Archive of Our Own

He dreams, as he often does, of darkspawn and mirrors twisted together, blighted eyes looking back out of cracked glass, and he wakes up shaking, pressing his hands to his own teary blighted eyes. Avrian sits up, curling his knees to his chest and his forehead to his knees, trying to slow his breathing. Nearby, someone stirs.

“Darkspawn?” Velanna asks wearily. “Is Nathaniel not doing his job on watch?” Her eyes are bright in the darkness, not tainted, and Avrian grounds himself in that. Just a nightmare. Just things that happened long ago. Just a nightmare.

“It’s fine,” Avrian says. He sees Nathaniel’s silhouette shift, turning toward them, and he shakes his head and gives his friend a dismissive wave, everything’s fine. “Just a nightmare - a regular one.” Just things that happened long ago.

Velanna grunts and rolls over. “Weren’t you doing better about not having those?”

“Like I can control it, lethallan,” he growls, closing his eyes and digging his fingers into his legs. “I… I wasn’t having as many, for a while.”

Then a letter from Keeper Marethari arrived in Amaranthine. Please, she writes, da'len, please send some word to Merrill and talk her out of this path she has chosen. 

She means, please don’t let her kill herself with that mirror, the way you and Tamlen died.

One day, Clan Sabrae will have their own land in Ferelden, a permanent place, but the earth is still blighted after over a year and a half and it is safer for them in the Free Marches for now. Avrian wishes there was something he could do to move his people back to Ferelden sooner - if they were closer - if he could talk to Merrill instead of throwing letters across the sea to find her in an alienage of all places - if - if -

If they had their own little Arlathan, maybe Merrill wouldn’t feel the need to risk everything for a piece of the past better left in the past.

Avrian sends letter after letter, stubborn and unrelenting, and he forgot how Merrill so often can be the same as him, with her thick skull and bitter determination. They are at an impasse and continue to send letters, throw themselves up against the brick wall that time and space has built between them, trying to break through, trying to convince the other - that the mirror is an important piece of our past that we cannot let go, that the mirror is dangerous and our lives now are more important than anything we had then.

And he dreams, again, of those mirrors, blighted eyes and tainted veins on Merrill’s face now, instead of Tamlen’s. He imagines storming into Kirkwall and dragging her back to the clan, shaking sense into her, how could she willingly walk away from the clan when Avrian would once have done anything to stay? How can she stand to be so close but so far when Avrian glances across the sea and his heart aches with a longing for a home that he has tried to return to but has no more place for him? He dreams of darkspawn’s claws and Tamlen’s blight-twisted hands dragging Merrill away from him, he dreams of screaming after her, please, lethallan, ir lath ma, I cannot lose you like I lost Tamlen, like I lost my own life, please! He wakes shaking, angry, sad, and feeling more alone than he ever has in his life.

He doesn’t sleep again that night; in the morning, his arrows do not so smoothly find their mark. “You’re sloppy,” Nathaniel tells him, the address of commander conspicuously lost, and Avrian yanks an arrow from a darkspawn’s eye - one of Nathaniel’s - and returns it to his own quiver.

“I know,” he says, and the look Velanna shoots him is disgust and pity both.

Alistair comes by Vigil’s Keep and Avrian grabs him before any of the other wardens can, dragging him up to the battlements where they can talk uninterrupted. “Would it be wrong,” he asks, “to devote some of the Order’s resources to tracking down Morrigan?”

Alistair looks at him. “I imagine,” he says slowly, “that no matter what I say, you’re going to anyway." Avrian nods. "Can I just ask, then - what brought this on? Why now?”

“I’ve been in contact with my clan,” Avrian says. “Thinking about everything that I’ve lost, everything that I can’t get back - I tried,” he adds, not sure of how much he told Alistair. “I tried to go back to them but it just… wasn’t right. I didn’t belong there anymore. And I don’t think I belong here anymore, not with the wardens. And I tried to look for Morrigan but it was just me and Zevran with no idea of where to go - with more people, more resources, if I just try again…”

I’m lonely, is the simple answer that he will let Alistair piece together for himself. I’m lonely, and I know it more than ever, writing to Merrill. I’m going to lose her like I lose everyone and that’s making me think more about what I’ve lost. I can’t save Merrill no matter how I try but I haven’t tried my hardest for Morrigan, yet. She’s all that’s left that he thinks he can maybe get back, whatever she might have told him.

Alistair shakes his head. “You don’t know how to stop hoping, do you?”

“No. I don’t.”

He doesn’t turn over the title of warden-commander, if only because if he does, he knows his chosen successor is going to order him right back into the ranks. “This is foolish,” Warden-Constable Velanna says. “This is - hopeless and foolish and -”

“Aren’t you still looking for Seranni?” Avrian reminds her. It’s a low blow and he knows it. It’s insincere - Avrian thinks her search is neither hopeless nor foolish - and she knows it. 

Her lip curls. “She is my sister, not a shemlen lover!”

But the sneer in her voice isn’t as pronounced as it is when Avrian knows her to be truly angry. She looks at him, silent now, trying to judge: does she really mean this much to you? Avrian does not know how to answer her. So much he has never said: that his father was killed just before he was born and his mother vanished into the night after him, seeking vengeance or giving into despair. Did she call on Elgar'nan for strength or Falon'Din for release? Did she imagine that one day her son would take after her, carry that strength of love that bids to follow into death or unknown?

Love is not a weakness, Avrian told Morrigan, once, and she looked at him and she knew: the way he loves is a weakness, unfailingly loyal and with all of his heart, all-consuming. Love bid him to race toward death after Tamlen, and Morrigan intercepted him upon that path; now love bids him to race into the unknown after her. How does he tell Velanna that? How does he tell her that wherever Morrigan is, she is there with his child, and when he was young he told himself that one day he would be a father and never would he let his child grow up without him the way his mother let him be without her.

Something must show in his face, because Velanna’s eyes soften. She means this much to you. “Stubborn,” she snorts at him, annoyed and admiring, the way that Tamlen always used to call him.

“Goodbye, lethallan,” Avrian says. “If anyone disrespects your command, knock some sense into them, or tell Arl Howe to.”

“Oh, Nathaniel is going to be insufferable.” Avrian thinks he almost sees a smile from Velanna, and he grins back at her and brushes his hair out of his eyes. She turns back to the Keep’s gates and stops. “Good luck, lethallin” she says quietly. “Creators guide your path.”

He tries to not look back.

Flemeth’s hut still stands, upright but hollow and surrounded by blighted land and broken trees and dragon bones, broken arrows from Avrian’s quiver still littering the claw-churned ground two years after the fight. The Creators lead him to another of the People, standing in the skeleton of the hut. Her name is Ariane and she, too, searches for Morrigan. “She stole an ancient text from my clan,” Ariane spits. Avrian’s stomach drops, and Fen'Falon shrinks away at the venom in her voice, ears flat back against his head. “What reason do you have for pursuing her?”

Avrian twists his ring. He has never told Ashalle, Merrill, Marethari, Velanna, of Morrigan’s identity. He has never told one of his people that he loves Asha'Bellanar’s daughter. When he answers, he closes his eyes to wait for Ariane’s judgment. “I love her.”

She looks surprised, and sad, and not angry.

They leave, together, and Ariane explains that she came here to ask Asha'Bellanar for help. It is brave of her, Avrian says, for few are willing to face the witch alone, and he hesitates, before he tells her that he killed Asha'Bellanar, years ago, at Morrigan’s behest. He can see in her face and her eyes that she pities him, like when she said, startled, that she had heard stories of Flemeth’s daughters being beautiful but never that they were able to love. She thinks him used by a witch with no heart.

Morrigan has a heart; if nothing else, Avrian’s, that he gave to her.

“Do you know what an eluvian is?” Ariane asks, after some silence, time she has given Avrian to be free from her questions of Morrigan. He shakes his head. “I don’t either, but that is the subject of the book that Morrigan stole. It was written in ancient elven. If we find out what an eluvian is, then perhaps that will help us find her.”

Fen'Falon whines. He whines every time Ariane speaks of her; sadness at her anger, perhaps. The mabari loved Morrigan, much more than she would ever publicly profess to love him. “Do you have any idea of where to go for answers?” Avrian asks.

Ariane nods, her mouth is pressed thin. She is not happy about it.

Avrian isn’t either. It feels wrong, insulting, that two of the People should have to go to the Circle, to the Chantry, to find a piece of their own history - but the fact remains that the Circle’s library is the only place that they have a chance of finding information. “The book we had was once part of the Circle’s library,” Ariane explains. “The elf that brought it to us stole it when he escaped.” She smiles a little as she says this, and Avrian grins too.

“Good for him.”

The Templars at the door question letting a Dalish elf into their libraries, but not a mabari. “I’m Dalish, too,” Avrian snarls, and the Templars look taken aback, like the blue-and-silver of the warden armor has washed the vallaslin from Avrian’s skin. He is not Dalish, he is not an elf, he is not anything that makes him Avrian Mahariel of Clan Sabrae; he is a warden, the Warden-Commander, the Hero of Ferelden. He hates it but the Templars stammer and bow and scurry out of their way and that he can be glad for.

The book they find in the Circle library mentioning eluvians - the fruits of a search that took hours and hours of skimming for anything about ancient elves - is also written in elven. “I wish Merrill was with us,” Avrian mutters, leaning his head against a bookshelf. “Or Velanna.” Even if they couldn’t fluently read it, they still would know more than him, and maybe that would be enough to tell them what an eluvian is.

“Perhaps they have some book on translations?” Ariane suggests, and Avrian tucks the book about ancient elven artifacts under his arm and follows Ariane back to the library’s index. Part of him desperately wants to keep this book and the one on translating elven that they look up. It is their history, not the Chantry’s; it deserves to see life and use with the Dalish instead of being trapped in the cold dusty halls of the Circle. It wouldn’t be stealing - the Chantry probably stole it first. He whispers this to Ariane and she laughs before suspiciously looking around to make sure no one heard. “We do want to be able to come back here, right?” she asks. Avrian shrugs.

“Probably?”

Fen'Falon barks cheerfully. Avrian has discovered that sound is as close to a laugh as a mabari gets. Ariane pulls the translation book off the shelf and cracks it open, flipping through the pages so fast that Avrian doesn’t know how she can see what she’s looking for. “Eluvian…” she mutters. “Eluvian, eluvian…”

“Hey! Be careful with that!”

Ariane’s head snaps up and Avrian has to stop himself from throwing the book he is holding in the direction of the stranger and going for his bow. Before them stands a human, marked as a mage by his robes, with his arms folded over his chest, glaring at them. “You’re bending the spine out of shape!”

Ariane raises her eyebrows, not adjusting her hold on the book at all, and looks at Avrian. “We’re in the middle of something important,” Avrian says tersely, biting back a snarl. “We won’t break your book. Please go.”

“Maybe you won’t break it, but you’re certainly helping to make it easier for someone a few more months down the line to break it - eluvians, did I hear you say?” The mage steps forward and Ariane, to her credit, does not shrink back like Avrian does. He looks over the opened pages. “Ah, yes, I did. You know no one has actually found one, ever?”

“You know what an eluvian is?” Ariane asks slowly. She sounds both surprised and annoyed, that the shemlen should interrupt them - but also that a shemlen should know more about their history than they do.

“It’s the old elvish word for ‘looking glass’,” the mage explains, and Ariane looks at Avrian and Avrian stares at the book in his hands, at the word, eluvian, eluvian, twisting before his eyes. “Colloquially, 'mirror’.”

“No,” Avrian breathes, and his shaking hands clench tight on the book in his hands. “How do you know?” he demands, finding his voice again, stronger. “You’re a shemlen.” You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.

“I’m the Circle’s linguist,” the mage says, oblivious to Avrian’s distress. “I’ve been studying all kinds of lost and rare languages since I was small - an eluvian isn’t just any kind of mirror, you know. It’s a special kind,” and he’s still talking, words and words swirling through the air, something about Tevinter - it’s an old Tevinter artifact he hears Duncan saying, but Tevinter built itself on the bones of Arlathan. There is a thud, the book slipping from Avrian’s hands, and he sinks back against the bookshelf and ignores the indignant cry of the mage. Something about being careful with that, careful, careful, Tamlen we have to be careful, we don’t know what we’re going to find in these ruins, and Tamlen grins. Mirror, looking glass, it doesn’t show a reflection and it ripples under Tamlen’s fingers, looking glass and Tamlen looks like a ghoul, like a monster, screams don’t look at me and runs.

“Avrian? Avrian, are you all right?”

He’s sitting curled on the floor, back against the bookshelf, trembling hands curled into fists pressed against the floor. Fen'Falon is whining loudly, pressing his nose into Avrian’s neck. Ariane is crouched at his other side, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes wide. “Avrian?”

“We found a mirror like that, once.” He can barely force the words out. He can barely hear himself. He doesn’t know if Ariane can hear but then the mage speaks and he realizes they must have.

“You’ve - you’ve found an eluvian? You’ve seen one? Actually seen one?”

Ariane glares up at him. “Can you -”

Something breaks. “In an old ruin in the Brecilian Forest, we didn’t know if the ruins were elven or Tevinter. There was a mirror - it didn’t show a reflection - it was magic - it was tainted by the blight. I got sick from it. I only survived because a Grey Warden took me. Tamlen - Tamlen vanished. He was just gone, the mirror - took him, or - it -” The words don’t come out right. The story replays in his nightmares but he can’t form the words. The taint took him; he was a ghoul; I found him again.“We - I - had to -” kill him.

He had to - but he didn’t. Tamlen begged and begged and Avrian couldn’t - couldn’t -

“Ir abelas,” Ariane whispers. Fen'Falon whines louder.

Eluvian. The thing has a name, the thing that killed him and Tamlen, the thing that Merrill now gambles her life on. Eluvian. He turns the word over and over in his head. Eluvian. Eluvian. Why did his ancestors create such a thing and how did it become so twisted, so corrupted? Eluvian.Does Merrill know the word? She hasn’t ever written it in her letters. Avrian could take these books to her - maybe it would be enough for her to know what the mirror is, maybe if she had answers she would stop trying to repair it, she would -

He is on his feet before he realizes, smacking his head into the bookshelves, and the mage says something and so does Ariane but Avrian doesn’t hear either of them. “Morrigan,” he gasps, and he feels sick, almost tainted sick, and he leans on a table to try and regain his balance. He can see his fingers shaking even pressed flat on the surface. “What is she - why -" 

She knows what it can do, or she should - not as well as Merrill, but she was there to see Tamlen, she knows Avrian’s story. She knows the mirror killed them. It’s going to kill Merrill - it’s going to kill Morrigan. They are going to die like Avrian and Tamlen died - Avrian is going to lose them exactly like he lost Tamlen. 

"We need to find her,” he gasps. “Now.”

We need to stop her. I need to save her.

Ariane puts her hand on his shoulder and he finds himself half leaning against her, trying to steady himself, trying to ground himself, against the screaming storm swirling about in his head. Fen'Falon presses against his hip, another solid weight, another constancy. “Wait, what happened to that eluvian?” the mage asks. “Is it still there?”

“Can you stop -” Ariane starts to say, again.

Avrian lifts his head, feeling dizzy, still sick, but he forces himself to stay upright instead of sinking to the floor again. “Duncan destroyed it,” he says, not caring that neither of them know who Duncan is. “He said it was too dangerous.” He said Tamlen was certainly dead. He said there was nothing we could do to help him. He said the Joining was a cure. He lied he lied he lied.

“D- destroyed it?” the mage repeats, indignant, as angry he was lecturing Avrian and Ariane about the proper way to hold a book. “You…” He shakes his head and turns away, muttering to himself, “But even broken if it could still be used to find the others, if we…” He paces a small circle next to the table.

Ariane scoops the book Avrian dropped up off the floor. "What are you talking about?“ she asks.

"I think - and I might be getting ahead of myself, but I think that the eluvians - they were used for communication, like I said - are all interconnected. You know where one is, so it could lead to others -”

“No,” Avrian says, and he stands up straight, one shaking hand clenched on the back of a chair to hold himself up. The mage is taller than him, but Avrian is Commander of the Grey, and he has long learned how to put the fear of Elgar'nan into shemlen who know only Andraste’s name. He shrinks before Avrian’s eyes but does not step away.

“If Morrigan is interested in eluvians,” Ariane says, her hand returning to Avrian’s shoulder, “then she will also search for one. It will lead us to her.” She waits for Avrian to respond. He can’t find any words to speak; everything is lodged in his throat, a shrieking whirlwind of panic and longing. “What else do you know?” she asks the mage.

“Nothing for sure - I know where to look, though, for the information. This is so exciting; if we can discover,” and he’s babbling more words that Avrian doesn’t hear.

“Exciting?” Avrian repeats. This time, the mage does step back, and Ariane jerks her hand away from Avrian like she had brushed it against a boiling pot. Fen'Falon steps back and barks like a warning. “Exciting?Fenedhis, what do you think this is? A game? A fun learning experience? You want to throw your life away chasing scraps of knowledge for - for a history that isn’t even yours!” He trips on the words; for a moment, Merrill’s was the face that he saw, Merrill the one he is yelling at, living now is more important than knowing how we lived in Arlathan he writes and crosses it out and writes it again and balls up the letter and throws it at the door just as Nathaniel walks in.

“I told you what discovering that mirror did to me! The Grey Wardens saved my life for a time but that’s not a cure, no one has a cure for the blight! You have no idea - do you know what happens when you’re not lucky enough to have a Grey Warden to save you?” He spits the word lucky; Duncan lied. There are eyes, more than this mage’s and Ariane’s, peering around bookshelves, staring at them, and Avrian doesn’t care. “I found Tamlen again, after five months. His skin was gray and rotting and his eyes were white like mine and the darkspawn didn’t even realize that he wasn’t one of their own! He begged me to kill him. Isn’t that exciting?”

This mage, stupid boy, stupid curious boy, doesn’t deserve this vitriol; Avrian, somewhere in the depths of his mind, knows that. But no matter how angry words inked on a page are, they yell only as loud as the reader’s own mind; and Merrill would read them quietly, take all of Avrian’s concern and none of his fury. That anger bubbles over now, anger at Merrill and anger at Morrigan - how could she be foolish enough to toy with eluvians and how dare she steal from his people to do so - turns frustration with this naive mage into screaming rage. Avrian sinks into a chair and presses his hands to his forehead, squeezes his hands together so tightly that they hurt, joints burning with the effort, fingers hurting where his rings push against them. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he says. “I can’t be responsible for…”

It’s like the Joining, handing the cup to someone and condemning them to death by the blight. He still remembers Mhairi, her enthusiasm, her curiosity. She wasn’t the only warden-recruit to die on the floor of Vigil’s Keep; but she was the first. How much more tainted blood will he have on his hands? “I can’t,” he whispers. He can’t let them come with him, and he can’t not. 

Fen'Falon lays his head on Avrian’s knee and whines quietly. He can feel the vibration through the mabari’s throat more than he can hear the sound. “I’m not going back to my clan without the book,” Ariane says firmly. She touches Avrian’s shoulder with her fingertips. “I knew I would face dangers when I left, and I accept this one, too.”

She pursued Morrigan, knowing that she must be a powerful mage. She sought out Asha'Bellanar, alone - but even Flemeth could be fought, killed, and the taint can only held at arms’ length, ever drawing closer.

“Look, whatever - whoever? - you’re looking for, this sounds really important,” the mage says. He’s still here. He hasn’t fled Avrian’s anger. He doesn’t know, as the wardens learned, how rare that anger is, and so how much it should be feared. “And you sound, sorry, you sound a little desperate. You need help, and I can help. I want to help. You know living in the Circle’s not the most risk-free life either, right?”

Avrian knows. The first time he traversed these floors, they were coated in blood and bodies. He knows what a Harrowing is. He knows all that Anders told him. He knows the Chantry wants control of everything and that the Templars will overstep any bounds, even within the wardens. There is no risk-free life in the Circle; there is barely a life in the Circle.

He sighs. “Should I - we - take your not-arguing as assent?” the mage asks.

Avrian covers his eyes with his hands, his fingers still linked together. Mythal watch over us. Falon'Din, do not take any of us yet. Dread Wolf avert your gaze. He looks up, at Ariane’s face, pulled tight with concern, and then at the mage, wide-eyed with some combination of apprehension and excitement. “Yes,” Avrian says.

“Yes!” the mage crows. “Okay, okay - the repository in the basement, I know exactly where to find the exact answers we need, I’ll go right nowand you can come or not -”

And he’s gone, running with a speed that Avrian didn’t know someone wearing robes was capable of. “Oh, Creators,” Ariane says, and then she races after him.

Avrian, for once, does not follow.

Fen'Falon whines. Avrian absently rubs his ears, staring blankly at the two books on the table, about the People’s lost magics and lost language. They have lost so much; but somehow they always face losing more. Ariane would risk her life for a book, for that piece of their past, just as Merrill risks her life rebuilding that mirror, just as Tamlen wanted to search the ruins for any shard of Arlathan left. Is there something wrong with him, Avrian wonders, that he does not have this compulsion to die for a piece of the past? He would die for the living or for love but never for what is lost.

He remembers, then, Keeper saying that she would be interested in the ruins and its artifacts had it not put them in danger. Tamlen’s life is more important than any mirror. She thinks the same as Avrian. She hasn’t managed to impress that upon Merrill. Stubborn, he thinks, and he tries to make himself smile at that. Himself, Tamlen, Merrill - all stubborn, all butting their stony heads up against each other.

There are things that will never be again. Arlathan is one; the eluvians are another; and the stubborn and reckless young trio of Clan Sabrae is a third. One is dead; the other two separated, lost, and no longer naming themselves of Clan Sabrae. He wonders if there is more than the mirror and disagreement with Keeper to Merrill’s leaving; he wonders if she has fallen through the hole that his and Tamlen’s absence left, like he could not find his place in the clan again when he visited. The hole he left is a different shape than he is upon return. He does not fit.

He sighs. Fen'Falon licks his fingers. “Are you worried about her too?” Avrian asks, and he thinks the whimper is affirmation. “We’ll find her,” he says. “Her and the baby, and we’ll…”

The child. Avrian told Alistair only what he needed to know in the moment, which was that Morrigan had magic that would save their lives, and Avrian had agreed to it. Alistair accepted it the way he accepted anything having to do with Morrigan; with a large amount of skepticism, and several puzzled glances at Avrian that asked why her? And they wrote a letter to Weisshaupt that was even vaguer, the equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders, and they moved on to separate warden duties.

The mabari is the only one who ever heard the full story, about a child that would maybe just be a child but may be a god. He is the only one that Avrian can trust not to judge, not to fear, and never to betray the secret. He is the only one that, when Avrian realizes he has no plan for when he finds Morrigan, cannot push him further for answers.

Avrian lays his head down on the table and waits.

The mage’s name is Finn. He trips over himself as he rushes back to Avrian, babbling something about mirror shards and scrying and everything is connected, and Ariane looks at Avrian and says apologetically that they need to go find the shards of his eluvian.

His eluvian. Tamlen’s eluvian, Merrill’s, theirs, the one that has destroyed them. He has to go back. He has to go back. His hands shake and he squeezes his eyes shut, I can’t. I can’t. 

“But you’re not allowed to leave the tower,” Ariane is saying to the mage, planning ahead, while Avrian has frozen in the past, and he shakes himself loose, stands and stumbles, holds himself up on the table again.

“The wardens get special dispensation,” Avrian says. They both look at him, like they forgot that he can speak. “They’ll let you leave with me.” I’ll make them let you go.

“Oh - no, it’s fine! I got special permission to leave the tower some time ago, to continue my research, but I never had anywhere to go until now. I can just let the First Enchanter know and then we can leave!”

Avrian wonders how rare that must be, to be granted freedom. He wonders if mages have taken it and run and never come back from their research. He wonders why Finn didn’t.

He finds out why Finn didn’t, when they’ve barely crested the first hill on the shores of Lake Calenhad and Finn complains about the muddy uneven ground when it hasn’t even rained in a week. “It could be so much worse,” Avrian tells him, and he tells a story of when he was young, a decade and a half before, where a rainy spring left the clan stranded in open, indefensible campsites because they couldn’t move their aravels through all the mud. The halla seemed a new breed that were white with brown spots. Merrill and Avrian picked flowers and wrapped them around their horns so that they would still feel beautiful.

Finn is eager to hear about Dalish life, as many ignorant assumptions as he carries. He asks Ariane if she and Avrian are related because their names are so similar, and when Ariane says that they only met earlier this week, Finn jumps to asking her if her name means something in elven. She sighs and turns the question around on him. Shemlen, Avrian thinks, and Finn is telling them about his name: Florian Phineas Horatio Aldebrant, Esquire. Avrian nearly laughs in disbelief but manages to shut off the sound before it escapes his throat. “What does 'esquire’ mean?” he asks. It isn’t a word that he ever heard in his tenure as Arl of Amaranthine.

Only when they settle for the evening does Finn finally ask something Avrian thinks he should have asked a while ago: “Who’s Morrigan?”

Avrian looks at Ariane. She is already looking at him. They each wait for the other to speak. “Uh, did I ask that out loud or just in my head, because I do that sometimes?” Finn adds hesitantly.

“She stole a book about eluvians from Ariane’s clan,” Avrian explains, “and they want it back.”

“But you’re not from the same clan,” Finn says. “How did you get here?”

“We fought together during the blight, Morrigan and I,” Avrian says. Ariane’s eyes are fixed on him as intently as Finn’s; she is just as curious as to how Avrian will spin this tale. “She disappeared after but I couldn’t just… let her go. I love her.”

He still hesitates on the word, love, not because he feels anything less but because he wonders, each time, how the other person will react, be it Ariane or Finn hearing the story, Alistair who laughed and then choked on it when he saw that Avrian was serious, or even when he told Morrigan and her eyes went wide and then sharp, anger to hide fear.

“And she left?” Finn asks.

Avrian sits forward and stares into the fire, remembering when he sat around a larger one with Alistair, Leliana, Zevran, Wynne, and others, or when he sat with Morrigan at her tiny separate camp, her desperate attempts to keep emotional distance from the rest of them by keeping physical distance too. The light catches off of Fen'Falon’s fur; he has been here, always. “It’s complicated,” he says, and he doesn’t look at either of them, not wanting to see their pity for his stubborn denial and the way he clings to a Witch of the Wilds who would sooner eat a man’s heart than keep it. “It wasn’t…” Wasn’t her choice? But it was, for all it might have been a choice born of her thinking that she had no others, no way to live but how her mother did. “She…" 

He twists her ring on his finger and then puts his head in his hands. "It’s complicated,” he repeats. “But I promised her I would find her. This is the first that I’ve found her trail and I can’t let her go again.”

“And with the eluvians,” Finn says, and Avrian looks up at him to see his eyes widening and eyebrows raising as he comprehends, “you’re afraid that something will happen to her like what happened to…” He stops. Avrian never said who Tamlen was.

“To my brother,” Avrian says.

“Did she know?” Ariane asks. “About Tamlen?”

Avrian nods. “She was there when I found him.” She was the one who killed him, because he wanted it, and because I couldn’t.

He dreams that night like he has many nights before, screaming for Merrill but unable to reach her before the taint has devoured her as Tamlen rasps kill me, please, but the next ghoul to appear out of shattered silver shards that show no reflection has shemlen ears and her eyes fade from golden to blighted white. When he jerks awake it is with a leg spasm that kicks Fen'Falon in the rump, and the mabari glares at him before shuffling away, closer to Ariane. Avrian presses his hands to his forehead and stares up at the open sky, star-speckled, and he remembers suddenly, in Orzammar, looking over endless crafted merchandise until he saw his own eyes staring back at him. He flinched then as he still does now, but the golden craftsmanship drew his attention back, remembering the story Morrigan told him of her childhood prize.

He has to press his fist against his mouth to stop from waking Ariane and Finn with his half-hysterical laughter. Morrigan, and mirrors, even back then.

The Brecilian Forest is empty of any clans at the moment. It has been two years since he last saw it, much longer than he ever went before; Clan Sabrae did not so much wander endlessly but make a rotation of several sites, until they ran from the blight. The Wending Wood has many of the Brecilian Forest’s spirits, murderous trees, and other assorted mysteries, but it isn’t home.

Stepping back into the thick trees that make the sun green on the moss below feels like home, somehow even more than returning to his clan outside of Kirkwall did. “Do you know where the ruins were?” Finn asks. Avrian shakes his head. He thinks if he opens his mouth to elaborate further, he might vomit. Home is not empty of horrors.

Ariane has a map showing the Brecilian Forest in more detail than Finn’s, and Avrian can make a circle of the section of the forest that they will most likely have success searching in. “So, uh, should I expect that we’ll be attacked by anything?” Finn asks nervously, squinting through the mists that cling to tree trunks like vines.

Avrian and Ariane make a game of how long they can keep going naming potential threats. He says darkspawn, she says bears, he says bearskarn and has to explain the tainted twisted monsters that he and Tamlen found in the ruins. His voice still shakes on Tamlen’s name. He thought he had let go.

Eluvian. 

He had. He had, but the grave that he finally set his grief down in is a shallow one, too easily scratched open to display its bare bones to the world. “Ir abelas,” Ariane says, mournful eyes watching his trembling shoulders, clenched fists. “I can’t imagine how this must feel, to go back.”

“We had no idea.” He closes his eyes, trying to stir up the feverish memories of what the forest looked like around the ruins, the pathways and gullies where the clan camped as they had so many times before. How had no one ever found the cave until he and Tamlen did? Did it awaken with the blight, stirred up by the darkspawn or was it just chance when the Dread Wolf decided to open his jaws, Mythal’s grace that kept any of the clan from stumbling in sooner? “That this was where everything would change, that… that he’d already walked away from the clan for the last time, that I’d never see him again healthy, whole.”

“My clan passed yours on our way back to Ferelden,” Ariane says. “They told us of their losses. There was a new baby, named Tamlen. They remember him, too.”

What did Morrigan name their child? If he could have gone with her - if their child was a boy - would he have, would she have let him, name him after Tamlen? Or would that be a sure way for Avrian to never live free of the ghosts of regret? “I never told anyone I found him,” Avrian confesses. “I thought to spare them that.”

Fen'Falon presses against his hip. Avrian rubs his ears. Ariane and Finn say nothing, letting him close his eyes and listen to the wind rustle the leaves, the stream babble against rocks down in the ravine. Something itches in the base of his skull, a pulse down his spine, a twitch like a compass point spinning, an arrow on a map drawn in tainted blood on his brain. He knows it is the cave, as surely as anything, sensing it as clearly as darkspawn or archdemons. “This way,” he says, turning and leading them off the path, over tree roots and shifting soil. Finn calls for them to wait up and Avrian leans against a tree, remembering the first days after Ostagar, as he and Morrigan so easily picked their way through the wilderness while Alistair stumbled behind them. That was the second life he has left behind.

“Are you sure?” Finn asks after he has caught up to them and disturbed every bit of wildlife in the area. “How do you know?”

“I can sense the blight,” he says. “I know.”

Finn stares at him like he isn’t sure if he should be afraid or concerned or simply accept it as fact. Avrian starts walking again and almost doesn’t answer, but he stops, one hand resting on the tree next to him and says, without looking at Finn, “It’s part of being a warden.”

“Oh,” Finn says, his tone suggesting that he really doesn’t know what to say, that he really sort of regrets asking. He doesn’t say more, nor does Ariane, and the silence that falls is the unnatural stillness of a blighted area, the way Avrian remembers returning to the cave with Merrill and Fenarel. Do you hear that? Merrill asked, and that was nothing. 

He leads them down the path and then off of it, through brambles and dead leaves that cover the ground so thoroughly that they will never all finish rotting away. The sensation of the taint tingles down his spine, churning over and over in his stomach now as they draw closer. Every heartbeat is followed by a sharp jabbing sensation, a muscle spasm in his chest, like his blood is trying to tear free of his body and join what else of the taint lies nearby. 

“Here,” he says, stopping, and for a moment he wants to fall to the ground and bury himself in it, give in to the calling a decade or two before it will become unbearable. Simpler, if he were to now. Of all the world, the Brecilian Forest, home to the paths he grew up on and the tombs of his long-ago ancestors, the trees within which Tamlen’s ashes were scattered, would be a good place to die. 

“Here?” Finn repeats in disbelief. Avrian pushes through the brush until he finds the sudden drop, easing himself down against the cliffside as far as he can before he drops the rest of the distance. Without turning he knows that the cave mouth gapes open behind him, waiting for the unwary to descend down the gullet of the earth into the cold stone where tainted beasts await. 

“Here,” Avrian says. Here, a lifetime ago, he and Tamlen stood.

I don’t like this, Avrian said, slinging his bow back over his shoulder and resting a hand on the dagger at his hip. We need to be careful. There has to be some reason we’ve never seen this place before. 

We should at least check it out, Tamlen said. He still had an arrow nocked to his bow in case the humans came back around again. See if there’s anything interesting before we go running back to Keeper. Don’t want to drag her out here for nothing because you’re scared of the dark and won’t go in first. How dangerous can it be? 

If he closes his eyes he sees himself, only two years younger but also so much more, hair pulled back in tight braids that Ashalle’s deft fingers could weave faster than he was ever able to. He wears his hair loose and curly now and some nights fumbles trying to braid it the way he never practiced enough because long after he received his vallaslin, Ashalle was still willing to help him. His eyes were still brown back then, eyes he got from his mother like he took her name, and now he only has the latter, the taint having stripped the color away even long after his veins stopped looking like charcoal lines drawn against his sickly skin. 

He sees Tamlen, clear skin and bright eyes and the lines of his vallaslin sharp on his face. The taint took that all from him and from Avrian it took the ability to remember him solely as he was. He sees again, unwillingly, rotting gray flesh and empty eyes, replacing the image of him alive, quick and curious and angry and affectionate and everything he was. How dangerous can it be, Tamlen asked, and the Dread Wolf grinned his terrible grin of a thousand bared teeth and said, now you will find out. 

“Avrian?” Ariane asks. The way she says it sounds like she has tried to get his attention several times before. Fen'Falon whines.

“Yes?” He slides Morrigan’s ring up his finger and back down, twisting it and then clenching his hand in a fist. 

“This is it?" 

"Yes.” He opens his eyes. “This is it.”

Here, once, he did die.

Ariane stands at his shoulder, her arm brushing against his. “If you don’t wish to go in -”

“No.” He surprises himself with the force that he manages in the word when otherwise he feels lightheaded and faint, the way he did when the taint first tried to claim him and failed. “You and Finn aren’t going in without me. Stay behind me, don’t touch anything.” He steps forward and turns around to stare them both down. “And if anything attacks, stay back. It’s probably blighted.”

The cave mouth narrows and then widens, the dirt beneath their feet switching to the stone of the ruins. Nothing has changed, not to Avrian’s memory; tree roots stretch down from the ceiling and cut across the corridor, and the statue of Falon'Din stands tall, almost untouched and undamaged by the ages. “Did our ancestors truly live down here?” Ariane asks. “It’s so… cold.”

Tamlen asked the same question. Avrian has an answer now. “Likely. We did once live in Cad'Halash - Cadash Thiag.” They went there looking for Shale’s old life and found some of Avrian’s ancestors, too. He kept the old diaries, cracked spines and flaking pages, that they uncovered and he copied down to new pages everything he could read. It was mindless but he needed that at the time; it was better than thoughts of broodmothers and ghouls and shrieks. “The dwarves there took in elves after the fall of the Dales. And east of here is an old elvish temple. Whoever of our people lived here long ago didn’t mind the stone.”

He traced the steps of his ancestors’ rituals and found in their tombs spirits desperately crying out for peace, fluent and begging in a language that Avrian only has pieces of. The way the trees had woven their way down through the broken stone looked the same there as it does here. The forest, their home now, reclaimed their homes then. 

All Tamlen wanted to find from these ruins was knowledge like this, anything to bring back to Keeper to impress her and make up for whatever trouble he had caused. It was something that, for once, Avrian hadn’t been an accomplice in. It was something that ceased to matter when Tamlen brushed his fingertips across the poisoned mirror. 

The larger open hall has a floor made of cracked tiles and walls coated in spiderwebs. Avrian steps over bones on the floor; people, he thinks, not animals. What other lost souls did the Dread Wolf swallow up? “I told Tamlen we should turn around,” Avrian says. “But he’d done - something stupid, like always, I don’t remember. And we heard about this cave, that it was full of old elven artifacts, and he thought if we could learn something and bring that knowledge back to Keeper, it would make her forgive him for whatever he did.”

He stops in the middle of the room and sees that Ariane and Finn have also stopped, watching him. Fen'Falon circles the two of them protectively, his ears laid flat back like he is staring down a threat, but the threat is everywhere. “Tamlen would have killed to know anything like what I learned from Cad'Halash.”

He died for it instead, just a few nights before they came to the thiag.

“I wasn’t even supposed to be out hunting with him that day, but I asked Master Ilen if I could help him another day and go with Tamlen instead. Keep him out of danger, I said, but usually he just got me into it instead. Even now, he’s still causing me trouble. I wouldn’t be a warden without the mirror, wouldn’t have found the mirror without Tamlen. Everything that I’ve been and done - that’s him. His fault.”

Avrian let go of his brother’s ashes but the grief will undoubtedly always linger and guilt flows through his veins like the taint that is Tamlen’s legacy. His ghost is Avrian’s life. “He’d be proud, probably, that he can cause trouble for me even after his death.”

It is still hard to say. His death. He’s dead. Tamlen is dead.

“I never did get to help Master Ilen like I was supposed to.”

He kneels to examine a broken arrow on the ground, wondering if it was one of his or Tamlen’s, fallen from a quiver or fired into a giant spider that has since rotted away. The echo of his voice fades back into the unnatural silence. Something about walking through the empty ruins again, among the dead, reminds him of returning to Ostagar, giving Alistair’s brother a pyre like later they would for Avrian’s. The sensation of omnipresent wrongness, of not nearby darkspawn but of blight encompassing everything feels more like the Deep Roads.

The longer he wastes lost in the past, the farther Morrigan can run, and the more chance there is of Ariane or Finn falling victim to the taint.

He stands and leads them through the broken corridors and a path he tread twice before, over two years ago, but it is burnt into his mind the way that memories of overwhelming fear are sharper than anything else surrounding. The door to the mirror room is closed. It shouldn’t be, he thinks. It took both him and Tamlen working together to push the heavy stone open and when he left again, after Fenarel and Merrill and Duncan, he did not shut it, thinking that if Tamlen were to somehow reappear inside, as sick as Avrian was, he would not have the strength to open it alone. To starve or waste away from sickness inside would be a terrible fate, he thought then. The reality he later witnessed was worse.

Who was here after him? Did they suffer like Tamlen did?

He doesn’t mention this to Ariane or Finn; they do not need to carry the burdens of the deaths between these walls. “See if you can find a key,” he says, kneeling down and examining the keyhole, taking lockpicks from his belt to find out whether he can pick through without Zevran or Sigrun over his shoulder helping him.

The answer to the question is that it will be answered another day. Finn rushes back, after how long Avrian isn’t sure, announcing that he found this key within the hands of a skeleton. Ariane’s face is pale in the faint light, bluish from the stone, paler than she should be. She seems to have realized the implications. “Thank you,” Avrian says, taking the key and straightening up. He throws his shoulder against the unlocked door and it yields to him alone. He is stronger than he was. Everything changed.

The twin statues still stand flanking the empty frame and the shards that never showed a reflection, but instead something that only Tamlen saw, are scattered all across the stone pedestal and the floor below. It must have been then, right after Duncan shattered it, as Avrian screamed at him and Fenarel paced the room looking for a hint about what happened, that Merrill took one of those broken pieces, thinking to study it and cleanse it. Marethari told Avrian that Merrill turned to blood magic in that pursuit, and maybe once Avrian would have been horrified by that. After Morrigan and a baby with an Old God’s soul, blood magic meant nothing, especially not with the taint to fear. He wonders how disappointed Keeper would have been in him if he told her of the strange old magic that he let Asha'Bellanar’s daughter weave in exchange for his life. He wonders whether he or Merrill would be the one fallen further from grace in the Keeper’s eyes, then.

“Is one piece of it enough for your spell?” Avrian asks.

“It should be,” Finn replies. Avrian tells him and Ariane to wait at the door and steps forward alone to retrieve a single shard, hoping that that will lessen the risk of contamination of them. “And this might be a long shot to ask, but you wouldn’t happen to have any lyrium with you, just in case I might need…?” He trails off as Avrian sets his pack on the ground and digs through it until he pulls out a few vials of the blue liquid. 

“I kept them on hand for mage wardens,” he explains. He forgot to leave them behind at the Keep.

Ariane sits cross-legged next to Finn, looking at the shard Avrian has set in front of them with another warning not to touch. A few wisps of magic drift toward it from Finn’s fingertips. Avrian turns away and walks back up to the frame, looking up at the statues standing so much taller than him. Who are they supposed to be? Perhaps Falon'Din and Dirthamen - death and secrets. Or perhaps Fen'Harel himself crafted the eluvians and gave them to the People. A gift, with a price, offered up like his slow arrow.

Fen'Falon growls once at the mirror’s frame before looking up at Avrian and woofing softly. “I told you to wait at the door,” Avrian scolds him. Fen'Falon sits defiantly. Not for the first time, Avrian wonders if the mabari can sense darkspawn and the blight like the wardens can. He was tainted too, after all. 

He scratches the mabari’s head and sits down on the pedestal, back to the mirror. Fen'Falon still faces it, and if the Dread Wolf comes, like story of the Keeper’s old courser hound, the mabari will chase him off. “Yeah, yeah. You won’t let me be alone." 

With the toe of his boot he prods one of the mirror shards. It scrapes against the stone floor with a sharp sound that sends a shudder through him. "Do you miss her too?” he asks. Fen'Falon bumps his head into Avrian’s shoulder in response. “I bet she doesn’t miss you leaving her dead rabbits.” He whines sadly. “I know, it was a gift. She just didn’t know how to appreciate it.” Avrian smiles a little at the memory of the first time he overheard Morrigan confronting the mabari about his actions. He wraps his arm around Fen'Falon’s chest and scratches his side. One of his back paws twitches in response. 

“You would’ve liked Tamlen,” he says. “He would’ve liked you. You would’ve been insufferably annoying together.” He rests his elbows on his knees and stares at his hands. “He would’ve hated being a warden, though, even more than I did. And he would have hated all our friends, at least at first, maybe forever. He didn’t want to give any humans a chance, ever.”

The blue of the warden uniforms would have matched his eyes, if they didn’t stay fogged over even after the Joining like Avrian’s did from being exposed for too long. Would he have tried to run as soon as he and Avrian - thought they - were cured, or would he have been too proud to? He would have thought Friendly Wolf was a stupid name for a war hound. He would have smacked Avrian upside the head for falling for Morrigan so quickly. He would have thought it a fool’s errand to run after her.

Would have. Would have. Would have. Didn’t. Couldn’t.

His eyes burn and he can’t swallow the shudder or blink back the tears. Fen'Falon whines and licks his face. “Thanks,” he says hoarsely. 

Ariane is calling him and he stands and wipes tears from his eyes and dog spit from his cheek. “We’ve found it!” she crows.

“Well, we’ve - I’ve - seen it,” Finn amends, “but we don’t know whereexactly it…”

“Describe it,” Avrian says, offering him a hand to help him stand.

“It’s Ferelden, north, on the coast but not on the coast, cloudy like it’s always cloudy -”

“The Storm Coast,” Avrian says. “Anywhere from Amaranthine through Highever to West Hill.”

“There’s an old ruin, a tower, and underground, down and down, that’s where the eluvian is, and up on the surface there’s this creature guarding the way down. It’s like - like it’s wooden, like tree bark, but alive? A bunch of legs and spindly like some kind of insect, but it’s huge and -”

“A varterral!” Ariane exclaims. “I bet that’s a varterral!”

Avrian frowns. “It can’t be near any city or town. We would have heard if humans were stumbling across a varterral.”

“It’s empty,” Finn says. “There’s nothing around, boulders, bare hills, barely anything growing, and - dragons! There’s dragon skeletons all over, just their bones and skulls all across the ground.”

“The Dragonbone Wastes,” Avrian says. Finn finally looks up from concentrating on the shard. “I’ve been there. It’s in the western reaches of Amaranthine, nearly into Highever. We fought darkspawn there, after the blight.” He stares at the mirror shard, willing it to transform into a map, show him the exact way home. “A varterral would have been a great help,” he adds. Clan Sabrae had one of its own on the Sundermount, to protect from the seemingly endless river of demons that spilled from its peaks.

“I don’t know of any clan who lives there,” Ariane says. “It might be ancient. Do you think it was left there to protect the eluvian?” She shudders suddenly. “I hope we don’t have to kill it to get past.”

“Maybe it will recognize you’re both Dalish?” Finn suggests. His voice squeaks a little.

“Yes, but you aren’t,” Ariane points out.

“We can worry about that when we reach it,” Avrian interrupts. “We have to get there first.”

“Then let’s go!” Finn says, more enthusiastic than he has been in a while. “And more importantly, let’s not spend any more time here. This place gives me the creeps.” His mouth twists like he suddenly regrets what he said. “And you probably want to leave even more.”

He does, until the moment he is pulling the doors closed, and he freezes, hands still resting against the stone. Two years ago he was the last to leave, long after Duncan had. Merrill and Fenarel waited for him as he tried to tear the packed earth walls apart with his bare hands like he would find Tamlen buried there. He finally walked away feeling that he was abandoning Tamlen by doing so, feeling that something within him got lost. Avrian got lost.

Maybe he still is.

He still feels that he is leaving something behind.

He jams the key back into the lock and twists, but his ancestors’ craftsmanship is strong, and it isn’t until Finn comes over and melts it down the middle with magic does it yield to Avrian’s wishes. The lock is jammed and the piece left twisted off in Avrian’s hand, end where it broke still glowing like a coal with the heat of Finn’s magic, he turns and throws as far as he can, falling beneath tree roots and broken rubble. He does not hear the metal clatter against stone.

“Let’s go,” he says, and he ushers them in front of him. He will be last out again and he runs his hand against the wall as he passes back through the halls. The stone beneath his fingers is smoother than he anticipated. Someone once lived or worshiped down here. Could they have foreseen that it would one day become a blighted tomb? He steps over a skeleton and looks back at it. Its armor looks elven. “Falon'Din guide you gently to the Beyond, lethallin,” he whispers. “May the Dread Wolf never catch your scent.”

The golden light filtered through the trees reaches into the cave mouth. Avrian stands there, blinking up at it, and Fen'Falon waits for him halfway out, as though afraid that he will decide to stay and let the tomb that tried to claim him before take him now. As a warden, one day he will never come back up to the surface. Mythal wills it, it will be a long time from now.

“Finn,” he says, and he almost says it like an order before he remembers that he is not commander and Finn is not one of his wardens. If they were wardens, and this a darkspawn tunnel - they had Dworkin’s explosives for that. “Do you think any of the spells you know would be able to collapse this cliff here?”

Finn follows his eyes up above the cave mouth to the hill they climbed down from. “I could try?” he offers.

“Please do,” he says. “I don’t want anyone to be able to stumble in there ever again.”

It looks like more of a mess than a natural landslide when Finn is done, but Avrian climbs over the piles of overturned dirt and clumps of grass and stomps hard on the ground experimentally. It doesn’t collapse beneath him and he walks a few large circles to make sure that no hint of the tunnel below is exposed. “Is that good?” Finn asks.

“Yes. Perfect. Thank you.” He scrabbles back down the shifting earth to where Finn, Ariane, and Fen'Falon wait. No one else will die there like he and Tamlen did. He has sealed their tomb and buried it, to be lost to the ages like so much else of their ancestors.

The taint still reaches for him as he walks away, clawing down his spine and scratching at his stomach as though from the inside out. Do not leave, it begs. Stay. Stay. 

He turns his head to look back over his shoulder, the whispers in his skull behind his ears pulsing in time with his heartbeat. “Dareth shiral,” he breathes, another goodbye to Tamlen though he has said so many in so many places already. Maybe one day it will be a final one and the ghost at his heels will settle. 

Over a campfire between Denerim and the Wending Woods, Ariane taps her fingers on her knees like she is finding the courage to ask something she has wanted to for a while. “That ring you have,” she says. “You play with it often.”

Avrian stops, realizing that he has it in his hand now, halfway through the process of switching it from one finger to another. “Morrigan gave it to me,” he says.

Ariane’s eyes widen. “Oh.” She frowns at the fire, shadows flickering across her face, and she glances back up at Avrian. “A ring is a significant gift. In human cultures, too, does that mean…?”

He doesn’t mean to laugh but he does, once, sharply. “No, no,” he says. “It wasn’t a marriage. It was just - a practical thing, she insisted. Enchantments to help keep me from being killed.”

She found him and Alistair in Fort Drakon, death in the wake of her and Zevran and Leliana, by the time the two wardens had barely cleared the fog of some likely concussions from their heads to figure out a plan of escape. Avrian’s thought process had begun with something like: Alistair has long arms. He can grab the keys off of the guard’s belt. He thought he was hallucinating when he saw Morrigan. 

“You’ve put yourself through so much to search for her,” Ariane says, pulling him back to the present, away from the memory of Zevran suggesting that the simplest way out of anywhere was always to find a window, Morrigan can heal our broken legs yes? “What will you do when you find her?”

In his dreams, he weaves together the perfect combination of words that makes her understand that whatever her mother taught her to believe, she does not have to live her life alone. She needs not hide. He will help her keep their child safe from anything that may come.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But I can’t lose her again.”

Ariane looks sad when he says this, like she did when he first told her that he loves Morrigan, but the pity he once saw in her eyes is absent now. “We will find her,” she promises him, and he remembers he once promised Morrigan the same thing, I will find you. “I swear it." 

She has her own reasons to not give up the chase, but he could not have anticipated her care and concern. "Ma serannas, lethallan,” he replies. “This would be a lonely journey without you.” She beams and then ducks her head, picking up a stick from the ground and prodding the fire, though it has been crackling brightly without help. “And you, Finn,” he adds, and the human boy, sprawled out on his back on a bedroll out of the firelight, absently scratching the mabari’s ears, suddenly jerks his head around. “We would be lost without you.”

Finn waves a hand dismissively up in the air. “Yeah, yeah, I know I’m crashing the Dalish party, slowing you down when without me you all know how to navigate dirt, mosquitoes, bears, and all those other unpleasant things about the wilderness. I know you didn’t invite me along and didn’t want me to and I just followed because I’d learned everything I could from the books about ancient elves and the eluvians. You don’t have to -”

“Finn,” Avrian repeats, and he is suddenly reminded of Alistair, Anders, brushing off insecurities, anger and fear and loneliness with jokes and rambling. What is it about the Chantry that makes the people it raises turn out like this? “I mean it. We’d be lost. Do you know what happened the first time I went looking for Morrigan without anyone who had a clue to guide me?”

Of course he doesn’t, and Ariane doesn’t, but Avrian sits back, propping himself up with his hands behind him, and stares up at the clear star-filled sky while he lets his words sink in. “Took a wrong turn at Kirkwall and ended up in Rialto.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ariane says. “Where did you mean to go? Even if you -”

“Ariane,” Finn interrupts sternly, and then he drops his voice into a mock whisper. “I think he’s joking.”

“Creators forbid,” Avrian says. “I have never in my life had a sense of humor and I certainly won’t begin now.” Finn laughs loudly and Ariane shakes her head, grinning like she doesn’t want to find this funny. “This is a life lesson about having purpose and a clear destination in mind, to never wander idly -”

Ariane rolls her eyes. “Yes, of course, hahren,” she says in the way that Avrian and Tamlen used to placate their elders before rushing off into another misadventure.

“- or else you’ll find yourself in Antiva, assassinating assassins with your best friend, an assassin once hired to assassinate you.”

“Sorry, what?” Finn asks, horror and disbelief and confusion all rolled into the two words.

Avrian’s hands slide out from behind him until he is sprawled on his back, shaking with laughter. “We didn’t know what else to do.” He folds his arms beneath his head. “And I had never been north of the Minanter River, and he had been talking about going home, so I went with him.”

“But you’d been to the Free Marches before?” Finn rolls over onto his side and props his head up with his hand. “What was Antiva like? Besides being full of assassins - my parents are nobles. Even I’ve heard of the Crows. Not that I’ve been anywhere near Antiva, or anywhere besides the Circle, really.” Despite his complaints about the outdoors, the dangers and the general nuisances, he sounds almost wistful. 

Ariane asks him where his parents live - West Hill - and Finn talks about how he is privileged as a Circle mage for getting to have contact with them, even if that contact mostly gifts him with hideous knitted hats. He asks Ariane where she is from, where she has traveled, and Avrian listens, his face turned up to the stars speckled across the clear sky. He read a book about the stars once, telling of the official constellations named by Tevinter, some of which were once speculated to have been images named for the gods of the elvhen instead. In the clan, there were a few common stories of the stars and so many more made up by generation after generation of children.

“So where’s home for you, Avrian?” Finn asks, interrupting Avrian’s attempts to remember where in the sky is Bellitanus, the Maiden, the Old God of Beauty. 

It feels like a weight is coming back onto his chest, a sinking feeling dragging his tongue down and making it exhausting to speak words. I don’t have one anymore sits heavy and bitter in his mouth. He closes his eyes. “We stayed mostly in some part of Ferelden or another. When the arlathvhens happened we would spend a while before and after in the southern Marches. Cumberland, Kirkwall, Ostwick. Furthest northeast we got was near Wycome.”

He remembers Finn’s earlier question, before he and Ariane began speaking of parents, something that Avrian does not have. “Zevran and I mostly traveled along the coast of Antiva. Antiva City was beautiful. I spent most of the time feeling like someone was going to mug me and leave me for dead in the middle of the street, but it was beautiful. Rained a lot, but not like Fereldan rain. It was warm.”

“Do you ever feel tired of never getting to stay anywhere?”

He wants to say no, thinking of the people of his clan who he loves, the culture he is proud of, how his people took in Pol and others from alienages who fled the only life they had known for the chance to never settle. The alternative is worse. Ariane is saying something like that. Amaranthine’s bustle was a crushing vice and its arl would rather deal with wolves than nobles. Vigil’s Keep’s old stone walls caged him - but so did the glances in Clan Sabrae’s camp from the people who he grew up with, that pity in their eyes when they see the shadow of Tamlen and the blight nipping at his heels.

“Yes,” he says when Ariane has gone silent, “but I’ve never found anywhere I want to stay, either.”

Home for the Dalish is never a place but is a people, their people, the elvhen people, but Avrian thinks he has always let his concept of home hinge too much on individual people. Without them it has not mattered whether he is alone in a shemlen city or alone surrounded by his clanmates. He can hear Keeper now, this is no way to live, da'len,because the clan and the people should always come before a person, but this kind of loyalty, wasting away to bones for the sake of it, is bred into his blood. His mother left her clan, Mahariel, for his father, love outweighing fear of the unknown. When he died she chose again to follow. She loved him more than she feared death. She left her son her name, Mahariel, and a legacy of unwise, dangerous, and self-defeating choices.

Love is a weakness, Morrigan said, and he argued but he has always understood what she meant. For a time he chased death just like his mother did; he didn’t find it and he finds that fortunate, now.

He had neither of his parents. He wants his child to have both.

He finds a voice to speak with again in the morning. Every footstep along the road through Amaranthine, through the wood and past Vigil’s Keep looming tall over all the surrounding plain, is ground he has traced before. The stories he tells are his own experiences, of his Grey Wardens, but already they feel distant, blue-and-silver armor that he does not belong in as surely as he does not belong in Clan Sabrae or in Denerim. He tells Finn that he is the kind of person that he would recruit for the wardens and Finn sputters for a moment, weighing accepting the compliment without reservation against his disinclination to spend his life fighting. Ariane rolls her eyes.

“What will you do after this?” Avrian asks - an open offer to go to the wardens if he wants, but never to be forced upon him should he not. When Finn answers, it is to suggest that he would return to the Circle to turn his firsthand experience and research back into academic papers, but he sounds uncertain now, equal to the wistfulness that Avrian could hear when he asked about Antiva and the Free Marches. 

“Back to the Circle?” Ariane repeats, aghast. “But you could go anywhere!”

“And spend all that time running from Templars?" 

"It’s not like you’ll be free of them in the Circle, either. My clan could give you advice on where the best places with fewest Templars are. It’s something we have to worry about, too.”

“Don’t go to Kirkwall,” Avrian says. He wishes his clan hadn’t - he wishes they had left, and left Merrill behind, rather than spend two years at mercy of shems that will one day lose their patience with the clan camped on the outskirts of their city. Their varterral isn’t meant to protect them from soldiers and Templars. 

“There’s a lot of reasons I would never go to Kirkwall,” Finn replies. Avrian does not ask. He worries enough over the stories he knows.

He tries to write a letter to Merrill that night when he takes first watch, sitting close enough to the fire that sparks leap through the air and land on the pages of his journal. With his thumb he blots them out into little ash marks around the words, eluvian, Ariane’s clan has information, this Circle mage has information, they would be willing to share - 

He tears the paper from the binding and throws it onto the fire and watches the edges blacken and curl until it crumbles into ash. She would think him trying to placate her, or this too at Keeper’s behest when Marethari would probably disapprove of his fool’s errand, too. 

I went back to the cave, he writes on a fresh sheet. Sealed it, and he drops a large blot of ink on the page trying to think. So no one can die from that eluvian again, except you. 

He scratched out the words and then rips the page in half and crumples it. Fen'Falon whimpers. “What am I even supposed to say to her?” he asks. It’s a pointless question - it isn’t like Fen'Falon knows Merrill, knows what would convince her, knows how to make her stop. And Avrian knows her - knew her, thought he knew her - and where has it gotten him? “What am I supposed to say to Morrigan?”

I love you. Please. Please don’t. 

He presses his face into his hands. That hasn’t ever worked before. How many times will he beg it of the people he loves?

He closes his journal and tucks the ink back into his bag. He lets the fire eat the words he’ll never send to Kirkwall. 

Bones litter the hilltops, ribs broken to sharp edges that scrape the black sky, skulls leering down with jagged grins. If the Forgotten Ones might still lurk anywhere in the mortal realm, it is here in these wastes. What is it that draws dragons here to die? Do they feel something different than this cold unease that clutches at Avrian’s spine? He fought his way through these wastes two years before, descending to the deep to confront beasts that even his nightmares could not create. It is quiet now, and even Finn has not spoken for a while since they began upon the winding path across the uneven ground and between the peaks crowned by bones. 

He looks around for any sign of his ancestors, some broken ruin of his people, but nothing in the crumbled archways marks them as elvish in origin. Who would choose to venture into the graveyard of dragons for anywhere else to go? Avrian scrambles up a nearby hill, up the boulders and sliding on moss, and scans the wastes for an idea of which direction to continue in. For a moment he entertains the idea that some of the Architect’s darkspawn, or perhaps even Seranni, may still linger in the area, with some knowledge of where the eluvian is hidden. He closes his eyes, breathing in the scent of the mud and the damp air and reaching with his mind for any trace of the blight.

He calls for that which most often calls him and his reply is the sound of the air passing through his lungs. He is alone.

“It all looks the same,” Finn says when Avrian returns to the path through the gully. “How do we even know where to look?” He shakes his head. “The ancient Tevinters probably hid it here hoping that the magic of dragon bones would strengthen its power.”

Tevinter, of course, Tevinter - it is the Imperium’s ruins that they seek, not those of Avrian’s ancestors. A bubble of anger bursts in his stomach at all that is lost, all that was stolen, and Morrigan - Morrigan simply follows a long precedent of taking without asking, without compensation, thinking to know better, to better use it. Standing with his boots sinking in the rotten leaves, bare treetops branching and silhouetted in shapes like his vallaslin, Merrill’s hopeless quest makes sense. As Avrian has loved people, Tamlen, Morrigan, more than his own life, so she loves thePeople more than her own life.

Funny, he thinks, that Tamlen, the troublemaker, who took them by the hands and led them into his schemes and their inevitable punishments, was the one who pulled them back from destroying themselves. Funny that he should be their anchor, holding down flighty Merrill from chasing dangerous dreams of the past, holding up Avrian who would too easily allow himself to drown. Somehow the ties of clan and culture were not enough to keep either of them once Tamlen was gone.

“But we still don’t even know what it does,” Ariane is saying. “Strengthen its power to do what?”

“Communication,” Finn says. “Somehow, the ancient Tevinters - and I guess the elves too - used them to communicate.”

“It’s a mirror,” Ariane says. “What would a mirror -”

They continue talking, throwing ideas at each other, as Avrian starts again along the bare path, letting it take him where it may. They have no other leads. He bends down and tries to tug part of a dragon’s rib free of Fen'Falon’s teeth. He pulls away, growling though he wags his stumpy tail, and when Avrian reaches again he bounds away, entire body wiggling with excitement. “Fen,” he calls, sighing. “Fen, that’s not a toy. You’re going to make something angry.”

“Everything’s dead here,” Finn says. “Sure, the bones are all magic, but it’s not like -”

“Let me stop you,” Avrian says, raising a hand in a motion to cut him off and directing his firmest glare at the mabari. “And I’ll just tell you about the time I fought a dead dragon in the Blackmarsh.”

Halfway through the story, Fen'Falon drops the bone.

When he finishes, Ariane is shaking her head and Finn laughs in disbelief. Avrian loves that tale to watch the struggle on listeners’ faces of whether or not such a thing could truly happen. He can picture how Morrigan will react when he tells her: immediate acceptance of its truth because she has seen too much at his side through the blight, but exasperation that surely he should know better than to toy with forces stronger and stranger than he knows.

And yet, that is exactly what she does.

Ghilan'nain, guide me, he prays, tilting his head back to the sky and the cold coastal wind. Give me a sign to show me the way home.

Now that Finn reminded him that Tevinter last held the eluvians, he can recognize the archways as resembling those that line the Imperial Highway. Would the magisters have marked the path to their stolen treasure or instead would they hoard it, keep it secret? Housed in an old ruin, Finn said, but nothing of a road. And guarded by a varterral - what Keeper set one at its doors after the Tevinters left? How do these histories jumble together?

Avrian leads them off the path over the rocky ground. They move slower now, meandering, waiting for Finn catch up, unused to the uneven footing as he is. Avrian expects a remark from either of them about how he does not know where he is going, how this has turned to confused wandering when they are so close to their goal, but they give him silence as they traverse the wastes searching for anything that could be a mark in the right direction.

Ariane finds it first, calling him over to examine an old warding glyph. It has faded, magic long worn off, but the symbol he recognizes as a sign that Marethari and Merrill refresh each time they return to Sundermount: be wary. A guardian dwells close by. 

Fen'Falon whines. When Avrian looks at him, he stretches forward a moment, one foot lifted, pointing; and then he whines again and presses close to the ground. “Do you smell something?” Avrian asks. “Hear something?” He places a hand on the mabari’s back to find that he is shaking. “What’s wrong?”

Ariane draws her swords. Finn clutches his staff so tightly that his hands shake and his knuckles are white. Avrian sloughs his pack from his shoulders and nocks an arrow to his bow and steps forward. There is always one way to find out.

He emerges from between boulders into a clearing, the ground inset with smooth stone and circling by broken archways between boulders, like this once enclosed a courtyard. To his left, a tower stands, topped by a dome and weathered by too many years. A shriek splits the air, not like the sound of shrieks - something earthier and deeper, but higher-pitched than the echoing rumble of dragons.

He remembers then that the curious and foolish children of the clan were always told to tread lightly on the Sundermount, and not just because of spirits and spiders and ghosts of the dead. Their own guardian, spun of wind and earth and wood with life breathed into them by the Creators, was just as dangerous.

And through all the years he never heard it angry. He never heard its roar.

The varterral looms into view on top of the tower, its movements insect-like silhouetted against the dark sky. Behind him, Finn chokes out a question and Ariane answers breathless and awed. Avrian does not listen to their words and takes several more cautious steps forward, standing exposed beneath the tower, amongst the tall columns. The creature’s eyeless head swings about and slows to fix on him. It scuttles from its perch down the side of the tower like a spider. “Andaran atish'an, mirthadra elgar,” Avrian says quietly, and the varterral stops as the vibrations of his voice carry to it, waiting above the ground for his next words. “Var shemlen na vhenallin. Ir garas ghilas vir'eluvian. Las mala'enaste.”

“You think you can convince it?” Finn whispers from behind him. Ariane shushes him with a hiss.

Words uttered in the old language are not enough - perhaps nothing grants a shemlen entrance or perhaps guarding the eluvian is too important to allow even two of the People to pass - and with another cry the varterral springs. Its movements are fluid, graceful even, but it lands heavy, stone cracking beneath its feet on impact. “Run!” Ariane yells.

Finn needs no convincing but Avrian runs toward the creature, weaving between its legs as it slams feet down in locations he stood a moment ago. The skin on its underside is lighter in color, like pale flesh rather than brown-gray bark or stone, and Avrian lodges an arrow in its throat and one in its stomach. It skitters backwards with a speed that golems and ogres and even dragons lack and it turns with ease, rather than taking a ponderous few seconds that give an easy opening. 

Its huge jaws open to a gaping maw that is half of Avrian’s height and the carved teeth along its jaw drip acid. The droplets sizzle when they hit the ground and the great body shudders, head bobbing forth and back again. The skin along its throat ripples. Fen'Falon is barking and Avrian sees him from the corner of his eyes, starting to approach and stopping to cower back, loyalty to his master at war with instincts of self-preservation.

Apathy and exhaustion trained Avrian out of his a long time ago.

But still he has seen that look in dragons but also his own mabari vomiting twigs onto Leliana’s boots, and he runs, dodging and leaping erratically and the poison the creature spits forth hisses on the ground behind him. “Distract it!” he yells, vaulting over a boulder to land in the hollow where Ariane and Finn have hidden. Finn clutches his staff like it is all that tethers him to this world and not the Beyond. Avrian stands, firing an arrow over his shoulder in the direction of the varterral. “Finn - fireballs, lightning, distracting wisps, anything. There’s lyrium somewhere in my bag if that helps you. Ariane, I need your swords.” He swings his quiver from his shoulder and pushes it and his bow into her hands. “Lay down cover fire for me.”

Ariane blinks, fumbling for a moment between his bow and her swords, but the blades are in his hands. For a moment he is Commander of the Grey again, surveying inbound darkspawn and giving orders over the nervous chatter over the new recruits, taking input of move quicker, exercise less caution, take the risk, from Sigrun and Oghren, and slow down, from Nathaniel, and Velanna stands aside, haughty, aloof, acting as though every suggestion Avrian could make is a stupid one. He learned to tell the difference between when she approved a plan and when she genuinely thought it was a bad call.

He thinks then, suddenly, that he will miss her most.

She would be right to call this one an idiotic idea, though.

“What are you doing?” Finn asks. Avrian peers back over the rocks, expecting to see the varterral bearing down on them - surely it can hear or smell them, surely they are out of time. But it has turned from them, spitting and snarling down at Fen'Falon, barking and sprinting between pillars as bubbling acid splatters to the ground around him.

“Fen!” Avrian yells, scrambling up onto the boulder, grasping for the bow that he does not have with him. The varterral’s head swings around. “Get out of there!” He forces himself to stay crouched in place, watching helplessly as his mabari bolts out of the way of the snarling creature. “Finn, Ariane, get its attention, get it over here!" 

"I thought you were - what are you going to do?” Ariane demands. The arrow she shoots clatters off of the varterral’s thick shell. 

“I’m going to kill it if you just -”

“Hey!” Finn yells. He throws a fireball at the varterral. It explodes near its head. “Hey, ugly!” He stands exposed now, between boulders, and the varterral abandons its pursuit to scuttle toward Finn. “You want the nice tasty human? Come over here!”

That would not have been Avrian’s first, second, or third choice for get it over here. “Finn-!”

The mage shrugs his shoulders and waves his staff. His second fireball flakes apart at the varterral’s feet and it scrabbles back, shaking heat from its legs, and it snaps at another arrow flying past its jaws. Finn takes the moment to run, shouting insults back at the creature. It tilts its head back and forth, its nose following Finn’s path through the hills. Avrian gages the distance to the varterral - too far without being able to take a running start, or just in range - and he sucks in his breath, braces himself, and leaps.

Ariane screams and then Finn does. The varterral shrieks when Avrian lands on its back, flailing for hold as it bucks in an attempt to throw him off. He slides sideways down its back, leaning his weight forward until he is about to fall headfirst to the ground. He stabs it, driving both of the swords deep into it, and it shrieks, tossing its body about, but with free hands he grabs hold of the top of one of its legs and hangs as he slips the rest of the way from its back, kicking at the air. 

A wave of heat batters one side of his body and the residual flash of fire fades sooner than the warmth. The varterral howls and jerks backward but does not seem to move. Avrian glances down at the ground nearly ten feet below him and sees that ice has encased one of the creature’s feet. As it tries to chip away at the ice, another of its feet is frozen to the ground. Avrian pulls himself up again onto its back, pulling a sword free as he inches his way up toward its head. Spindly hands, strangely small and thin for the body like the Creators belatedly realized they wanted to give the creature hands but had only a few twigs left to build those, scrape at the ice and then the varterral twists its upper body to swat at Avrian. He stands, a hand on its shoulder joint to balance, and when from its movements the pale flesh of its throat and chin become visible, he stabs upward, into its head.

The roar that breaks loose from its jaws is a strangled sound and its head and neck fall forward, sending Avrian tumbling over himself and over its head. He catches himself from its nose, hanging in front of its gaping mouth. Its neck is flecked with more arrows and Avrian kicks the hilt of the sword to drive it in deeper. The varterral’s body spasms one last time and its legs not iced in place splay out in every direction. Avrian tumbles to the ground with it.

He lays dazed, sprawled on the ground half beneath a leg, for a few moments until the clouded black sky stops spinning. “Fenedhis,” he gasps. Slowly, he sits up, dragging himself away from the varterral’s body. Fen'Falon’s angry barking fills his ears and the mabari rushes up to headbutt him in the face. “I know, I know, I’m an idiot,” he says, leaning his head against the dog’s shoulder. 

“Avrian! Avrian! Avrian, are you dead?”

He snorts and regrets the movement, lungs sore from impact, but the fear starts to ease from their faces when they see him partially upright. “That was -” Finn struggles for a word. 

“Reckless,” Ariane says.

“Yeah,” Finn agrees, “but also amazing.”

Tamlen would be proud. The thought wells up in laughter in his chest and he doubles over, wheezing from his aching body and from mirth. He lets himself ignore Ariane and Finn’s onset confusion and concern. Tamlen would find it hilarious. He would have laughed, or maybe he would have been the one to suggest that tactic - or maybe he would have done it himself, without suggestion, with Avrian yelling after him, because Tamlen could never have witnessed Avrian being the troublemaking brother-in-arms that he always wanted. It was his ghost just over Avrian’s shoulder, whispering in his ear - it was his bones beneath his feet and the shadow of the trees that his grave should become like someday - that shaped him into this. 

He accepts the hand that Ariane offers to help him to his feet. “Are you all right?” she asks, looking him over with concern, only letting go of his hand when he nods.

The breaths he tries to take before he speaks ache, as does the motion of leaning over to draw one of Ariane’s swords forth from the varterral’s body. “Sometimes you have to wonder how you came to the point of killing one of your people’s own ancient guardians,” he says, to provide some, any, sort of explanation. Finn laughs nervously like he isn’t sure if it’s a joke. Avrian isn’t either. Velanna would be angry with him over this, if she knew. Merrill told him once that a varterral killed will always one day rise again for as long as it is bound to a location to guard. The thought lessens some of the guilt until he tries to imagine telling her that he threw himself at this danger chasing down the greater danger of the mirrors, when he broke their friendship apart criticizing her for burying herself in researching the same greater danger.

Morrigan pursues it too, and she is closest – closest to danger and closest to save. He hands Ariane her sword and accepts his bow back and goes to find his pack.

The arched doorway of the tower leads them into a dark expanse. Shadows bear down on his head with stifling weight, and the stairs, stone worn by hundreds of feet hundreds of years ago, spiral down into a similar blackness. Avrian fumbles for the pouch on his belt where he keeps flint and tinder, but cold orange light appearing behind him throws his shadow long against the old walls. He steps down while behind him Ariane and Finn argue about whether Finn with the light in his hands should actually be first or last in line. Fen'Falon barks at them.

“He agrees with me,” Finn says. “You should go ahead. I -”

“Didn’t you listen? He agrees with me,” Ariane says.

It was like this with the wardens, too, some days, his pace slowed by the need to stop arguments behind him and herd everyone into position. “He says you both should start moving,” Avrian calls up at them. His voice bounces off of the stone around them. White spots flicker across his vision from the attempt to adapt again to the darkness ahead after glancing straight at the fire.

He waits until they are right behind him, and he draws an arrow from his quiver and dips the fletching into Finn’s fire to make his own torch. “If you’re not going to hurry,” he says, lowering his light so that he can see the path beneath his feet. They are close. The air in most of the ancient ruins he has traversed feels the same as this: cold and thrumming with the kind of energy like a storm. He bounds across the stairs two at a time until the spinning makes his head and stomach twist in knots, and then he holds one hand along the wall to keep himself balanced. A thousand years of dust and dirt rubs off on his fingertips as he watches his feet to avoid glancing down the center of the spiral at the emptiness he could fall into.

He jumps down the last five stairs and turns in a circle until the light finds a break in the walls, a doorway that lacks clear shape or decoration, nothing like the arched entrance he first passed through. The tunnel ceiling is low enough that he can touch it. Whoever built the tower above seemed to give up below and beneath his feet the ground has the crunch of hard-packed and slightly damp sand. It is winding but mostly level and he runs. He runs until the movement blows out his torch and then he fumbles his way along until Fen'Falon and Ariane catch up to him, and Finn moments later, panting, wisps dangling in the air around him. “You can’t slow down?” he gasps. “Just for -”

“No.”

Avrian’s fist is clenched tight enough that his ring digs into his fingers on either side. If she really does not want to be found, he cannot take her by surprise or catch her no matter how fast he runs. She will vanish, would have vanished as soon as she noticed that his movements formed a pattern of pursuit - if she noticed, if she still kept track of him, if she had not given up assuming that he gave up.

He likes to think that she knew him better than that.

The tunnel spits him out into a huge cavern and he freezes simply with shock at the expanse. The path continues twisting through a still lake. Faint light illuminates the area like a cloudy dusk and dusty fog hangs in the distance, shrouding the broken columns that rise from water and the archways halfway crumbled that hang like stalactites, fangs from the skull of the ceiling. Into the mist, dragon ribs curl up from the ground alongside the path, sentinels long dead flanking the hill marked by one of the only undamaged structures. Two statues rise out of a pedestal, turned toward the tall mirror that peaks in a point between them.

The eluvian casts its own light. Hues of bold and unnatural purple shimmer and drift across its surface.

Silhouetted in front of it, close, too close, stands a woman.

“The eluvian!” Finn breathy voice echoes loud, excited and fearful, all at once. “It’s - glowing?”

Avrian runs.

“Morrigan!”

She doesn’t turn or even flinch. She must have known. Fen'Falon barks loudly, rushing up to Avrian’s side and then past him, galloping toward the eluvian. At the second bark, Morrigan does turn, shadowed by the light behind her, but she kneels down and reaches for the mabari that careens into her arms, yapping with delight. Her greeting is more enthusiastic than she has ever been with him before, patting his neck and rubbing his ears.

When she lifts her head, though, her smile fades, and her golden eyes lock on to his. Is it anger or sadness that she turns on him? Avrian falters. The ten feet between them feels deeper a gulf than over two years. “Come no closer, please,” she says. His chest clenches at the sound of her voice, cold, betraying nothing, but the firm set of her eyes falls into something regretful. “One more step and I will leave - for good, this time.” She stands, scratching Fen'Falon’s head as he whines, and she steps back toward the eluvian, brushing her hand across the surface. It ripples beneath her fingers like water.

“Morrigan,” he pleads, and he isn’t sure at first what argument he means to make, where to even begin - two years and he stands here like a memory, with Tamlen then, the ripples multiplying as lightning crackles across the surface, that is the same, and the outcome, she was there, she helped him build Tamlen’s pyre. “Get away from there, vhenan, please -”

“’Tis not tainted,” she says, and something in her voice has softened as well as on her face. “Not as yours was. I have gone to great lengths to find this; I would not have activated this portal were I not sure.”

He has left behind everything to find her; he cannot lose her. This picture has presented itself to him in nightmares. He cannot stomach the thought, can barely swallow screaming panic as the air hums with the metallic, almost musical, shriek of the eluvian. “Please,” he repeats. “Vhenan, please.”

She takes one step forward, and then another, and Fen'Falon weaves his way around her legs, behind her, placing himself between her and the eluvian. “Did I not ask you to swear to not follow?” she asks, almost accusingly.

Fear has tangled together with relief and he wants to scream and kiss her and drag her far away from here, but horrible heartbeat after heartbeat has passed and he is still here, she is still here, nothing has burst forth from the mirror in blight and blinding light to take her from him. “You waited,” he says. He cannot shut his eyes to the bones, the eluvian, the ruins, but the confusion of the conversation is familiar, the same sort of years ago. Love is not a weakness. Why must you leave when the battle with the archdemon is done? Where will you go? Why can you not tell me?

“And should you give me reason, I shall step through.” She eyes the eluvian with some sort of pride. “To activate this portal even once was difficult. It will not be used again.”

“A portal?” he echoes and the ground sways, or maybe it is him, shaking, sickly, crushed under the weight of memory and grief and guilt. A portal - I see something! Tamlen says, excitedly, leaning close to the mirror, nose to the churning surface. A city? A - something’s moving!

A portal. Tamlen, vanished from the cave, from the forest; Tamlen in the Frostbacks, south of Orzammar, north of Cad'Halash. Avrian had barely wondered how, only why, a question he has continued to ask across years and now again more than ever.

“Yes, a portal,” she says. “To another place, beyond this world and beyond the Fade.” Her eyes finally move from him, up past him, and she says, louder, “You will find your book by my campfire. It was quite useful to me.”

Avrian glances over his shoulder in time to see Ariane frown and then he turns quickly back to Morrigan. She has not disappeared as soon as he moved his eyes from her. The eluvian has not snatched her away. “You stole it,” he says and the indignation that rises does not feel his own, but something by proxy from all of his people, shouldered in this brief moment by him alone. “You could have asked to borrow it, you could have asked for help, you could have -”

She folds her arms across her chest and shifts her weight on her feet, frowning, and she says, her voice gone cold, “Do you pretend to know me at all? Or do you cling to some idealized memory and it is that which you pursue, not the woman who truly stands before you?”

“Allies and friends aren’t a bad thing to have,” Avrian says. Another conversation from long ago, by campfires in Redcliffe and the Brecilian Forest, near different kinds of danger that still necessitated fear of the taint. “You could have, rather than go to a people who have so little and try to make an enemy of them by stealing one of the few things they have kept.” As bitter as the frustration that falls from his tongue is, it dissipates instantly, and exhaustion batters him in heavy waves. “Did you think you would leave less of a trail if you just disappeared?”

“Perhaps it was my mistake to think that you would not so easily collect the band of cast-offs that you needed to reach your goal.” Her lips twitch but then the look is gone. “You will never understand me,” she says, and her tone is harsh, but she still cannot harden her face into anger over the sad regret crossing her features, framed by the strange shadows of the eluvian’s light. “Nor I you.”

If he knew that it was what she truly wanted, not simply Flemeth’s influence shaping her to believe she cannot be anything otherwise, he could let her go. He could carve his heart from his chest.

Even softer, she adds, “You kept the ring.”

She sounds surprised.

“Of course I did.”

“Tell me, is that the reason you came? Because you who once argued that love is not a weakness do not know when to let go?”

She saved his life; she is the mother of his child; he tried and cannot live with the ghosts in his clan but does not wish to die with the wardens; and he thought about none of that as soon as Finn uttered word about the mirrors. He is afraid for her; he is afraid to be alone.

“I love you,” he says. “Isn’t that enough?”

She blinks her golden eyes shut and slowly shakes her head once. “Then help me understand,” he begs. “What is your plan for the eluvians? For the child? For -” He stops. “Where is our child?”

“He is safe,” she says, and his head spins with worry, with glee, a son, does he look like Morrigan or like me or like both of us or neither, I have a son, "and he knows nothing of the destiny that lies before him. He is an innocent, but to prepare him for what is to come, I must have time, and power. More than that I dare not say, not even to you. If I cannot have your trust then instead you may give me your anger.“

"Prepare for what?” Avrian asks. “What is coming?”

She teased him often for having so many questions for her and everyone. She does not look so amused now. “Change,” she answers. “The world is changing, and soon, I will assure you, it will look to be a very different place. I will not be caught by surprise. I will preserve what I can of a world that has already long been corrupted, and I will not resist what is to come as so many others do with every fiber of their being. Sometimes change is needed. Sometimes, change is what sets us free.”

“Is freedom what you want?”

He expects the question to be one that she scoffs at, rolls her eyes and answers in words that make sense only to her, but she looks taken aback and manages to say, “What I want is…” before she trails off, blinking, and then she looks down at her hands. “What I want,” she repeats, more firmly, “is unimportant now. And you,” she adds quickly, like she knows he will protest and press that point unless she does not give him an opening, “would do well to, if you must hunt and interrogate anyone, hunt Flemeth, not me.”

“I killed Flemeth,” Avrian says. She saved his and Alistair’s lives and they killed her, put a sword through her skull like they would the archdemon half a year later. Her bones, picked clean, sank half into the muck of the Wilds, a monument to the mad reckless loyalty that carried Avrian back to her hut to see what should have been a confirmation of her death two years ago.

“My mother,” and she utters the words with something of a sneer, “has tricked her way past death. I thought she craved immortality. I thought I knew her supposed ends, and the means by which she aimed to reach them. I was wrong.” The admittance is heavy, alarmed. It is almost fear that flashes across her eyes. “So very, very wrong. She is no simple blood mage, no mere abomination - she is not even truly human.”

If it was not to steal her daughter’s body, then what was it that Asha'Bellanar wanted of Morrigan - and what was it that she aimed for the soul of an Old God? Have they still played into her talons? “What is she?”

Morrigan’s eyes are wide. “I am not sure.”

“And if she wants revenge on us for her… death? If she -” He lets out all of his breath and closes his eyes. “She’s why you’re running.”

He expects her to argue, as a point of pride and resentment toward the creature who called herself her mother. Perhaps it is time that had blunted that edge; perhaps it is necessary concern for a helpless child. “There is much in the world that would like to do me and the child harm.”

For one stupid, stupid moment, Avrian wonders if she even named him.

“I’m the Warden-Commander of Ferelden,” he says instead. “I’m the Arl of Amaranthine - I have a fortress, I have armies. If we need to kill Flemeth a dozen more times - whatever it might take to keep you and our son safe - I can offer it. I kept the ring so that if you needed to - if you wanted to - you could find me. So that if you needed a home, Amaranthine would welcome you.”

“I wish to owe no one nothing. I will have no debts incurred on my behalf.” She takes a few more steps toward him, down from the pedestal, but she glances away, out over the water.

“It would not be a debt, vhenan. That is not how love works.”

She turns back, raising her head, her chin jutting out at him, the picture of regality and arrogance and he loved her in spite of that and because of that and he loves her now still. “I will have no one die protecting me when I may protect myself.”

“Then let me come with you.”

He blurts the words like a panicked reaction, desperate for anything that she will not dismiss immediately, any way to show her she does not have to live life alone. Morrigan’s mouth falls open and then closes in silence. He wants to close the last of the distance between them but he forces himself to remain where he is, not close enough but too close to the mirror and the echoing crackles of activity that cascade across its surface. “Help me understand - wherever you go, wherever you choose to live free, outside of the world, away from the dangers - let me follow. Let me come with you.”

It seems that is the one argument she was unprepared to have, the one request she did not expect to hear. “You… you cannot know what you ask,” she says. “You would give up - everything?  The power and prestige of Amaranthine?” She stumbles across the words, speaking faster than usual, composure flaking apart. She hesitates, before seeming to realize that her values – power, survival – are not the same that he was raised with, and she goes on. “How many times did you say you would return to your clan after the blight? Should you not be with them?”

“I tried,” he says, a confession never made out loud that he probably should have put word to long ago. “I tried to go back to the clan, live that way again, I did. I’ve changed too much to have a place with them and I never wanted the place I have in the wardens. I want to be with you, Morrigan, wherever that may be.”

“Truly?” she asks, quieter. “Truly, you would – for me?”

“I would. I will.”

It is a welcome change to want to live for love, rather than to wish to die.

She does not speak but closes the years between them and takes his face in her hands and kisses him. Two years ago they stood outside of Denerim’s gates and he pulled her to him like he does now and hoped, hoped against hope, that she would change her mind. “Then let us go,” she says, her forehead against his, her mouth at his ear. The word us flips his stomach in a kind of childish giddiness, the same of when he presented her with a golden mirror, beaming, trying to draw forth one of her rare smiles, rarest laughs.

He reaches up to take her hand, tangle her fingers with his, and he turns halfway around, nearly tripping over Fen’Falon who is suddenly behind him. Finn and Ariane both seem to be conspicuously looking anywhere else and he can’t help but laugh. Ariane clutches the book to her chest, fingers curled protectively around the edges, and she tilts her head as she says to him, “You never mentioned you had a child.”

He tried a few times to tell even Alistair, Zevran, Leliana, but the words never came, never properly formed. He never let Oghren quite understand why he snapped and hissed with more fury ever directed at any of his own friends, for walking away from his family to join the wardens. Ariane, helpful as she is, close as they quickly became -

“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

She hums acknowledgement of his words and he steps forward, not releasing Morrigan’s hand, to face her. “Ma serannas. Ma malava halani, lethallan.” He reaches out to touch her hand, still clasped around the book, and he turns then to Finn, patting his shoulder. “And thank you for your help, lethallin. Take care of each other.”

Fen’Falon barks, sidling up to them and demanding some last ear rubs. Morrigan tugs on his hand, drawing him back toward her, up the steps to the eluvian. He tries not to look back. They stand shoulder to shoulder, Ariane with her hand raised in farewell, the book open in her other palm and Finn holds the other edge, pointing to something on the page, nudging her with his elbow.

His hand in hers might be trembling and then it slips away when he cannot make himself move with her, up close to the warping surface that spins before him, dark and storming. The air around it vibrates and the hairs on his arm stand on end. He is locked in place, ghosts dragging him back. She touches her fingertips to the surface and spiraling circles move in waves out from her hand. Everything in him is screaming, get away from there Tamlen, Merrill, Morrigan, two years of nightmares congealing in this moment.

You’re not going to leave without taking a closer look at it, are you, Avrian? I wonder what it is.

It’s a portal, Tamlen, and I am taking a closer look than I ever wanted to.

If he faints from this nauseous feeling, hopefully he will manage to fall forward through the eluvian.

Tamlen would find that funny too.

“Come, my love,” Morrigan says. Fen’Falon nudges Avrian’s hip, urging him forward, and when he doesn’t move the mabari trots forward himself, to Morrigan’s side, tongue lolling, entirely at ease. She glances back at him, eyes piercing through him, down to his heart. Does she remember Tamlen’s rotting body, screaming at Avrian to kill him? – She was the one who did, after all.

The mirror sings and parts around her like a sheet of falling water and she is gone and he cannot feel his heart beating frantically in his chest anymore. Fen’Falon practically bounces after her, and he disappears, and Avrian is there, still, unable to breathe, he is a ghost, some warped memory stripped down to bones of the man who last stood before an active eluvian.

Fear looms in front of him, confronting him, daring him to run. Cold shards of fear cut between his ribs, reaching for his heart.

He loves her more. He follows her through.