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It was silent in the Undercroft of Skyhold, apart from the roar of the waterfall, the crackling of the ever-present forge, and the soft scratch of Dagna's carving tool as she worked. She had half a brain on her project, and the other half composing another letter to her father that would go unanswered. She knew what he thought, anyway. She didn't need him reminding her. She wasn't supposed to be here. Dwarves weren't supposed to give up good positions in the smith caste to go to the surface and study magic. But that's what Dagna did. It was a path she'd had to create for herself, but it was the only one she could've walked.
“What the hell is that?” the Inquisitor asked. Dagna blinked. She'd been so absorbed in her work and her memories that she hadn't noticed Juniper coming in and sitting next to her. The Inquisitor smelled like pine needles and smoke, and just a little like the dull electric crackle of the Fade. Dagna felt a shiver spread through her body from her left side. Juniper would be fascinating enough, interesting enough, just for that mark on her hand. But she was a mage, too, who had studied independently at her Circle, subjects that Dagna had had to ignore to focus on other topics. She had a wealth of knowledge Dagna did not, something Dagna found very attractive. She found other things attractive, too.
Dagna nudged her project closer to Juniper and scooted over on the bench until their shoulders were touching. “Well, I was thinking the other day about some of the big 'don'ts' of runecrafting—don't introduce secondary materials too soon or too late, don't use the wrong kind of stone—things like that—and I realized that I didn't know the why behind some of those rules, they're just taught without explanation, so I've been going through and breaking a bunch of them to see what happens. This—” and she pointed at her project with her carving tool “—is a rune I've made with leather in place of the runestone and using a plant-based etching agent I developed myself. You aren't supposed to use organic materials to make runes—except dragon's blood, I guess, but only because everyone thinks dragon's blood is so special, but why should it be? Anyway. It looks like a bust so far. Completely inert.”
“What plants did you use?”
“There was a lot of elfroot sitting around, so the base came from that. Deep mushroom, blood lotus...I didn't want anything with a connection to the Fade, at least not this version. Some pond scum too, but I have this theory that pond scum isn't all plant material, that some of it is more animal, because...”
She talked uninterrupted for five minutes before she realized it and hastily wrapped up her explanation. Usually people stopped her before she went on that long, but Juniper never did. She just listened, always interested, always engaged. Dagna liked that.
“So it doesn't do anything?” Juniper asked. She reached toward the rune with her left hand and stopped. “Can I—”
“Sure,” Dagna said. “It's completely defunct so—”
But as soon as Juniper’s fingers touched the leather, there was a blinding flash of green. Juniper yelped in surprise. Dagna blinked, trying to clear the white spots in her vision. Smoke tickled her nose and she waved at the air to clear it. The rune, which had sat on the table like dead lump, was glowing orange. She looked at Juniper, who was gaping at the table.
“What's it supposed—”
“Fire rune," Dagna said, already pulling a junky old sword out of a pile on the floor. Carefully she applied the rune, willing herself to stay calm in spite of her excitement. When she was finished, she stood up and took on a fighting stance with the sword. Flames rippled up the blade from the hilt. She looked at Juniper, who was grinning widely.
Dagna said “We need more etching agent.”
It didn't look good when Sera walked in. There was a lot of smoke in the air, very Fade-smelling smoke, and a bright flash that made her see...things. Funny things. Not-good funny things. Her vision cleared enough to see her Widdle and her Tadwinks, and she kind of wanted to be mad, really, because they'd been down here for hours and she'd been bored without them, but they made it hard to be mad.
Juniper had her hair pulled back, different from usual, and from the black bits on the end, Sera figured she'd only done that after something had gone wrong. Dagna was down to her smalls and breastband, like she often was when she really needed to concentrate. A dozen or so weapons were lined up on the ground, with sheets of notes in Dagna's tidy printing and Juniper's wild scrawl. When they heard the door shut, they looked up at Sera, both with expressions of excitement barely masked by guilt.
Dagna blurted “The Anchor puts the Fade in things!”
Sera shivered. “Oo, Widdle, why'd you have to say that? I thought you might be doing something cool but now it’s all weird.”
“It's alright!” Juniper said. “It only works on stuff that doesn't have it but could, so anything alive is fine, because most living things already have the Fade in them a little bit—”
“Not helping!”
“—and almost all metals and stone are no good, I can’t just make stuff fade-touched, that isn’t what this is, but anything that used to be alive—“
“Not anything,” Dagna corrected. “The pine and cedar worked, but the birch was inert.” She nudged a bow on the floor with her foot. She beamed up at Sera, who felt a quiver in her chest. Andraste, that smile. “But do you get why this is so interesting, Sera? With the Anchor, we don’t need lyrium to make runes. Juniper can make them all by herself.”
“Dagna's been showing me the patterns, I'm starting to get the hang of it.” Juniper stepped around the weapons on the floor and stood beside Sera, shoving papers in her face with crude, asymmetrical rune tracings on them. She had all this light in her eyes that sent Sera's fingertips tingling. "I know, they're shitty," Juniper said, laughing. "I'll get it, eventually."
"They're brilliant, Tadwinks," Sera said, and wrapped her arms around Juniper and smooched her hard, ignoring the crumpled papers between them. Juniper mmmed in her throat and pinched Sera in the ribs. She shrieked and let go, getting back at her with tickles on her stomach. Juniper jumped back and stuck her tongue out at Sera.
They both looked at Dagna who had one hand covering her mouth, obscuring her enormous grin. "And you," Sera said, rushing at Dagna and lifting her off the ground, to Dagna's clear delight. Sera's heart fluttered as all of Dagna's smoosh settled in her arms. She stared up into Dagna’s face, hair loose, the sunset light making half her face shine. "You're the real brains around here, aren't you?"
"And the looks," Juniper chimed in.
"And the looks!" Sera took a deep breath, stuck her head between Dagna's tits and blew a raspberry. Dagna laughed and kicked Sera with her bare heels.
"We thought you might be mad, you know," Dagna said, "that we were down here all day, so we made sure to come up with a way to make it fun for you, too."
"Oh yeah?" Sera said, and bit her lip. "What kind of fun we talkin' about?" She waggled her eyebrows at Dagna.
"Not like that," Dagna said with a laugh. "Although—no, nothing right now anyway. But there is one other interesting thing Juniper can do with this stuff." She looked at Juniper, who smiled and lifted her left hand.
The weapons on the ground rose into the air. Juniper threw her hand up and the swords and bows clattered into the stone ceiling and fell to the ground. Sera yelped, twisting Dagna away from the clamor. "What the fuck! You can what...control stuff you've enchanted? What's fun about a bunch of floating swords. No, hang on—" She stared up at the ceiling, thoughtful. "I can think of three things."
Juniper scratched her chin. "I wasn't thinking swords, no—but, you know." She gestured at Sera. "Let's write those three things down. I was actually wondering, do you still have that Andraste statuette Blackwall carved for you?”
Sera set Dagna down. “Yeah? The one with the huge knockers?”
“Do you know,” Dagna asked, “what type of wood it is?”
“Pine?” She looked at Juniper, who was hopping over weapons to approach them. The corners of Sera’a lips crept up at the look on Juniper’s face: mischief, joy, and that spark of something that had made Sera fall in the first place, for someone who was a noble and a mage and still made Sera feel safer than she’d ever been.
“Would you be upset if it got broken?” Juniper asked, hopeful.
“For the right prank? Never.”
“Well,” Dagna said, pulling her shirt back on, “we are very curious about whether or not this enchantment could be stopped by templar abilities.”
Juniper felt Sera’s breath hot in her ear as Sera whispered “There he is.” They were in the stairwell that led to the Inquisitor’s chambers, stacked on top of each other to peek out from behind the door, watching Delrin Barris approach from the bottom of the stairs. Juniper had had him summoned with a lie about a meeting. It felt sort of mean to pick on him, she supposed, but of all the templars who’d kicked lyrium, his abilities were still the strongest. He was the best test subject. She’d make it up to him later.
Before he could make it further up the stairs and see them, Juniper nudged the statuette from its hiding spot in the rafters. It fell with a thump into a pile of sheets, and Delrin stooped to pick it up. The second his fingertips touched it, the fire rune activated and the statue was wreathed in flame. He jumped back, shouted, instinctively reached for his sword. The burning statue lifted slowly off the ground to hover at Delrin’s eye level, Andraste’s eyes and significant cleavage staring him down. He thrust out a hand, attempting to dispel, but nothing happened. (“Interesting,” Dagna whispered, quill scratching a note in her book.) Panicking, he tried again, and still got nothing.
“Pfft,” Sera said.
“Dellllriiiiin,” Juniper said, affecting a spooky, high-pitched voice. “It’s meeeee, Andraaaaaaste.”
“Taaaake off your troooouuuusers, Delrin,” Sera added, and Juniper choked on a laugh. She grabbed at Sera’s waist and Sera yelped, rolling off Juniper’s back, taking the other two down with her. In the giggling heap they made on the floor, Juniper felt kisses on her neck and fingers on her back and she felt something in her stomach that told her it was a forever moment. It was a moment that felt like a lifetime and she knew it and she would never forget every tiny sensation of it, ever.
Delrin picked up the statuette, now extinguished, and looked up the stairs at them. “Pardon me, Inquisitor, but what the fuck?”
They explained it to him, meanwhile pulling themselves off of each other. Juniper hopped down the stairs to stand beside him. He was looking at her with a weird smile. She knew him pretty well by now, but she couldn’t read that look.
“What is it?”
“You might not like it.”
She elbowed him in the chest plate. “Tell me, ass.”
“I wonder what Knight-Captain Perkins would think about you finally learning how to draw runes.”
Juniper felt her stomach drop, and her ears filled with taunts and jeers and a persistent roar. Someone took her hand and she blinked, and Sera was standing next to her, with a face that said she knew exactly what just happened. “What’s that mean, Tadwinks?”
“The templars at the Circle,” Juniper said, jaw tense. “They would tell me I ought to start practicing rune-making, since that’s….” She stopped. That was all she could say.
Dagna stood on her other side and looked up at her. “That’s what tranquil do.”
Juniper felt Sera pinching the inside of her arm, making the tender skin sting. Each pinch was a reminder that she wasn’t in the tower anymore, and she never would be again. She wasn’t who they’d meant for her to be, who anyone had meant for her to be. She was herself instead.
Juniper quirked a smile at Delrin. “It was Perkins who got you transferred, right? After you fought those other templars off for me?”
Delrin nodded, smiling. “It was, yes. I believe my crimes were disobeying orders, assaulting a fellow templar, and, of course, being too soft.”
“But with your sterling record, all you got was a transfer and a slap on the wrist.”
“I was lucky,” he said. “You can get a lot worse for being too kind.”
“And now, here you are.”
“So are you, Inquisitor.” He glanced between Sera and Dagna, both with their sides pressed to Juniper. “And I think you’re the luckier one, after all.” He bowed, and left.
“I’m sorry, Juniper,” Dagna said. “If I’d known, I’d have never—”
“Dagna.” Juniper bent down and pressed her forehead to Dagna’s, holding her soft face in her hands, breathing deeply the smell of the forge and lyrium and good, soft earth. She felt every inch of her body and she felt where she was. She felt here.
Dagna took her hands as she leaned back up, and she smiled up at Juniper. “We discovered some incredible things today, Dagna. And had a lot of fun, too.”
“But you know what would be more fun, right?” Sera asked, draping herself over Juniper’s back, making her spine tingle.
“Yep, sure do,” Juniper said, and she grabbed Sera’s thighs and hoisted her up. She stumbled. “Oh Maker, this isn’t going to last long.”
“Hurry up them stairs, then, Tadwinks!” Sera smacked her on the ass, and Juniper hustled them to their bed, Dagna following behind. Probably, Juniper assumed, getting an eyeful.
It was good. Juniper was here. She wasn’t supposed to be, but in spite of it all, she was.