#weishaupts

Forget that! "Sakra, did you just clobber him?"

She probably did! -- but to his credit, his thoughts whirring with the ground strewn far above his head, he is too dazed and too throttled to properly tell. Why, just a second ago, unfortunately, he had been in what Sir Emmrich would label a rather vigorous conniption. See, some bastard had raved about the refugees, that bedraggled, hungry push of such miserable wretches, and riled, his heart but the size of a fifth-month solstice, Hal, come from Skalitz, threw his fist. Maker, and how he ate it, obviously, with the bastard about the size of a far off mountain, but as he ogles this girl with a storm in her eyes?

“You hear they’re trying to separate us?”

Davrin spoke through a smile as he followed Athera through the forest. His eyes were focused on the back of her head. The First Warden had tossed an old map of the Hunterhorn Mountains into her hands and sent them on their merry way. They had dropped into Laysh to get more supplies and were supposed to be closing in on their destination. It was an unmarked, deep cavern.

Some of their colleagues found weird mutated darkspawn in a mountain a few years back and the Grey Wardens had been clearing them out ever since. The one they were headed to was the last and the smallest. So, the First Warden was hoping, the easiest. Otherwise, sending just the two of them was practically an assassination attempt. Was the First Warden so far up his own ass he would put his own people in danger?

…anyway.

Davrin would see to it that him and Athera got out of this. It’d be a damn shame to not hear that laughter again. “Whoa!”

Davrin caught himself on a nearby tree. He almost fell over. No. He had almost been knocked over. He forgot. There wasn’t two of them here— there was three.

A baby griffon rubbed up against his pant leg. “You’ve ever heard of personal space?” He asked him. Of course, the response was a squawk. He shook his head and scratch behind the little guy’s ears. Still no name yet… but that’ll come.

“That’s why they assigned me as a griffon babysitter.” Davrin entertained the idea that the First Warden sent the little guy along as a test of sorts. But Davrin thought it was a bit dangerous. The griffons were just kids, definitely not ready for the battlefield. Yeah, it was supposed to be in their blood but Dalish was in his and look where that got him. In the middle of the woods with a hot… Dalish girl. Huh. More for that thought later.

"That all? After some bastard comes in and steals you from us?"

How unthinkable. Henry spins on her. Behind them, in her room, the water, her staring baubles, darken in terror.

But, well, then again, when a man would loom lumbering like a maelstrom might, there would wear perhaps no better palette quite like black. Indeed, the whole of him would seem to humble all the twilight, his air as thundering and as fathomless as the emptiest pitch. His jaw clenched, the line of sits taunting like everything a fever as it nears a fucking break, but who here still breathing would scold him for his anger? And fouler yet, who here so foolish would dare to try?

Slowly, he comes to wake.

"Mmm?" Henry, for all the years that the stars have known him, has never cared much to so frivolously want or to so grossly desire. He's simple. He likes simple, tasty stews, and simple, gentle loves — there, in the clasp of her arms by the thump of her heart. To the point, he's learned that it's scarcely the complexity of the matter that would so color all the quality or the heft or the value in something. Not at all. For the fullness of a thing to enjoy on its own? She kisses him. Simplicity! He beams at her, a whole decade or two younger.

Henry doesn't say yes. Sweating, eyes shut and breaths trembling, he would believe that those tells that shake his body offer answers enough. In saying that, she'd feel all those wraiths that haunt his marrow, his every shuddering like those buildings that had toppled at home. He would see his felled village in the shadows, his ma wallowinf in the space in that dark behind his eyes, and struck, he can hear her bubbling as she grappled at their sword and father... Butchered. Breathing, he catches the greediest, foulest glimpse of drooling blood.

Skin cold, he turns nigh on phantom-like, lonely, smaller than perhaps ever he has seemed in Athera's company. In his bedroll, he appears all of twenty-three again, still soft and still young and still half of a lamb. Alas, he's feeling forty in his seasons, his beard thicker, his heart darker, and that blue that tints his staring like the surging of a sea. He must seem wild to her, lost, struck desperate for an anchor. Their eyes meet. Their campflame smote, he still sees it, the ask in her eyes all bright and silver.

as does florence, or they had until the road forked. the wrong path was chosen, and the world turned upside down. each day brings something new to their door; less than half of it is pleasant. 

“ oh, me too, ” says florence. “ i used to dream of it while wasting away in val royeaux. a far away place. ” absent of white stone walls and pompous templars, utterly peaceful. “ i never thought the hungering thrill would bring me here. ”

they should have known. expect the unexpected when following varric, but not even he could weave a tale like this.