Chapter Text
A misting of rain hung over the soggy yard, catching the pale yellow light of early morning and holding it like a breath. Dalgar lurked below, in the stark shadow of the Warden fort, Kasselwatch, his numb fingers adjusting the strap that anchored his right pauldron to his boiled-leather vest for the tenth time in as many minutes. A stocky, red-faced human boy and a wiry elven woman with storm gray eyes and a pinched face lingered nearby.
“It shouldn’t be much longer,” Dalgar said. His smile was a little tight from standing out in the pre-dawn chill for so long. “I’m Dalgar, by the way.” He extended a hand to the boy.
“I-I’m C-Conrad,” he replied, voice shaking, and clasped the offered hand. The tips of his fingers were as red as his cheeks, the rest of him pale against Dalgar’s light brown skin. Thick callouses rasped against his own as they parted. “From down by way of Nordbotten. Did a few months of training there, too, but they sent me up here for the Joining.”
“I was wondering from your accent before.” He nodded amicably and turned to the woman, who glowered silently from under her knit cap. She kept her hands shoved firmly under her armpits. Dalgar’s arm fell back to his side.
Conrad’s mouse brown hair was plastered to his forehead from the rain and he pulled his heavy cloak around him tighter for better protection from the cold. It was slightly too long for him and had trailed a little in the mud. He’d left his pack sitting in the mud, too, Dalgar couldn’t help but notice.
“Do you have everything?” he asked. “Best to make sure you’ve got everything and your gear fits well.” Conrad shrugged.
“Thanks, I’ve probably looked everything over a hundred times already. Don’t think I could stomach the hundred-and-first. Anyway. You a Kassel elf? You sound it.”
“More or less,” Dalgar replied. If you counted the Warden fort, he added mentally. “Been here since I was about yea high.” He held his hand just above navel height, then tugged his wool cap down tighter over his short, black hair and adjusted his hood to better insulate his ears. Didn’t want to get bitten by the early Anders winter.
The woman was almost unnaturally still, but her breath still came in clouds before her face, so she hadn’t frozen to death on her feet, at least. Dalgar stomped his feet in the muddy slush and wondered if Dunhammer had been telling him stories again, or if she’d actually seen that happen. The state of the woman’s boots was concerning, he observed. He made a mental note to check that she had good socks on underneath. Dalgar had a couple spare pairs in the pack leaning against the wall nearby.
“Not your size, kid—you can stop eyeing them,” she croaked.
Conrad practically jumped out of his skin and Dalgar choked out a laugh around his surprise. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve got feet like shovels. No way those’d fit.”
She graced him with a grim little smirk, bringing out the fine lines around her eyes and mouth. They all lapsed back into silence, though a little less tense than before.
Kasselwatch was waking up around them now—Wardens finishing off morning chores and heading to the main hall to break their fast with the Revered Mother—and Dalgar watched the long shadow of the fort shrink by degrees.
Now and then a passing Warden would give him a wave, or holler a clipped greeting that cracked like a whip in the morning hush. Anyone stationed here for more than a year knew Dalgar pretty well. Anyone who had been here when he’d first arrived, just a little twig of a boy, was practically family.
Across the yard, Dunhammer’s forge was coming back to life, a dark thread of smoke drifting up from the blackened chimney and over the fortress walls. He could see the dwarf herself already hard at work at the anvil, her wrinkled, leathery skin almost as tough as the gurn hide gloves she wore and her dark beard short and neat—broken in several places by decades-old burns. Dalgar scratched at the puckered scarring crawling up his own neck and the curve of his jaw; the healers had helped with the burns, to be sure, but it was Dunhammer who helped heal everything else.
Her expressive face stretched into an easy smile as she caught him looking her way and she gave a big wave. Dropping her hammer on the anvil, she signed: “Roast a few darkspawn for me, kid!”
Dalgar couldn’t help the sheepish curl of his lip. “For you, I’ll make it ten,” he responded in kind. Dunhammer threw her head back and laughed her silent laugh, then shot him an exaggerated wink before turning back to her work. The yard filled once again with the clang of her hammer.
Dalgar took as deep a breath as he could manage in this ice-brittle air. If he survived the Joining, he could do something real, instead of this endless rotation of training, chores, and guard duty. He could finally stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his brothers and sisters, like Dunhammer, after all they’d done for him. No more freeloading. No more questions from the higher ups. No more gentle “suggestions” from the Chantry that he might be better off in a circle somewhere.
He’d finally be a real Grey Warden… even if it wasn’t what she’d wanted. And if he died, then at least—
A flash in his periphery caught his eye and he spied the woman taking a furtive sip from a small bone and silver flask, before spiriting it back into her coat. After an almost imperceptible shudder, she turned her dark, deep set eyes on him, expressionless, and held him hostage with her gaze. Dalgar’s skin prickled; he knew the Wardens attracted all kinds. He liked to think he was used to it.
Dalgar dismissed that feeling and looked away just in time to see Liv—Senior Warden Olivier, he reminded himself—and the Revered Mother Clara crossing the yard, her coral and blood red robes peeking out from under her humble, dun-colored cloak. He stood up a little straighter on instinct. Olivier, a nonbinary human whose pale face concealed its age as fastidiously as its owner did, towered over Clara—and most people. They were fully prepared to leave, a bow and pack slung over their narrow shoulders and a shining silverite rapier glinting beneath several layers of wool and leather.
“Apologies for keeping you waiting!” Olivier called out on their approach, Dalgar’s fellow recruits flinched at the sound.
Liv’s Orlesian-accented enthusiasm and reddish gold hair were far too bright for so early in the morning, but Dalgar was used to it; all those grueling hours of archery training and fencing drills in the pre-dawn haze came to mind—he inwardly cringed at the memories—who needed the sun when you had Liv’s dazzling disposition? Besides, as Liv would tell him through a brittle sort of cheerfulness, Dalgar would almost certainly have to fight in the near-dark of the Deep Roads someday.
The Revered Mother inclined her head as she came to stand before the gathered recruits; the crown of her white and red wimple caught a sliver of the growing morning light.
“Blessed be this day, for even in adversity, we bathe in the Maker's light," she intoned.
Liv cleared their throat. “Revered Mother Clara, Dalgar, allow me to properly introduce our recent arrivals: Warden Recruits Conrad of Nordbotten and Sybil, who we…met in Vol Dorma.”
“At the gallows, he means.” Sybil picked at her nails.
Conrad’s eyes widened and he edged away from her.
“It’s ‘they’, my dear,” Olivier corrected without missing a beat. She glanced up at them and gave them a brief nod before returning to her nails. They continued: “And it was not literally the gallows. Not yet, anyway.”
The Revered Mother smiled. “How fortunate that you have found this second chance, Miss Sibyl—”
“Please, ‘Miss Sibyl’ is the daughter my mother wished she’d had,” she deadpanned. “It’s just ‘Sibyl,’ if you have to.”
“Very well. Sybil. Even so, the one who repents, who has faith, unshaken by the darkness of the world, she shall know the peace of the Maker's benediction.” Clara sighed, a brief flash of weariness in her brown eyes, then addressed the group. “I came to offer what reassurance I can before you embark on your first test.”
Conrad mumbled something incoherent in response and Sibyl had already returned to her stonewalling. The Revered Mother was unperturbed.
“You set out today to face the darkspawn for the first time in your young lives. No matter how any of you came to be here, in this moment and in this way, you are all the same. And whatever happens, you will all return changed, having confronted the incarnation of our darkest of sins in this world.”
Dalgar already knew their objective: bring down a darkspawn and collect its blood. He had a few small, thick-walled glass vials tucked in his pack for just that purpose. He knew the smell of a darkspawn’s ichor. He’d seen time and again the damage one could do. He’d seen several from a distance and one of them dead, but Dalgar had never faced a live darkspawn. In fact, he had never even called on his magic in real combat before, and the only thing he was confident in was that it would be nothing like his training. But he could do this, Dalgar thought. All of it. He had to.
Dalgar could only stare miserably at his feet while Clara performed a blessing for Conrad and offered one to Sybil, who refused with a sneer. She then turned to Dalgar, a spark of affection in her pink, weathered face.
“Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter,” she said, briefly laying a hand on the crown of his head. Clara appeared to consider her next words.
“I know that… circumstance has brought you a little wisdom beyond your years, child, but I must remind you to keep your eye on the Light of the Maker and not on the fire in you, lest it consume you.”
Dalgar swallowed hard and nodded.
“Dalgar is already more Warden than most of us Wardens,” Olivier said with a sharp grin and a slightly-too-airy chuckle, resting an encouraging hand on his shoulder. Dalgar’s face heated in embarrassment. “Our boy will do beautifully.”
The Revered Mother pursed her lips at this and Dalgar’s gaze fell to his feet. These two never changed.
“I have no doubts—about any of you. Look out for each other and heed Warden Olivier’s experience. All of Kasselwatch eagerly awaits your return, recruits.”
Clara returned to her duties and left the now and future Wardens to theirs. The other recruits walked ahead of Dalgar as he lingered in the blue shadows of the early morning; he faltered when he felt a hand on his elbow, just as they passed through the open gates.
He turned to face Liv, their lips quirked into a warm smile, even as something complicated surged in their eyes. The arc of their shoulders and long, sleek hair were dusted with rainwater, glittering like crystals in the sunlight. Liv blinked away the water that collected on their pale lashes.
“Well… at long last, mon chou,” they said, after a beat of silence. Their voice was low and their words gentle. “I know that you have fought hard for this. Casilda would have—” Dalgar cut them off with a firm shake of his head.
Liv only sighed. They studied him for a few moments, a muscle in their jaw jumping and their expression conflicted, but then they took a step back, every trace of whatever-that-was evaporating like the mist in the sun. From this moment forward they would be Senior Warden Olivier du Lac and new recruit, Dalgar Thorne—even if their gaze still betrayed the tenderness of someone who had nursed him when he was sick and comforted him after every nightmare. Someone who celebrated the anniversary of the day Dalgar arrived at Kasselwatch as if it were his name day.
The other members of their party lingered a little ways away, awkward and standing just out of earshot. Conrad fidgeted and kept readjusting his pack. Sibyl just looked bored with her arms wrapped around herself, staring off into the mottled, dove-gray sky.
“Are you ready?” They asked.
Dalgar nodded. He’d been ready since he was twelve years old.
“Then, let us hunt some darkspawn.” Olivier declared.