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Chapter Text

To its credit, the six-eyed wolf stuffed in the back of my car looked like it was just as surprised as me.

"I'm going to assume that this is a dream," I informed the wolf, adjusting the rear view mirror and turning down Ari Shapiro. "Because the last time I drove to an agility trial, I definitely did not bring a giant nightmare wolf. The AKC frowns on that, for some reason."

"Welcome to Washington!" chirped my GPS.

I took a sip of coffee and gestured at my phone with the paper cup. "And now I've just transported an endangered species across state lines, which is probably several kinds of illegal. This better be a dream, because otherwise I do not want to deal with it today."

The wolf shifted uncomfortably in the crate that was several sizes too small for it and did not reply.

I pulled over at the next freeway exit, turned off the car, tugged up my mask and got out to lift open the back hatch of my little Honda. With considerable difficulty, the wolf managed to turn around and peer at me. I opened the crate door and extended my hand towards the rest area parking lot for his consideration as if it were a fine bottle of wine.

"Anyway, ar lasa mala revas, or whatever. Run free, Fen'Harel. Enjoy the rest of the night doing your…very important wolf things, I guess. I will work on having normal person dreams, but I am not optimistic."

The wolf blinked slowly, carefully extracted itself from the crate, stepped down out of the car and bolted away.

When I woke up, I found myself in a suspiciously familiar-looking dungeon with a glowing hand and a migraine.

"Fuck," I whispered, wincing at the sound of my own voice.

"Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now," growled Cassandra something something Alegria I-couldn't-remember Pentaghast.

"Can we use inside voices?" I whispered.

Cassandra lifted a fist menacingly. This would have gone over much more smoothly if they’d given me caffeine when I'd woken up.

"I, um, because I have no idea how I got here? And both of us would like to figure out what the hell happened. And this thing on my hand isn't exactly healthy."

"The thing on your hand. Explain."

"Long story," I said. "You know, the kind where nobody gets stabbed. Well, except by wolf teeth."

"You're lying!" declared Cassandra.

"She's delirious," said Leliana. "We need her, Cassandra." She turned to me. "What do you remember?"

"I remember.. a woman and....things chasing me. It was in the Fade, so maybe it was a dream?"

I guess it was close enough to the game dialogue, because they hauled me to my feet and dragged me outside to start the tutorial. My headache worsened slightly.

It suddenly seemed cruel somehow, game developers dragging their protagonists from place to place, putting living characters into situations where the hero would presumably die over and over. Sometimes they burned alive, sometimes shot by crossbows, sometimes downed in melee combat by terror demons.

I worried I would die permanently.

I had only ever played a rogue in Dragon Age, so I figured it was unlikely I would turn out to be a mage. Archery it was, then.

"Maker above, I hope they have left-handed bows," I muttered.

Fortunately, the starter bow turned out to be ambidextrous and I already knew the basics of archery. My Earth bow had been gathering dust in my garage for a number of years by that point, but let's stick to what's relevant. Sharp end of the arrow goes in the hurty bits. I knew where those were on a deer or an elk, not so much on a demon...or a person.

I would save the world one arrow at a time.

This was going to suck.

I couldn't help but stare a little at Solas, and he seemed to recognize that I recognized him. Fuck. I needed a distraction, stat.

"My name is Solas, if there are to be introductions."

" Lasa ar’an alas’nira aron fen’en , Solas," I said solemnly, praying to the author of Project Elvhen. I'd just asked if he wanted to do it like wolves do on the Discovery channel.

Mission accomplished. Solas' face didn't just go on a journey; it went full Joseph Campbell. I did a little mental fist pump to congratulate myself.

Wait. I was supposed to be attracting less attention from him, not more. Oops. Oh well. Might as well own it.

"Is that not a proper formal greeting? Did I pronounce it wrong?" With considerable difficulty, I managed to maintain a straight face.

"In most circumstances...no. It means.." Solas cleared his throat. He stood very still while he tried to collect himself. He sighed dramatically and visibly decided against translating what I had said into Common. “Nevermind.”

" Ir abelas , Ser Solas."

"You are Dalish, but clearly away from the rest of your clan," said Solas. "What brought you to the Conclave?"

Wait, I was an elf now? That was news to me. I decided to worry about it later.

"My clan probably sent me here, but I don’t remember the details. In all honesty, I can't recall much of my life in Thedas before waking up here. Have you crossed paths with the Dalish before?"

Solas began to rant about his encounters with "my people." I allowed him to vent, wondering if he had simply showed up to the Arlathvhen proclaiming "Greetings, I, Fen'Harel, have returned!" I'm sure that had gone over wonderfully.

When he finally finished his diatribe, I blew out a breath. "I'm sorry that happened to you, Solas. Nobody deserves to be treated like that."

He opened his mouth as if he had already been preparing to argue with me, then abruptly closed it and bowed his head for a moment, apparently thinking deeply. When he raised his eyes again, they shone with something unreadable. His expression finally settled on "slightly bewildered."

"Oh no. You're looking at me like I have Fen'Harel vallaslin."

Solas actually choked at that and stopped in his tracks.

I left him there and walked onwards, trying to check my pockets without drawing too much attention to myself. Although I was wearing an outfit appropriate to Thedas, I seemed to have retained a few items from Earth.

Via my rummaging, I discovered my phone, a Fisher Space Pen, a few pieces of dried beef liver and a dog toy made of an actual dead raccoon.

Great. Hopefully no one would see it and start pointing at it and accuse me of raccoon murder. Sighing, I stuffed everything back into my jacket pocket.

Ahead of us marched Cassandra and Varric. Both looked reasonably pleased with themselves, although Cassandra still appeared unconvinced that she was not hallucinating the entire day.

I could sympathize.

I allowed Roderick to do his thing and chose the mountain path in the hopes that we would be able to save the scouts. After climbing around three dozen ladders, I sat down for a rest.

Cassandra pulled her attention away from me to remark on what she considered marvelous scenery (besides the giant green hole in the sky, anyway.) It might well have actually passed for pretty on first glance, but once you looked closer, all you could see was more rocks, clouds and, of course, more mountains.

We continued on in relative silence until we came upon a clearing and a pack of demonic creatures attempting to murder two human women.

With no small amount of struggle, we defeated the Pride demon and stabilized the Breach. Success! Perhaps I could go home now.

" Taarsidath-an halsaam ,” I informed Solas dizzily from where I was laying on the ground. There was the scent of spilled coffee in the air. Or perhaps it was dirt, I wasn't entirely sure anymore. If the world could just stop spinning for a moment...

"Excuse me?" Solas said incredulously. Well, that answered that.

"You do speak Qunlat!" Upon my discovery, I tried to sit up and immediately passed out.

Chapter Text

The good news was that everybody spoke English, presumably because the games had been developed in Canada. The bad news was that even one's native language can become an insurmountable challenge when one is sufficiently stressed.

After stabilizing the Breach and waking up for the second time, I booked it directly to Solas' little hut, slamming the cabin door behind me and panting. Might as well get this over with; there was no way he wasn't already suspicious of me. Granted, our earlier interactions had been overshadowed by war cries and the threat of imminent doom.

"Please do not do me a murder," I said, saving us a lot of awkward pleasantries.

"You're awake!" said Solas, putting down his tome and standing up.

"Yes. Thank you for that," I said. "Please do not do me a murder," I repeated more slowly and eloquently.

"How are you fee--excuse me? 'Do you a murder?'" Solas looked me up and down and quirked an eyebrow. "Do you have reason to believe that I would murder someone?"

We stared at each other for a moment and there was nothing but flat-out panic blooming inside my chest.

"Yes. No. Wait. Just -- please do not do that. Specifically, to me. Do not murder me. Please. Sir. I mean, Ser."

I held up an index finger and paused, still trying to catch my breath from the run to his hut. "I know things," I proclaimed. Then, more quietly, I added, "Or at least I think I know things." It wasn't a guarantee that events would proceed here exactly as they had in the video game.

"And what things might you know, da'len?" Solas tilted his head, apparently deciding to humor me.

"First of all, please do not call me that. I am thirty-six. Which I recognize is not a lot in your frame of reference, but... Anyway, you hate tea, you love Wisdom, and I know your favorite animal. I'm pretty sure it is a wolf." I knew I sounded ridiculous as soon as the words left my mouth.

"A wolf. And what do you know of-"

"Specifically, a very large, very OLD wolf, with six-"

That got his attention. He froze. His entire demeanor darkened. "Explain," he said in a very quiet, very dangerous voice.

"See, this is why I asked about the murder thing!" I lowered my voice to match his. "Because you have done a non-zero number of murders in your very, very long life. Not that I blame you. They were probably justified."

Then I remembered Felassan. "Some of them, anyway," I added.

"You are talking nonsense," said Solas. "An argument for another day. Is there anything else you might wish to tell me?"

He waited.

I waited.

He waited.

I waited.

He blinked and let out a small sigh. "Very well. I will not 'do you a murder.' Now, explain."

"Ok, cool. Cool, cool, cool. You're Fen'Harel," I began.

"Just so," said Solas with deceptive calmness. "Now tell me about yourself."

"This is going to take awhile, so you might want to sit down. I'm…. Not from around here."

"Imagine you're watching a play in a theater," I said.

"All right."

"The play is interactive; the audience gets to decide how the story goes, to a certain extent. The script has multiple versions of each scene in it. Which version the actors perform changes depending on the decisions that you, the audience, make at certain points in the story."

"I think I am following. The audience effectively becomes the protagonist in the story."

"Exactly. In my world, the story of the Inqu-of the Herald of Andraste is the third in a series of plays about Thedas."

"So we are but fictional characters to you?"

"Not anymore, clearly. In short, I’ve watched these plays dozens of times, but being here is a different experience. And I'm not sure how reliable the narrator of any of them was to begin with. If the stories were accurate, you probably still think everyone in this Age is Tranquil, so you’re not really one to talk.”

"How… How could you know that?"

"You told me. You tell me? Well, the 'you' from the story does, anyway. It was part of a dramatic, heartbreaking monologue set about three years in the future."

“I…” said Solas blankly. “Go on.”

I frowned. "You made a lot of people cry, Solas."

He merely stared.

"There was very dramatic violin music," I emphasized seriously.

He didn’t seem convinced.

"It was sad!" I protested.

In the end, I think I managed to convey the essence of a choose-your-own-adventure story and my understanding of Solas' very important mission to do us all a BIG murder eventually. However, I despaired of being able to explain my own life to him.

To save myself a great deal of embarrassment, I would normally just claim to be a photographer and leave it at that. "Also, my dog is famous enough on Instagram that he has to pay taxes" tended to rapidly derail conversations in ways I found increasingly uncomfortable.

I had no desire to explain social media to the Dread Wolf. For all I knew, the Evanuris had been the original influencers and Elvhen Twitter had been the true cause of Arlathan's descent into chaos and destruction. That certainly seemed plausible to me. Besides that, as far as I knew, photography had not yet been invented in Thedas.

"I'm.. An artist," I said. "Sort of?"

"You are a 'sort of artist.'"

I scrunched my nose and raised my hands to clarify. "It's.. I don't know if I can explain it to you."

He frowned.

"Not," I continued, "because you are unintelligent, but because you lack the context. I'm not sure if anyone has invented it here. Although I think we might be able to, with some silver nitrate, salt and parchment..."

"You are an alchemist, then."

I snorted. "No, but I can show you how to square a circle." For the first time since I had revealed I knew his identity, he seemed uncertain. Like he wanted to ask me something, but wasn't sure he should.

"Yeah, so, let's save the integral calculus for later. I promise to get back to that. I mostly work in marketing. I'm not sure that has been invented yet here, either. I'll have to ask Varric about that, but I digress. Art."

"Art."

"Thedas has camera obscuras, right? Cameras obscura? Whatever. You take a dark room and you stick a tiny hole in the wall, and if the hole is just right, you can see what is happening outside the room on the wall and you can trace it onto paper. Follow like, solar eclipses and stuff."

"These techniques and instruments are familiar to me, da'len," he allowed.

"Oh good, we're on the same trol-nevermind. Imagine you have a special kind of paper that will sort of do the tracing for you because it reacts to light, and now make the whole room into a portable box you can carry around with you. We call this photography."

"Photography," he murmured thoughtfully. The word did not really capture the rather dizzying combination of mechanics and beauty that lay underneath the science of invention. "Ah. We had a similar form of 'art' in Elvhenan, though its use was… costly...and therefore rare. It has not been practiced since before the Veil was erected, to my knowledge. Best it remain forgotten, for it was a grisly business..."

"Uh. Oh. Yeah, not so costly where I come from. No, uh, slaves sacrificed or anything like that. I, um." I coughed. "I mostly take pictures of dogs."

Chapter Text

Having secured Solas' promise to not do me a murder (at least not an immediate one) I dutifully made my way to speak with Cassandra, Roderick and Leliana. Inside the Chantry, I passed by a mirror. Yup, that sure is my Lavellan. Great.

I really hoped "my" clan didn't come looking for me. More importantly, I hoped that I didn't manage to get all of them killed. I knew that I shouldn't send Cullen to contact them, but couldn't remember the rest of the quest chain. Oh well, that was a problem for future me.

I tried to sound as normal as possible as I received my history lesson about the original Inquisition from the Right and Left Hands of the Divine. As least as normal as a person who supposedly had amnesia and was also secretly neither Dalish nor an elf could sound.

Afterwards, I wandered over to the Singing Maiden to ask Varric about his Tales of the Champion. Hopefully I could glean some information about the current worldstate.

I hadn't had a chance to check out the sanitation situation, but I figured alcohol would be relatively safe. I procured a mug of ale and found Varric where he was seated by the fire.

He looked restless. I took a seat opposite him.

"Any chance you have a copy of Tales of the Champion I could borrow? I think I must have read it before, but I can't quite remember how the story goes."

"Oddly specific question, but sure thing, Lefty." He handed me a well-loved copy from his satchel and I paged through it while sipping.

Skipping to the last chapter, I discovered that Hawke had dramatically shanked Anders and sided with the mages, or so the text claimed. Flipping backwards through the book, I tried to see if I could find any mention of Hawke meeting Alistair. No mention at all of him could mean any number of things, but King, Warden or (hopefully not) drunk would tell me a lot about what was generally going on in Thedas.

Sure enough, it appeared Alistair was King of Ferelden. But also…

I spit out my ale, narrowly missing the coarse paper. "Queen Tabris?"

"Uh, yeah? Do you have a problem with that?"

"Alistair married the Hero of Ferelden, who, just to clarify, was an elf from the Denerim alienage?"

"Yeeess? There was some hand wringing among the nobles, but the public consensus was more or less that the King can marry whoever the hell he wants after ending a Blight. Officially, her title is more ceremonial than anything. She's a queen consort." His eyebrows drew down and he studied me carefully. "Are you feeling all right?"

"It appears my amnesia is worse than I thought."

Varric hmmed. "You know," he said casually, "You have an unusual accent for a Dalish elf."

My heart stopped. My brain froze. My skin chilled.

"I mostly grew up in a city," I said truthfully. "And besides, not all clans have the same accent." Hopefully that would help cover for my American English. Even though they had sort of retconned it in DA2, Lavellan still had the option of being voiced by Sumalee, and I had always played with her voi–

"You sure about that?" asked Varric, interrupting my thoughts.

"Umm… Why?"

"That doesn't sound terribly Dalish. Telling me where you grew up instead of which clan you’re from.”

I.... was not a good liar. "I'm not from around here. Let's leave it at that for now."

"You got it," said Varric, one side of his mouth pulling up into a smirk.

In retrospect, the first indication that something was terribly wrong should have been my outfit upon waking up in Thedas. I woke up in Dalish scout armor, not a mercenary coat.

The second red flag should have been the greenery around Haven and beyond. As my understanding had it, the Conclave had taken place in early autumn, but this looked closer to spring.

Thirdly, and much more obviously, it simply should not have been possible for a city elf to marry Alistair, unless this was somehow my own unique worldstate. Years back, I'd installed an Origins mod to bypass the race restrictions on marrying Alistair.¹ (It had been my first ever video game romance and I was devastated when he dumped me. Seven years later, when I finally played DAI... Well.)

Something finally awoke in my brain when I opened the special requisitions trunk in my cabin to find an aged leather backpack along with a handwritten note which said merely, "Enchantment!"

My suspicions were confirmed as I managed to fit item after item into the bag without increasing its heft. Oh. Oh, shit. My world was modded, and this was my life now.

I barely had time to contemplate what I remembered of my load order and consider the far-reaching implications of living in a modded world before we set out for the Hinterlands for the first time. Would the dracolisk mounts show up as wolves? Would we gather a disproportionate amount of Fade-touched materials and wreck the Thedosian economy? Would everything crash when we got to the Winter Palace?? Fuck. Me.

My most important (and much more serious) consideration was whether or not I would be able to cheat the system by crafting the skip combat potion. That might be useful, but less so if other people managed to get ahold of the recipe and use it on us. Mutually assured destruction was not my goal, and I wanted to err on the side of treating all of this as if it were real. Just in case.

I lay awake in my bedroll, mind spinning in circles, before finally falling asleep shortly before dawn.

If I had a nickel for every time the Dread Wolf appeared in my car, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it was weird that it happened twice.

It was night this time and I was driving south on I-5 in my little hatchback. I had just business-expensed a dinner at Panera, and it was shaping up to be a great weekend with my favorite dog club. Best of all, my elaborate daydream of ending up in Dragon Age hadn't been real.

"🎵 Woah-oh-oh-oh, it's always a good time, 🎵" I agreed with the radio. "Especially when you're not stuck in shitty old Thedas."

A large, furry black head appeared in my peripheral vision to my right, peering at me and then ahead through the windshield at the highway.

I screamed and swerved, narrowly avoiding slamming into a semi-truck I had been carefully passing. The wolf stumbled forward onto the center console, inconsiderately spilling my iced tea in the process.

"Jesus Christ! You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I yelled, keeping my eyes on the road. "I'm not even going to ask what you're doing in my dream, but if you could TRY not to get us KILLED while I'm driving a 2,500 pound vehicle at 73 miles per hour, it would be much appreciated."

"And you know what?" I added. "It isn't even entirely clear to me if dying here would make me dead-dead or just Tranquil. I wasn't going to ask about Felassan, because it didn't seem POLITE."

Fen'Harel visibly startled at the mention of Felassan.

"ALSO, I cannot express how much you do not want to be in this memory. I'm on my way to a lure coursing trial, and I'm pretty sure that coursing hounds are specifically contraindicated for the Dread Wolf in Dalish mythology. Do you want to keep your tail or not? Moreover, it's fucking rude to…"

I glanced over at him, but he was gone. 

1. This had unforeseen repercussions when I imported the save into Dragon Age II; Tabris was consequently referenced in the Codex as both King Alistair's wife and his mistress. If you like Piña Coladas… return to text