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Chapter Text

Illario did not see the blow that blighted him.

To be fair, he took a lot of blows in that final battle for Minrathous and what he largely remembered in that moment was the crunching noise when an ogre (that’s what the warden’s called it) brought its club down on the Crow behind him. He didn’t know their name, a de Riva agent he never met. All he knew was the hot wet slap of their blood and bone shards hitting him.

Somewhere, up in the Archon Palace, Rook and Lucanis and the Veilgaurd were killing a god.

Down there, in the muck and ruin and screaming, Illario found himself cornered by darkspawn. Hazily, through the physical fatigue the cotton wool of shock, he realized he was finally going to die. It didn’t alarm him. Death, his or that of others, had never alarmed him particularly but it was a disappointment nonetheless.

It was going to be a messy, fucking death

He’d have liked it much more if Lucanis had the guts to slit his throat like a proper Crow.

Again, he could not tell you precisely what happened in that fight because most of what he did was lost to a blur of adrenaline, spite, and a marching resignation to finally be done with it all. He only recalled Teia screaming his name as the blighted giant swung a cart-length club, missing him as he dive-rolled under its arc, between the thing’s legs.

He recalled his blades catching steel-tensile tendon in the beast’s right ankle, then the back of its knee. He recalled skidding in the blood and the blight slick, the burning of its poison on his bare palms. He recalled rolling to avoid the beast as it staggered, the 100-proof snap of pain as the thing stepped on his right arm as it fell, then his rapier slamming home in the thing’s skull the very second it was on the ground with him.

Death throes. The darkspawn must have nerves because when he punched his blade through the skull, into its brain the body still flailed.

He was too tired to dodge it, to even see it when the arm spasmed. He only felt its meteoric fist catch him across the ribs, shatter every bone across his right side, then knock him spinning over the edge of the parapet. He remembered trying to catch the edge of the wall, his nails ripping out as did, then falling.

In the end, none of the other Crows saw it happen.

Figures.

The first thing he heard waking up was, “He’s dying, Lucanis. He was lying in that blight pool for fucking hours. It’s way too advanced for Broma’s Bloom. It’s not going to be months or weeks. He’s gonna die right now, Luc. I’m sorry—”

Then Illario’s nerves (finding him conscious and with braincells to report to) reported simultaneously that every cell in his body was shredding apart at the molecular level to become something else and it was, you know, excruciating. If he were anything less than a Crow, he might have screamed about it but as it was, he kind of retched and had a seizure.

It wasn’t much fun.

He lost the thread, but came back to Lucanis saying, “—do it though? Could it save him?”

And Rook saying, “Join him? Right now? Here? It might. Or he might die in more agony than he’s in right now.” Then in a softer tone, “Or you can just let him go, Lucanis.”

It was clear to Illario that the latter was what Rook thought his cousin should do. As the veteran Grey Warden, they probably knew what they were talking about and any affection they had for Lucanis wasn’t restraining them from saying it. Illario fantasized briefly about the alternate universe where he managed to stab them a bit more during that fight in the opera house.

(He didn’t really disagree with them. But on principle.)

Between uncontrollable shocks of neurological fire, Illario managed to grab Lucanis by the collar of his battle leathers. He could see his own hand veined in black, like his blood was turning to tar under his skin, his sinews putrefying in real time. He was in too much pain to be hysterical about it, but it bubbled in the bottom of his half-collapsed lungs.

Illario’s vision was going by then.

He could only hazily see how Lucanis looked at him, only feel his cousin – indifferent to the black ichor stuck to Illario’s skin and armor – take his unbroken arm and grip it. Tight. It brought a memory: Being fourteen. That time Lucanis put him in a chokehold because he thought, in a strange hysteria, that Illario was going to jump from the roof of the villa.

“Don’t…” Illario panted, “you… dare.”

Lucanis’ grip tightened. “You’ll die.”

“No…shit...”

If he could bottle the look on Lucanis’ face, he’d do it. But another seizure took him and by the time it was done, it was hard to speak. Or think. Illario started puking black fluid that could have been blood or the inside of his stomach lining gone rotten. Hard to say. He started to hallucinate about then.

There were voices.

It sounded like singing.

Illario could not tell anyone with any certainty if his cousin really did pull him into his arms and hold him like they were kids again. Cradling the back of his head. He vaguely recalled someone rocking him, saying his name over and over in a way that filled him with relief. The certainty he was dying felt like impact, release after so fucking long waiting for the blow.

Finally.

Then, somewhere through that haze, he heard, Lucanis say, “Rook. Do it.”

“Lucanis. I only have one. There are other people—”

“If you love me. Please…”

Everything after this, Illario can recall clearly.

Clear as the sound the knife made across his mother’s windpipe forever: The memory of Lucanis’ comforting embrace becoming a grapple, his hold changing position, his arm hooking suddenly around Illario’s neck, forcing his face up. He was too feverish to fight it of course. He could only claw at Lucanis arm, try to say, ‘Fuck you! Let me go! This is mine! IT’S MY FUCKING DEATH—'

But he didn’t.

He couldn’t speak and there was no mercy. Just the cold pain of the glass against his teeth as Rook forced a bottle into his mouth and poured something burning and rotten down the back of his throat.

He’ll always remember trying to scream through his cousin’s hand because Lucanis held his mouth shut to make him swallow.

The molecular fire intensified to white-hot agony, racing from his gut and out through the rest of him; like molten glass shot through his circulatory system. He had this brief, hysterical thought that whatever they’d put inside him was worse than the blight somehow. And in his feverish, anguish-addled brain Lucanis had done it to him as payback.

For a year in trade.

That made sense.

(That made much more sense than the notion Lucanis did this to him because he loved him.)

Illario lay there screaming for a long time. Writhing and wishing he’d fucking die but not dying despite his best efforts. He clawed himself bloody, attacked anyone who tried to touch him. He screamed until his voice gave out, until he was sobbing like a fledgling under their first flaying. Illario collapsed, proceeded to have a grand mal seizure, then finally laid there paralyzed while he continued to burn for another twenty minutes.

Rook, much later, would tell him he did pretty well. All things considered.

Minrathous was still a war zone, so the Grey Wardens did not have much bandwidth to bother about a newly blighted Crow puking his guts up in post-Joining aftershocks.

They did want to keep an eye on him though, which meant Illario was allowed the small mercy of lying unmolested on a ratty cot in the back corner of the warehouse barracks while the blight-song set his brain on fire. (This, he was told, was completely normal and he shouldn’t panic. Stop panicking. Why are you panicking?)

Sleep was impossible.

His newly flash-fused ribs (glued together again by the miracle of warden regeneration) itched so badly he wanted to scrape the skin off them to get at the buzzing inside the marrow. Worse, there were voices. The voices didn’t say anything, but he felt he understood what they wanted despite that, the meaning metastasizing inside his brain until he could feel it like a physical fist in his head:

What they wanted was him.

The voices were constant, in his ears, in his skull, a low lullaby hum that told him down to his blight-riddled bone marrow that it wanted him, needed him in a mutual, utterly alluring way. That it would lick every thought out of his skin and then cannibalize that skin. Illario snapped back to himself sitting on the cot, hyper-ventilating, stomach cramped with hunger pains.

 But the voices were still there like tinnitus and for a hysterical moment he started to wonder if this was it.

This was what being a warden was. Every Grey Warden was insane, standing in a swarm and pretending not to be. Or maybe there was something wrong with him specifically. He didn’t want to be a warden, but somehow he was also the worst warden because he couldn’t sit still and breathe correctly.

He—

“You need to eat something,” said a dwarf woman who seemed to materialize standing next to him. She shoved a mug of gluey paste into his lap, careful to fit his shaking hands around the ceramic. “C’mon. The first forty-eight hours are the worst. Eat something or your body will start cannibalizing itself and then you’ll really have a bad time.”

The dwarf woman’s strength was such he couldn’t do anything but let her push the mug to his mouth and tip it back. (He thought, giddy, I need to stop letting people shove things in my mouth.) The soup tasted vile, exactly like the paste it appeared to be. Illario would retch, but there was some kind of animal fat in the gruel and when that hit the back of his tongue, he was suddenly ravenous.

He downed the entire mix in one go.

Illario coughed. The stranger filled his mug from a large soup pot in the middle of the warehouse floor, then gave it to him. He drank that too, but his stomach still cramped with hunger. He had never been this fucking hungry in his life. He drank four mugs of the gluey mixture before she slowed him down, her hand on his shoulder as he gasped and gripped his abdomen. The hunger pangs were less, but a migraine was rising behind his eyes.

“What is wrong with me?”

“Nothing. You’re new. Burning hot is all.” She frowned at him, moving to pick up a hooked war hammer from the end of the bed, set there while she fetched him soup apparently.  “Why didn’t you eat?” she asked.

Irritation took him.

He snapped, “Am I allowed to just take things?”

The dwarf woman studied him for a moment and Illario studied her back. He still felt drunk, like trying to memorize a mark through too much liquor. He made a note of her features: A tattoo stripe in Anderfell blue, zigzagged at right angles across her nose and cheekbones. Heart-shaped face, olive skin, dark hair braided into two short tails. Kissable mouth. Biceps that would make you think twice about saying so.

“No,” she said with a nod. “You’re not.” She slung the hammer over her shoulders, jerked her head toward the soup pots. “But that’s for anyone laid up in here. Drink the gross soup. Trust me.”

“It tastes like wet bread.”

“Because it is. That and pure animal fat. I mean it. Eat the gross soup. It’s made for a warden metabolism, and you don’t have any weight to lose, warden…?”

“I’m not a warden”

She looked at him, then said, “My mistake.” Her tone didn’t seem like she was mistaken, but she said, “There are a lot of new… converts today.” Her face darkened slightly. “Too many civilians.” Then her face smoothed out again. “Glad you’re alive to feel like shit, is what I’m saying.”

“Evka,” someone called from the door of the warehouse, an Orlesian accent, mildly concerned. “My love, we have a problem out front.”

“Coming.” She nodded to Illario. “Eat while the nausea dips. Drink water. If you hear voices, count out loud to yourself or sing or talk to someone. Just focus on a real sound and it’ll fade. Alright? Do not chase the voices.”

“Or what?” he said.

Evka turned to blink. “Or you’ll start seeing them.”

Forty-eight hours later, for the second time in his life, Illario found himself dragged off the floor, then taken into custody. Not by Crows this time, but by a pack of disinterested Grey Wardens who man-handle him from the warden barracks to what looks like their make-shift camp in what was left of the Dock Town shipping yard.

He recognized the parts of Minrathous that weren’t shattered.

He also recognized Rook when the wardens finally dragged him to a private tent and forced him to sit on a crate in front of the hero of the Veilguard or whatever they were now. Mostly, they looked exhausted and annoyed. Which is to say, exactly how they always looked speaking with Illiaro.

The Qunari warden was recognizable from two-hundred meters out.  Six and a half foot tall, military mohawk, shaved short along the sides of their skull. Golden skin, and intense monolid eyes that stared at you in raptorial black and gold. Looking at Rook, you could have guessed them a man at their build and vocal tenor, a woman at their pretty face… and realized it didn’t matter because they said things like:

“You’re going with the wardens, Illario, and if you bitch about it, know that it’s funny to me and I’ll laugh the whole time. Got it?”

They didn’t look like they were laughing to Illario.

Illario sat forward. “What did you do to me?”

“An emergency Joining,” Rook said, unflappable. “You were dying. We stopped it using the same process used to make new Grey Wardens. You’re blighted, but you won’t die from it for a very long time. That makes you a Grey Warden now.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Rook repeated it patiently, “You belong to the order now, like any other conscript.”

“Am I conscripted?” Illario demanded. “Is that what this is?”

Rook’s mouth did a little twitch, like Illario was a bitter thing they’d rather spit out.

“Lucanis is First Talon, the only authority the Crows answer to. He says you should ‘make yourself useful’ with the wardens instead of rotting in a cellar.” There was a beat before Rook added, “Conscripting usually means a government decided to throw you to the wolves, but in this case the government is an assassin cartel and I’m not going to argue.”

“You could,” Illario pointed out. “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?”

“Sure.” The warden couldn’t be less movable a thing short of gravity being built in their bones. “But I’m not going to.”

“Then you’re the wolf he’s throwing me to.”

Rook reacted to that. A nerve poked.

Illario leaned forward a little more, never taking his eyes from Rook’s.

“You could just slit my throat and be done with it.”

Rook stared at him, exhausted and baffled.  

“I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you Crows, but I’m not getting any more involved than I already am. You’re a warden now. You’re remanded to the custody of the senior wardens here. I wouldn’t recommend trying to run but if you really want to kill yourself, no one is going to hold your hand and stop you.”

Ringing silence.

The quality of Rook’s silences reminded Illario of Lucanis, how his cousin could just sit there, wordless, and convey something without ever speaking. Rook did speak though, eventually.

“Any questions?”

“Where is Lucanis?”

“Not here anymore. He’s coordinating in Treviso.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care. You’re a warden now. If we have to drag you kicking and screaming to the Anderfells, we will do that. But you’re a trained Crow, so I’d expect a little better.”

Illario felt a renewed interest in killing himself just to spite Lucanis’ androgenous little hero in their world-saving afterglow. But the effort required seemed monumental and he kept thinking about what everyone said about the Grey Wardens, how it superseded everything about you – blood, rank, breeding, race, class, all of it and he couldn’t shake the building gnaw at the interior of his heart.  

“I’m not a Crow though, am I?”

Rook’s eyes flickered with pity enough it made him want to claw his wrists open. “No. Not anymore. You’re not even a Dellamorte. Legally, you’re basically dead.”

Illario barked a laugh. He didn’t mean to. Reflex.

“So, I’m the closest I can be to not existing while still being around in case he wants me.” Illario sat back on the crate a little, felt a shiver of desperate trapped animal madness run through him like a fever. He felt sick for certain. Dizzy. Giddy almost with it. “Andraste’s fucking cunt, can’t you motherless bitches just kill me? I at least was trying to kill you.”

“Right.” Rook sighed. “I’ve been advised you’ll probably try something crazy so—”

Rook gestured and there was nothing Illario could do about it as the two big wardens from before came back into the tent, one grabbing and wrestling his arms behind him. He was kitten-weak and nauseous still from the Joining. The other warden soaked a rag. He recognized the smell – Viago having used it on him dozens of times to calm him over the years – so he didn’t bother fighting when they sealed it over his nose and mouth.

The world went pleasantly blurry.

Last touch of home, he thought.

Then everything went dark.

Illario woke up in the dilapidated barracks at Hossberg where, upon waking, he was asked by an annoyed elven man what his name was and who, exactly, was he anyway? To be sent back without doing his part in Minrathous? About twenty minutes later, Illario was locked in the fortress drunk tank with his ribs flogged open, his brow split, and seventy demerits for attacking the company’s Warden Sergeant and snapping three of the man’s fingers.

(It hadn’t stopped the veteran warden, just annoyed him into slamming Illario’s head into the flag stones.)

Laying there, watching the skin over his knuckles and ribs miraculously knit closed, Illario thought about sitting in the estate kitchens with Lucanis when they were ten, both bleeding from the knuckles, Illario’s face hot and welted red across the mouth. (Lucanis never talked back or asked questions. So, Caterina never slapped him like she slapped Illario.)

He thought about cutting orange slices while Lucanis sat dry-eyed and silent at the galley table. Coaxing his cousin into eating was the first step to get him talking again after a poor training session. He’d never told anyone about his private dread: That Lucanis would just stop speaking one day and leave him alone with Caterina.

Strange what you stop being scared of.

Three weeks later, someone opened the door to the drunk tank. Properly opened the door, not simply tossing a hank of bread and jerky through the bars while asking him, once again, if he was ready to follow orders or not. A shame. Calling Warden Lee a cunt to his face in his native Tevene was starting to be a load-bearing part of Illario’s daily routine.

“The Warden Sergent tells me you’ve been here nearly a month.”

“Twenty-two days, but who’s counting,” Illario said.

The speaker, a slender Orlesian man – elven, coppery brunette, widow’s peak part, freckles, probably no more than a hundred fifty pounds – simply stared at him with a look of puzzlement that Illario mostly associated with Viago as the man decided what poison to use on someone. Not a malicious look. Just a scientific one.

“Hmm. You know, my wife is acting First Warden. Which I do not generally abuse for any reason save one, Warden Illario. Can you guess what it is?”

Illario, from his position seated against the far wall, looked the elf up and down. Lucanis always had his freakishly sensitive hearing, but Illario had the better sense of smell. Even through his own stink (blood, bile, sour flop sweat, dead blight ichor, and unspeakable organic slime) he can smell balsam, a bit of rose-water, the faint whiff of starched cotton.

“You have imported soaps,” Illario guessed with a playful little smile, like they’re at a party. Like Illario isn’t a horror-show in shredded Crow under armor. He hums. “From… southeast Orlais? The soap I mean, not the rosewater wash. That’s Tevinter. Very expensive.”

“Ah.” A genuine smile, all the way to the eyes. “A good nose.”

“Unfortunately.”

The elf warden leaned against the doorjamb, arms folded, head tilted.

“I am Antoine.”

“I recognize your voice,” Illario said. He held eye contact steady. “You were with Warden Evka.”

The warden, Antoine, nodded. “I think, monsieur Crow, that you’re tragically out of your mind. Which we in Orlais respect entirely, but Warden Lee will not understand and waste more time and effort at—” Antoine gestures with two fingers to the stinking cell, his person becoming one with the filth in said cell— “this.”

Illario heaved an elaborate shrug, but did not answer.

“How would you like,” said Antoine, “to wash your hair, have a hot bath, pretend to be sane, and agree to take a duty rotation with me? Away from the fortress?”

Illario smiled, folding his hands under his chin, looking up at Antoine. “Do you… want to fuck me before or after the bathing part?”

Antoine balked. Hard. His delicate brows knit in confusion, then a mild horror as Illario realized with some exasperation that while Antoine had been flirting a little it had been purely conversational and certainly not transactional. Illario would be annoyed at himself for not tracking that, but the fucking voices were so damn loud today, and this felt so much like being in the Dellamorte cellar—

“Well,” Antoine said politely, “were I not happily married, the answer would be ‘after’. But I’m afraid that’s not what I want you for. With my apologies.” He did a very Orlesian half bow, one hand over his heart. Like he wasn’t rejecting a sexual overture so much as a very generous offer. He straightened up and said, “Evka tells me you were a Crow.”

Just a Crow. Nothing notable of course.

“I was.” Illario bites off the syllable.

Antoine nodded. “Then you are very good at falling correctly to avoid being hurt from moderate heights?”

Illario paused.

Antoine smiled but Illario saw a flash of Viago-like malice in it. “Soap, bath, fresh air, special placement away from the Warden Sergent that you assaulted. Agree or its back to—” Antoine gestures again, exactly as before to the piss-stinking cell and Illario himself— “this.”

In truth, Illario had been sold at the first mention of access to hot water, but he spent a moment pretending to think about it just to flex a conversational muscle after weeks talking to himself and the voices.

“Fine.”

Antoine grinned. “Excellent. What do you know about griffons?”

Chapter Text

So, the facts Illario knew about griffons could fill a thimble and not much else. In fact, what he knew about griffons was largely what he recalled from a child’s picture book when he was six and he didn’t get to see the griffon pages much because Lucanis kept insisting that Illario re-read the pages about wyverns over and over.

Illario knew, intellectually, that being annoyed with the ghost of his six-year-old cousin was probably petty but fuck it. Six-year-old memory Lucanis was a prick, and it wasn’t Illario’s fault he was reading before him. Why did that mean he had to do ‘the funny voices’ every time? And what was so great about wyverns anyway?

“Are you listening to me?” Antoine asked, interrupting his daydream of six-year-old Illario throwing a picture book through a window.

“Not even a little.”

“I can leave you to it, if you’d rather. I’m just under orders not to let you wander unattended.”

“Do you really think,” Illario asked, genuinely curious, “you’ll be able to stop me if I decide to run?”

Antoine made a noncommittal noise.

“Eh. If this were a city with many ports of exit where a smile, stolen coin, or a little violence could buy you passage to other countries? Non. I could never stop you. You were a full-fledged Crow.” Antoine sounded so perfectly unoffended it circled back into the realms of insulting. “Buuut we are in the middle of blight-infested swampland, and I know you will not get through our eluvian.”

Illario sank a little deeper into the tub of hot water, watching the steam rise ceilingward.

“I could still run.”

“You could, and we would be obligated to hunt you down and then I really could not protect you from Warden Lee. Or worse, we would be obligated to inform the Crows and put a contract on you for desertion and I do not know Lucanis Dellamorte well, but I know him enough to surmise he won’t let you go so easily. No?”

(“What could be worse than this?”)

Illario submerged and stayed under the water for a bit, muting all the world to a low amniotic roar. Thank the Maker for squirrelly Orlesian mechanis. Thanks to Antoine’s improbable forge-heated water system, for a moment at least, the middle of the blight-infested swampland was functionally no different from the baths at the Dellamorte villa.

Post-mission rituals were an important part of being a Crow.

Closing the door on something. Wiping the slate clean.

(Drowning the parts of you that need to fucking die.)

Illario held his breath for a minute, then two, until his lungs began to strain, until the effort rolled over into a dull animal panic and even then, he stayed under, counting steadily as he’d been taught. Two. Four. Six. Eight. His hands gripped the edge of the tub until the wood dug into the meat of his palms, pain in his lungs blooming to light-headedness and—

He sat up, inhaling hard. 

“Are you alright?” Antoine asked, his slim shadow moving on the other side of the privacy curtain.

“Other than being blight-ridden and naked in a swamp? I’m perfect, thank you for asking.”

Illario grabbed the soap from a little stool by the tub and rubbed it into a lather against the sopping mass of his unbound hair. The water turns milky with soap, and pink with rehydrating blood. Literally months of grime, gore, blight ichor, and body oils dissolving into the water. He’d already taken a wet rag to every inch of skin during the first two minutes of access to hot water, certain Antoine would hurry him, but the friendly little Orlesian never did.

Letting him take his time.

“When you’re done,” Antoine said, the heels of his boot rocking up and down, “I’m afraid we will be packing up quickly and heading for the mountains.”

“I’m your captive audience, am I?”

“I admit, I may be taking advantage of how badly you’ve annoyed the Warden Sergeant.” He could hear the grin in Antoine’s voice. “You did such a good job of it…”

Illario snorted, combing his fingers through a soapy knot, gratified when the tangle came undone over his knuckles. Antoine was not lying; the soap was very expensive. He stared for a minute at his hair trailing dark in the pale water, sitting with the feeling of finally being clean for the first time in much longer than three weeks.

Caterina hadn’t done too badly by him, considering Lucanis left Illario under her lock and key for nearly a month.

The evening after the opera house, she had the estate guard put Illario on his knees and force his arms out. Then she caned his hands until his knuckles split to the bone and his blood sprayed her skirts. Never said a word, not even when she slapped him, not when she backhanded him, not when she stood at his shoulder and stroked his hair off his brow with her fingers and let him breathe through the pain.

(Like he was a boy again.)

He didn’t see her a second time until he was pulled from the cellar for the final battle.

Antoine interrupted this reverie, saying, “Why did you attack the Warden Sergent?”

Because he didn’t know who I was.

“Because he had a kickable face,” Illario said, toweling off his hair with a miserably scratchy cloth.

“Hmm. Wardens Kai and Ahsoka said he threw you through a door? Then kicked you through another door and… knocked you unconscious.”

“Turns out, I could only kick it once.”

Illario pulled on a set of twill-weave cotton trousers that fit him through the leg if not the waist. He turned to the rest of his Grey Warden uniform: A grey linen undershirt. A blue double-layered cotton pullover with a hood, the torso cross-stitched in a gambeson-like pattern. A plain leather kidney belt, double strapped, with loops enough to cinch tight across the waist.

He kept his own boots.

On the bench, beneath the clothes lay what looked like a small leather scroll which Illario unrolled in his hand and stared at. In a series of pockets along the length of the leather was a thin bone comb, a straight razor, a tiny mirror, a comically inadequate shave brush, miniature scissors, and bits of twine for pulling the hair back.

A personal grooming kit.

Almost standard-issue military, like a city guardsman or a soldier might own and staring at it, for some reason, Illario found himself thinking: So, I really am a warden.

“Are you alright?” Antoine called.

Had he made a noise?

“You do fret, don’t you?” Illario snapped, wiping his face with the heel of his hand.

“I’ve been told so, yes.”

Illario had long since mastered the art of shaving without a mirror. That done, he tied his hair up and took the razor to the undercut at the nape of his neck. Briefly, he set the edge of the razor against the underside of his jaw, against his throat, just to see how it felt… but the desire to open his own jugular remained that – a desire only.

He could not make his hand do it for him.

(“Nothing worse than a useless death. Die on the job, if nothing else.”)

Illario drew aside the privacy curtain to face the dank mud-crusted reality of the Lavendel.

Antoine turned to look up at him.

“Ah!” The elf warden raised his hands in relief. “Much better. Nice to meet you.”

“You’re absolutely sure,” Illario said, leaning an arm against the wall next to Antoine, “that your wife would mind if I showed you some gratitude?”

“She would mind that I didn’t ask first,” Antoine said cheerfully, rocking away from the wall (and him) with a casual gesture that he follow. “And as I said before, monsieur Crow, I do not want you for that.”

“What do you want me for?” Illario demanded, unoffended, adjusting the small bag over his shoulder and scanning the dour farmland. “And just to be extremely clear and keep expectations in line:  I will be bad at anything that isn’t drinking, fucking, or extremely expensive professional assassination.”

Antoine, impervious to snide remarks, says, “Then we may need to expand your repertoire. But I think it’s a good position for you. Crows so often work in pairs do they not? Or threesomes?” Antoine frowned as though he were not sure of the phrases on that last bit but shrugged. “And the other wardens are very busy. The Minrathous cleanup has been all consuming, but someone must see to the griffons. It might as well be you, since you were—”

“Rotting in a cell?”

“Yes, precisely. Also—” he paused to point— “you are a real Grey Warden”

“Again, I’ve been in the fort drunk-tank for a month.”

“That sounds exactly like something a Grey Warden would do.”

Optimistic little bastard, Illario mused.

“So you’re in charge of the griffons now because all the wardens are mostly dead anyway?” Illario looped his hands behind his head, really letting the sneer luxuriate. “Do the Grey Wardens even mean anything now that every Archdemon is dead? Aren’t you lot pointless and poisoned now?”

Antoine gave him a look reserved for cats who bite you, which is to say with a tolerance and unwarranted fondness that Illario didn’t like from a virtual stranger.

“It’s a good question,” Antoine said. “I cannot yet answer it.”

“Wonderful. Until then I’m trapped here doing chores for you lot because you legally own me, is that right?”

“I’d say something comforting but, since you’re not in the mood for it, yes, that’s right.”

Antoine was being nice to him. (For a certain value of ‘nice.’) Presumably to get his cooperation since torturing Crows into submission only works on fledglings.  Or maybe something about his disaffected demeanor, shit situation, and complete lack of autonomy had triggered a sense of nostalgia in the elf-warden, but it was too soon to pry for who or what exactly Antoine was projecting onto him.

Getting marks to project onto you was the heart of social infiltration. Usually, he’d be pleased. The problem was Illario hadn’t done any acting just recently, so this was entirely down to Antoine being a strange little man who liked being insulted perhaps.

Maker’s holy cock though, that some Orlesian swamp mechanic though him pitiable enough to tolerate like—

Illario didn’t finish this unkind thought because something completely silent, unfathomably heavy, and moving at a speed just south of terminal velocity hit him from behind at a downward angle. As if it fell from the sky. Illario would have liked to say he didn’t scream because he was a highly trained professional killer and nothing surprised him, but mostly he didn’t scream because he got hit so fast and so hard, he had the wind knocked out of him instantly.

His body whipped chest-first into the ground, arms pinned, unable to protect his face as the rest of him followed. The impact cracked red and black across his vision, splitting his brow instantly, and for a moment he laid there, stunned and trying to breathe, unable to because the thing on top of him was crushing him.

Through the concussed sense of panic, he felt something smooth and hard and somehow incredibly fluffy nosing at the nape of his neck. Then he heard a massive, razor-sharp beak snap shut as what could only be a griffon began to rip at the tie holding his hair up.

It also nearly scalped him. It was so strong and thoughtless, it torqued his head back, making his back arch and this time he knew he would have screamed if he’d had the air.

Antoine was screaming though.

“Blanchbeak! No! No! Drop!”

There was a thump of a small elven warden tackling a pony-sized griffon. The animal squawked in offense, gave up on killing Illario, and flapped awkwardly to scramble away like a cowed dog.

“Bad! Very bad, Blanchbeak! Non! You hurt him!”

“Fuuuuuck me,” Illario hissed from the ground.

He accepted as fact and the growing pool of blood under his cheek. Yes, this felt about right. Good to know the trajectory of his life was holding its consistent sharp, nearly vertical downward arc. He didn’t bother getting up and simply laid there in the pain and rising sense of resignation.

Antoine, a few bystanders, and another patrolling Grey Warden (they’d been standing a dozen paces off, the useless fuck) ran to assist. Illario swatted the farmers away from him, the feeling of strange hands on his body fucking intolerable just now as he levered himself to his knees. A red-headed fieldhand removed her ratty head scarf and handed it to him.

“Careful, warden,” she said, trying to make light. “You’ll ruin your new uniform.”

“What a nightmare,” he said, rolling his eyes and taking the bandana to scrub the blood from his face. It was going to be unsalvageable with his blood now.

The fieldhand asked him his name, but he ignored her.

The guard-warden was saying something, angrily, to Antoine. He caught the middle of if: “—told you to keep that one out of Lavendel! She’s too aggressive. If she’d done that to anyone but a warden, she’d have ripped their damn head off.”

“I know! I know, Juno. But, she knows wardens from civilians. She would never—”

“We’re all sad about Hallin, but she can’t act this way.” The guard, Juno, was getting louder and louder with each word. “It’s dangerous. She’s too big now. What if she’d killed that recruit? Can you imagine a warden dying now? Right now, at home when it’s supposed to be safe? After everything else that’s happened?”

“Juno.” Antoine said it softly, like a hand on the shoulder. “I know. I will take care of it. Alright?”

The guard seemed only barely placated.

She glared past Antoine at the criminal animal in question who seemed to understand very well the raised voices and fearful tones of the bipeds around her. The griffon was crouched small behind Antoine’s knees, comically enormous behind the already slight-statured Grey Warden. Blanchbeak was not blanched at the beak only, but a mottled grey-white color all over. Save her enormous blue eyes, darting with concern from Antoine to Juno to Illario.

Minding all the wardens in the immediate area.

There was a moment of dim realization then that he was looking at a no shit, genuine article griffon.

Even prior to their going extinct, griffons were largely the stuff of Grey Warden legend. He saw a few of them from a distance during the final battle and Minrathous but most of the griffons he’d seen were smaller than this one, the size of large Dobermans.

This one was the height of a mule, its top half like an albino hawk’s head and shoulders pasted on a taxidermy lion.  The body was feline and densely muscled, furred in white with a grey underbelly, like dirty snow. A long tuft-tipped tail lashed behind it, a canopy of white wings folding and unfolding in little micro-movement.  

Illario thought, again, of the children’s book. Of the page he didn’t get to read, with three frolicking brown griffons and a stout little man in armor and watercolors.

“Did you bail me out just to feed me to your flying cats?” Illario demanded, climbing to his feet.

He peeled the sopping scarf from the side of his face. The blood was already slowing. True impact headwounds were deadly, but flesh-wounds on the head were simply dramatic – bleeding like crazy but largely harmless. He rolled the scarf into a band and tied it lopsided to put pressure on the cut.

“Wait,” said Juno suddenly, squinting at Illario. “Is that the guy from the drunk tank?”

Antoine made an abortive neck cutting gesture to stop her from going on which she seemed to understand because she said no more. Illario might have been paranoid about the meaning of this back when he was a Crow and interpreting every social gesture around him could be life or death, but this was a muddy backwater with a bunch of yokels and mutated head-bashers, so he decided not to care.

Blanchbeak – Maker that was a terrible name – quirked a set of long tufted ears at him.

“She’s usually really friendly,” offered one of the farmers, a brown-skinned man in overalls. “Blanch just misses her rider, I think. Hallin. He passed during the big fight in Minrathous. Poor thing probably saw him go. Bad omen. First rider in centuries, dying so fast.”

Blanchbeak was slowly padding toward Illario. Staring directly at him.

Illario took a sizable step backward.

“Good for her,” Illario said, grabbing his satchel from the ground where it was knocked off him.

Then he took another step back because the griffon had closed further distance, and the other two Grey Wardens were talking rapidly in (for some reason) dwarvish. He suspected they were trying to exclude him from the conversation. However, while dwarvish was not one of the languages Caterina insisted he be native-level fluent in, he was conversational, which served him here as he caught Antoine saying:

“—take him to the aerie and keep him away from Lee. I know it was hard.”

“His whole unit. Yeah. Then fuck-head here wouldn’t let him help even when the—” word he didn’t know— “started up. You sure you can—?”

Illario missed the rest because Blanchbeak was suddenly directly in front of him, head lowered like a shy dog, one ear quirked forward, as the giant griffon very un-shyly stretched an experimental talon toward Illario’s leg. Like a cat thinking about swatting something.

“What?” Illario backed up another step. “Shoo.”

The red-head farmer woman cooed and stepped forward to pat the Blanchbeak on the flank, then scritch at the base of feathery ears. The griffon chittered and purred deep in its chest, blue eyes closing in cat-like bliss.

“She’s just saying ‘sorry’,” the woman crooned.

“She is a dumb horse with wings that jumped me.”

The woman looked him with appall. “Don’t say that. Griffons are terribly smart. We’ve gotten used to them here in Lavendel. She probably understood every word of that.” She switched to a terrible baby-talk tone. “Didn’t you? So smart. He didn’t mean it.”

“I absolutely meant it,” Illario enunciated, taking another step back.

Antoine broke away from Juno by then, reclaiming his own pack of equipment and slinging it over his narrow shoulders, coming to join Illario, the farmers, and the griffon, the last of whom he patted comfortingly along her feathery ruff. Blanchbeak nuzzled into Antoine’s hip, nibbling anxiously at various satchels on his belt while he walked.

“I apologize,” Antoine said. “Here I take you under my wing for just a few hours and you’re bleeding in the street. Evka will kill me. Both as my wife and as the First Warden.” He seemed moderately genuine in his anxiety about this but recovered, saying with enthusiasm, “I promise duty at the aerie will be uneventful.”

“The aerie… where there are more of these things,” Illario said flatly.

“Yes. But most are much better behaved than Blanchbeak.” And when Illario did nothing to mask his skepticism, Antoine put a hand over his heart and said, with puppy-dog eyes that would have charmed anyone but a professional, “I swear it.”

So, Antoine was a fucking filthy liar.

Getting attacked by one griffon was certainly no fun, but you could keep an eye on the one griffon and make sure it didn’t get your back again. Having twelve of them stalking you like a pack of wild dogs while you attempt to water and feed said griffons? He was spending a lot of time ducking, dodging, and dive-rolling away from pouncing predators.

Perhaps prison was better.

On the third day at the aerie, Illario woke up yet again to one of the fucking griffons trying to wedge themselves through the window of his bedroom. Beaktooth this time. (Who the fuck named these griffons?) This was unfortunate for Beaktooth because he was halfway through the same growth spurt as Blanchbeak (Snowball, Illario was renaming that one ‘Snowball’ and no one could stop him).

All that to say, Beaktook he didn’t fit through the same holes he used to but had not yet accepted this fact. So, Illario woke up to a squalling griffon with its hind parts stuck in a window, clawing wildly at the interior of the small, three-person shack. Griffon screams were near to deafening and Crow-paranoia was such Illario was face-first on the floor rolling to escape before he was even fully conscious.

“Mierda! Not again you stupid—!”

From the outside, Antoine shouted, “If you woke with the sun like I told you, they would not come sniffing around for you!”

Beaktooth had his wings wedged through the window now, squeezing them in by wiggling and then suddenly Illario was getting buffeted by gigantic feathery limbs as he ducked and ran for the door, grabbing his boots and a bottle on the way out. One silver-lining: the Grey Wardens largely didn’t care if you drank on the job. (Less of a silver-lining: getting drunk as a Grey Warden was about four times harder to do.)

Antoine watched him hop/pull his boots on, drink the remaining terrible wine, and huck the empty bottle off a nearby cliff. This he managed before four griffons raced up to stare at him like he’d done something interesting. Or in case he had food. He shooed them away by shoving the nearest one (Rumptail, another terrible name) away and inciting the others to attack their helpless sibling.

“If you want to get drunk,” said Antoine, “you’ll have to come back to the fort for evening meal. Ahsoka’s moonshine would kill a cart horse so it’s a proper drink for wardens.”

“No,” Illario said, dropping onto the ground next to the fire Antoine had going.

Antoine looked him up and down. “You really need to eat more, my friend. Wardens burn hot and the trail rations up here are not enough. Evening meal is usually where—"

“I do not care.”

Antoine sighed. “Starving to death is not a great way to die for anyone, even a Grey Warden. Are you really so dramatic?”

“I’m Antivan,” Illario said, like that explained it.

“Of course,” Antoine said, because that did explain it. “Rook told me some of what you did before you joined us.”

“Then you know I’m being incredibly cooperative comparatively.”

“Yes.”

Antoine paused because there was a crash from the cottage as Beaktooth finally got his rearend through the window and came barreling out of the shack with Illario’s sleeping roll stuck over his head. Determining that the griffon was not in imminent danger from this, he turned back to Illario.

“When you were locked up at the fort, you ate then. No one starved you.”

“Stupid really.” Illario reached up to pull his hair tie out and smooth the loose strands back into order. With the tie between his teeth he said, “I would have knuckled under much faster if Lee had starved me. Torture we Crows ignore, but death we’re trained to fight.”

Antoine frowned. “Lee wasn’t trying to break you. He was hoping you’d cool off. You didn’t. For three weeks straight.”

Illario finished knotting his hair back and cast his gaze out over the rolling hills around them, high enough elevation that the near perpetual fogs of Hossberg burned clear off to sun. The grass was yellowing but alive, wind shorn and tough. From here, he could see all twelve griffons chasing each other over the hills, leaping into the air, and rising into the sky.

If he were six again, he might have been captivated by this: Creatures of a long dead age sailing on winds off the coast.

(He tried, again, to remember what the words on that page had been.)

“I’m no quitter,” Illario decided.

“That’s what Lucanis said.”

Illario frowned and for a while only the sound of griffons beating the shit out of eachother filled the air.

“How was it going to work” Antoine asked. “Your plan to be First Talon?”

“Which plan?” Illario said, laying back on the grass, arms under his head. He grimaced as a cramp of hunger coiled, growling, through his abdomen. He exhaled. “Because there were two plans. The original plan and the fucked up plan. Which plan are you talking about?”

“I wasn’t aware there were multiple plans.”

“There were.”

“Tell me about your original plan.”

Illario shrugged. “Kill Lucanis and be the only option left to take the position.”

“Ah.” Antoine processed this. “And how was the ‘fucked up’ plan going to work?”

“Poorly.”

There was a moment of silence in which Illario could feel Antoine get a little annoyed with him and he would have taken that as a win if his guts didn’t choose that moment to contract and growl with hunger pain so acute Illario felt lightheaded.

“You need to eat,” Antoine said again. “You were heavily blighted before you were Joined. You’re still healing. This is terrible for your health.”

Illario waited for the spell of dizziness and stomach pain to pass, then smiled winsomely at Antoine. “Make me.”

"I could, you know.” Antoine said it mildly enough, but there was a vein of threat there. “I could enlist others to drag you back to the fort infirmary.”

Illario shrugged to mask the shiver.

Eventually, Antoine said, “Tell me your fucked up plan.”

Illario counted things on his fingers, “One: Kidnap Caterina to placate Zara. Convince her the fuck up with Lucanis hadn’t tanked my shot at First Talon. Two: Leak the Antaam intel on rival Crow Houses, to kill their people and get them leaning on House Dellamorte. Three: Kill Zara because she got chatty. Four: Make good on that Venatori alliance because, at that point, fuck it, Zara’s commanders were desperate and the Crows weak as they’d ever be.”

Antoine chewed on this a while.

“Would the Crow Houses really have allied with Venatori—?”

“What? No. Of course fucking not.”

“Then why—?”

Illario sat up slightly, “Because I could, Antoine. Keep up.”

Antoine clicked his tongue. “When did you know you the second plan would never work?”

“Immediately. Too many moving parts and I was making it up as I went.” Illario flopped back on the ground. “Would have been a miracle, but like Lucanis told you,” Illario grinned, the shape brittle as a bad knife, “I’m no quitter.”

Antoine sighed and Illario heard grass crunching as the warden came to stand over him. He was joined by Rumptail, Heidas, and Beaktooth who also stared down at him as though this were some game.

Antoine said, “Well, I respect it. I do. Dying dramatically at your cousin’s hand on the floor of an opera house would have made excellent theatre. Assassin cartel politics always sells seats.”

“You’re winding up to something,” Illario said.

 “There aren’t many Grey Wardens left.”

“I know. Everyone knows.”

 “Yes. But the blight still walks the world. And you need to understand less than ten percent of the people we Joined from Minrathous survived. We need everyone. So, while it’s been charming to wonder just how far you’re going to take your second attempt at suicide, I think this is the point where I intervene whether you like it or not.” That little Orlesian bow again. “With my apologies.”

Illario sat up on his elbows, head tilted.

“You’re going to make me?”

“I’m stronger than I look and you’re as weak as a new warden could possibly be.” Antoine shook his head, the momentary dark on his face brightening back up. “But I don’t need to make you.” Antoine pointed at Illario and said, “Rumptail, Heidas, Beaktooth? Fetch.”

“Ah,” said a familiar voice. “So, you annoyed my husband enough to see the Orlesian side of him. That’s fun. He doesn’t do that much.”

First Warden Evka Ivo was leaning against the door of the infirmary. Her warhammer was slung to the ground behind her, one warm brown shoulder set against the frame of the entryway. She was slightly sweaty and almost muddy with dust. Fresh from Minrathous then and doing manual labor despite her position.

“Yes, I’m the special-est boy,” Illario snapped, sitting cross-legged on one of the tables, attempting to stitch his own leg closed.

The warden physician on site was hovering nearby. An androgenous long-haired person who looked about twelve. They clearly wanted to close distance and interfere but since Illario already put them in a wristlock and shoved them off the last time they tried it; they seem resigned to let him bloody himself.

Evka, arms folded, said, “Flynn would make a cleaner job of that. You’re just being contrary for the sake of it.”

“Well,” said Illario sweet as a smile-kill, “Antoine did let a pack of griffons drag me half a mile down the cliff-road so I’m not feeling the fraternal glow of warden brotherhood or whatever the fuck you lot have down here.”

“He got you to eat though,” Evka said mildly.

“I was always going to,” Illario seethed. “He just got dramatic.”

Evka grinned, fond and faraway. “He is Orlesian.”

“Mister,” said the healer, as Illario tied off the cut in his leg. “You’ll be out of here a lot faster if you just let me patch up the small cuts neat for you.” They sigh. “I know Antoine got rude, but I didn’t and you’re taking up space.”

Illario was going to argue but Evka cut in.

“Do what the doctor says, junior warden. You need a fucking physical. You’re the only recruit who refused theirs, then starved after.” She lowered her voice. “It is entirely possible to make yourself so sick that the weak blight in your blood starts eat you again so, Warden Illario, get a grip.”

She let the warning hang a moment, then collected her hammer and left.  

Warden Flynn did bandage him up quickly, half a dozen talon-claw cuts sealed with ointment, the flesh pinched until it adhered shut, then bandaged in place. Then Flynn reached for Illario’s neck, thought better of it, and took his wrist to feel his pulse.  

“How are you feeling?”

“Annoyed. Touch of ennui.”

“I mean physically.”

Illario rolled his eyes. “Up until about thirty minutes ago I was hungry. Now I feel fine.”

“Antoine said you weren’t eating?” They adjust their grip on his forearm, taking his hand to turn it over and inspect the thin skin of his wrists, where you can see the blue blood beneath brown skin. He thumbed the thin, scar-like lines following the path of his more prominent veins. “Are you feeling nauseous? Or sick? Like you can’t stomach regular food?”

Illario twitched his wrist out of their hands.

They did a rabbit-like jump then looked embarrassed about it.

“No,” Illario said, staring them down. “But to be clear, you don’t have any ‘regular food’ here. You have technically edible grey slop.”

“Okay. So, no loss of appetite just…”

“Ennui and disgust. Yes.”

“Look, lack of appetite or inability to stomach regular food can be a sign of early degradation. So, try to eat more, Warden Illario.”

“Ugh. Don’t.”

“Do… do what?”

“Call me a warden.”

“Uh, right. Sure.” Warden Flynn rubbed their hands together restlessly. “Look, I got Joined from an emergency too. I get it. It’s not as bad as you think once you have time… to…” They trailed off after catching the incredulous look Illario was giving them. “Nevermind. How about your strength? You feeling stronger yet?”

“No idea. What do you want me to do? Arm wrestle one of you?”

Flynn raised two hands and backed up a step.

“I am asking because the warden medic in Minrathous said you were Joined from a heavy blight. The amount of damage it had already done—”

“I’ll be a shitty warden because of it. I’m aware.”

Flynn blinked. “No. It’ll just take a while to heal. Might have you weak for a bit. I assume you’re already getting the nightmares?”

Illario’s nightmare: He was blind or held down somewhere so dark that no light could reach him. The close press of rot-sodden mud under his clawing fingers while every scream turned into uncontrollable vomiting. Needle-pain unzipping his veins from the inside. When he tried to scream again, he puked up the lining of his throat, his teeth, then the separating meat of his own tongue.

“Yes, I get the nightmares.”

“They’ll dip off after a while. Get less frequent. And I’ve got—” they gesture unconsciously toward a nearby cabinet— “twenty different tonics for nightmares.”

“Do you have spearmint?” Illario asked on reflex.

“Yeah!” Flynn looked so eager to be helpful it made Illario want to push them down some stairs, but there were none, so Flynn went on. “Of course. If that worked for you before the Joining, we have a couple concentrates that can really help.”

“I’m fine,” Illario said, planning to steal a lot of spearmint later.

“Sure. One more question: Are you hearing voices when you’re awake at all? Since the Joining I mean. Everyone hears voices for a bit at the start, but have you heard voices recently?”

“Sure.” Illario said it with a shrug.

Flynn’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding or did you really hear voices?”

“The whole time I was in the drunk tank. Went away once I was walking around a few days ago. Why? Am I dying? Am I dying more than I was dying before?”  

Warden Flynn stared at him.

“Wait just a minute,” they said.

And then they walked out of the infirmary leaving Illario alone for the first time in a while. He hopped off the table and checked the cabinet on the far wall, found a bottle labeled ‘Spearmint’, pocketed it, and returned to his previous seat. He did it very fast because suddenly Warden Flynn was back with Warden Lee (goody) and Evka.

“So, I am dying faster,” Illario said, sitting back on his hands legs still crossed.

“How long were you hearing voices?” Warden Sergeant Lee gritted the question. Lee was tall for an elf and glaring down at Illario in a way what wasn’t very convincing to Illario’s trained eye. Lee looked around forty-five, sinewy, claw-scars over his face. Fear made him look a bit younger though.

“Why?” Illario smiled placidly. “Feeling guilty you stuck me in solitary? Even though talking to people is, apparently, an important part of not going crazy after the Joining?”

And Warden Lee, no fucking joke, looked stricken. Then his face closed and he said, “Less guilty by the second…”

“You’re still a cunt,” Illario said in deeply informal Tevene.

Lee started forward like he was going to bounce Illario’s head off the walls again, but Evka arm-barred him at the hips, saying, “Don’t, Lee. He’s professionally annoying. What’s done is done. Assuming Warden Illario is even telling the truth, there’s nothing to do about it now. Let it go.”

Lee’s face did something complicated before he swore and rounded about, leaving the room with Warden Flynn who chased him. That left the First Warden alone in the infirmary, glaring at Illario, her face a mask of dust and sweat and disapproval.

“You want to be a ghoul? This is how you become a ghoul.”

“Well, I don’t want to, but—”

“If ninety percent of the Wardens in Thedas weren’t dead and I weren’t First Warden you’d be getting flogged every day for being this kind of malcontent.”

“If you want me shirtless and whimpering, just say so.”

Evka ignored that and said simply, “I saw your face in Minrathous.” And when Illario had nothing quick to say she went on. “You don’t remember, but I heard the shit you said while fevered. I know exactly how you don’t want to die, so stop being a fuck-head because when we all take The Long Walk, for most of us, its alone. Stop racing to it. Am I understood?”

Silence.

“I said: Am I—”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, First Warden,” he said, utterly devoid of tone.

Evka glared a moment longer, then, “Good. From now on, listen to your superiors. You’re with me, hauling supplies like everyone else. Unless you have further dramatics you’d like to distract everyone with today?”

Illario opened his mouth, thought better of it, and shook his head.

“Good.”

“This is Antivan,” Illario declared after an hour rolling and hauling barrels through the cellars of Grey Hold. He crouched by the wine cask, inspecting the distillery brand on the wood. “It’s garbage water Antivan wine, but it’s Antivan. Are the Crows still sending supplies? Thought they would have begun to fuck off by now.”

Evka, picking up an entire wine barrel like it was full of pillows, said, “Not yet. Six of the eight major Houses are contracted for the next three years to send us tithe. Which is good, considering almost all the non-national tithe contracts from Weisshaupt were lost when it fell.”

Illario, who could not pick up a barrel nearly as easily as Evka, rolled it down the hall until he was closer to the wine cellar, then knelt to rock it up onto his knee before getting his arm under its middle and hiking it onto his shoulder. (He ignored the thrill and disquiet in this: That he was hauling some 600 pounds of weight onto his shoulder at all.) He followed her to the cellar to stack it with the others, gaining yet another layer of dust as it shook free from the ancient support beams on impact.

“Is this your way of saying Lucanis is strongarming the Crows into funding the Grey Wardens?”

“I don’t profess to understand anything about how the Crows work,” Evka grunted, tossing her cask up onto the stack. She dusted her hands off and declared to the dusty ceiling, “They’re an odd bunch.”

Illario trailed Evka to and from the wagons outside. Back and forth. Getting increasingly winded and sore hauling crates and wine and whatever else needed to go down into storage while other Wardens did the same with other supply carts for the fortress larder up top.

The fortress, by Illario’s estimation, could house no more than three-hundred troops and last he’d heard of their numbers before the final battle in Minrathous, the infamous fighting force of blight-eradicating elite warriors had gone from nearly three thousand in all… to just about the five hundred.

After the final fight in Minrathous?

His guess: Grey Hold was the new Weisshaupt until such a time as the Grey Warden ranks numbered enough to need new accommodations.

“You good?” Evka asked, amused as Illario dragged another wine barrel from the front of the wagon to the back. She tipped the 600-pound barrel off the cart and onto her shoulder. She was also sweating liberally and breathing hard, but like an athlete breathes through the end of a workout. “Take a break. You’re no where near full strength. Don’t push it.”

“If you insist,” Illario said, crouching at the back of the wagon, trying not to huff.

Evka turned with the barrel, paused, and stepped back to look at him. “I’m saying this because I said it to all the other recruits: None of the Minrathous recruits got the reverence or care a Joining is supposed to have. We didn’t have time. For that, I am sorry. It’s not right.”

Illario responded before his brain could catch the words: “Any idea how long I’ve got before the blight rots me entire?”

Evka blinked, eyebrows jumping before smoothing. “It’s hard to say. I’ve never seen any warden have less than five years or more than thirty.” She lets that hang. “It mostly depends on the will power of the Warden.”

Illario gave her a flash of teeth but didn’t bother much selling it as a smile. “I’ve been told repeatedly that caving under pressure is my defining feature. So…”

Evka left him to sit on the back of the almost empty cart to contemplate the muddy tapestry of Lavendel village. He had to wonder why the First Warden was stacking barrels and bothering with a probably soon-to-be-dead ex-Crow warden.

Surely, she had more important things to do.

He had exactly three minutes to ponder this before he heard someone say with suspicion then panic, “Hey, what are you doing? Nooo… Hey! No! Oi! You! Watch out!”

Illario’s quick-twitch reflexes, despite a month in solitary confinement, were still reliably Crow-level paranoid. He dove off the back of the cart, hitting the ground shoulder-first in a rolling dive. Behind him, he felt something enormous slam into the back of the cart followed by the sound of the draft horse going ballistic.

Coming out his roll, Illario spun around in time to just barely throw himself sideways, narrowly avoiding the second attack as fucking Blanchbeak launched at him. The beast was so fucking fast for a creature her size. Illario had just enough time to think this as he scrambled again to his feet.

She was skidding, wings flared to slow her momentum as she quick-reversed and whipped around. Her giant blue raptor eyes locked onto him, her feathers and fur bristling, wings extending as she screeched, bounced, then attacked him again. Illario threw his arms up, like he would block a blow, spinning right as her right paw came down in a grizzly bear swipe.

She hit him, her claw ripped the back of his forearms open, but most of the force glanced off even as blood splattered the stone.

Illario ignored it.

He grabbed for knives he didn’t have, swore and ducked as the griffon charged him, pouncing first left when he tried to break left, then right when he spun and tried to go right. Blocking him and chirping, butt wiggling with predator glee. He jumped back and she dove at the space where he’d been.

In Antivan on reflex, he snarled, “Get the away from me, you deranged snowball fuck!”

Then said snowball fuck lunged at him again, rearing up, wings out, both forelegs going wide in a bear-hugging grab. He ducked, juked left… but felt her beak snap closed on the hood of his Grey Warden uniform. She whipped her head down, throwing Illario like a ragdoll to her feet. Panic. A snap of pain as his palms hit the cobblestone—

There was an awful lot of yelling as three Grey Wardens simultaneously tackled Snowball Fuck to pry her jaws open, put her in a headlock, and try to restrain her wings.

Offended griffon screeching followed.

Illario rolled, getting free of the fight just as Snowball Fuck seemed to realize how much trouble she was in. She dropped to the ground, ears flipping back, making querulous purring noises as she was dog-piled by Grey Wardens. Among them was Antoine, his arm locked around the griffon’s neck as he said, rapidly:

“Still! STILL! Now!”

Snowball Fuck complied, dropped her head on top of her paws, ears flat, her wings folding in. After she remained in this position for full ten seconds, the other two wardens warily got up, leaving Antoine knelt with the griffon, slowly releasing the choke hold to instead gently pet her head and smooth her feathers.

“What the fuck,” said a voice, “is happening?”

Illario turned to see Evka stood on the edge of the courtyard, staring at the carnage of supplies thrown from the cart, the draft horse whinnying half-way down the road toward the town, and the milling of Grey Wardens who’d all sprinted down here to stop the attack. She looked at Illario for a moment as if hopeful he could be the problem or have the answer, but Illario just threw his bleeding arms up.

“It wasn’t me!”

Antoine stood up. “This is my fault.”

“It sure is, my love.” Evka said it, not in anger precisely, but bafflement, “I thought we were all extremely clear where Blanchbeak is and is not allowed unsupervised.”

“We were. She followed us down from the aerie.”

Evka scrubbed a hand over her face, looked toward the sky for strength, then her husband also for strength, then said, “Antoine. The griffons are extremely important, and I have every faith that you can figure this out, but this griffon—” she pointed to Snowball Fuck— “is getting out of hand.”

“I can work with her,” Antoine said.

“Honey, I believe you. But you need help and we’re shorthanded. I’m getting Davrin and that’s that.”

“He should be with Rook—"

“He should be,” Evka cut in, “where his extensive experience raising a griffon can do us some good. She’s been harassing the other junior wardens, and she’s attacked this junior warden twice. I can’t have this. This isn’t a discussion. It’s done.”

Antoine slumped a little but nodded. “You’re right of course. I—I’ll handle this.”

“Get Blanch out of here. I’ll handle clean up.” She looked at Illario. “You’ve got rotten luck.”

“Mierda de vida— I was literally,” Illario gestured generally about him, “sitting there doing nothing.”

“Bad luck doesn’t care what you’re doing,” Evka said flatly. “It fucks you standing up or lying down. You’re bunking in Grey Hold from now on.”

Illario was reminded powerfully, in that moment, of Caterina dolling out contracts. She’d never think of it this way: that she was assigning Illario a bed to sleep in so to speak, but that was very often the case. He remembered the first mission offers that came in for him after he’d debuted as full-fledged Crow – the surprise at how many were bedroom kills.  

When he asked why so few were simple social infiltrations or even standard breaking and entering, Caterina had said, “You’ll take the contracts you’re given.”

Standing up. Or lying down.

Chapter Text

Turns out all the new junior wardens had excruciating night terrors.

Feeling relieved that other people were miserable wasn’t one of Illario’s more endearing qualities, but it did mean none of them harassed him on the nights he woke up retching and shaking in his rack. It also meant no one was getting much sleep because at least one of the greenhorns was waking up sobbing, screaming, or thrashing themselves out of their bunk every other evening.

Illario was at least silent in his night terrors, waking lock-jawed and rigid rather than shrieking. (At least one Crow skill still worth something.) But his stomach was starting to churn even in daylight from the doses of spearmint he was taking to quell his dreams.

The taste of bile and medicinal syrup at the back of his teeth brought with it a sense-memory two decades old now: Waking up, the hinge of his jaw aching with the bite of mint, his cousin’s weight on the mattress next to him, trying to hush him so his screams wouldn’t bring staff or house guard running.

Caterina still found out of course.

There were ten brand new junior wardens in all. Four of them were former Minranthous city guard, four former Shadow Dragons, a former Mourn Watch mage, and one extremely baffled pastry chef. His name was Martin and he’d never killed so much as a chicken in his entire life and kept saying so.

“I thought it was just a cure! I didn’t realize I’d become a Grey Warden!”

Martin at least had the good sense to be upset about becoming a warden. The rest of the new recruits were neutral to enthusiastic about it, which largely made Illario hate them. The group had had a month of acclimation to Grey Hold and all of them knew Illario primarily as ‘the lunatic junior-warden who’s been in the brig the entire time.’

Which is to say, none of them knew how to talk to him.

He intended to keep it that way.

“Warden Illario,” came the deadpan sigh from their drill instructor. “You do realize darkspawn will not have standard humanoid anatomy you can exploit to avoid a fight, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Illario said, pacing his side of the sparring ring. He gestured with his sparring stave, iron-cored but feather light in his grip. “But Warden Mizzrik doesn’t do a very good job guarding his anatomy, so I keep hitting it. Hardly my fault.”

Warden Mizzrik – whose right arm from the shoulder down hung paralyzed and numb in the wake of yet another nerve-strike during an exchange – made use of his left arm to flip Illario the bird. Illario, bored, bounced on the balls of his feet and wished it was night so he could get drunk off moonshine and ignore every soul who tried to talk to him.

“Mizzrik,” said their instructor, “you better sit it out.”

Mizzrik shook his dark head, grabbed his sparring stave with his off-hand, and spun it around with reasonable dexterity. The other junior wardens murmured encouragement from the sidelines as their friend took a defensive stance against Illario, stave raised, his bad arm tucked to his ribs.

The drill instructor nodded, signaling the fight to start—

Illario was inside his guard instantly, swiping the weapon aside with his stave then snapping back the other way at Mizzrik’s now unguarded face. The butt of his sparring stave cracked across his temple. The Grey Warden took the headshot that would have killed most people, staggering and – because half-measures were not a thing among Crows – Illario straight-kicked the bigger man in the chest and sent him to the floor.

Groans went up from the onlookers.

Illario grinned at Mizzrik who wearily wiped the blood from his brow.

“Yes. Yes. We all get it,” the big man said, shouldering past Illario.

“Chin up,” Illario said, turning his head to follow his opponent’s progress. “I’m sure you’ll figure out how a sword works eventually.”

The drill instructor, Warden Marcus, pinched and bridge of his nose and sighed.

“Warden Illario, since you seem in need of a workout and disinclined to listen or be useful to your fellow wardens, you’re doing sprints until I tell you stop. If you stop before I tell you to, you’re scouring the great hall floors by hand for a month. Hell, I might make you do both anyway, just for annoying me. Generally.”

Illario tossed his sparring stave into the equipment pile nearby and jogged to the far end of the ramparts to start a loop of sprints by his lonesome. He could feel the other junior wardens glaring, but honestly the warmth of their hatred was doing something for him and a punishing glut of physical pain was familiar at least.

About thirty minutes later, once Illario was dry-heaving and fighting drills had concluded, Warden Marcus finally told him to stop and left him to collapse and contemplate the new limits of his physiology. Unsettling. Illario used to know his limits so intimately he could press his back into them on every mission.

Now? It was all gone. The blight burning every cell to new thrill-inducing heights. He’d be awed by it if he didn’t know what was burning to fuel it.

“Making friends?” said a familiar, bemused voice.

“Always,” Illario said, spitting over the parapet, doubled over and still panting heavily. “Better hurry. I’ve got… armory duty after… I finish puking.”

First Warden Evka Ivo took a seat on the wall to look at him.

“Well, you got what you wanted I guess.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re on patrol duty starting tomorrow.” She shook her head. “Weapon and combat assessment too solid to ignore. You’ve fought dark spawn before, and you’ve demonstrated that you’re not going to be useful here in the fort so… you’re banished to the swamps to stare at wetlands and maybe get attacked by darkspawn. Are you happy now?”

“Giddy,” he said, finally catching his breath.

Evka looked at him levelly. “You’re paired with a veteran warden to make sure you don’t do anything stupid of course.”

“Of course.”

She continued to look at him.

“First Warden,” he said, laying on the charm in a way that made it a mockery.

“You should know: Blanchbeak tried to get out of the aerie again”

“If Snowball The Terrible wants to rampage through the fort, I think you should let her.” Illario finally straightened up, stretching until his back popped. He sighed. “It’s enrichment.”

“What the fuck is wrong with that animal?” Evka muttered. “The other griffons are starting to give her corrections when she leaves, but she’s so damn big—”

“A bully at heart,” Illario said almost fondly.  

“I think you like it a little.” Evka leveled the accusation with an eyeroll. “That the big problem griffon is obsessed with you. Even if it’s specifically to maul you.”

“Yes, I love being attacked at random while I’m doing chores around Lavendel. It’s doing incredible things for my nerves.”

“Well, she won’t be able to find you while you’re on patrol. It’s a few weeks posted at the Cauldron.”

“Goody.”

She ignored his sneer. “How are the voices?”

“I don’t hear them anymore. Same as the last time you asked.”

“That kind of sensitivity is dangerous,” Evka said, for what felt like a billionth time. “If you hear the voices again, you need to tell someone. The blight is changing, even now, after the risen gods died. The rules are different so all we can do is talk to each other. You can make all the faces you want, buddy, but this is logistics.”

Illario folded his arms. “Is it efficient to keep telling me the same things over and over?”

“It is while you continue to ignore your fellow wardens. I thought you were supposed to be good with people or something.”

“When I was being paid for it,” Illario said flatly. “I’m not being paid right now, so…”

“You technically have a stipend.”

Illario gave her the most condescending look he could muster. “I repeat: I’m not being paid.”

Evka snorted, which wasn’t exactly the response he’d been after. “Well, ya got me there. Our rank-and-file wages are basically lint and a slap on the ass right now.” She seemed distracted and mildly distressed by this. Beneath her veneer of amusement, he could see it in the crease of her crow’s feet and the down-twitch of the mouth. “Even with our depleted forces, it aint great.”

“I don’t think it was ever ‘great’,” Illario deadpanned.

“Not to you, you pampered pussy.”

Illario grinned mean back at her, but Evka just waved him away and set off to talk to the other junior wardens. She made a point to talk to all of them regularly and whatever she was pitching to them, his fellow junior wardens were largely bought in. (Except Martin, who only got increasingly nervous because he was, clearly, the only smart one.)

While she was inspiring hearts and minds, Illario slipped into the infirmary to see if anyone was around, stole more spearmint from medical storage, and made his way to his rack to flop there in private for a while. He’d be late for his duty in the armory, but they worst they could do was chew him out or flog him bloody, the latter of which no one seemed to take any pleasure in.

Which meant there were not many consequences he couldn’t live with for being a lackluster warden. What were these people going to do? Torture him? Find something fourteen-year-old Illario hadn’t learned to live with under Caterina’s kindly attention? Frankly, he felt a little invincible, which was probably a mistake, but he couldn’t be bothered to care.

“Oi,” said a voice, gruff but neutral from the barracks door.

“Mizzrik!” Illario enthused, not moving even an inch from where he was laying with his hands knitted behind his head in his bunk. “Your arms are working again. That’s great news. I hope you got more practice in because, cabrón, your form is fucking shit.”

“Right. It’s been weeks and you’re a cunt running for cuntiest cunt in all of Hossberg.” Mizzrik, looming in the door, held up a hand to stop him retorting. “Don’t worry, mate. You’re winning. Don’t know why you’re obsessed with making things harder on yourself, but—”

“If I’m making you hard, Warden Mizzrik, you might want to keep that yourself.”

Mizzrik sighed. “Fuck me. Why do I try?”

He was gone. If Illario recalled correctly Mizzrik had been a captain of the guard in Minrathous and as a result the other former city watch recruits were immediately loyal to him. The Shadow Dragon juniors seemed friendly with him as well (“One of the good ones,” he’d heard them say.) so over half the junior wardens followed his lead.

If Illario was on his game, he’d play nice – get close, become the man’s best friend, get the rest of the junior wardens on his side, leverage that and… do what? Gain what? If he was really smart, he’d be nicer to Evka and Antoine, win them over. They had the seniority, resources, and connections. He could charm and cajole his way in. They were both moderately pliable already and…

And what? Do what? To what end?

Quietly, to himself, Illario whispered in his own tongue, “Who fucking cares?”

Then something slammed into the windows of the junior warden barracks at about thirty miles per hour, instantly destroying the window shutter and sending the splintered wood rocketing through the room.

Illario, again, would like to say he was getting used to these random attacks, but the fact was he literally dive-rolled off the end of his bunk and was fetched up against the wall like rival Crows were descending on Hossberg. But no. Of course, it was Snowball The Disemboweler trying to punch her way through the window to get at him, having found him at last in the Grey Hold barracks.

Blessedly, she did not remotely fit through the window, so it was just her beak and claws scrabbling madly around the edges. Eventually, when she realized she couldn’t get through to maul him, she screeched in rage, one big raptorial eye peering at Illario through the gap.

Illario picked up a bit of wood from the ground and hucked it at her through the window, yelling in Antivan, “Go back to being extinct, you motherfucker!”

Another enraged shriek, like she understood any of that, followed by the sound of claws pushing off stone and the griffon flapping away in the distance.

Mizzrik reappeared in the door of course, finding Illario breathing hard, the window busted in, and feathers absolutely everywhere.

“What the ever-loving fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded, less in anger than disbelieve.

“Just incredibly lucky,” he said, shouldering past the other warden.

Illario reported for armory duty only somewhat late, and he did a perfectly mediocre job cleaning everything and no one gave a shit one way or the other about it because, like Lucanis had said, he was a nobody, had always been a nobody, and would stay a nobody. Exactly as expected.

Warden Ahsoka was known for two things: Being the biggest, scariest Grey Warden in Hossberg and brewing moonshine that could strip the paint off buildings. Scarred from head to foot, covered in Tevinter slaver brands, both her Qunari horns were snapped in half and re-fitted with iron tips. Her battle ax was the size of Illario’s torso.

He found out she was the veteran warden assigned to his patrol when she marched through four other wardens at evening meal to slam herself seated on the ground next to him. He was so drunk by the time she did it, he momentarily forgot there were Qunari Grey Wardens that weren’t Rook and got confused.

“What—” he started to say.

“You with me tomorrow,” Ahsoka declared in a heavy North Rivaini accent. She contemplated the bonfire and the other wardens all loudly and drunkenly milling around it. “Patrol duty for two week. Give me no trouble, or I snap you in two, ke?”

Illario was swimming by then. He lifted a mostly empty bottle of moonshine to his mouth and repeated, muzzily, “Something something… split me in two.” He shrugged, took a swig of the vile, throat-burning swill. “Mierda. Yeah, sure. Why not?”

“You crazy, huh?”

Illario swapped to tolerable North Ravaini. “I mean, you all keep saying that, but I think I’m appropriately displeased about being a Grey Warden.”

“You are a fast-talker on a hot-streak heading down,” said Ahsoka, suddenly far more verbose in her native language. “And I don’t really care about that, but if you do what I say, when I say, and keep your eyes open then we will spend two blessedly uneventful weeks walking circles around an empty fortress. This is my goal. Do not fuck it up for me, sparrow-bone. Meet me at the gate tomorrow. Dawn.”

Illario took another pull of moonshine and felt his stomach roil like he’d microdosed Adder’s Ache cut with rotten apples. He exhaled fumes and let the world blur as Ahsoka’s braincell annihilating brew burned through his body and left him adrift again in his own senses.

“Walkin’ circles,” he slurred. “Got it.”

He finished the bottle and promptly started to fall over but Ahsoka braced his shoulder.

“Where you learn Rivaini? You sound like old book. Prim proper.”

“Makes sense,” Illario mumbled. “S’where I learned it.”

“Why? Heard you speak Tevene too. What you were? That you learn all that? Lotta tongues, saza.”

“None of your business,” Illario said, rolling out from under her hand to lie down on the ground.

Once there, he let the earth tilt on its axis beneath him, his skull vibrating with the commotion of Grey Warden footsteps, all engaged with the nightly ruckus of drinking, eating, and partying until unconscious. Warden evening meal didn’t always descend into helmet-bashing debauchery, but the moonshine was largely intended to sedate warden metabolisms into sleep or chemical unconsciousness. 

Illario was aiming for unconsciousness.

He was robbed by someone shaking his shoulder.

“Hey. Hey, can I talk to you?”

“No,” Illario says, baffled.

“Please? I’m trying to settle a bet.”

Illario blinked until the blur talking to him resolved into the round, worried face of Martin the Baker. Illario rolled on his back, sitting up on his elbows to glare at the man.

“What the fuck do you want?” he managed between swallows to keep from puking. His stomach really didn’t handle the mostly poisonous moonshine well, so it was a race between inebriation and his body’s purge response. “I am in the middle of blacking out. I’m making incredible time so what—?”

“You’re a Crow right?”

Illario blinked harder. “If I was a Crow do you think I’d tell you?”

“Right, but you are, aren’t you?”

“It’s a little racist to—” Illario hiccupped, then went on— “accuse the only Antivan of being a Crow.”

“Right, but—”

“Fuck off, Martin.”

Martin fucked off and Illario managed to pass out successfully.

Unfortunately, he also immediately had a skin-crawling nightmare about being held down by a dozen sharp-fingered hands. A shadow crouched over him, sliding claws beneath the notch of his breastbone to shred skin and muscle like wet paper. Somehow his lungs were unimpeded, and he screamed the entire time it was happening.

He could do nothing but feel it as a fist closed around his beating heart and started to tear it out of him like a spasming root vegetable. Then the dream got confused and he was on a contract, was getting fucked in some bed somewhere, or was doing the fucking. (Unclear.) Then he was getting gutted again.

He woke up as something ripped his belly wide like a lover pulls a shirt open.

Illario rolled to his side and puked moonshine and bile until his throat burned and his eyes watered. He tried not to wish, childishly, to be home in his own bed. He rolled to his back, resting his head against a sandbag (what Grey Wardens used for chairs out here) and stared up at the starless black sky, the slightest blush of sunrise under-painting the far clouds.

“You alright?” a voice called from nearby.

“Fuck off,” Illario said, but not with much energy. He was shivering. Adrenaline cold in his veins as he laid there. Fuck. It was a bad one then, had his body believing it was under assault. He wrapped his arms around his torso and slowed his breathing.

“You sure?” said the voice. Just some random warden.

Illario ignored them and pretended to pass out again. To his horror, the speaker got up and came to check on him and (Andraste’s cunt, why?) rolled him onto his side again. In case he puked while asleep and choked on his own vomit. Great. Incredible. He hoped he would choke and die in his sleep. The warden crouched there for a moment, a hand on Illario’s shoulder as if trying to gauge the medically significance of his shivering.

Stop. Fucking. Touching. Me.

“Leave it,” said another warden, a woman, somewhere nearby. “They’ll sleep it off.”

The warden he didn’t know left him. Unconsciousness came again, this time too blessedly deep for nightmares, so at least when he woke up bleary and late to meet Ahsoka, he had some rest behind him.

“Late,” Ahsoka declared as he slouched to the courtyard where she awaited him. “Sorry, saza. You gon’ learn this lesson once.”

“What les—?”

Then Ahsoka sucker punched him in the jaw. Not hard enough to drop him, but hard enough his head snapped to the side, and he staggered before catching himself. Ahsoka, unbothered, adjusted her pack on her shoulder and started walking toward the city gates.

“Don’ be late or I punch you in the mouth. Keep being late. I punch you inna balls. Ke?”

“Got it.” Illario spat blood and started to follow her.

“Fucking around done. Real danger out there. You’re my junior, so I got you, but not if you so reckless I can’t do nothing. So do what I say, when I say, no mouth from you.”

“Got it. Keep my mouth to myself.”

Ahsoka paused, squinting at him, did not smack him again, and they departed for the Cauldron.

“Hear Rook was da one who Joined ya.”

Ahsoka said this on their second night camped out by the Cauldron.

Illario had gotten used to her somewhat disjointed trade-tongue and funny way of punching into conversations without warning. She poked their small cook fire with a stick, sending a sheet of orange sparks into the night air. Illario ignored her because he was trying to do something about the shit state of his assigned short sword.

He’d been attacking it with a whetstone for the better part of an hour now and made enough progress to have summit fever. Also, he was mostly committed to being a terrible conversationalist just to spite the senior warden. Unfortunately, she seemed content to talk at him regardless of his silence. He wondered, angrily, if this was what Lucanis felt like on mission with him.

Maybe he’d been secretly wishing Illario would shut the fuck up the whole time. Maybe he’d never found it comforting. Maybe he could have saved Illario all the fucking breath he wasted over the years by mentioning it instead of just sitting there with his mouth shut.

Ahsoka tilted her head at him.

“Heard you said ‘no’ about it an’ they did it anyway.” The big Qunari woman clicked her tongue. “That true? Mizzrik says he saw it. In Minrathous, Rook made you take it.”

Illario glared at her over his half-sharpened sword.

“Mizzrik should keep his mouth shut.”

“True story then, huh?” She hums. “Interesting.”

“So what? You people drag conscripts to the Joining all the time.”

“No. We don’t.”

Illario blinked angrily before saying, “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Means Rook broke da rules, saza. Not supposed to ever give a Joining to someone screaming they don’t want it. Dead for sure. Pointless to do it and fucked up beside. We back people into corners plenty. Last resort for most, we be, absolutely. But no one get Joined that say ‘no’. We’ll kill ‘em instead if they want. One rule we do hold.”

Ahsoka said all this like commenting on the weather while Illario sat there in the swamp feeling a cold rage lace threads through his diaphragm. Until he was breathing fast, glaring into the fire. Familiar rage – that trapped animal feeling that twisted his gut like a wet towel around itself.

“They said I was conscripted.”

“I mean, that between you an’ whoever arrested you. Conscripts usually death row guys or lifers. Agree to come out here. Be Wardens instead, but if conscript get out here an’ scream ‘no’? We send ‘em back or kill ‘em.” She pointed at Illario. “You never get say ‘no’. That unfair to you, ke? Too late now, can’t take it back, but bad form.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any punishment for forcing someone to Join?”

Ahsoka shrugged. “I mean, flog ‘em, demote ‘em, maybe worse if they did it gross. But…”

“It’s Rook.” Illario gritted a grin. “And they can’t do any wrong, can they?”

“No, they wrong for what they did,” Ahsoka said, like declaring the sky was blue in its obviousness. “That was fucked up. Don’t matter if it were a hero who did it. You got wronged, friend. Sorry about it.”

“Fuck your ‘sorry’.”

She nodded. “Yeah. But someone gotta say ‘sorry’. Or maybe you keep thinking it weren’t fucked up.”

Ahsoka stopped talking to him then and promptly fell asleep, leaving him on watch with apparently no concern that he might take his newfound rage and use it on her while she slept. A familiar part of him debated trying to kill her purely for dismissing him as a threat but like every thought about wanton destruction for the sake of it… he was fucking tired.

He went back to honing the edge of his shitty slightly unbalanced bog-standard sword, knowing he still had hours of sharpening his shitty bog-standard dagger to follow. He’d always maintained his own weapons, but they’d always been custom made for him, with Crow business in mind, with his decades of training and razor-sharp utility in mind.

If a Crow was a knife, a Grey Warden was a bludgeon.

He’d never felt blunter, stupider, or less like he existed than he did right now. Pointlessly sharpening a weapon for a fight that didn’t matter for a life that didn’t matter. He stopped sharpening to stare instead at his hands: the grey water runoff from the whetstone, dirt and alloy dust settling between the creases in his palms.

He thought about quick deaths.

The one he’d owed Lucanis and didn’t give him.

The one Lucanis, in turn, took from him. Twice, in fact.

He thought about how it was all incredibly proportional. How the helpless, nerve-shaking rage he felt was no less than a lesson Lucanis was beating into him until it scarred deep as Caterina’s cane: To know his place and stay there.

Illario didn’t bother sharpening his blade. He also didn’t bother keeping watch and simply rolled over and went to sleep. Ahsoka punished this carelessness around midnight by kicking Illario in the stomach so hard he was moderately sure he’d be pissing blood if he wasn’t a warden. She crouched over him while he laid there gasping, arms wrapped around his gut.

In Rivaini, she said, “You don’t leave another warden’s back open. Not ever. If you do something like that again and I’ll drag you face-first over gravel, sparrow-bone. We heal fast, not clean and I have no problem scuffing your pretty face forever. You got me?”

And in Rivaini he said, grinning, “You think I’m fucking pretty?”

So, she kicked him again.

On day four of hiking pointless circles around the Cauldron waiting for his commanding officer to ‘feel the blight go buzz’ in her head, Illario was begrudgingly starting to miss Grey Hold. (Mortifying.) The quartermaster at least kept hot water available at the mess hall in the morning for both coffee and personal grooming. Also, there was no moonshine to drink himself unconscious, which was a massive downgrade.

They were again making their way along the docks that ran the base of the fortress, as Ahsoka said, “Aint pointless to guard. The bad stuff be locked up here. Stuff that melt faces off, ke? Old blood history an’ all that.”

“So,” Illario deadpanned at this explanation, “we’re sleeping on top of the Grey Wardens’ bomb disposal site.”

Ahsoka, unbothered, said, “Yeah. Warden secrets. S’where the griffon bones are. Fucked up, that. What come of blood magic. Every time it just death all over—"

“Do you feel that?” Illario demanded, cutting Ahsoka off as he turned to the lake.

Ahsoka blinked at him, turned, and moved to peer out over the waters. The wind rippled waves of silver across the green water grass, reeds and cattails bobbing. Ahsoka’s immediate attention, no hesitation or doubt that he was feeling something, was both a relief and anxiety the longer they stood there scanning the horizon.

Sitting with it for longer, he realized it was settling in as an ache behind the eyes.

“What you feel?” Ahsoka asked, looking down at him. 

“I don’t know.” Illario set his hand on the shitty sword strapped to his hip, grimacing as the feeling sharpened behind his retinas. With his other hand he pointed. “Over there.  No. Mierda.” He shifted his weight, hand up like a horrifying dousing rod and felt the skin across his palm prickle and flex as he settled northwest across the water. “There.”

Ahsoka frowned.

“Hmm. I don’t feel nothin’. But the beach go round. Let’s walk about. Sharp now, huh? Watch behind. Most important not let things sneak up, ke?”

“Yes, don’t let things stab us in the ass. Got it.”

Ahsoka set the pace, but wasn’t much bothering with stealth it seemed and Illario went swiftly from tracking her footfalls for guidance to the horrified realization that watching her back was largely because anything within fifty meters would surely hear them slopping through the mud.

After a while he said, exasperated, “Aren’t we being a bit loud for sneaking up on darkspawn?”

“Oh, I tell ya when they close, saza. Hundred meter or so.” She tapped her temple. “I feel ‘em when it’s time for blood up. I bet you feel ‘em far. Das fun.” He could hear the grin in her voice. “Good pair we can be if you got the far sense. Not many Wardens got far sense. Useful.”

Illario did not like that Ahsoka seemed to be vetting him for his suitability in a two-man team or that his weird headache might mean something. That, finally, he was feeling the famous warden sixth sense and, of course, it was another varietal of pain. He thought of Lucanis on missions in Tevinter, saying how blood magic made the back of his eyes itch, how he could feel where the Fade ran thin.

Illario used to bring extra vials of painkillers, low dosage, for treating headaches because Lucanis would ignore the pain and get testy with him during downtime. When he did, Illario would just pull the vial out, set it like a chess piece on the table between them and – to his credit – Lucanis never argued against taking the medicine upon realizing it was making him a shitty mission partner.

Years later, into their thirties, he still didn’t pack the painkiller for himself.

Like he wanted to see if Illario would keep packing it for him.

Eventually, Ahsoka held up a fist, indicating they stop, then got down on one knee to listen. Illario followed suit and almost immediately heard the clicking, hissing, throat-noises of soldier-class darkspawn somewhere past the cliffs just ahead. Illario watched the senior warden pull her great axe from her back, settle it across her knees, then turned to him.

“Okay. Time for the fun, baby warden.” She jerked her head. “Try an’ tell me how many spawn round that corner. No peekin’.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Try feel it, ke? Count. In ya head. Use your sense.”

Illario glared, put his hand on the ground to steady himself and silently shifted forward alongside the other warden, like proximity might clarify anything. Knelt by Ahsoka, he closed his eyes and tried to focus on the headache. The pain had settled somewhat into a shifting pressure behind his skull, but he didn’t see how that would tell him anything about individual—

Illario frowned.

“There are seven, no, eight of them.” He wrinkled his nose. “Roughly.”

“Oooh,” Ahsoka enthused. “Quick with that. Okay. We gon’ fight ‘em now. You wan’ help or let me handle, saza?”

“Stop calling me that and I don’t want to do fuck all unless we confirm what’s over there.”

“It a bit of beach, cliffs, like big bowl. Bout hundred meter across, hundred meter deep. Bit where it wide at the beach, then narrow into smaller space. They feel scatter to you, Rio?”

“Don’t call me that either. And ‘yes’.” He couldn’t explain it, but yes. The little… pressure points seemed fanned out in his head. A shifting constellation of discomfort along the interior of his skull. “They feel spread out in the… uh, wider beach area I suppose.”

“Hmm, better if we could get ‘em all lined up.”

Illario unsheathed his short sword. “Okay.”

“Huh? No! You crazy little—”

Illario was too quick for Ahsoka, already up and crouch-running along the cliff edge, just below the tall grasses and tracking to the shadow of the rocks. He could hear Ahsoka hissing at him to come back, but he ignored her, poking his head around the corner, assessing the wide-open section of beach and where it narrowed back toward some small cove, a passage barely two shoulder-widths across to enter it.

He felt Ahsoka closing in on his back, but she couldn’t move very fast and be quiet.

“I’ll bottleneck them,” he said softly when she was still five meters off from him. “When I come back out, block the passage won’t you?”

“Don’t you dare—”

Illario darted from his crouch into a dead sprint across the beach. (Thanks Warden Marcus, for all the running practice.) He was on the nearest darkspawn instantly, shot past it, cleaving the blade through the back of its neck so fast the other darkspawn didn’t immediately react. The decapitated head hit the ground at the same time the others realized an enemy was racing through their ranks.

Illario was moving so fast it felt impossible.

He wondered if the darkspawn understood it when he laughed, hitting his full stride as the other seven (he was right about the count) erupted into shrieks. They streaked into a simultaneous narrowing fan behind him, pursuing, but Illario bee-lined for the grotto. He rocketed through the narrow passage, hearing the spawn screaming and scrabbling down the corridor behind him, his blight-sense spiking to a fever-pitch as proximity closed.

Succeed or die, said the part of him that was, forever, Caterina.

Illario hit the dead-end, drove one foot against the cliff-face and wall-ran directly up, easy as any brick wall in Treviso or Tevinter. It was effortless. Like he was playing. Warden speed and strength taking him so far up the cliff he nearly fucked his release before kicking off, twisting in mid-air to a rolling-dive that landed him on the pad of his shoulder and transferred the momentum into forward motion.

He shot out of the roll into a dead sprint, past Ahsoka now stood in the only exit, her big, spooky, great ax gripped in two hands.

“Crazy!” she shouted in Rivaini but she was laughing. “Crazy fucking Crow!”

Illario skidded, panting, pivoting just in time to see Ahsoka use her perfect tactical bottleneck to literally cleave the darkspawn down like gory wheat before her, separating blighted bodies into back-and-forth sprays of black organs and rib cage. Then it was over. She turned, soaked in black viscera to look at him, her grin bleach white through the gore.

“I should bust your pretty skull for that.”

Illario flicked the blood from his weapon and sheathed it.

“Do what you want. That felt good and I don’t care.”

“That all you care ‘bout? Feel good?”

He shrugged. “What else is there in this backwater?”

She huffed, slinging her weapon over her shoulder. “Fine. Imma leave ya skull alone. Was cool. Stupid. Fuck stupid, unnecessary, show-offy and suicide-like… but worked.” She shrugged as she moved toward him. “Next time, just ask, saza.”

“Stop calling me—”

She loomed over him.

Illario took a small (totally not intimidated) step back from her. “Right. Whatever you like.”

She slapped him on the shoulder hard enough he staggered. “C’mon. I got some moonshine in my bag. We celebrate ya first kill as a Grey Warden, huh?”

He blinked at the absurdity of celebrating the most pointless kill in his long history of killing. He’d killed people who mattered, whose deaths changed the course of countries. He’d killed for prestige. For so much money he could buy and sell small villages. For Caterina, in secret, for the position of his House and for the notion she might stop looking so fucking annoyed at him when he spoke to her in the presence of others.

There was a day that it mattered when he killed.

It wasn’t today.

But… he did want the moonshine. So, he didn’t argue.

Over the next week, they killed three more disjointed packs of soldier spawn.

Trained in pitched battle Illario was not, but two-man tactics he did know, and Warden Ahsoka was far tougher than any non-warden master assassin. He only had to put his back to hers like a wall and handle whatever ran at him.

Begrudgingly, he understood why she was the chosen babysitter. She could probably kill most of these groups on her own, but having a second was helpful for dividing the attention of her attackers. That, Illario knew like the back of his hand. Pulling fire for Lucanis was most of his job when they ran as a team in their early days, back when it was blitz killing and blood.

Figures he would end up doing more of the same out here.

Ahsoka sighed at the end of the seventh night, annoyed, “You so sour, saza. But it good time to be warden.”

Illario snorted at this, pulling his small camp pot of boiling water off the fire. “First of all, cabrón, it’s never a good time to be a fucking warden. Secondly, what is ‘good’ about being part of a pointless organization?”

He pulled a wash rag from the dry-line nearby and soaked it, using the painfully hot rag to scrub dried blight-slime from his face and neck. His shirt was drying, still filthy even after he tried to wash it in the lake, so he was crouched shirtless and scowling into the fire.

“That what you focus on?” Ahsoka demanded, incredulous from her seat by the fire. “Fuckhead, we save the world! Warden Rook kill Elgarnan and last archdemon. Warden Davrin put down other archdemon at Weisshaupt—”

“An Antivan Crow,” Illario cut in, “killed a god in the middle there. Also, Solas. I’m pretty sure. And didn’t you all get famously decimated at Weisshaupt?”

 “Do you no get it?” Ahsoka leaned forward to enunciate. “There gon’ be no more Blights. Ever. That done, saza. World changed. That amazing and you sulkin’ making stupid face and pickin’ fights for nothing. Big bitch ‘n’ moan.”

“Yup,” Illario said, rubbing his arms raw getting the ichor off. “Too old for wonder and glee.”

“You too young to act like old man.”

“Suck my cock, Ahsoka.”

“If you wan’ me to,” she said, shrugging.

He thought about it for a full five seconds, about finally giving in to the Grey Warden lackadaisical culture around fucking coworkers, before deciding against it. Honestly, sex outdoors was a good way to get sand in terrible places. He’d fucked in enough strange locations to know better. (Damn, he really did sound like an old man.) He pretended to ignore her making the pass at him.

“You really not hook up with anyone in Grey Hold?” Ahsoka asked, not with any particular judgement, just curiosity. “What? You don’ like sex?”

On reflex, mostly distracted scrubbing his nails, he said, “I conditionally like sex and, let me tell you, the conditions are never getting met out here.”

Ahsoka, made wary by this statement, changed the subject. “Look, Rook got friends in high places now. Evka an’ them?” She crossed her fingers. “Close. They gonna get patrons. Evka gon’ change things. Blight different. Wardens different. Watch.”

Illario glared up from scrubbing.

“Your optimism is fairy-tale like in that it’s delusional and for children.” He swapped to Rivaini. “Maybe if I say it like this, you’ll understand me better: We’re in a death cult and we already drank the nightshade, my friend. Just because it’s killing me slowly, doesn’t mean I can’t resent the fucking poison.”

“You’re alive because of the fucking poison,” Ahsoka said, a little amused.

Incensed by her amusement, he said, “I didn’t ask for the fucking poison.”

“And that was fucked up,” she said, calm and unimpressed, “but lots of people become wardens for lots of unfair fucked up reasons. You’re so intent on being miserable you won’t even look up for five seconds and see the world is changed.”

Illario smiled at her and, in that smoky bedroom way he knew most people found enticing, said, “Maybe for you the only direction is up in all this, but my standards are moderately higher, and I don’t think we’re going to find a common fucking ground there.”

Ahsoka considered him in a calm, narrow-eyed way. She was deciding whether or not those were fighting words and she was within her rights to beat the shit out of him and shove him in the swamp.

“I cut you slack,” she decided, shrugging and sitting back, “cuz Crows make you crazy.”

“I am not a—”

“Shut up. I watch you do flips an’ shit. You Crow. Not even hiding it. Just being annoying.”

Illario, despite literally everything, snorted a laugh.

Ahsoka pointed at him. “I hear that. You laugh. I saw.” She raised two hands in fists of victory. “Win, me!”

Illario took his hot water out of talking distance and continued to clean up in peace.

On the last day before a new warden team would come to relieve them, Illario woke with his head swarmed by migraine lights. Usually, he didn’t wake up loud. Today, he woke spine curling, clutching his head as a bolt of black pain split his skull to tune of his scream. The sensation bloomed through his nervous system like a stroke and for a moment he wondered if he was fucking dying.

Then Ahsoka was on top of him, trying to force-feed him a painkiller.

“Stop!” Illario slapped her hand away from him, the glass vial from his mouth in a panic. “Something’s coming! Mierda! Fuck me!” He clawed at the side of his skull, but the pressure was starting to relieve. Agony as first warning. Then dimming to something tolerable. “A lot of them. There’s a lot of them. Coming…Maker…I can’t—”

He pointed randomly where he felt it.

Ahsoka was already throwing her armor on. Simple breastplate with straps. Illario, instinct and muscle memory, pulled his leathers toward him but his vision was swimming as he tried to secure it to himself. He felt Ahsoka grab his shoulder and cinch the straps tight to his ribs; she knew warden armor even on someone else’s body.

“Move,” she hissed, pulling him up. “Now!”

The darkspawn swarm came screaming through the broken gates of the Cauldon as he and Ahsoka ran up the rampart stairs to the second story. There were far, far too many for two wardens to deal with and he didn’t need Ahsoka to say it as they broke for the half-ruined west tower. Panic had a calming effect on him, everything else falling away into conditional cold.

“Only one way up the tower!” Ahsoka shouted, reverting to her mother tongue in her urgency and want for clarity. “There’s an archer’s roost on the third-floor roof. Follow me there. We’ll knock out the ladder and figure out what to do after that.”

“The reinforcements!” Illario hissed. “We can just wait for them.”

“Sure. But we must not die first, sparrow-bone.”

“I told you to stop calling me that!” Illario quipped, trying to ignore the sound of screaming monsters getting closer. “We aren’t ‘fun nicknames’ close! Stop trying to make fun nicknames happen!”

“It cuz I keep forget your real name!” Ahsoka assured him, cheerful strain in her shouting. “Cuz don’ care ‘bout you, saza!”

“That’s more like it,” Illario grunted, throwing himself up the wide spiraling tower staircase toward the wooden construction platforms that bridged holes in the ruined steps.

Ahsoka knocked the ramshackle scaffolding to scraps behind them, the swarm trying to use the weakened structures and falling to smash on the ground below. But still, the swarm followed, leaping the gaps, howling, scrabbling at the stones. Too many getting up the stairs behind them.  

Ahsoka busted a door down near the middle of the tower, spilling them onto an exterior covered walkway that ran under the jutting bulk of the third story. She sprinted for what looked like a bolted-on ladder to the roost above. Mounting it required swinging over the outer wall, over the now two-story drop to the swamp ground below.

“You first!” she shouted, spinning to face the coming spawn. “You lighter! Won’t break for you!”

Illario was on the wall, and up the ladder before she’d even finished speaking. The height didn’t faze him even a second.

The rusted-as-fuck ladder giving out as he got within six feet of the top, however, fazed him very badly as the entire top quarter of the ladder snapped off at the top joints and folded just under his heels. His stomach dropped, metal shrieking as the ladder peeled off the wall to drop him to his ignominious death in the mud below.

Luckily, Crow training covered what to do when falling badly.

Before the ladder lost all purchase entirely, Illario threw himself sideways, toward the wall and bare-finger snatched a section of cracked mortar between the stones. Two fingernails ripped off in his mad grab. It was a thin shitty handhold, but grip strength was a Crow specialty and warden-powered, just enough to catch and hang by.

“Ahsoka!”

His boots, still the flexible Crow leather from home (made to assist with exactly this kind of free-climbing scenario) caught a fine seam between the building blocks. His free hand palmed frantically for a second handhold, found one and he pulled himself flat against the wall.

“I can’t stay here forever! Ahsoka!”

He risked looking to his patrol partner.

Taller than him by far, the big Quanri woman launched herself from the top of the broken ladder to catch the edge of the archer’s roost, pull herself up, then scramble to the bit of roof directly over him but jutting out slightly. She lay flat, stretched her arm out toward him and—

 Fuck.

Too far up. He’d have to jump up and back to catch her hand.

“If you fucking drop me—” he snarled, heart pounding in his head.

“I won’t drop you. Jump!”

Ahsoka shook her palm with urgency and Illario, fingers already beginning to strain with gripping the bare wall, palms not nearly chalked or prepped for a climb like this, with no choice at all, used every bit of strength to throw himself up and out, one arm extended to catch her hand and—

His fingers slapped shut around her forearm and his fall arrested with a jolt at his shoulder socket.

Above him, Ahsoka laughed in triumph.

“Yes! Knew you were a real fucking Crow!” she shouted, grinning down at him. “You hard to fuckin’ kill, ke!”

Illario, hanging like an aerialist from a silk rope beneath her, just shouted as sarcastically as physically possible, “Yes, good job! You didn’t drop me! Get me up! Ándele!”

In Rivaini, she said with deliberate calm, “It’s slick up here, Rio. Can’t move real good. I’m going to hold still and stay anchored. You use my armor as a hand hold, alright? Pull yourself up. I won’t let you—”

And then a blight-lance thick as his forearm hit Ahsoka in the side of the head and exploded her skull like a melon.

Time froze. (It didn’t.) For a split second, Ahsoka’s body spasmed. Her hand gripped his arm so tight it strained the bones. Then her headless body slipped forward, off the ledge, and Illario – with nothing else to grab onto where he was hung so far away from the wall – simply… dropped into the open air.

Fuck, he thought, as the wind roared in his ears. Fuck me. God damn.

The last thing he knew before he hit the ground, was the taste of Ahsoka’s blood in his mouth and his blight-sense rising to a fever pitch scream as he landed in the middle of the swarm.

Illario woke up.

This was a surprise.

He blinked, confused, before his broken body began to tell him all about how and in what ways it was broken, and he was fucked. He was floating in cold water, his vision obscured by cattails and reeds, the grey sky above framed by the wobbling circle of swamp plants his body had punched through to land. He could feel his arm was broken below the elbow, ribs bruised if not cracked, and there was pain somewhere in his lower body.

Everything hurt so specifics were hard to come by.

He lay there, glowing with agony trying to breathe through the pain and the animal panic, letting his nerves tire of telling him how much it hurt until he could think through the pain and focus.

Above him, Illario could see the crumbled section of rampart that he’d fallen from, too far to survive for any human being. (But he wasn’t, in fact, all human anymore. Was he?) He’d fallen. (Again.) It should have killed him. (Again.) He was still alive and it hurt. (Again.) He didn’t understand because if the fall didn’t kill them, the swarm beneath him should have. So where were the—?

Something moved on his peripheral.

Illario froze.

Unbreathing, he moved only his eyes up and to the left.

Standing, staring down at him, its jaw hung wide and dripping black ichor from between rows of needle-teeth was a soldier darkspawn. It didn’t move. It just stared at him, its burning orange eyes lidless and locked on his face. It drooled black blood into the water, threads of it slipping from calcified gums.

Illario thought about Evka, saying, “I know exactly how you don’t want to die.”

Namely: Shredded to death by something that hated in a way beyond madness, that would draw out his dying like a you pull apart unprocessed fibers. Until sanity and humanity were flayed down to red viscera with the ability to gargle and wish it was dead.

Fuck. Fuck.

If the Maker was real, he hated Illario too.

The darkspawn twitched toward him, corpse-waxy skin spasming. He couldn’t move – terror and injury too heavy on his bones to even try. He could hear it now, the hissing, hacking, and staggering movement of the rest of the pack walking around him. His sword was still on his hip. If he wasn’t broken in a dozen places, he could at least try to fight out of this. Try to run…

The darkspawn stood directly over him now.

Black necrotized claws reached for him. Fuck it. Illario closed his eyes, waiting to feel his face shear off his skull and—

The claws scraped his chest, gently.

Then they pawed his armor, plucking harmlessly at the buckles and belts.

It took Illario a moment to recognize the dumb ministrations as those of a confused animal, mouthing and batting at something it didn’t understand. In shock he lay there, breathing shallowly as the creature curiously molested his armor, clothes, and extremities. It even bent its hairless, scab-mottled head down to sniff his shoulder.

Then, seemingly satisfied, it simply… wandered off.

Relief warred with confusion, then slit its throat. 

Focus. Illario closed his eyes. Counted. Eight beats. (Lucanis’ voice: “What can I say? It’s catchy.”)

He opened his eyes and slowly, slowly, so slowly it was mind-numbing rolled himself over in the water. He could hear, see, and feel the rest of the swarm moving through the water and reeds around him. Under the water, he unsheathed his sword. Then he began the agonizing business of elbow-crawling through the water and mud toward the deeper part of the lake.

If he could just… drift into the water. Give his warden-healing time to kick in.

A darkspawn stepped over him, almost putting a heel down on his forearm. He waited, strangely numb to the possibility of being attacked now. But the creature snorted, wheezed, then kept moving. Illario kept crawling, mud and water up to his shoulders, biting down the occasional noise of low terror that tried to work its way out of him.

Time and again the blighted things passed directly over and around him.

Just keep moving, he thought, flinching as two spawn attacked each other shrieking. Bone and flesh tearing apart just meters away. Just keep moving.

The swarm was getting agitated. Individual soldiers spasming and sprinting randomly at nothing, swiping the air and seizing. He’d lie still, wait out their frenzy. Then he’d move again slowly until they started to go mad, then lie still with his cheek laid against his own forearm realizing with a sick dread something about his presence was escalating their rage.

Like they knew something was wrong but couldn’t find the source.

Whatever this veil was over him… it would not last.

Illario got within three meters of the lake when one of the spawn finally sighted and charged him where he lay.

He didn’t run. Didn’t panic. He let it race, screaming at him. Then, when it lunged, he torqued his body in the water and hooked his arm around its neck. He got bitten badly along his shoulder for the maneuver but slammed his blade up through its throat and out the top of its skull. Silence.

He laid dead still with the corpse, waiting.

Then a dozen orange eyes rose simultaneously above the reeds. All turned toward him.

Illario ran.

Or he tried. His leg gave out after two steps, leaving him at a hobbling run through the lilypads as the sound of sprinting, shrieking spawn closed on his back. The first one hit him from the left and he ducked it, cleaving an arm off as it threw itself at him. The second one tore his back open, knocking him into the water again.

He twisted, slashing randomly behind him, felt his blade catch flesh, driving the thing back. On in ass in the water, scrambling backward, sword raised like it would stop anything, he watched a dozen spawn rush into a loose half-circle around him, chittering, spasming, screaming at him. One on his left started to laugh.

Illario went cold. His thoughts locked out.

He didn’t realize they could do that.

In his head, he could see the future: The pack skinning, tearing, and dragging him along the border of death while that fucking thing laughed at him the entire time. He was going to die. He was going to die ugly. He was going to die fucking alone and pointlessly, and he knew exactly the expression of annoyance Caterina would have.

He wondered… he wondered if Lucanis would—

Illario never finished the thought because a big white wall of feathers and fur slammed down on top of laughing spawn and it exploded in a burst of wet gore.

Then Snowball the Terrible went fucking apeshit.

She screeched and tore the head off the spawn directly beside her, spun and snapped her beak like a guillotine through the next spawn’s skull. She ripped the body around, spinning and bucking like a bronco as she threw the corpse away, her wings and kicking hind-legs creating room to move in the pack of enemies.

Then she bounded, wings flapping, and landed between Illario and the pack.

She roared, rearing up, flashing her talons as the canopy of her wings flared wide and for a dumb idiotic moment, Illario remembered the shitty illustration from that book when he was six: a griffon with his forepaws raised, wings out.

Then the darkspawn swarmed her.

Snowball chittered as three of them landed on her back. She lunged high into the air then barrel-rolled into a dive that slammed her into the ground like a feathery alligator, crushing two of the spawn. The third tore her right haunch open. Blood on fur. Red on white. Snowball shrieked, spinning like a Doberman and snapped her jaws shut on the offending limb.

Up again, she dove into another kicking bucking spiral, keeping the pack at bay.

While they were distracted, Illario stood and cleaved the head off a spawn as it ducked her wings. He dropped to crouch immediately, slashed at the knees of another as it ran by him. So distracted by the big, screaming, apex predator they couldn’t properly track Illario in the chaos.

Which was just as well because he was on the verge of passing out.

Two finally broke away from Snowball to attack him.

Exhausted, Illario hacked the first one down with a two-handed swing that split its ribcage. Didn’t have the speed to stop the second spawn tackling him into the water. It tore at him, clawing randomly at his chest and head until Illario got his boot under its pelvis and launched it off of him.

He coughed water, blood running down his face.

Then Snowball was at his side.

She swung grizzly-strong talons at the second spawn, tearing it in two at the belly. She knocked Illario down into the water, jumped on top of him, legs planted around him so he was beneath her belly and untouchable as she screeched. Illario could feel it in his head only a few remained and in seconds, Snowball dismembered them.

Then he was alone with the griffon.

Delirious, he thought, They weren’t kidding about griffons hating darkspawn.

Snowball immediately circled Illario like an anxious dog and nosed her enormous filthy beak against his back, wiggling her massive skull under his armpit in (he realized slowly) an effort to help him stand. He numbly sheathed his sword and looped both arms around the muddy animal.

“I guess,” he managed, as she pulled him to his feet, “I am slightly glad you’re not extinct.”

She chittered and chirped at him.

Slowly, the griffon walked him to a section of dry beach and knelt with him on the sand, tugging her head to pull him into a side-recline against her neck. She purred worriedly, curling around him to lay her head in his lap. He felt one wing wrap and fold over him like a heavy blanket.

He was going into shock.

For sure, this was shock.

First time as a warden, but he knew shock like he knew blood loss, fatigue, and hunger. The limits at which his body started to break down.

He realized he was hugging Snowball’s neck a bit too hard when she chirruped softly at him. He loosened his hold but didn’t turn his face from where he’d pressed it now into her filthy feathers. She was just so fucking warm while everything else was going concerningly cold.

Snowball purred anxiously.

Illario could feel himself bleeding. He couldn’t tell if it was fatal or cosmetic. Internal or external. He couldn’t think at all anymore. He was too fucked up, head-hammered, and in pain to do anything but lean into the relief he felt that, if he was going to die, it was kind of warm and soft at least. And the griffon’s animal concern was a strange… vindication? A comfort?

Fine. Evka was right.

He did kind of love this ancient beast of legend becoming increasingly distressed as he got colder and number against her flank.

It felt familiar. Like… like something…

Like the summer he fell down the forest ravine behind the estate. He and Lucanis had escaped to ‘hunt wyverns’ and spent most of the day throwing sticks at each other, eating stolen empanadas, and messing around in the creeks. Near the end of the day, Lucanis had lunged at him, laughing, then screaming when Illario – showing off a little too much dodging his older cousin – lost his footing and fell down a near vertical slope.

It felt like that.

Lying in the bottom of a gully, forearms torn open on prickle-bur thorns, but miraculously mostly unharmed and realizing the crack-voiced terror in his cousin’s throat was proof of something.

Tangible fucking evidence.

Real as a bottle of painkiller set down on a table.

Maker, he thought through the last of his dimming consciousness, Snowball is going to be a monster when I die. That’s two times watching her favorite – Fuck, I am her favorite, aren’t I? That’s what all that was. She’s going to be ungovernable after losing her second favorite. She’s going to wreck everything out of pure fucking spite.

Then, comforted deeply by this thought, Illario Dellamorte passed out.

Chapter Text

When Illario woke, he was sweating through his sheets, choking on his tongue, and shackled to a bed in a room that smelled like wet dog. It took him a blurry moment – lying there slack and panicked on the mattress – to realize that he was staring at the ceiling of the infirmary ward in Grey Hold and the wet dog smell was the enormous, snoozing griffon curled up on the floor at his bedside.

He lay there, blinking, staring at Snowball (coiled in a pile white feathers and fur) of trying to string the story together in his head: How he got from lying dying on a beach in the swamp to a bed in Lavendel.

His head hurt too much for speculation though.

Illario fell back on reflex and assessed his restraints and physical condition instead. He’d been thrashing in his sleep. The sheets were rucked down around his middle, between his legs where he must have kicked and curled himself until the blankets were gathered in a pool on his stomach. The bandaged and bruised length of his right foot to thigh was uncovered and bare. His jaw ached. He’d been grinding in his sleep.

Someone had stripped him down to small clothes, bandaged his chest, quick-healed his broken left arm (bone alignment was priority with warden regen), stitched his other wounds shut to close naturally, and wrapped them in cotton strips. He looked like a badly patched toy taped together. He could smell his own sweat, the anti-septic poultice beneath the bandages, and spearmint.

His breath felt feverish, his tongue a medicinal-tasting carpet.

The heavy cuffs around his wrists, Illario noted, were padded with thick wool along the interior so built for the specific purpose of restraining someone with Grey Warden strength but gently. A good sign? Maybe? (He tried not to think about the Caliper Job, that summer in country with Zara Renata, or that one weekend in Tevinter, or…)

Experimentally Illario cleared his throat.  “Ow…”

Someone stepped into the room almost immediately.

Warden Physician Flynn moved to his bedside, their dark hair bound at the top of their head, looking harried and urgent as they looked him over. “Hey. Warden Illario? Do you know where you are?”

“You let Snowball the Disemboweler stay in here?” Illario rasped. “Alone?”

Flynn blinked, glancing at the snoozing griffon coiled like a piece of bizarre furniture and taking up the relative space of a couch. Their expression suggested that while it had occurred to them Snowball was largely responsible for most of (if not all) the injuries Illario had sustained as a warden these past two months, it hadn’t barred them from leaving her alone with Illario’s defenseless Maker-be-damned body for some reason.

They cleared their throat, looking a little sheepish.

“Um, she wouldn’t leave?” They admitted this with a weak smile, hastily adding, “She, uh, carried you most of the way back to Grey Hold. If she hadn’t…”

Illario blinked.

Alright, in truth, he’d been too busy being drunk or being a dick to his fellow wardens to pay much attention to Antoine’s lessons about griffon intelligence so he couldn’t decide if it was impressive or par for the course that Snowball had dragged his half-dead corpse back to civilization. He tried to imagine how she’d managed that.

“Anyway,” Flynn continues, “it was faster to treat you and let her stay. She’s… stubborn. Do you need anything? Are you thirsty? Does anything hurt?”

“Flynn” Illario pulled a wrist up to show them the chains. “Why am I cuffed to the bed?” 

He said it with a conversational mien that absolutely did not match the building volume inside his head. He could ignore it for a while, but pretending to be fine with being tied to the bed was going to get difficult. He was way too busted up, aching, and injured to reframe it all into something he could tolerate.

“You’re not in trouble,” Flynn said quickly, hands raised. “You were having nightmares. We couldn’t wake you from it, so we had to restrain you.”

“How long have I been unconscious?”

“In and out of consciousness. Not fully unconscious. And not too long. About forty-eight hours?”

“Great. Uncuff me. I have to piss like a racehorse.”

Flynn, to his secret and jaw-clenching relief, immediately grabbed the key from a table-side and unlocked the shackles, leaving Illario to rub his wrists out and sit up. (He didn’t have to relieve himself actually; he was so fucking dehydrated his head hurt from it.) Snowball, on the floor, twitched slightly at all this ruckus but didn’t move.

 Illario could see someone had bandaged and stitched the injuries to her flanks and hind quarters. There was gauze around her right foreleg.

We match, he thought.

Flynn was looking at him funny. There were lots of perfectly explainable medical reasons for that probably, but there was some… tension under the Warden Physician’s professional exterior that had Illario’s hackles up immediately.

“What?” Illario snapped.

Flynn went to the table side, poured water into a large clay cup and held it out. “Drink that for me and then I’ll tell you.”

Illario, too tired to argue, took the cup, downed the water, and handed it back.

Flynn immediately refilled it and held it out again, saying, “The attack that hit you and Ashoka… there were others like it in Hossberg and Southern Thedas. We know because Rook came through an eluvian this morning to coordinate with First Warden Evka.”

Illario thinks about Ahsoka, the shock on her face at the numbers swarming them, how she’d snarled at him to run ahead of her, put her body between him and the horde that was (for no fucking reason at all) coming down on two idling Grey Wardens in a mostly abandoned fortress.

“Drink that,” Flynn said, pushing the cup into Illario’s hands.

Illario, conditioned by years of not arguing with House Dellamorte in-house physicians post-mission, didn’t argue more out of instinct than anything.

“We know Ahsoka didn’t make it.” Flynn spoke without inflection. “When Snowb— When Blanchbeak showed up at Lavendel, Davrin took off with Assan to see the site and report back. It looks, to him, as if a contingent of fifty-plus hit the Cauldron, chased Ahsoka to the roof, and killed her. Somewhere in all that, Snowball arrived and killed some of the pack, but most of them moved on. She dragged you from the beach to the road.”

Flynn handed him the cup again.

“That’s what Davrin could tell from the tracks and the dead. but other than that, we can’t account for what happened to you.”

Illario drank the water to buy himself a moment to think. Honestly, he’d forgotten (or rather, purposely ignored) that one of the Veilguard team was permanently on site in Hossberg. Davrin (the elf warrior, dark skin, built like a wall, never smiled, spoke almost exclusively in grunts) and his runty griffon kept to the aerie basically full time and Illario had managed to avoid them entirely.

He suspected it was a mutual avoidance. If Davrin had wanted to corner him and, say, read Illario some kind of retroactive riot-act about being a back-stabbing traitor of a Dellamorte, he’d had every opportunity.

Illario cleared his throat. “I’d guess you’re all terribly curious why I’m not dead and where the rest of the darkspawn went?”

“If you’re feeling up to it,” Flynn said, neutrally, “Evka and the others want to debrief you on what happened.”

“Rook debrief me?” That came out, perhaps, a touch too quickly.

Flynn hesitated.

“Unless,” they said in a way that confirmed they too heard Mizzrik’s rumor about Illario’s Joining, “you’d rather it was just Evka? I could… make up a medical reason?”

Maker, and he’d thought the fucking Crows were heinous gossips.

“It’s fine,” Illario said through his teeth.

On the floor, Snowball suddenly raised her head.

“Oh,” Flynn said, hopping back as her great white bulk unraveled and stood.

She shook herself like a feathery dog before trotting to the bed and laying her big raptorial head like a cannon ball in his lap. Then, like a cat demanding attention, he began to purr loudly. Illario blinked nonplused at this new development. Through his rising headache, he supposed it wasn’t much different than a big dog and rubbed his knuckles across the top of her head.

The purring intensified to the point it was vibrating through his ribcage.

“Wow,” Flynn said. Then, after a moment’s consideration, “Didn’t she try to kill you like four times?”

“She absolutely did that, yes.” Illario regarded Flynn flatly. “Do they want to talk to me now or…?”

Flynn opened the nightstand drawer beside Illario and pulled out a fresh tunic and fatigues. “If you’re up for it.”

“Give me hot water, soap, and a shaving kit and I’ll do whatever you want, Flynn. And I do mean anything.”

Flynn went gratifyingly red and skittered away to fetch the requested items. Illario, left alone, immediately stole more spearmint from the infirmary medicine cabinet, returned to bed, and did not resist Snowball’s attempts to nuzzle her razor-sharp beak along his forearm until he gave in and ran his palm over her head and triggered another round of violent purring.

“You remind me of someone,” he said.

Snowball attempted to bite his fingers like a teething puppy.

“You remind me less of someone,” he said.

Snowball continued to gnaw.

River “Rook” Thorne looked exactly the way they did the last time Illario saw them with the exception that they weren’t covered in blight-slime, dust, and dried blood. The big qunari warden and Hero of the Veil looked good, if Illario was being honest and not petty. But Illario was locked in on being petty and took some solace instead in how exhausted and annoyed they looked.

(Again, exactly how Rook always looked when speaking to Illario.)

Evka and Antoine gathered everyone in her office where Illario could sit in a dusty partially padded chair and Snowball could lay curled up on the floor next to him growling softly whenever someone paced slightly too close. This included Assan, Davrin’s runty griffon who – after several months unseen to Illario – was not very runty anymore.

Like most of the other griffons, a growth spurt was upon the tawny little mongrel and while he had not yet reached Snowball’s pony-sized proportions and density, the griffon was bigger now. Big enough that Snowball probably couldn’t instantly bullrush and pin him like she did to most of her siblings. Despite this, Snowball greeted Assan’s attempt to preen her by snapping and swiping at him.

Davrin, annoyed, barked, “Place, Assan. For fuck’s sake.”

Assan ran back to him immediately and sat at his heel. Illario refused to be impressed by griffons that followed instructions, but he had a sneaking suspicion that griffon-tamer did not like Snowball’s attachment. (Davrin was trying to look neutral, but he kept glancing at Snowball, then Illario, and doing little micro-expressions of distaste so it was absolutely going to be a problem later.)

In truth, Illario had had very limited interactions with Davrin and his griffon.

There were a few instances in the Cantori Diamond where they had crossed paths as Rook’s strike teams came and went, but the total that he knew of the dour Grey Warden was A: He let Teia pet the griffon which was the most critical. B: He was extremely hostile (even more so than Rook) to working with the Crows. C: He was part of the strike team that defeated Illario and his Venatori guard in the opera house.

All that to say, Illario liked no one in this room.

Once Assan was dutifully seated by Davrin’s heel, Evka leveled a sober look at Illario from across her desk. She looked exactly as tired as Rook did. In fact, all the veteran wardens in this room looked exhausted. (Except Davrin, who looked, again, secretly furious.) Antoine had his arms crossed and was bouncing one foot anxiously. Rook sat on a corner of Evka’s desk, nearest to Illario and he refused to be nervous about that.

They studied him a moment. Then: “Glad you’re awake. Flynn cleared you to talk?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Illiario said, but matter-of-factly. 

Rook nodded like this was the correct greeting between them.

Evka shot them both a long-suffering look and said, “Let’s not spare time the pleasantries.”

“What part of that was pleasant?” Rook asked with fake-puzzled frown.

Evka ignored them and went gamely on.

“We have a problem – the Blight might be moving in coordination again, against what we were led to believe when Solas took his place behind the Veil.” She leveled a look at Illario. “What happened at the Cauldron seems to have happened all across Southern Thedas, so we’d like you report on what happened, in detail, to see if matches what happened at the other strike points.”

This, at least, felt familiar. Seated across a desk from a superior asking for a mission debrief. He’d sat post-mission in Caterina’s office in conditions so similar – down to the barely healed injuries and twitching nerves – that he felt himself relaxing a little bit. So, Illario began to report, calm as any Crow in after-action.

“The swarm hit us a just before dawn. I remember because it woke me up and the sky color was pre-sunrise. From the time I sensed it to the time they came through the gates was about five minutes. I estimate they were roughly a mile out and closing.”

“How do you figure?” Rook cut in, gently.

“It’s about five minutes to sprint a mile. Darkspawn sprint in a frenzy, and the last time I sensed spawn, it was at just under a mile out. Give or take.”

Antoine said, “That’s a very far blight sense.”

“Ahsoka mentioned. Should I go on?” He paused waiting for further interruption, then resumed. “We retreated to the west tower. The darkspawn pursued us up to the second level. Ahsoka managed to get up the second story ladder to the archer’s roost. The ladder broke for me, so I scaled the outer rampart wall to avoid the spawn below us.”

(Blood slapping him in the face, the taste of warm iron. His gut hoisted into his chest he started to free fall.)

“A lancer took Warden Ahsoka’s head off when she tried to pull me up.” Illario kept his tone clipped and dispassionate. “I fell into the swamp and lost consciousness. I can’t say for certain how long. When I woke, there were, to my count, ten of the original swarm. They seemed confused. Not like in Minrathous or when they first came through the gate.”

“Confused in what way exactly?” Antoine asked, leaning forward a little.

“Non-hostile. Soldiers looked right at me but didn’t attack.”

Illario watched reactions like a hawk and saw Antoine and Davrin’s eyebrows both shoot up before they hid it. Flash of confusion and fear (Antoine) cut with anger and disgust (Davrin). Evka and Rook maintained their politically neutral masks with such discipline Illario felt a begrudgingly respect for it. Even while annoyed.

“So, you got away because they just… didn’t attack you?” Davrin demanded.

“No. They attacked me after about five minutes. I was injured. I tried to crawl to the lake, but they—” Illario startled slightly as Snowball rubbed her head against his thigh. He dropped a palm on her brow to settle her, then said, “They started to notice me. The longer I was there, awake, and moving, the more they started to see me. They attacked me finally, but Snowball arrived in time to kill the pack.”

Rook tilted their handsome half-horned head, their black and gold eyes dropping to Snowball where she purred under his palm. “She killed all ten?”

Illario shrugged. “More or less. I was getting… fuzzy near the end. I passed out from my injuries shortly after. I don’t remember anything after that.”

There was a long silence then as Rook glanced at Evka.

“Dawn.” They said it, holding up a finger. “Blitz attack.” Another finger. “Disorganized retreat.” A third finger. They looked to Davrin and Antoine. “Dunno about the rest, but that matches the reports.”

“Thank you, Warden,” said Evka, looking directly at Illario in a way that brooked no argument. “You’re dismissed.”

Right. Important people in the room only.

Illario stood and strode out of Evka’s office like his knee wasn’t a screaming locus of pain. He exited into the hallway, closing the door behind him… then stood outside the door and listened as Davrin immediately raised his voice and said, “Anything that killed Ahsoka and not Illario, killed her because Illario ran. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“Lower your damn voice,” Evka snarled.

There was nothing audible after that. Illario hung around for about twenty seconds longer, then draped an arm over Snowball’s neck. She, sensing his intent, let him lean on her and take the weight off his bad knee all the way outside to the outer rampart wall where he sat down on a bench overlooking Lavendel.

He let Snowball fall asleep with her head on his boots.

Illario had hoped that grieving rites for Ahsoka had occurred while he was unconscious but, of course, he wasn’t that lucky. That night, evening meal was deafeningly loud as the veteran wardens of their diminished number stood up and told stories about Ahsoka, how she’d joined the Grey Wardens rather than face the gallows in Rivain.

(She had, apparently, murdered seven wealthy merchants having decided they were, to her reckoning, the legal sort of rapists and slavers that would never otherwise face the justice she thought warranted. Illario hadn’t asked her about her past and she had not offered, but the fact she too was a conscripted warden and never mentioned it seemed odd.)

They talked about her fighting skills, her optimistic outlook, her very very good moonshine distillation methods which would absolutely be upheld by a stone-faced dwarven fellow named Raj who was her best friend and partner in the face-peeling barely edible poison business. Davrin was there and said some words. He’d known her well enough to have funny anecdotes about hunting monsters down south.

He did a big toast to rousing cheers and it was heart-warming and hopeful and exactly the kind of thing the dead woman would have probably liked.

Illario Dellamorte was in the far, far back of the room while all this happened, standing outside the main door with his shoulder leant against it, having pre-emptively stolen a large bottle of the face-peeling moonshine for himself. He observed the mourning rituals, drinking every time someone said anything that made him want to slam his face into a wall.

So, he was very near finished with the bottle when a voice said from behind him, “Do you find trouble or purpose or are you just shit-for-luck all your life?”

Illario didn’t turn around, despite every nerve in his body seizing at being snuck up on. Snowball had finally left him alone to go snooze somewhere and the noise from evening meal was such that she probably wouldn’t have heard Rook sneak up on him anyway.

Illario turned around, set his weight back against the door, and took another pull from the bottle as he looked up at his cousin’s towering paramour and hero of the realm. Rook wasn’t standing near enough that it was a physical threat, but at their height and physique (even lean for their race) made them a threat no matter what they did.

They were standing with their arms folded, head tilted, relaxed in their stance.

They default to non-threatening body language, Illario thinks, passingly.

“Y’know you’re going to make a great statue,” Illario said, gesturing up and down their body with his bottle. “Like, alright, they’ll all wish you weren’t qunari. But you’re very pretty so they will forgive it.”

Illario didn’t resist when Rook took the bottle from him.

They gave it a sniff and made a face. “That’s vile.”

Illario leered a bit. “Don’t love Ahsoka’s work?”

“I didn’t know her,” Rook said flatly. “I’m a mage warden. I traveled around where-ever they told me to go blow things up and burn cities down and I didn’t meet her while I was coordinating things here either.” Rook took an experimental drink of the moonshine, and their entire face wrinkled up like they got punched in the mouth. “Ugh. I guess,” they said by way of review.

They gave the bottle back to him.

“So.” Illario took another drink. “What now?”

“Evka will tell you what’s next when you need to know.”

Illario grinned unkindly. “Sure. You wandered over here to share drinks with me and not talk about something else.”

Rook sighed and set a hand on one hip, half stepping back from Illario. “I’m not here because of Lucanis if that’s what you’re implying. I’m here because the blight is still killing people down south or do you really make everything about yourself?”

Illario shrugged. “Alright. Adiós.”

He started to walk off. He got about ten feet before Rook said, with resignation, “Wait.”

Illario turned around, still foggy with drunkenness, fingers loose around the neck of the bottle and waited until Rook closed distance again. They looked down at him and it was like a small dragon glaring at you. (Or a griffon, now that he thought of it, something raptorial in the gold on black stare.) Illario thought, muzzily, that he did see it – what Lucanis saw in Rook and why he might want it even if he himself didn’t understand the strange chemistry.

“I owe you an apology,” they said.

“Ay, que la chingada.” Illario rolled his eyes so hard his entire head followed through. “Don’t bother. Ahsoka explained it to me, that you fucked me even by Warden standards.” He raised the bottle. “Cheers, cabrón. I’m humbled. You and Lucanis win.”

“Stars and the songs in them,” Rook muttered, rubbing their face with one hand. “Do you honestly think I Joined you as a fucking punishment?”

“No, I think it was a happy by-product of Lucanis being incapable of letting me die,” Illario said, careful to pronounce each word through his inebriation. He gestured with the bottle. “You Joined me because he threatened to break up with you if you didn’t, then you both shipped me out here, so you didn’t have to deal with me.” Illario shrugged expansively. “Let me know where I misunderstood any of that.”

Rook stood quietly.

“Right,” Illario muttered, taking another drink. “Exactly.”

“Like I said,” Rook went on, dogged in their deadpan delivery, “I owe you an apology.”

“I can’t think of anyone on this planet I want pity from less than you, you high-horse motherfucker.” Illario waved them up and down. “There are bards with dicks are rock hard to write ballads about you. Just…” He turned his back on them. “…go away. Go be a hero around one of them or something.”

From behind him, Rook called out. “Are you really that angry Lucanis did everything, including blackmail a partner, to save your life?”

Illario paused then. Something in Rook’s tone, a little… tension.

He turned his head.

“You broke up with him,” Illario said, only about 40% sure but Rook blinked a bit too fast. “You did.” He turned around fully, laughed. “You fought about what he made you do to me. It broke you up.”

“Right,” Rook said, ignoring the accusation for the moment and pinching the bridge of their nose. They dropped their hand and said, “I don’t discuss my personal life with people, but if I did, I specifically wouldn’t discuss it with the Crow who lost his mind so badly he tried to kill or collar everyone that ever loved him, then has the gall to be resentful when they slap the fuck out of him for it.”

Illario grinned at that. “I know you’re freshly single, Rook, but don’t talk about a slapping me around unless you mean business—”

“You… suck so much,” Rook said, finally, shaking their head.

“Aw.” Illario lifted the bottle again to his lips. “Did Luca not tell you, at length, that it’s my specialty?”

“Is that blowjob pun or…?”

“Yes. It’s a blowjob pun.” He dropped his eyes significantly to Rook’s beltline, then back up, mollified by how visibly irate it made them. “Something on your mind?”

“Why do you do that?” Rook stared at him. Their gaze pried at something in Illario’s calm. “Everyone is trying to throw you lifelines and you’re just… pissing it all away. You’re in the one place in Thedas where all the fucked-up shit you did doesn’t matter and you still—"

“I don’t want your fucking lifeline!” Illario whipped the last of Ahsoka’s moonshine into a wall, shattering the bottle in a spray of glass and alcohol. “I don’t want anything you fuckers deign to give me when it suits you. On your terms. Fuck you, Rook. Fuck Lucanis. Fuck Ahsoka and this entire building of pointless dead people.”

Rook said nothing for a moment. Illario wondered which mask his cousin fell in love with – the stoic, the jokester, or the vicious weapon of the times Illario saw when Rook was tearing the Venatori apart in the opera house. The son of a bitch who carried out his cousin’s objectives against him with the military precision of a war axe coming down. Indifferent as an act of god.

Honestly, Illario understood wanting to fuck a miracle as brutal as Rook.

It made sense Lucanis would fall in love with a weapon.

“You know, every Crow I’ve ever met is crazy,” Rook said. “But you’re the only Crow who decided to make it everyone else’s fucking problem, Illario. I didn’t do right as a Grey Warden, but you sided with the fuckers who tried to kill the world. They’re hanging people for less in other parts of the continent and you’re bitching that Lucanis did too much to save you?”

Illario ignored all that, studying Rook’s face. Feeling around for an angle on instinct, then said:

“You and Lucanis can dump me here to rot but don’t you try to make it mean anything. Luc flinched. He didn’t choose to save me. It wasn’t mercy. He did it on reflex. By fucking rout because la familia died and I’m the only one left so he can’t help himself.”

Rook did not react but Illario caught their jaw clench.

“He made you do something vicious,” Illario pushed, stepping closer. “Something you didn’t want to do.” He tilted his head up at Rook, really watching their eyes. “You need to know, you did that for nothing and now, with you gone,” Illario shrugged, “he’ll be just like Caterina.”

Rook stared at him. “Is that what you think of him? That the second someone’s not holding his hand he’ll just… become someone else’s creature?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I think of him.” Rook looked offended at the speed of his response so Illario doubled downs. “He was your creature for a while. Now he’s Caterina’s again or did you think the instinct to burn up people we love for short-term gains wasn’t a family trait?” He smiled. “You know, like when he cashed in your relationship to keep me alive?”

Rook stepped toward Illario.

Reflex, the smell of magic like ozone rising off their skin as the dark textured fringe of their mohawk began to rise like hackles off their forehead. Static filled the air around them. Temper, Illario thought with a jolt of giddy fear, and watched with fascination as Rook reined themselves in and stepped back.

For a moment, Illario wondered if they were going to walk away. Then, into the white noise of the Grey Warden celebrations from the other room, they asked, “Is that why you betrayed him?”

Illario froze. “Is that really what you want to know?”

Rook was studying him, too close. They saw him go still. “Yeah. Fuck it. Tell me.”

“I killed him because I wanted his job, Rook. He was in my way. Easy math.”

“Bullshit.”

“I killed him because it was a mercy. I couldn’t stand to see Caterina kill another Dellamorte for her own ends, might as well kill him for mine.”

“Bullshit.”

Illario could feel himself losing control, a dizzy kind of revelation, like vomiting up poison. He couldn’t stop himself turning down cards on a gambling table even as the flop turned against him.

“I killed Lucanis, because we ran out of time for him to stand around with his dick in his hand hoping that somehow, he’d never have to make a fucking decision. I killed him before he killed himself or came around Caterina’s way of doing things.” Illario bared his teeth. “Fucking me to death while insisting, I’m too stupid to decide what kind of job I’m good for.”

Rook stared at him.

Illario felt a stab of panic then, an incandescent burn of adrenaline indistinguishable from anticipating a blow. He could feel himself breathing too hard, too fast, too drunk, too possessed by his own rage to control his delivery, retching up family secrets to the bastard who put him here. What the fuck was wrong with him—?

“You don’t know him,” Rook said, but with a strange… softness. Realization, not accusation. “You’ve made up some gutless asshole who’d do something… fucking awful to you, so you have a reason to strike first. If you’d just spoken with him—"

“I did.” Illario snapped, outrage snarled in his throat. “I begged him to just tell her ‘no’ that I’m not an accessory, but he never fucking could because deep down he does think I’m an accessory and Caterina is right—"

“You’re wrong,” Rook punches in. “He doesn’t think that way.”

Illario choked on a laugh. “What the fuck are you talking about? Lucanis is picking out curtains and tiles for the estate, right now, Rook. He’s exactly where the old woman wanted him. He’s an attack dog and his ability to beat the shit out of me doesn’t mean he’s suddenly grown a spine.”

“You’re wrong, Illario.”

“Lucanis whored me out to the Grey Wardens.” Illario took care with each syllable. “He fucked you over to maintain status quo. What about of that sounds like a man who isn’t becoming the new Caterina?”

Rook’s eyes flickered.  

Gotcha.

Illario spread his arms, did a half-tilt bow, as he stepped back. “Have a good night, Rook.”

Then he turned and walked away.

Illario dreamed about blood.

It had been a while since he dreamed about it like this and like he’d never gotten used to the nightmare as a child, he didn’t like it any better as a man. In his nightmare, he lay paralyzed with the dream logic that if he spoke the people holding the knife against his throat would slit his windpipe wide and let him drown on his own blood.

Sunflower, he thought, the code-word that brought your second in a two-man cadre to save you if your approach was fucked. The word he’d say to bring Lucanis crashing through a window when they were young and not yet master assassins. Sunflower. Sunflower. Stop, stop, stop—

But the dream didn’t stop, and his nervous system insisted to him that he was being gutted by a dozen blight-gnarled fists. One at a time, queued up in a line to rip chunks off him while he lay tied to the frame of a merchant lord’s bed. (He remembered the smell of pine in the sheets. The gold stencil on the ceiling.)

He woke up gagging on the pine smell as someone shook him by the shoulders. They wisely and immediately jumped back as Illario, on reflex, lashed out at what looked to him like the next body in line. His fist hissed past the figure’s cheekbone as they juked – “Fuck! Leave off!” – and swore. Illario snap-scanned the empty infirmary.

There was a wall of stacked firewood near the infirmary stove, freshly split and smelling like live trees, the glow of the fire in the stove cast relief on the person before him.

Junior warden Mizzrik had his hands up, lines of sap and dirt pressed into his palms. The former captain of the guard was vaguely sweaty, dressed down to fatigues and sleeveless under-tunic. The picture of a Grey Warden splitting firewood at midnight because he couldn’t sleep and hoped hours of physical exertion might quell the restlessness.

“Ye had a nightmare,” he said defensively.

“Mind your own business,” Illario snapped, annoyed to find himself out of breath and shivering.

The other Grey Warden dropped his hands. “Mate, yer piece of work an’ then some. You know it so?” There was a pause, the other man scanning Illario’s hands where he quickly balled them up to hide their shake. “You don’t usually make a fuss. Bad as all that?”

Illario made a show of looking around. “You see a griffon in here?”

“Snowball? Sure, she’s gone a prowlin’ the hallways beggin’ for attention.” Mizzrik stretched laboriously and took a seat on the empty infirmary cot across from Illario. “A right sweetheart, she is, since she’s not batterin’ the doors down t’ murder ya. Kinda like a big ol’ dog.”

Illario only partially listened. He had stopped shuddering enough to dig the spearmint bottle from his bag hung at his bedside. He downed most of the bottle, ignored the way it churned his gut and burned his sinuses until his eyes watered.

“You the one stealin’ Flynn’s supply?” Mizzrik demanded.

“Yes.” He tucked the contraband away. “Gonna rat me out?”

“Why steal it now?” Mizzrik said, sounding exasperated. “Could just ask, mate.” And when Illlario had nothing to say, he shook his head heavily. “Do everything the hard way sure. Never just fuckin’ ask.”

Illario, sitting cross-legged on his bed, looked sidelong at Mizzrik. “Asking gets me what I want? That’s the theory?”

“You could try it on at least once, ya dumb cunt. Andraste’s sake…”

Illario turned slightly toward his fellow warden. “Can I ask you for something?”

“Oh no.” Mizzrik pointed at him. “Don’t start that now—”

Illario grinned. “What? Listening to me moan in my sleep wasn’t enough to get you going?”

“Fuck off, Crow.”

“Not a Crow.”

“Everyone knows you’re a Crow,” Mizzrik said, rolling his dark eyes to ceilingward. “Doesn’t matter now so all the lyin’? Just annoying. We’re all Grey Wardens so.”

“And if I asked you to fuck me like a Grey Warden?”

Mizzrik paused.

Illario swung one leg over the side of the bed, drawing the other knee up slightly to drape his arm over the top, and tilt his head at Mizzrik. “You closed the infirmary door.”

“Because you’d had a nightmare. Didn’t want to embarrass you so.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

Illario held the other warden’s eyes.

Mizzrik was sweating slightly now. “You don’t even like me. You don’t like anyone.”

“I’ll like your cock. Do you really care if I like the rest of you?”

Mizzrik paused again, giving the question the consideration it was due.

“Can ya tell me somethin’?” The man sat forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and Illario felt his eyes roll back into his skull in a decidedly unseductive way. Mizzrik gamely waited to see if he would interrupt, then asked, “How’d Ahsoka die?”

“Fast,” Illario said.

“By the burning lady… Ya know, for someone askin’ after a shag, you’re really actin’ a cunt.”

Illario pulled the sheets off his lap and Mizzrik shut up for a moment and went faintly pink. He wasn’t wearing anything but small clothes and bandages under the blankets so he tracked closely the way the other man’s eyes dropped first to Illario’s mostly naked physique… then to the mottle of bruising and medical wraps around his arms and ribcage. A touch of uncertainty there under the embarrassment. Cute.

Illario felt something click into place behind his tongue, easy as tucking a pill or a key behind your teeth.

Here kitty.

“Fine,” he said, pitching his voice a little lower, like he was dropping a pretense and showing something authentic. He sat back on the bed again, looping both arms around his knee and dropping his chin on top of his folded arms, looking away since the eye-contract was spooking the man. Illario paused, then shrugged. “She died trying to save me. Everyone’s right. She’d have probably survived if it wasn’t for me.”

That wasn’t remotely true. He’d sensed the horde coming. They’d only gotten so close to saving themselves because his far-sense had woken him screaming from his sleep. If anything, that was the real thorn in Illario’s side in all this – they’d been so fucking close to getting away consequence-free. To getting the high-ground and living to brag about it. It was just so fucking stupid.

All that running around for nothing.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was Mizzrik lapping this up. The man was sat forward, expression soft with concern. “The vets are mad, but that weren’t yer fault.”

“Maybe.” Illario pretended to glance up, meet Mizzrik’s gaze, then drop it. Like the eye-contact was too much for him now and he cleared his throat, flashing a perfectly unconvincing smile. “Anyway. That’s how it happened. She was trying to pull me over a ledge and a lancer hit her. Fast. Like I said, so—"

“Oi.”

Illario made show of going quiet. This had the intended effect and Mizzrik got up from where he was sitting and moved to crouch in front of Illario, elbows on his knees and meeting his stare in a way that re-enforced how this man had commended troops of his own once upon a time.

“It wasn’t yer fault.”

Illario held Mizzrik’s stare then, softening the lines of his face until the other man looked involuntarily at his mouth, so Illario could make a show of swallowing, a crooked smile, a nervous catch of his lower lip between teeth before he started to say:

“We’re wardens, right? Everyone fucks each other here. So—”

Mizzrik was between his knees and pushing him back into bed almost immediately.

Okay. Less seduction needed than he thought.

Illario pulled the other man down on top of him, hooked his legs around his waist.

Mizzrik was bigger than him, heavier, working muscle and he smelled like the firewood he’d been splitting. (Whatever, he could ignore that.) Illario didn’t have a type per-say but Mizzrik wasn’t bad looking and his weight was reassuringly solid pressing down on him, forcing his thighs apart to accommodate his pelvis. The weight of his hips was a slap to the face, snapping him to alert like nothing else had since he woke up in Grey Hold.

Illario was quickly naked under the other fully clothed warden, who got his hand around Illario’s cock with a fervent immediacy that smacked of fucking fellow guardsmen in Minrathous alleyways. (Again, cute.) Illario tangled his fingers in the other man’s hair, cropped short, gripping hard enough to hear him hiss.

Illario arched impatiently, rocking into the friction of the fist around him. That seemed to do something for Mizzrik because he was rock hard against Illario’s thigh through his fatigues.

“Fuck.” The other warden kissed his neck, palming his nape, murmuring against his jaw. “You smell amazing. You know that’s so?”

“I’ve been told,” Illario mutters, pulling Mizzrik into a pressing kiss, panting against his mouth, “Just fuck me already.”

“Not shagging you dry, mate.”

There was some negotiation here, but the bigger warden could hardly argue with Illario pushing him back on the bed and taking his cock in his mouth. Messy and a little mean, bringing the full force of his training to get this done fast, Mizzrik was shaking at the knees, spit-slick, swearing blasphemies up and down, his cock hard enough to be truly desperate now to fuck something.

Illario would do.

Mizzrik fussed for a moment about prep, fingers touching tentative in a way that prompted Illario to bite his shoulder hard enough to bruise. (“What the fuck?”) And draw blood. (“Stop fucking around.”) Then Mizzirk shoved him down, buried his face in Illario’s neck and his cock to the root in Illario’s clenching and decidedly unready asshole. Illario turned the noise he made into something erotic. Something needy. Then Mizzrik started to fuck him against the headboard with such force Illario couldn’t catch his breath.

It hurt like a motherfucker.

He wasn’t bleeding yet, but he probably would be.

He didn’t want it to stop though so Illario made the appropriate noises while Mizzrik rowed his cock over and over into him until the pain crested into an adrenaline-soaked disconnect. Breathless incandescent pain. Clarifying agony. He grabbed Mizzrik by the hips, told him ‘harder’ and whined when the next stroke sent pain like a bolt from his balls to the back of his throat. His erection flagged it hurt so fucking bad.

Mizzrik didn’t immediately notice. Or maybe he thought Illario had come untouched. Who cared? Illario went slack under the other warden who slowed down a little, a hand on his neck, another on Illario’s thigh to steady himself. Nervous thing, Illario thought. Mizzrik bent down to press his brow to Illario’s shoulder as he set a new, slower pace that had Illario shuddering at the edge of shock.

He kept saying things like, “I’ve got you,” and “You feel so good,” and “What do you need?”

Illario would roll his eyes but the pain was pretty distracting and Mizzrik was getting suspicious the longer this went on. Illario could feel it in the man’s back. The tension in his spine, how he kept pulling back to try and see Illario’s face.  

Illario pulled him into a kiss, licked his throat, demanding, “Harder.”

Mizzrik wasn’t distracted. “You crazy now?”

“I’m close. Just do it.”

He was not close. Mizzrik did as asked though, pressing Illario into the mattress by the shoulders, kissing his jaw, the scrape of 5 o’clock shadow electric and rough, then his tongue silky and a little shy pressing into Illario’s mouth as he ramped his pace. Illario canted his hips up, growling when that put the next stroke directly against his prostate.

A blot of pleasure in the middle of the molten friction. Finally.

Illario bit down and chased it. Thought melted into sensation – pain liquifying into something that felt good, something not quite pleasure but nerve-deep and undeniable, pressed up the length of his spine over and over until he shook with it. Sweat ran down the back of his thighs, his heels dug into Mizzrik’s spine, into the mattress, his hands latched around the man’s nape to give him leverage to fuck himself on the warden’s cock even as the other man drove down into him.

He felt a wet red-on-white tearing then. Agony on a hard down stroke. His body spasmed on instinct, his entire abdomen clamping around injury. Mizzrik groaned at first, then froze. His hand on Illario’s hip moved worriedly up his flank. Nope. None of that. Illario immediately yanked the Grey Warden down into a kiss, licking into the man’s mouth with a hunger convincing enough to reassure the man into fucking him again.

“Like that,” Illario heard himself saying, his chest rising and falling, orchestrated to look nice even as he fought the pain-induced instinct to hyper-ventilate. He gripped Mizzrik’s arms, dropping his head back in the facsimile of pleasure. “Like that.” He moaned, a bitten off sound as Mizzrik kissed him and snapped his hips exactly as Illario told him. (Good listener.) “Fuck me. Right there. Harder. Don’t stop.”

Mizzrik did as he asked, to his credit, but he wasn’t dumb and even sex-addled with his cock buried to the root in a professional, the man was paying attention. He got another ten strokes in before saying, “Wait. Hold on. Something feels—You’re alright?”

Fuck’s sake.

Illario ignored him, gripped him at the nape, kissed him. Felt his own lip split.

“Stop,” Mizzrik snapped, jerking his head back. “Oi!”

“Just fuck me, pendejo. Stop talking.”

Mizzrik shot him an incredulous look. He immediately pulled out of Illario, gripping his hips to gentle the friction and rocked back on his knees. He swore in a string neverending when he touched his cock and it came away slick and arterial red. Illario sat up and glared unabashed, tangled in the infirmary sheets that stank now like blood and sweat.  

“You’re a lousy fuck. All that and a quitter.”

Mizzrik stared at him the way you stare at dogs that bite to draw blood – recontextualizing the creature in its entirety.

“You’re absolutely barkin’ mad.”

Illario bared his teeth, then laughed when Mizzrik swore and tucked himself back into his clothes, blood on his standard issue fatigues and no blood at all in the man’s complexion. Something about the nausea in his face told Illario this was going to bother him, follow him, eat at something in him. (Oops.) Mizzrik pulled the door open, fled the room, and slammed it hard behind him.

Illario laid there for about a while, feeling sweat cool on his skin, blood and spend getting tacky, then dry along his inner thighs, his abraded insides hot and radiating pain through his core to the dull rhythm of his heartbeat. Illario studied the ceiling. He felt better, even if Mizzrik couldn’t fathom it. The ache had the catharsis of released a tight muscle. He could breathe while he bled and clinically wondered how long his Warden regeneration would take to fix that kind of injury. (Convenient.)

He still wanted to scream though.

He’d been keeping a scream between his teeth like a razor blade since he woke up unexpectedly alive. But screaming seemed idiotic. What was there to scream about that hadn’t been there since Lucanis and Rook forced the Joining down his throat? He was alive. He didn’t die alone in a swamp which was good. He had aimed to die loudly and in front of people if he was going to die as a Grey Warden.

He closed his eyes.

He tasted blood in his mouth as it slapped across his face in a sheet, shards of Ahsoka’s skull in his hair.

He opened his eyes.

Skinned like a dead animal for its hide, Illario couldn’t claim to be a Crow anymore. Lucanis, Rook, Caterina, and his own actions (he could admit) saw to his degloving with a thoroughness he can appreciate. But stitching feathers to a flayed wolf didn’t make it a bird and vice versa. He was not a real Grey Warden and he didn’t care about Rook’s apology, Davrin’s disdain, Evka’s exhaustion, Snowball’s obsession, or the fact some dwarf named Raj was going to take over moonshine production at Grey Hold.

He did not give a fuck about these things.

Illario closed his eyes again.

He felt Ahsoka’s hand go tight, then limp around his wrist.

Pointless. A fucking waste of time.

He thought, unbidden, of his cousin. Of Lucanis screaming his name at the top of that gully when they were ten. Lucanis, at seventeen, mistaking a moment of drunk inattention for a suicide attempt and tackling him away from a roof ledge. Lucanis hunched, clutching Illario so hard his fingers threatened to perforate Illario’s blight-softened skin, rocking slightly as Minrathous went rotten and dark to Illario’s dying senses.

Illario contemplated his forearm. Ahsoka had gripped him hard enough to bruise but his warden healing had stripped the story from his skin. Like it was redacting the damage he’d coaxed Mizzrik to do him in the name of ritual decompression. Everything impermanent except the terminal end eating him in slow motion.

He heard scratching at the infirmary door, the scrabble of talons on the flag stones, and the disgruntled noises of a large griffon stuck on the wrong side of a closed entry.

Illario sighed, rocked up out of bed, and went to let her in.