Vir Lath Sa'vunin: Chapters 17 and 18

[lenna_nightrunner]

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 (Language and Violence)
Authors: twist_shimmy and lenna_nightrunner
Post Word Count: 3060
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 blood is used, shared, and shed.

Seventeen: This is Where the Shadows Come to Play, ’Twixt the Day and Night. (Kate Bush)


TESNI


“Another night of watch with me?” Zevran sat down beside me wearing an even wider smile than usual. “Dare I hope you enjoy the company?”

I took out my bow and studied the wood. I’d finished the vines a few days ago. Now, it needed....

...He was still smiling at me. I responded to encourage his eyes to move elsewhere. “I’ve taken you out once before. I’m the best choice to watch you.”

“Ah, but now I know what I’m up against!”

I shook my head. A snake’s head. The upper end of the bow would be a snake’s head. Knife drawn, I began to carve. “You have no idea what you’re up against.”

Zevran’s smile faded, and I was allowed a few hours’ peace while I worked and cleared my mind.

Tomorrow we’d reach Redcliffe. Alistair had been on edge since we’d found out that the shem lord of the town was sick. The man had cared for him growing up, which meant that we were going to Alistair’s home.

The thought bothered me every time it occurred to me, and I wasn’t sure why. I was also too worried about giving my reaction much analysis, and so I sat and carved my bow until it was my brother’s turn to take watch with Alistair.

“And how will you watch me when you sleep, my Warden?” Zevran asked as I moved to my tent.

“That’s my job,” Caerwyn told him. He still hadn’t learned to ignore the assassin.

“I shall make it easy for you, then, and sleep atop the blankets.”

Caerwyn grimaced like I’d betrayed him when he heard me stifle a laugh, but I couldn’t help it. It had been years since we’d met someone who could get beneath his skin as thoroughly as Zevran had. My brother hadn’t even bothered to declare his hatred for the man. Instead, he refused to discuss Zevran at all.

I went to sleep in our tent and woke to Caerwyn pressing his back to mine. Leliana and Sten would be on third watch, then. We had reached the time of night when the nightmares were most likely to happen. Once he’d fallen asleep, I rose and relocated against a large boulder and stared up at the stars, waiting for the dawn. The others noticed my presence, but kept to themselves on opposite ends of the camp.

Zevran rose with the sun, rolling from his back onto his knees and stretching gingerly. Our eyes met as he stood, but he was too sleepy to hide behind his smile.

“How are your wounds?” I asked by way of greeting, and he collapsed beside me with a tired sigh.

“Not healing as quickly as I’d like, in truth.”

I shook my head and thought of my brother. “We’re not healing you until I know you can be trusted with your knives.”

“Last night you said you could handle me.” He arched an eyebrow.

“It’s not me I’m worried about. Take off your shirt.”

He did so without commentary, and helped me remove the old bandages before lying on his back and wincing while I packed more elfroot against the lacerations on his chest and stomach. As always, I tried and failed to keep myself from staring at the pattern tattooed down the side of his midriff. Strange enough for him to have markings on his face; what was the point of a tattoo where no one could see it?

Caerwyn rose as I was giving Zevran fresh bandages. I could feel how badly the assassin wanted to say something to my brother, but he wisely abstained while I was within hurting range of his injuries.

I made sure everyone was fed and packed, and then we continued on the road to Redcliffe. I expected that we’d find a sad, crowded shemlen city like Lothering. I was trying to prepare myself for meeting and being polite to more nobles... and finding a way to keep my brother silent.

I expected hardship, and stress. What I did not expect was the tingling on the back of my neck that I used to feel in parts of the forest where the Veil had thinned, and the smell of blood on the air.

Redcliffe would have been bustling, yes, had anyone been left alive in its streets. The only survivors were locked in the main building in the town, asking their Maker for protection. And there was not an entire noble family to meet, but one lone noble, who caught me completely off-guard with pleasantries.

He wanted us to help defend the city from the force that was making the back of my neck prickle. Alistair looked to me, silently begging my approval. I wanted to tell him that swords wouldn’t stop this. Dalish were raised to turn and walk the other way if they moved into an area that felt like this.

But we were also raised not to abandon our own, and if we didn’t help, there would be nothing left of this town but blood by dawn. I could see it in their eyes. And so I agreed and ignored the way Sten scowled and Shale grumbled and shuffled her heavy feet, making the entire building shake slightly.

I ordered everyone to split up and look around. Alistair went to help the knights, Wynne and Leliana to find the blacksmith. Sten, Zevran, and Shale remained with me, Caerwyn, and Elgar’nan. We began letting ourselves into houses and shops, seeking supplies.

And jewelry. Whoever owned that necklace was likely dead by now, in any case.

“This is stupid,” Caerwyn muttered, throwing his knife at the back wall of a shop as we entered to inspect it. The blade eased into the wood with a soft thwack, and he stalked over and vaulted the counter to retrieve it.

“I agree,” Sten said. “You have tasked us with a losing battle.”

“I hate to admit, my Warden....” Zevran straightened a glove. “While I am loathe to go against your say-so, we have neither the weaponry nor the manpower to defend the town from a legion of walking corpses.”

I sniffed at the air. “Oil.”

“¿Como?” The assassin raised an eyebrow.

There were barrels lining the far wall. “Oil,” I repeated, pointing toward them. “Don’t you Maker-lovers burn your dead?”

“They are not typically walking when we do so,” Zevran replied.

But they didn’t remain walking for long once set aflame, as it turned out. They came in droves, yes, but they also didn’t avoid oil-sodden ground, and igniting large swaths of the hills around town was easy with just a few flaming arrows.

Eventually the corpses broke through the burn line, but by then everyone’s blood was pumping and they were ready for a fight. I kept my focus on the ones in the distance, doing my best to hobble them so they would fall quickly to Alistair or Sten. I was so focused on my task that I didn’t notice a corpse break loose from the others and run for me, but Zevran had beheaded it by the time I could react.

My neck prickled, I felt magic, and then Zevran wasn’t favoring his stomach wounds any longer. Wynne stood a few paces away, staff raised. The assassin, newly-healed, practically danced back into the fray, and soon all I saw were flashing knives.

We moved down the hill to guard the waterfront, and I was forced to switch from my bow to my knife to keep from accidentally shooting one of the jittery shemlen soldiers as they screamed and threw themselves about in the square. I found Alistair’s side and kept it, pausing only long enough to stare at Shale as the golem shouted and began hurling rocks at the incoming enemies, felling them by the dozens and doing little to help the smell clogging the night air.

The stars were beginning to fade overhead and I’d developed a stitch in my side so bad that it made it difficult to breathe when I heard laughter amidst the sound of steel on bone.

“Thirteen!” my brother called, and I saw his blond hair, matted with dust and blood, from behind a shem.

“Catorce,” retorted Zevran.

“Count in common!”

“Fourteen.” Zevran’s blades sought a new foe, disappeared, and came back coated in clotted blood. “Fifteen!”

“What?”

Their competition gave everyone the energy they needed to finish out the battle. When the sun rose and the few remaining corpses scattered for the hills, my brother was the victor.

“Thirty-six,” he crowed, tossing his knives to the ground and sinking to his knees beside me, swallowing large gulps of air like water.

“And fairly beaten am I,” conceded the assassin, passing me his waterskin. I took a sip and then tilted it against my forehead, washing the worst of the battle grime from my face.

“Proud of me, sister?” He looked up at me like he used to when I was teaching him to hunt, and I reached down to ruffle his bloody hair.

“Of course, lin’len¹.”

“Blood chi-- hey!” He ran his hands over his face and grimaced. “Yuck!”

“Such is the price of victory,” laughed the assassin. Somehow, I managed to stifle my smile.

 

---

Eighteen: Don’t Look Back at What You Know. It’s Over and This Chapter Has Been Closed. (Tsunami Bomb)


CAERWYN

I’d thought that defending their sorry little town from walking corpses would’ve been enough to earn us the support of the shemlen soldiers--After all, thirty-six kills!--but of course that was only part of a bigger problem.

We left Sten, Shale, and Leliana to help clean up the village while the rest of us went to the castle to meet with the human noble again. Unfortunately, we found him prancing around like a madman who was trying to impersonate a pigeon during mating season while a demon-possessed shemlen’len² laughed and clapped his hands.

It was almost funny for the thirty seconds before I was assaulted again by the feeling of magic, thick in the air. I was ready for it that time, but just barely. My chest felt like a weight was pressing against it and I had to brace my hand on Alistair's shoulder for a moment to keep myself steady. My skin crawled and I fixed my eyes on the stones near my boots while I took deep breaths and willed my heartbeat to slow down.

And... there’s a great blackness....

Alistair looked around at me worriedly but I shook my head and let go of his shoulder. I saw Tesni shudder and rub at the back of her neck before she shook it off and confronted the demon.

That was what'd created all of the walking corpses that'd destroyed the town. Magic. Again. It was enough to make me consider becoming a Templar if we survived killing the archdemon.

There were a few different ways of getting rid of it. Someone had to die--it was only a question of who. The answer was clear to me, but Tesni had a harder time deciding. She made the last choice I would’ve picked, and both Alistair and the shemlen noble protested.

“Blood magic?” Alistair cried when Tesni’d ordered that the mage responsible for training the boy be brought up from the dungeon. “Are you mad? There has to be another way!”

“Would you rather I kill the child?” she asked him with her unbreakable resolve in her tone and her expression. The boy’s mother wailed at the suggestion and insisted that she be sacrificed in order to perform the ritual to save her son. I thought that was the least she could do after her selfishness’d killed hundreds of people. If she'd done what she was supposed to do in the first place this never would've happened.

Wynne was hesitant to take part in the ritual, but begging from the mother and reason from Tesni convinced her. She liked playing the martyr anyway. Zevran stood quietly with his arms crossed the whole time, not knowing what to make of all this, while Alistair shook his head sadly as the nobleman said his goodbyes to his brother’s wife.

I stood as far back as I could from the ritual and ended up pressed against a stone wall. As soon as Alistair looked away, I shut my eyes. It was bad enough having to feel it without watching it. When I opened them again, the woman was dead, Wynne was asleep on the stone floor, and the blood mage was sitting near her looking exhausted.

“Did it work?” Tesni asked him.

“I got her into the Fade,” he said, “but she must still kill the demon. For now, all we can do is wait.”

So we waited. I sat in a corner, trying to block out the feeling of the magic and the memories it brought back.

It saw me!

Tesni and Alistair were standing near me, and I closed my eyes again and tried to find the tingling in my blood that meant they were there. When I found it, some of the pressure in my chest lifted. Salin. Ellin.³ I focused on the way my blood felt and lost track of time. Sister, brother, make it go away. When Tesni spoke I opened my eyes.

“Did you kill it?” she asked Wynne, who’d sat up and was rubbing at her head and looking weary. Yes, she had. The air was clearing up. I could breathe properly again.

“Yes. Connor should be himself again.”

“Bann Teagan,” Tesni addressed the nobleman, whose face was wracked with grief, “please have someone send a message to Knight-Commander Greagoir at Circle Tower. There are two mages who need to be taken there.”

“Two?” The bann looked startled, but after a pause he nodded his head in resignation. “Yes, of course, you’re right. It is long past time that Connor was sent to them.” He nodded his head again more surely, pulling himself together. “I will see that it is done.”

“And will we have Redcliffe’s support?” Tesni asked.

“You would, if it were mine to give,” he said with a heavy sigh. “But only Arl Eamon can promise you that, and he remains gravely ill.”

"And no medicine or healing can help him?"

"We've tried everything." He looked over to where his brother's wife's body lay and then quickly back at Tesni. "Isolde was right. If no common cure can help my brother, we must seek an uncommon one."

"I don't understand," said Tesni.

I’d heard of Andraste. All the Dalish had. But apparently the shemlen called her the Bride of the Maker and believed the ashes of her corpse could cure sickness.  And of course, he wanted us to be the ones to look for them.

Another delay. Another quest. How were we supposed to stop the archdemon in time at this rate? But Tesni promised that we’d find the prophet’s ashes if we could, and bring them back to heal the man who’d raised Alistair. Again, if they could. Those were two very big ‘if’s.

Alistair lagged behind everyone else as we made our way back down to the village, hanging his head while he walked. No one could mope like Alistair could. I stopped until he caught up with me. We walked together in silence for a few minutes.

"I wish....” He sighed and shook his head. “Isolde... I can't help but wish there had been a way to save them both."

Did anyone but me understand that Tesni’d made the wrong decision?

“I wouldn’t’ve done that,” I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I would've killed the mage and the boy, too."

Alistair stared at me in horror, speechless, and I looked away. When he fell behind again, I didn’t wait for him.

We slept at an inn in the village that night. Leliana helped Wynne to their room almost as soon as we arrived, and Alistair and Zevran (much to Alistair’s dismay) went to join Sten in their room after we’d eaten dinner. That left Tesni, Dalasen, and me with our own room. The statue apparently didn’t sleep.

I was silent as we began to strip off our bloody armor. There was a basin of water on a table and Tesni began to wash her hands and face as well as she could.

"I don't understand how shemlen bathe properly. I wonder if there's a stream nearby."

I threw my cap to the floor and it made a loud clang that startled Tesni into looking at me.

“Caerwyn, what--”

“You shouldn’t’ve let him live.”

She heaved a weary sigh, crossed her arms, and fixed me with a tired look. “Please don't do this. I made the best decision I could, given the circumstances.”

“He was a demon, Tesni,” I said. “You should’ve killed him.”

“He wasn’t a demon. He was being controlled by one. We killed the demon.”

“By using blood magic!”

“You sound like Alistair. What would you have done? Killed the child?”

“I would’ve killed all three of them.”

She was struck silent for a moment. Then her eyes became sad. "You're becoming bloodthirsty, Caerwyn," she said quietly. "You're a hunter, not a killer."

"And a protector,” I reminded her. “So are you. We keep our clan safe."

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

"You put us all in danger!" I was fuming. "You risked our clan to save an abomination. You tore open the Veil and sent someone into the Beyond! We move on when we feel setheneran,⁴ remember? You're forgetting who we are!"

Her cheeks were red with anger under her vallaslin. "Did you let feeling setheneran stop you from going into the cave?"

She looked as stricken as I was as soon as the words’d left her mouth.

"I--" I swallowed. I didn't know what to say. There was nothing I could say. When she reached to touch my shoulder I flinched away and saw the hurt in her eyes.

"I'm not forgetting who we are, Caerwyn," she said gently. "You're clinging to who we were."

"We are the last of the elvhenan," I quoted. If we abandoned the ways of our race, we weren't any better than the shemlen or the flat-ears.

"No," she said. "We are the last of the dorfen.⁵ And we have a job to do."

She pressed her hand to my cheek where the skin was black with the symbols of our gods. I closed my eyes.

"Changing doesn't mean forgetting." She ran her thumb over my cheekbone and smoothed my hair back behind my ears with her other hand.

No, I thought. Even if I wanted to, I could never forget.

---

 

1Blood child

2Human child (lit. “quick child('s) child / quick children('s) child”)

3One blood. Our blood.

4A place where the Veil is thin (lit. “tenuous waking dream place”)

5Grey Wardens (lit. “grey people”)

"I would've killed all three of them."