#zevbrosca

“What the hell are you doing here.”

She’d felt her Calling for weeks before she did anything about it, hoping in vain that she could will it away. She had things to do, ironically searching for a cure to the very thing plaguing her, but eventually she could ignore it no longer and crept from her camp and her sleeping assassin and delved alone into the Deep Roads. She had left him a letter, one she’d prepared years ago for just this eventuality, along with a small selection of tokens to remember her by; she hadn’t had a lot to her name, on the road as they were, but she’d willed it all to him. And now here he is, his hands on her shoulders turning her to face him like her letter hadn’t said specifically to let her go.

“Mi amor,” he says as his lips brush the tattoo on her forehead, sounding on the verge of tears. “You must come back.”

She doesn’t respond. They’ve had this talk, or some variation on it, many times before: he doesn’t need her to repeat the familiar steps. Becoming a Warden might have been the only thing that saved her life years ago, but she’d grown into the identity and into her role as Warden-Commander of Amaranthine, embraced the good she could do for other people. She’s proud of being a Warden. Dying in the Deep Roads, surrounded by nothing but darkspawn, is an unappealing prospect, but she sees it as the last act of service she can offer, to go out fighting the monsters rather than become one herself. She’s told Zevran as much every time he told her to give up that part of being a Warden, the way he had given up being a Crow. It isn’t the same, but he doesn’t want to hear it.

“Darkspawn,” she says, her sense of them tingling along the top of her spine.

She stalks out of the room and back into the broad hallway, taking up a ready stance in the middle; Zevran follows her after retrieving his dagger.

“Inatia,” he pleads, but he has a dagger in each hand, ready to fight alongside her. “The Calling is false.”

The darkspawn crash into them and that makes talking difficult, but that’s never stopped Zevran before. He shouts to her, relaying information heard from Isabela heard from someone named Varric heard from Varric’s dealings with the Inquisition. The Orlesian Wardens—because of course it’s the Orlesians—well, honestly she loses the thread of what it is they’re doing, more focused on the swings of her hammers through darkspawn sinew, but what sticks is what he said first. How could a false Calling even be possible? He must have said, but if he’s right…

The wave of darkspawn ebbs, and she steps up onto one of the crushed pieces of statuary that litter the hall. With the head of her hammer, she hooks Zevran’s neck and pulls him close.