Chapter Text
Awareness crept to Lyndsey’s sleep-fogged mind slowly. Birdsong. The soft padding of footsteps on a wooden floor. Humming. A lullaby? Scratchy sheets, rough cloth against her cheek. The faint scent of woodsmoke. Glass clinking against glass. Vaguely she registered sunlight through her eyelids.
Too early, she thought blearily, trying to wiggle from her back onto her side to get more comfortable and jamming one arm under the flat, lumpy pillow her head was resting upon. Lyndsey rubbed at her eyes with the back of her other hand, a mild frown tugging her lips into a pout as she felt the crust that had accumulated at the corners. Was it just from sleeping or had she gotten pink-eye again? Ugh, whatever. M’going back to sleep. But it was like her mattress had turned to rock overnight - hard and unyielding on her side. With a dissatisfied noise, she squirmed onto her stomach, the coarse fabric of her pajamas tangling around her as the corner got pinned under her own body.
The continued wriggling knocked her foot against the bedframe, and she hissed at the pain, a sharp intake of breath released with a groan as she squeezed her eyes shut. Ow! Guess I’m not going back to sleep after all.
There was a moment of silence and then she heard the footsteps again - a low, shuffling sound - moving somewhere behind her. That was enough to jar her from the haze of sleep and make her forget the pain in her leg. She lived alone. Who the hell was in her apartment?
Before even registering that she’d opened her eyes, Lyndsey was rolling onto her back so she could throw herself into a sitting position. Immediately she regretted the sudden, severe motion as her ribs protested and the blood rushed from her head, making her vision go dark and her head go dizzy.
She was not prepared for the scene that greeted her when her sight returned.
Lyndsey found herself in a rustic cabin with rough-hewn wooden walls that was a far cry from her bright, contemporary apartment in D.C. Jars and bottles filled with who knew what were organized neatly on shelves lining the walls, barrels helping prop them up, candles stacked haphazardly like that wasn’t some sort of fire hazard. The scent of smoke briefly intensified as a piece of firewood cracked loudly in the hearth on the far side of the room - which admittedly, wasn’t very far at all. A hearth with an honest-to-god cauldron bubbling in it. Underlying the smoke she smelled something not unlike oatmeal, which was what must have been cooking. As Lyndsey flipped back the covers, the heat of the fire felt far more pleasant on her legs than the scratchy fabric had.
As her gaze swept to the left, she focused on a slender woman, her back to Lyndsey, standing at a crude desk. Undoubtedly she’d been the source of the footsteps. From this angle, Lyndsey couldn’t determine much of what she looked like aside from her straight blonde hair pulled back into a bun - the stranger was covered from neck to toe in a simple brown dress.
“Wh-where am I?” Lyndsey croaked, suddenly aware that her mouth felt mossy and her throat and lips were dry. “Who are you?”
“Ah, so it seems you’ve recovered enough to rejoin the land of the living,” the woman replied nonchalantly without turning, her attention still captured by whatever she was working on at the desk. Something about the way she talked sounded off - but Lyndsey couldn’t quite put her finger on what.
“With how delirious you were, I’m not surprised you don’t remember. You’re in Redcliffe, in the village. I’m the local healer.”
Redcliffe? Healer? Neither of those things meant anything to her. If she was hurt, she should be seeing a doctor, not some crazy woman in a hut with a cauldron like she was some sort of witch - was this some whacked-out dream? She knew she should lay off the sugar before bed...but this felt different. Maybe she was in the hospital, hopped up on some sort of drug. Didn’t some of the stronger painkillers have hallucinogenic effects? Or maybe she was in a coma, there’d been stories of people waking up having recollections of living completely different lives or visiting the heavens...
The woman finished whatever she was doing with a flourish and turned to face her patient. For the first time, her profile was in view, and Lyndsey froze in horror, fingers clenching the blanket so tight her knuckles paled.
“Y-you…you have... your ears ...” she repeated dumbly.
The woman’s eyes narrowed in distaste, mouth curling as if she’d tasted something sour. “I knew it,” she said bitterly. “I told them nobody would be grateful to be healed by a knife-ear. You lot are all the same.”
Alright, this was definitely a dream. Pointy ears like that? That didn’t look like a chintzy costume piece from the Halloween store? An elf. Elves weren’t real. So she was dreaming of some fantasy world with elves. Or, she supposed, some sort of Hylian - she’d been looking up the new Zelda game recently, maybe that was what had spurred this sequence.
“No, I was just surprised, that’s all. We, ah, don’t have...elves,” she tried to hold back a hysterical noise, but failed. “Where I come from.”
The healer - an elf, she giggled to herself again - shot her a flat look. “No, I suppose the closer you get to Orzammar, the fewer elves there are.”
“Orzammar?” The name was even more foreign than Redcliffe.
“Are you not from near there? You certainly sound like it. Never been that far north, but we do get a lot of visitors passing through the village for the Memorial.” The healer seemed to pause to consider her charge. “You’re no dwarf - but the tale of it says there are small villages tucked into the mountains near Orzammar that are so filled with new surface dwarves that everyone sounds like them.”
Best to just play along, she decided, not sure how disagreeing would affect the rest of her dream. It was already off-course - she’d never had one this vivid before. Usually she was an uninvolved observer from above - or if the dream was about her, she never thought about what her body was doing, instead overtaken by some emotion or another. “Oh, uh, yeah. I was just...surprised that you could tell.”
The elven woman was seemingly not one to mince words; she merely shrugged, turning away to fuss with a pitcher at a table closer to the hearth. She returned a moment later with a tall ceramic cup, holding it out for Lyndsey to take. “Here. No doubt you’re parched.”
Lyndsey accepted the glass without protest - she was thirsty - and downed it in a series of quick gulps. After setting the empty cup on the nightstand at her elbow, she cleared her throat to try to prevent herself from giggling again at the strange dream she was having. “In any case, thanks for taking me in and - uh - healing me.” Was she supposed to repay the healer in a dream? She didn’t have any money anyway. She bit her bottom lip as the corners of her mouth lifted up, resulting in a grin that looked rather pained. “I’ll get out of your way now.”
Just as Lyndsey swung her legs over the side of the cot and began to stand, the healer rushed at her with arms outstretched. Pain seared from the base of her foot up through her right leg, and some part of her registered the healer chastising her for “aggravating her wound when she wasn’t half-healed yet.” Namely, though, her mind was racing over the fact that you weren’t supposed to feel pain in dreams.
Which could only mean…
This isn’t a dream, she thought, face paling. A wave of nausea overtook her, and she scrabbled for the cup she’d abandoned not even a minute before. When her stomach roiled again, Lyndsey didn’t fight it, upending the contents in a series of heaves and trying to keep the tears that were prickling at the corners of her eyes from falling. Firm hands took the cup from her own shaking one and set it aside somewhere.
“It’s not a dream,” she whispered, falling back on the cot, eyes squeezing shut tight once again to try and tune everything around her out. “No, no, no, no, no. That can’t be true.” Lyndsey clamped her hands over her ears and tried to ignore both her surroundings and the sour remnants of bile in her mouth. “I’m just dreaming, I’m just dreaming…”
An arm slid between her neck and the cot and pulled, propping her up. Her skin crawled at the touch. Lyndsey writhed, trying to escape the arrest - don’t touch me! - but a claw clamped around her shoulders to hold her still. It’s not real, it’s not real. Warm glass was pressed to her lips as she opened her mouth to continue her chant, but before she could bat it away, foreign liquid bloomed bitter on her tongue. She coughed as she breathed some of it in, but was forced to swallow the rest lest she choke.
Immediately her panic started to fade at the edges, and her hands slid from her ears. Her eyes opened again. The healer looked down at her with stubborn concern, holding an empty vial above Lyndsey’s mouth. As if from underwater she could hear the healer speaking, but the words made no sense. Lyndsey stared entranced as a red droplet ran down the side of the vial to pool at the bottom.
“You drugged me,” she accused slowly, the anger in her expression so muted by the haziness that was overcoming her like storm clouds rolling in overhead that instead she just looked piteous. It wasn’t much longer before Lyndsey slipped into the oblivion of sleep.
Sleep didn’t cure all things, but whenever Lyndsey was having a hard time of it, she’d feel better after a rest. When she woke in the same place she’d fallen asleep, she was once again hit by a sense that things weren’t right, but the panic had backed off some, lurking behind a curtain. Another moment later, and she remembered why. This wasn’t home. This wasn’t even Earth, for all she knew. That didn’t stop her from squeezing her eyes shut and opening them a few times in sequence, hoping that when she’d open them she’d see the walls of her bedroom, or the little hole in her ceiling where the previous tenant must have hung something - but that effort proved to be in vain.
Fuck.
Lyndsey pushed herself up into a sitting position more slowly than the last time to avoid all the blood rushing from her head too quickly. It was darker than before, the sunlight slanting in through the window on its last legs for the day. Dust motes danced in the air, heedless of Lyndsey’s discomfort. Then she noticed the quiet: the birdsong had faded, further heralding the approaching sunset, and the woman who’d tended to her earlier was absent. Besides that, the room was much as she last remembered it, though she didn’t recall how she’d fallen asleep. Another cup was placed at her bedside - hopefully not the same one she’d used earlier. Gingerly she took small sips from it, unsure what to do with herself but unwilling to risk putting weight on her leg again after it had gone so badly last time.
Okay, Lynds. Freaking out’s not gonna help ya. Think. You ended up in the middle of another world like some sort of bad sci-fi plot, with no idea how you got here. What would...fuck, who would have been in this sort of situation...Oh! The Doctor. What would the Doctor do?
“Okay, okay, um. First things first, assess the situation.” Lyndsey’s voice was shaky to her own ears, but something about speaking aloud was fortifying. She was still in the shift she’d woken up in before, but now she noticed that there were some bandages wrapping her arms, mostly around her elbows and forearms, and they stung a little if she pressed them. Her hands weren’t bandaged, but she could see parts of them were a tender pink in spots - the tell-tale sign of newly-grown skin. She couldn’t ruck up the shift she was wearing, since she was sitting on it, but it was sheer enough to see the dark indigo of a bruise underneath it, and she hissed in pain when she poked at her side. Nothing, however, seemed as bad as her leg had. And worst of all, she couldn’t remember what could have caused it all. “A little worse for wear than usual, but you’ll be alright, you’re not dying,” she grit out. “Just need to keep it together.”
She needed a plan. It didn’t matter where she’d gone or how she’d gotten here. She needed to get home. And to do that she needed to be well enough to walk. And clothes - where had hers gone?
Wait, maybe it does matter how I got here - if I can figure that out, I might be able to get home the same way. Could that lady know?
She wasn’t left alone to wonder for long, for the door swung open and in came the elven woman carrying a bundle of goods. Speak of the devil.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” she said. “Gave me quite the fright, you did, trying to walk on that leg of yours before you were ready. You’re lucky you didn’t make it worse.” The healer pursed her lips in thought as she inspected her patient before nudging the door closed behind her with one foot.
Lyndsey swallowed past the hard lump in her throat, the “keep it together” part of her plan rapidly unravelling at the seams. “Please, I need to get home,” she pleaded. “My name is Lyndsey Turner. Can you tell me how I got here? What happened to me?”
The healer didn’t answer immediately, opting to set her bundle down on the desk before turning back to face Lyndsey. She fetched a plain wooden stool from underneath the desk and placed it at her bedside before sitting down to address her patient. A strand of her hair had fallen out of her bun, and Lyndsey watched as the elf tucked it behind her pointed ear. The healer noticed Lyndsey tracking the action, and though her mouth quirked to the side, she didn’t look upset as she had the first time her patient had stared at her long ears.
“Hush now,” she instructed, her voice firm, but not harsh. She had pointedly clasped her hands in her lap, as if to show Lyndsey that she was no one to fear. “The last time you worked yourself up, you were in hysterics. I had to give you a sleeping draft for fear you’d harm yourself.”
The memory was foggy, but Lyndsey could recall struggling, forced to choke something down that tasted awful. That’s right, she’d been drugged. The healer must have read something in her expression or saw that Lyndsey stiffened, for she added that as long as Lyndsey promised not to endanger herself, there would be no more sleeping draughts, and that as a healer the woman had pledged to do no harm. Lyndsey wasn’t sure if she could believe the elf, but it seemed she had no other choice for the time being. It wasn’t like she could run - or, it seemed, had anywhere to run to .
“I need to go home,” Lyndsey insisted, once again pulling back the blanket as if to get up. The healer gave her a stern, disapproving look.
“Oh no you don’t,” she leaned in, forefinger pointed at Lyndsey in admonition. “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Mages won’t leave that tavern they’ve taken over to heal you, so you’ve got to wait out the healing like anyone else.” When Lyndsey didn’t move to get up, the willowy elf relaxed, seemingly pleased that her warning was heeded. She crossed her arms, but it seemed more like a natural pose than as if she were closing herself off from her patient.
Lyndsey’s mind was reeling again as she tried to absorb this new information. She shouldn’t have been surprised to hear about mages when she was talking to an elf, but it was just starting to drive home how she was further from home than ever. This couldn’t be Earth. So where the hell was she?
The healer continued like she wasn’t just spouting nonsense. Lyndsey decided to consciously ignore that part, because she was dealing with enough right now. She wasn’t sure she could deal with more on top of that.
“Banged up some of your ribs, though that only looks like bad bruising. You also fractured a bone in your right leg. It probably won’t be healed for another…”
“Two months,” Lyndsey answered quietly. She was going to be stuck here for two months? She couldn’t be here for two months. She didn’t have two months to lose. But if she couldn’t even put weight on her leg without pain...
The healer looked at her critically. “Not the first time you’ve done this then, I see.” She stood and began unpacking the bundle she’d brought in, placing additional jars on her shelves and some sort of plant on a workbench at the foot of Lyndsey’s cot.
“But how did I get here? What happened?”
The blonde elf’s mouth drew into a tight line. “Something similar to the rest of the refugees, I expect. It’s not pretty; no wonder you’d been wishing it were a dream. Those rifts keep popping up full of demons, and before that it was the mages and Templars fighting, driving everyone from their homes. Redcliffe’s been the safest space around lately, as it’s got walls and soldiers to defend them. Well, until the Inquisition stabilized the Crossroads. They’ve been seeing everyone back to their homes as they clear more of the area.”
Not only did these responses not truly answer her questions - they also spawned additional ones. None of it meant anything to her, except for the fact that whatever this “Inquisition” was, it was probably her best bet at getting home.
“Okay then, tell me how to get to them.”
The woman finished unpacking and crossed to the hearth. She stirred whatever was in the cauldron, the contents sounding sticky as they were mixed. After tasting the food, she added a handful of something she pulled from a small sack on the mantle and stirred once more. Again the smell of cooked oats wafted through the room.
“I told you, I’ll not have my healing go to waste,” the healer said, frowning over her shoulder at Lyndsey before stepping away from the hearth, wiping her hands on the off-white apron she wore over her dress. “We’ll discuss this again when you’re well enough for the journey. Until then you need to rest.”
She felt the panic rising up again, clawing at her eyes, clutching her throat. “You can’t keep me here!”
Her protest was ignored as a small sack landed in her lap. ”Separate out the leaves and stems of the elfroot, and strip the roots off the spindleweed.”
Lyndsey stared at her with incredulity for a moment before her brows furrowed into a deep scowl. “W-what? You can’t honestly believe I’m going to stay here and - and,” she paused to inhale, short of breath, and found herself hurling the sack at the elf’s back before she could think better of it. It hit the other woman with a rustle, and a few plants spilled from the lip after it landed on the floor. “Work for you. I’m going home!” Her voice dropped to a piteous whine. “I want to go home.”
The elven woman spun on her heel and marched to Lyndsey’s bedside, eyes narrowed. Lyndsey tried to scramble backwards but didn’t get very far - the cot was tucked against a wall, barring any retreat. All she managed to do was irritate her wounds and make the painful discovery that the bruise on her chest did, in fact, extend past her side and onto her back.
The blonde woman was not deterred by Lyndsey’s sudden backtracking - she took Lyndsey by the chin and kept a firm grip to ensure she couldn’t look away. The healer’s eyes, such a dark brown that they were nearly black, bore into her own. “Now you listen to me, shem . The Inquisition’s done a lot to make it safer out there, but we are still in the middle of a war zone. It’s a miracle you made it all the way here from wherever you came from, and in all likelihood you. don’t. have. a home to return to. This isn’t some midnight waltz through the Fade. Your stubbornness will only get you killed. I’m the best bet you’ve got.” Concern marred her brow, but her thin jaw was clenched tight as if daring Lyndsey to challenge her authority.
Lyndsey deflated, her anger slipping through her fingertips. What if she really didn’t have a home to return to? She worked an office job - she couldn’t imagine what could have caused the array of injuries she bore. More tears rolled down her cheeks, and the healer’s gaze softened in response, as did her grip on Lyndsey’s chin. Now Lyndsey noticed the worry lines and the beginnings of tear troughs on the elf’s pale face. “Look, Inquisition scouts will be by to bring me to the Crossroads in three days. If you’re well enough to travel by then - and they have a cart to bring you in, you will not be walking miles on that leg - and they agree, you can come along.” She paused, seeming to realize again how lost Lyndsey felt. “In the meantime, you’ll focus on getting better, and make yourself useful while you’re at it. Got it?”
Though the healer looked nothing like Lyndsey’s mom, there was something about her expression that was so motherly that Lyndsey could only nod in acceptance. The healer stared at her for a moment longer, then made a noncommittal noise, seemingly satisfied with what she saw. The sack was retrieved and returned to her. Her face flushed slightly in shame when she recognized how childish throwing the sack had been, but she didn’t apologize.
She tipped the contents onto the blankets. That there were two different types of plants was clear; one was green and vine-like; the other was a ruddy brown color with a wax-like texture and looked almost like kelp.
“Um… You said elfroot and some sort of weed, right?” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. “Which is which?”
Again the elven woman’s brow furrowed as she examined her patient. Lyndsey was starting to wonder if that was the only expression she made.
“You don’t know elfroot from spindleweed? I was so sure you hadn’t had head trauma, but the head’s a tricky thing; I could have missed something…”
Lyndsey didn’t like this scrutiny. Something told her to keep her background a secret - a feeling in her gut that she’d be labeled some sort of crazy person, and that definitely wouldn’t help her get home. More like locked up ‘for her own good’.
Nonetheless, she couldn’t stop the healer from performing another check-up. The elf pressed at either side of Lyndsey’s head at about eye level, slowly moving her fingers around the side until they met at the back of her head. Then she started to move back toward the front of Lyndsey’s face, pausing at the outer edges of her eyebrows. The pressure when the healer pushed there was unpleasant, and Lyndsey’s nose wrinkled in reaction. “You must’ve hit your head, you’ve got a bump on your left side here… but it’s a wonder you don’t have a black eye.”
“It doesn’t really hurt, so I’m sure it’ll be fine… Guess it messed with my memory, though,” she lied. Yes, she’d hit her head there a few years prior, resulting in a concussion - a nasty sports injury that had ballooned to the size of a softball and had indeed blackened her eye for over a week. The woman didn’t react for a moment; Lyndsey hoped she was convincing enough.
“Well, alright,” she said, seeming to accept Lyndsey’s meager explanation. “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it. Perhaps you’ll remember with time - you seem to know a smidge of healing, since you knew about your leg. Elfroot’s the green one. The leaves are good for minor wounds, and you can chew the root for internal aches and pains. Spindleweed’s used in a tea that’s good for the lungs.”
“R-right,” Lyndsey said with a watery smile she hoped looked sincere. The bald look she received in reply made that unlikely. Her eyes - no doubt red from her tears - probably weren’t assisting in that regard.
“Once you’re done you can put them into these jars,” the healer instructed, bringing over three large glass containers. The writing wasn’t any script Lyndsey recognized, more like what she would call runes than actual letters. But hadn’t they been speaking English the whole time? If not, how could they even understand each other? Lyndsey didn’t speak Alien.
However, not wanting to bring further attention to her origins, she only nodded. “Okay.” Thankfully the jars weren’t empty, so she could match the contents instead of worrying about the words. She set to her task quickly, but her mind was elsewhere.
She had no idea where this “Redcliffe” was. There were elves and mages and weird plants that were entirely unfamiliar. She couldn’t read the language, she couldn’t walk right, and she didn’t have any clothes.
Just how was she going to get home?