#less of an australian accent than I portray here I must confess

[wild-houseplant]

Have Warden, Will Travel- Chapter 16

I’m a lazy little sod who’s taken an age to get this to Tumblr. Sorry about that. We’re still on Broken Circle, so the usual death, gore, and general misery-- but with an added bonus of ableism. I’ve fixed up a couple sentences since I last mentioned it (look at me editing my first draft! Gosh!!) AO3 chapter here if needed, and the rest is in this post! Please drink your fluids and look at something nice today!!

§

Why was it never long before Zevran heard another noise? How many people lived in this shoebox of a place? He could have sworn they’d passed some thirty bodies between the great doors and the stockroom. At this point, that was probably more than the population of Redcliffe.

Swallowing back a sigh, he touched Rhodri’s elbow and gestured ahead to an open room off slightly to the left. They hugged the wall, approaching out of sight. There were at least three voices, if he wasn’t mistaken. Two deep, one light, all speaking in a hush.

“What are we doing here, Willard?”

Someone tsked impatiently. “We’re making sure no-one disrupts Uldred’s plan. I thought I was quite clear…”

Rhodri stilled, head tilting in the direction of the other group. “I think I hear Tara,” she whispered.

“You know what I meant. Uldred isn’t even Uldred any more! This has gone much too far, I don’t–”

“This is what we’re faced with, Tara. There is no turning back now, do you understand me? If we turn back now, we will lose everything we've fought for!”

The Warden turned sharply to Wynne. “That filth is roping my apprentices into this,” she growled.

Before Wynne could answer, she stepped away from the wall and waved a hand. “Tara?” she called out, her voice gently rasping. “Ah, and Georgie, too. Good. Come over here, if you please, away from Willard.”

Zevran and the rest of the party peeled themselves away from the wall. Two wiry mages, a boy and a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, were watching the party with open mouths. A third mage, substantially older and wearing a gold robe instead of the younger ones’ blue ones, observed the scenario with a curled lip.

“We…” the girl looked uneasily between them and her co-conspirators.

“We are explicitly here to thwart Uldred’s plans,” Wynne said firmly. “Join us now, or fight to the death.”

Rhodri’s eyes widened. She beckoned frantically to the apprentices. 

“Come, leave him,” she said urgently. “Please, please be sensible– SHIT!”

The man named Willard threw a gashed hand in the party’s direction, and a stream of rippling, singing blood was narrowly stopped by Rhodri’s shield.

Chaos ensued. Willard tipped his head back and lifted his arms, as if to call to something, only to have a fire blob fall out of thin air and… into him? This was without a doubt the strangest pornography Zevran had ever witnessed, and by far the most unpleasant. 

The blob was Willard and Willard was the blob, a blazing bag of flesh and char who was apparently as foul-tempered as he had been prior to the possession. Willard the Fire Blob threw himself at the party, magic assaults aplenty. That was probably for the best on his end, because the teenagers flopped over most unceremoniously, asleep before they could finish crumpling on the floor.

With a snort, Zevran distracted Willard long enough for Rhodri, for whom sleep spells were becoming something of a personal trademark, to bolt over and haul the anaesthetised teenagers away by their ankles. 

With five against one, Willard the Fire Blob didn’t have a hope. Especially, Zevran decided as he slipped around and neatly snicked Willard’s throat open, against someone like him. After all, who in the Fereldan Circle– and who in the Fade, for that matter, expects an Antivan Crow? What a gorgeous thing it was for a powerful beast to be easy prey.

Willard died immediately.

Tara and Georgie, once awakened, looked rather nonplussed about the whole affair.

Wynne marched over to where the blinking pair sat, shaking her head. “Blood magic,” she said reproachfully. “I expected better from both of you.”

“We were trying to free ourselves!” the boy protested. “Uldred promised us the Circle would support Loghain and Loghain would help us be free of the Chantry!”

Rhodri squatted down near them. “I have always told you,” she said gently, “that blood magic is dangerous, and only a last resort if you have had the proper tutelage and testing. No-one here is qualified to teach it, or even practice it.” She frowned. “You understood that. You never wanted to get into any of it. Why did you side with him?”

“A lot can change in a few months,” the boy snarled. “You might know that if you hadn’t fucked off and left us in this miserable pit!”

“Georgie!” the girl whispered furiously, shooting Rhodri an apologetic look.

“Shut up!” he barked at her. “Rhodri didn’t even try to take anyone with her! Didn’t leave a note, no letters. It was like we never existed to you once you were free.” The little bastard glared at the Warden and spat out, “Soulless Tranquil bitch.”

  Zevran couldn’t remember a time in his life where he hadn’t attended Saturday prayers at the Chantry. The whorehouse children were many things, the whores would regularly say, but they were not unbelievers. 

The tiny Rialto Alienage Chantry was the most gorgeous building he had ever seen. The carvings of Shartan and Andraste, inlaid in the supports and the hardwood walls, were so magnificent, so consecrated in their perfection that not even the guards would threaten to raze it to the ground. 

After the Crows had bought him, his new house of prayer became the gilded, stained-glass edifice in Antiva City, which his mother’s taxes had no doubt been funnelled into while she lived. Magnificent, certainly, and inspiring an awe that matched the tone of the Canticles.

Now, in that grand place, he was down on both knees, eschewing the embroidered hassock for the well-deserved hardness of the marble floor. His prayer beads smelled of ancient sweat and Antivan cypress, hanging from his clasped, trembling hands, a fingerwidth away from the bridge of his nose. 

You have walked beside me Down the paths where a thousand arrows sought my flesh. You have stood with me when all others Have forsaken me.

The cold guilt turning in his belly was tamped down momentarily with a fervent plea for forgiveness, and Zevran did it again when the unpleasantness resurged, and again, and again. If he had to spend the rest of his life on his knees, he would do it. 

He prayed until his legs had gone numb, and even then was only interrupted when a hard kick toppled him over. Zevran clutched the prayer beads, not bothering to reach for any of the daggers on his person, and lifted his gaze without moving his head.

Master Eoman watched him from his great height, swinging a set of polished rosewood prayer beads on his finger.

“I heard you praying for that little half-breed,” he sneered at a respectably low volume.

Zevran gave no answer. What was there to say?

The Master squatted down and smirked at him softly. “Is there really any point, though?”

“The Maker has never told me otherwise.”

Zevran's insolence was met with a triumphant smile that made his blood curdle. 

“I’ll tell you something now, Thirty-Three,” Eoman whispered, teeth gleaming. “No prayer will turn the Maker’s eye to something like her, and you can be sure it’ll have the opposite effect if you're the one praying.”  

The Master chuckled and shook his head. “To come this far as a Crow means something's forsaken you. If you believe in the Maker’s divine hand shielding people from the worst things in life, you’d know that Forty-Seven-Two is nothing even to the All-Loving. She had no soul, and neither do you..” Eoman drew a finger under Zevran’s tightening jaw and forced it up to face him. His eyes narrowed menacingly. “And as sure as day follows night follows day, Thirty-Three, your turn will come. You’ll follow her footsteps and die as you lived: nothing.”

There should have been the usual anger and indignance that came with serious blasphemy. Failing that, at least a desire to point out that disputing the existence of a soul insulted the Maker. And yet, nothing compelled him to disagree. Zevran swallowed back the bile crawling up his throat, resisting the urge to curl into himself.

Master Eoman flicked Zevran’s jaw out of his fingers and stood up again. He wiped his hand on his cloak. “If you have the urge to do a good deed, you might pick yourself up off the floor before you leave a mark there. Or at least consider wasting away on one of the darker tiles.”

Without another word, the Master turned and strode away toward the Revered Mother's office. Zevran wanted to die.

Zevran clenched his fists as the briefest shock rippled over Rhodri’s face. When her usual frown was in place again, she raised an eyebrow at the boy. “‘Tranquil,’” she echoed, folding her arms. “Hm. I suppose I have Willard to thank for you picking up cheap slurs, is it?”

The boy scoffed. “People have always called you that–”

“But you never did,” she said simply. “In any case, we don’t have time to discuss the likelihood of the Templars burning my letters to you, or the fact that you two and Clarrie were in crucial, uninterruptible examinations when I was conscripted into the Grey Wardens–”

“You wrote to us?” the girl gasped.

Rhodri sighed. “Yes, Tara, many times. If we make it out of here alive, I suggest you take your questions to the First Enchanter about that."

"But–"

"Later, if you please. Now, as the Senior Enchanter has already said,” she indicated a frowning Wynne, “we are eradicating the blood magic in this Tower, and making very quick work of it. You two are fighting a losing battle, and I want you to give up now.”

“Rhodri, don’t you remember what it was like?” Tara protested. “The floggings, the dungeons, the constant surveillance? Greagoir's brutal, and he lets that handful of underlings get away with everything! We can’t keep living like this. We have to fight for change!”

“Do you think the Circle will ever be the same after this?” Wynne asked gravely. “It has already changed.” She rubbed her brow and sighed. “You are one of a miraculous handful of survivors, and unless you stand down from this now, your luck is about to take a turn for the worse.”

“They will stand down,” Rhodri said firmly. She looked around at Wynne. “May I have a moment with them, please, Senior Enchanter? They’re my students. They’ll listen to me.”

When Wynne nodded, the two teenagers were pulled to their feet and walked just outside of hearing distance. With their backs to the party, it was hard to know what was being said, but Zevran was sure he caught the apprentices’ eyes briefly widening. A suspicious look from the boy was quelled by some unknown thing from the Warden; hope threatened in the girl’s eyes and didn’t dim. 

And then they nodded, to themselves and to each other, and that was that. The three of them returned to the party.

“And?” Wynne asked. “What have you decided, Tara? Georgie?”

“Your side,” they replied together. 

“We didn’t actually do any blood magic,” the girl added quickly. “Just watched. Willard only wanted us to give him some of our blood.”

Rhodri said a filthy enough word to make Wynne purse her lips. She watched the apprentices worriedly. "Did he take any of your blood?"

They shook their heads. The boy held out his hands, dirty but admittedly free of blood.

"See?" he said calmly. "Nothing. Not even on my sleeves."

The Warden relaxed. Wynne relented with a sigh. 

“Very well," Wynne said. "I will give you the benefit of the doubt for the time being.” She pointed in the direction the party had come from. “The other survivors are in the library annexe. Wait with them.”

The apprentices nodded and as they made to leave, Rhodri pulled the boy aside.

“Pharamond and Owain still live,” Zevran heard her murmur to him. “I don’t know if your sudden affinity for slurs has brought other behaviours, but I expect you to treat them, and any other Tranquil mages, with respect.”

The apprentice winced. “I know,” he mumbled. “I shouldn’t have called you that. I only said it because I was angry. I– I didn’t mean it.”

Rhodri shook her head. “That’s beside the point. If you want to insult me, that is your prerogative, but it will not come at the cost of the Tranquil mages’ dignity.”

“I’m sorry, Rhodri.” His voice cracked a little.

“Prove it to me, Georgie. Go back with Tara to the annexe, and don’t abide a single bad word about Owain and Pharamond.” She bent down until they were eye-level and watched him gravely. “They’ve been good to you all these years, and someone needs to care about them, even if they feel nothing. I expect nothing less of you.”

He sniffled. “I'll do it.”

“Good.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t say these things if I thought you incapable of doing better. You’re a kind boy, and I know you won’t disappoint me.”

He nodded.

“Good,” she said again, and gestured to the girl. “You two go, then, and tell the others we’re well.”

Wynne and Rhodri waved the apprentices goodbye, heaving their own private sighs once they were out of sight.

Zevran sighed too, and didn’t know why. Something in here smelled like victory; he didn’t know what that was, either.

The party moved into the adjoining corridor. After seeing so many rounding hallways, Zevran couldn’t help but note a curious craving for straight lines.

And relative safety, but the former of these seemed a more likely encounter at this point.

The rooms in this stretch were, at least, much smaller than what they’d been walking through. That meant fewer enemies behind each closed door, which was always a good thing. 

They were nicer, too. Three or four of them were dormitories– and not the open slather, forty bunk beds to a single space affair like what they’d seen downstairs. At most, one dormitory had five beds big enough to sleep two or three people each, separated from one another by a three-quarter wall that opened out into a common hallway.

Zevran gave a low whistle as he poked his head around one of the walls to look inside one of the bedrooms. Along with the bed, the room boasted its own storage trunk, wardrobe, and vanity–or rather, the broken remains of them now. It must have been positively palatial by Circle standards while it was still intact.

“Who gets to sleep in here?” he asked, regretting it instantly as the Warden stiffened. 

Wynne looked over her shoulder at him. "The mages who pass their apprenticeship," she said, not unkindly but with a matter-of-factness he had often heard in himself when talking about life in the Crows. 

Leliana frowned. "But there are so few beds here. The dormitories downstairs–"

Alistair touched her shoulder and shook his head. "Don't think about it too much," he said grimly, wincing a little as Leliana's face went white.

Wynne called Rhodri and pointed at the room Zevran had peeked into. "Nobody took your room, Rhodri. If you stored anything useful in there before you left, you should collect it now. I'll do the same, actually…" she strode further down the tight corridor and went into the fourth room.

Rhodri wasted no time, wading over the wreckage to the trunk, which sported only a little damage to the top. She hauled the lid open, and a hard breath tumbled out of her.

“The pictures,” she mumbled, fishing out a hand-sized paper and kissing it. “They’re still intact.”

Rhodri looked over at him. Zevran glanced over his shoulder; Alistair and Leliana had gone with Wynne, so it had to have been him she'd meant it for. It almost came across as a request to come nearer and look with her, but why she would want him close by for that–

Oh. Oh. No, he knew. She kissed it because it was the picture of a lover. Perhaps she had been aware of Zevran’s flirtations, let him do it because she was too polite to turn him down– perhaps even too afraid to upset him– and now was the moment before the gentlest rejection in history. It had been a while since he had made any come-ons with any real intention, but she might have decided to dissuade him from starting up again. How awfully decent of her to be so thoughtful about it all.

His stomach sank anyway.

Still, he waded over the wreckage to her, ready enough to accept the rejection. She didn’t smile, but leaned in toward him when he drew close enough. Salt, burnt blood, scorched earth, all sweetened by sundried linen. The smell should have made his stomach turn. It did on some level, but he couldn’t find it in himself to shift away from her.

She brought the picture near him, a colour portrait of a tall, sharp-faced man with a sharkmouth and wavy, brown hair, standing with his arm around the waist of a slender, raven-haired woman who wore a remarkably familiar frown. They were flanked on either side by two older teenagers with confident smirks (twins, Zevran presumed), along with a beaming redheaded boy, and a solemn, bright-eyed young girl who held the woman’s hand. All but the woman wore luxurious, patterned robes and had staves strapped to their backs (the woman had a lush velvet gown that went to the floor) and every one of them stood proudly, resplendent in their finery. These had to be relatives.

“My mother and father,” Rhodri said softly, “and my younger siblings. The twins, Mazarin and Evander. Owen is this one here, and my youngest sister, Bethann. They all live in Minrathous, of course, so I got a picture each year to see what had changed as the time passed.” She gulped. “This is the last one they sent before my mother went missing.”

Not a picture of a lover, then. Zevran’s skin prickled with shame under the lightness in his chest. He smiled, and he couldn’t decide if it came because he’d summoned it, or if it had simply been waiting for the opportunity to emerge.

“I see looks run in the family,” he nodded at the picture. “Your mother is a stunning beauty.”

Compliments to mothers were always welcome with marks. Other family members less so, but treasured mothers were a shrine at which all good words were expected to be laid. And certainly, Zevran hadn’t said anything untrue.

“Yes,” her thumb brushed over the woman’s cheek. “My father always kissed my mother’s hands and told her so.” She sighed and slipped the picture into her satchel. “They’re a funny bunch. Full of stories and wickedness. I think they’d love you.”

Zevran’s body locked, and Rhodri– the Warden! why did he keep calling her that?-- to his incalculable relief, wasn’t even looking at him. Already bending down to close the chest and, with a quiet request that he follow her, walking past him and out of the little room. She had no idea, and his muscles loosened again on that basis alone.

Wynne appeared in the corridor, with Alistair and Leliana hot on her heels.

“Are you ready to move on?” she asked.

The Warden touched a hand to her satchel and nodded. 

§

Try as he might, Zevran couldn’t shake the feeling he had stumbled into a particularly bad party. The rampant destruction the company encountered on the next floor up wasn’t out-of-place at boisterous, down-at-heel celebrations. Drunk humans, especially, had a real affinity for shattering windows and other glass, upending anything not nailed to the ground, and getting into fights that had the host finding bloodpatches and loose teeth on the premises for a week. 

Really, if it weren’t for the monsters and the fact that the floor and walls were festooned with swollen, bulbous entrails big enough to eclipse him, Zevran could have convinced himself he’d walked in on the tail-end of a human gang leader’s birthday. Was it always this awful here? Oh, to have been back downstairs, where the walls were cleaner and the main task was pilfering lyrium from the First Enchanter’s office. (And, in the Warden’s case, a black leather book that, she declared to the baffled party, belonged more to Morrigan than to Irving).

And the timing of all this had been particularly bad (though when, precisely, was a good time to see tree trunk-sized gizzards and tendons snaking their way around like bunting?). The kitchen was the last room the party passed through before stepping into the– well, what was that room? The entrails parlour? Whatever it had been, Zevran found himself deeply regretting any gratitude he might have felt that the food in said kitchen was still fresh.

Perhaps the only good thing about having to enter said parlour via the kitchen was the fact that the party had been able to loop back down to the library annexe and drop off food to the ecstatic survivors. And, Zevran was quietly pleased to note, Rhodri had spoken with the Tranquil mages and seemed satisfied with the way Georgie– and the others there, had been treating them. As good as the situation could possibly be, then.

Really, the problems had only truly started once they entered the entrails parlour. Even then, Zevran might have felt reasonably at ease with the situation had Wynne not audibly gasped. Touched a hand to her mouth, even.

“Th–this cannot continue,” she stammered softly. “If there were so many deaths on the lower floors, what has gone on up here? Is this from possessions?”

The blanched Warden reached around and touched Alistair, who was wearing a quizzical frown.

“You see it, too, right?” he murmured to her.

“Mmm,” she nodded weakly. “So much like Darkspawn corruption.”

Zevran’s stomach dropped at that. Wynne and Leliana looked around at them sharply.

“You do not think…?” Wynne’s eyes widened. “... Do you?”

They shook their heads. “The blood’s too red,” Alistair said. “Darkspawn blood is much darker. I’d hazard a guess that this is Abomination corruption.”

“Maker preserve us,” Leliana whispered. “These poor people.”

At the mention of sympathy, the two mages straightened up.

“We must stop them,” Wynne declared.

“Mmm!” Zevran smiled. “Better the abominations die than us!” He spun his blades in his hands, half to offset the nerves and half to encourage himself.

“Keep that enthusiasm,” Alistair muttered darkly. “I’ve a feeling it’s only going to get worse from here.”

Zevran shrugged with all the good-naturedness he could muster. “We will either come out of this alive, my friend, or we will not.”

“We can’t afford to fail,” Rhodri said simply. “Come, please. We should move on.”

§

The last room to clear out on that floor sat directly across from the staircase. The door was closed, and Zevran wasn’t sure if it was his tired muscles talking (in all fairness, the previous door had housed another of those bodacious desire demons), but there was something vaguely soporific about the air. Softer, warmer, with the vague, heavy pull of an Antivan summer afternoon in the minutes before a downpour broke the stifling humidity. He couldn’t help but love it.

From behind him, Alistair yawned. “That desire demon really took it out of me, you know,” he mumbled. He uncorked a stamina potion and downed it in two mouthfuls.

Wynne and Rhodri shared an uncertain hum. “I think we ought to brace ourselves,” the Senior Enchanter said, blinking owlishly. “There seems to be something that saps energy at proximity.”

Rhodri stifled a yawn and led the group away from the door. “We should split into two,” she declared. “Someone come in with me, and if we both fall asleep, the other contingent can drag us out, yes?”

Without thinking, Zevran, who was already feeling much more energised, gave a small wave and stepped forward. 

“I am ready and willing!” he waggled his brows daringly. “Shall we?”

Rhodri nodded. They strode back to the door. 

“Stay behind me,” Rhodri murmured. “If I fall and you’re still standing, go out and fetch the others. I’m too heavy for you to carry alone, and you need to get out before you drop, too.”

Zevran opened his mouth to complain, but under the sombre look she was pinning him down with, he could do nothing but nod once. Appearing satisfied, she opened the door and let out a surprised ‘Ae ae!’

“It’s Niall!”

Zevran looked around her shoulder and saw a rail-thin human lying on the floor. His long, dark hair spilled around him like a halo, and his cheeks were so sunken that Zevran had thought him dead until he saw his chest barely rise. Under one of his skeletal hands was a scroll– litanies were long texts, were they not? Was this what the mages were after?

“Oh dear,” Zevran sighed. His body slumped a little under the effort, which was decidedly less than promising.

When he looked up again, he was already being shoved back toward the door. He turned around and caught sight of a colossal red… thing looming behind Rhodri. A blob, not unlike the other blobs, but larger and with a sag to its entire body that gave the distinct impression of melting. Its one, yellow eye sat in a black socket, turned directly onto him.

“Wh–?” 

“Go,” Rhodri gasped. “It’s a sloth demon. I’m too close to it, I can’t cast–” she groaned and sank to her knees like an invisible hand was pressing down on her from above. “Go, Zev!”

“Ah,” the demon lamented in a guttural purr. “But we were just starting to have fun.”

Zevran’s knees buckled. “Ah… hello?” he called out the door. “We may–” he paused and yawned, an unfortunately pleasant heaviness creeping into his bones. Where was this bloody demon during the insomnia nights? “May need… reinforcements…”

Footsteps were coming, no doubt bound for the same fate, and Zevran was on the floor, sinking into the stone like it was a feather mattress. The gentle light filtering through the windows was just the right dimness for a midday nap, and what a gorgeous thing it was to feel so dreamy and leaden. Unwise, of course, but with a body that was nailed to the floor by forces unseen, what was he to do? He glanced over as a hand– ah, lovely Rhodri’s hand, reached back and took his shoulder.

“Go, Zev,” she slurred, giving it a futile push. 

There was no going for either of them, and Zevran didn’t mind that. Her hand stayed where it was on him, and he drank in the tender, earnest weight like parched earth. Those rubbed-eye shapes danced over his field of vision, cutting off grey eyes watching him with such apology. What a fool he'd been. What a damned fool. His mouth twitched in a rueful smile.

The (hopefully reassuring), "Goodnight, mi sol," he mumbled sounded like it had come from someone else. Maybe it had.

Zevran was satisfied either way; he gave in.