Fanfic; Dragon Age: Origins: Sound of White, part one
Title: Sound of White
Characters: Amell, Cullen, Alistair
Rating: M for future chapters
Words: 2000-ish
Spoilers & warnings: Spoilers for mage origin as well as Ostagar. Not much else.
Summary: She quite possibly makes the worst first impression in the history of Grey Wardens.
Notes: Chapter 1 of 4. The SO said the other day "the should have made something more with Cullen, that tidbit was really cool". I was going to write a brief little story of my mage PC and her background. Then this happened. Oh, templars, you wicked, wicked things!
1. Air
She was born in the Tower.
She know this like one knows certain unspoken things; it has been told to her as a story half-forbidden, in scraps and pieces all spread out across her upbringing. It is told in the way glances never linger on her face, in the way some words - father, mother, history - carry double meanings. One for everyone else, one especially for her. Did she once call someone mother? She does not know. There were men and women all around her, surrounding her, praising her and scolding her; men and women shaping her and holding her upright. This she knows.
Little Ella Amell, name like a rhyme and eyes like the sky. When she's fifteen she overhears someone speak of her in a corridor, mention her and her mother and the accident; Irving shakes his head sadly the one time she brings it up. He won't tell.
They are encouraged to forget their history. In that sense she is an ideal mage, since she remember so very little. It is almost as though someone has taken measures to prevent them, these memories of hers.
At times she lays them out in her mind, placing them in a chronological order, making her own narrative.
When she was a little girl, perhaps no older than five or six, one of the templars used to play with her outside in the sun. They would watch the lake and he would tell her of creatures sleeping beneath the glittering surface. He had a round, soft face and eyes that could seem sad even if he was in the middle of a riotous tale. His name was Ingram. It was one of the first words she could spell, laboriously and in blotchy ink. There were rumours that he drowned himself the year after she begun her formal practice for the Circle. Others said he had been called to Antiva on duty.
She knows this was her father.
Past like a puzzle and she never retrieves the pieces, not even afterwards when all is done and she has seen it all. All these places. Places with life, with death, with worry. Places with defeated resistance and newly awakened. Places of darkness and light, of her and others, of thick cobwebs embracing past and present until everything is part of the same pattern.
Perhaps there is never a prospect of change.
A circle is round. Even a broken one.
*
Cullen comes to them when she is eighteen and dreading the idea of being caught in the Tower for the rest of her life, while fearing the options besides being just that. He is something else. She spots him in a crowd, drawn to his light and fluttering energy that swoops around and above him, unable to settle down. He is awfully, hopelessly nervous around mages, never able to form coherent sentences if teased. And they tease him. Some nights after supper a group of older apprentice girls gather in the Great Hall, all fluttering eyelashes and silly voices. A few of the bolder ones extend their teasing to touches and strokes, each one more intimate than the ones before. Quickly this become habitual, like cruel jests often do in places like the Tower.
Cullen storms out, blushes, even looks ready to cry. But he never gives in.
She admires him for it. When she tells him, he stares at her for the longest time.
“Y-you... why? Why would you do that?”
The question leaves her at odds with herself.
All her life she has learned about the templars' sacred duty. The Chantry's obligation. They are properly schooled in the ways and means of the blessed knights yet what remains once the decorative words have been removed is the one thing everybody knows about them. What they are denied. She finds it peculiar and terrible to extract such crucial parts of life from a person. It must feel like they drag this out with brute force, like tearing off a limb. To live is to desire. Only the templars must never desire that which most creatures desire above all else - to love and be loved. She wonders what Cullen would have been like in another place, another time. If he thinks about it.
“You have courage,” she says eventually. “Yes, that is why.”
They pity the templars as they share each other's beds. The templars in turn pity them for their leashes as they march off to war.
Cullen gives her an unsteady laugh of disbelief before walking away.
*
“I do not intend to remain here,” she tells Cullen on a winter's night when they sit outside the library, their voices carrying low messages of some kind of understanding. The Tower is too small to avoid him, she figures, and makes schemes where he happens to cross her path regularly. He doesn't seem to mind.
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. You could come with me.”
“That's... impossible.” She knows he considers this nonetheless because of the worried wrinkle across his forehead, the way his mouth tightens around the words.
*
The night before her Harrowing, he waits outside her chambers, a flushed sort of panic showing in his face. There is no need for words, she knows all too well why. It's a speciality of the Chantry to observe every detail in this manner and prey upon it, forcing the gentlest of them to the cruellest experiences. She supposes it strengthens the templars, if it doesn't drive them to madness.
I don't want you to get hurt, she thinks as he stretches out a hand to touch her shoulder. Tentatively, almost reluctantly. She holds her breath. Waits. Fingertips against the cloth of her robes, wandering up to grace the line of her collarbones, her neck, her lips. He moans softly when she takes his other hand and places it on her waist, pressing up against him and the cool stone wall.
“You are always watching me,” she whispers. She's bold tonight, it might be her last.
“Y-yes.” There is an apology within his tone and she wants to brush it away, shake it out of him, but her hands are suddenly callous and he looks away, at something invisible behind her. “I-I must... I really can't do this.”
And he is leaving, the haunted expression in his face still so visible in the dusk-dark corridor. Ella draws a sharp breath when he turns around again, looking straight at her.
“I wished to give you good luck. For tomorrow.”
*
She has Jowan's blood on her hands when she kisses him, darkly and without any hope of redemption. He pushes her away, but relents and she can feel the smug air of resistance leave him the moment she covers his body with her own, tugging at his lower lip with teeth and opening her mouth to his tongue.
“Maker...” he gasps.
He tastes of metallic harshness and traces of herbs, her tongue dancing over his own, pressing him as close as the armour allows and then a bit further, until he cuts into her body and it hurts but she needs it tonight, she forces him to remain.
“I'm leaving now,” she whispers. They step away from each other, both trembling.
“G-good.”
And the goodbye is every bit as bittersweet as she expected.
*
The former-templar Warden has a smile that reminds her of how Cullen could smile - warmly, honestly - if nobody watched. There ends the similarities.
“I will be your aid as you prepare for the Joining,” he informs her in a brisk and cheerful tone that is nothing like anything within the Tower at all and she cannot for the life of her see him prod up and down those heartless corridors watching over mages. There is a much stronger light in him. He burns with it.
“Why do I need aid?” she must ask, frowning at the possibilities.
“Oh, don't worry. I promise you I will not in any way be compromising your personal integrity,” he says but that wasn't what she was afraid of and he doesn't answer her question in the least.
He is good at that.
*
Being in Ostagar is so different it hurts.
For the first couple of days, with Jowan in her mind and heart and Irving's disappointment like a bad dream impossible to wake from, Ella walks around with tears in her eyes. Every small obstacle and she has to fight them back. In her throat they soar, in her head, in her stomach that simply refuses food of any kind because everything is different and too-loud and the very air trembles with people and voices and duties and orders.
As they follow King Cailan's order and go round to aid the soldiers with tasks, raising their spirits, she has to sit down with her head between her legs not to faint on the spot.
Alistair rolls his eyes and hands her bread and dried meat and doesn't leave her alone until she has swallowed it down with a large goblet of ale. Its strength overwhelms her and at the end of the meal she finds herself asleep half-way to her tent, a pair of strong former-templar arms the only thing that keeps her from falling to the ground.
“Alistair...” Duncan sighs when he spots them. “Do keep in mind that she isn't one of the lads and that she might not have been on a steady diet of ale in the Tower.”
“Yes,” she hears Alistair's voice say. It reverberates strangely in her head since her ear is pressed against his chest. “I'm sorry.”
“Tell that to her in the morning.”
She quite possibly makes the worst first impression in the history of Grey Wardens.
*
In the Korcari Wilds, she is convinced she will die and wishes the others would leave her alone to meet her fate.She runs out of energy, out of magic, falls and breaks and oh, it is nothing but an endless ache everywhere, incessantly. Her body can't take it.
They are delayed and must put up their tent, Alistair claims, ignoring the protests from Daveth and Ser Jory who are both surprising her with their outspoken fear of the forest. Never could she have imagined knighted men so open to exposing their weakness in this fashion. The gods know she's ashamed and she's a mage whose only previous experience from fighting is limited to childhood frolic gone awry.
“Stop that, truly, it's no matter-” She has vainly tried healing charms for several minutes, without success. They taught her how to avoid these situations, how to store and channel magic, but nobody has mentioned how hollow it is, when you run out. A cold cavity inside.
“You've bled all over your robes,” he cuts off, holding a bandage pack to her nose while gently tilting her head backwards. She grimaces as the blood trickles down her throat. “That can't be healthy. I don't need to be a spirit healer to notice when someone needs some patching up. Soldier skills, if you will.”
She's embarrassed. Her injuries, each and every cut and bruise on her body, seem to mock her presence here and spell in red ink the mistake Duncan has made in bringing her along. This shames her worse than the dislocated shoulder from yesterday because this is nothing - a simple nosebleed made unstoppable after a harsh blow to her face. It will heal, potions be thanked, but it seems to take forever.
“I know for a fact they don't condone physical violence in the Tower,” he says, grinning. “So when Duncan told me about you I let a few extra bandages slip into my pack. No offence.”
“None taken,” she mutters almost against her will.
“Don't worry, you'll overcome it with time and more first-hand experience. Maker knows I did. You harden.”
It doesn't seem like such a bad thing when it's words coated in his soft voice, but Ella still has a knot of fear tied up inside her, a little cringe at the idea of changing yet again. Another shape, another form. As though her body is merely a map for fearless adventures to thread upon, adding and withdrawing samples for studying.
He has such soft, careful hands and she closes her eyes and pretends she is somewhere else and the throbbing fear in her body isn't hers to carry.
*
Waking up after the Joining, she barely knows her own name.
“Ella,” Alistair says gently and she's grateful that he is there, reminding her.
*
“Cover!” he roars the following night, across a crowded room and an full-sized breathing Ogre that holds the tower guard far too high up in the air. “Dear Maker, do you want to die? Get down!”
She doesn't understand at first that he's shouting at her, and when she does she's already too far gone in her plan. In the middle of the room she stands, all robes and trembling staff against a creature who could break her neck with a little wisp of his hand.
“I can hold him off!” she screams back, employing logic that states if she screams something loud enough it will be true. “Attack!”
He's the warrior but doesn't protest. She gives him no reason.
“You're out of your mind!” he declares later as he leaps from the dead ogre-body in one swift move, sheathing his sword mid-air. “I am very impressed!”
“Yes, I am very impressive.”
“Crazy and prone to suicide missions might also come up, if we're listing your traits,” he adds, still grinning. In the midst of all the horror, they are so grateful to be alive.
They would have continued like that down the stairs, comparing strategy and reality while fighting off new hordes of darkspawn and she can feel it rise in her, the fury-induced joy that follows battle. They would have shared that. Would have ran out to more ill-advised ambushes and uncovered fighting. Joined the King on his glorious field of storybook dreams.
But, of course, then they are betrayed.
Characters: Amell, Cullen, Alistair
Rating: M for future chapters
Words: 2000-ish
Spoilers & warnings: Spoilers for mage origin as well as Ostagar. Not much else.
Summary: She quite possibly makes the worst first impression in the history of Grey Wardens.
Notes: Chapter 1 of 4. The SO said the other day "the should have made something more with Cullen, that tidbit was really cool". I was going to write a brief little story of my mage PC and her background. Then this happened. Oh, templars, you wicked, wicked things!
1. Air
She was born in the Tower.
She know this like one knows certain unspoken things; it has been told to her as a story half-forbidden, in scraps and pieces all spread out across her upbringing. It is told in the way glances never linger on her face, in the way some words - father, mother, history - carry double meanings. One for everyone else, one especially for her. Did she once call someone mother? She does not know. There were men and women all around her, surrounding her, praising her and scolding her; men and women shaping her and holding her upright. This she knows.
Little Ella Amell, name like a rhyme and eyes like the sky. When she's fifteen she overhears someone speak of her in a corridor, mention her and her mother and the accident; Irving shakes his head sadly the one time she brings it up. He won't tell.
They are encouraged to forget their history. In that sense she is an ideal mage, since she remember so very little. It is almost as though someone has taken measures to prevent them, these memories of hers.
At times she lays them out in her mind, placing them in a chronological order, making her own narrative.
When she was a little girl, perhaps no older than five or six, one of the templars used to play with her outside in the sun. They would watch the lake and he would tell her of creatures sleeping beneath the glittering surface. He had a round, soft face and eyes that could seem sad even if he was in the middle of a riotous tale. His name was Ingram. It was one of the first words she could spell, laboriously and in blotchy ink. There were rumours that he drowned himself the year after she begun her formal practice for the Circle. Others said he had been called to Antiva on duty.
She knows this was her father.
Past like a puzzle and she never retrieves the pieces, not even afterwards when all is done and she has seen it all. All these places. Places with life, with death, with worry. Places with defeated resistance and newly awakened. Places of darkness and light, of her and others, of thick cobwebs embracing past and present until everything is part of the same pattern.
Perhaps there is never a prospect of change.
A circle is round. Even a broken one.
*
Cullen comes to them when she is eighteen and dreading the idea of being caught in the Tower for the rest of her life, while fearing the options besides being just that. He is something else. She spots him in a crowd, drawn to his light and fluttering energy that swoops around and above him, unable to settle down. He is awfully, hopelessly nervous around mages, never able to form coherent sentences if teased. And they tease him. Some nights after supper a group of older apprentice girls gather in the Great Hall, all fluttering eyelashes and silly voices. A few of the bolder ones extend their teasing to touches and strokes, each one more intimate than the ones before. Quickly this become habitual, like cruel jests often do in places like the Tower.
Cullen storms out, blushes, even looks ready to cry. But he never gives in.
She admires him for it. When she tells him, he stares at her for the longest time.
“Y-you... why? Why would you do that?”
The question leaves her at odds with herself.
All her life she has learned about the templars' sacred duty. The Chantry's obligation. They are properly schooled in the ways and means of the blessed knights yet what remains once the decorative words have been removed is the one thing everybody knows about them. What they are denied. She finds it peculiar and terrible to extract such crucial parts of life from a person. It must feel like they drag this out with brute force, like tearing off a limb. To live is to desire. Only the templars must never desire that which most creatures desire above all else - to love and be loved. She wonders what Cullen would have been like in another place, another time. If he thinks about it.
“You have courage,” she says eventually. “Yes, that is why.”
They pity the templars as they share each other's beds. The templars in turn pity them for their leashes as they march off to war.
Cullen gives her an unsteady laugh of disbelief before walking away.
*
“I do not intend to remain here,” she tells Cullen on a winter's night when they sit outside the library, their voices carrying low messages of some kind of understanding. The Tower is too small to avoid him, she figures, and makes schemes where he happens to cross her path regularly. He doesn't seem to mind.
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. You could come with me.”
“That's... impossible.” She knows he considers this nonetheless because of the worried wrinkle across his forehead, the way his mouth tightens around the words.
*
The night before her Harrowing, he waits outside her chambers, a flushed sort of panic showing in his face. There is no need for words, she knows all too well why. It's a speciality of the Chantry to observe every detail in this manner and prey upon it, forcing the gentlest of them to the cruellest experiences. She supposes it strengthens the templars, if it doesn't drive them to madness.
I don't want you to get hurt, she thinks as he stretches out a hand to touch her shoulder. Tentatively, almost reluctantly. She holds her breath. Waits. Fingertips against the cloth of her robes, wandering up to grace the line of her collarbones, her neck, her lips. He moans softly when she takes his other hand and places it on her waist, pressing up against him and the cool stone wall.
“You are always watching me,” she whispers. She's bold tonight, it might be her last.
“Y-yes.” There is an apology within his tone and she wants to brush it away, shake it out of him, but her hands are suddenly callous and he looks away, at something invisible behind her. “I-I must... I really can't do this.”
And he is leaving, the haunted expression in his face still so visible in the dusk-dark corridor. Ella draws a sharp breath when he turns around again, looking straight at her.
“I wished to give you good luck. For tomorrow.”
*
She has Jowan's blood on her hands when she kisses him, darkly and without any hope of redemption. He pushes her away, but relents and she can feel the smug air of resistance leave him the moment she covers his body with her own, tugging at his lower lip with teeth and opening her mouth to his tongue.
“Maker...” he gasps.
He tastes of metallic harshness and traces of herbs, her tongue dancing over his own, pressing him as close as the armour allows and then a bit further, until he cuts into her body and it hurts but she needs it tonight, she forces him to remain.
“I'm leaving now,” she whispers. They step away from each other, both trembling.
“G-good.”
And the goodbye is every bit as bittersweet as she expected.
*
The former-templar Warden has a smile that reminds her of how Cullen could smile - warmly, honestly - if nobody watched. There ends the similarities.
“I will be your aid as you prepare for the Joining,” he informs her in a brisk and cheerful tone that is nothing like anything within the Tower at all and she cannot for the life of her see him prod up and down those heartless corridors watching over mages. There is a much stronger light in him. He burns with it.
“Why do I need aid?” she must ask, frowning at the possibilities.
“Oh, don't worry. I promise you I will not in any way be compromising your personal integrity,” he says but that wasn't what she was afraid of and he doesn't answer her question in the least.
He is good at that.
*
Being in Ostagar is so different it hurts.
For the first couple of days, with Jowan in her mind and heart and Irving's disappointment like a bad dream impossible to wake from, Ella walks around with tears in her eyes. Every small obstacle and she has to fight them back. In her throat they soar, in her head, in her stomach that simply refuses food of any kind because everything is different and too-loud and the very air trembles with people and voices and duties and orders.
As they follow King Cailan's order and go round to aid the soldiers with tasks, raising their spirits, she has to sit down with her head between her legs not to faint on the spot.
Alistair rolls his eyes and hands her bread and dried meat and doesn't leave her alone until she has swallowed it down with a large goblet of ale. Its strength overwhelms her and at the end of the meal she finds herself asleep half-way to her tent, a pair of strong former-templar arms the only thing that keeps her from falling to the ground.
“Alistair...” Duncan sighs when he spots them. “Do keep in mind that she isn't one of the lads and that she might not have been on a steady diet of ale in the Tower.”
“Yes,” she hears Alistair's voice say. It reverberates strangely in her head since her ear is pressed against his chest. “I'm sorry.”
“Tell that to her in the morning.”
She quite possibly makes the worst first impression in the history of Grey Wardens.
*
In the Korcari Wilds, she is convinced she will die and wishes the others would leave her alone to meet her fate.She runs out of energy, out of magic, falls and breaks and oh, it is nothing but an endless ache everywhere, incessantly. Her body can't take it.
They are delayed and must put up their tent, Alistair claims, ignoring the protests from Daveth and Ser Jory who are both surprising her with their outspoken fear of the forest. Never could she have imagined knighted men so open to exposing their weakness in this fashion. The gods know she's ashamed and she's a mage whose only previous experience from fighting is limited to childhood frolic gone awry.
“Stop that, truly, it's no matter-” She has vainly tried healing charms for several minutes, without success. They taught her how to avoid these situations, how to store and channel magic, but nobody has mentioned how hollow it is, when you run out. A cold cavity inside.
“You've bled all over your robes,” he cuts off, holding a bandage pack to her nose while gently tilting her head backwards. She grimaces as the blood trickles down her throat. “That can't be healthy. I don't need to be a spirit healer to notice when someone needs some patching up. Soldier skills, if you will.”
She's embarrassed. Her injuries, each and every cut and bruise on her body, seem to mock her presence here and spell in red ink the mistake Duncan has made in bringing her along. This shames her worse than the dislocated shoulder from yesterday because this is nothing - a simple nosebleed made unstoppable after a harsh blow to her face. It will heal, potions be thanked, but it seems to take forever.
“I know for a fact they don't condone physical violence in the Tower,” he says, grinning. “So when Duncan told me about you I let a few extra bandages slip into my pack. No offence.”
“None taken,” she mutters almost against her will.
“Don't worry, you'll overcome it with time and more first-hand experience. Maker knows I did. You harden.”
It doesn't seem like such a bad thing when it's words coated in his soft voice, but Ella still has a knot of fear tied up inside her, a little cringe at the idea of changing yet again. Another shape, another form. As though her body is merely a map for fearless adventures to thread upon, adding and withdrawing samples for studying.
He has such soft, careful hands and she closes her eyes and pretends she is somewhere else and the throbbing fear in her body isn't hers to carry.
*
Waking up after the Joining, she barely knows her own name.
“Ella,” Alistair says gently and she's grateful that he is there, reminding her.
*
“Cover!” he roars the following night, across a crowded room and an full-sized breathing Ogre that holds the tower guard far too high up in the air. “Dear Maker, do you want to die? Get down!”
She doesn't understand at first that he's shouting at her, and when she does she's already too far gone in her plan. In the middle of the room she stands, all robes and trembling staff against a creature who could break her neck with a little wisp of his hand.
“I can hold him off!” she screams back, employing logic that states if she screams something loud enough it will be true. “Attack!”
He's the warrior but doesn't protest. She gives him no reason.
“You're out of your mind!” he declares later as he leaps from the dead ogre-body in one swift move, sheathing his sword mid-air. “I am very impressed!”
“Yes, I am very impressive.”
“Crazy and prone to suicide missions might also come up, if we're listing your traits,” he adds, still grinning. In the midst of all the horror, they are so grateful to be alive.
They would have continued like that down the stairs, comparing strategy and reality while fighting off new hordes of darkspawn and she can feel it rise in her, the fury-induced joy that follows battle. They would have shared that. Would have ran out to more ill-advised ambushes and uncovered fighting. Joined the King on his glorious field of storybook dreams.
But, of course, then they are betrayed.