Chapter Text
She was already hoping for so many things that seemed impossible that she hadn’t dared to hope that they might proceed into the Wastes without a fight. But she did think that a semi-mythical elven creature was going a little too far.
Still, she was a hero. If she’d killed an archdemon and stopped a blight, she could hardly let a varterral slow her down. So, while Ariane gaped and Finn panicked, Elissa planted her feet, drew her blades and, because she was a hero, when she charged, they charged with her, and if she failed or faltered, they’d die with her too.
Responsibility, the curse of every hero.
Honestly, it had been easier when the stakes weren’t personal, and her name wasn’t known.
Thankfully, though, it seemed that they would not be dying today.
The fight wasn’t easy. Unlike a dragon, a varterral jumped, snapped and was considerably lither than a giant lizard. It was almost akin to fighting a shriek, except much much bigger. She found herself grappling for tactics on the fly.
Luckily, she was faster, and Finn, at least, was smarter, managing to catch the beast in a magical trap long enough for her and Ariane to do some real damage.
Then it was dead. Another ancient creature felled by her blades.
She didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, beyond the fact that they weren’t dead, and were now free to delve into the ruins.
When they got there, she was relieved to see that there was virtually no trace of the Mother’s corpse. For Finn’s sake, more than her own. But her initial relief soon gave way to concern. They had set the fires carefully but to see no trace of that bloated corpse… It made her wonder if perhaps the Mother had survived after all.
If she had, Elissa knew that it wouldn’t be long before she heard from her. From what she’d seen, intelligent darkspawn tended to hold a grudge.
Beyond where the Mother’s bulbous body had blocked further exploration, a narrow bridge across a lake led to a steep hill, and atop that hill….
Was the proof that maybe she hadn’t been wrong to hope.
“Another Eluvian,” Finn breathed as Elissa held out an arm to halt him in his tracks. “And it’s… glowing. We should…”
Ariane stopped him as he moved forward, just as, in front of the… well, it couldn’t really be called glass, Morrigan glanced back at her.
Even though they were still some distance from each other, she felt the weight of those yellow eyes like an arrow to her heart.
“I think she’s waiting for you,” Ariane breathed.
Elissa nodded dumbly, confused by the leaden weights that her legs seemed to have become as she forced them to walk up the hill. Dane, of course, showed no such compunction, bounding forward with a happy bark as soon as Morrigan turned from the mirror.
“Ask her about our book,” Ariane hissed just before she passed out of earshot.
“No further, please,” Morrigan cautioned as she approached. Her voice was hard, but underneath it Elissa could sense the same uncertainty that she was feeling.
She paused, feeling rather like a cat before a tiger. She felt quite bereft without a tail to twitch.
“One more step and I leave… for good this time.”
Elissa didn’t doubt it.
“Hello to you too, Morrigan,” she said, not trusting herself to make her voice anything less than utterly flat.
“I assume you know what this is?” Morrigan said, choosing to ignore her sarcasm as she gestured to the Eluvian behind her. “I have gone to great lengths to find and activate this portal. Give me reason and I use it and you will not be able to follow.”
Elissa frowned. She knew why she was feeling trepidatious, why she had come ready for – and wondering if this would be – a fight, hoping desperately that it wouldn’t be… But she was surprised to see the exact same feeling reflected in Morrigan.
She supposed that, as far as Morrigan was concerned, she could just as easily have changed in the intervening years as well. Perhaps Morrigan feared that she had become resentful over their shared past. Over that night. Over the manner by which her life and his had been saved.
After all, Morrigan could not possibly know how very hard she had worked to avoid becoming so.
She should probably ask what she meant about the Eluvians being portals. Finn would. But while she wanted to help both Finn and Ariane, she could not afford to forget her purpose in coming. And that relied on Morrigan’s good will.
Besides, maybe just a small part of her hoped that if both of them were nervous – if neither of them wanted a fight – then perhaps there didn’t have to be one. Maybe even after all this time, they were, in fact, still friends.
“I didn’t come here to fight you,” she said slowly, carefully, as she let her shoulders drop to force some of the tension from her frame.
Morrigan’s shoulders also fell.
“I did not think you had,” Morrigan said, a slight smile pulling at her lip. “Tell me. Why did you come?”
“I came for… answers,” she said, wondering why the question seemed to stick in her throat.
“Answers. We all want answers,” Morrigan said cryptically. “We had a deal. I save your life and, in return, you leave me be. Why should I answer any of your questions now?”
Ah, Morrigan. Always so prickly. Always so annoyed when people didn’t fall in line with her assumptions and plans.
Elissa grinned. “If you didn’t want to talk, you wouldn’t have stayed.” Her eyes flicked to the oddly glowing Eluvian behind her.
Morrigan snorted a laugh. “Always the clever one,” she drawled. “Ask your questions then, since you have travelled so far.”
She would have thought that after the past few weeks of searching – of spending virtually every night trying not to get her hopes up, convincing herself that most likely Morrigan knew nothing, only to try and temper her hopes and expectations, which just seemed to keep skyrocketing despite her efforts – that her first question would naturally be ‘do you know how to cure the taint?’
But for some reason the words were still stuck in her throat. Now, face to face with the only other woman who had bedded the love of her life – a woman who had been able to do what she could not and bear him a child – there was only one question that seemed important…
“Tell me where the child is,” she said, the words bursting forth from her lips before she’d really consciously thought about it.
Morrigan blinked, her mouth setting into a grim line as she folded her arms across her chest. A mother in defence of her offspring.
“He is safe and beyond your reach.”
At first, all Elissa could think of was the word he. Alistair had a son. A son. She wished that she could tell him. He’d be delighted. Or, at least, he would be initially. The idea of a son, of a family. But then, of course, he would remember that he’d likely never see the boy. And, as reality set in, his face would fall and…
No.
Unless…
She opened her mouth to speak. Perhaps to demand more details to bargain for Alistair’s cause but Morrigan forestalled her.
“All you need to know,” she said, holding up one hand, “is that the child is an innocent. He knows nothing of the destiny that lies before him.”
For someone who hated her mother as much as Morrigan did, she was certainly capable of sounding like her on occasion.
“What is your plan?” Elissa said, her instincts crawling beneath her skin warning her of some danger that she couldn’t quite grasp. “I want to know.”
Morrigan’s eyes hardened, and Elissa knew that whatever Morrigan said next would be all the information that she would ever impart on the topic.
“My plan is to leave and prepare the child for what is to come,” she said sharply. “Such preparation requires time and power. I must have both if I am to be successful. More than this I dare not say… not even to you.”
The right thing to do would be to pry. For all she knew, Morrigan’s plan might be a danger to the world. Or it might be something she needed help with, and she was too proud to admit it. Or she might have been working with her mother all along. She’d like to think that she could trust in Morrigan’s intentions. That they were still friends …
But she couldn’t be sure.
What she could be sure of was that Morrigan would not wait around conversing forever. If she were going to ask what she came here to ask, she should do so.
She wet her lips… and swallowed heavily.
“You once spared me and… someone I care about deeply from a deadly fate,” she said. Finn and Ariane were still hanging back, it was likely that they couldn’t hear the conversation, but even so, some secrets weren’t meant to be said aloud. “I… wondered if you might know how to prevent us from suffering a horrible one in its place.”
“Ah,” Morrigan said, understanding cresting in her eyes. “I see. I am sorry, my friend.” Elissa’s heart plunged into her stomach. “But the ritual requires that one of the participants have magical talent. Otherwise, I would not have…”
Elissa shook her head, her breathing hard. She didn’t need to hear that Morrigan hadn’t wanted to bed Alistair, hadn’t wanted to bear his child, when it was all she wanted and all that kept them apart.
“I want more than that. I want a cure for the taint. A way to circumvent it. Permanently.”
“I do not know of such a thing. But I believe it may be possible.”
“How?”
“I do not know for certain. All I know is that such a thing might be possible. I should have thought that if anybody, the wardens would have information on such things...”
Elissa responded to that with the most sarcastic glance she could muster. Morrigan smiled. She was teasing her, which Elissa supposed was only a good thing. Perhaps one day, given time, they might even find their way back to friendship.
Because somehow, despite the fact that this hadn’t been a fight, she wasn’t sure she could exactly call Morrigan a friend in this moment.
“Perhaps not,” Morrigan agreed. “It will be a long road, this path. But I think you are prepared for that, yes?”
Elissa nodded. As if this fool quest hadn’t proved, to herself most of all, that there was nothing she wouldn’t do. No place she would not go just for the chance of avoiding the day that haunted her existence. The day when he came to her and told her that he had finally found someone to marry.
Someone to make a family, an heir with.
Someone who wasn’t her…
“Then what I have left you may help,” Morrigan continued. “It is over there. Along with the Dalish book.”
“Thank you.” She wondered if Morrigan could hear the frantic beating of her heart as hope sparked to life within her. Even if all she had was information on how the ritual worked its magic, at least it was a start. Even the knowledge from Morrigan that it may be possible seemed like proof that she wasn’t chasing the impossible.
That she wasn’t mad for trying.
“I cannot tarry longer,” Morrigan said, sounding almost sad. “The time has come for me to go.”
“You don’t have to do this alone, Morrigan,” she said, tearing her gaze from the small camp where Ariane’s book and whatever Morrigan had left for her waited. She still owed Morrigan a life-debt and even if she didn’t, they had been friends once. If she could help, she would. Always. “Whatever it is. Whatever trouble you’re in…”
“I wish it were not so,” Morrigan said, stepping closer to the Eluvian. “But it is. Goodbye, my friend.”
“Goodbye,” she muttered as the purple mist in the Eluvian wrapped around the witch’s lithe form.
Barely a second later, the mist reformed into solid glass, sealing Morrigan behind it.
“Where… where is she going?” Finn cried, rushing forward, having apparently broken loose from Ariane’s hold. “How… How does the Eluvian do that? We should….”
She held out her arm. Stopping Finn before he went careening through the portal. Morrigan had said that she would not be able to follow her. Since everything else that Morrigan had ever told her had come to pass, she didn’t want Finn to take a chance and find himself blown apart by some spell or other.
“But…” he said.
“She’s gone.” Elissa told him, her throat surprisingly tight. For all that had happened, Morrigan had been, and possibly still was, her friend. Watching her disappear into the unknown had been… difficult. Another piece of her old life slipping away.
“Come,” she said, stalking over to what must have been Morrigan’s camp. “She said the book was here.”
Thankfully Morrigan hadn’t been lying. The Dalish book was easy to identify, both by the writing on the cover and the delighted squeal that Ariane let loose when she saw it. Finn smiled at her indulgently for it, but only behind her back, of course.
The other treasure, which undoubtedly had been left for her, was less easily identifiable. It appeared at first glance to be a grimoire, not too dissimilar to the one of Flemeth’s that they had recovered from the Circle Tower, but instead of being written in strange languages and pictograms and runes as that one had, this appeared to have been written in Common.
It was just… incomprehensible Common.
Alchemic and magical terms were blended together in ways that she had never seen before, and since she was an expert in neither, she couldn’t discern the meaning. But she did recognise the words ‘architect’ and the Grey Warden sigil hastily drawn on one page. In the margins beside it, one name had been scrawled: ‘Fiona’. There was a drawing of a blade too. One that might have been Maric’s.
Either way, it wasn’t a puzzle that she was going to solve right now. But she had an idea of who she might take it to. Namely a very old warden at Soldier’s Peak, who was handily also a mage.
Madness, probably, but she could think of no-one else better placed to make sense of it.
And she had asked him, once, long ago, to look into a cure. He hadn’t turned anything up yet, but perhaps this grimoire might provide the information that he was missing.
Maybe.
She hoped.
“So,” she said, stuffing the book into her pack before turning to Finn and Ariane. “What will you two do now?”
Predictably, they shared a glance with each other. His fingers tightening around hers.
“Well…” he said slowly. “I’d like to do more, um… field research on the Eluvians and perhaps other elven artifacts of magical importance. There are so many unknowns. Did you know that…” He trailed off, glancing at Ariane. “Of course…” he continued. “I’d need someone to look out for me. I’d probably trip over my own feet and end up bleeding to death in some forgotten ruin otherwise, and who knows how many varterrals are out there?”
Elissa nodded, a smile on her face, and she waited for him to ramble enough to work up the courage to ask the question he really wanted the answer to.
“I don’t suppose….” he said, turning to face Ariane properly. “I mean, at least you’d get to see… Ariane, would you…”
Ariane laughed and threw her arms around his neck.
“Of course I’ll look after you, you idiot,” she said delightedly.
Elissa turned her head as they kissed. It was easy for them. So simple. No kingdom at stake. No duty. No need to protect the world that they had just saved. Just love and research and being together.
Her path, it seemed, would be much harder. But she’d walk every painful, heartbreaking step of the way if it meant that one day…
One day, she could have the same kind of happiness.