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anything, anything

Summary:

What would you risk, to save it all?
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In the aftermath of Tamlen's disappearance, Merrill meets a spirit that calls itself Audacity.

Notes:

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Merrill met Audacity in a nightmare.

It was the same one it always was. Every night, back there, like she’d never left, heaving-sick in the belly of a boat, emerging coughing into the dampness of the Marches, the least free she’d ever been. The City of Chains had grinned at the elves it swallowed into its docks, and the mages had escaped only by hiding their staffs. Merrill remembered the smell of the lyrium-lingering Templars, the dense crush and press of human bodies and sweat. She had never seen so many people before in her life. In the nightmare, though, she was alone.

The mirror was dark and taunting in the hollow embrace of the crumbling ruins of the Brecilian Forest, where no wise Dalish went. In it, the fleeing edge of Tamlen’s back through the mirror, imagined, for Merrill hadn’t been there, wondered, sometimes, if it would have taken her instead. Wondered, sometimes, if that’s what Marethari would have wanted. Wondered if that was what Merrill wanted.

Merrill saw the hunter’s mouth, spilling black taint. Merrill had been there for that like she hadn’t been for Tamlen, there for the way he’d coughed and gasped, bubbling on the fluid in his lungs, as Merrill cast spell after spell to save him. Even blood only delayed the inevitable. For nothing, in the end. The clan never looked at Merrill quite right after that. Like she’d walked away and come back ghoulish from the ruins, like they’d kissed her, smeared her with a stain that was all the clan saw when they looked at Merrill’s face marked with the same gods they wore. Like the Creators hadn’t made blood with magic in it to be used.

Death when it came for him had darkened the hunter’s eyes to smudges and the hollows of his cheeks like he was gaunt, an old creature in a young hunter’s body. Like the ancients, wrathful wraiths that waited, cursing Fen’harel the Trickster for taking their gods away and shattering their curse-mirrors to the realm of dreams and demons that whispered, help me.

Through the mirror, she could see them – their ancestors, their people, their suffering faces and their tear-grave eyes, screaming as they clutched to them Tamlen, who had always been kind to Merrill. Tamlen’s gaze was spawn-dark, his smile was gone, gone, and he had no kindness left for Merrill, none at all. Was he with the Creators now?

 Like clockwork, the mirror shattered, and Merrill was left, looking into in her own eyes. Green as grey-leaves, lost, and confused, alone against the darkness. Or almost alone. Around her feet, the bodies of her clan, spawn-bloated, blood-drained, Marethari’s staring eyes accusing, accusing. The blood between her toes that soaked and squirmed like her skin soaked it up, to replace the blood she’d lost on the hunter. The blood she’d given with a knife jagged as the mirror-shard and hope cutting each breath and each poisoned promise she begged from the hunter’s blight-licked lips.

Help me, the demon whispered. Help me.

Merrill closed her eyes and prayed to wake up. Every time, she feared it was real, felt immeasurable relief when she saw the rippling fabric of the aravel and knew herself among her clan and alone, except for her dead – Tamlen’s face, the hunters they’d lost along the way. This time, she opened her eyes in the dream, and knew she was not.

The demon was there, and it saw her.

On the green slopes of the Fade beneath Sundermount, Merrill felt the hole in the world. The Fade here was rippled and pinched, like a scar. Kirkwall was a burning blister in the distance, the howling grief of the city swelling like a canker, night after night. The sea-wind was foul and carried the screams of darkspawn-fodder, left behind on the docks of Ferelden but for the price of passage.

(Ferelden, where Tamlen’s body didn’t rest, uneaten by the worms that had crawled through the eyesockets of Brecilian Forest elves for decades of generations. The mirror shard pressed like a dagger into her skin through her pocket. It was heavier here, in the Fade, and warm like a breathing creature. Merrill always felt it. Always just on the edge of cutting her. Disagreements with Marethari had grown more and more pointed, and the shard sharper and sharper.)

Sunken into the darkness, the hole in the Fade where the demon cried was in the shape of chains. They sloshed when Merrill tugged them, curious, and her hands came away sticky and red. Help me, the chains whispered in elvhen voices, remember me.

“I remember you,” said Merrill, moved, and she saw in her eye a white-haired man, an elf, old, old as the mountain, close his eyes in bitter suffering. His face had no Dalish tattoos at all, but he carried around his shoulders a wolf-pelt. His throat smiled in a wet gash, and the chains pushed their way out like the grasping hands of an infant, out of his blood, out of his body. In his closed eyelids were mirrors.

The ancient ones slept on Sundermount, but they did not rest.

“Do you, brave elfling?” asked a voice, strained, indistinct, and Merrill looked for it – found-

The demon was bound, like the old elf, and it was beautiful. It was like something that had never been a wolf, with more eyes than legs, and the spiralling horns and scales of a dragon. The fur pushed its way out between the scales like vines, like the pitch between the boards of a ship. It smelled of shem-wine and the gull-cries of the new shore, of dusty books and magic. It was vaguely purple like forget-me-nots, each coloured scale smooth as an old statue, washed clear by the ages. Sparks cracked and snapped in its nostrils when it breathed laboriously, and its eyes, seven, maybe eight of them, looked at Merrill like a challenge.

Like they saw her, beneath her dead.

“What are you?” Merrill asked the demon because it paid to be polite. She had never seen Pride like this before, proud enough to ask for help, proud enough to demand it. Maybe desperation had made itself bedfellow in its purpose. The things that Merrill had done for desperate love of her clan – she knew that it could make any feeling stretch liquid to fill the containment of necessity.

The chamber it lay in was as red as the secret inside chamber of a peeled heart. Elfsblood was dark, dark and still warm where it rose around Merrill’s calves. When she opened her mouth to speak, the air tasted of iron and the adrenaline just before a bone-snapping fall. It was dizzying. Merrill had never been so conscious of her aliveness.

“Anything,” said the demon. “Anything I want to be. I am the pride of every one of us who has gone before. I am the boldness of the sun swallowing the night. I am Audacity.”

“Where are you?” Merrill asked. “Did you kill these people?”

“Hurting,” said Audacity. “Do you dare to help me?”

 Now – Merrill wasn’t born yesterday, contrary to what Marethari thought. But after that night, she didn’t have that nightmare any longer. Instead, she had Audacity.

“What can you teach me?” Merrill asked the demon.

They were in the Fade again. Merrill sat and felt the warm blood ebb and flow around her knees. She gazed into her eyes in the shard of the mirror and Audacity’s fingers – humanlike, since Merrill had met Hawke, but still clawed, like Fenris’ gauntlets – curved over Merrill’s shoulder. Their body was feminine, crowned with feathers over the shoulders like Anders’ coat, dragonlike, wolflike, piratelike, since Merrill had met Isabela. Audacity’s breasts against Merrill’s back felt like the hand between the shoulderblades that pushed Merrill tumbling over the cliffs into the tossing waves of new experience, of the melting pot that was Kirkwall – comforting, warm, sure, since Merrill had met Varric. Audacity’s face was approximately elvhen ever since Merrill had met her own eyes in the cracked washbasin in the Alienage and known herself, but the band of crowning horns around the delicate, scaled features gleamed Aveline-sure and Aveline-strong. 

Merrill’s dark hair was a raven’s wing against Audacity’s shock-storm cheek. Audacity’s chin was the pointed fork of a tree struck by lightning against a black wreathing sky, defiant til the end, against Merrill’s shoulder. Promise hung about it like perfume. Audacity held Merrill close, like no one could for Tamlen, like no one had for the dead hunter. Except Merrill.

There was Tamlen’s absence in the sanguine wetness that stained Merrill’s feet and Merrill’s hands and Merrill’s magic, and that left footprints when she walked in the Fade. The Blight sung its discordance through the bones of Merrill’s dream where she held the mirror shard. Where Audacity held Merrill and Merrill held the mirror shard.

It was warm and hard in Merrill’s hands, but her flesh was soft and chilled from the blood, the dream, the shadow of the nightmare Audacity ate, and it dimpled against Audacity’s searching grip. The chains clanked and shifted, heavy as snake-coil, all muscle. Merrill felt the echo of them, when Audacity was this close, in their corner of the Fade. In the warmth they made together, in that secret little hollow between Audacity’s spiritstuff ribs and Merrill’s thundering heart.

Audacity’s nose found its resting place in the shadow behind Merrill’s pointed ear, and it said, in its voice of the People whose blood wrapped manacles around Audacity’s spirit and Audacity’s body it had made for holding Merrill, “Anything.”

“Anything?” Merrill echoed, and Audacity’s pointed teeth grazed Merrill’s neck when its lips measured her pulse. Its clawed hand spanned Merrill’s stomach like the pinpricks of knives, like the rusty spikes that stabbed through Kirkwall’s walls and its listless summer heat.

“What will you dare to learn? What will you risk to know?” It was probably lonely, prideful creature, all alone in its pit of blood, Merrill thought. Kept apart from the world, soaked in death. When Audacity’s new-made fingers curled in the fabric of Merrill’s tattered and torn-again shirt, Merrill thought she felt desperation there. Hunger, there.

Or maybe that was Merrill’s own. It hadn’t asked her to free it. But Merrill dreamed of it in the daylight, its pointed tongue, its enamel-bone horns.

Anders called her a fool. But Merrill looked at him and saw Justice engraved in the lines of his flesh, and thought – Audacity would hate that.

“Tell me,” Merrill tipped her head back against Audacity’s cheek, felt its not-breath against her skin, its razor-crack singe of electric-tail looped around her thigh. It made her nerves prickle like they did when Merrill tried sips of the foul alcohol Varric pushed on her, chuckling with warm whiskey eyes when she coughed and spluttered. Never sweet, shem-ale and shem-wine. Not like Dalish Red. Not like Audacity. “Tell me of the pride of the Elvhen.”

Audacity’s words were rhythmic and soft, and they wove into her thoughts like glue for the mirror she made with blood and guile, each piece painstaking, weeks of work.

“Where are you, kitten?” Isabela needled once, halfway through a game of Wicked Grace with Merrill’s wrist limp and her mind sore with mental equations of metallic magic. Merrill looked at her and thought of Isabela’s lips, so soft, so inviting, so warm when she laughingly kissed Merrill on dares she made up, spewing darkspawn bile like the hunter’s had, at the end.

What was behind the mirror? Was Tamlen there, waiting, like Audacity was with brighter eyes like coals fanned with the sighs lovers made each time when Merrill rested her head against the thin pillow in her damp little house in the Alienage? Merrill wanted to know. Wanted to save her People. They had known once. The knowledge was there, locked away under the dusty sheafs of history. There was a way to fix the mirror, Merrill just had to be –

“Brave,” Audacity called her, when Merrill gripped its face between her hands and felt its scales cut her palms. Her blood mixed with the seething sea of everyone who had come before her that surged around Merrill’s hips, bracketing Audacity’s grapevine thighs. Its voice was the storm of Sundermount, deep as the sleep of the ancients that waited in the heart of its peak.

“What do you want from me?” Merrill asked Audacity, all of her breath left inside of Audacity’s chest, its mouth that tasted of sparks and stepping in front of charging carriages.

“Anything,” said Audacity, “What are you bold enough to give me?”

Anything, thought Merrill, for the taste of the strength to keep going with the thankless task of repairing the mirror, of banishing the Taint a cut at a time. She felt always faint, these days. The blood in Audacity’s prison was richer than ever. And Tamlen was still gone, the dead still distant, and the clan ran away from her when Merrill wandered the hunting paths.

Merrill answered by biting Audacity’s lip until it burned in her mouth and she saw herself reflected in the ivory mirror of Audacity’s scales. Her own eyes seared into Merrill’s soul, her face in the blood, in the scale, in the chain and the old man whose neck smiled redly. In Audacity, who moaned and met her touch for touch, kiss for kiss.

All spirits are dangerous, she said to Anders, I understood that. I’m sorry you didn’t.

Audacity traced the edge of the mirror shard that was as heavy as Merrill’s dead with a claw white as bone. Their reflection together was beautiful in the mirror’s Blighted face, Audacity’s horns spiralling over Merrill’s head while its lips kiss her hair. The ivory tips were beaded with red, red, from where Audacity had laid in the blood underneath Merrill and twisted and gasped, like it felt pleasure in the body it had made to hold Merrill. The horns crowned Merrill like thorns, like the spirals of vallaslin that marked her face.

“What will you risk to find out what your People have lost?” Audacity asked, its clawed palm upraised where it wrapped its arm around Merrill’s waist like a chain, an offering, a promise. Its skin was scale-soft when Merrill kissed the pad of its thumb, and its fingers twitched, as if it fought not to hold her cheek.

And Merrill said, “Everything.”