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Harritt takes his leave of the Inquisition shortly after it disbands. It comes as a surprise to many, though Dagna supposes she can see the reason behind the smith’s departure.
The Blight, followed by the war between mages and Templars ripping a great chasm across Thedas, then the sky opening up with Corypheus and the Rift. He’d lived through it all, and she supposed there were only so many swords the man could hammer before something gave. His wrists, or his heart.
Her father would have spat on the ground to hear such thoughts, and the memory of him leaves a warm but unsettled feeling in her stomach, heavy like too much honey.
With Corypheus gone and the Red Templars more or less eradicated, the question of Samson begins to gurgle beneath the surface. It’s not so much that anyone truly cares about him – and well he knows it – but in the absence of immediate threat, people begin to trot out their principles once more.
Some of the Inquisition’s prisoners are wanted for trial and questioning elsewhere. Some have families begging for their release and safe return. Samson has neither – Kirkwall’s newest Viscount content simply to bar the man from entry and forget him – though he has fewer enemies than one might think within Skyhold. Unlike many, he actually cooperated once captured.
Ancestors, he even named the rats in his cell.
So Dagna listens as words like justice and authority and freedom are repeated, in various tones, until the broken man is standing before her one day, his calloused hand extended in farewell.
“Not bad, fer a batty dwarf bint,” he smirks at her when she shakes his hand heartily. The insult lost its teeth years ago, now almost bittersweet.
“I’m sad to see you go,” Dagna says as he turns, studying the uneven angle of his shoulders, the way his body curls in defensively on the cavity left behind by his armor.
His lungs were so corroded with red lyrium they had to carve most of them away, stitch what was left back together with magic and her own knowledge of his twisted body. She had held his heart, a bruised and sickly thing, in her palms like a clump of ore.
It’s still in there, somewhere. Beating.
“After all, you’re some of my best work.”
She has spent so much of her life running towards where she wants to be, away from where others think she should be, it is strange to be the one left behind.
She had found the Undercroft surprisingly loud in Harritt’s absence. His grumbling used to ground her senses, a reliable drone to draw her attention away from the irritating scratch of her quill, the roar of the mountain’s waterfall barreling down into oblivion mere feet from her workbench.
It’s deafening now, the voiceless not-silence, since there isn’t so much as an anvil left to deaden the noise. Years’ worth of work, of study, experimentation and minor emergencies, reduced to so many crates on a cart.
She touched the Fade here, she recalls, hand trailing along the damp stone. Came as close to dreaming as any of her kind ever will, and isn’t that a sort of dream all its own?
Before she leaves, she cannot resist the habit of looking towards the shadowed corner of the stairwell. Harritt was always leaving his hammer there.
The silhouette stains of the unwelcome visitors she dispatched have finally washed away – as she had promised the Inquisitor that they would. All it took was some heavy rain and a bit of elbow grease, all of which was helped along greatly by a concoction from Ambassador Montilyet’s tailor used for getting bloodstains out of even the most stubborn silk.
That’s important to Dagna.
If she makes a promise, she keeps it.
She decides on the Grand Necropolis as her next destination and – hopefully – realm of study. The Nevarrans and the Mortalitasi aren’t typically all that welcoming of strangers, but the Inquisitor’s anchor and the Rifts have paved the way for a whole new understanding of the Fade. And while Dagna is keenly aware of all there is left to discover in the world, she also recognizes that her experience with the Inquisition, her insight, is just as valuable. An opportunity to teach, to share in the knowledge that she has covetously collected over the years – through challenge and chance – and in so doing, affect real change.
It’s a decision that ultimately leads to her first disagreement with Sera.
“Ugggghhh…” the elf groans, rolling her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Does that mean if I come visit I’ll be breeches-deep in all those posh nobles an’ corpse-kissers? A whole country of Cassandras? Dunno if I can handle that…”
“Oh, I probably won’t even notice. There’s just so much to learn, and if I can get a meeting with one of the Death Mages, then it’s almost guaranteed that I can finalize some of the lessons I didn’t have a chance to complete in Tevinter – ”
“What? Ew, no, you wanna muck about with dead people? It’s bad enough you’ll be squeezed together with all those high-an’-mighty folk who need servants to do everything for ‘em.”
The words come before Dagna has a chance to think them through, as so often they do, spilling from her lips like brook-water.
“Well, that’s not so bad. Servants can be pretty useful. Besides, haven’t all your meals been made by someone else, since you came to Skyhold?”
Sera gapes as though she’s been slapped.
“You’re – no, that’s – stupid!”
They reconcile, eventually. Sera returns to calling her Widdle and Dagna in turn makes no more mention of necromantic practices in the elf’s presence, nor of her participation in the very systems she despises.
The heaviness of her tongue reminds her of home.
The morning she leaves for Nevarra, it is brisk enough that her breath solidifies in the mountain air. She watches as the sun catches the suspended flakes of frosted exhalation, rainbow sparks glancing off as though from a faceted gem. Pretty.
It had rained when she left for the Frostbacks, when word of her place with the Inquisition had first reached her.
And the time before that, when she took her leave of the Stone, it had been humid and warm.
She barely remembers what she ate for lunch a day ago, so her retention of such insignificant details is amusing.
Then again, temperature is an integral aspect of smithing. Perhaps it only makes sense she would note such things.
“You remind me of someone,” the witch Morrigan says one day, when Dagna happens upon her while fetching herbs from the garden.
“Oh? Who of?”
“Another dwarf, who I met through the Warden. ‘tis a strange coincidence – if it is one.”
She never explains, and Dagna – despite her curiosity – does not ask. But she doesn’t mind. There’s something almost fond in the way that Morrigan looks at her, a curious warmth beneath the molten amber of her eyes.
It’s much better than how Solas regards her, as if she were an unnatural thing.
As if she were something to fear.
Her equipment, naturally, makes up the bulk of her luggage, but one of the few remaining staff at Skyhold inquires about the chest. It’s small, but heavy.
“Reminders, reasons, and resources!” she chirps in response, though really, it’s just paper and ink.
She’s not even sure why she bothers hauling it around anymore.
The first few weeks are easy. Reasonable. The Warden and their strange band of companions cannot possibly make the necessary miles from Orzammar back to the surface and the nearest Tower of Magi in such a short period of time, least of all when they clearly make the time to listen to regular folk like herself.
Well. Maybe not regular. But still.
So she busies herself with her father’s shop and her own small, secret experiments. Lyrium is such a volatile thing, and between the dust from Janar’s whetstone and the tiny broken shards glittering through the sawdust, she is able to test a few theories without raising suspicion. It satisfies the twitch in her fingers, directs her focus. She wants to have a solid path to follow when she gets to the Circle, a body of work with enough structure that she will be taken seriously as a scholar.
The uproar of politics throughout Orzammar is enough to keep her occupied otherwise – dusters and casteless staging coups, noble hunters becoming possible queens, accusations of assassination, House Aeducan and House Harrowmont at each other’s throats worse than nugs in heat.
But then the weeks actually do turn into months, and Dagna finds that her pulse spikes every time she hears the door to her father’s shop open. Hoping. Her palms sweat and her throat tightens and maybe this time – but it never is. Just another dwarf looking to have their armor polished, or a dent pounded out of a ceremonial shield.
They always ask the same questions, and she never knows how to answer. Or maybe she does, and it’s just that none of them know how to accept it.
Nearly a year passes, and Dagna finds herself spending every spare moment on the steps to her father’s shop. Waiting. Watching.
“I don’t think they’re coming back, sister.”
She looks up at the declaration, somber and apologetic and so clearly intended for her. It’s the strange surface-dwarf, the Andrastian. Brother Burkel.
“But I believe that is the will of the Maker,” he tells her with smile. “I was not sent here to be disappointed by false promises – and neither were you. I see that now.”
He never succeeds in bringing the Maker and Andraste in to Orzammar, but through his various connections with the Chantry and Circles above, he does manage to smuggle Dagna out.
The Circle is… amazing.
The food, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.
Dagna decides at first it’s simply that she has never had human food before, let alone food fresh from the surface. The mushrooms are different, the meat soft and greaseless, and the fruit altogether alien in its sweetness.
Varric tells her, off-handedly and many years later, that his brother complained of the same thing.
“Happens to all of us cloud-gazers, apparently. Something to do with the change in altitude.”
Given that there is very little in the way of precedent for a dwarf studying at the Circle, the amount of restrictions placed on her feels unnecessary. How can they determine what she should not be allowed to do or study or access before having determined what she can? An excess of caution on the Grand Enchanter’s part, perhaps, or maybe a deep-seated need for the mages to guard their secrets against the unknown. Either way, she’s often left in the care of the Tranquil.
Every question she poses, they answer.
The young dwarf cannot believe her luck.
The Templars regard her with a mixture of amusement and distaste.
She’s not dangerous, technically, at least not in the way that they’re used to. No matter how hard she tries or how much she studies, she cannot undo the reality of her blood – she is a dwarf, and dwarves can neither perform magic nor be possessed by demons as a result.
But it’s the fact that she does study, that she does try, which makes her dangerous in a way that they aren’t used to, and that’s almost worse. Some take pity on her – Dagna the Delusional, Dagna the Daft – just a droll dwarf playing pretend, ever-reaching for a power she will never harness. Others, the ones who volunteer to stand watch for the Harrowings, take no pains to hide the fact they think her meddlesome, perverse even.
She ignores their muttering, their open scowls.
She’s had plenty of practice.
“They are unfortunate creatures,” Marsen, one of the Formari, remarks.
“How so?”
He pauses for a moment, instructs Dagna to adjust her grip on the forceps she is holding above the workbench, and then the room is filled with the smell of evergreens and impossibly blue smoke.
“I do not remember my… alteration. I understand that it was painful, but the memory is either buried so deep or was stolen by the process that I cannot revisit that pain. The Templars will always remember, when they run out of lyrium. There is no Rite of Tranquility for them. They do not get to forget.”
Dagna’s first lover is a mage.
And a human.
And a woman.
The act itself does little for her – physically it might even be described as uncomfortable – but beyond the awkwardness there is novelty, a wealth of what ifs.
It helps that halfway through the woman does something that literally involves sparks.
The day she finds out how the Inquisitor has been locating those mysterious shards, Dagna hits her anvil so hard she cracks her hammer.
She thinks of Marsen, and realizes there will be no forgetting for her, either.
Harritt had asked her once whether she thought she might become a Paragon. She thought he’d been joking, but the crotchety man had actually been quite serious.
“You’re doin’ the likes of which no dwarf before you has ever done, aren’t you? Isn’t that what it takes?”
Yes, and no. It was hard to explain.
“You have to be a dwarf to become a Paragon. I’m… well, technically that’s not what I am, anymore.”
“What are you, then?”
A steward of Nevarra greets her at the city’s gate.
“I’m Dagna, the Arcanist.”
No further introduction is necessary.