The Past Catches Up With You
You wake up, slow and groggy, to the sensation of something warm and wet and furry shoving against your face. You grunt and bat vaguely in front of you, coming in contact with what appears to be a large, furry wall. Cracking one eye open, you see nothing more than a giant nose directly in front of you. It exhales hot breath onto your face.
You push Bella’s nose away with a groan. You wish she’d never learned how to unlatch windows. You’d move your bed, but you’re too worried she’d try climbing through into the house.
“I was having a dream about… about…” you squint, not quite remembering. “An elf? And a war?” You shake your head, then roll haphazardly out of bed, stumbling around as your body wakes the rest of the way up. You manage to locate an oatcake for Bella, which is all it takes to get her to remove her entire head from the window.
Your home is small, more of a cottage than anything, but it’s yours. You’d had enough saved up for a little hovel in the middle of nowhere, most of a mile away from the nearest village. You’d made it your own, and the summer breeze coming in through the window, bringing with it the myriad scents of your garden, is proof enough that you’d made the right decision. You can be yourself here. Just yourself, and no one else.
You fight off a shiver despite the summer heat, and move to your wood stove to make some tea. Maker knows you’ll need it to get through the day after being woken up at the crack of… uh… noon… by Bella. Maybe you’ll take her into town today, to wear her out a little if nothing else. Or you could go the opposite way and head into the Dales, collect some alchemy reagents. If you can get a hold of some more mugwort, you’re pretty sure your cooling potion would sell like… well, you’d say like hotcakes, but given how warm it is, probably more like ice cream.
Still strewn about on your desk is your current project, rubbings from an elven ruin you’d found in Fereldan. You feel sick every time you look at it, but you can’t bring yourself to throw it out. Your quest for knowledge trumps all else… but even that thought has you rolling with panicked nausea. You decide to skip the tea for now and all but burst out of your door.
The air is fresh and hot, real and familiar. You suck in desperate breaths of air as Bella trots around the cottage to butt her head against your chest. Honestly… you have no idea why you even bother with the illusion of putting her inside a fence. Absentmindedly, you run hands through her mane.
“Let’s go into the Dales today, Bella,” you murmur through the fog in your mind. “Let’s forget about knowledge for the day. We’ll pick flowers and braid them into our hair.” You let your face rest against her head. The smell of her is solid, earthy, and comforting. “Let’s let this summer pass us by. Let’s just waste our time and prove…” You take a deep breath full of mule. “Prove we can.”
She snorts her assent, and you go back inside just long enough to grab your bags, not even stopping to put shoes on. Today can be a day for you and Bella. You can ignore your hunger for a few more days. You place a kiss against Bella’s nose, close your eyes, and—
You wake up with another disoriented grunt, this time, regretfully, not to a face full of mule. You’re in a tent, and for a confused second, you think you’re in Fereldan, but no, that’s stupid. You’re in the desert, and Cole’s waking you up three hours before sunrise because sleep is a luxury you can scarcely afford. No wasting time picking flowers for you, not anymore. You feel an unsettling churn of nausea. The only thing left from your dream is the disgusting knowledge of just how far your burning need to know will go.
You push that thought out of your mind and rise, enjoying the cold and dark of the desert, not a cloud in sight. The stars are beautiful. Perhaps you’ll just pick a dune and stargaze until the sun comes up. Maybe you’ll just—
“Not asleep? Is something amiss?”
You grit your teeth against the sound you least want to hear at the moment. It seems that the current watch is the Seeker. What luck.
“Everything’s fine. I sleep poorly under the best of circumstances, and I simply got tired of tossing and turning. I thought fresh air might clear my mind,” you tell her, turning to eye the Seeker. You feel like her prey more than ever at the moment; it’s hard to see her or the Inquisitor as anything other than enemies to be avoided until they can be taken care of for good. When you look at her, you see a problem, not a person, and it’s an unsettling reminder that she should be viewing you the same way.
“I’m on watch at the moment. If you’d like to walk together—”
“With all due respect, Seeker Pentaghast,” you say, your mouth moving before you can stop it. “There is little I would like less. If you’ll excuse me.” You turn and stalk away from her, for the moment uncaring of her thoughts as to why you dislike her so. She barged into your tent with her sword drawn. You are allowed to hate her.
You make your way to the edge of camp, or whatever you think counts as it, hoping to be far enough away that the Seeker won’t bother you. You’ve no doubt she’d have the boldness to, despite what you just said to her. She thinks you misguided. She thinks you naive. The sharp words you throw at her probably only strike her as hard as a child throwing a tantrum.
Somehow, that thought doesn’t do anything for your temper.
But that just leaves you to stew alone, hating who she is and what you are and the overwhelming realization that you’re marching into the desert with her because you are what you are, you are what you tried to avoid in forgotten corners of Orlais. No matter how long you tried to avoid it with Bella, the truth of the matter will always catch up with you. She’s dead, and your hunger will drive you over the edge of the Abyssal Rift and into the darkness.
No sooner than the sun is up, it’s sweltering. This gives you a very clear picture of your life for the foreseeable future, and you can’t say you much care for it. You’ve always disliked the cold, but at the moment you can’t help but think that’s because you’d never experienced real heat. Still, it’s not as bad as the sticky summer of Seheron in your memory… though that’s little comfort.
Solas had the last watch last night, so while you’d gotten a few hours of sleep in under Cole’s watchful eyes, you’re still up bright and early, which means you’re learning how to do implausible stretches in the sand. Some are harder, but some are admittedly easier, as sinking an inch or so into the sand adds a degree of stability to some poses. All in all, you absolutely hate it. You’re just voicing this to Solas when something immeasurably worse happens.
“Come on, then,” says the Inquisitor, who you hadn’t even noticed approaching. You’d been too busy studiously looking anywhere but Solas’s bared forearms. “Now that you’ve warmed up, let’s get some practice in.”
“Now?” You don’t mean it to come out as a whine, but in retrospect it absolutely does.
“Yes, now. I have some time, and by the look of it, so do you. Besides, there have been darkspawn reports in the area we’ll be going through today. I’d prefer you learn how to move in sand before we run into a fight, in case you get scared and run headlong in to massacre a hurlock.”
That sobers you completely, and sets a chill in you that even the morning heat can’t bake away. Darkspawn. The one good thing to come of your kidnapping and subsequent slavery is that you’d never had to deal with the invasion of Denerim. You want to believe with all your heart that you would never have been left there to deal with it alone, but you can’t be sure.
That lack of darkspawn had been perhaps the singular highlight of your life, besides your talent at avoiding experiencing slavery version two at the hands of the mage Circles. And now, it would seem, the Inquisition is going to take that from you wholesale.
You doubt the Inquisitor can see any of this on your face, but Solas is watching you closely. It doesn’t matter. Anyone would be terrified at the prospect of facing darkspawn. In this, you are hardly unique.
“Fair enough,” you say with a sigh. “But given what I’ve heard about darkspawn blood, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.” There’s not enough gold in the Inquisiton’s coffers to get you to willingly fight one of those things. If you do anything, it will be with throwing knives and at a great distance. But you go with the Inquisitor nonetheless. It’s not as if there’s any discouraging him.
Fifteen minutes later, you can tell he’s taking it easy on you, likely not to wear you out before a long day. Something you idly wish Bull would have kept in mind more often, although you suspect he thinks he was the most important part of your day in any case. That being said, footwork in sand is exactly as impossible as he’d made it sound. You slip, you stumble, you almost stab your own foot once, saved only by the Inquisitor quickly knocking your own blade away. It’s a bit telling that he’s better at controlling the direction of your sword than you are, but whatever. You’re not supposed to be good at this.
As a child, Leah taught you how to protect yourself with a knife. Any other sort of weapon would get an alienage elf killed. In Antiva, your lessons had continued in much the same way. In Rivain, you’d learned a little bit of staffwork, but not much. Even in Orlais, full-sized swords had never factored into your training. And come the Inquisition, Bull had focused solely on hand-to-hand. For once, you don’t have to fake being bad at something. You just are. The fact that this allows you to genuinely put your all—or most of your all—into the sword training is something of a mildly pleasant side benefit.
Though when you started thinking of this as mildly satisfying and stopped thinking about it as the worst thing in your shitty journey, you’re not sure. Probably about the time when it stopped hurting just to lift the Inquisitor’s damn sword.
After some shoddy practice and a lot of slipping and being very aware that the Inquisitor could make you fall on your ass if he had a more Bull-like approach to these things, the two of you grab breakfast as camp is being broken down and packed back onto the mounts. This routine, having just now begun to feel slightly familiar, is almost over. Soon, you’ll be at your destination. And, having decided not to run, you’ll be with the Inquisition for the foreseeable future.
You throw on a loose-fitting linen top over your undershirt, wrap your face in a damp wrap, check to ensure your knives are all in their proper locations—even slipping the dagger you often keep hidden in the small of your back into place—tie a hat around your neck, and effortlessly pull yourself up onto Revas’s back.
Perhaps it’s the new, dark tint of your skin, but you can’t help but marvel at how much—and yet how little—you’ve changed.
The desert does not make for a fun ride. You and the mounts both appreciate the frequent water breaks as the Inquisitor—leading once again in the ahead group—zig-zags you across the approach. However, each relief is short-lived and it feels as though it takes no time at all for all the moisture to be sapped from your skin and out of your body entirely. Solas informs you to drink liberally, and you do, absolutely guzzling water down at every opportunity. You’re so full with the stuff that you barely eat lunch, managing to munch down some bread only because Solas insists.
The afternoon is unspeakably hot. You feel like bacon sizzling in the sun despite—or perhaps in part because of—the new shade of your skin. At least you’re mostly free of the painful sting of burning flesh. Solas’s creation certainly worked, and you’ll certainly be having him show you how to make it at a later date, when time and resources allow. The acquisition of any knowledge, great or small, helps tamp down on the sizzling panic in your heart, the feeling that you’re making a horrible mistake, taking a terrible risk.
Of course, no sooner than you’re batting down that growing feeling of dread, an odd shift in the air has you looking up. It almost feels like a storm is coming, but in the desert, you have no idea what a storm would even be like. The sun in the sky seems as bright as ever… Perhaps the wind has picked up, or shifted direction?
The fact that you’re looking around, anxious and looking for answers, is why you see them, the sudden crest of darkness over a hill. You have no way of knowing what you’re looking at, but something about the sight captures you. When you see it rushing down at the Seeker, the Inquisitor, and Cole like a swarm of ants, you briefly freeze, your whole body seizing with terror. Your voice catches in your throat as you go to speak up, but it doesn’t matter.
“Darkspawn!” yells Blackwall, and you finally have a reality to fit to the word in your head.
You can taste the wrongness of them in the back of your throat, even from this distance, something sick and twisted that makes the world itself scream out. You desperately don’t want to get any closer than you are right now.
But the others are rushing forward. Of course they are. Those are your companions up there, threatened to be buried in this sensation in the air like sickness and death itself. Sera once said that they save each other, back and forth, without a single thought. It means nothing to them. You wonder what that’s like, because as you charge forward to keep pace with the others, all you can think about is that they’re definitely all going to owe you for this if you have to get involved.
You leap from Revas’s back sooner than the others dismount, thudding down into the sand and pausing just long enough to place a firm hand on his snout. Stay back, you try to communicate through a glare. You refuse to lose him to Blight, and this fight is far too dangerous for a creature that doesn’t know to avoid the Darkspawn’s diseased blood.
The others are crashing into battle, but Solas hangs back a bit, even further than Sera, who’s loosing arrow after arrow in a literal blur. Rather than wonder at how the fuck that works, you scamper to Solas’s side. The air tastes like ozone near him, an indescribable tang like the taste of air at the peak of a mountain. That’s the only comparison you’ve ever found apt for trying to describe that taste, that sensation, when the power of the Fade is used to warp reality. It’s uncomfortable to be around, but not painful.
You pull out two throwing knives, but you’re still too far away. You don’t have the kind of range that Sera does with her arrows, or Solas with his spells. You could get them there, but you might risk missing or even hitting one of your companions. Worse than useless. But you don’t want to charge forward, either. You’re a noncombatant, you remind yourself. No matter how much the Inquisitor has been teaching you in your off time, you’re barely a beginner with the blade, and no one here expects you to charge in to fight Darkspawn with a knife.
Which is good. Because you don’t want to. You really don’t want to. Even as close as you are, you can smell them, a stench like rotting flesh. They’re viscerally wrong, every sense you have screeching at you to stay away from them. Even the burning desert sun itself seems dimmer in their presence, the air colder.
That’s not your imagination, you realize. There are clouds growing, clouds in the desert… or is that dust? You have no frame of reference for what a dust storm even looks like, but you pray that’s not the case. The last thing you need on top of Darkspawn is a fucking sandstorm. Either way, the clouds are growing thick enough to dull the desert’s midday sun, and with the absence of light, the Darkspawn’s wrongness seems only to grow. You grip your blades tighter, knuckles whitening.
Solas and Dorian are controlling the field masterfully. Sera is away from the horde and relatively safe. It’s Blackwall, the Seeker, and the Inquisitor in the thick of things… and presumably Cole, somewhere, but you don’t even think spirits can be Blighted. He’s probably the safest of anyone here.
But there’s just so many. Where did they come from? And yet even this number must be nothing compared to the overwhelming hordes of a Blight proper. Once upon a time, Leah had stared down the face of this times a thousand, times a hundred thousand, and saved it from overwhelming the whole of Fereldan. It feels like only right now do you understand the implications of that. You don’t think she’d been any older than you are now. Where did she find the courage? Where does anyone?
There’s too many of them. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get sick. There are Darkspawn overwhelming the fighters now, breaking free to charge towards the back ranks, towards Dorian, Sera, Solas… and you. You swallow thickly, and take as deep a breath as you can through the wraps covering your face. You taste plague in the air, so it doesn’t particularly help.
Before the Darkspawn can reach you, however, something huge and fast barrels into them, through them. You’d been so hyperfocused on the approaching Darkspawn, the whole world becoming a narrow tunnel between them and you, that you didn’t even hear it approaching. The huge animal—a camel, you realize, which doesn’t make the situation any less surreal—sends Darkspawn sprawling, a few even flying through the air in a way that would be absolutely comical in a less dire situation.
You have just enough time to register that there’s someone on the camel’s back before the figure comes tumbling off, falling onto the sand only recently cleared of Darkspawn. The camel keeps going, and you realize with muted horror that whoever it is, they’re surrounded on all sides by rapidly recovering Darkspawn.
There’s about to be a massacre.
It seems as though you’re the first one to recover, first one blade and then the other hurtling from your hands, each striking a different darkspawn in a black, oozing eye. You charge forward, one hand going to the Fang at your back so you can defend yourself, and the other grabbing for another throwing blade. But there’s a grip on your arm, and you get yanked back, almost losing your footing in the sand.
“Laissez-moi passer, idiot!” you snap, pulling at the grip—which is painfully firm. Your eyes are on the collapsed figure, dark brown against the sand, and the cackling darkspawn, too far back to have been struck by the camel, drawing its bowstring taunt—
The arrow looses, and you desperately hurl your blade, not considering what your companions might make of your talent—you’ve given this much away to Leliana. But from this angle, from this distance… You slice it in two, too late to matter. The arrow strikes true, the front half of the arrowhead and shaft burrowing into the sand—wait, the sand?
The figure rolled over right before the arrow hit. You let out a ragged breath of relief, but his situation is still dire. He staggers, stumbling, and you fear he was disoriented or concussed from the fall.
“Don’t just stand here, you idiot!” you yell, half turning to Solas. “Do something!”
The first of the Darkspawn to recover are charging him, and one or two sprout arrows from Sera’s bow, but it’s certainly not going to be enough. The man stumbles backwards, then sideways, and then there’s a Darkspawn upon him. You kick Solas sharply in the shin, hear a hiss of pain as he finally releases your arm, and begin to run forward, although you’re sure you’ll be too late. The Darkspawn swings its terrible blade down, but the man trips sideways, narrowly avoiding the blade. Then backwards, avoiding a sideways swipe by collapsing onto the sand, knees bent. Wait—
The man sweeps his legs, knocking the Darkspawn off balance and into another Darkspawn that had been ready to swing, and in that moment, you realize what’s happening. You half-stumble yourself as you stop running, staring in disbelief.
The man seems drunk, alright, but thinking that would be a deadly mistake. No, he’s tripping and tumbling with purpose, avoiding strikes and bewildering even the near-mindless Darkspawn with unpredictable movements. Forget Solas, the idiot here is you.
He’s not just avoiding the Darkspawn, either. No, quick as a whip they begin to fall as he returns blows with blades that glint in the dim light and seem to appear and then vanish just as quick. Of course they do. Only one idiot would stumble like a drunkard and use knives of ice in a desert.
If those Darkspawn don’t break his neck, you’re going to do it your damn self, because Banal’ras has followed you into the fucking desert.