NaBlo #5: Description and Snippet of Fic WIP "This Bird Has Flown" (Alistair/Surana, Surana/Cullen)
Sorry to not keep on schedule with my NaBlo posts yesterday and the day before. I started writing this post on Tuesday morning but a combination of a deep lack of sleep, a 12-hour workday, and all of the hullaballoo with the U.S. elections squarely got in the way of finishing this post. By the time I got home, the 6th of November had come and gone, and I was a crazy mix of drunk (wheee, alcohol), wired (wheee! Great election results!), and exhausted (booo… no solid sleep for days…). Yesterday, I decided to take a MUCH NEEDED “fall off the face of the earth” day. I slept until early afternoon (yay! Sleep deficit resolved!) and then I sequestered myself in a coffee house with a book. Dinner somehow ended up involving a lot of tequila as my dinner-mates monitored state and county election returns (at that point, only 60ish% of our state’s vote had been counted, and less so for our populous county). I finished writing this post late last night (after sobering up) but was too tired to post it. Clearly I need to catch up with my NaBlo posts by doing double posts over the next few days.
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Today’s post is about one of my WIPs, This Bird Has Flown (Alistair/Surana, Cullen/Surana). A 500 word excerpt from my draft of the first chapter is at the bottom of this post.
This Bird Has Flown grew out of the first DA:O fanfic that I drafted almost a year ago. The story hasn’t yet seen the light of day because the idea needed a lot of time to cook. Along the way, it merged with a few other story ideas until one day the whole thing just *CLICKED* and I could see the entire novel. At that point, I only needed to sit down and write it. (Harharhar.)
While TBHF is narrated entirely by Alistair, the story is just as much about Neria’s friendship/relationship with Cullen in the Circle and Alistair’s prior friendship with Cullen as monastic brothers as it is about Alistair/Neria, Alistair’s relationship with his royal-blooded family, and Alistair feeling unsure about what he wants out of life.
So, imagine ex-templar Alistair falling hard for the female Warden right after Ostagar. Actually, imagine Alistair being primed to fall for the female Warden because she is a perfect match for a fantasy Alistair secretly harbored. (And imagine Duncan correctly guessing that fantasy and accidentally-or not(?)-eluding to it in a letter he wrote to Alistair immediately after recruiting the new Warden from Ferelden’s Circle). And, right after being rescued by Flemeth, right after seeing Warden Neria Surana take multiple arrows in the chest that were surely fatal, imagine Alistair having his canonical freak out in the swamp, just outside of Flemeth’s hut. Flemeth assures Alistair repeatedly that Warden Surana will be okay. He doesn’t believe her yet, lo and behold, Surana really is fine, and this is the moment Alistair falls head over heels in wild, fantasy-driven infatuation. What does Alistair do? He picks the rose, he flirts, he’s rather forward about winning Neria’s affections and getting her to give him a kiss. Neria clearly likes him and, thanks to their Chantry upbringing, a friendship blossoms very quickly and very naturally. Suddenly, one evening in camp, they go from exchanging the rose to knocking knees in Neria’s tent fifteen minutes later. Meanwhile, Alistair hides his identity while purposefully ignoring Neria’s hesitancy to start a relationship. Once they sleep together, Alistair fails to ask obvious questions and he steers conversation away from Neria’s stories about her friends in the Circle, especially her “friend” Cullen.
Oh, yes, Alistair knows Cullen. Knew him very well, in fact. Quiet, earnest, hardworking Cullen took ten year old Alistair under his wing at the monastery after Alistair became deeply depressed when his attempts to run away and return home to Redcliffe castle were thwarted. Whenever the sons of nobles bullied Alistair for being a bastard and the sons of labors teased him for being a stuck-up boy from the poshest of posh upbringings, Cullen told Alistair to ignore all of them and concentrate on excelling in his studies. This was how they became friends. These two outcast boys (Cullen’s mother was an outlaw apostate) protected themselves from bullies by shrugging off every taunt hurled in their direction and calling the bluff of those who challenged them, even if that meant steeling the strength of their will by swallowing a handful of worms and slugs before an audience of jeering boys.
Alistair definitely knew Cullen. They knew each other’s secrets, knew the stories of each other’s pre-monastic past: A bastard son of royalty and bastard son to a wandering single mother apostate.
After Cullen was tortured by Uldred’s blood mages and rescued by Wardens Surana and Alistair, Cullen suffered a mental breakdown. He endangered the lives of others and Greagoir decided that Cullen could no longer remain as a templar in Ferelden’s Circle. Unfortunately, the Blight made it difficult for Greagoir to process Cullen’s transfer. Rather than keep Cullen locked up in a room in the templar quarters, Warden Surana convinced Greagoir to let her party of companions take Cullen as a sword arm and if he proved mentally incapable of fighting, they would take him to Greenfell Chantry.
For the period of time that Cullen traveled with Alistair, Neria Surana, and their companions, Alistair puts his relationship with Neria on hold after spilling the truth about his parentage. Shellshocked Cullen works on stabilizing his emotions and mental state such that he can regain his productivity. Neria and Cullen reach an understanding, which plants a seed in Cullen that sprouts years later in Kirkwall when he begins to realize that some mages can be trusted.
Throughout all of this, Alistair meditates on the meaning of love, loss, and obligation.
Overall, This Bird Has Flown looks like it will be somewhere between 80k and 100k words. The entire thing is outlined in detail (12k outline!) but only a tenth or so of the actual novel has been drafted. I had originally planned on posting Chapter 1 (~3400 words) in late October but life and NaNo prep got in the way. Here’s a taste taken from the end of Chapter 1.
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[Excerpt from draft from This Bird Has Flown, Chapter 1]
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Our ferry boat pushed off from the base of the Circle tower and began its slow crossing to the Lake Calenhad dock. Neria sat facing me, Cullen next to her. While the boat paddled through the fog, we remained silent. Cullen’s unfocused eyes stared off into the grey nothingness. Had Neria not held his hand, anchoring him to our world, Cullen might have drifted away into the fog and the Fade, gone from this world forever.
Throughout most of our ride across the lake, Neria stared straight into my eyes like she was looking for the glint of silver coins tossed into a wishing well. I assumed she was trying to get my agreement on something, but I could not fathom what. So many thoughts raced through my mind that I could not grab hold of any single thought long enough to make sense of what I felt.
Now, looking back at who I had been on that day, I can no longer conjure up the pang of dread that wrenched my stomach as our ferry boat silently cut through the fog. At that time, I agonized over the fact that everything between Neria and me was about to change. Surely Cullen would tell her every word that I had failed to tell her. Fright gripped me as I imagined how Neria’s feelings for me would shift. When she heard the truth, inevitably everything between us would be different.
I remember feeling envious as I watched Neria and Cullen sitting together. A dam that had once stood between them burst and all of their prior secrets had flooded out. Rivers of truth flowed freely across an open plain. Whether they remained together or went their separate ways mattered little to me. Instead, I envied their honesty. They exchanged words that caused them pain, yet the words that should have divided them brought them closer together. As they sat together, side by side, their silence reflected a sense of familiarity and an acceptance of who they would always be. On that day, the two of them seemed much older than me even though all three of us were very close in age.
I knew back then how foolish it was to think that Neria and Cullen had an easy road ahead of them. Cullen was unwell. His prior sense of security had been stolen from him. The Cullen I had known in the monastery was a serious young man, yet he was always congenial, always thoughtful, always fair. This Cullen appeared to peer at the world around him in reflections cast in the shards of a smashed mirror. He had no reason to trust Neria, yet he followed her onto the boat when she chose to help him navigate a landscape that confused and frightened him. She did all of this without fear or judgement. Watching them filled me with an unbearable emptiness because they understood something I did not. I had never experienced love. They had.
Crossposted at http://vieralynn.dreamwidth.org/183208.html.