Vir Lath Sa'vunin, Chapters Forty-Nine and Fifty

[twist_shimmy]

A Dalish-centric AU gen fic featuring two Mahariel Wardens, one bastard prince, and lingering ghosts.

Title: Vir Lath Sa'vunin (We Love One More Day)
Rating: T
Authors: twist_shimmy and lenna_nightrunner
Post Word Count: 4000
Summary: When their parents died, Tesni Mahariel was left to raise her brother Caerwyn with the help of the rest of their clan. True to their penchant for getting into trouble, Caerwyn and Tamlen went hunting one day and ran afoul of a mirror, of all things. The next thing Tesni knew, Caerwyn had been recruited by the Grey Wardens. As if she’d let some shemlen just take her brother away! Determined to keep Caerwyn safe, Tesni goes after them, and antics ensue. She’ll stop the Blight to protect her family, Caerwyn will help--grumbling all the while--and Alistair will do his best to bond with his tattooed and bristly new brethren. When all is said and done, the blurred lines between friendship and blood bonds will draw them down a path that will change all three of them forever.


In which Tesni and Caerwyn bleed.

Side note from Shimmy.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Märk hur vår skugga, märk inom ett mörker sig sluta. [Behold Our Shadow, Look How It’s Encompassed By Darkness] (Mediæval Bæbes)

TESNI

Days in Denerim became a blur. Zevran and I would wake and spend our mornings picking pockets, then split up and "keep our ears to the ground," as he called it. He would track his Templars, and I would amble from tavern to tavern and listen to the drunks gossip. Most days it was horribly boring, but as time passed I began to catch whispers of a resistance dedicated to countering the lies about Grey Wardens murdering the king.

Sadly, no one seemed to know any details.

Three weeks into this routine a fat man with red hair stopped me in the market. "Might I have a word with you, Warden?"

My shoulders stiffened, and my dagger was in my hands in seconds.

"No, none of that. I’m a friend. You’re a hard woman to find!" he added with a smile.

I lowered my blade slightly. "You managed it."

"I make a habit of finding secrets. Like who’s been lightening pockets in the market and cutting in on my boys’ profits."

"Ah." I sheathed my blade. "We can go elsewhere."

"No, no need! I’d actually like to suggest a joint venture. Word on the street is you like nobles about as much as I do, and I just so happen to know how to hit them where it hurts."

"Oh?"

"Cut their profits, that sort of thing. All I ask is a finder’s fee for the spoils."

I shook my head. "I don’t want their money. You can have it."

His face turned suddenly impassive. "Oh? What’s your angle, then?"

"I want Howe."

There was a long pause. "Give me a few days to see what I can do." Without another word, he disappeared into the crowd.

That night, I told Zevran about the encounter while we lay in bed together, and he chuckled and ran his fingers through my hair. "Giving petty thieves pause now, are we?"

I bit at his shoulder. "Hush. I feel like we’re wasting time when we should be finding our enemies, and if a fat shem can do it for me, I won’t complain."

"But it is so much fun to watch the people!"

I shook my head. "Drunk shems. There are only so many times them falling out of their chairs can be amusing."

"The city has jaded you, tesora." When he said the word, I kissed him, and tried to ignore the fact that my cheeks were flushing.

"You’re awful at courting a Dalish, you know," I teased, straddling him on the bed.

Zevran grinned up at me. "What should I have done? Hunted for you? Skinned a great bear?"

"Nearly anything would have been better than acting like you were my brother for months."

"Tsk, tsk. It is not my fault you misread my intentions."

I slid beside him and closed my eyes. His blood was silent to mine, but I’d slept better since he had forced me to understand. And when I woke, feeling the archdemon’s song coursing through my veins, he would distract my nerves until it was only him I felt against me.

The next morning I stopped by our merchant messenger and found a letter waiting from Alistair, its simple wax seal still unbroken. I paid the man half again what we’d promised as a thanks for his honesty and practically ran back to the inn to read it.

Sister-

I’m writing to you on your desk. Do you have any idea how many ink stains there are on this thing?

Good to hear things are okay. We’ve all been worried here, since you and your brother are both gone. There are more of us every day, though, and everything is nearly rebuilt and stocked. It’s like a proper home. Just... big.

Right. I talked to Pether and he says to tell Tavish ‘hello’ for him. He’s the head of the family, after all, and what he says is law.

-A

I stared at the last paragraph for several minutes, but wasn’t able to work out what he was hinting at until Zevran joined me for dinner.

"Ah, the Knight-Commander of Denerim! He is in charge of giving orders to the Circle’s Templars. Alistair is warning us that the mages are worried the Chantry may move against them, after all."

I groaned and shook my head. "This is bad news."

"It could be worse. Tavish’s second is a lover of lyrium, you see." When our eyes met, he smiled merrily. "Shall I see if there is an opportune time to approach him with a business offer?"

"Yes." I chewed on my mutton for a moment. "I wonder if that fat shem knows anything about the Grey Warden supporters. They’d be a huge help, you know."

Zevran shrugged. "Why not ask? He knows who you are, so it is not like you are at risk of losing something with the question."

It took me two more days to find the bastard, but when I did, he was full of good news. "I’ve got a plan, Warden. Howe’s sealed up tight, but if we can turn his workers against him, you should be able to sneak in and do whatever you please to the blighter."

I raised an eyebrow. "And how do we turn his workers against him?"

"Hit the bastard in the coin-purse. I’ve got lists of his warehouses, and know plenty of hungry folk who would benefit from a donation from his stores."

I shrugged. "Let’s try it, then." He gave me my first mark, and was about to disappear into the crowd again when I grabbed his wrist. "One more question."

"Yes?"

"Have you heard anything about this secret ring of Warden supporters?"

He rubbed at his chin. "Can’t say I have, which is odd, considering none of my boys believe a word of those lies about Ostagar. I’d say your best bet is to keep an eye on the market-- see if you can find anyone being furtive."

Better than sitting in taverns, at least. I slumped over in a shadow and did my best to look slightly drunk while the crowd swirled around me obliviously. I was getting sleepy from the sun by the time I saw an elf-girl dart from an alley and paste a sign to the stones of a nearby wall.

I walked the opposite way at first, like Zevran taught me, and so it was firmly adhered to the wall by the time I got around to reading it.

Don’t believe the lies! The hidden pearl holds the key to resistance. The griffons will rise again.

That wasn’t very subtle. And if Sanga had known about this the whole time, why hadn’t she told me?

Hunh. I whistled for Elgar’nan and walked for the docks. But when I told Sanga about the posting, she stared at me blankly.

"We’re not hosting a resistance here. Any idea what that would do to my business?"

I groaned. "Then what was the sign for?"

"You know...." Sanga put a hand on her hip. "There’s a man been renting a room from us for the past few weeks. Says he’s writing a book about Ostagar and doesn’t want anyone looking for him. I wonder if...?"

"I’ll go talk to him."

"Last door on the left, love. Your lip looks good as new, by the way."

The door in question was locked, and when I knocked, a muffled voice asked me for a password.

I thought back to the sign. "The... griffons will rise again?"

The door unlocked, and I let myself in to find six armor-clad warriors lounging around. One of them was a qunari, which seemed strange.

"Hey, we’ve got another one," said a short human, but the elf beside him shook her head.

"That’s a Warden." The glee in her voice made me shift uneasily, and Elgar’nan began to growl where he stood beside me.

"The Warden’s got red hair and tattoos--"

The elf pointed at the top of my head. "Her hair, Paedan. See the red? It’s growing out."

A trap. I crossed my arms behind my back to get at my knife and pretended confusion, but my mind was whirling. They’d seen my new hair. I couldn’t let them leave here alive.

...That was a big problem.

"Howe’ll pay us double when he sees we landed a Warden," the man said to the elf beside him. "Take her alive, boys!"

I was unarmored and trapped in a room with six men with only a dagger to protect myself. I did the sensible thing and screamed as loudly as I could.

"Maker’s breath!" The human called Paedan clutched at his ears, and the qunari stepped forward, hand intent on covering my mouth. Elgar’nan had him by the wrist in seconds, and I slid my knife into the throat of the man at my right.

One. I took a deep breath and screamed again, then launched myself at the elf girl--

--and received a gauntlet to my gut for my troubles. I wheezed and fell to the floor, clutching my knife to me like a child. If I lost it, this was over. Elgar’nan lunged at her, but she deflected his attack with her sodding armor.

"Nice try," she grinned, then cocked her head and stared behind me.

The door crashed open, and two of the burly men Sanga paid to kick out rowdy drunks burst in. "Oi, what’s all this--"

The qunari took his mace into hand, knocking over one of his human comrades. I lunged forward and made short work of him where he was sprawled on the floor before a searing pain in my hand told me I’d just taken the heel of a boot to the fingers. I looked up, howling in pain, saw the little elf girl standing over me, and then took her boot to the face.

Rage kicked in. A flat-ear should never-- I screamed again and sprang on her like a wild thing, knocking her head against the fireplace behind her. She crumpled to the ground, completely stunned, and I put my dagger through the base of her neck. Three.

Her sword fell, and I seized it in my other hand and spun. The shems and my mabari had taken down another man in leather armor and were dodging decoration-shattering swings from the qunari. I met eyes with the last human standing, who was working his way behind them where he could take them down easily.

I was about to lunge for his exposed spine when a knife came soaring in from the hall and got him in the neck, instead. Five.

I looked up and saw the dark-haired woman that Zev had known standing in the doorway. "You lot get out of here. I’ll handle the big one."

The qunari howled and surged toward her. Elgar’nan howled in turn and slammed into his back, sending him into her blades. I dropped my weapons and shoved Sanga’s shems into the hall, then broke into a run as Elgar’nan snarled and the fight escalated behind us.

I got back into the lobby just in time to realize just how much pain I was in. I crumpled to the floor and barely registered the hands on my shoulders. It wasn’t until Elgar’nan was beside me, reeking of blood, that I could make sense of the words swirling around me.

Sanga. One of my eyes was watering uncontrollably, but she was ordering two shems to lift me, so my ears told me what sight could not. "Take her to a room, and someone go clean up the mess Isabela just made of that qunari. We’ll need a new carpet in there before their boss comes looking for them."

It sounded like several people followed Sanga into the room, but she kicked them all out. "I’ll clean this one up myself. Go distract our clients from the ruckus. We’ve got a new room to pay for!"

The sun was down by the time Zevran found me, and Sanga had almost finished tending to a cut on my cheekbone from the elf bitch’s boot. I lay in silence while the whoremistress told him what had happened, mortified by how stupid it sounded in retrospect.

Zevran helped Sanga with the rest of my bandaging, holding me up while she wrapped my ribs tightly. "We never follow leads alone, tesora," he murmured as he inspected my swollen eye. "What were you thinking? And what were they wearing, rocks?"

I tried to laugh, which hurt, so I just leaned back on the bed and pretended I could ignore how much my ribs ached. Elgar’nan rested his head on my leg and whined, which made me feel bone tired.

"We found this on the elf girl," Sanga said, passing a scrap of paper to me. I held it with my good hand and read with my good eye.

Paedan-

Allow me to commend you again on your excellent idea. The page should have your most recent payment with him. If it’s not thirty sovereigns, cuff the boy and check his pockets.

Howe

I crumpled the letter in my fist. It was time to take out Howe. I tried to tell Zevran as much, but my voice was gone, so I just closed my eye and waited for everything to stop burning.

---

Chapter Fifty: The Residue of What Once Was, a Shattered Cloud of Swirling Dust. And Their Eyes Change as They Learn to See Through Flame. (Massive Attack)

CAERWYN

Darkspawn corpses. Excellent. The only time I'd ever seen dead darkspawn before was when they'd been killed by one of us or another soldier. It didn't seem very likely that there were soldiers wandering around in the Deep Roads, and if it wasn't soldiers who were killing the darkspawn, I didn't want to meet what was.

It turned out that there were all kinds of things besides us that killed darkspawn. Spiders, and ghosts, and golems, and a creepy alas'len that I put out of its misery. Plus all of them'd been so kind as to leave us plenty of darkspawn to fight, too. At the end of a 'day' of fighting I made a game of trying to guess which blood spatters on my armor belonged to what. Oghren was the only one who'd play it with me.

Apparently I'd been tempting the Trickster thinking I'd at least have Leliana's touch to help me through the rest of our time in the Deep Roads. It worked for about a week, and then anything against my skin at all hurt. Wearing clothing and armor was irritating at best, and even stroking Chat’len’s fur made my hands feel raw.

It wasn’t long before the pain began to turn my stomach. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and for all I knew we could’ve been going in circles. There was no way Sten or Oghren hadn’t noticed me not eating or how slow I’d gotten, but even Oghren didn’t say anything about it. He just led the way, filling the silence between fights by either waxing poetic about the old alas’len cities and Branka or making obnoxious comments that were apparently supposed to be funny.

At ‘night’ after everyone but me’d eaten dinner Leliana’d sit with me and sing until she was too tired to stay awake. I lay next to her and stared at the inside of the tent or watched her face while she slept until I slipped into that horrible half-conscious state where the archdemon could find me the easiest, calling me so strongly that sometimes I thought I could hear words.

“Leave me alone!” I screamed at the voice in my head, and opened my eyes to find Leliana sitting over me. She frowned and drew away, but I caught her by the arm and pulled her back toward me. "Don't," I said hoarsely. "Not you."

Her eyes were full of pity and worry, and I clenched my teeth in frustration. I didn’t want to be pitied. I didn’t want to be worried over. I wanted to sleep and eat and stab at all that green until the archdemon shut up for good.

The tunnels were too crowded for so many enemies. I hated the spiders the most. Even when I knew they were lurking above, it was impossible to fight them until they jumped down on top of us, and they were all spindly and green and gooey and it got to the point where I found myself looking up every few seconds to see if they were going to strike.

There was no way to get them to spread out and nowhere to retreat to. Too many of us with swords and knives in such a tight space. Add Chat'len's teeth and we were like a very sharp wall, and not in a useful way. When there wasn't a spider up against me it was Leliana or Sten or Oghren or Chat’len.

It was only a matter of time before that ended badly.

Sten and Oghren were in front of me, hacking their way through the latest spider ambush while being careful to stay out of the way of each others' powerful swings. I got to deal with the ones that dropped in behind them while Chat'len guarded Leliana, who was--

Fen'lin.

"Leliana!" I shouted when I saw her spinning her knives with a dead spider behind her. "Use your bow!"

But it was too late. She'd come up alongside me and was trying to get at the spider to my right. There was no room. Like I'd been worried she'd do, she swung out and scraped her elbow on the rock wall, knocking her knife toward me. A second later I was bleeding from a long cut that ran across my upper right arm from my shoulder to my elbow. Of course it had to hit me somewhere I didn’t have good armor covering my skin.

Sten took down the last spider, and I rounded on Leliana.

“I said use your bow,” I fumed.

Leliana looked at my arm with a guilty frown. “I’m--”

"Sorry? That won't do much good if you get one of us killed."

"They got too cl--"

“That’s why Chat’len was there!”

Her eyes turned angry and her tone became defiant. "Maybe if you told us what to do, things like this wouldn't happen!" she spat. "You're supposed to our leader, aren't you?"

It took me a moment to recover from how hard those words hit me. Leliana crossed her arms and glared at me.

I swallowed, and my voice was cold when I spoke. “You should know better.”

She didn’t even bother responding. Instead, she stormed off into the cavern we'd been heading toward--which was thankfully empty--cursing furiously in Orlesian all the way. Sten looked in her direction with an expression that I'd be polite by describing as disapproving. It was hard to tell, but he didn't look very impressed with me, either.

The qunari walked away into the cavern, but Oghren smirked knowingly at me. “The ale’s worn off and the headache’s set in, eh?” He chuckled. “That explains why we haven’t been favored with those noises you and Firesnatch make when you’re supposed to be sleeping lately. I’ve missed ’em!”

"Shut up!" I yelled, and when he laughed in my angry face I got the spider goo-covered knife I was holding with my good arm to his throat in seconds. “We’re down here because you sodding dirt-lovers can’t choose a sodding king! And as soon as we make you pick one he’s going to honor the sodding piece of paper your precious ancestors signed so we can get out of this Creators-cursed hole!”

But he just chuckled at me again until I snarled, picked up my other knife, and stalked off toward a nearby stream to wash off my arm. Once I’d gotten my armor off and was sitting in the dirt by the stream I cursed my thick, sticky, burning blood. The fabric of my sleeve was stuck in the clotting blood, and I got to focus on a different kind of stinging while I peeled it away and hauled my shirt up over my head.

I cupped my hand to get water from the stream and began rubbing at the dried blood cautiously. Once I got most of it off I sighed in relief. The bleeding’d mostly stopped already, which meant the cut wasn’t very deep. Thank the Creators. Without a healer I would've needed stitches, and the thought turned my stomach. Needles puncturing my skin I could handle. Needles pulling thread through my skin to hold it together was another story. My arm’d be scarred, but that didn’t matter.

Footsteps behind me, then Leliana was hovering hesitantly behind me.

"Caerwyn, I--" she started, but I shook my head

"Not important."

She gave me a wary look, but when she didn’t find any anger in my expression she knelt down beside me and examined my arm. “It’s not very deep, is it?”

“No.”

"That's good," Leliana said, and held up some elfroot and bandages. "May I?"

I nodded, and she began packing the elfroot into the cut.

"I didn't mean--"

"I know."

"It's just that--"

"Leliana." I snapped. "It's fine."

Her hand fell away from my arm and her eyes fixed on the rocks beneath us. Creators curse it. This wasn't her fault. She was the only thing that helped make it bearable. I was just so tired and everything hurt.

I sighed and ran my hand over her hair as an apology until she looked up again. We were both silent as she finished doctoring up my arm.

Finally, when I’d all but convinced myself that not only were we never going to find Oghren’s wife, but that we also weren’t going to be able to find our way out, Leliana found a journal sitting in a pile of supplies.

Branka’s journal. And of course it said we had to go even deeper underground. I couldn’t’ve cared less at that point. I told Oghren to keep leading and we headed toward the next place we were never going to be able to find our way back out of. Every tunnel and cavern was the same and my blood and my skin and my stomach felt the same.

But then, finally, a different kind of tunnel, with a different smell, and a different sound, and light at the end of it, but not the sun. The further into it we went the more strongly my blood burned, until the air actually felt cold. I decided that was a bad sign.

Then we we emerged from the tunnel into a huge cavern, where--

Fen’lin. There must've been thousands of them.

"Andraste's blood," Leliana gasped.

And there, bellowing so loud I could feel the vibrations in my chest--

No. Please, no.

Creators, help me.

Creators, help me.