#oc: velrand cadash

[pavus]

PROMPT : Deep Roads. DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION ERA. Words: 1304. Characters: Suri & Velrand Cadash.

“Surischa.”

Suri cringed at the sound of her elder brother’s voice – and his use of her full name. That had been unnecessary, and he knew it. His footsteps could be heavy enough to get her attention. He could’ve cleared his voice to announce himself to her and the Carta brutes that traveled with them. Instead, he chose to throw out the name only their mother used… and only ever when she was well and truly incensed. 

Only a few of those who traveled with them were from their family, but the others still parted like a pair of legs when Velrand approached. It was impossible not to. Her brother was twice as wide as she was, though he carried himself like he had the width and crushing power of a fucking golem.

“We need to move south,” he said, his low-bellied voice filling the underground chamber they’d stopped off in to fill their water skins and a few emptied barrels. Though he spoke directly to his sister and lieutenant, she could see the other dwarves absorbing his every word. You don’t get to miss shit when you’re doing Carta work, especially not when they’d already lost a few men to darkspawn infections on the way in.  “Getting too close to Aeducan Thaig for my liking.”

Their cousin Maris – the sniveling coward – bobbed his head hard enough for his mass of matted brown hair to give a limp bounce. He wasn’t the only one who nodded.

The men liked agreeing with Velrand.

“Alright,” Suri grunted. “Take his cock out of your mouth and give me your real answers.”

Velrand opened his mouth to protest, but she was already filling the silence, her voice raised from its usual sedate murmur so that it might reach the boys and girls in the back. “Now, you all know that we got word that there was an untapped vein in this direction. Respectable, believable, trustable word, along with a mark on our map.”

Going toe to toe with Velrand wasn’t often worth the trouble, but when else would she get the chance? If the plan went well enough, the men would bring home word that her big brother was too careful and lost them an opportunity. If it went tits up, she’d just continue being the disappointment.

Or, she’d be dead.

Either way.

“We’ve still got the miners.” The pair of lyrium miners raised up a warbling rallying cry. “And we’ve got a bunch of empty crates, too. What better way is there to please my mother than by bringing her back gold and lyrium?”

“If there’s anybody to bring the take back at all…”

No one ever talked back to Velrand.

Suri was tired of all the incessant walking after months of plodding with only the briefest of respite on the surface. Suri was tired of combat against spiders and deepstalkers and darkspawn and whatever else found them in the Deep. But she was never tired of fighting for the sake of fighting.

Pushing aside the two women who stood in her way, she made a beeline for the man who’d spoken. He was smaller than the others and younger by a few years, with barely an inch of ratty, ginger beard. She shoved him hard enough against the side of the carriage he stood next to to lift it up off of one of its well-worn wheels.

She knew it was Vodol ‘cause he was the only fucker down there with a lisp.

“Sounds like we shoulda left you on the Surface,” Suri spat, punching him to punctuate rather than wound. “How many of us had to haul your sorry ass out of the Rose before we could get back on the road? And you knew it was Coterie grounds!”

The crowd’s approval pivoted, paused, then surged in her direction.

“He wasn’t the only one, either!” “Aye! Half a dozen of you bastards dove in the second we hit Kirkwall!” “Better to wet your wick in Orzammar than burying it in some elf!”

A grin smeared itself over her mouth.

“We’re only a few days out from the mark!” Suri reared back and shouted. She didn’t have a voice dripping in old dwarven gravitas like her brother, but she could make her words carry. Didn’t matter, either way. The crowd had turned, and she was just as much of a Cadash as Velrand. “What’s a few days when we’ll all be drowning in gold!”

– 

Days later, those words were still echoing in her head, along with the sound of dwarven weapons clashing against the rusted and violent edges of darkspawn blades. Days later, numbers halved, and with crates of lyrium weighing down a carriage drawn by one bronto instead of two, her brother looked at her as if she was a petulant child rather than a fallible grown woman. They walked in silence on the roads back to Orzammar, knowing that the cost had been too high, knowing that it was her fault.

Vodol was dead, as were the miners, as were twenty others. Some of them had been kin. Some of them had been strangers turned compatriots turned friends. Some of them died without her even knowing their name.

She had a wound that made walking, thinking, or breathing difficult, but it’d been a fellow Carta’s dagger that clipped her in the jaw rather than a darkspawn’s blade or a swipe of their claws. She would be fine, but she found no comfort in that fact. Not with Velrand looking at her like that, not with all of them looking at her like that.

“You have to go,” her brother muttered to her and her alone, no more than a few hours before they reached Orzammar. “Mother is going to kill you when she finds out what you did here.”

Suri pressed her lips together. The pressure sent an ache into her bandaged jaw.

“And who’s gonna tell her?”

“I will.”

Her heart broke. A crack formed right down the middle of it that she wasn’t sure would ever mend. Hearing the solid surety in Velrand’s voice, knowing he’d been deliberating on whether or not to expose her since their brush with the darkspawn, she couldn’t help but feel herself taking on too much water. She was drowning, but her eyes were dry.

“Oh.”

Velrand cleared his throat. It was the gentlest sound she’d ever heard him make.

“If… If you leave now, before we get home, I will figure something out,” he said. Velrand, who never spoke against their mother or their father. Velrand, who acted with an excess of caution. Velrand, who had not dissented, despite her lifting her voice in opposition of his plans. He reached out a hand, a future. “I will find a way to get you out.”

There were only a few ways to leave the Carta.

She hadn’t realized her big brother was one of them, just as she hadn’t realized until that exact moment just how badly she wanted to be let loose.

Suri nodded.

“I have heard mother speaking to the other families about an Enclave that is happening on the surface in the next few months,” Velrand continued, still as quiet as before. No one overheard them. No one bothered trying to. They were as defeated as she was, and she was at fault for the state of them. “It’s all templar nonsense. Might be a lucrative business opportunity.”

“Wouldn’t know one,” Suri said before spitting a mouthful of blood onto the ground beneath her boots. “But I’ll trust you.”

He rested a broad hand on her shoulder.

“Everyone learns,” was the last advice Velrand offered to her. His voice was warm and laid heavy in her ears, on her chest. “I can only hope that you do before you have to watch more people die.”

[pavus]

PROMPT : Carta. DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION ERA. Words: 1006. Characters: Suri & Velrand Cadash.

“The Knight-Captain here from Hasmal seems… squirrely.”

Velrand did not so much as glance up from the leather-bound journal in front of him. He scribbled something down, then scratched out another something higher on the page, his heavy brow knitting. “Hasmal is out. The Garvish family has dealings with the Marchers from up north.”

They’d been given their own quarters, if only just. There was a bed, a cot the size of a footrest, a vanity that was more than half-mirror, and a bucket to piss in. Behind a simple wooden divider was the other half of the broom closet they’d been shoved into, which was unoccupied as of yet. If they hadn’t flashed one of the Orlesian templars some of their product, they might have been truly roughing it.

There was no desk, so Velrand used his thigh for a writing surface. And below him, sitting on the cot with her short legs folded, was his sister.

“So everything along the Minater is out?”

“Yes.”

Suri let slip an annoyed snort. “By the fucking Garvishes?” She knew enough about Lutag Garvish to fill their piss bucket, and it was all bad. Or dull, rather. “How’d they land an agreement like that? From Hasmal to Wycome?”

The scratching of Velrand’s quill slowed, then stopped. He looked up at her, his dark eyes bleary and his concentration well and truly shattered. “What?”

“Lutag Garvish is dumb as a sack of nugshit,” Suri said, rather than repeating herself. “Fresh nugshit.”

Velrand’s massive chest heaved in a sigh.

“Yes, and?”

“How’d he get Hasmal and Tantervale and Starkhaven and Wycome buying his lyrium?”

Suri watched as the sharpened end of her brother’s quill tapped anxiously at the edge of his journal. The tap tap tap made her eye twitch. “Starkhaven’s Circle isn’t an option for any of us. Burned out about a decade ago, and the mages were sent to Kirkwall.” With his free hand, Velrand scrubbed a hand through his thick, brown beard with such ferocity that the three, gold-clasped braids under his chin bounced in response. “And he doesn’t have Wycome.”

“Then we should –”

“The Kadrat family has Wycome.”

That stopped her short, and she sighed the heaviest of sighs, her shoulders deflating into a weary slump. The Kadrat family didn��t just deal in lyrium. They dealt in everything – lyrium, weapons, textiles, wine. One of their lot ran a dye business in Orzammar that was swimming in gold and had been for longer than even her mother had been alive.

“So, what’ve we got left?”

Velrand began writing again. “Mother wants Cumberland.”

“You’re shitting me.”

That brought a half-smile to Velrand’s serious mouth. “Not shitting,” he grunted. “She pulled me aside before I left. She wants Cumberland, and she wants Sezda out.”

Suddenly, the fog she’d been carrying since the incident in the Deep Roads cleared. Suddenly, there was brilliant sunshine and a song playing on the wind and the weight of gold in every single one of her pockets. That was how you measured a mother’s love, wasn’t it? It couldn’t be anything else, not with theirs.

If opportunity was a woman, she’d have her tongue down her throat.

“I can do that for you.” The words sprinted from between Suri’s eager little lips. Before her brother could interrupt her, she lifted a hand with an, “Ah!” that stole his voice out of his throat and replaced it with an annoyed growl. “I know I’m shit in a large-scale fight, but you know I’m good for something that’s one-on-one. I’ve beaten you. Let me put a knife in the bitch.”

Velrand gave his heavy head a shake. “I know what this is.”

Suri stood up from the cot and planted her feet in front of him. The wound on her jaw was healing, if only just, but her smile was as uneven as his own. Just for different reasons.

“Don’t say I’m just doing this to get back into mother’s good graces,” she demanded, the edges of her raspy voice sharpened in her own brand of frustration with her brother. “It… might be that a little, but that’s not all. I’ve always wanted to do good by you, too, you know? And you’ll be taking up the business soon. Let me get you Cumberland.”

At first, the rigid line of Velrand’s broad shoulders made her think he was going to snap his quill in half and make her eat the damn thing. But then, they relaxed, and he looked up at her, and his half-smile turned into a full one. There was an undercurrent of surprise that she didn’t appreciate, but what could she expect, after all she’d done recently? Who could believe in her, except for herself? Except for – maybe – her brother?

“I’ll look around the place tonight,” Suri continued. “I’ll check things out and get my bearings, and tomorrow afternoon, I’ll put Sezda Varmi in the Stone.”

That night, as Suri was doing as she said she’d do, she happened upon something else entirely. She did not find an old dwarven woman with a crisp white braid and twin bruisers for sons. She did not find a letter or a trap or an empty bed, indicating that Sezda Varmi was long gone or had grown wise to her plan. She did not find another trio of dwarven merchants, counting their gold against the bottles of glowing blue lyrium that remained.

What she found was an old woman in fine Chantry garb and a god, floating above the ground, with lyrium that shone red rather blue rising from the pallor of his skin. What she found was a dropped orb, rolling towards her feet. What she found was another path in her story, another twist, another loss, as she lifted the orb into her hands and the world split open.

She would only see Velrand once more – a smoking corpse in a field of bodies, stuck in motion, stuck in agony that would chase him forever.

It was her fault.

It was all her fault.

[pavus]

PROMPT : Templar. DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION ERA. Words: 1263. Characters: Suri & Velrand Cadash.

“I don’t like dealing with templars.”

Velrand uttered a sound that hinged between a chuckle and a sigh from where he sat with his back leaned up against the painted wattle and daub wall of their shared room, looking every inch as if he was keeping the entire building up himself. Finding lodgings for forty dwarves in a city like Kirkwall wasn’t impossible, but it was egregiously expensive, so most of the lads had been left off in the Deep Roads to twiddle their thumbs while they made the exchange at the Gallows.

“Words that have never been uttered in Kirkwall before, sister,” he said in the tone he always used when he simply did not care. “What a trendsetter you are.”

Suri pulled a face. She could only imagine the horror of her expression — all wrinkled nose and scrunched mouth and jutted out tongue, but Velrand didn’t rise to the bait. He never did.

“Oh, piss yourself.”

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