Work Text:
They were lucky to have been raised where they were. Denerim had had its difficulties, but most of them hung above the alienage, past, like bloodied portraits of late rulers. Bann Shianni had been kind and clever. She’d arranged luxuries like clear water, real pencils, books, and better tools for farming. The Herald remembers having a new blanket every second winter.
Books had been their favourite luxury. The stories inside were like songs, but there was no bard to put the lute down. Books let you look again and again. And every time you looked, the heroes would always regain the hope they’d lost, always fall in love, always have light on their hair.
They would have liked to be in a book, very badly. But when they did good deeds and said smart things, nobody was going to write it down. Bann Shianni had been good, and there were no books about her. All the heroes had soft, round ears, and noses shapely as rose petals. They thought they’d read about a maleficar who looked like them, just the once, but they could have been wrong. Nobody wrote about them. Alarith wrote, they’d seen him. So where were the books?
Once, a runt of a boy had plucked their book from their hands, jeering.
"Get your nose out! You don't learn nothing good from shem books!"
They’d cried, because he was right.
They knew they wouldn’t be able to write at all: their words would puff themselves up to mimic what they’d read, and their descriptions would be poor, as they knew little more than dirt and birchwood. So they never tried. Instead they got betrothed, because Father told them to. They went to the Conclave because the new Bann told them to, because the Arl’d told him to. Loyally, like a pack donkey with its head down, they didn’t stray.
They’re thrown from the path regardless, cold and terrified, and the presence of a flat-eared apostate is the only thing reminding them that there’s no purges outside the alienage, there’s no purges outside the alienage.
When they approach the elf, later, he looks to them warmly.
"The Chosen of Andraste, a blessed hero sent to save us all."
And it sounds like the start of a song.