DA Rogues Week is an event celebrating all the rakish rogues, secretive scouts, and boisterous bards that populate the length and width of Thedas. Grab a drink, have a seat, join us in the fun, and take care not to end up with the pointy end of a dagger somewhere unfortunate.
And so the first annual DA Rogues Week comes to a close!
Thank you everyone for sharing your time and your creativity with us. It was truly a wonderful time scheming with you all.
Before we part ways, we do have one final surprise announcement. We have been keeping track of which characters star in how many chapters within our AO3 collection. At the time of closing, the rogue character most frequently represented in the presently included fics is… a tie between Lucanis and Mercar!
Due to appearing in a greater number of distinct pieces across all submissions, it has been decided to award this tie to Lucanis. As such, he has received the honor of representing this year's subcollection as its icon! Congratulations to him and our runner-up.
A late entry to the last day of the rouge week. It was super fun!!!!
This is a painting personally commissioned by her ladyship Cousland, Ferelden warden commander. It is said that it was made to adorn her personal quarters. However all the records of it were lost *wink*.
I just love all the in game paintings in the inquisition so I had to make something similar. I loosely based it on one of them and some concept arts for Orlesian fashion.
Chapters: 6/7
Fandom: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Zevran Arainai & Original Arainai Character(s)
Characters: Original Arainai Character(s), Antivan Crow Characters (Dragon Age), Original Female Character(s), Zevran Arainai
Additional Tags: Antivan Crows, Assassination Attempt(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rinna Arainai haunts the narrative, Canon-Typical Violence, Darkspawn, and darkspawn related horror, Background Relationships
Summary:
For 7 long and bloody years, there has been a contract out for Zevran Arainai’s life that has survived even grandmaster Eoman himself. Now, pushing 30 and therefore old by Crow standards, it is Giulia Arainai’s turn. Everybody expects her to fail; what they don’t know is that she has an ace up her sleeve. Her face looks strikingly like that of her sister, Rinnala Arainai. Her spilt blood remains unavenged, and the past is ready to stake its claim on yet another life.
DA Rogues Week: The Neromenian Job, Part 7 (finale)
Day 7 of Rogues Week (@da-rogues-week)! You know what that means!
Let's have a soft conclusion for this one. Also maybe a bit of yearning (you can blame the "OC's kids" games going around for that).
Context note: the dragon fang dagger is a reference to the Qunari "necklace of Kadan" tradition mentioned in DAI as a way to declare commitment to a romantic partner in the Qun. Saadrah just...does that as knives instead of necklaces. Yes, Lucanis has a matching one.
Read on AO3 here. (Part 7: 968 words)
VII. Music
Lucanis leaned back in his seat in the nicest tavern in Neromenian that was still open at such a late hour—or, rather, already open so early—sipping at his wine and watching the crowd through low-lidded eyes just in case trouble reared its head one last time. Music drifted through the warm, ale-scented air, light and jaunty and not half-bad, something Marcher by the sound of it. Maybe Fereldan. Soft conversation rolled through the sparse crowd in low tones, dishes clinked, and just outside the windows the streetlamps still flickered and the stars still winked in the sky, though a smudge of paler light outlined the roofs of buildings across the river.
His nerves still hummed in anticipation. The job wasn’t done, after all, not until the child was returned safely to her father. Once the child had rested, and once they could book passage to Minrathous. Until then, he couldn’t relax his guard, not completely. But threads of warmth trickled along his spine, unintentionally wearing away at his worries simply by being there. Spite, alert, supernatural senses flitting about like the watchful eyes of a crow.
Should trouble arise, the demon would warn Lucanis.
Beside him, Saadrah shifted slightly and finished her own wine with an appreciative hum. “Much better than that swill I had earlier,” she said softly.
Lucanis smiled and allowed himself a little laugh for having spoiled her tastes.
“Your fault,” she muttered, but he could hear the tease smoothing the edge of it.
“I regret nothing.” He glanced over at her.
She’d tucked herself into the corner of the wall their table sat beside, resting her shoulders against wood paneling, her chair tilted back ever so slightly to make a more comfortable nest out of her lap and chest for the young girl now snoring softly, curled up under Lucanis’s outer coat. Peaceful. Safe. Saadrah’s free hand absently stroked the girl’s dark hair.
Something twinged in Lucanis’s chest. He tried to ignore it. Didn’t want to examine it, not right now. Maybe not ever.
Too many broken pieces, Spite rumbled, and Lucanis suppressed a wince at how quickly and easily the demon read him.
Saadrah grunted softly, and shifted position. Slowly set all four legs of her seat back down so she could straighten up, moving slowly and gingerly so as not to disturb the child still cuddled against her. Her arm curled around the little girl like a shield, and she set her now-empty glass down on the table to cup the child’s head with her other hand.
Lucanis raised a brow in question.
“I need a refill,” Saadrah said softly.
He moved to stand. “I can—”
“I also need to stretch my legs before they fall off.” She gritted her teeth as she shifted her legs. “Take her for a moment, will you?” She didn’t wait for an answer—she knew what it would be anyway—and started maneuvering the child with careful hands to pass her to him.
And he, Maker take him, didn’t hesitate to accept, even though he knew—he knew—he was not fit for this, not suitable, not safe.
But Saadrah trusted him, and he shifted the weapon strap across his chest out of the way to accommodate the bundled child with minimal jostling. The girl murmured softly in her sleep and snuggled into his shoulder and the crook of his arm, and he almost missed Saadrah’s little laugh at the sight. She stood with a stretch and the pop of vertebrae and a jiggling shake of her legs to wake them back up, then walked back to the bar with her empty glass, leaving him and the child alone in the corner with the calm and the music.
Smells like softness. Moonlight and silk.
And with the demon, he amended, and looked down at the fragile child in his arms. Not safe.
Won’t hurt, Spite muttered.
Lucanis actually believed him.
The girl shifted again, tiny hands reaching out from under his coat, catching the front of his leathers. She gave a soft sigh of contentment and rubbed her cheek more firmly against his sternum.
The twinge behind his ribs returned. He swallowed thickly. “Mierda,” he murmured, as he recognized the feeling for what it was.
He wanted this, or something very like it at least.
Tiny feet, tiny hands. Tiny knives and wings and horns—
Enough, Spite.
The demon grumbled again.
He wanted, and he couldn’t have, because he wasn’t safe. He couldn’t be. All he knew was danger and death.
A boot scraped on the floor, and he glanced up in time to see Saadrah stop just shy of their table, an odd look on her face. Wistful? Hopeful?
The twinge in his chest intensified. Something in his heart melted, sank to his stomach and sat there, not like a stone but a seed of something bigger. Something warmer. Something more alive. Something he clearly would have to examine sooner rather than later, whether he wanted to or not, as his eyes lingered too long on his lover, tall and beautiful. The Crow mask she’d claimed from him hung at her hip beside the dragon fang dagger that marked her promise to him.
Not a Crow but a Rook. His Rook.
Saadrah recovered from her pause, her hesitation, and slid back into her seat with a smile that spoke volumes while saying nothing at all.
“What?” he asked, a bit of Spite’s pique leaking into his tone to mask the emotions that sat heavy in his chest.
Saadrah shook her head. Her smile deepened into something so fond it almost hurt. “It’s nothing.”
But her hand found his underneath the table and gave a squeeze.
Chapters: 3/7
Fandom: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Zevran Arainai & Original Arainai Character(s)
Characters: Original Arainai Character(s), Antivan Crow Characters (Dragon Age), Original Female Character(s), Zevran Arainai
Additional Tags: Antivan Crows, Assassination Attempt(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rinna Arainai haunts the narrative, Canon-Typical Violence, Darkspawn, and darkspawn related horror
Summary:
For 7 long and bloody years, there has been a contract out for Zevran Arainai’s life that has survived even grandmaster Eoman himself. Now, pushing 30 and therefore old by Crow standards, it is Giulia Arainai’s turn. Everybody expects her to fail; what they don’t know is that she has an ace up her sleeve. Her face looks strikingly like that of her sister, Rinnala Arainai. Her spilt blood remains unavenged, and the past is ready to stake its claim on yet another life.
@da-rogues-week chapters 3 (Bridges), 4 (Captive) and 5 (Corpse) are live!!!
That’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever drawn. Leli after the warden killed her in the temple of Sacred Ashes. She is resurrected though, through Andraste’s holy light!!!!
I’ve only did it once playing as a ruthless Aeducan (that one “evil” playthrough), but I cried afterwards because she is my all time favourite companion across all DA games, so yeah in my canon world state she will always be alive❤️🩹
Dirt made itself visible in the blue ink on Yasmin’s brown face. Her beard, usually trimmed neat to the line of her jaw, curled out from her face. Even her crow’s feet and laugh lines seemed to droop.
It's Day 6 of Rogues Week (@da-rogues-week), and that means I'm back with Part 6 of "The Neromenian Job." Things are coming to a head now.
Small content warning: claustrophobia panic attack
Also I see Antivan as being a mix of Italian and Spanish, and will use whichever seems most fitting. Someone please let me know if the Italian in this section is wrong/bad. I did what I could. (It's just a short phrase, at least, not even a full sentence.)
Read on AO3 here. (Part 6: 1,087 words)
VI. Deep Roads
The dwarves sure were fond of high ceilings and spacious passages for being such short people, and that was the only reason Saadrah wasn’t completely panicking at having to enter the Deep Roads.
Even so, the door and stairs that led to the Deep Roads, accessible through a blocky arch tucked away in a back alley at the outer edge of Neromenian, were still so much tighter than Saadrah would have liked. Ceilings designed for humans at best, walls close enough that she could hit both with her elbows at the same time and not even have her arms fully extended.
Puddles of dank, slimy water collected on the well-worn stairs, pooling in the depressions that generations upon generations of feet had worn into the stone. She slipped more than once, breathing tight as her horns scraped against the ceiling or knocked against a wall, and she couldn’t even appreciate Lucanis’s steadying hand on her arm for the way she had to focus to keep the air coming steadily to her lungs.
The Deep Roads will be more open. The Deep Roads will be more open. The Deep Roads will be—
“Smells like pitch and pine,” Spite rasped.
“Not helping, Spite,” Lucanis chided out loud for Saadrah’s benefit.
No, definitely not helping. She tried to shove down the memories of the first time she got stuck, trapped in a new hiding place in a shipyard when she was small. Tried not to think about how tight that space would be now, as a full-grown adult. Tried not to think about walls pressing in, about horns snagging, about hunching to squeeze through and never being able to straighten out again—
A firm hand pressed against her back, between her ranger blades, between her shoulders. Firm. Warm. Safe.
“I’m here,” Lucanis said softly.
She smelled the blade oil on his leathers. A whiff of cinnamon, a flicker of purple, the nettle-sting brush of Fade-feathers against her cheek.
She took a deep breath, and didn’t even mind the sinus-clearing burn in her nostrils.
Still, she pushed a little faster, and stumbled when the narrow passage opened up into the entry chamber to a branch of the Deep Roads, sucking in several deep breaths and bending to brace her hands against her knees. Lucanis gave her space. Let her breathe. Simply rubbed the backs of his knuckles up and down one of her arms, just shy of the vitaar design she’d painted there, until she felt steady and whole once again.
“More people,” she grumbled, “should build their spaces for us tall types.” Almost in defiance of the narrow entry, she stretched to her full height, arms spread wide until she could hear her spine popping, head thrown back but eyes closed. She wanted to feel that there was enough space around her—feel herself stretch out and have nothing to touch, nothing to contain her, only open air on her fingers—and not see that there was still a ceiling overhead. Not right now. Maybe in a minute or two.
Lucanis’s feet padded away, pacing the perimeter of the room, stopping every now and then as he examined something. Never too far from her side, but making use of his time while she recovered.
His consideration still made her heart flutter, and she smiled.
Then she heard it.
Voices.
Low, distant, echoing through the open passage that would lead to one of the great causeways of the Deep Roads.
Saadrah’s eyes snapped open. Fixated immediately on Lucanis.
His eyes flared purple.
No words, just action. The dregs of Saadrah’s panic burned away beneath adrenaline and drive, fuel for her perseverance. Shadow Dragon and Antivan Crow moved as one, and charged through the passage toward the voices.
Saadrah felt grim satisfaction at the look on the Venatori’s face when he saw just who bore down on him like a spectre of death, even as she ended him decisively with a blade through his gut and another through his ribs before he could even gasp out the first words of a spell.
Do not linger on the death. They are not worth it.
The Venatori’s guards didn’t last any longer than their employer, brought down by Qunari swords and Crow rapier and dagger, two assassins working in terrifying tandem—danza della morte as Lucanis had once called it—and neither Saadrah nor Lucanis had to draw even one spare blade.
The last guard hit the ground with his throat slashed open by Lucanis’s dagger, and Saadrah took a deep, cleansing breath. Let the mask of the Ghost fall from her emotions as she found the politician’s daughter where the guards had dropped her.
Young.
That detail brought her up short.
The girl was so much younger than Saadrah had expected. Not a young woman, like the initial request to the Shadow Dragons had implied, but a child. Maybe five years at most, about the same age as Saadrah’s nephew.
And absolutely terrified at the death that had been dealt around her.
Saadrah’s blades were on the ground, her arms around the girl, before she even registered what she was doing. Instinct drove her, honed by years of rescuing young slaves, and she pulled the girl into a firm embrace against her chest to shield her from the horrors Saadrah’s own hand had committed.
The child cried. Saadrah let her.
Small. Human children were so small. So fragile.
“Shh, I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she murmured into the child’s dark hair, stroking in repetitive, soothing motions. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
Everything around her fell away as she held the girl, and trusted her Crow and his demon to keep them both safe.
“She is so young,” Lucanis’s voice eventually murmured near her shoulder, and she looked up to see that he had piled the bodies out of the way, out of sight of the girl. That he held Saadrah’s swords, wiped clean of blood and wrapped in a length of the Venatori’s robes until they could be returned to their sheaths. The lines of his face softened at the sight of the sobbing child clinging to Saadrah, nearly swallowed in her arms, so tiny against such a tall frame.
“Would have been nice of her father to mention that,” Saadrah said, knowing it wouldn’t have made any difference.
“She is safe now, at least.”
Saadrah nodded at her own thoughts voiced, and carefully pushed to her feet with the little girl still bundled in her arms. “We should get her home.”
So I am super late I know, but I said I'll make it short and sweet and ended up with nearly 4k words total. Because I have my life in order.
This one includes my rogue Hawke Charlie and Fenris and the 5 times they had failed to cross a bridge. And 1 time they did.
read first snippet below, ~600 words or read everything on AO3
dividers from here
"It really wouldn't hurt you to stay." Charlie broke the awkward silence that had settled between her and Fenris after parting ways with Anders and Merrill. She intended to crash at the Hanged Man, but when everyone seemed to plan on going their separate ways, she did too. It didn't hurt that it was the same way that Fenris would need to go to make it to the mainland and towards Hightown. "If Gamlen bothers you so, I bet Varric could get you a room in the Hanged Man."
"And what good would it do?" Fenris shrugged, "I have the mansion."
"And as far as I can tell not even a bed inside." She rolled her eyes, the memory of dirty floors, cobwebs and general abandonment flashing in her head.
"It would disturb my dancing routines."
Charlie blinked at him incredulously before bursting out laughing, a flock of nearby pigeons scrambling to the air at the unexpected noise. She could barely keep up with his brisk pace, wiping away tears from the corner of her eye and struggling to catch her breath.
"Well, yes of course. How… inconsiderate of me." Charlie fiddled with the seam of her sleeve, not willing to check if her outburst had caused any reaction in him or not. If only she could keep her head on her shoulders around him, everything would have been so much simpler. "But the invite still stands."
"Of course. But perhaps I should be inviting you to the mansion instead?"
"Mother might not enjoy the bodies." Charlie turned serious for a split second earning her a glance from Fenris, before her brows furrowed in consideration. "How are there still bodies on the floor anyway?"
"Decoration."
"Truly a man of arts… but how do they not stink yet?" She prodded. It'd been among the longer, if not the longest, not-job-related conversation they had had in the few weeks since they met each other. She was not quite yet ready to let it go.
"Hawke." an array of emotions passed through Fenris face. Annoyance, confusion… amusement? "Did you really think it's the same bodies?"
"I…" she hesitated realising that since he now had something approaching a stable residence he'd have more unwelcome company not less. "You know what, maybe I won't be answering that."
She shoved her hands into her pockets, the quiet she'd been trying to keep at bay catching to them once more.
The walk was over. Or at least their shared part of it. The bridge connecting Lowtown with the Merchants' Quarters that lead towards the Hightown had mercilessly revealed itself from behind the corner, where it always was.
It had never felt this cruel before, if Charlie was to be honest.
"Alright! Last chance to come crash at Uncle Gamlen's place!" She put on as easy smile as she could muster, hoping that Fenris was not in the process of reconsidering all his life's choices and planning on leaving Kirkwall by dawn.
"I really am quite fine where I am." He ensured her, his voice sharp just enough to mark the end of this particular topic.
"Your choice!" Charlie shrugged in what she had hoped was a nonchalant manner as she watched him turn his way and across the bridge without as much as "goodbye". "The invite stands for later tho, if you change your mind, you know?"
"I will keep that in mind, Hawke."
"Right, great!" She took a couple steps back, but didn't turn away. "See you around then."
She murmured against the wind, staring over the bridge for much longer than was reasonable.
