#oc: suri cadash

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▶ You're strangely charming.

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Suri. 🖤

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every dwarven inquisitor deserves a bit of princess time, if you ask me. 🖤

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Everything you've heard? Completely true.

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🖤

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Inquisitor Cadashing, at your service.

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one day, i'll make actual progress in the game, but until then... them. 🖤

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"Eyes ahead, Carta." Varric's voice found her ears as nothing more than a rumble of warning, and its words tangled into the hiss of restless spirits that surrounded them and the haunting sizzle and crack of the Breach above their heads. "Don't pay them any mind." But they were people, gnarled and burnt and frozen in their last moments of torment — mages and templars alike of all ages, elves and humans and...

Suri pulled her eyes away from a not-quite-familiar-enough corpse that had been reaching for something in its last moments. A doorhandle? A window? There was no way of knowing, not with the state of their surroundings. Glass had burned away, melted into jagged points from the explosion and glowing faintly green at their fingertips. What had been turned to splinters had quickly burned away. All that remained were the corpses, as horrid testaments to what she'd apparently done. If it had been her brother, it wasn't any longer. Everything around them would be ash after a rain. And before long, nothing more than words on a page and hazy memories. Eyes ahead, he told her. She'd have to keep that close.

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Breach.

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she's just so... 😍

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Suri Cadash.

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[ a thousand screenshots of suri fall out of my pockets and onto the floor ]

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having a horrendous day. time to look at dwarf wife for a bit to feel better.

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i've been trying to focus on playing the dang game rather than taking a frankly obscene amount of screenshots of her, but i can't help myself sometimes. :')

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This screenshot of Suri & Varric has me feeling very normal and well-adjusted.

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PROMPT : Armor. DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION ERA. Words: 1042. Characters: Suri Cadash, Blackwall, Leliana, Josephine Montilyet.

“It’s… shiny.”

Blackwall laughed suddenly and despite himself, clearing his throat with a raspy cough when both Leliana and Josephine narrowed their eyes at his unhelpful addition. Neither of their reactions drew any notice from the Herald – from the Inquisitor, from Suri – who was entirely too distracted by the golden chestplate emblazoned with the unsettling eye-sword-and-sunburst symbol of their order.

She rubbed her thick-knuckled fingers over the unblemished surface of the armor. Volcanic aurum wasn’t used for protection by dwarves; it was purely ornamental, used more often for exports than their own, personal crafts. When she tugged at the raised lip that ran across her ribs and pointed down towards her navel, the suit’s leather straps did much to ensure the chestpiece would not budge. She tugged it again, then nodded to herself, finding the fit more than suitable.

“Well, shinier than I’m used to, at least,” Suri continued, though even she caught the doubt that crept into her voice. Ears as sharp as Leliana and Josephine’s wouldn’t miss it. “It just doesn’t feel like me, s’all.”

Josephine opened her mouth to speak, but clamped them together just after. Nothing important, then. Or, at least, she’d quickly convinced herself not to say what she’d felt in an instant. It wouldn’t be the first time the Inquisition’s diplomat corrected her pronunciation of something. All she could do was try not to take it to heart.

Suri understood why they’d cast aside her usual and dressed her like this instead. 

There was a certain amount of gravitas surrounding the title of Inquisitor. Her role was an important one, offered up to her for reasons she couldn’t explain in any amount of detail. There was a green hole in the palm of her left hand, and with it, she closed the even bigger, greener hole in the sky. If there was anything else that distinguished her from the others, she couldn’t know what it was.

No one had bothered telling her why she was so special.

“So… uh,” Suri began, fumbling pitifully through the half-dark of silence. She reached for something – or, rather, someone – familiar. “What d’you think, Blackwall?”

The Warden had been up in her quarters when Josephine arrived with a pair of Inquisitor soldiers carrying a massive and seemingly heavy crate, delivered straight to them from an armorer in Orlais. Behind them, Leliana followed. When he offered to excuse himself alongside the agents, Suri was the one who reached out.

“Can you stay?” she’d asked without hesitating, without thinking. “It’d do me a lot of good. Show me how soldiers might see… all of this.”

Blackwall paused for just long enough to look her up and down. 

“A show’s a show, but you’ll put on a fine one in that.”

“A show is a show, as you put it, Warden Blackwall,” came Josephine’s immediate, but delicately worded interruption. “But naming Lady Cadash the Inquisitor is more than mere pageantry or puppetry. It will not be a simple show of strength, but a moment that will be scrawled upon the pages of history for even those who are not present.”

Suri’s conflicted stare broke away from the warden and the diplomat, circling back around instead to the spymaster. She caught the woman stroking her gloved thumb over the point of her chin as her eyes roamed from her boots to the highest fold in her samite collar.

“The druffalo hide is the color of cat sick,” Leliana said just loudly enough for all those gathered to hear. “Send the atrocious coat back for something prettier. Snoufleur, perhaps?”

Suri couldn’t stop herself from laughing, and once she did, the others followed suit. 

Blackwall snorted. Josephine’s giggle was swept aside with a delicate – and disapproving – sigh. While Leliana often proved herself blunt for a former bard, none of them had been prepared for the words she cut from her own tongue.

“I still have mine.”

Suri squirmed out of the coat, only noticing once she’d been freed of the thing that the leather did look the exact sickly brown-green color of cat vomit. Her duster had been shoved unceremoniously into a chest at the foot of her bed once they arrived at Skyhold, but it was there. It was an option… and one she wanted to take.

“Send this one back, but don’t have another one made,” she continued. Tossing the coat into Blackwall’s arms before moving around her bedside and dropping to her knees in front of the massive trunk, a certain glimmer of confidence swelled inside her chest. Maybe she wasn’t comfortable in the gold, but she’d be comfortable in something else. “A little something shiny, a little something worn – it’s the best way you could dress me.”

Stealing a glance at Josephine over her shoulder, she caught a smile tucked into the corner of Blackwall’s mouth. 

“If you are… absolutely certain, Inquisitor.” Varric called Josephine Ruffles, and from the sight of her ruffled feathers, she could tell the nickname suited. “I assure you that the issue is not monetary in nature. We only lack time.”

Suri issued an involuntary grunt as she hefted the heavy chest open. The first scent to hit her was smoke, caught in the lining of her coat from their last night in Haven. How it managed to cling onto the fabric, even after her walk through the snow, even through their exodus to what would be Skyhold… 

She shook her head to clear the memories away. 

“I know it’s not a money thing,” Suri said under her breath. “But bronto’s better, and the quality isn’t bad, no matter how old it is. I’ll have them see me in this.”

This time, when Blackwall cleared his throat, he did so to draw her attention towards him rather than swipe it away from himself. He held the cast-off coat in his arms, both hands curling deep into the rumpled fabric.

“I’ve always thought you look well in it.”

Don’t grin. Don’t grin. You’ll look like a little girl. Don’t grin at him.

Suri beamed, all flushed round ears and dimpled cheeks and creased skin around her dark eyes. There was no stopping the inevitable.

“This coat wins, then,” she laughed. “And I’ll be keeping all that flattery in my pocket.”