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Ghosts of Amaranthine

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On the very last day of Drakonis, when the healers were about ready to give up hope, Theron woke up and stayed that way for half an hour. Zevran shoved food at him, and hovered worriedly. Fen’harel barked and hopped and wagged his stumpy little mabari tail enough to tire himself into an early nap.

Alistair used the opportunity afforded by Theron eating, and unable to say anything, to yell at him for the entire half-hour. He’d gotten as far as ‘you should have sent a note from Ostagar telling us where you were going to look for Morrigan’ when Theron dropped off again sitting up.

“I wasn’t done,” he threatened his unconscious friend. “When you wake up, there’ll be more! A lot more! So much more you’ll wish it was Oghren singing drunk again!”

“Have you ever heard him sing sober?” Zevran asked.

“No, but it couldn’t possibly be worse!”

There was more yelling. A lot more yelling. Alistair finally finished a couple of days later.

“Well?” he demanded, out of breath. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“I’m sorry,” Theron said. “I thought that Amaranthine would be happier without me for a couple of months, and then I just kept running from my problems, and only found more.”

“That’s right you did! You should be sorry! You’re going back to Vigil’s Keep and I’ll knock Caron onto his ass off the battlements even without you asking me to, but you’re going to be Arl-Commander again and if you try to slip off again I’ll- I’ll ride back to Ostagar and tell Ashalle on you! And then I’ll go to Kinloch Hold and tell Wynne! And then-”

He couldn’t come up with anything else. He didn’t know any other motherly sorts of people that Theron would listen to.

“I’ll think of something else to do about it!”

Zevran lifted one of Theron’s hands to his lips.

“You are never allowed to go anywhere without me again, ‘ma vhen’an,” he murmured. “And I will never go anywhere without you.”

“I’ll tell Zevran!” Alistair decided, because Theron might run out on Ashalle and Wynne, but he cared about Zevran too much to do the same to him.

“Ah, Alistair, my old friend,” Zevran said. “You seem to be laboring under the terrible misconception that I would not be the one helping him to escape, so that I would finally have my chance to whisk him away to foreign lands and indoctrinate him in the ways of debauchery and devilish scoundrelry.”

Annoyingly, Alistair found that Zevran had been right. He had been concerned about the man when he’d stopped making absurd comments and puns full of innuendo.

“I hate you,” he told them. “Just so you know.”

Fen whined piteously.

“Oh, not you,” Alistair sighed. “I could never hate a dog.”

Fen barked happily.


Theron was fit to ride by mid-Cloudreach. He still wasn’t really recovered, but two weeks of being awake the whole day and eating properly had done a lot for him.

Still, Alistair kept a close eye on him on the road.

Thankfully he had help with that. A very nervous surfacer merchant stopped Alistair in the market one day and asked if the Warden-Commander also wanted the massive quantities of lyrium he’d heard about transported with the rest of the shipment going to Vigil’s Keep?

What other lyrium?”

Why, Dworkin Glavonak’s sand for his explosives experiments, and the odd bunch of regular dust he’d asked for this time around, too.

“Theron, we’ve got a dwarf who makes lyrium explosives staying at Vigil’s Keep?”

The surfacer merchant did end up contracted to transport the lyrium recovered from Amgarrak, but only after Jerrik Dace turned down Theron’s offer to take some of it as recompense for his ordeal. He said he’d had enough of lyrium for his entire life, but if the Wardens could make some use of it, they should take it.

Theron generously left the magic-using golem they’d brought out the Deep Roads to the joint custody of Houses Helmi and Dace, ‘for study, and the march to Kal’Hirol’.

“It’s never spoken, Alistair. I don’t think it was ever alive. If the Helmi smiths can figure out how the smiths of Amgarrak made it, then the dwarves will stop searching. No one will ever try killing dwarves to make golems again if they already have a working method.”

“Okay, one- I don’t believe that, people are awful. Two- when this inevitably backfires on us horribly, Theron, I’m blaming you. And just where are we going to safely store like, an entire ton of lyrium!”

“We have an entrance to the Deep Roads in the basement no one is supposed to go near. And the darkspawn really don’t like large concentrations of it.”

“We live right on top of that.

“It’s harder to steal if we’re sitting on it.”

“This is a horrible idea, Theron. You understand that I won’t be able to live in Vigil’s Keep, right?”

“We have a mountain fortress,” Theron reminded him. “We need someone to be in command of Soldier’s Peak. It would be hard to do from Vigil’s Keep, and as Arl-Commander I should try to stay there more.”

“You can’t just put me in charge of things!

“You have a problem with taking authority,” his friend told him. “I didn’t start out supporting Arl Eamon’s idea instead of your wishes because I wanted to country to fall apart, Alistair. If you’d wanted to take the job, I think you could have been a good king. I know you’ll be a good Warden-Captain.”

“We only have forty or so Wardens in the entire country,” Alistair pointed out. “There’s no one for me to be Captain over.

“There will be.”

Houses Helmi and Dace announced their joint expedition to retake Kal’Hirol the same day Theron, Alistair, and Zevran left with the lyrium merchant’s caravan. Personally, Alistair was glad for the timing. He really didn’t want to see if Helmi and Dace had managed to turn Orzammar into a riot of epic proportions.

Cloudreach was a good time to go traveling in Ferelden. The country really came into its own in the spring, between the rains of late winter and the humid heat that stank up the cities so badly in summer, and could destroy an unlucky farmer’s livelihood with an chance strike of lighting from one of the big seasonal thunderstorms. In spring, the sky was clear, the weather was mild, and best of all, it didn’t rain.

It took the rest of the month to get to the arling, and Vigil’s Keep. Caravans were slow things, and Alistair and Zevran were enforcing a low profile that Theron didn’t seem to mind much. He was mostly left to continue recuperating on cushions in the back of a merchant’s covered cart, while Alistair and Zevran rode with the guards. They still wore their Grey Warden armor, but the hope was that everyone would assume they were more Wardens come as reinforcement from Orlais.

The one really stop they did make was at Kinloch Hold, because the lyrium merchant covered for his semi-legitimate contract with Dworkin by also doing completely legal business with the Circle. The three of them went out to Kinloch Hold to drop in on Wynne for a happy visit, and also to secretly glean the Circle’s information on lyrium.

“If that is what you want,” Wynne told them in amusement. “Then there is someone familiar you will want to talk to.”

She sent them down to the enchantment areas, filled with Tranquil and one vaguely familiar dwarf woman, who gasped in excitement when she saw them.

“Grey Wardens!” she said excitedly. “Oh, Wardens- the Grey Wardens, oh! You probably don’t remember me, I’m Dagna, I-”

Alistair did remember her now.

“We need to know about lyrium,” Theron told her, and she happily chattered on and on about it, and even gave them papers and studies to take with them. She promised to write to Vigil’s Keep with more information.

At least the stop, and the pace, gave them time to fix up Theron’s armor from the months spent in the Roads. By the time they got to the approach to the Vigil, the enamel had been redone, the stitching replaced, and the metal shined.

The tent city came into view, and Theron stopped dead at the sight.

“It is big, no?” Zevran remarked quietly to him. “Do not worry. I will be watching for you.”

“It’s smaller than when we left,” Alistair said. “I guess it’s because Velanna took off so many for her clan. But it still feels like it should be bigger.”

He hoped it hadn’t all been attrition from disease, if for no other reason than it would make Theron feel bad about burning Amaranthine again.

 The caravan was moving up the approach without them. Theron nudged his horse into moving again, and the three of them took the lead.

Dworkin was waiting outside the edge of the tent city for them, impatiently tapping his foot.

“I’ve been waiting weeks for this shipment!” he yelled. “You’ve never been late before- what, did the King die again? Is that why you’ve got these Wardens-”

He got a good look at the three of them and sputtered momentarily.

“Warden-Commander!” he exclaimed.

“Hello, Dworkin,” Theron said. “How have your experiments been going?”

“Very well, very promising-” Dworkin floundered, still surprised; and then gave up and turned to face the tents.

“The Arl-Commander is back!” he bellowed. “Somebody run and get Oghren and Howe!”

“Oghren and Howe?” Alistair muttered to Zevran, who could only offer a shrug. It was nice they weren’t being made to face Caron right away, but he didn’t think that Oghren and Nathaniel Howe were going to help Theron’s threatening court martial much.

People swarmed into the empty spaces between tents, and the area was filled with the low uproar of excitement.

Sigrun was the first to get to them, people making a path or getting shoved out of the way as she barreled up to them.

“Commander! Commander!” she said excitedly. “You’re back! We were so worried-”

“Theron, you sodding tree-hugging Dalish excuse for a commanding officer!” Oghren roared over everyone else, and the crowd hurriedly parted for him as he stomped over. “Where in the Paragons’ names have you been!”

“Mostly the Deep Roads,” Theron said. “It was a rescue mission.”

Oghren threw up his hands in disgust, and then slapped Theron’s knee. It was the easiest part to reach when he was sitting on a horse.

“All by yourself? By the Stone, man, you’re crazier than my ex-wife. You’re lucky to be alive!”

“I know.”

“Just because you killed an Archdemon don’t make you invincible!”

“Where’s everyone else?” Alistair butted in to ask. “From the camp, I mean. They can’t all have gone to the Dalish clan.”

“Rebuilding on Amaranthine’s finally got started,” Oghren told him. “Nathaniel had the bright idea of offering anyone who volunteered to do grunt work or contribute their skilled labor first pick of the land inside the city walls. And they might be expanding the walls, too. Voldrik had some choice words about the whole set-up once he started making plans.”

Nathaniel arrived accompanied by Vigil’s Keep soldiers, familiar in their silverite armor with the Amaranthine bear prowling on the chestplate. He was carrying a shield with a protective cover on it.

“Welcome home, Arl-Commander,” he greeted Theron formally. “As appointed Acting Constable of the Grey, I regret to inform you that Acting Commander Gerod Caron went missing at the beginning of last month, and has been declared dead.”

He didn’t sound too regretful about it. Alistair hadn’t spent a lot of time with Caron, but the little he had coupled with the stories that had been passed on left him not feeling very regretful either.

“Oh?” Zevran asked. He had his eyebrow raised, for some reason.

“We’ve had to assume it was an ambush by bandits,” Nathaniel said. “He went riding on the Pilgrim’s Path by night, during a period where the roads had been left mostly unchecked by patrols.”

“How unprofessional of him,” Zevran said mildly.

Theron was looking around.

“Where are Anders and Justice?”

The three Wardens in front of them went somber, suddenly.

“There went with a group of Or- other Wardens to check out a report of something strange in the ruins of Amaranthine,” Sigrun said. “They- they’re all dead.”

When Theron looked sad, he looked really sad. Alistair hadn’t met Anders or Justice- and thought that he probably would have been pretty freaked out about the spirit, so maybe that was a good thing- but they’d been some of Theron’s people, and he had first-hand experience of how Theron felt about things like that.

“There is more to this story,” he heard Zevran whisper to Theron. “I do not think they wish to tell it in front of an audience.”

Theron glanced over at him in acknowledgement.

“Constable Howe,” he said, tilting his head towards the covered shield. “Is that for me?”

“Ah, yes,” Nathaniel said, brightening a little. “A ‘welcome home’ gift, from all of us. I notice you haven’t got a shield on you now, so maybe this it’s even a well-timed one?”

“It is,” Theron told him, and reached out to take the offered present. He pulled the cover off.

It was dragonbone, which probably meant someone had gone to that man Wade for it. The bone had been bleached white and quartered with woodsy gold enamel inlays so it laid flush. It wasn’t quite the conventional shade of Amaranthine’s colors, but it satisfied the heraldry standards.

In the top right quarter, one of the white ones, Wade had inlaid a deer’s head in profile- no, it was a halla, with those twisting antlers- in the same woodsy gold. The opposite quarter held Amaranthine’s bear.

“I asked Velanna if the Dalish clans had heraldry,” Nathaniel said. “She said they didn’t have much use for it, but most Dalish who go out in the world and end up needing a symbol use a halla.”

“This is good work,” Theron said, running a hand over the shield. His fingers lingered on the halla. “Wade?”

“Yeah.”

“We, um,” Sigrun said. “Owed him a challenge for some other work he did.”

That sounded like another story.

“The Wardens plaster griffons on everything,” Oghren said. “So we figured you should have something that ain’t all blue-and-white-and-feathery.”

“Thank you,” Theron said, settling the shield across his back. “All of you. For this, and for making sure I had something to come back to.”

“You gave us somewhere,” Nathaniel told him. “We couldn’t do any less.”

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