#tangle will take her sister out to buffalo wild wings

[pocketscribbs]

ITS THE BUGS BIRTHDAY!!!🎉🎉

it’s the beeble’s birthday…

[sky-scribbles]

The Shape of the Soul

Dragon Age Daemon AU, featuring the Origins and Awakening companions. Inspired by this amazing post by @piedpica (who tumblr won’t let me @ for some reason? but go check out their daemon headcanons, they’re amazing). Not included are Leliana, because I can’t top the idea from the above post, Anders, because he’ll be addressed in the DA2 instalment, and the dwarves, because I've adopted the idea from other Daemon AU makers that dwarves wouldn’t have daemons.)

~

Alistair

You wouldn’t think to look at Cara that she was the daemon of a King’s son. And that’s just how Alistair likes it.

He’s never asked anyone what Maric’s daemon was, and honestly, he doesn’t care. No doubt it was something very heroic and glorious, an eagle or a stag, fit to stand alongside his father in portraits, fit to be sung of in tales. But Alistair grew up sleeping in a kennel, and Cara was always going to settle as a dog.

She doesn’t stay as a dog all the time, of course, no child’s daemon can ever stay still. After he’s sent to the Chantry, after he hurls his mother’s amulet at the wall, they both go out of their way to cause as much trouble as possible. When the sisters gather them to pray, Cara pads in quietly as a cat or a little terrier. Then, halfway through the Canticle of Exaltations, she transforms into a great snorting druffalo or an ugly-faced wyvern or even a ridiculous nuggalope, and the drone of voices transforms into yelps of shock and shouts of anger. Alistair doubles up laughing, and keeps grinning even during the chores he’s given as punishment. ‘Worth it,’ Cara whispers, and he has to agree.

But for all the jokes she plays with her changing, she always seems to come back to dogs. Perhaps she's simply trying to be as un-King-like as is physically possible, perhaps she's just being a true Fereldan. It doesn't matter. There's a comfort in it that he finds nowhere else, in having her curled against him at night, warm fur against his skin to remind him that he is not quite alone.

He doesn’t even notice that she’s settled for days, the form she takes is so very like her. It takes him some time to realise she's stopped shifting, that she's taken on the shape of those Storm Coast retriever dogs. One of those none-too-smart looking ones, with the folded-over, floppy ears and the big brown eyes. ‘I wanted a mabari,’ he mock-moans, and Cara opens her mouth and hangs out her tongue in a dog’s way of laughing. ‘I wanted someone with brains,’ she sniggers, and Alistair pounces on her and wrestles her to the ground and they tussle like puppies, letting out breathless gasps of laughter.

It’s Cara that Alistair looks to for reassurance every time the insults fly his way, every time he hears a voice sneer idiot or sees the curl of a lip betray the thought of worthless. Cara is a creature bred on the wild seas, to drag in nets from icy waters and to retrieve hunters’ kills from tangled undergrowth. She rolls around with her eyes laughing and her legs waving in the air, a jester of a dog, but there’s a soldier underneath the creamy pelt. There's strength and endurance there, things that no one sees in him until the Templars press a sword into his hand and the weapon somehow feels like a perfect, natural extension of his arm, things that no one respects until Duncan passes him his Joining chalice. And Cara's pelt is thick, to hold out the cold of a frosted sea. Over the years, Alistair’s skin has grown just as thick against the whispers of bastard and fool.

Loghain betrays them, and Alistair feels like he’ll be snarling inside forever. Never betray a Fereldan, never betray someone with a dog-daemon, never incur the wrath of a man to whom loyalty comes before all else. The murmurs start, that the crown might fall to him, and he wants the earth to swallow him. His daemon is a dog, and dogs don't rule nations. They follow and they serve. ‘We’re not leaders,’ he whispers to Cara.

She rests her head on his knee. ‘We could be.’

And Alistair looks at her, and knows she's right. For all their games, for all their playful tail-wagging and soft fur, her breed are only jokers on the surface. At their core, they are workers, hunters - even guides to the blind. Dogs are made to serve, and surely that's what a king does, just as much as a Warden? Perhaps there’s more to him than he thinks. He already knows there’s more to him than people say. No one with a dog-daemon is a fool.

~

Morrigan

Gwydion settles as the mirror breaks.

He was always changing his shape, just as Morrigan did. She pities the children who can only watch the shifting of their daemons and envy them, the children who have never known what it is to feel flesh meld into fur, to spread wings against the sky or run on velvet paws through midnight forests. She and Gwydion have run together as wolves, flitted through the woods as bats, stalked the verges of villages on cats’ silent feet. They pride themselves on their closeness, and watch the outside world with scorn. None of these poor fools can be so close to their daemons, when they have never taken on their shapes, never seen the world through any eyes but their own.

When Flemeth’s hands cast the mirror down, everything changes. The glass shatters, and Morrigan’s world solidifies. Gwydion, cowering as a rat among the shards of the mirror, twists and flickers one last time, and then flies to her shoulder like a shadow, the dark beads of his eyes glittering at Flemeth across the fragments of her bond with her daughter. Morrigan watches her mother turn her back and leave her, then rises to her feet. She would like to cry, but she knows no one will come, and so she shifts her form into the one that her daemon has taken.

Together, the two ravens lift away into the night.

He could only ever have been a bird, for so it is with all mages. And perhaps he could only ever have been a raven, for Morrigan knows the old superstitions about them. Birds of the night, birds of magic, birds of wisdom and secrets, birds of death. They are not the brazen crows or showy magpies who strut around the cities – they are birds of wild places, birds of the untamed. And Morrigan is a child of the wilds.

Ravens have an eye, too, for precious things, things that shine.  Morrigan clasps a thread of polished stones around her neck and weaves glossy feathers into her hair, but a part of her still hungers for the golden mirror that Flemeth dashed on the ground. And another part of her yearns to go beyond the trees, to find something beyond, something more, because birds were made for freedom and because a creature like Gwydion screams power in his every breath, because no one could look at the shadow-black feathers and vast wings and dagger beak and think that this is a bird that could live in a cage.

It is only after she meets the Warden that Morrigan discovers that Gwydion is a dancer.

The campfire is lit, and the wilds lie far behind them. Morrigan has a new mirror in a corner of her tent, a gift from the Warden, this strange wandering hero who has become, impossibly, a friend. Morrigan knows what happiness is – it is touching the sky on an eagle’s wings and slipping through the night as a fox, it is a spell cast to perfection, it is watching a moon rise in silver light while Gwydion perches on her shoulder. But what she feels as she and the Warden sit fireside together is something different, a kind of contentment that fills her and warms her, until she feels frighteningly comfortable and safe, until her mission and her task seem distant, even unimportant.

And as she wonders at this strange happiness, Gwydion leaps from her shoulder, shoots upwards, and starts to twist and roll in the darkening sky. He twirls wing over wing, diving and soaring and revelling in his mastery of the air.

Her daemon is an acrobat, a creature of joy, as well as a dark omen. And maybe she is more than a witch’s daughter.

~

Sten

She has no name, of course. She is the Sten, just as he is, one part of a greater whole.

The Tamassrans judge much on what shape your asala takes. The snakes and wildcats become Ben-Hassrath, the horses and oxen are clearly born for labour. He was always going to be a soldier, so he felt no great pride that day, long before he was the Sten, when he awoke to see his asala lying beside him in her true form. The golden fur, the heavy paws, the hooked talons – none of it was a surprise. ‘As it should be,’ he said, and the lioness inclined her head.

A lion is a soldier, but a lion is no brute – it is a strategist. It knows that to walk alone is death, that the one is never as strong as the many. It knows that ignorance is a disease, that only knowledge of the bush and the plains, knowledge of how prey thinks and how a hunter should act, will keep it from starving. And Sten, too, is a hunter of knowledge, learning to speak the bas tongue and asking about their world. Someday, the Qunari will rise to bring these people to the Qun, and he will stand in the front ranks of the charge. As a lion must know its prey to hunt it, so he must know his enemy to fight them.

The Arishok asks a question, and the Sten is sent to answer it, because his asala is a hunter and who better than a hunter to go on a search for truth? But then they learn the answer in the harshest way. What is the Blight? the Arishok asks, and Sten learns the answer: the Blight is the darkspawn, and the darkspawn are hunters too.

The Karashok’s buffalo blinks into nothingness as her other half’s head is torn from his body. Ashaad slumps motionless as an axe sinks into the side of his ape. Sten’s asala crouches over him long after he falls, curls over his wounds to keep the blood in, and when she sees the humans she runs to them, straining to the very edge of her bond with Sten, until they follow her and find him. He lives, yet he awakens incomplete. There is his asala, but not Asala.

Sten is a man in three parts – in his body, in his asala, and in his sword. Your weapon is your asala made metal, their strength given shape. He has lost his sword, and with it, the right to his glorious lion-soul. He is no longer a hunter who can track down the Arishok’s answer. He is worth only to be thrown in a cage to await death, and he cannot meet his asala’s eyes as they huddle inside the bars.

But then the Warden brings him into a kith, a new pride, and he no longer walks alone. His sword is returned to him, and he is complete, he is whole. On the road to Haven, he issues his challenge, the way any lion worth its claws will challenge an unworthy leader, for no pride can survive with weakness at the head. But the Warden’s words are enough for him to know that there is no weakness in his new kadan.

He always welcomed knowledge that would make him a better hunter, but now he welcomes knowledge of the Warden’s world for different reasons, because the Warden’s world has made them strong, and he wishes to understand that strength. For long nights by the fire, he and his asala listen to the Warden’s words, and they learn.

They are strange beasts, lions. They are cats like any other – proud, strong of will, free. And yet they know loyalty, and follow a leader who proves worthy.

The Warden is worthy, and Sten and his asala have a great deal of loyalty to give.

~

Wynne

Sometimes, Wynne wonders if it’s right. Daemons settle so early in life, before anyone can truly be who they will become, before anyone can truly know who they are.

She certainly didn’t, and when she looks at her daemon now, she sees something very different to what she saw back when Solomon settled. She was young, then, full of pride in herself and in her magic, in how her daemon settled so long before her Harrowing. She was proudest of all of what he became. So many of her fellows had to wait until they were thrown to the demons before they could know the shape of their souls, and so often they came back with ragged, nervous sparrows and terrified little wrens, scarred forever by what they’d seen.

But Solomon found his shape years before she was Harrowed, and it was a good shape for a girl so full of pride. Talons, and a little hook-bill, and great piercing black eyes. Mages have birds, it’s a rule of the world, and so Solomon became the newest addition to the Circle’s aviary, a beautiful tawny owl.

Wynne is rather ashamed to remember what she thought of him, back then. She saw only power and cunning, the marks of a predator. And so she snapped at Aneirin as she pushed him harder and harder still, while Solomon added screeches to her complaints. Only after Aneirin ran, and the Templars marched after him with steel glistening in their fists, did she remember those old superstitions about the wisdom of owls. Only then did she have the courage to feel ashamed.

She was not born with wisdom. There was so little wisdom in her the day that Solomon settled. Wisdom comes only from experience, from knowing that your fierceness has driven away an apprentice into the blades of the Templars, from having a son taken from your arms and into gauntleted hands, from decades of teaching pupils and coming to understand that it is not an owl’s sharp senses and cunning that she needs, but its patience. Owls can sit and watch for hours, so silent and still that you might not see them even if you walk right past them. And Wynne has learned to do the same, to sit back and watch, to perceive, to not judge the people around her but to know them.

Solomon is gone now, of course. When that demon fell upon her back in the Circle, she saw him reach feebly for her with one wing, then flicker out of sight and into nothingness.

It was the last thing she ever saw. And then a spirit embraced her, and she woke.

‘It’s a good shape for you,’ she says to Faith, who sits beside her in Solomon’s form. The Warden and the others mill about the fire, talking and laughing, utterly unaware that one of their companions is only alive because a spirit replaced her dead daemon an instant before the Maker could claim her.

Faith turns and looks at her. The spirit rarely speaks, but Wynne knows it’s waiting for an explanation, the way she so often knows what it’s thinking. It has become her soul, after all.

‘An owl is a creature of patience,’ Wynne says softly. ‘And faith is all about patience.’

Together, they sit in silence and watch.

~

Zevran Arainai

Elves are vermin, and their daemons prove it. Zevran has seen plenty of them in his time – ragged city elves with patch-furred rats clinging to their clothes, scruff-feathered pigeons on their shoulders, mangy cats slinking at their heels. His mother, with her fallow deer, was different. That’s the way it is with the Dalish. Their souls take the shape of forest creatures, creatures that can never be tamed.

Aeno both breaks the rules and keeps them. Dalish elves are forest creatures; city elves are vermin. Zevran is a city elf with Dalish blood, and Aeno becomes both.

An assassin can’t have some lumbering beast following them. As his peers’ daemons settle, the ones whose souls become clumsy dogs and horses are the first to go. Those who remain have sharp-taloned birds, venom-fanged snakes, cats that see in the dark. And then there’s Aeno, who switches one day into a sinuous little creature, creamy-white underbelly and dark russet back, tail-tip black as coal. She winds around his neck and bares her tiny dagger-fangs, and Zevran chuckles. Stoat is not a pretty name, but she’s a pretty creature, and more importantly, she is dangerous.

Weasels are vermin, that’s true for Aeno as it is for Rinna’s silky mink. But Aeno was not made to rummage through refuse or slink through street corners. Her place is the forest and the fields, where her wild kin hide among the long grass, waiting for prey. She’s a perfect companion for an assassin – small enough to meld with darkness,  to scurry ahead through shadows to listen and watch, to carry a vial of poison in her teeth and slip the contents into a waiting cup. And those little teeth… they may not be long enough to tear open a throat, but just try fending off Zevran’s dagger when a stoat’s fangs are buried in your hand. And a stoat is really a lion, shrunk down to be pocket-size, all the ferocity and power crammed into the sleek little form. The meadows are its savanna, the fat rabbits its antelopes. But the stoat does not simply spring from cover and give chase. It bounds in twisting leaps in full view of its prey, not chasing them, but hypnotising them, entrancing them until the fangs are near enough to strike. A rabbit is twice a stoat’s size, and only wit brings them down. It’s the same with princes and noblemen, men and women who think their wealth and influence gives them armour. The stoat is a dancer, and so is Zevran. He knows that a word is as deadly as a dagger, a kiss as fatal as a knife. And so he and Aeno master all those things, he and his tiny little murderous soul forging a life for themselves in blood, until -

Until Rinna's mink twists away and drifts apart into nothingness, and even while Zevran laughs, Aeno is frozen and silent on his shoulder. And then they learn the truth. Death would be easier than life with the guilt, but Warden spares him, saves him, and makes him look at Aeno with new eyes. Without the eyes of the Crows upon him, she seems different. Less of the vermin, more of the beast of the wilds. A beast of freedom. The word is strange to him, almost foreign, something that sits uncomfortably on his tongue and yet is so very, very sweet to taste. When Taliesen falls still in the alleyway, the word becomes stronger, nearer, truer. And he and Aeno are facing new prey, very different prey to pompous nobles and former comrades.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Aeno says, and shows her teeth in a grin. ‘An archdemon will die like a prince.’

For the Warden’s sake, Zevran is willing to see if she’s right.

~

Nathaniel Howe

When a man grows up in  a cage, no one should be surprised when he grows wings. Or talons.

Diana always favoured the shapes of hunting birds. The servants whisper behind their hands and his family brazenly speak the words aloud, he may be a mage, and the thought doesn't frighten him as much as it should. What would change, if he were taken to the Circle, if he swapped one prison for another? But as he grows older he sees that they’re wrong, that it’s not the spark of magic that gives Diana her wings, but a longing for freedom. He grows up crushed by his father’s glare, trapped by the resentment that hangs in the air between his parents. He sits in the trophy room, gazing at the prizes won by his ancestors and longing to share in their glory, and Diana perches beside him as a hawk, a kite, an eagle. And he thinks, this is the glory I am capable of. Look at my soul, look at the shapes she takes. Nothing can hold me back.

As soon as he’s old enough that people no longer suspect him of magic, it gets a little easier. The killers of the sky are good daemons for nobles, souls that mirror the falconry birds they carry on their gloves. His father tells him that Diana should become a gyrfalcon, the bird of the nobility, the glorious white-and-grey hunter kept by kings, and Diana tries, she does, she takes that shape again and again as if trying to force her body to stay in it. When she settles at last, though, her back is the dark blue-grey of slate, her form small and sleek, her eyes piercing yellow. His father purses his lips and turns away, because the peregrine falcon is a commoner's bird.

Despite all his father's disapproval - or maybe because of it - when Nathaniel is sent away to the Free Marches, he doesn’t learn a nobleman’s trades, doesn’t pick up the sword, the shield, the lance. He learns how to set a snare and follow a trail and make an infusion of herbs that will spell death for whoever drinks it – and he learns to fire an arrow, to place it so precisely that he can kill a dragonfly on the wing.

Diana is the soul of a man who is both nobleman and assassin. Something in him always wells up with joy when he sees her rising in the sky, sees her fold in her wings and drop, slamming towards the earth like a thunderbolt, the deadly stooping strike of the fastest animal in Thedas. She never falters, never slows. Never misses.

And yet their wings are still clipped, their freedom kept at bay by his father’s name.

The Warden comes and, impossibly, offers him forgiveness and a future. And for the first time, Nathaniel sees his daemon as she was meant to be, hunting free against truly dangerous prey. And the name Howe is no longer a shackle, because with every darkspawn he slays, every fragment of the truth he learns, every moment he spends in the Warden’s company, he purifies the name. And so at last he is free, and he knows that he doesn’t have to cast off his name to stay free, nor to be a good man.

‘I didn’t need to be a gyrfalcon,’ Diana tells him quietly, and he nods.

‘Nobility,’ he says, ‘has another meaning.’

~

Velanna

Again and again as they grow, Velanna and Nanlen hear the words, spoken and sighed and tutted by their clansmen. You never listen.

Which is true, and they are unashamed of it. What reason do they have to listen, when no one around seems to have anything to say to them? When no one has anything worth saying? The other children shun them, turn their backs because Velanna has no idea how to take part in their purposeless games, and so they stand apart and alone. They stand in silence, where they feel most comfortable, and they study the histories, hunting down knowledge and lost lore. Their solitude is met with rolling eyes and scornful glances, and none of them seem to care enough to realise how much it hurts. Pain hurts to live with, and it's easier to turn it into anger. And so they bristle and snap and insist that they know best, and Nanlen changes to show it, so that any other Dalish who tries to quarrel with them will be met with a snarling fox or hissing wildcat or a kestrel with glaring eyes. Even his very name burns. Nanlen, child of vengeance, a name that makes the hahrens swap glances and murmur their misgivings. Only Seranni can ever soften them, persuade them to stop a moment and think. They listen to Seranni, because Seranni cares enough to listen to them.

Nanlen settles not long after Velanna comes into her magic. The Clan seems to think that Velanna doesn’t hear the things they whisper to each other. ‘Keeper Ilshae’s got a struggle on her hands,’ she overhears one of the hahrens say. ‘Even the shems barely ever train goshawks. They never listen.’

But Velanna can be nothing but proud of her magnificent daemon, his feathers the colours of stormclouds and silver and snow. The goshawk is exactly what she is: the living embodiment of the wildest and most dangerous parts of the forest. Its talons are fierce as the thorns of the sylvans, the thorns that Velanna summons to her side in battle. And how can she not be proud of having a daemon who cannot be tamed or trained? The shemlen come and burn the forest, force her clan away with smoke and flames. Velanna aches to punish them, something within her crying out to tear and rend, and when the Keeper cowers away from dealing out justice she feels her rage erupt.

‘We’re Dalish,’ she snaps at the Keeper. ‘We are the last of the Elvhenan. Never again shall we submit.’

Nanlen throws out his wings and lets out a screech, and while Ilshae sighs, Velanna smiles. She pities the fool who thinks anyone could make a goshawk submit.

But then their pride kills their brothers and sisters, and Nanlen seems to change. ‘Velanna,’ he says, ‘we led them to death because we would not listen.’ But Velanna closes her ears to him, just as she always has to everyone. She doesn’t want to hear it, and she unleashes a hawk’s rage on the shemlen who made it happen, shreds them with her thorns the way Nanlen's wild cousins rip apart their kills in their claws, until –

Until she is made to see that she was wrong.

Ilshae was right. She was not ready to be Keeper. Because a Keeper’s task isn’t about being right. It’s about listening. Listening to the lessons of their ancestors, and listening to her fellows among the clan. Listening in the way that Velanna can never do, the way that a goshawk can only do if you show them patience and a reward.

The Warden offers her both.

‘It is not submitting to admit that we were wrong,’ Nanlen murmurs to her. ‘You can follow another without submitting to them.’

And so Velanna follows the Warden, and drains her Joining chalice, and marches out with the others against the darkspawn. To find Seranni, to avenge her kinsmen. To learn, at last, how to listen.

~

Justice

He knows much of demons. But these daemons – these strange, speaking, shifting creatures that the mortals call their souls - they are far, far beyond his understanding.

At first, when the Warden tells him what they are, he almost reaches for his weapon. ‘They’re not demons, they’re our daemons,’ the Warden tries to explain, tells him that they’re not the Fade’s dark entities masquerading as animals, that the spelling’s different, as if that matters – but in the end, it’s Kristoff’s memories that make him understand.

The dead Warden’s mind is full of images of his living soul, a dark-furred Orlesian shepherd dog. Her name was Mariette, and he adored her. It’s a love of a very different kind to that he felt for his wife, somehow less complicated, but no less intense. In every memory, in every vague glimmer of Kristoff’s childhood and in every vivid recollection of a battle fought, the daemon is there. A constant. Unchanging, like a Fade spirit.

From Kristoff’s memories, and from what the Warden tells him, he learns that no is quite sure what daemons are or where they come from, only that they are bound to the Fade, which is why Sigrun and Oghren walk alone, with no companion beside them or on their shoulder. These creatures are somehow linked to the Fade, to his home - but they are not demons, he realises. They are not spirits, either. They are exactly what his newfound mortal allies claim they are: souls.

Justice watches, and so he learns to respect them. For he sees how so very often they represent the better parts of his friends’ natures. He sees, for instance, how Velanna’s silvery hawk sometimes gives her a long, patient stare when her jaw clenches with anger, as if reminding her to be calm. And he sees how, when Anders tries to cast off his responsibility for his fellow mages – people suffering under an injustice that makes fury stir in Justice’s heart – the dark-eyed magpie on his shoulder turns to him and gives him a sharp, reprimanding peck.

And one night, as they travel across Amaranthine to their newest task, he sees how his friends’ daemons curl up against them, and he feels something that terrifies him. He envies them. He envies the completeness they seem to have, the closeness. Jealousy is for demons, and he tries to banish the thought, because it makes him fear what he could become, but it stays and it stays and it stays.

None of them are sure what will become of Themis, when Anders offers himself to Justice. ‘I’m willing to take the risk,’ she says. ‘Perhaps it won’t affect me at all.’ But it does, of course it does, because Themis is a part of Anders, and Justice becomes Anders, and so he becomes Themis too, and so he sees the suffering that has been wrought upon the mages, and the Templars will pay, and the Circle will be ripped apart, and he will tear down every last enemy until the mages are free, and the magpie screams like a mad thing as veins of blue flare beneath her feathers –

As they struggle through their life in Kirkwall, Justice looks at her through Anders’s eyes, and feels a terrible wrenching guilt. ‘I’ve changed you,’ Anders says, his face tear-streaked and flushed, after the night they lose control and attack the mage girl. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And Justice wishes he could reply, I have changed you too. You are not the man you were when your daemon settled. I have made a distance between you, I have brought you farther from your own soul, and for that I am sorry.

And as if she knows his thoughts, Themis raises her head and looks sharply into his eyes – and yes, they are Anders’s eyes, but the part of Anders that is Justice knows she looks at him.

‘We are all one now,’ she says.

And Justice feels, despite everything, a faint pulse of pleasure. Because he no longer needs to feel the envy that he harboured, when he thought of Kristoff’s love for his breathing soul. Because Themis is his daemon now, just as much as she is Anders’s.

Perhaps I am not only becoming more demon, he thinks. Perhaps I am becoming more mortal.

Once the thought would have frightened him. But now, when he sees Themis, it gives him comfort.