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“You’re paranoid. I saw the archdemon in the flesh in the Dead Trenches, and it didn’t know I was there. It didn’t see us through a dream,” is what Avrian is about to say to Alistair, right before the screeching of darkspawn hits their ears and everyone in camp is awake and on their feet, fighting.
Avrian’s nerves and senses are frayed after so long in the Deep Roads, and he thinks, as he smacks a shriek about the head with his bow, that must be why he didn’t sense the darkspawn sooner. He spent so long sensing them everywhere that he went numb and he hasn’t had long enough to recover. They’re supposed to know, he’s supposed to be able to keep his friends safe, nowhere is safe but he should at least know –
“Lethallin!”
This is a nightmare. That voice croaking for him, coming out of a ghoul, pale eyes and tattered rotting skin gone gray, far worse than the ghoul he met in the Deep Roads, this can’t – “Creators, no,” Avrian whispers, because he has prayed and prayed but this is no miracle.
“Don’t look at me!”
But Avrian has spent all of Tamlen’s life looking after Tamlen, chasing after Tamlen; and even now when his brother runs, Avrian follows.
He can’t run like he did, bolting across the camp dodging around the hahrens; the taint has slowed him, brought him to a shamble, and Avrian catches him easily, knocks him down like they’re children wrestling, about to be scolded for being in the way. Tamlen shoves him away, scrambles up, but he doesn’t run because he knows he can’t, Avrian has always caught up to him to pull him out of trouble or get dragged into it. “Don’t – I don’t want to hurt you, Avrian.”
“Tamlen, Tamlen,” Avrian says, and he takes a step forward, and Tamlen moves back.
“Stay away!” he screeches. The sound sends a shiver down Avrian’s spine, a shriek, like the darkspawn, but he isn’t, he is ghoul-elf-creature-brother Tamlen.
“We can help,” Avrian says, hands raised, reassurance, I will come no closer like they’re children and Tamlen nicked a book from the Keeper and Avrian has been sent to retrieve it, approaching Tamlen cautiously before the boy bolts, giggling, a game, and in moments he and Avrian are on the ground together laughing and Avrian has the book and takes Tamlen by the hand and leads him back. “Lethallin, I can help –”
“You can’t,” Tamlen tells him, stubborn, they always argue, Tamlen has one idea and Avrian another. For all their differences that is why they drew together, thick heads the hahrens said, better for them to butt up against each other than anyone else. “The song,” and he chokes on his words, on his guttural voice, “is too loud. It wants me – make it stop. Stop it!”
“You can’t be asking this,” Avrian says to filmy blighted eyes like his own, vallaslin that once mirrored his own before the familiar face of a brother became hollow and bony and rotten, and the voice that answers him is almost too hoarse and broken to be recognizable.
Almost.
“Then I’m sorry,” Tamlen replies, “that it had to come to this,” and he punches Avrian in the face.
Avrian’s instincts – I am a Grey Warden under attack by a darkspawn –respond before anything else, knife drawn and slashing, and he leaves a bloody gash across Tamlen’s stomach before he realizes what is happening. “No!” he cries, mind and heart forcing his muscles to uncurl, drop the knife to the ground, even with his senses still screaming in the base of his skull about darkspawn. But Tamlen is not one of the talon-bearing mindless beasts that needs to be killed. When Tamlen was three Avrian was six and Tamlen took his hand and dragged him away from the halla to go play with the other children; when Tamlen was nineteen Avrian was twenty-two and Tamlen clapped a hand on his shoulder and together they ducked in a cave; when Avrian is twenty-three and dead tainted walking Tamlen is twenty dead tainted walking, but even clawing at Avrian’s face Tamlen’s hands are still the same hands that badly fletched arrows next to Avrian when they were seven, ten, knocked one to a bow and shot it down the gullet of a demon-bear in that cave when they were nineteen, twenty-two.
Tamlen’s second punch lands heavy on his cheekbone, and Avrian lets him swing at him again and again, like they are children and Tamlen is angry and needs to throw it at someone and that someone is Avrian who probably let him get in trouble with Keeper or sold him out on on a plan that was too reckless. The next punch that connects lands true, squarely on his nose, shattering, and Avrian feels the force behind it, nothing held back, a taunt, a dare, a desperate plea, strike me down for this, kill me, lethallin, please.
Avrian has spent too long keeping Tamlen alive.
“Fenedhis, lethallin!” Tamlen snaps, and Avrian can hear his brother still beneath the taint. “You – stubborn – halla-shit – ”
Stubborn; isn’t that what Duncan called him when he refused to leave the clan, when he insisted bitterly that with no body there was still a chance to find Tamlen if only the mirror hadn’t been broken, if only, if only? Avrian has spent too long insisting that his brother is not beyond saving to listen to anyone who says it, even if it is Tamlen himself. Hasn’t Tamlen always made rash reckless choices, hasn’t Avrian always come running after him to save him from those choices? Avrian takes his hand and leads him back, every time.
“Let me go,” Tamlen whispers, anger at Avrian evaporated as quick as it always has, and he can’t stand straight, hunched under the ugly pain of his own tainted blood. Avrian remembers, faintly, foggily, the trip to Ostagar, the taint eating him alive.
He tastes his own blood on his lips when he answers, feels another sharp burst of pain through his broken nose. “I can’t.” Avrian has spent too long clinging to his brother’s ghost to not cling to him when he finds him. He lets Tamlen bloody his knuckles against his bloody nose again.
“Avrian!” someone shouts, from somewhere that might as well be miles away, for all the world is just Avrian and Tamlen. He thinks it’s Alistair, his shemlen brother, yelling for him, but what arrives first is a flurry of ice, icicles like daggers that tear through Tamlen in moments, leaving the ground slick with frost, red, and Avrian’s knees give way and he hits the ground at the same time that Tamlen’s body does. More bloody scratches mar his stomach, his neck is torn open, and Avrian thinks one tore through his heart, turned it out on the ground the same as Tamlen’s blood.
“You foolish – are you hurt?” Morrigan is here, turning Avrian’s face up to look at her, and he closes his fingers around her glowing hand and pushes it away. Let him bleed, let him bruise. “What has possessed you to—”
“What was that?” Alistair is here now too, and Avrian looks up at him and Morrigan through the darkness, the two who have been with him longest, been at his side too long to hear every prayer, every utterance of sad foolish hope – stubborn – “Was that – someone?” Alistair adds hesitantly, having seen now the body, seen that is proportioned more like a man than a monster.
“Tamlen.” Avrian lets go of Morrigan’s hand and crawls forward to his brother’s side, closing the distance that has separated them for so many months.
“Tamlen?” Alistair repeats, and Avrian wants to scream at him, give him silence, let him grieve, don’t make him explain. “But he was – oh.”
Oh. That’s it, all the realization is to Alistair, that Avrian was right. Alistair looked at him with pity on his face like Avrian was a deluded fool for holding onto hope, Avrian was right there was no body he’s not dead, Keeper, you can’t stop looking! “Oh. Maker, I am – so sorry.”
“Ir abelas, lethallin.” Avrian’s lips stick with blood and he bows his head over the sickly gray corpse, black veins stark against fallow skin. The Joining isn’t a cure, Avrian screamed when he found that out, he’d been dragged away from his clan and used as a soldier and all he’ll get is an early grave. Avrian and Alistair are dead men but not this soon, it didn’t have to be this soon – stop saying he’s gone! Avrian screamed at Duncan and his voice cracked from progression of the taint even then. Much of the time between the mirror and Ostagar is indistinguishable from a fever-dream in memory but Avrian remembers tasting blood as he kept yelling, if you didn’t break the mirror –
“I wish we’d never found that cave,” Avrian whispers, too little too late. “I’m sorry, Tamlen, I’m sorry.” He wipes the blood off Tamlen’s cheeks, trying to pull from his memories and place Tamlen’s face, white with crisp vallaslin and sharp blue bright eyes, overtop of the twisted maimed ghoul.
The grass beneath them is dead, their campsite littered in darkspawn corpses. The ground is blight-scarred, Avrian can sense it in the stillness, scorched broken land like Ostagar and Lothering and the Wilds. No tree will grow here; no tree will grow on Tamlen’s grave. The mirror took everything from them; they lost clan and life and the blight hands them final indignity in death. The clan held a funeral, Avrian knows, he didn’t stay for it because he knew Tamlen was not dead and a funeral without a body is useless. Somewhere in the Brecilian Forest they will have planted a sapling for Tamlen. They gave him a corpeless grave, and now here is Avrian with a graveless corpse. It’s that, that final twisted mockery, desecrated death, failing Tamlen in life and death both, that rips through Avrian like Morrigan’s ice ripped Tamlen apart.
He screams.
He screams, doubled over his brother’s corpse, until he has no breath left in his lungs, a faint croak out sound from his throat. His next breath hurts and he lifts his head to the sky and screams, five months of grief held back by hope bursting forth in a howl. The sound echoes through the night after he’s stopped, choked down a sob and another breath, and another, and another, and now he breathes so fast that no air has made it into his lungs, that his next scream is a shredded cry from an aching throat. He wants to tear it out, take back every prayer he ever made for Tamlen’s life – Tamlen deserved more than wasting away to a shell that had to bait his brother to kill him. Tamlen deserved more than this cruel joke, the Dread Wolf’s joke, a prayer answered at a price too steep.
He doesn’t know who to yell at, who to curse. He never prayed to Fen’Harel, but Falon’Din, Mythal, to blame them (why did you not claim him quickly if you must have claimed him; why did you not protect him)or himself or Tamlen (why did I not drag you from the mirror, from the cave; why were you so stupid). The realization that Duncan did the right thing by destroying the mirror is a cold one; Avrian still does not feel inclined to forgive him for it, not when there are so many other wrongs.
Avrian is alone, now. Alistair and Morrigan have retreated, given him space; Morrigan left a few blue wisps hanging in the air, casting him and Tamlen both in their pale light. Avrian has been alone, since the first time Tamlen was taken from him; a brother without his brother, then an elf without a clan, then a warden without an order. In the quiet, when his ragged breathing evens out, he hears whispers; presumably Alistair, presumably explaining. There is nothing left for him here but a blighted body; to get up and walk away makes him no longer alone, returns him to his odd misfit clan-and-army of shemlen and others stranger, but there he will face their pity, their hollow comfort. They only ever knew Tamlen’s name, Avrian’s scant stories; tonight, Avrian would still be alone among them, the only one to carry the grief and the anger.
They can pick their camp up out of the darkspawn blood and bodies, spend the rest of the night too on edge to sleep discussing how best to protect themselves, set up wards and traps in the future, plan. Avrian will stay here, spend the rest of the night screaming and raging, picking up branches and the dead blight-ruined forest to make a pyre and burn Tamlen like he’s a darkspawn or a shemlen. Making life from death,Alistair said of the Dalish funeral rites, and Avrian said yes, it is. But this blighted land does not need further ruin; nothing tainted should be buried, not even an elf who deserves to be.
He drags dead brush back to Tamlen to find that the others have added to his pile. Oghren seems to have tried to outdo everyone by finding the biggest piece of wood beyond all sense and practicality for making a fire, and Fen’Falon surely has made his piece more difficult to set alight with his slobber, and Sten bluntly asks why this empty shell merits any concern, and Leliana prays to her Maker and Andraste, and Shale only drops a few crunchy dead leaves with a muttered comment that Avrian is glad he doesn’t catch; but they are here, and so are Zevran, arranging logs in hands gloved in Dalish leather, and Alistair who knows what Avrian’s people do with their dead says sadly that he wishes they could do better, they can fight darkspawn and the archdemon but they can’t purge the taint from the ground and let life reclaim it, and Wynne and Morrigan who set the pyre ablaze from both sides after Avrian has hoisted Tamlen’s body onto it. He is too light, wasted away by the taint, or Avrian has gotten stronger; either way, more distance between them. Avrian knows he should not be able to lift Tamlen so easily (nor Tamlen him; they tried, twenty-two, nineteen, laughing at each other, Merrill laughing at both of them).
Morrigan stands with him longer than the others, silent but still there, watching Avrian watch the flames. In the morning, with the sunrise, she tells him he looks terrible and sloshes some water in his face to tell him to clean the blood off; she insists on healing his black eye and cracked nose, but he doesn’t let her straighten it back out to the way it was before she heals it. She offers him, from her belt (and were this any other day he would tease her over the fact that she carries it close), the golden mirror, to examine what his face looks like now; besides the crooked bump, there is a scar across the bridge of his nose, and he wonders whether Morrigan left it purposely for him or whether it’s because she simply isn’t as talented in healing magic as Wynne. Either way, he welcomes it.
The two of them gather up the ashes, dead wood and bones all, and Avrian closes his hands around his brother and thinks, I can’t.
Andraste’s ashes have a magical guardian who can stare down into Avrian’s soul and know the ashes that he carries are of someone as beloved to him as Andraste was to the Guardian. You have carried this guilt for too long, a specter wearing Tamlen’s face, bright and whole, tells Avrian. Leave it behind. I wish you well, my brother. We will not meet again. Avrian finally cries, forehead against the stone of a temple that belongs to a god that isn’t his. He wonders if Andraste’s ashes could heal the taint, could have saved Tamlen, could save him and Alistair; he wonders how the Guardian thinks he could set down this guilt so easily.
When they return to Redcliffe, Zevran raises an eyebrow and tells Avrian not to get the pouch of Andraste and the pouch of Tamlen confused. Morrigan chuckles, and Avrian laughs half horrified half amused. Is this letting go, taking the specter’s words to heart, or simply that his sense of humor has simply been irreparably twisted by his new company? Zevran sloughs off pain with a laugh; Avrian thinks now the joke means to comfort, not hurt, and he wonders when he grew fond enough of this assassin to ascribe the most charitable explanation rather than assume the worst.
They pass by the Brecilian Forest on their way back to Denerim. Avrian finds the tallest tree and scales it (he hasn’t since seventeen, fourteen; a branch snapped beneath Tamlen’s feet and dropped him twenty feet down, leaving him with a broken leg that Keeper Marethari didn’t heal immediately because there was a lesson to be learned from it). The bird beside him is suddenly Morrigan, and they stand there in the sky above the canopy of leaves. Morrigan makes a storm in her hands, wind that picks up with the wind around them, and Avrian opens the pouch and tosses ashes to the sky. Bits cling to his hands, his rings (one from Keeper, one from Morrigan, the living who he still carries with him), and he scrapes it off and lets the wind carry Tamlen away.