Work Text:
The Testament of PolLastra “Rook” de Riva
(also known as Trouble)
Neve made this journal for me.
She said I could use it for case notes,
or for the moments when my thoughts needed somewhere to go
before they started leaking out of my mouth
and getting me stabbed.
Again.
She bound it herself.
Leather. Salt-stained paper. The kind that smells like sea air and old ink.
She said it was practical.
Necessary.
The sort of thing anyone in our line of work ought to have.
What she didn’t say, and what she would sooner swallow a spellbook than admit, is that she put hours into this.
Every stitch is straight. Every fold pressed flat with that meticulous frown she gets when she’s hyper focused on something. Every edge burnished smooth enough not to catch on my gloves.
Her jaw clenched, brow knit in that ‘don’t look at me, I’m caring too loudly’ expression she swears she doesn’t make.
She worked with the kind of concentration you’d expect from someone assembling a Fade-damned relic, not making something for me.
Then she handed it over like it was something she threw together over her lunch break.
Like she hadn’t carved a piece of herself into it.
She loves like a prayer she’s afraid to utter,
and works like she’s confessing it anyway.
Classic Neve.
So naturally, I decided to write a gospel.
Not for the Maker.
Not for the dead gods or the self-imprisoned ones.
Not for anything that demands kneeling.
For what grows after the battlefields go quiet.
After the shouting stops.
After you’re left with your hands still shaking, wondering what comes next.
A gospel for the mess that comes after saving the world:
trying to live,
trying to love,
trying not to set the detective agency on fire.
Also again.
All the while pretending I’m not soft about Neve Gallus.
For the record, I am. And I pretend badly.
It is for the people I bled beside,
who became my family when I was not looking,
and for the stubborn joy of surviving each other.
And for Varric Tethras,
because he taught me that every legend starts
with someone too stubborn to shut up.
Most of Thedas calls me Rook.
But that wasn’t the name I started with.
They tell all sorts of stories about me now.
Ballads. Epics. Tavern trash.
Hero of the Veilguard.
Icon. Legend. Terrible influence.
Titles are easy.
Survival wasn’t.
Some of us didn’t make it out.
And the ones who did came back changed in ways no song can touch.
Truth is, I wasn’t supposed to lead a damned thing.
Varric named me his second, and then Solas promptly made that my problem.
So I led.
Because someone had to.
Was it wise? Absolutely not.
Did I do it anyway? Apparently, yes.
Somehow it worked out.
Not without pain.
Not without regret.
Not without nights we still wake up screaming.
Just your average tale of a rogue assassin herding a bunch of misfits into a fight with the Evanuris,
the so-called gods my people were expected to fear.
Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain.
Ancient tyrants so drunk on their own power they couldn’t piss straight.
They thought they could chain Thedas and decorate it with the Blight like demented interior decorators.
And Fen’Harel, who kicked the whole damned mess off because he knew better than everyone else.
He wanted the Veil torn down, demons pouring over the rest of us like a giant overflowing chamber pot dumped from a third-story window in the Fade.
Please.
They were the world’s oldest brats playing at divinity.
More magic than sense.
Big egos. Bigger tantrums.
The emotional maturity of drunk toddlers holding lit firecrackers.
Not one of them had ever been properly punched in the face.
You could tell from the way they screamed when we finally did it.
Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you the real backstory of your humble prophet.
Lastra “Rook” de Riva.
Crow. Thief. Assassin.
“Trouble,” according to Neve.
She’s not wrong.
Very tragic. Very beautiful.
Mostly inconvenient.
Occasional disaster. Frequent disappointment.
I never knew my birth name.
If I ever had one, it died the moment the Crows pulled me out of that crate.
I was barely a year old, stuffed in a box full of terrified chickens in a slaver’s caravan bound for the Imperium.
I’m not sure if I was meant for free labor before I learned to walk, or if I was a culinary experiment for the Antaam. One more two-legged ingredient to throw on the spit.
I lean toward the latter.
I hope at least that I would have been properly seasoned.
Fortunately, the Crows do not take kindly to anyone deviating from the recipes handed down through generations of abuelitas.
They intercepted the caravan and left a bloody mess of dead Antaam behind.
The prisoners ran into the brush before the fighting even stopped.
Which left me.
When the Crows pried the lid open, I was screaming louder than the birds, wearing nothing but feathers, filth, and blood. My adorable, cherubic cheek had caught the business end of a very panicked rooster’s spur.
The scar never fully faded.
It runs from my cheekbone to my jaw, a reminder that the world leaves its mark early and does not ask permission.
No one ever told me who my parents were.
Or where that caravan came from.
The Crows filled in the blanks by insisting I hatched from a cursed egg.
The rest came courtesy of a nightmare the Fade sends on repeat.
If my parents were there among the slaves, they didn’t look back.
Sometimes I imagine them, thin, sun-burned, wrists rubbed raw from chains. They saw their chance and bolted into the smoke while I was still screaming.
Maybe they thought a crying child would slow them down.
Maybe they thought I’d have a better chance with the Crows.
I’ve wondered about that my whole life.
It’s easier to believe they didn’t mean to leave me.
Terror makes cowards of everyone.
The Fade takes the brave too early.
It’s easier still to believe they were already dead.
But on the nights I can’t sleep, I remember the sound of that crate breaking open, the wings of startled birds exploding into the sky, and I tell myself the truth.
They ran.
And even now, that sits heavier in my chest than any scar or knife wound.
Because I can forgive desperation.
I can forgive fear.
But cowardice.
Cowardice is something I’ve spent my whole life trying not to inherit.
The Crows named me Pollastra. It means little hen. They did it for a laugh, or maybe to ensure my childhood was as traumatic as possible.
They dropped me into a Chantry orphanage in Treviso for a while. There wasn’t much enthusiasm among their ranks for dealing with a squalling thing that couldn’t walk, feed itself, or hold a knife.
The sisters at the orphanage believed pain built virtue and silence built obedience. They tried to drill their Chant into me like it might scrape the elf off my bones and make me acceptable. To them, I was a lesser thing. Quiet was holiness. Obedience was salvation. And elves were born failing both.
So they made sure I felt the weight of that failing.
Once I could walk without falling on my face, I learned to take what I needed. First it was crusts of bread. Then anything that wasn’t nailed down. By the time I was five, I could pick the lock on the Chantry’s collection box.
I also learned to fight back when I had to.
Because the only thing worse for a child’s self-worth than having religious dogma beaten into them is other children with no hope and lots of free time.
The other orphans zeroed in immediately. My name. My scar. My ears. The red hair. Every part of me was a punchline.
“Pollastra! Pollastra!” they’d cluck and crow. Pulling my ears. Shoving my face into the dirt. Trying to make me eat bugs.
They treated me like a built-in group activity.
I had to break three noses before everyone discovered the joys of minding their own business.
When I was old enough, I dropped the Pol and kept what was mine.
Lastra.
It was shorter. Sharper. Easier to pronounce while spitting teeth. I dared anyone to call me little hen again.
No one ever did.
By the time the Crows came back for me, I was thirteen. Old enough to be an adult by their standards. Already written off as a child by everyone else.
The years that followed were filled with cruel handlers and endless training. They kept us in crowded quarters, children stacked in rows like weapons waiting to be sharpened. Some were orphans. Some were bought. Some were stolen outright.
We learned quickly not to make friends. You might have to kill that friend before breakfast. Or they might be ordered to kill you.
I never thought I’d miss the orphanage, but the sisters’ cruelty almost seemed like love in comparison. At least they pretended to believe in something.
The Crows didn’t bother pretending.
They broke us down to make us useful. I learned how to move without a sound. To lie without blinking. To kill without hesitation. We brewed poisons until our hands stank of death. When they ran out of volunteers, they made us drink our own concoctions to build immunity.
If we survived.
And if we didn’t, they called it a lesson.
When I staggered out the other side still breathing, they called it proof of talent.
I called it proof of stubbornness.
That was enough for the Crows.
They inked the mark on my shoulder and bound me to a house. De Riva. House of the Fifth Talon, Viago de Riva. One of the many bastard sons of the king of Antiva, and the only one to choose the Crows over exile.
Viago was the first person in my life I looked up to with admiration instead of fear.
He wasn’t kind.
People don’t write sonnets about the kindness of Crows.
But he was fair.
And sometimes fairness feels like love when you’ve never had the real thing.
I clung to that.
Worked for it.
Bled for it.
Killed for it.
Climbed the ranks.
Right up until I ruined all of it spectacularly.
The day I took out an Antaam slave caravan on my own, everything changed. They were moving prisoners out of the city toward the Drylands. My orders were to watch, report, and stay unseen.
But when I saw the cages, whatever I was pretending to be fell away.
There were children inside. Filthy. Half-starved.
There were adults too, but my eyes slid past them, snagged and held by the smallest bodies in the dark.
Their eyes were empty of protest. They had already cried themselves hollow. What remained was silence, and the weight of a fate they no longer fought.
Something inside me snapped.
And I let it.
The first guard never saw me coming.
The second barely made a sound before my blade split his throat.
After that, it was only heat and motion.
The air filled with screams and steel,
the crack of fire as canvas caught,
arrows cutting through the dark.
When it was done, the sand was red and the air thick with smoke.
Twenty Antaam lay dead at my feet.
The cages stood open.
The children were gone,
vanished into the desert
like birds loosed from a snare.
I remember standing there, shaking,
With blood drying on my hands,
and knowing I had crossed a line
I could not step back over.
And for the first time in my life,
I did not regret it.
“Nice work,” a man’s voice said. “But you could have left one of them standing. I was hoping to ask more questions.”
My head snapped around, searching for the owner of the voice. I didn’t find him until I looked down.
There, beside the open cages, was a dwarf tied to an old tree stump.
From the bruises blooming across his face and the split lip, I didn’t think he was in any position to ask questions of the Antaam.
Or anyone else, really.
I must have stared longer than was polite.
“You going to cut me loose, kid, or should I get comfortable?”
I took another second to take him in. The way he held himself despite the ropes. The way his eyes tracked my hands instead of the blade. Still sharp. Still present.
That told me enough.
“Try not to get comfortable. I’m terrible company.”
I crouched and cut the ropes, quick and clean, blade already back in my hand before the fibers finished giving way.
He rolled his shoulders once, then again, wincing as the blood rushed back into his hands. He flexed his fingers, testing them, then gave an approving nod like he’d just been handed a decent blade.
“Efficient,” he said. “No hesitation, no wasted movement. I appreciate that in a rescue.”
He didn’t wait for a response.
Instead, he limped over to one of the wagons and rummaged through the wreckage, shoving aside torn canvas and splintered crates until his hand closed around something solid.
When he pulled it free, I felt it before I understood it.
A crossbow, but not the kind you issue to soldiers or hang over a hearth for decoration. This one was overbuilt, layered with metal and darkened wood in a way that spoke of long use and deliberate modification. Reinforced limbs. Custom fittings. Weight where it mattered.
She was scarred, but cared for. Every piece sat exactly where it should, no warping, no looseness. The kind of weapon that had been rebuilt more than once and improved every time.
He checked the string. Ran his thumb along the stock. Sighed in relief.
“There you are,” he murmured. “I was starting to worry.”
Then he turned back to me, resting the crossbow against his shoulder.
“Varric Tethras,” he said. “And this is Bianca.”
He tilted the weapon slightly, as if she might acknowledge the introduction.
“She’s sensitive about being left behind.”
He looked me over again, slower this time, measuring in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar.
“Do you have a name, kid?”
“Lastra,” I said after a beat. My voice came out hoarse. “House de Riva.”
He nodded, taking in the blood, the bodies, the broken cages.
“Lastra, huh? You look more like a Rook to me.”
I frowned. “Another bird name? Figures.”
That got a laugh out of him, loud and genuine, like it startled the air itself.
“No, kid,” he said. “Like the chess piece. Moves straight until it hits a wall, then sideways to knock the board over.”
The word sat there between us for a second.
Rook.
I rolled it around in my head, testing the weight of it. It didn’t feel wrong. That bothered me more than it should have.
“Huh,” I said finally. “That’s one way to put it.”
Then I tilted my head.
“Funny thing is,” I said, “you sounded pretty confident about asking questions a minute ago.”
I gestured at the stump, the ropes, the general state of him.
“Didn’t look like you were on the asking end of that interrogation.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That part wasn’t ideal. But it wasn’t accidental either.”
I waited. He noticed. Of course he did.
“I needed them talking,” he went on. “Not to me. Around me. You’d be surprised what people say when they think you’re too tied up to matter.”
I raised a brow. He shrugged.
“The Antaam have been moving differently lately. Not just raids. Not just bodies. They’ve been sniffing around old things. Ruins. Relics. Anything that predates the Chantry and makes mages nervous.”
That got my attention.
“They don’t worship it,” he continued. “They don’t trust it. But they pay attention. And when they start paying attention, it means something big is stirring.”
He glanced toward the desert, then back at the wreckage of the caravan.
“I figured if I let myself get dragged along for a bit, I’d hear what they were worried about. What they were guarding. What they were afraid of.”
“And the part where you get tied up and beaten half to death?” I asked.
Varric snorted. “Interrogation goes both ways. You just have to be patient enough to survive it.”
There was something he wasn’t saying. I could hear it in the way he stopped just short of the real point.
“But whatever they were chasing,” he added, quieter now, “it wasn’t a rumor. And it wasn’t small.”
He met my eyes, sharp and assessing.
“And now you’ve blown up their caravan and scattered their prisoners into the sand.”
I didn’t apologize. “They shouldn’t be occupying my city and taking people from it.”
He smiled anyway. Not amused.
Impressed.
“Well,” I said, nodding. “Hope you find what you’re looking for. I’ve got a date with consequences for this.”
I waved a hand at the carnage around us and turned to walk away.
“If it’s any consolation,” his voice carried after me, “I’ve found the right kind of trouble is usually worth the consequences.”
I tried to find that supposed worth once I returned to Treviso and faced the full wrath of eight sharpened Talons.
Turned out I’d blown a much bigger operation wide open. One that was meant to dismantle the Antaam’s network from the inside. My little act of mercy cost them months of planning, coin, and pride.
I was beaten, humiliated, thrown out of my house, and would have been marked for culling if Viago hadn’t still had a soft spot for his ‘disastra con le gambe’. Or maybe it was because Teia was in his ear, softening that spot for me. Either way, exile it was.
They didn’t even let me keep my gear.
One handler grabbed me by the arm, dragged me through the de Riva courtyard, and kicked me into the street with nothing but my small clothes and a warning to run fast.
My eyes were nearly swollen shut from the beating, every breath a reminder of cracked ribs and promises they intended me to remember.
Treviso nights were cold, and the cobbles bit at my feet. People on the street, the buskers, the merchants, the night-watch hawkers, didn’t make eye contact with me. I was Crow business, and they knew better than to interfere.
The stars, what little I could see of them, didn’t look like freedom. They looked like a ceiling too far away to reach.
I kept walking anyway, because what else was there to do?
A low whistle to my right dragged me out of my downward spiral and brought me up short.
“That’s one hell of a shiner, kid.”
I turned to face that familiar voice fully.
Varric was leaning against a pillar outside the tavern holding a bottle of something, eyebrows lifted like he’d found something interesting in the gutter.
“Oof,” he winced sympathetically, gesturing at my face. “They got the other side too, huh?”
“You again?”
I spat a thick mouthful of blood onto the cobbles between us, then scraped the rest off my lips with the back of my hand.
“You always hang around looking for naked, half-dead idiots?”
Varric snorted and pushed off the pillar.
“Only the interesting ones,” he said. “Besides, somebody’s gotta make sure you don’t die in the prologue.”
He reached into the satchel slung over his shoulder and tossed something at me.
A bundled shape thudded into my chest. I grabbed it reflexively.
Clothes.
“Go on,” he said. “Cold out here. And you’re wearing… a lot of courage and a bruise.”
I unfolded the coat. Sturdy stitching. Soft lining. And it didn’t smell too terrible.
Pride lost to hypothermia.
I shrugged it on, warmth spreading through me like an unfamiliar kindness.
Only then did Varric offer me the bottle.
“Here,” he said, giving it a small wiggle. “Burns less going down than whatever the Crows left you with.”
I took a swallow. The liquor hit like another fist to the ribs.
He watched me drink, his expression softening.
“Rough night?” he asked.
I huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You could say that.”
“Good,” Varric said simply. “Means the worst part’s over.”
I frowned at him. “How do you know?”
His smile came small, warm, and entirely unexpected.
“Because you’re still standing.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. Compliments were rarer than soft landings in Treviso.
Varric cleared his throat and glanced up and down the street, like he was checking for witnesses, then looked back at me.
“You looking for work, kid?”
I blinked at him. “Work?”
“Yeah.” He gestured vaguely. “You know. A job. An occupation. A reason not to die in an alley tonight.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s always a catch,” he agreed. “Pay’s terrible, hours are long, and you’ll probably get stabbed at least once.”
I snorted. “So exactly like being a Crow.”
“See? You’re already qualified.” He grinned. “And the company’s better.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What’s the actual job?”
Varric sobered, the joking slipping aside.
“I’m looking for an old friend of mine.”
“He owe you coin?”
“No.” His face pinched with something heavier. “He’s about to do something profoundly stupid.”
I studied him. “And what does that have to do with me?”
Varric sighed and rubbed a hand over his forehead.
“Because I talked to Viago.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“We came to an understanding,” Varric said. “He accepted my contract on the condition that you stay a de Riva. At least on paper. Until we take care of this matter with Solas.”
I stared at him, stunned. “You negotiated?”
“Yep.”
“For me?”
“Yep.”
“You talked Viago into that?”
“Kid, I talk everyone into things,” he said. “It’s a gift.”
“Why? Why would you do that?” I hated how small my voice sounded.
He shrugged, all casual arrogance and hidden kindness.
“Everyone needs a good story, Lastra. Yours shouldn’t end with you freezing to death on the street for doing the right thing.”
Something in my chest twisted, sharp and unwelcome and new.
No one had ever called anything I did the right thing before. It stung worse than the bruises.
I looked down at my hands. They were still shaking. One clenched around the folded clothes, the other around the bottle he’d pressed into it, knuckles white like I might drop both if I loosened my grip.
“Profoundly stupid, you say?”
“Yeah,” his voice dropped into that serious register again. “I’d say it’s going to shake the world.”
I took another swallow from the bottle and let it warm me from the inside.
“Then I guess we’d better go stop him.”
Varric’s smile returned, warm as a hearth.
“There’s my Rook.”
A year with Varric taught me more than the lifetime I had spent with the Crows. He showed me that trust could be its own kind of weapon. How to listen. How to read a room. How to make people talk without ever pulling a blade. He taught me how to slip into a crowd and come back with names, rumors, and secrets no one ever meant to share.
And he taught me how to tell one hell of a story. The kind people believe even when they shouldn’t.
By the end of it, I’d trained the Antivan accent out of my trade tongue. Because let's be honest, no one outside Antiva would ever trust a Crow.
He turned a killer into a confidence artist, and for once, I didn’t mind the disguise.
It came with a place at the table, and something I’d never had before.
A steady presence. A voice at my shoulder. Something dangerously close to a father.
I assume once again that you know everything that happened after that. If you don’t, ask literally anyone with a lute.
They will not stop talking.
I am here to record the after that happened when love led me to Docktown.
To a detective agency that may not be saving the world, but is certainly bringing hope to this city’s huddled masses one bonkers case at a time.
To one Rana Savas who will warm to me eventually.
To one cat who may be a demon, a minor god, or the Maker himself. The jury is still out on that one.
To the clients who wander in because apparently I have the face of someone who won’t let their life fall apart. (Terrifying news for them.)
To the companions. The family we chose.
And of course, to Neve Gallus.
Yes. The Neve Gallus.
Stop making that noise. I can hear you from the future.
I did not find faith in gods, or banners, or glorious last stands. I found it in the deeply inconvenient act of staying alive long enough to build something small and real. In shared laughter, shared grief, shared silence, and a woman who insists she does not believe in miracles while performing them daily and calling it “being practical.”
She is also, unfortunately, my editor. Expect commentary in the footnotes. She will not be able to help herself.
And if you’re wondering how a childhood full of chickens, assassins, and bad decisions produced a woman stubborn enough to still believe things might turn out all right, not to mention a devastatingly charming, utterly hilarious menace to polite society on top of that, I blame poor supervision.
Neve blames brain damage.
Or Varric.
Or a combination of the two.
He would have just laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, and said:
“Kid, the world’s a mess. But you make it interesting.”
****
**Annotations**
You’re using my meticulously crafted gift to write odes to yourself and slander the innocent? — N.
Name one innocent. It’s certainly not you. — R.
Rook. — N.
What? Every good gospel needs a little divine inspiration.
Guess who mine’s about?
Stop correcting the prophet, Gallus. You’re supposed to be fixing my spelling and grammar, not questioning my holy text, you heretic.— R.
Your spelling and grammar are a lost cause, Trouble. If you insist on calling this a gospel, it should at least be readable. — N.
Readable? Neve, this is ART.
This is PASSION.
This is the sacred scripture of thighs and chaos. — R.
Stop calling it scripture. — N.
The first Canticle is going to contain our most exquisitely delicious sins, and I intend to linger.
I fully expect you to squirm, deny it, correct my spelling, and then scold me for being blasphemous.
All of which will only encourage me.
The faithful must be tempted properly. — R.
If you so much as mention that incident in the Chantry, so help me, Rook.
Rana reads everything and she will never let it go. — N.
Perfect. You’ve just locked in Verse I.
Rana won’t have to snoop very far.
How else should a gospel begin but with the prophet finding her faith… between your thighs? — R.
You are not a prophet.— N.
That’s what they said about Andraste. — R.
The only thing you and Andraste have in common is an alarming tendency to catch fire at inconvenient moments. — N.
You’re saying there is a pattern. — R.
If you invoke Andraste again in reference to my thighs, I will freeze this journal shut. — N.