Dragon age: Composition

You know, I always feel a little sorry for Master Dennet. The Inquisitor is like, hey, I need a horse expert! Here is a horse expert! And he comes along to be your horse expert.

And for a while all is well. He brings his own fine horses, and the Inquisitor adds to the stable as she finds new breeding stock—often excellent. Where she got the charger from, he doesn’t know, and he feels too honored by having it in his care to ask.

And then the Inquisitor starts coming back with like… deer. And Dennet scratches his head, because he knows horses, and just because it has four hooves and you can put a saddle on it doesn’t make it a horse. Hell, the food and space and exercise requirements for a cob and a draft horse aren’t the same—a goddamn deer is presumably completely different. But he goes around Skyhold rounding up Dalish elves until he finds one who knew something about halla, on the principle that that’s probably the closest thing, and they work it out. (He’s always respected the way Dalish treat their halla, so it’s not that big of a leap. And even though Dalish—the Charger—doesn’t know anything much about how to raise halla, he looks the other way when she wants to spend half a day in the deer’s box stall being all affectionate at it. Can’t hurt.)

But deer of various kinds are at least still… well… grass-eating hoofed animals. Things don’t begin to really go sideways until they bring back the first dracolisk.

It’s a lizard. It’s a giant meat-eating lizard. Dennet is a master of horse, and he will stretch that to deer in a pinch, but asking him to figure out the care and feeding of big spiky lizard things is a bit much. It is—he tries to explain, first to Cullen and then to Josephine and finally to the Inquisitor herself—as if someone had decided that because you knew how to knead bread, you were obviously a master pugilist, because both things involved punching things. For his trouble he got a friendly clap on the shoulder and a “Just do your best! We can free up some funds to hire you more help!” (help from where? was he to hang up fliers somewhere for dracolisk handlers? where exactly was one supposed to go for that?).

(We will not even discuss the zombie horse with a sword through its head. We will not. The zombie horse got a stall to itself and was studiously ignored, on the principle that it was dead, and not much Dennet did could either help or hurt it.)

Dennet knew that he was in over his head and then some when the Inquisitor showed up with a charming grin and a giant fucking nug, and all he thought was, “Better see if any dwarves know what to feed it.” (Dagna does, but he’s a little afraid because she keeps having these ideas for ‘experimental feed,’ and….)