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I - Vivienne
Augustine flicks through an entire aviary of bird shapes, just as all apprentices’ daemons did. Raven, eagle, swallow, finch, nightingale, heron, owl. Peacock, hornbill, lammergeier, quetzal, crowned crane, ostrich, spectacular shapes from far away and only ever seen in books. Mages had birds, everyone knew, like servants had dogs and chevaliers had lions and elves had vermin. Nevermind that newly-harrowed mages would stumble into their new quarters with a cowed rabbit huddled in a fold of their robes or a docile sheep at their heels or with the drab kildeer of their spirits playing weak, playing wounded, dreams of rainbow feathers and raptor claws forgotten. Vivienne, twelve years old, Augustine a pale gyrfalcon on her shoulder, promises herself that that would never be them.
Vivienne, fifteen years old, is the strongest mage of her cohort. Augustine is wrapped in the white feathers of a snowy owl when she is dragged from her bed and thrown headfirst into the Fade.
Power, whispers Pride, so you never have to be afraid. I will give you your talons, little eagle. I will be your broad wings.
“I am not afraid,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake. “I don't need your talons. Everything I want, I will take with my own hands.”
She wakes on the floor of the Harrowing chamber cold and shaking, a Templar’s blade balanced at her throat. She scowls and pushes the sword away - “really, is that even necessary any more” - and reaches for Augustine. He’s settled - they almost always did after a Harrowing - and just as she’d promised herself, those meek, drab sparrows aren’t them. Huge and milk-white, save for the coal darkness of his face and beak and legs, he ruffles his swan’s wings and lets her throw her arms around his neck when the Templars aren't there to see.
Vivienne, twenty-seven years old, is the most powerful mage in Thedas, although most wouldn't know it. She glides through the court without effort, without a ripple. Beautiful, silent, collected, and no one is fully sure why they give the Iron Lady such a wide berth, why they are so afraid of something so serene.
What people don't know about the swan is: underneath that smooth gliding majesty is a whole mess of frantic activity they’ll never even see, that his greatest trick is making it look effortless. That hundreds of miles will fall away behind steady wingbeats, and the swan will fight for every flap, never faltering (the power in those wings, after flying so far, can break a man’s leg.) That talons aren't the only way to grab what you want. That dark, murky lakes have better pickings, and the swan is not afraid to dive for his dinner. That he is one of the only birds with teeth.
II - The Iron Bull
The Iron Bull is used to being out of place in the south. He’s about two feet taller than anyone else, for a start, and at least twice as wide. And, oh yeah, the horns.
And he hasn't met anyone else down here who had a wyvern as a daemon. Not that he’d met other Qunari with one, either, but.
Orlesians seem to think they’ve got a monopoly on wyverns, but those Orlesians have never been to Seheron. Bull was made there in steamy jungles and blood, and his soul is quick, cunning, venomous death slipping between the trees. She's a good match for him, huge, bulky, snub-faced and garish and ugly, a dappled jungle-wyvern who is more dangerous than she looks (and she looks plenty deadly already).
Bull has a scar where his eye should be because he caught a flail with his face for a scared Tevinter kid trying to act tough with his back against the wall because fear meant they’d win. Bull’s daemon - and not even daemons have names under the Qun, so she is just as much “the Iron Bull” as he is - will never glide again after she put herself between a spiked mace and Krem’s Iovita. That's okay, though. Kid’s worth it. They're all worth it.
(They sent him to the Ben-Hassrath because he could lie, and sent him away because couldn't stop loving. A mother wyvern will fight, and kill, anything up to and including a high dragon that threatens her nest. His nest is shaped from the bones of southern mountains, now, and tattooed smiles and lyrium bombs and foul-smelling poultices and Orlesian accented death and back-talk flavored with the twang of Tevene. A high dragon is nothing to The Iron Bull, to keep these nestlings safe.)
III - Sera
Elves, everyone knows, have vermin for daemons. Rats, pigeons (gulls, in coastal towns), raggedy, mutty terriers and rangy cats at best, skittering, many-legged things at worst. Rabbits, to go with their ears, if they're lucky; rabbits can serve inside, and be seen by guests.
Sera, who is by all accounts ‘everyone,’ does not disagree. She’s been raised that way, after all, the words softened to ‘bunny,’ and ‘little rabbit.’ Elves, the message was, should not think too highly of themselves.
So they don’t, Sera and Butcher. They just think lowly of everyone else. ‘Vermin’ becomes something to be proud of: Butcher is definitely a nuisance, and so is Sera. They’re as urban as the pigeons and the rats, even that young, and they turn to the streets. So far, it's working for them.
Butcher settles early, at ten (or eleven, or nine - Sera’s not sure on an exact date and was never good at keeping count, not after she left.) A vixen in patchy-brown summer coat, knocking over dustbins, just one more dirty, spotty face among the scurrying crowd of barefoot urchins nicking bruised fruit from the edges of market stalls. By the time Sera’s fifteen, she’s nocking arrows instead, and Maker help any fat, pampered cockerel of a nob who thinks Butcher is too little to know how to go for the throat.
Elves get (are) vermin, and that's alright. The henhouse could use a fox.
IV - Dorian
Mages get birds, that’s the same here and in the South, and the steamy tropical heat of northern, coastal Tevinter produces some spectacular ones for inspiration. His House is a peacock, his Father’s ground hornbill a majestic, brutish, intimidating thing, his mother’s glossy rainbow starling a lovely, flighty, nasty little gossip. Dorian’s Caiaphas is straight out of Seheron, though, a magnificent macaw in azure and gold. His parents aren't displeased - parrots are said to show particular intelligence, talent, and you wouldn't know by looking that Caiaphas was male.
By the time Caiaphas settles, he’s already learned to be beautiful and silent, and how not to scream like he wants to, all alone and pinioned. Pretty bird, pretty bird, and he only picks the feathers under his wings, where they won't show when he's perched, elegant and pretty and quiet on Dorian’s shoulder.
They almost make it in Tevinter, too, with the support of Alexius, until Dorian finds a very particular ritual circle in the notes on his father’s desk, a spell that would seal Caiaphas’s voice in blood. To change and reshape this deepest part of himself. So he wouldn't even be screaming on the inside. So he wouldn't be screaming at all, ever again.
Pretty bird, pretty bird.
Dorian runs.
The South is cold, and drearily wet, and unpleasantly backwater. Dorian complains vocally, and, to his delight, so does Caiaphas. A parrot throwing a tantrum is not quiet and does not endear them to their new companions, but Dorian couldn’t bring himself to shut up if he tried. Twenty years, he’s wanted to scream like this, to shout his displeasure to the sky instead of drowning it in drink and sweat and secrets.
The feathers on Caiaphas’s flanks grow back, and he chases Solas’s creepy raven around the vestibule, both of them laughing until the stone walls echo with it.
It’s… a while later, that Caiaphas finally stills. Dorian is tucked up close against Bull’s side, breathing together, and Caiaphas wiggles his way under the wyvern’s bent wing. They were both forged in the North, in unpleasantness and lies, and the warmth of those green-orange-purple scales feels like coming home. For the first time in a long time, Dorian doesn’t feel a howl trying to burst from his chest.
V - Solas
Solas’s daemon, if it can even be called that, is not a wolf. He is not actually stupid.
He’s a mage, and an elf, and the spirit he calls to aid his disguise takes the form of a raven, huge and black and looking more like some kind of primordial beast than a simple bird. Her voice creaks and cracks like bare boughs under snow, lilting and cackling in Elvhen. He blames the Fade, tells them that walking waking in dreams can change your daemon like this, but it's a lie. She delights in that too, swooping around his head and secreting herself among Leliana’s birds, although what she gathers from the ciphers of their spymaster, she doesn’t share with him.
She ranges far and wide, though Skyhold and beyond it’s walls, and Solas explains it as his dreaming once more, lucky that even in Tevinter, Dreamers are rare enough that no one can know he’s lying through his teeth. Lucky that the Seeker’s daemon can do it, too, so it doesn’t seem so strange. Solas sighs, and grumbles, and does his best to bring her to heel, but the only person she ever really obeyed is long gone. She laughs when she whispers all his lies back to him, and he swats her away, wonders why he even tries.
After all, Deceit has always been like this.
VI - Blackwall
It’s lucky, he thinks, that none of them ever knew the real Gordon Blackwall. The beard covers a lot of sins, as does the thick, padded gambeson he wears, but Blackwall’s horse daemon was distinctive. There is, after all, only so much one could do to a badger.
Valeraine could be a more Ferelden-sounding ‘Val,’ though, and he’s hammered almost all the Orlesian out of his accent. Valeraine isn’t happy about it, not at all, she’s as stolid and straightforward and any badger could be, a voice to his guilty conscience, growling and snapping at him when they’re alone. More than once, she’s locked her teeth in the leg of his trousers and dragged him bodily to where he didn’t want to go, or when that failed, dragged herself to the very edges of their bond and dug her claws in, refusing to budge until her came to her. She always has been the stronger part of him. The better part.
Thom doesn’t think that a person’s relationship with their daemon should be so adversarial. It wasn’t, always, back when he was Thom Rainier, back before. She’d railed and snarled at him then, too, as the money changed hands, a part of him knew it was wrong, but he’d let the gold blind him all the same. Maybe, if he made it all right, they could go back to how it used to be. Maybe he could be at peace with himself.
Hiding behind a Grey Warden shield, he wishes he knew how.
VII - Cassandra
Cassandra Pentaghast is brand new Seeker, fifteen, and highly disappointed with herself when she wakes up after her vigil and Constantin is stuck in the form of a long-legged, long-nosed Nevarran wolfhound. It’s not. Well. It’s not bad, per se, a wolfhound for a daemon is very respectable. He’s a very solid, very predictable, very respectable, very Pentaghast kind of daemon.
Anthony’s daemon had been a wolfhound, too.
She’d known becoming a Seeker would change things, of course. She’d seen the Seekers training, or coming back from missions, their daemons (lions, wolves, panthers, martens, hawks) ranging far ahead or far behind. She’d known something about the Vigil granted Seekers the ability to send their daemons far afield, miles and miles, without pulling at the bond. She just hadn’t expected it to be so strange.
It’s helpful, though, especially when it means that the hound can stay on the ground while she’s busy with the dragons. She learns that day that Constantin can rip out a Pride demon’s throat all by himself, too.
Later, with Divine Justinia and with the Inquisition, she learns that people who don’t know dogs but think they know dogs, and daemons, think she’s a servant, a lackey. The right hound of the Divine, like they’re clever, like Cassandra has ever let anyone’s opinions bother her. Wolfhounds have a reputation in Nevarra, for being difficult, for doing the job on their own no matter what their masters might say about it. Dragon hunters use them, will set the pack on dragonlings while they take the dragon, relying on their dogs to not flinch, to not falter.
Cassandra, the Seeker, the Right Hand of the Divine, is not disappointed to be hound-hearted. She’s still a Pentaghast, one of the ones that nearly wiped dragons out entirely. This time, they’ve just set her on different dragons.
VIII - Varric
Dwarves didn’t dream, and dwarves didn’t have daemons. This had, in the past, caused things to be somewhat fraught, but that was the past, and elves and humans and dwarves got along just as well as could be expected.
Given, Varric thinks, that dwarves don’t dream, he is spending entirely too much time in the Fade. Granted, the first time wasn’t like this.
He’s used to his companion’s daemons, a surface dwarf like him. Last time Hawke had dragged him into the Fade, they’d simply been absent, rolled up into the dreamer’s minds, maybe. It hadn’t been weird. Or, okay, it had been weird, but not weird like this was weird.
The first one he notices is Hawke’s, because Marian’s irascible and reassuringly familiar boar is pig-shaped no longer. He’s bigger, maybe, kinda smeary, kinda glowy, like if you took everything a boar meant and spun it out of motes of glittery purple-red light. Sparkler’s is the same, his obnoxious bird a blinding impression of blue-and-gold-and-sound. The Seeker’s hound is just a stretched, white blur, coursing away and reappearing at her side again and again, Tiny’s pocket-dragon disappearing until you looked at her sideways, where you could catch her as a flash of color and dripping venom. The Inquisitor’s enormous vulture is the most normal looking, except for how his wings look like a hole cut into somewhere else, somewhere impossibly dark.
They’re making his eyeballs hurt, so it takes him a moment to realize that Hawke is looking at him funny. “What,” he says.
“You’ve got a little…” she gestures to the air beside her head, over her left shoulder. Varric turns to look. He’s got a blobby little light-animal too, just like the rest of them, emerald green and zipping back and forth. As soon as he notices it, it zooms off to dance around Hawke, then the Seeker and Sparkler, then back to him, then off again.
Definitely not this weird.
They lose Stroud, and it’s awful, and he’s an awful person to be grateful that the Inquisitor threw the Warden to the demons and not Hawke. Everyone’s daemons are normal again when they all fall out of the Fade, and he’s so tense, waiting for the Inquisitor and Hawke to follow them that he almost doesn’t notice the warm weight in his sleeve.
The warm thing stays put until he’s off alone for a breath, and then a golden, downy rat sticks her head out of his coat. Her name is Corri, he knows, like he knows his own name. Her body is the length of his palm, an elegant, smooth tawny, her eyes bright button black.
She sits up in his hand. “Well,” she says, his soul’s very first word to him. “Shit.”
IX - Cole
It’s actually easier like this, out in the real world. Almost everyone carries their pain around on the outside, in animal shapes. All he has to do is ask.
Varric lets him touch, after he comes back from the Fade with his soul on the outside, too. No one else will, the conceptual repulsion of someone else’s hands touching that deep raising fur and feathers defensively, but Varric doesn’t know that, not instinctually, not yet. Corri is lightning wrapped in cornsilk fur, never still and happier when she’s crowded like this in Cole’s palms.
“She’s the city,” he tells Varric.
“Yeah?” says Varric as his daemon climbs Cole’s hat.
“Yes,” says Cole.
Later, when the amulet doesn’t work, when he finds the man who killed him and doesn’t kill him back, he feels something split inside him. Like the center of him is suddenly solid, frozen, and all the rest of him stayed water. He’s more human now, Solas says, and he seems sad, but it’s harder to hear now, and Solas never carried his soul on the outside.
It takes a few days for his daemon to appear. They’re there in between blinks, all the cut-loose bits of Cole that have been floating around finally condensing into a shape. Long legs, dusty fur, easy to miss. The next time Varric comes to visit, his Corri touches noses with Cole’s daemon - Asa, their name is Asa, he didn’t know it until suddenly he did.
“She’s like me,” says Asa, long jackrabbit ears swivelling. “New. Bright. Has it always been this bright? It’s raw, like a skinned knee when we were children. We, I, we, me, us.” They climb up onto Varric’s leg, and it feels strange, not like how Varric felt when Cole touched Corri last. Cole isn’t sure if he doesn’t like it or doesn’t mind it.
“Stop it, stop it, that feels weird,” says Corri, pushing at Asa’s paws, and they’re back by Cole’s side in a blink.
Cole frowns. “I can’t hear you any more,” he tells Varric and Corri.
“I can,” says Asa, before Varric can say anything. “I’ll listen for you.”
“Kid,” says Varric. “That’s still kinda creepy.”
X - Cullen
Growing up in post-occupation Ferelden leaves a child with both a fierce sense of patriotism and somewhat muddled symbolism. His daemon is named Boudica, which is such a good Ferelden name it’s almost Avvar, and he very very badly wants her to grow up to be a lioness.
When he’s older and he realises how Orlesian that would be of him, a Templar, a Knight with a lion, he’s actually quite glad that she turned out to be a Mabari instead. It’s something to be proud of in Kinloch Hold, his Mabari. A soldier with brains, they say it means, and call him ‘officer material’ and ‘knight-lieutenant one of these days, mark my words, Ser Rutherford.’
When it all falls down around his ears, she’s steadfast, and he clings to her fur as she growls and snarls and snaps at the demons, even though it won’t do any good, none at all. They send him away after that, and the transfer feels like a dismissal.
The Kirkwall Circle needs a Knight-Captain, and well, Cullen’s officer material, isn’t he, after all, and could do with a spell a good ways away. When they wash up in Kirkwall, they’re tired, and scared, and find out exactly what Marchers think of a dog-daemoned Ferelden. Meredith’s Lapdog, the Circle Terrier, the upstart little puppy, they really mean it when they say dog-lord, don’t they.
He’s tired, and he clings to the rules and his job like they’re the only things keeping him afloat (they are), and he can’t bring himself to look Bethany Hawke in the eye. She’s one of them, after all, knows what a Mabari should mean, should be, and he isn’t anymore. Boudica slinks behind him like a whipped cur.
Later, when everything - everything - has fallen apart, and Cassandra Pentaghast appears, a light in the darkness. He’s still shaky, though, still scared, and he snaps at the offered hand. “You want Meredith’s Lapdog at the head of your Inquisition’s armies?” he says, incredulous.
Her daemon comes up out of nowhere, impossibly tall and elegant, all long legs and flowing fur. “I’ve found,” says Constantin, “that most people don’t know what they’re talking about, when it comes to dogs.”
Boudica’s ears perk up, her tail wags. Cullen takes Cassandra’s hand.
XI - Leliana
For some reason, everyone expects Leliana’s daemon to be a bird. They always have, even Lady Cecilie, when Leliana was a child. She lets them think it, does Sister Nightingale, the pall of magery having a bird endows her with is intimidating, and makes her achievements all the more alarming.
There’s not magic there, or none of hers, at least, although there are mages in her excellent network. Because Sister Nightingale is no mage, and no one suspects the silent ginger tomcat that haunts to rookery to really be the living soul of the Inquisition’s spymaster.
“You’re agitated, Odilon,” she tells him one evening, when the rest of the tower is asleep. Even the perennially insomniac Dorian has retired for the night. The ginger tabby leaps lightly up to her desk, pacing the length of it.
“Something’s not right about this place,” says Odilon. His voice is soft, like always, and has been growing more and more suspicious, ever since Kirkwall. His only tell is the soft twitch of his ears as he rounds the corner of the desk, keeping an even pace until he leaps at the railing, scattering the dozing birds.
The cracked-wood voice of Solas’s daemon echoes from the cacophony of flaps as she swoops down into the darkness. Leliana hadn’t even noticed her there.
“Something’s not right about her,” Odilon says, unblinking as he stares after the raven. He is insufferably smug when later he is proved right.
XII - Josephine
Many people miss Ximena at first, she blends so well the with gold at Josephine’s throat. She’s not really little, as snakes go, but she seems it, tail twined with the chain Josephine wears, the bulkiest part of her body hidden behind Josephine’s neck. Her voice is very soft, and she often greets guests and dignitaries first, before Josephine opens her mouth. It’s a very disarming, very intimate thing to do, and it also has the helpful side effect of getting the other party to shut up so Josephine can plow over them in the most polite way possible.
It makes people underestimate her, when she lets her daemon speak, as though she’s naively showing that kind of vulnerability. Admittedly, for many people, it would be a poor move - the self-control it takes to keep your demon from revealing your thoughts and emotions is not something most people have. On the other hand, most people’s daemons are warm and covered in fur and have mobile faces, expressive tails or ears, tells in their fur and their hackles and the growl of their voices. A snake, a gentle little gold-colored python, can’t lay her ears back or bare her teeth or blink in shock, her response to threat is to go quiet and still, demure and composed rather than afraid. Josephine Montilyet has an Orlesian mask on her soul, and the best part is no one realises.
(Well, except Leliana, who watches Josephine’s face rather than her daemon, and who has known her through many years and many teenage high-dramas.)
It’s Dorian who sees through her, frustratingly enough, him and the Bull. Bull she can understand, he’s a spy, after all, but Dorian wasn’t supposed to be able to.
“Oh, we’re very fond of snakes in Tevinter,” he says, as his daemon regards them from where he is hanging upside-down from a wall sconce. “You see them rather often. The big pythons will hiss and bite, and the vipers show their teeth. Royal pythons,” and Ximena flicks her tongue at him, the most annoyance she ever shows, “get small and quiet. They’re not all that hard to read, once you get past the ‘ooh scary snake’ part of it and learn to watch.”
“What is your point,” says Josephine, not politely. She’s a touch rattled.
“My point, my dear Josephine,” says Dorian as his daemon dangles from the sconce by one foot, twisting his head through a half-circle to look at her with his other eye, and in that gimlet gaze she knows that he knows, “is the chocolate.”