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He wakes to loud voices and when he opens his eyes, his vision spins. Everything aches. He sits up, rubbing a hand over his face, looks around at the tent, empty but for another bedroll and a fire pit that is no more than ashes. “Creators,” Avrian breathes, doubling over and resting his head on his knees until the nausea subsides. After his stomach stops spinning, his head continues to, and he focuses on staring at his hands. Blood is dried on them. He doesn’t know where it came from as he picks it off his skin and his ring – his ring? No, isn’t that Keeper’s? It looks like Keeper’s ring, the carvings, and he licks the pad of his thumb to scrub some kind of otherworldly dark blood off of the wood.
The voices outside are growing more heated. He hears a stranger’s voice, a man’s, deep and commanding, and Keeper’s tired rasp, up against Tamlen’s yelling. “–cure of yours doesn’t work, if he doesn’t wake up–”
Avrian pushes aside the flap of the tent and crawls out. The sunlight, even filtered through the thick canopy of the Brecilian Forest, is momentarily blinding. He stands up, a little dizzy again, and blinks several times, and in that time someone has crashed into him, throwing him off-balance at first but then pulling him upright and holding him there. “Are you all right, lethallin?” Tamlen asks, steadying Avrian with hands on his shoulder and back, and Avrian blinks a few more times.
“What – what happened?” he asks. Tamlen looks paler than usual, like he is still recovering from some sickness, but his eyes are bright and sharp as ever and he turns and glares when someone else, the stranger voice, starts to speak.
“I found you both stranded in the woods,” he says, and Avrian stiffens in surprise to see a shemlen in heavy armor standing in the middle of their camp. He has graying black hair and beard and brown skin and he wears heavy armor, gleaming silver metal and bits of blue fabric. “You were half delirious and sick from that mirror.”
“You were lucky that Duncan was around, da'len,” Keeper says. Tamlen glares at the stranger in the suspicious way that he always looks at shemlen. He always suggests killing them. “I could not cure the taint on my own.”
“Now what?” Avrian asks. Everyone looks at him.
“What do you mean, child?” Duncan asks.
“We – join you, the Grey Wardens, against the darkspawn or – now what?”
They all continue to stare, and then the silence breaks with Duncan’s laughter. “Your clan needs you more than the Grey Wardens do,” he says. “Take your cure and live well.”
Tamlen is already starting to drag him off, but Avrian digs his heels into the ground and doesn’t move. “But – the blight? The… the…”
Duncan frowns and his eyes catch the light strangely. “Are you arguing that you wish to leave your clan?” he asks. Keeper looks sad, disappointed, and Tamlen is glaring at Avrian now.
“What – no! Of course I don’t want to leave!”
“Then you protest far too much,” Duncan says, and with a wave he dismisses them.
Tamlen tugs at his elbow. “Come on, Avrian. Merrill wanted to know when you woke up. She’s curious about what we found in the ruins. She’s disappointed that Keeper forbade us from going back.”
“So naturally we’re finding Merrill and sneaking out of camp and going back?” Avrian asks. Tamlen stops walking and Avrian runs into him. Tamlen turns around with a puzzled look on his face.
“We nearly died, Avrian,” he says, like Avrian needs a reminder, the ruins, the mirror, the taint. “I touched the mirror and we nearly died and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
He sounds serious, sad, and when he starts walking again it takes Avrian a few moments to follow. Tamlen, apologizing. He shouldn’t argue with that, like he shouldn’t argue with Duncan to leave. He should accept it and move on but instead he finds himself yelling. “Why are you always that stupid, Tamlen?” he says. Tamlen stops. They stand in the center of camp, now, half of the clan’s eyes on them. “I said we shouldn’t go any further and you did and see what happened!”
Tamlen throws his hands in the air. “You didn’t have to follow!”
“Of course I did,” Avrian says, rubbing his face. Keeper’s ring on his hand, against his skin, is familiar and not at the same time. It shouldn’t be familiar but it is. “I can’t just let you go off – look what happens! Look what you did!” He doesn’t know why he’s so angry. He’s fine, Tamlen is fine, they’re fine. He should have stopped Tamlen but Tamlen shouldn’t have been so curious.
“I said I’m sorry!” Tamlen says, and Avrian doesn’t know why hearing that hurts so much, cuts deeply somewhere in the region of his heart. Tamlen is sorry that he got them killed – nearly got them killed. Avrian does not need to keep being angry at himself and Tamlen because they are fine and Tamlen apologized.
“Okay,” Avrian says. Some cold weight has settled heavy on his shoulders and he is suddenly tired, so tired. He wants to bundle himself up in one of the aravels and let the clan take him wherever they may go next. “Okay, Tamlen. I’m sorry, Tamlen. Let’s go see Merrill.”
“Avrian!”
Another unfamiliar voice, with an accent that is not from anywhere nearby, not any kind of Dalish Avrian has met, nor Fereldan. He turns to face an elf, his age, brown-skinned and blond, but his face is bare except for a few lines of tattoo down one side of his face – not vallaslin. “There you are. Morrigan found me, but we are still missing our elderly mage companion and your dog. Come, we must go.” He reaches for Avrian’s arm and Avrian jerks backwards.
“What are you talking about? Who are you?”
The elf frowns. “Really, now?” He sighs. “I fancied myself more difficult to forget than this. You have probably forgotten who you are, too, so let me tell you: you are Avrian Mahariel, a Grey Warden with a remarkable willingness to trust anyone, ever.”
Avrian takes another step back. How does this stranger know the name Mahariel, his mother’s clan name that so rarely sees use, so rarely is spoken? Who told him? “A – a Grey Warden? I’m not – Duncan is. The shem, he’s somewhere…” Avrian looks around.
The strange elf turns about and hollers, “Morrigan! Might you perhaps knock some sense into our dear friend’s head?”
“I – friends? We’re friends?”
The elf makes a face. Avrian isn’t sure what it means, gritted teeth and eyebrows knitted together. Air hisses in through his teeth and then he says, holding out a hand and wiggling it from side to side, “In some sense, yes.”
“Who’s this?” Tamlen is there, at Avrian’s side, and the other elf flinches and both of his hands fly to his sides, like he’s reaching for something, but then he stops. He looks at Avrian, raising his eyebrows like he’s trying to convey something, and then he glances at Tamlen out of the corner of his eyes. Avrian turns his head and looks at Tamlen. Tamlen shrugs. “Come on, Merrill’s waiting. You can chat up random city elves later.”
Avrian rolls his eyes. “Don’t be so rude, lethallan. Tamlen – Zevran. Zevran – Tamlen, my brother.”
Tamlen makes a sound of annoyance. Zevran’s eyes have gone wide and his eyebrows stretch toward his forehead. “What?” Avrian asks him.
“A pleasure to meet you, Tamlen,” he says, a little stiffly, with a short bow of his head. “You would not protest if I borrowed Avrian for a few moments?”
“He would, but that’s just how he is,” Avrian says. He turns to Tamlen, who sighs, folding his arms and huffing in annoyance. “Could you go find Merrill and bring her back here?”
“Fine,” Tamlen grunts.
“I…” Zevran starts to say, and then Tamlen is gone, and he looks back at Avrian. “I wouldn’t.”
“What, Zevran?” Avrian asks.
“Ugh.” There is another stranger here, a shemlen woman, a bit taller than Zevran and Avrian both, but unlike most of the shemlen the clan has encountered, she is dressed in a strange mismatched collection of fabrics and accessories, more like some kind of forest spirit than a human – or perhaps she is one of the Avvar or Chasind, the humans who live a little more like the Dalish. “Tell me he’s found some sense himself.”
“Morrigan? What are you doing here?” Avrian glances about the camp, to see which of his clanmates might be looking in their direction. “Most of the clan don’t like letting shemlen just wander about – Grey Wardens are one thing, but Tamlen’s going to come back and he doesn’t like–”
“Is he?” Morrigan asks. Avrian blinks. “Is he going to come back, Avrian?”
“I – of course, I just asked him to go get Merrill and they’ll…”
Morrigan’s eyes are the yellow of the center of a campfire. Avrian wants to both never meet her eyes and never look away. “I thought you not a fool,” she snaps, “but you force me to reassess my assumption with every passing moment. Surely all Grey Wardens are not as dim-witted as Alistair, I thought, surely you are not…” She waves her hand dismissively.
“All two Grey Wardens that you’ve met,” Avrian says. “I wouldn’t even count myself as one. I…” He stops, mouth open, and slowly closes it.
Morrigan snaps her fingers. “Piece it together,” she says. “We are wasting time. With every passing moment the demons take control of more the tower. You do want some mages left for your army, yes?”
Avrian closes his eyes and presses his hands over his face. Keeper’s ring digs into his skin, a parting gift that he has marred with darkspawn and demon blood. “It seems quite nice here,” Zevran says, almost apologetically. “If this is how your clan is.”
“It is,” Avrian says through his hands, and then he drops his arms to his sides and looks between Morrigan and Zevran. “Yes, this is… what it’s like. What it was."
”‘Tis time to leave,“ Morrigan says. Zevran grabs Avrian by the arm to pull him along, and this time Avrian does not pull away. He glances back over his shoulder, at the aravels and the trees and his clanmates, bustling about clearer than in his waking memories or in his regular dreams. "What?”
“I…” He chokes on his words. “Say goodbye to Tamlen.” This is a dream. This is not Tamlen.
Morrigan makes a noise of exasperation in the back of her throat as they walk away from the camp. The fog across the forest floor starts to rise, covering up the trees and the path and the aravels behind them. “He is not going to come back,” she says sharply.
Avrian swallows. “He’s not – he’s not dead. I’ll find him.”
“You are hopeless.”
“Actually,” Zevran interrupts, quietly, “I believe that what our warden is expressing is the exact opposite of being hopeless.”
Morrigan sighs.
The forest is gone now, the camp too, leaving behind nothing but a shapeless swirling greenish fog, opening to an endless expanse of sky, a void, beyond. Avrian has daggers at his sides again, bow and arrows on his back, armor on his chest and arms and legs. His hands shake and he presses them against his legs to ground himself. Keeper’s ring is on a cord around his neck, now. Tamlen’s going to come back. “We have to find – Wynne,” he says, and his voice sounds small to his own ears, and when he sees the expressions that Morrigan and Zevran look at him with, he knows they hear it, too. “And the mabari. And then…”
“We kill the sloth demon,” Morrigan says.
Avrian nods. He wants to ask Morrigan more about the Fade, about how she seems to have a plan, about what happened to her and what to Zevran, but if he speaks again he knows that the choking tears rising up his throat and gathering in his eyes will burst. It seems quite nice here.
Yes, this is what it was.