Just a BioWare Fan

Stormy Weather

Thankfully, Captain Anderson proved to be as anxious to confront the ambassador as his trumpet player. Kaidan got a reply while he was still assembling his meal.

Having a deadline settled his stomach further. By the time he’d finished eating he had begun to look forward to clearing the air. It almost doesn’t matter what Udina says, he thought. I’ll just be glad to be done with it.

The next morning dragged with routine problems and fixes. The green recruits under his training could tell their Lieutenant still hadn’t fully returned to them, though they assumed he still suffered from his migraine rather than simple distraction. He’d long ago earned enough respect to keep them on diligently on-task without his scrutiny, a fact for which he was thankful as he found his thoughts turning every five minutes to the afternoon’s confrontation.

Rallying the Troops

In many places Cullen found no Templars at all, though the slaughter was just as bad. Most of the corridors remained empty but Fade creatures had sprung up all through the tower. In some rooms he found mages who had fought against them and died for their pains. Relief at seeing how many of them had resisted this plot which had spun so quickly out of control cut through the grief of seeing the loyal mages sprawled, lifeless and bloodied, in their own quarters.

Every few rooms presented yet another tableau that fueled Cullen’s anger and determination. The appalling waste of life and the proof that the Chantry had been right all along pushed him through his desolation. He used his every reserve to keep moving. Once he’d investigated each room on the periphery he headed to the open central area, one used on each level for a different purpose. The one he hesitated outside held the storerooms, manned by Tranquil who could not be possessed because they had no connection to the Fade.

Cullen stood with one hand on the door, awkwardly holding his sword in his shield hand rather than sheathe the weapon. He reminded himself that any tactician would want to secure the potions and tools contained within so he should expect the worst.

At their remove, the priests and guards suffered far less than those at the heart of Arlathan.  They were not, however, immune to the dissolution.  The sentinels had fended off a dozen groups, from bands of slaves seeking asylum to a small army marching under no banner the priests could recognize.  As each gave his or her life to protect Mythal’s Heart the well had grown, from a chalice to a basin to a pool.

Finally Mythal had come a final time.  Abelas, then known by another name, had met with her in one of the forested glades near the temple.  Slaves had brought heady wines and rich cakes, their faces resolutely bent to keep from being blinded by the glittering majesty of their god.  She waited to speak until they were quite alone once more.  Other sentinels had kept guard out of earshot so that none might interrupt their conference.

She’d spoken his name gently, drawing his attention from his contemplation of how pale she looked, how worry shadowed her eyes to a deeper amethyst, and lightly laid a hand on his arm.  “I cannot tell you all that comes,” she said,

The passage through the eluvian brought only a moment’s discomfort.  It hadn’t been pain, precisely, more a dislocation centered on his navel, one that slewed his viscera a hand’s span widdershins and his heart a finger’s breadth to the right.  The twist drove the breath from his body so that he gasped indecorously as he emerged from the blue glare into a diffuse gleam.

Had he been able, he’d have caught and held his breath the moment his eyes adjusted.  On the graveled path before him stood the goddess herself, her flowing gown coated in gem dust so that it glittered and flashed even in the muted light.  It had covered one arm and left the other bare, covered in a filigree of gold chased with bright silver.

The waist had been caught with a wide belt of pale leather on which her symbols had been worked in the same threads that sparkled from his own new cloak.  Her hair had been braided and coiled to lie over the exposed shoulder in tangled profusion while the sides had been tied and lacquered into impressive horns that swept back just shy of meeting well behind and above her head.

Generally, after a passionate kiss on the balcony outside her bedroom, a girl presumes returning indoors will result in something more or less physical.  Saetha, in this one single case, was like most women.

As she followed him into the room she couldn’t help but smile.  After months of her teasing and tempting, she’d finally gotten him to give in to his desire.  She thought she had, anyway. 

Solas, unfortunately (in this one single case), was utterly unlike most men.  Instead of taking her in his arms again, he started toward the stairs.

Tenuous Survival

A lone woman moved among the slaughter near the far door. She looked about her dazedly, dark hair matted and hanging in her face. To all appearances she was having as much trouble believing she’d survived as Cullen was. The mages who had been fighting around her sprawled in untidy, unmoving heaps.

Cullen recognized the enchanter lying just at her feet. His heart sank at the sight of the healer’s body but he picked his way to her through the filth and blood. She lay unmoving, so pale he thought she must have fallen to one of the demons. As he reached her side, however, Wynne sat up, her shaking hand going to her head while she swayed. The other woman gasped, “I thought she’d been killed.”

“As did I.” Wynne’s calm voice sounded wry as ever, weak though it was. She took but a moment to gather herself. “We have to get the children somewhere safe.” She spoke serenely, as though she weren’t sitting among dead abominations and the bloody remains of her friends.

Nightmares Come True

Cullen’s mind wandered a bit with his aches and boredom. The mages had begun discussing the various fraternities and how best to keep the peace among those factions within the Circle. As the conflicts had amounted to little more than verbal tussles and the occasional thrown punch, they themselves held little interest for the Templars.

The views of the fraternities, however, did, at least the ones obvious about how they chafed at the Chantry’s control of the Circles. As the mages technically governed themselves the Templars could do little overtly but many of the Order found methods, subtle to varying degrees, to encourage those who supported the status quo. The little privileges the knights encouraged the First Enchanter to grant and the more aggressive treatment the others received made the Aequitarians a strong faction, even if they weren’t the strong Chantry supporters the Loyalists were.

The differences fed the restlessness of the Libertarians. They pointed to every perceived inequity, no matter the true source, as further proof of their oppression. Cullen wondered from time to time

Settling Down

The tower felt dank and empty after Kyla left with Duncan. Cullen dreamt of her often; the fleeting contacts and covert smiles haunted him. The other mages seemed dull in comparison and even overtures from friendly Templars could not tempt him. He focused on his training and renewed yet again his devotion to Andraste and the Maker.

Jowan’s display had shocked him out of the complacency into which he had so quickly settled. Between the proof that the mages needed closer watching and the removal of Kyla’s insidious, if delicious, influence he found himself more sure of his duty than ever. Events over the following weeks tested that new dedication.

The Warden’s sudden departure left all of Kinloch Hold on edge. The Templars who’d believed Duncan had been ready to recruit them groused about a blood mage and a slip of a girl, an apprentice mere months past her Harrowing, forcing him to leave before he could decide which of them to take.

Something’s Gotta Give

In a low voice, Kaidan told the group about the camera and microphone he’d found in Jenkins’s crushed pin. “I wasn’t about to confront Udina right there but Captain Anderson and I thought you should know.”

Pressly leaned back with a low whistle. “No wonder they always put the spike-heads on the right.” Jenkins, whose eyes were already round with surprise, turned to stare at the navigator as comprehension dawned. Pressly nodded knowingly, as though none of this were a surprise to him.

A passing wave of suspicion left Kaidan dismayed. Pressly enjoyed the way Jenkins looked up to the more-senior officers and was just playing the world-weary cynic. He didn’t exactly embrace alien relations but there was no way he was a good enough actor to have sat through all of those discussions about the insignia with Kaidan and Anderson without giving away that he knew something.

A Heart Conscripted

A young man in worn novice robes emerged. He’d clearly outgrown them—his thin ankles and wrists showed where the size intended for young people hadn’t kept up with his adult size. His head was turned as he spoke to someone behind him and for a moment he remained unaware of the threat facing him.

When Jowan faced the room he stopped cold, his greasy black hair tumbled across eyes widened in fear and anger. In a fraction of a second he'd pulled a little blade from its sheath at his belt and drawn it across his wrist.

The room erupted into bedlam. The Templars reacted with their abilities made to suppress blood magic, their training overtaking their shock at being confronted so boldly. Irving flung a spell of paralysis at the younger man. The homely woman in yellow Chantry robes behind him screamed and flung herself away, burying her face in her hands.

A Warden and a Worry

On an early-spring day of the sort that made Cullen wish the Circle tower had windows below the Harrowing chamber, a man arrived that threw the complacent residents into turmoil. The weathered little boat rowed across Lake Callenhad unannounced and a Grey Warden stepped onto the dock.

His dark beard jutted to a perfect point before him and his distinctive plate threw sparks of sunlight as he strode up to the doors with a dagger and sword gleaming prominently on his back, at least according to the men guarding the entry that day. Everyone in Thedas knew of the fabled order and their ages-old charge to protect their world from a threat unseen for four hundred years, no one at Kinloch Hold had ever seen a Warden nor expected to.

Even in the isolation of the Hold reports had come ever more frequently of skirmishes with Darkspawn, the tainted creatures that teemed in the Deep Roads the dwarves had tunneled beneath all the known world thousands of years before. The king himself, Cailan the Glorious, had called for a contingent of the Circle’s strongest mages to travel far south to Ostagar.

Routine Disruptions

There were accusations and even proven incidents of Templars stepping over the boundary between guarding and abusing. The Order was no different than any other group: bad apples found their way into it. What was deemed a healthy fear of mages had been ingrained in each of them and some chose to prove their dedication by dominating their charges instead of monitoring them.

The long quiet that Cullen found in the Ferelden Circle tower fostered a sense of protection rather than oppression. It led to boredom more than violence but that lack of excitement posed its own dangers. Whispers circulated and he heard stories of beatings or more-subtle punishments for infractions real, imagined, or even invented for entertainment.

Half of those whispers in Cullen’s first days at Kinloch Hold concerned a young man brought to the tower by force at the unusually advanced age of twelve. From the very beginning the boy had tried to escape the Circle’s confines. He had taken advantage of the beach excursions novice mages had once enjoyed to swim away one afternoon.

I never liked Jowan in Dragon Age: Origins. From the very first run I looked on him with distrust. Everything he did proved me right. In part it was that greasy-looking hair; in part it was asking his supposed closest friend to help him do something dangerous and illegal then making her do all the work.

Factor into that his unwillingness to piss or get off the pot as far as the Harrowing was concerned, add that nasal, whining voice, and you get nails on a chalkboard. Jowan was precisely what the ritual of Tranquility was designed to control: a weak-willed mage who would turn to blood magic because he wasn’t talented enough to do anything useful. His only saving grace was that he turned out to know the ritual to get the Warden into the Fade to save little Connor from the demon that was raising the dead all around Redcliffe’s castle. I found him to be a weasel of the highest order.

Thus, I’ve written the sort of conversations my Amell Warden would have had with him, had she been able. This is, of course, tongue in cheek. First, a short conversation during the Templar confrontation at the beginning of the mage origin:

First-Day Jitters

Cullen’s first day at the Ferelden Circle of Magi in Kinloch Hold was nothing like what his Templar training had led him to expect. Instead of slavering fiends waiting for a moment’s inattention to burst into full demonic flower he found children carrying books, elderly women who looked more like his grandmother than dangerous maniacs, and young people studying and engaging in lively debates.

He had first joined the Order as a recruit at the age of fourteen, fresh from the farm, filled with self-assurance and love for Andraste. The good Sisters had cropped his red-gold curls short, fit him for long skirts and his first shiny breastplate, and given him a sword. He and a dozen others had sworn to loyalty and devotion to the Maker and his bride. It was, in short, as thrilling as he’d expected…for about a week.

Then he discovered that most of his time would be spent studying and learning Chantry history and scripture. Lessons began with reading. None but the wealthiest young people recently accepted could make out so much as their own names much less the ornate and dusty tomes containing the Chant of Light. Rote memorization and long lectures filled the hours between chores and meals.

“Kaidan.”

I hoped I didn’t sound as breathless as I felt. I hadn’t had too many opportunities to practice my cool composure over the last several months. What else could I say to the man I loved, the man who’d already dismissed me once, who’d never even sent me a message after I’d survived my suicide mission and returned triumphant, much less while I’d been imprisoned in his home town?

He couldn’t have contacted me directly but surely he could have gotten a message through Anderson. He hadn’t. I still missed him so badly it hurt.

He looked down at me, his face coldly neutral. “Shepard.” Where was he hiding those eyes, the ones that had softened when he’d looked at me, the source of those looks that I dreamt of at night? He’d had them on Horizon. They’d flashed at me for a few long moments before he’d stuffed his feelings behind his good-soldier façade. No hint of them showed now.

I’m not quite ready to start publishing The Champion’s Side, recounting femHawke’s version of the events of DA2, just yet but I’ve decided that I’m deep enough into it that I really will tell the story. It took me a long time to find the door to this one but I think I’ve finally settled on a plot arc.

In part it was so hard to settle on a Dragon Age 2 story to tell because the game kept taking these horrible left turns every time I thought I knew where I was going. I was blindsided by Anders, stunned by Sebastian’s response to our “romance”, and every time I thought Fenris might be starting to settle down I’d say something nice and he’d start screaming at me.

Isabela lied to me and betrayed me over and over again, Merrill refused to quit slitting her wrists for a mirror I knew would bring no good, and Aveline got mad when I brought her a present. The first two trips through the game were fascinating, yes, but frustrating in the extreme for the writer in me.

That's why I avoided spoilers, so that I could come at them all with fresh eyes. Now I’m on my fourth run and I believe I’ve got a pretty good handle on motivations and characters. Naturally I’m taking this one off into left field a bit, following the general arc of the DA2 story but embellishing it with explanations and conversations that the game lacked. And you already know how I feel about Fenris.

So next Wednesday I’ll start Sideline Wednesday with Chapter 1 of The Champion’s Side. I hope there are some surprises and entertainment in store for everyone. I just have to fix some spelling issues with these names...Petrice? Really? Dang.

Because I have so much already written I’m going to start a schedule for moving the stories here. My first step (tomorrow) will be to institute Thane Thursdays, on which I will publish one chapter from one of my few long and finished stories. Losing started as something else entirely. I’d intended it to be a frothy romance between Shepard and Thane but then, well, it got serious. It took a long time for this one to really get going and much of the last half was hard to write but I quite like how it came together.

I have two other stories underway that are utterly different but may turn out to be vaguely related. The Double is a goofy, sarcastic romp in an Alternate Mass Effect Universe in which double agents have infiltrated the SR-2, fighting to use Cerberus to their own ends.

The Swing of Things takes place while the original Normandy was being built and strives to find a relationship between some of the crew members and explain how they ended up on the ship together. Shepard may make a cameo at the end but it’s written from Kaidan’s point of view.

I have a Dragon Age story, too, though not for Origins. I wrote Frustrations before I had played DA2 and so it’s an exploration of how things may have developed between my female Aeducan and Anders, off-stage. That one is a mere eleven chapters but some of it will be all-new material as I never published the whole thing.

And so I’m instituting Swingin’ Saturdays and Double Mondays, Tidbit Tuesdays, and Frustrating Fridays. Tuesdays will be for the one-shot stories I’ve written for Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’ll be linking each story to the Stories page linked above as they are published.

I’ve got a start on a FemHawke story, The Champion’s Side, but every time I get to the end of a romance arc with her while playing it ruins what I’ve written. I keep shifting my focus. I’m about to meet Fenris in my third run so we’ll see if he gets to win her heart or if I’m going back to an alternate universe to brighten up this dark chapter in Thedas’ history.

I’ll also be working up a link list to other fantastic authors on the many places you can find fanfic published, both other blogs and writers on fanfiction.net and deviantart. Maker knows when that will get ready. All this and Mass Effect 3 still to come? Who could ask for anything more?

[Note: I started an Anders story while I was playing my first run through Dragon Age 2. Then I finished the game. I deleted the wholly wrong-headed predictions. This ultra-short is all I of the story I can write for now. At some point I’ll do an alternate plot for DA2 with a happy ending for Anders and Lady Hawke but right now I’m too angry.]

The Last Time He Told the Truth

“I am going to break your heart,” he told me at the very beginning, gently stroking my cheek. There was a haunted sadness in his eyes I’d have given anything to ease. If only I had listened maybe I wouldn’t have had to execute him. It turned out that was wrong: I could not give everything to stay by his side. But if he’d been who I thought he would never have asked.

Bastard.