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Velanna insists, even after Avrian tells her she may die in the Joining. She is stubborn and strong, as benefits a daughter of the People, but she is desperate and she tells him, her chin held high, that she is not afraid to die. Avrian sees a woman who has lost everything, the shallow graves she buried her clan in and the gray blighted eyes of her sister. Avrian thinks he is looking in a mirror. He hasn’t, not for a long while. He doesn’t trust even the ones he knows aren’t tainted magic for the way they show his own eyes never recovered from the blight and his nose crooked from how his brother and his own blighted eyes dared him to kill him – but when he looks at Velanna he sees himself, diving into ambushes and perilous situations without fear of death. What does it matter if the body is killed when the one who inhabits it died long before?
“If this is what you want,” Avrian says, and he knows her answer is an empathetic yes before she says it. The words taste bitter as darkspawn blood, like a way to shrug responsibility for her death off of his shoulders. You want this, I’m only the man who gives you the cup.
He tells her, on the long walk back from the Wending Wood, all of the terrible things about being a warden that he can think of. He tells her how Mhairi died, how Daveth did; he tells her of the calling; he tells her of the ghouls he’s met, of Ruck and Hespith; and Hespith, oh, Creators have mercy on her still. He tells her of broodmothers. Her face looks ashen as he tells her of Branka, but her jaw clenches as she says, “If the darkspawn would do that to Seranni, all the more reason for me to join, and find her, now!”
“I don’t know if they will.” Avrian tries to reassure her, tries to give her hope, because the Creators know that hope was the only thing that carried him forward in many moments. “Everything is different, here.”
Velanna shrieked when she saw her sister’s eyes, her veins dark against sickly skin; and before that, the shemlen ghoul that Avrian found in the woods gasped "Don't look at me!", the same words that Tamlen croaked over the shrieks of darkspawn; and some things aren’t different enough.
“You really don’t want me to do this,” she snaps at him in Vigil’s Keep, and Avrian folds his hands over the edges of the Joining goblet and tells her that he doesn’t want to see anyone who doesn’t have to throw their life to chance, as the Joining does, and he hands her the cup.
“Lethallan,” he says, and her head jerks at that, like it’s far too soon for him to call her such a thing, but after coming through the mines alive, Avrian would proudly call her kin. “If you die here, I swear to you, I will not abandon your sister.”
He thinks her sharp features soften, just a bit. No one believed Tamlen was alive but Avrian, and in other moments the only thing that carried Avrian forward was the knowledge that if he died, there was no one who would keep looking. What a reassurance it might have been, if he knew that somewhere out there, there was someone who, if they found Tamlen, would know to mourn him, would take him for more than just another darkspawn cut down during the blight. If he cannot save Seranni, then he can at least honor her.
And then Velanna tips the cup back, and Avrian’s prayers to the Creators – he has been praying since Velanna decided she wanted to join, Mythal protect her, Falon’din do not take her yet – go from a silent chant to a whispered one.
She lives. Avrian waits at her side for her to wake up, and she glares at him like she’s trying to figure out his motivations, his easy trust, why, why. She knows of Zevran; his story Avrian and Oghren told when they met Nathaniel on the road back to the Keep, a welcome diversion from the horrors of the wardens that had been the previous conversation topic - and she knows Nathaniel himself, now; she should not still be wondering of why Avrian trusts.
“You don’t need to care,” she says, and trust and care are different, Avrian supposes. “Why do you?”
He calls her lethallan, means you are my kin and that is enough reason to care; but he tells her the reason more. "You remind me of me."
“What does that mean?” she demands. She is shrill, hard-edged, suspicious, and he is quiet, welcoming. Nothing that she yet sees marks them as similar beyond the ink on their faces.
“I had a brother, once,” Avrian says, and he tells her about Tamlen.