Chapter Text
Honestly, when Alec first heard of the Inquisition it’d been his natural inclination to go and check it out. The family learned about it during a visit into town. All about the giant hole in the sky, the destruction of the Conclave, Divine Justina’s death, and someone called the Herald of Andraste. However his parents, who he dearly loved, and his grandparents, who he also dearly loved, had just gotten him back from the mayhem that was the Circles falling apart. So he decided to stay.
The Circles breaking was probably the best thing that had ever happened to him. He loved his magic dearly but being cooped up in the Ostwick Circle for years upon years drove him up the wall. Not enough to break out into demons, but still he felt like something would end up getting broken.
Possibly a wall.
Or a head.
Something.
He’d never done very well being cooped up and he’d spent years being cooped up with the threat of one wrong nose wiggle and bad shit would happen to him. To put it mildly.
The tranquil were creeeepy.
Thankfully his parents weren’t the sort that wished to have nothing to do with him, and his uncle managed to do one of those things he did, so Alec had some contact with the outside world. On his own quiet moments, Alec admitted it was a pretty ingenious system. The world outside was so terrified of mages that their family rarely wanted anything to do with them - to the point of disowning them - and since their family rarely wanted anything to deal with them the mages got cranky or upset or tended to cling to one another or hate those rare few that did have people with contacts on the outside world…
It was messy.
Home suited him a lot more even if things were a bit smaller than he recalled- he’d been eight when his magic manifested by setting fire to a barn in town – but it still was home. Parents, grandparents, minus his uncle. But Uncle Taliesin never stayed at home very much anyway enjoying being a wandering bard too much. Every so often his uncle visited him at the Circle, despite protests from the templers. The head enchanter forced them to allow it. Alec didn’t know how he managed it, but he did. He even managed to get it so others could have families visit as well.
Uncle Taliesin was good at those sorts of things.
He was a bard after all.
The second time Alec heard of the Inquisition it came from a letter written by his Uncle Taliesin who informed him that he somehow managed to become its leader; the Herald of Andraste and Inquisitor that they’d all heard about. The family sat around in quiet shock after Alec’s grandmother read that part as they tried to reconcile the idea of Taliesin, the generally good natured peaceful man fighting rogue mages and templer rogues, destroying demons, and generally becoming one of the most powerful men alive who the entire world’s survival based on.
Not only that but the man who closed the hole in the sky.
With magic.
Uncle Taliesin couldn’t do magic.
That was Alec’s thing.
Alec got enough magic to compensate for the lack of magic in the family since they left Tevinter four or five generations ago.
Still, there wasn’t a reason for Uncle Taliesin to lie and they had other people come through confirming the stories. He still helped people he could. He was going to save the world from demon Tevinter Thing. They talked about his kindness, his humor, and his fierceness in battle. The last didn’t make any sense. While he was good with knives, Uncle Taliesin never fought anyone, preferring to just talk to people.
He certainly never killed anyone.
Yet the stories were full of him slinging magic around and killing people.
Also that he was in a relationship with a Tevniter mage.
Which the family found almost as unbelievable as the killing.
The first letter they got about him and the mage was quite frankly the sappiest and incoherent letter he’d ever read from his uncle. No one knew what to make of that one. His uncle was a bard. Bards didn’t do incoherent ramblings. Uncle Taliesin didn’t do relationships either. But there was a three page letter about this Tevinter mage that Uncle Taliesin was apparently madly in love with.
After writing letters back and forth with his uncle, Alec came to a very simple decision: he wanted to help. While the decision was simple, the letting him go and do so wasn’t. His uncle said he shouldn’t. His parents said he shouldn’t. His grandparents said he shouldn’t.
He decided he should.
Sneaking away one night, he went. It wasn’t too hard to sneak out, he was rather good with fade magic; fade stepping out for a while with a bit of haste. Leaving a note didn’t stop him from feeling a little bit guilty, but he needed to do this.
So he told himself.
It could just be that he really didn’t want to stay at home; it was just as bad as being in the circle.
Also it was boring. Being on a farm was boring. He missed all the people in the circle, if not the circle itself.
By the time he reached Skyhold, Alec seriously started to doubt the wisdom of his decision to try and join the Inquisition. Walking through the gates, however, made it quite obvious that the time to turn back was long gone. After talking to some people about how to meet the Inquisitor he learned if he wanted to talk to his uncle he’d needed to make an appointment.
Which seriously amused Alec.
For most of his life his uncle had to make appointments to see him, now he had to make an appointment to see his uncle.
What he wanted to do first though was get something to eat. The food on the road had been abysmal at best and completely unrecognizable at worst. The tavern, the Herald’s Rest, beckoned him like a desire demon. Running his fingers through his hair in a futile gesture to make it look nice he pushed into the tavern.
Noise greeted him, loud boisterous noise mostly coming from the corner of the tavern where a massive quanari sat with a group of humans and elves. The Chargers,
Alec realized. The were in quite a few of his uncle’s letters. Alec didn’t really believe him, really.
But there they sat. Real as life. Really.
If that was true, then the rest might be true…
His eyes flicked across the tavern as everyone else looked at him, the usual new comer stare before they mostly went back to their business. The qunari… the Iron Bull, wasn’t it? Stared at him a bit longer than most, the one eye narrowing a little bit, probably taking in the fact Alec carried a mage’s staff but didn’t wear robes. Alec never liked them much and with a friend cobbled together a light armor set that was heavier than what most mages wore, but still light. A new mage, a strange mage with a passing resemblance to the Inquisitor (which he knew he had) would be something that would get him noticed. At least by someone like the Iron Bull.
If his uncle’s stories were right.
Ignoring the Iron Bull and the Chargers, he walked over to the bar and sat down at one of the empty seats and ordered a beer, not really caring what it was exactly because it would probably taste horrible like every other tavern he’d been in.
It smelled like it.
The first sip proved him absolutely correct. It tasted something like piss and he wouldn’t be able to stop drinking it either. Weird how that stuff worked.
A shadow hung over him as he contemplated the strangeness of beer and looking up Alec tilted his head back even more as the Iron Bull stared down at him.
“Um. Can I help you?” he asked, not really sure why the Bull decided to hover over him. Sure he did look unusual but lots of unusual people must have come in here. Like the Bull himself.
The Bull sniffed a bit. “You’re new,” he said.
“As are a lot of people.”
“You looked like you recognized me.”
“Erm. My uncle’s here. He wrote about you. A lot about you and the Chargers. Good things, mind you. I didn’t really believe him, but now that I see you, I can definitely believe that you can cleave a man in two with one swing.”
The man looked pleased at the description of himself, “Who’s your Uncle?”
For a moment Alec thought about lying but decided against it. He was going to be announcing himself to his uncle so everyone would know eventually. Lying wouldn’t really do much. “The Inquisitor.”
“You’re the nephew?”
Slightly alarmed, Alec asked, “The ‘nephew’? What do you mean by that?”
Sitting down next to him, large arms nearly cutting off Alec’s view of the rest of the room and making him feel rather small, the Iron Bull said, “He talks about his family a lot including his nephew, a mage who had a knack for fade and fire magic.”
“Ah. Good things, I hope?”
“Yeah. Mostly. Not too sure about the rabbit incident.”
Alec’s face turned bright red, from his neck to the tips of his ears. “I can’t believe he told you that story.”
“He told everyone that story one night at Wicked Grace.”
With a sigh, Alec banged his head against the bar top. It felt good, if slightly sticky and smelled of something that he couldn’t place and really did he want to place it.
“Lovely.”
“I’m guessing it’s true then.” The Bull’s hand slapped onto his back, sending his nose driving into the bar a bit more. “Come on, why don’t you grab your drink and come sit with me and the Chargers. They’ll be delighted to actually meet you.”
“Yeah. Sure…” Why not?
Taking his questionable beer, Alec followed the Bull over to his corner and his group of mercenaries.
“Boys, we’ve got the star of the boss’s rabbit story right here.” Was the Bull’s introduction, sending the blush back onto his cheeks even if it wasn’t as bad this time.
“Is that true?” A dark haired elf with knives - Skinner then – asked him.
“Yeah. Unfortunately.” Next to her sat a blonde elf with her own staff or bow as he was told she called it, which made her Dalish. The shorted haired man in armor who wore a bit of a grin would be Krem
“Hah, I knew it.” Krem said a bit of a Tevene accent lacing his words. Then he held out his hand. “Krem.”
“My lieutenant.”
“Alec. That nephew, apparently.” He took the hand in a firm grip before getting pulled into a chair between him and the Bull. Barely getting himself situated and introduced to the others, the Chargers started pelting him with questions about his uncle.
Yes, he really was the bard known as Cricket. No, he never fled a Circle. Or had some sort of hedge mage put a spell on him that contained his magic. Yes, he had enchanted – with just his voice and charm – a duchess into spending the night on the town with him. Yes he had performed in the Imperium several times. No, he really was allergic to onions. Yes, he did have a pet nug for three weeks when he was little…
During it all he got his drink down and was given a second one of something stronger than the first one. Another blonde elf (Sera) joined them. When she found out who Alec was she said, “So you’re Teeny Inky?”
“Teeny Inky?”
“Well you’re not Inky, yeah? But you look little bit like him. Teeny weeny. So, Teenky Inky.”
“Alec is just fine.”
“Course it is! Teeny Inky,” she said, slapping him on the back. Was slapping people on the back a thing here? “You a mage like him?”
“Yeah…?”
“You’re not going to go all freaky demons, are you?”
“… No?”
“Good, cause otherwise I’ll shove an arrow up your arse.”
Alec didn’t ask about that, instead he changed the subject to get answers about what his uncle had been up to while at the Inquisition. The Chargers, Sera, and the Iron Bull were happy to fill him in on that.
The third beer ended up in front of him when the tavern door opened again and everyone went completely silent for a moment. Looking up to see why, Alec saw his Uncle Taliesin walk through.
He looked… different.
His gaze swept the room with a tenseness that Alec had never seen before, looking for something, threats maybe? And the clothes; they weren’t clothes really. He wore armor, real armor like Alec wore. Cleaner than Alec’s. Far nicer. Clearly made to fit him. Never mind the mage’s staff on his back. But not the civilian’s clothes Alec last saw him wearing. The relaxed, calm presence he always had was replaced by a determined air of ‘listen to me’ that Alec’s father sometimes got. The commanding stance.
Their eyes met and Uncle Taliesin went from sweeping the room for interesting things to Not At All Happy.
Alec slumped in his chair as his uncle stalked over to the table, slapping his hands on the table with a growl. “Alexander Raven Troven, what in the name of the Maker are you doing here?”
No. His uncle was not happy.