Sometimes I write fanfic about my OC. This one is about Heaven.
Mages in the Circles were trained to fight. They were the king’s soldiers just as much as any warrior. But Vezhka had never learned offensive magic — she had never been allowed anywhere near that kind of spellwork. And frankly, she had never possessed the nerve to hurt anyone deliberately. So instead she learned other things. She learned to run. She learned to hide. She learned when to keep her mouth shut and when to endure without complaint. More than once, those skills had saved her life. Hide or run — she had chosen that as her personal motto years ago, and she was living by it now, as an unknown army tore Haven apart around her.
Two of her oldest nightmares had merged into one. Templars and darkspawn — both at once, as if someone had reached into her mind and designed this specifically to break her. The dread of darkspawn was almost ancient by now, the kind of fear that lived in the body rather than the mind, sharpened by memories of the possessed and the horrors of the Fifth Blight. The fear of Templars was newer, rawer, and far more personal. Back in the Circle, they had been a nuisance — extra eyes, overseers, people to be careful around. But the last three years had taught her something different. She had seen apostates cornered and cut down by warriors who had been built, trained, and made to kill mages. That was not something you forgot. That was not something you ever really got over.
But right now, hiding wasn’t an option. Archdemon fire was falling on Haven alongside the Red Templars’ volleys. There was only one thing left to do.
Chaos had swallowed the settlement whole. Soldiers were scrambling into formation. The Herald of Andraste was rallying his companions and pulling injured people to safety. Chantry sisters were steering survivors toward the thick walls of the temple. The ground shook. The air thundered with boots and crumbling stone. And Vezhka stood completely still in the middle of it all, frozen, until a scout sprinting past clipped her shoulder and knocked her back into motion.
Her mind was a roar of noise. Every muscle in her body was coiled and ready — her joints, her pulse, the blood hammering into her hands and feet — all of it primed to move. But her frightened mind refused to give the order. The only thought she could hold was a single, all-consuming terrified. Somewhere beneath it, Hope was fighting to be heard, pushing back against the fear, calling out from beyond the Veil that she needed to move, now. Their bond had grown strong over the years — the spirit had found its way to her so reliably that the exchange of mana and thought between them had become almost effortless. But the noise of the battle was too much, until the explosion went off right beside her.
The shockwave hit her like a wall. First came the ringing — a solid, airless silence that swallowed everything — and then the force of it physically staggered her. The building that had sheltered Haven’s refugees simply ceased to exist. One moment it was there; the next, it was splinters. Vezhka felt several shards of wood bite deep into her shoulder and looked around, dazed. Her ears were screaming. Her heart was throwing itself against her ribs. Her body still wouldn’t obey her. And yet — faintly, beneath all of it — she could hear Hope now, pointing her toward a path that wasn’t on fire.
What finally moved her was the sight of the corrupted Templars. The moment she saw them closing in, every higher instinct gave way to something much older and much simpler. She ran.
The memories hit her as she went — fragments of past slaughters, bright and brutal, striking her with the force of something physical. Burning debris littered the snow around her, scraps of wood and worse. Mountain air that had once been clean now tasted of ash and charred flesh. It felt endless. The longer she ran, the more bodies she passed. Black and red against white snow. Green and black against grey stone. A metallic sharpness at the back of her throat. The faces of people she recognised — and what remained of those she could no longer recognise — arranged themselves in her mind like the shattered pieces of a stained-glass window under a sky that reflected everything back at her.
The Chantry sisters were calling the survivors to the temple. Vezhka was running toward it when Hope tugged at her — a quiet pull, almost like a whispered word, steering her sideways. She followed without question, and found herself beside a wounded soldier. He looked more alive than dead, which was good enough. She got her arm under his and hauled him with her, silently grateful that he could still use his legs. She closed her eyes and let Hope lead. The spirit had never failed her when it truly mattered, and her strength — generously lent — was probably the only reason she made it to the temple doors at all. She hammered on them hard enough to make her knuckles ache.
Whether by Andraste’s will or by sheer luck, they let her in.
She caught the tail end of the news as she crossed the threshold — the Herald had stayed behind in Haven to draw the enemy’s attention and buy time for the retreat. Vezhka pressed her hands together at her chest, said a quick and genuine prayer, then forced herself to look around. She had a few minutes. That was enough to do some good.
Her own fear had quieted. In its place, something steadier had returned — hope, and the particular kind of calm that came from believing, however irrationally, that things would be all right. They were under the Herald’s protection. Under Andraste’s watch. They would survive this. The dawn will come.
She spotted the wounded innkeeper and made her way over.
“I’m a healer,” she said simply. “Let me help.” She looked the injury over — a burn, deep, and what felt like a broken bone beneath it.
“A mage.” The innkeeper grimaced and turned her face away.
Vezhka had long since stopped being surprised by that reaction. She exhaled quietly, let the soft blue light gather in her hands, and got to work — mending what she could in the time she had. The innkeeper muttered something under her breath, but didn’t pull away.
Then the temple shuddered. A low, enormous impact — the Archdemon testing the roof. The Commander’s voice cut through the noise, ordering the Inquisition to fall back.
Vezhka glanced once more toward where she had last seen the Herald’s group, then whispered under her breath: “Maker, don’t let their souls be lost.”
The tunnel felt as though it went on forever. In a strange way, that was almost a relief.
Nobody spoke. Even footsteps seemed muffled, absorbed by the ice. Everyone was somewhere else in their own head — some searching the line of survivors for a familiar face, others mouthing silent prayers for the people who weren’t with them. Vezhka gave up trying to think and let Hope carry her instead. The spirit walked her forward, gently and without pushing, giving her the small mercy of not having to feel everything at once. Her shoulder had stiffened badly around the splinters. Her legs ached in a deep, bone-level way that she was choosing not to examine too closely. The cold was thorough and unrelenting. But she kept moving, held up by the knowledge that as soon as they stopped, there would be wounded to treat. There always were. Her fight never started during the battle. It started after.
By nightfall, Leliana and Cullen had begun counting the losses. Vezhka worked through the list of injured, drawing freely on Hope’s energy now that her own was running low — anything to help one more scout sleep through the pain. Every name called out among the dead landed somewhere in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. Lives she hadn’t reached in time. Lives that had simply stopped, somewhere under the snow. Her shoulder had gone from aching to almost immobile, but there was no gap in the work to address it. No infection, please, she thought. Two more, and then I’ll deal with it.
She was still working when the name was read aloud: Allen Lavellan. The Herald of Andraste.
Vezhka paused. She tried to remember her interactions with him — they had been brief. A few words, a few gestures. One memorably awkward moment on her very first day with the Inquisition. He had been Dalish, but not unkind. She felt sorry for him, in the particular hollow way you felt sorry for someone you’d barely known. And beneath that, a colder feeling entirely — because he was the only one who could close the Rifts, and without him, none of this meant anything.
She was still praying when the commotion broke out at the edge of camp. People rushing toward the snow. Voices overlapping. Someone had been found.
She pushed through the crowd and saw him.
Partially burned. Partially frostbitten. Completely and thoroughly in a bad way. But alive.
The breath she let out lasted a long time. She turned to Lady Cassandra.
“I can work with this,” she said steadily. “Don’t worry, Seeker.”
She knelt beside him and reached for Hope’s strength one more time, taking stock of the damage. Frostbite had claimed part of his ear — that, she couldn’t save. The burn across his torso responded to healing, but it would scar, and she suspected she already knew what had caused it, even if she didn’t want to put the thought into words. The smaller wounds — cuts, abrasions — she closed cleanly. Hours passed. At some point she shifted so that his head was resting in her lap, a more practical position for the spells she was working, and she settled in.
He was delirious. He muttered things that made no sense, fought weakly against her magic, tried twice to sit up. She met each outburst with a quiet, slightly embarrassed smile. She had heard scouts in delirium say stranger things — marriage proposals, death threats, confessions she had never asked for. It came with the work. Slowly, the spell did what it was meant to do, clearing away the confusion, and eventually he went still and slept.
Vezhka stayed where she was and didn’t move. She watched him breathe.
Another miracle. That was what this was. Andraste’s Chosen had walked out of the fire twice now, from places that should have had no exit. If that wasn’t reason to hope — if that wasn’t the clearest sign she had ever been given that this world still had a chance — she didn’t know what was.
She stroked his hair, praying quietly for his recovery. The noise in her own head had gone still. Even her shoulder seemed to have forgotten to hurt, and she noticed only now that a wisp was circling slowly around her in the dark. She smiled. Hope’s doing, she thought, with a warmth she didn’t have the energy to put into words.
Somewhere in the camp, someone began to sing — a Chantry hymn, familiar and low. Vezhka joined it without quite deciding to, her voice soft, her hand resting gently against Allen’s cheek.
When she looked down, she found him looking back at her.
She couldn’t hold the smile back. She couldn’t hold the tears back either. They came quietly, tracking down her face in the firelight.
“Herald,” she said softly, reaching up to catch a tear before it could fall on him. “I prayed for you.“
