Work Text:
Interview with Alina Crendelle (colloquially known as Widow Crendelle), 91-year-old resident of Denerim’s Alienage. Transcribed by lay-sister Lorinda Matthews in 9:32 Dragon for the book Denerim’s Hero.
With annotations by Kallian Tabris. Learn to hide your valuables better, Sister Lorinda!
They say you’re asking for stories of the Hero of Ferelden. Well, I’ve stories for you, and I doubt you’ve heard any like mine. I’ll speak the truth, not like the liars and flatterers who’ve bent your ear and taken your coin.
I don’t even want your coppers. What would I spend them on? I’m 91 years old, and everyone who’s ever loved me is dead or taken from me. I want nothing and can lose nothing.
Everyone talks about the Hero like she walks on air. These days, no one can say a bad word about her! But she’s as common as any elf. More so, if you consider her mother.
Good old Widow Crab Apple. They say her husband died just to get a moment’s peace from her tongue.
It’s a pity, what happened to Cyrion Tabris. His mother passed away on the birthing bed and his father passed away a few years later of cough. At 11 years old, Cyrion became father and mother to his eight siblings. He worked like a dog to provide for them. Got hisself an apprenticeship to a local human carpenter who was always trying to grope me, the prick.
Cyrion was good friends with my eldest, Gertie. Wait. No, I had a son first. A blonde son.
Eh? Where was I? Gertie? Yes, my eldest and only. I hoped Gertie and Cyrion would be matched as they grew older. She was sweet-tempered and kind. He was responsible and hard-working. They would have made such lovely babies! I was always dropping hints to our hahren, Valendrian, who was my cousin’s husband. I was sure I had my Gertie’s future all sewn up.
Then Adaia Risalla came to Denerim.
They say she was on leave from guarding a caravan, for she worked as a mercenary. They say she came into the shop where Cyrion worked to ask his master about bows. They say Cyrion took one look at her and fell head over heels.
What a disaster! For him to love a mercenary. A killer, too, I don’t doubt! All my plans laid to waste. Gertie couldn’t hold his attention anymore. All he did was count the days until Adaia returned from her next job.
Two years later, Adaia had fully ensnared him, and Cyrion begged the hahren to arrange their marriage. Hahren Valendrian couldn’t even speak to Adaia’s people, since they lived in Rivain. How can you trust someone if you don’t know their people?
But I’m no fool. It was greed that ruled Valendrian’s heart! Adaia brought us coin, you see. She could earn more with a bow in a month than I could as a cook for Lord M----’s estate in a year. She was always tossing coins to beggars or the orphanage or the children. Trying to buy our good opinion! Hmf!
Yeah, Mum was a real monster.
Adaia’s money didn’t stop when the Hero of Ferelden was born and Adaia settled down. I’ll speak plainly: she was a thief! Some nobles own too much. She gave all us Alienage elves a bad name! Humans may call us vermin—pardon my language, sister—but we hardly need to act like it!
Blood will tell, as anyone knows. Kallian was always leading other children in pranks and mischief. She climbed our sacred vhenadahl tree! The nerve! Whenever you tried to correct her, you got sass in return. She had no respect for honest, hard-working, Andraste-fearing obnoxious old busybodies.
Her parents indulged her terribly, and her mother taught her a thief’s ways. It’s illegal for an elf to have weapons in the city, but laws were for mere mortals, not Adaia Tabris.
Her unrighteous ways caught up with her. One night, she was out past curfew to rob someone, and she got caught. The guards tossed her body in front of the Alienage gate, her throat cut, as a warning to the rest of us. A terrible thing, of course, but hardly a surprise.
You’d think this would get Kallian to see sense. I tried to talk to lecture her. But who listens to old women, eh? She was 14, and she knew best.
Adaia’s death shattered Cyrion. Gertie looked in on her old friend often. I’ll admit I hoped a spark might fly between he and Gertie, for she was widowed at the time. But she saw him only as a brother by then, the dear little hen. If she’d just been a bit more ruthless….
Ah well. Perhaps it was for the best. Who would want Kallian as a step-daughter? Her mother’s death loosed some desire demon within her. She flashed her eyes and other parts at everyone in the Alienage, tempting good men and women to licentious fornication! Someone’s jealous. And at night…well, you’d never catch her inside the Alienage during curfew. Off cutting purses and emptying poor boxes, I don’t doubt.
Our hahren, Valendrian, cared more for the Tabris name at this point than either father or daughter. It was he who brokered her marriage to that Highever boy, and her cousin Soris’s marriage, as well.
And then that mess happened at her wedding. She would have been eighteen or nineteen or so. I still remembered the moment the arl’s son walked into the crowd: voices dying, everyone going still. Our joy burnt to ashes. Kallian, her cousin Shianni, and those girls were stolen during the ceremony by Arl Vaughan and brought to his keep for sport. I sat with the mothers and grandmothers, holding them as they wept and prayed. Thank the Maker the humans didn’t see my Gertie.
The girls were rescued after Kallian slaughtered half the castle, including the Arl's son himself. As happy as we were to see the girls back…well. Nothing comes without a cost, doesn’t it? And whenever a price is paid, elves pay it double.
Because Shianni broke a bottle over Arl Vaughan’s head, he stole her and her friends to take their virtue.
Because Kallian killed Vaughan and his friends, we had Teryn Howe’s purge. Elves were beaten, killed, houses burned. Where do you think I got this limp, eh?
I’m not saying Kallian Tabris had an easy choice. But it seems to me, there was a choice that made things harder for all her people, and a choice that made things harder for her, her cousin, and a few young women. She made a selfish choice.
[A splotch of ink, as if someone held a quill pressed to paper for some time.]
Don’t look at me like that, sister. You think me heartless?
I had boys. Three boys, with blonde hair, like master M----’s. All human. My husband would drop them off at an orphanage in the dead of night, so no one would know they had elf’s blood in them. The master was fond of me when I was young. As I aged, he turned his attention to the new girls. I watched out for them. Tell him you’re bleeding, I said. Or you’ve got the pox. Hated getting sick, did master M---.
We’re women, and we’re elves, and we’ve suffered, and we’ll always suffer. We get on with it. We don’t grab a sword and go on a mad rampage. You put your head down, you get breakfast started, and you keep working. But Kallian never knew restraint, did she? Vicious little vixen.
I apologize for shocking you, sister. Wasn’t my intent.
Eh, the rest, well, everyone knows that part. The Grey Warden took her, and she came back in glittering armour with a mabari by her side. She’s the Hero of Ferelden. But I remember who she was. And now everyone will know.
I suppose master M---’s family might take offense to some of what I’ve said. Let them. What are they going to do to me? Burn my hovel? I'd welcome the flames to keep me warm. I’m an old woman. My Gertie is a slave in Tevinter, if she lives at all. My husband died decades ago. My sons…I never knew them. Human now, and living good lives. I pray for them every day.
Pray for us all, sister, in this sinful, fallen world. Pray for us all.
Addendum, 9:33 Dragon: Lord A---- M----, 97 years of age, passed away recently. His family reports that he was in agony for weeks, flesh so swollen and covered in boils that he barely looked human.
I cannot prove this has anything to do with the content of Widow Crendelle’s interview or its subsequent vandalism by Kallian Tabris. By all accounts, the Hero of Ferelden was in Amaranthine when Lord M--- passed.
I will say that sometimes the Maker is kind.