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“What are you going to do, Father?”
Felix’s voice, though urgent, barely rises about a whisper. He has perched stiffly on the edge of his bed, and his arms are pressed tight against his sides — as if that way, he might make himself smaller; take up as little space as possible in the living quarters that rightfully belong to the local arl.
“About the Herald?”
No answer comes. The older Alexius, his robe’s sleeves rolled up to the elbow, goes on clinking with various flasks at the makeshift alchemy station he has set up on the small bedside table (which, like nearly everything else in this rustic southern castle, is carved in the shape of a leering, bulgy-eyed dog).
Felix inhales, bolstering the strength to raise his voice. A split second later, the air is pushed right back out of his lungs in a heaving, bed-shaking cough. Not feigned, this time.
Alexius looks up, fingertips still pinched around the grains of whichever powder he’s decided to experiment with today. He opens his mouth — to reassure his son that the medicine is almost ready, that he will feel better soon, as he has done countless times, on countless similar afternoons, whether here, amid fur rugs and dog paraphernalia, or back home. Back before he put on this cursed robe, dark-red as the carapace of a giant desert scorpion.
Felix’s heart clenches at the mental image; still, he raises his hand, insistent on being heard.
“What are you going to do about her? I think I know, but I need to hear it from you.”
Again, he is met with silence. Heavy, almost sticky like the shimmering desert air — even though the tree branches that scrape against the castle shutters are barren with the cold, not the sweltering breath of a Tevinter summer. Felix finds himself thinking of scorpions in the sand once more.
Slowly, his movements awkward as a rusty candlehop’s, Alexius turns away from the messy, potion-splattered dog table, and hands his son a tall glass that’s filled to the brim with a hissing, bubbling mixture — about the color and consistency of damp moss. Only when Felix accepts the glass from him, his eyes never leaving his father's tired, haggard face, does Alexius speak.
His response is husky and curt, and when he pushes it out, he seals his lips into a thin, tight line.
“Whatever it takes.”
“I see.”
Felix drops his gaze to where his fingertips meet, locked over the still-untouched glass. They grew back from… last time, but that rotten purple has begun seeping in again. Maker, he has been every shade of not-quite-ghoul over these past three years.
He snaps his head back up to face his father — so abruptly that it makes him dizzy. He is not about to let that stop him, though.
“You are going to kill her, aren't you? You are going to lure her in here, under the pretext of handing over ‘your mages’...”
His lips curl in distaste, and for a moment, his reflection in the glass looks just like his father. They certainly have the under-eye bruises to match.
“...And then, you are going to strike her down. You have laid a trap for her.”
And I have done my best to warn her about it. The words dance on the tip of his tongue, but he reels them back. This is not the point — not right now.
Alexius returns to his potions… Or rather, makes a bit of a silent pantomime about it — which does not go beyond demonstratively turning away and gripping the edge of the dog-table with a force that nearly turns it to splinters.
“I have no other choice,” he says, voice washed of all color after all the times he’s repeated the words — to Felix, to Dorian, to the ornate urn in the family crypt, pristinely white against all the age-worn ancestral markers, and marked with the words STUDIOSA. MATER. AMATA.
“There is always a choice!”
At last, Felix has drained the mossy concoction (which tastes precisely as it looks) in a single swift gulp. Like he’s giving himself liquid courage.
He doubts, of course, that the solution all those powders were dissolved in had any alcohol in it; but once the green sludge is down his throat, he finds it in him to persist.
“Well, if you put it that way, I suppose there is,” Alexius forces out a hollow noise that Felix has no word for; certainly not a laugh. “Of course. A choice whether or not to lose you.”
“No,” Felix retorts. “Whether or not to lose yourself!”
He pauses to inhale again. This time, no cough comes to rattle him — but suddenly, his eyes begin to sting. Suddenly, he is a tiny child who just wants, with all the power held within his frantic little heart, to please, please, please go home. And so, the next word out of his mouth is that of a child.
“Mama… Mama dying was enough. I was too frightened to keep her from harm, and now she is gone. You… you can’t be next! I recognize you less and less every day. Papa, I —”
Again. A child’s word. A child’s plea.
“I am afraid of what will become of you if you choose to have innocent blood on your hands.”
***
The seconds crawl sluggishly by, each a painful, pulsing heartbeat — and each carrying an echo of Felix’s words. His boy has not called him Papa in so long… and he is also feeling guilty over Livia’s death?! This is not right! This cannot be allowed! Alexius intended to carry the burden alone. He is the one that was not there; he is the one who doomed his family by not coming with them on that accursed trip to the Anderfels — because some trivial business in the capital was oh so urgent! And he is the one who has to atone for it, even if it means spilling blood. A scorpion stings indiscriminately to protect his young.
And, of course, just at this moment, a nagging memory has to resurface in his thrumming skull. An image of that southerner, the little mistake from the Fade, the obstacle that the Elder One expects him to remove. His thoughts, much as he tries to stop their flow, twist into a whirlpool — and within it, he sees that round, sun-touched face of hers. The way she gasped in alarm (seemingly genuine, for all her distrust of Alexius and his entourage) when she rushed over to catch a stumbling, fainting Felix at the Redcliffe tavern.
Quick on her feet, and quite strong despite her tiny stature (the Venatori agents reported that she is elven on her mother’s side, dwarven on her mother’s, and she certainly has the built of her maternal kin), she easily reached the younger Tevinter while his own father was still uselessly flapping his arms around… For shame! And as she secured Felix in a tight embrace, guiding him with the assured firmness of a farm girl tending to a sickly lamb, her eyes briefly met Alexius'.
Before that moment, he had not really seen her. He had looked her over, yes, during their unfinished conversation — but that was merely detached observation. He was a scholar, and she was a specimen, to be collected, as per protocol, and ultimately destroyed to achieve the desired results. But during that fleeting exchange of glances over Felix’s shoulder, it was as if… Something shined within her. Something warm and gentle; a fragment of her true nature. A wisp that he was intending to snuff out; to drown in his scorpion venom.
Not that it matters, of course. The girl may be as sainted as the prophet that the gaggle of southern peasants liken her to (she even has the singing voice for it, according to certain… irrelevant rumors). But in the eyes of the Elder One, she is still a mistake. She cannot be allowed to be anything else.
Before Alexius can answer his son, he has to make a grasping motion with his free hand. Instead of the table, he closes his fingers around thin air. As if trying to strangle that blasted half-elf apparition, to toss her out of his mind — with her open, trusting face and worried eyes… Such a rich shade of brown, far darker than Alexius’ own; nearly solid black. And aglow from within.
“You fret too much over the Herald, Felix. She is nothing to me,” Alexius says, feeling the bitterness of scorpion venom against the back of his throat. “You are... everything. I think the priorities are obvious. And if there are consequences... Let them fall upon my head, and mine alone.”
***
“The Inquisition ought to gather more influence before we can make a move on Redcliffe,” Cassandra leans over the war map, tracing her gloved finger across the kingdom of Ferelden. “I suggest trying to expand our reach beyond the Hinterlands; calls for the Herald's aid are coming in from far and wide... Yvonne, are you listening?”
The Herald normally gives Cassandra a joyful grin whenever she refers to her by her first name, and not just as “Kader” — the name of her mother’s surfacer clan, which also adopted her elven father, and stood by him whenever humans attempted to give him grief for settling outside an alienage. She might even quip something about herself and the stern lady Seeker becoming fast friends... Chers amis! But this time, she does not have anything more coherent in her other than a vague “Mhm”.
She is perfectly aware of how important war council meetings are. As bearer of the Mark, she is expected to contribute to them — and Maker knows, once she gets her head in order, she will be the first to kick herself for being so absent-minded... But she just cannot help it. Whenever she stops waving her hand around and banishing demons, her mind immediately turns to that meeting with the magister.
Yes, yes, bien entendu — the man is evil and cannot be trusted! After all, he did join one of Tevinter’s most infamous cults, and brought along the most over-the-top meet-and-greet gift that a northern mage could fathom. A disruption in the natural flow of time! An elaborate scheme to swindle the rebel mages! Not to mention his, so far unknown, dastardly plans involving herself.
Yet nonetheless, Yvonne wonders. Wonders again, and again — about that one single instance when the sinister stranger in his ridiculously ornate robe almost… stopped being an invader from Tevinter. When his son, the poor, poor Felix, staggered and began to faint — oh, he is clearly deeply ill, much as he has been trying to put on a brave face; he almost reminded Yvonne of what she’d seen in the Blight-stricken Amaranthine all those years ago, when she was visiting her Warden sister.
Before Felix could hit the ground, she instinctively barged in to help, even though she was not exactly invited… Well, if she’d waited for a human’s invitation, she’d never get anything done in her entire life. Granted, one human — Felix, bless his heart! — did give her an invitation… to come to the Chantry and discuss the danger she was in. Until she became aware of his note pressing into her fingers, however, she and the magister spent a certain while silently staring at each other. Which must have looked quite comical, but did give a chance to see — truly see! — his features. Somehow, in that particular fraction of time, awash in the golden evening sunbeams streaming through the tavern windows, he looked quite different from the man that had just sat across the table from her, negotiating for “his” mages. That man had been cold and domineering, with his fingers steepled before his face and his lips parted in a smirk that did not bring a single spark of light into his amber-brown eyes. And this new man, the one still grasping for his son, the desperate cry of “Felix!” still quivering on his twisting lips — he looked… lost. Tired. Almost in pain.
The contrast between the two has been giving Yvonne this odd sensation... of… of her brain straining, like it struggles to birth a memory… What was it?
“Hey there! Still straining your brains?”
Now both the Seeker and the Herald get distracted — the former from the map, the latter from her brain battle — as a beardless yet excessively hairy-chested dwarf saunters in, with a cheeky grin on his face.
“Last time I checked, Varric, you were not a member of the war council,” Cassandra says dryly.
“I came to rescue Froggy from your steely clutches,' the dwarf replies, giving the Yvonne a friendly wave. “You are overworking the poor kid: in addition to wading through demons and giving pep talks to the faithful, she also has to suffer through your boring meetings! Just give her a break!”
Ah, Froggy. That’s the nickname Varric gave her; she has several guesses at to why. Could be her love for wearing green clothes or for puttering around in the damp soil (she was originally the daughter of an orchard keeper, after all; gardening grounds her, in every sense of the word… it makes her think of home). Could be the dark-green streaks in her hair — the story of why she started dyeing her hair with odd alchemical concoctions is rather long, but yes, here’s even more green to complement her Mark! Or it could be that silly idea a lot of people in Ferelden and the Marches seem to have that Orlesians are obsessed with eating frog legs (Sera certainly loves coming up with rude frog-themed rhymes about Vivienne, Andraste grant the Enchanter patience). Either way, apparently she is Froggy now; in addition to being Your Ladyship, and Herald, and Maker knows what else…
Wait. Froggy. Froggy! That’s it! That’s what she’s been thinking of!
At a great risk of incurring even more of Cassandra’s wrath, Yvonne gets lost in another vision. Of a blissful autumn night in their cottage, years and years before the famous Julie Kader, the paragon of the Kader clan (at least as far as Yvonne is concerned), became Commander of the Grey, and Yvonne wound up here in Ferelden, because apparently the Maker decided that not just one, but two women from her family needed to be heroes.
She thinks back to the pots and pans lining the walls, looking almost scary in the encroaching dusk, and to one of their barn cats, strolling across the striped mat, her tail a question mark, looking for leftover food. And to her mother, wrapped in a giant flower-square shawl, thoughtfully stroking her glorious sideburns as she told Yvonne and little Odette, the youngest of her numerous elf-blooded children, one of her many bedtime fables.
Once upon a time, her mother’s voice rumbles in her ear, there was a little green frog with a soft, kind heart, always eager to help any stranger she came across. And one day, the frog chanced upon a mean old scorpion, with a giant stinger and long, sharp pincers, red as blood. The scorpion said he needed to get across the nearby river, but he couldn’t swim, and wouldn’t the frog please let him climb on her back and take him to the other side?
The frog was kind, yes, but she also knew that scorpions sting all soft creatures with their deadly venom — for such is their nature. So she hesitated.
“If I let you climb on my back, won’t you sting me?” she asked.
“Don’t be foolish!” said the scorpion. “If I did that, you’d drop dead and sink to the bottom of the river! And I can’t swim! I’d drown us both!”
The frog was convinced, and took the scorpion with her to the river, and let him climb on her back, and got into the water. She was almost halfway across, when all of a sudden, she felt something pierce deep through her skin; and everything went cold and dark! The frog was about to die!
“You stung me!” she cried to the scorpion, angry and betrayed.
“I couldn’t help it,” he replied, just before the river swallowed them both, forever and ever. “Such is my nature.”
Yvonne can still recall how her younger sister had long since curled up against her, her little nose whistling a drowsy tune — their mother’s low, melodic voice was enough to lull her to sleep. But unlike Odette, Yvonne remained wide awake, pouting, with her arms crisscrossed on her chest.
“That’s a dumb story!” she declared back then. “Why did the frog have to die? She did everything right! Someone asked her to help, and she did! And why did the scorpion have to sting her? He said himself it was foolish!”
“He lied,” her mother explained softly. “Sometimes the person you are trying to help lies to you, but then their true nature comes out, and everyone gets hurt.”
Yvonne pouted deeper, her mouth turning into an upside-down horseshoe.
“Well, it sounds like the scorpion decided to sting the frog because he was just that evil! Nobody is just that evil!”
They went back and forth for quite a bit, until Julie stumbled by, scratching her behind through her nightgown, on her way to find a drink of water, and their mother turned away to ask her about something, while Yvonne slid under the covers, still stewing in the unfairness of it all.
And here, in the present, the adult Yvonne lets Cassandra and Varric bicker on about discipline and responsibility — and keeps on wondering.
You want to sting me, Tevinter scorpion — but what is your nature?