Then one day, he’s wearing armour again, just like he was at Ostagar, and there are brothers-in-arms around him whose daemons play-fight with Brianna until her barks and snarls turn into yapping laughs. He walks tall, proud of the emblem on his breastplate, and prouder still of Brianna, because dogs mean loyalty and Carver plans to give all the loyalty he has. First to his new order. Then to his sibling, when the city goes up in flames and he understands at last why his daemon is a dog.

Dogs aren’t about serving. They’re about helping. Years later, on the way to Weisshaupt to find his disaster of a sibling, he passes one of the Anders shepherds, and stops to ask him about his dogs. And the shepherd looks at Brianna, smiles with understanding. The Anderfels shepherd, he says, needs a purpose, or it’ll snap and snarl at everything. They won’t take to many, but the ones who raise them and stick with them, they’ll die to protect. Except they won’t die, because they know how to fight, and by the Maker, but do they fight hard.

 ‘Well,’ Brianna says, as they walk away. ‘Looks like I got it right after all.’

Carver stops walking, drops to his knees, and throws his arms around her.

~

Bethany Hawke

Night comes after day, dwarves don't dream, and mages’ daemons are birds. These are facts of life, things that no one can fight or change. Bethany thinks often about the Circles, about how their halls and passages must be like aviaries of caged birds, and her throat tightens. And yet they might be beautiful. All the bright feathers. 'And all the singing,' Eliron whispers, and Bethany smiles.

He doesn’t like to become a bird too often, though. It feels like tempting fate. He spends most of his time as deer, and Bethany prays to the maker to let him settle as one. Just let him not be a bird. Then that jeering boy from the neighbouring farm gets into a fight with Carver, and somehow she hurls him away from her brother and halfway across the street without laying a hand on him. They run home, Father shouts for them to pack their bags, the family runs again. And Eliron panics. He flickers through every bird Bethany knows and plenty she doesn’t, trying on shape after shape, refusing to take any form that doesn’t have wings and feathers.

Be an eagle, Carver tells him, be a swan or an albatross, but Bethany knows that’s not what Eliron’s going to be. Eliron knows it too, because he never listens to Carver. He favours small things, things with round black eyes and plain feathers, things that can become invisible just by staying still. He moves around the house in cautious hops and short bursts of flight - a wren, a dunnock, a treecreeper - until he realises that what he loves most, what they both love most of all, is to hear him fill the house with song. From then on, it’s nightingales and blackbirds, robins and larks.

At last, Eliron settles as a song thrush.

He’s plain to look at, if you don’t look closely, if you just take in the brown feathers and don’t notice the beautiful cream and dark flecks on his chest. He’s small enough that he can just about hide in a pocket if he’s afraid, and he often does, because the Templars stare long and hard at anyone with a bird-daemon. She could look at them wrong, and that would be all the excuse they’d need to cut her down, just because her soul has wings. Like hawks on a songbird.

She looks at the Gallows sometimes, from across the water. She looks at it and thinks about how people keep thrushes as pets. They can live in a cage. They’ll sing their hearts out, with bars between them and the hawks and cats.  Maybe it would be easier, to let them clip her wings, so she can sing.

But after the expedition – when everything’s said and done and there’s no going back, no matter how much she and her sibling might hate it – she realises something. She and Eliron – they have a secret, and it’s the reason Eliron became the kind of thrush he did, not the plainer-feathered yet more beautiful-voiced cousin. A nightingale will sing to make you weep, but you’ll never see it, where it shrinks deep into the woods. A thrush, though… a thrush is something else.

A thrush learns. A thrush steps out into the open. A thrush knows how to crack a snail’s shell with just a few quick, hard strikes against stone.  Bethany knows how to strike like that, when she’s got something worth fighting for, knows how to step out into the light of day with lightning at the tips of her fingers. Put her in a cage, and she’ll survive, but she was always meant to be free, because a thrush is more than a brown-and-cream bird with a pretty song, a thrush is a wild bird and a thrush has skill and smarts and pluck.

That’s Bethany’s secret.

Oh, she’s afraid. But she’s also a thrush. Which means that at heart, she is bold.

~

Aveline Vallen

Her father, of course, wanted her daemon to be a lion. Strong, proud, loyal, and, most importantly, Orlesian. He was about as determined for her to have a lion as Aveline and Audric were determined for her not to have one.

‘Too grand,’ Aveline complains, after her father raises the idea for the fiftieth time.

Audric, in the shape of a mabari just to prove a point, nods. ‘Too stately.’

‘Walking around Ferelden with some great golden cat beside me? That’d mark me out as foreign even more than my name.’

‘And they’re lazy, the males. Sleeping in the sun all day, taking first bite of whatever the females catch.’

Both their jaws clench. That’s injustice, that is, and they want no part in that.

So it’s with some relief that Aveline realises one day that he’s stopped changing. He’s loping at her side in the form of a stocky reddish-coloured bullmastiff and isn’t showing any signs of abandoning that form any time soon. ‘Perfect,’ Aveline says, and Audric gives his tail the tiniest wag. A bullmastiff is as Fereldan as a lion would have been Orlesian. Very tough, very straightforward, and very, very Aveline.

Even without the lion, her father gets her into the king’s service. It’s all right, they tell each other. Audric’s a more natural daemon for a knight than you might expect. A dog-daemon means loyalty, and it means respect from any true Ferelden. The lips that curl at the sound of her name tend to go still again when they see Audric, because he’s about as Fereldan as a lion would have been Orlesian. And it’s only right for her soul to be Fereldan – she speaks with its accent, knows its ways, falls in love with one of its men.

But then suddenly all of that is behind them, and Wesley is dead, and she’s in Kirkwall with a family of ragged refugees.

The guard becomes Aveline’s new pack, because a dog’s nothing without one. She knows some of her comrades-in-arms wonder why she’s always wandering off with Hawke, and why she challenges the Captain’s orders when the cost could be her career. She knows why they wouldn’t expect it, because Audric’s quiet for a dog. The guards never thought the woman whose soul is this watchful, stoic creature would be the one to raise her hackles or show her teeth.

You can’t give the same command again and again to a bullmastiff, though. Not unless you want it to stop listening and start looking for more. Aveline and Audric know that, and that’s why they question things, find the scent of corruption and follow the trail until they’ve flushed out the source.

That’s what marks them out. All dogs are loyal followers. But there are only a very few who can be leaders.

~

Anders

Anders wakes from his Harrowing with his mind aching and his heart pounding and his sheets cold and wet from sweat. He almost lashes out when something touches his shoulder, but it’s Karl, just Karl, thank the Maker, and without thinking twice about it - damn the consequences, just this once – pulls his lover to him and holds him close. And Karl smile against his shoulder, clings to him for a moment, then whispers, ‘I think you should take a look at Themis.’

So Anders does, his heart beating even faster. She’s been ridiculously late to settle - he likes to joke that it’s out of spite, that she refuses to take a shape while the Templars are trying to define what they are. But everyone knows that when a mage’s daemon settles late, it’ll often happen after the Harrowing. So he looks, and there she is, his Themis, his soul, perched on the end of his bed, bobbing her long tail up and down to show off its beautiful blue-green sheen.

He stares, then grins.

‘Maker,’ he says. ‘The senior enchanters are going to love this.’

He can’t count the number of times someone tuts or mutters ‘of course,’ when they see the shape she’s chosen, when they realise that the Circle’s resident troublemaker has a magpie for a daemon. Anders, though, has no complaints. All crows are clever, and Themis has his flair, his flash, his wit, his love of hoarding. Little trinkets, shiny things, useless things, any things that he can squirrel away beneath his bunk, just for the joy of having something in the world that belongs to him.

Then they take Karl away. So he starts testing his wings for the first time in years, desperate to break the cage, and he sees the darker side of a magpie-daemon. He doesn’t remember much about his home, no matter how stubbornly he clings to the images, but one flash of memory is of his father hurling a stone at a black-and-white bird. He can’t hear the voice in his mind, only remembers it saying that the bird would have got at the hens’ eggs, even the new-hatched chicks if it could. He remembers thinking that surely only a few magpies do that, and not very often. And it’s the same with mages who try to be free. They summon demons, people say. Only a few, Anders wants to scream. Not very often. And not me.

Magpies are hunted, hated. The whole world is against them.

It sank in long ago, the cruel irony of the rule that mages’ daemons are always birds. People love to cage birds, to watch them sit behind bars and sing, but a bird is a creature of the sky and that is where it belongs. You'll never hear a magpie sing for anyone. Anders certainly doesn't plan on doing so. So when Justice makes his offer, he says yes.

And after – after the world becomes as black and white as Themis's feathers – there’s an odd distance between them. He’s not the same man he was when Themis settled, and she doesn’t quite fit as she used to. He and Justice are one now, after all, and no spirit has a daemon. But Anders still loves her, of course he loves her, because he will always be a magpie at heart. You can tell it just to look at him – feathered shoulders and dark eyes that don’t miss a thing. He may hunt for escape routes and messages from the underground now, not for trinkets, but he’s still a scavenger.

He watches her sometimes, a lone magpie flashing around his clinic, and the old rhyme runs through his head. 'One for sorrow,' he says, and Themis shakes her head. 'You're me,' she says. 'You're a magpie too. It's two for joy.' She was always the bright-eyed part of him, the part that laughed and bobbed her tail. She's the part of him that hopes. So he allows himself to believe her. The thought that there might just be a chance at joy… it’s what keeps him fighting.

~

Fenris

‘Little wolf,’ Danarius called him, but Danarius was wrong.

A wolf is a creature of packs. A wolf is bright eyes and obedience. A wolf craves company and a wolf knows its place. Fenris is not a wolf. Fenris is power and pride, even if that pride is bruised and raw from its shackles, and anyone who looks at Tenebris can see it. He doesn’t know whether she settled before he got the brands or whether the lyrium changed her, somehow, just as it changed him. All he knows is that for as long as he can remember, she’s been like this, a sleek, beautiful, black-furred creature of the northern rainforests.

Danarius should have known they’d break free. No one could ever tame a panther.

He kept her on a chain, of course, and clasped a spiked collar around her neck. He made her clean his boots with her tongue, rested his feet on her back, stroked the glossy fur of her head whenever one of his rivals came to visit. Look, said that hand that buried itself in the black pelt. See what powerful beasts I have at my command.

His touch on her was like knives in Fenris’s gut. But he stood silent, still, head bowed. His master owned his body. His soul was held in his master’s hands.

Danarius would force them apart, make them sleep in separate rooms, forbid them to speak to each other, even touch. In his anger, he would beat them both, and Fenris would feel Tenebris’s pain jolt through his own body, and he’d think vaguely through a fog of anguish that it was wrong, seeing a creature of strength and grace cowed like this. The thought would flicker for a moment, and then be gone.

When they finally run, it’s the first time Fenris has ever felt close to his soul.

Living in Kirkwall is not only about learning to live with freedom. It’s about learning who he is. For the first time, Tenebris is not an oversized cat, she is a piece of the wild, and so is he. They spend long nights curled up beside the fire in the mansion, talking as they never have before. Fenris curses himself for never realising that he always had an ally in her, then stops and curses Danarius instead for forcing him to feel separate from her. Slowly, the barriers break down, and he’s willing to touch his own soul at last, to run his hands through her velvet fur, and she’s willing to lie alongside him at night with her pelt brushing his skin.

When the accursed mage starts up his ranting about freedom again, Fenris finds himself listening for once. Because the mage mentions Tranquility. About how no one deserves to have their daemon severed, their bond with their soul taken away.

Fenris glances down at Tenebris, at this creature who would always, eventually, slip or break any collar you placed around her neck, because she’s a panther, not a cat. He feels his heart swell, and for the first time in his life, he finds himself understanding what Anders means. 'No one will cage us,' Tenebris growls. 'No one will seperate us.' And she bares her teeth, teeth that can bite right through a man's skull, just as Fenris's hand can slam through a chest. He doesn't doubt that she is right.

~

Merrill

Merrill always did do things a little differently.

Many Dalish have jays as daemons, even those who aren’t mages, but they’re all the normal creamy-brown jays, creatures that can melt into the woods, go unseen if they want to. There’s no missing Belavahna. She’s so obviously foreign, her feathers vibrant, exotic, tropical, the blue of shallow waters in warm oceans. No Fereldan bird looks like she does.

The other Dalish frown and shake their heads at the sight. When your daemon stands out as much as her, it means you’re different in some way, and people are always ready to think that different means dangerous. But Belavahna – she’s not dangerous. Merrill knows she isn’t. A jay will give you a nice firm peck if you try to hurt it (and serve you right), but they aren't cruel. Jays are bright, inquisitive eyes, and cheerful voices that rarely still. Jays are curiosity and cleverness.

Jays like to keep things, too. They stash nuts and seeds away, keep them hidden, keep them safe. Merrill feels like she's doing the same, as she gathers the shards of the Eluvian, pieces it back together, and lugs it around with her everywhere she goes. ‘Like a magpie gathering things that glitter,’ the clan say, but Merrill bites her lip and carries on. Bela’s always been the bolder part of Merrill, though, the stronger part, so she looks their clanmates in the eye defiantly, and later, she presses her head against Merrill’s face, the brush of her feathers a soothing comfort.

‘You’re not keeping these things out of greed,’ she says. 'That’s not what jays do. Jays keep things because they’re too precious to be lost.'

They stand out even more in the Alienage than they did with the clan. A Dalish girl with a tattooed face and her vivid azure and cream bird-daemon will always attract stares and turn heads, nowhere more so than where everyone else’s daemons are so... faded. When Merrill looks at the other elves’ patchy-furred dogs and mice and squirrels, the only word that comes to mind is defeated.

She could never fit in with these people, when her soul is so very, very different to theirs. So she’s on her own, and that’s the hardest part, because jays really don’t like to be alone.

But there’s brightness in this life too. There’s Hawke. And there’s Varric and Isabela and the others, and card games in the Hawke estate and feeling like she’s not so alone after all. And there’s browsing the bookshelves in Hawke’s house, and stumbling on one about Free Marches birds. It’s the book that tells her that Bela’s a scrub jay. It’s the book that tell her a lot of things about her daemon and thus about herself.

She reads. She reads about how scrub jays pick the ticks and fleas from deer and cattle, helping them in ways so small they might not even notice. She reads about how they’re frowned on, called thieves. ‘Well, that’s a little unfair,’ Bela says. ‘They need to eat.’

Yes, they do. Just like Merrill needs to fix the Eluvian. You don’t stop doing something you need to do because other people have the wrong idea about it.

But the most important thing she learns is that scrub jays watch. They watch each other, and they remember. They don’t forget where they hide their stashes, not ever. They move their caches when another bird sees them hide it. They hold on to the past and they plan for the future, looking behind so they can find a way ahead, because behind those quick darting eyes and the cheerful chattering voices are minds that never, never forget.

And it’s a Keeper’s job – Merrill’s job – to remember. Even the dangerous things.

~

Isabela

Mages have birds. But they’re not the only ones. Isabela’s never shot lightning from her fingers her whole life, though she can think of plenty of circumstances in which it would be… interesting to be able to do so. She has a bird all the same, and it means something very different. It means freedom.

When Delmar settles, Isabela’s mother clenches her jaw and mutters something about even harder to get you married properly now. The birds-are-mages association isn’t too much of an obstacle, not in Rivain, but Delmar is… Delmar. He’s no sleek, beautiful creature, no elegant peacock to adorn a rich man’s house. He’s big and brown, webbed feet and a short beak ending in a little dagger-hook, and he doesn’t keep quiet when he’s got something to say. He fills the house with his sharp, laughing call, and of course, Luis hates him.

Zevran, however, finds him hilarious.

‘A skua for a daemon,’ he says, tossing her a knife. ‘That being the case, you should find skewering me fairly easy, no?’ And Isabela laughs for what feels like the first time since she set eyes on Luis, and as she matches Zevran’s blades with her blades and his puns with her puns, she finally feels like she deserves Delmar. Like her soul is winged for a reason.

When at last Isabela breaks free, she lets Delmar lead the way. They know where to go. The sea has always called them, because the skua is a migrant, a wanderer, travelling for thousands of miles over open water. Delmar’s webs and sail-like wings were made for voyages. So was Isabela. But not for her the tame merchant life, because the skua is marked out from the aimlessly squabbling gulls and the fragile terns and the stately albatrosses by one thing. It is not only a traveller, but a thief.

On days when the spray’s flung into her face by the wind and the ship’s skimming across the waves as if it’s as eager to meet the horizon as Isabela is, she loves nothing more than to watch Delmar taking to the sky, flying to the very edge of their bond. Sometimes there’ll be some hapless seabird, a gull or a gannet, that manages to grasp a fish in its bill only to have a huge brown bird with a bill like a knife descend like a thunderbolt, grasp its wing to make it stall and fall to the sea below, snatching the fish from it beak with vicious deftness. Isabela pities the other birds of the sea when there’s a skua in the air, just as she pities the poor merchant who sees the Siren’s Call descending, flags fluttering, the pirate captain standing grinning at the prow, her pirate daemon on her shoulder.

When the arrows start flying and the swords start swinging, Isabela knows her place – right in the thick of things, with blades at the ready. And Delmar circles above, dive-bombing the enemy, beating his wings in the face of the bandit (who misses the blow he aimed at Merrill) and pecking at the face of the Tal-Vashoth (who would have had Varric if Delmar hadn’t been there) and scratching and clawing and fighting, fighting, fighting.

Because here’s the thing: nothing takes on a skua. Nothing but an eagle or a killer whale will ever be bold enough. Go near its nest, threaten its fledglings, and it won’t stop fighting you until you’re fleeing or dead.

Hawke and the others are like a bunch of clueless fledglings much of the time, and Isabela and Delmar are in agreement that if anyone tries to harm them, they will gouge out their Maker-damned eyes.