“I walked in on them. Not like that. Not… that.. They were just lying there, she was on his chest, tracing the scars down his ribs. He was half asleep, smiling and she whispered, ‘You know this can’t end well.’
He said, ‘I know.’
She said, ‘I’ll leave first.’
‘No. I will.’ Then they both went quiet, held each other closer and. I knew then that they wouldn't... not without the other.”
A children’s rhyme spreading now through Arlathan.
Up in the tower with stars in her braid,
lives a girl made of secrets and gold and blade.
Down in the grove with the griffons that roam,
lives a boy who got lost and never went home.
They meet in the middle where silence grows sweet,
with blood on her fingers and mud on his feet,
They don’t speak of forever, they don't speak of fate,
they just hold each other and whisper, “too late.”
“… I don’t know how to start this, Revered Mother. They say confession is for sins, but I’m not sure what to call this.
There’s this elf, a Grey Warden of all things... He’s… he’s everything I was taught to be wary of. Quiet when I expect anger, gentle when the world’s burning down. He looks at me like I’m made of something more than knives and ghosts. And when he does, I forget the rest. The vows. The discipline. The weight of all the blood that brought me here. I tell myself it’s wrong. That I’m not supposed to want like this, not when I’ve seen how love ruins. But every time he’s near, the air changes. I can feel him before he speaks. He smells like rain on metal and the wild before dawn, and sometimes, Vieja Madre Mía, perdóname, I stand too close just to breathe it in.
He’s patient, far too patient. I think he knows how much he undoes me and says nothing. I talk too much around him, fill the silence so I don’t hear how loud my heart gets and when I touch him, his arm, his jaw, his back, anything, everything, it feels like stepping into sunlight after years underground. When I sit near him, the air shifts, it’s not magic, not the Fade, just him. The man who keeps his hand at the small of my back when the world feels like it’s falling apart.
If I’m fire, he’s the earth I burn upon, and somehow, that’s enough.
I know this isn’t what the Chant means when it speaks of devotion but I can’t stop praying for him. Not to Andraste, not to anyone who’d listen. Anything that could hear me, I find myself begging. I ask them to keep him safe. To let him find peace and if it’s sin to love him this much… then I’ll sin again because he looks at me like he’s already forgiven me for it.”
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art by @amys2885 thank you so much again, winning this literally means the world, they’re sososo beautiful. Thank you for your art and the inspo 💕💕
Davrin was cleaning his blade when he heard the small knock of glass, not loud, enough to break. Just that little clink of vials nudging one another as she shifted them in the bag. She swore softly in Antivan and steadied the whole bundle at once, one palm cupping the satchel, the other easing back the cloth inside it. Then she pulled them out, one by one, and laid them across her lap in careful rows: tinctures, suspensions, little glass vials sealed in wax or cork, precious as secrets. Her mouth went flatter as she checked each one, turning them toward the light, holding them up to see whether any had cracked. None had. She exhaled through her nose and kept going anyway.
Davrin watched for longer than was decent. Not just because she was beautiful in the firelight, or because Arlathan made everyone look a little haunted and a little holy, he watched because of the concentration in her hands, the quiet irritation, the familiarity of the motion. Because she had done this before, because she would do it again, because the cloth inside that satchel had stopped being enough several miles ago and she still made do with it because that was what people did when they had learned not to expect things made easier.
The next morning, while the others picked their way through a collapsed courtyard swallowed by climbing ivy, Davrin broke from the path under the excuse of checking the perimeter.
He came back with a length of fallen wood across one shoulder.
Harding looked at it. “Planning to build us a house?”
“Not today.”
That evening he sat a little apart from the fire with his knife, the wood braced against one bent knee. The first curl of shaved wood fell into Davrin’s lap. Then another.
Daianira was cleaning something from one of her rings when she stopped to look up. She watched his hands for a moment. The knife moving slow, certain, the wood turning, changing.
“What are you making?” she asked.
Davrin kept his eyes on the work. “Something.”
Her mouth tilted. “You’re very generous with information.”
“I can stop talking entirely.”
“That might improve camp morale.” He grunted, which was almost a laugh but his held the smile.
She went back to her ring, but after that she glanced up every so often. Just to see, just because.
Over the next few days the thing took shape by degrees. Not all at once. Never in one sitting. Arlathan did not allow that kind of uninterrupted peace but in the pauses, at dusk, at first light, in the hush after eating, Davrin worked.
He hollowed the first piece carefully, a box, though not obviously so at first, just a piece of wood with its center slowly carved away. Daianira realized what it was before he meant her to. She had gone to refill water and came back quietly enough that he did not hear her until her shadow fell over his shoulder. Inside the hollowed shape, fitted almost as if measure, were small divisions, narrow, even, sized for glass.
Davrin looked up, she was standing with the water skin in one hand, the other resting loose at her side, her face unreadable except for the brightness in her eyes.
He tipped the wood away from her instinctively.
Daianira’s brow lifted. “Oh, so it is a secret.”
He set the piece across his knee. “You’re hovering.”
“This is my camp too.”
“And yet you’re in my light.”
That got him a smile, quick and sharp and impossible not to look at. She crouched instead of moving away, elbows on her knees, chin angled as she regarded him and the unfinished box between his hands.
“For someone who acts as charming as you, you’re making quite a production of mystery.”
“Maker, preserve me,” Harding muttered from the fire, not bothering to hide her grin. “Will one of you just kiss or stab the other already? The suspense is getting tedious.”
Daianira barked a laugh and Davrin just watched the way it reached the corner of her eyes. But Harding’s words hung in the air a moment too long and after that Daianira stopped asking what Davrin was making, she just watched in silence.
She would settle near him while he worked, pretending interest in her own tasks. Drying herbs, binding small bundles, rewrapping her vials, oiling the leather straps of her bracers, then doing his. Assan liked these hours best; he would drift between them shamelessly, laying his head first in Davrin’s lap, then nosing at Daianira’s hand until she scratched at the feathers beneath his beak. Sometimes Davrin would glance up and find her with his head in her lap, light caught in her dark hair, and something inside him would go terribly still.
On the fourth evening he finished the box. It was perfect for her, careful embellishment, smooth lines and a fitted lid, the inside sectioned neatly for vials wrapped or unwrapped. Strong enough for travel. Small enough to carry. He rubbed oil into the wood with the heel of his palm until the grain deepened and warmed, rich as honey in the firelight. He might have stopped there. He did not.
The comb began because he saw hers in her hand the next morning.
Old wood, polished by years of use, one side cracked near the spine, still serviceable, but only because she had careful hands and more patience than she liked to advertise.
Sentimental to a fault.
The thought reached him as he watched her with hair loose over one shoulder, drawing the comb through it slowly. Assan lay at Daianira’s feet in a stripe of sunlight, one wing stretched open like a cloak just for her.
Davrin looked once and then had to look away.
By midday he had cut a second piece of wood. This one slimmer, finer grained, easier to shape delicately.
He worked the comb with more care than the box and hated what that implied. The teeth had to be even, each carved narrow and then sanded smooth against rough cloth so they would not catch. The handle he left broader to sit properly in the hand. Not ornate. Just a subtle curve, a few carved lines at the grip where his knife wanted to linger. Nothing so elaborate, only enough to make it beautiful when the light touched it.
Bellara saw it first. She sat beside him uninvited, knees drawn up, chin in hand, and watched without speaking until Davrin finally cut her a look.
“What.”
Her eyes dropped to the comb, then to the finished box by his leg, then up to his face again with that infuriating softness she wore when she had noticed something tender and intended to be unbearable about it.
“That’s lovely,” she said.
“It’s a comb.”
Bellara smiled. “Very lovely.”
He went back to carving.
“You know,” she said after a moment, “the Dalish give gifts when they’re interested in courting.”
Davrin did not look at her. “Do they.”
“Davrin.” She sat up just to stare at him.
“Bellara.”
“You should let her know that.”
“Bellara.”
She laughed under her breath and rose, apparently satisfied to have annoyed him. “Fine, fine. I’ll keep your secret.”
Daianira came by not long after, carrying a bundle of dried leaves tied in cord. She slowed when she saw the comb in his hands. Her gaze moved over it once, then to the box near his boot, then back to him. Her face did not change much. That was the problem. With her, feeling often showed first in stillness.
“That’s pretty,” she said. Davrin’s knife paused for half a breath.
“It’s wood.” A softer woman might have let him have that.
Daianira only tilted her head. “And you’re sulking at it like it’s offended you.”
“It hasn’t.”
“Yet.”
He looked up then. She was smiling, not broadly, not enough to be called a grin, just that small wicked mouth-curve she got when she knew perfectly well she had landed somewhere beneath his armor.
“Go bother Lucanis,” he said.
“He’s boring.” She sounded scandalized.
“Harding, then.”
“Oh no, she’d make me carry something.”
“And Bellara?”
“She’s busy being in love with this place.”
Davrin followed that glance despite himself. Arlathan glowed around Bellara as if answering her devotion. When he looked back at Daianira, she was looking at him instead. Not at the comb. Not at his hands. At him.
The moment held too long, just long enough that the wind wrapped her scent around him long after she walked away, mumbling about wardens and secrets.
Davrin carved the last teeth of the comb with his pulse in his throat.
He gave her the gifts on the sixth morning.
He hated that his mouth had gone dry. “For your vials.”
That line appeared between her brows and she took the bundle slowly, as if she expected it might vanish if she moved too fast. First the box with the comb laid on it, smooth and pale and warm where his hands had touched it.
The forest seemed to hush around them.
Davrin had seen her handle knives, herbs, charms, the threads of her own clothing, Assan’s ridiculous face. He had seen her lay hands on many things. But nothing prepared him for the gentleness with which she held what he had made.
“This is for me,” she said quietly. It was not a question, but it sounded like one.
He folded his arms because he had to do something with them. “You nearly broke half your kit two nights ago.”
“Nobody broke.”
“You nearly did.”
Her thumb moved over the carved handle of the comb.
“And this?”
Davrin met her eyes. There were easier answers available to him. Something dry, deflecting, something practical enough to hide behind. Instead he heard himself say, rougher than intended, “Your old one’s cracked.”
Daianira looked at him for so long that the back of his neck grew hot, then she smiled.
“This is, I— graci— ma serannas,” she said with misty eyes, holding the box and comb close to her body as though she did not trust the open air with them.
Later that day, when the sun rose high enough to burn away the mist, he saw Daianira near one of the broken columns and open the bundle again.
Davrin was not watching, he only happened to look over when she lifted the comb to her hair.
The teeth slid through without catching. Once. Twice. Again. Dark strands smoothed beneath the carved wood, sunlight flickering over her hands. She slowed after the third stroke and looked down at it with that same strange, softened expression, as if the thing in her hand had become suddenly heavier with meaning than wood alone should be. Then, perhaps feeling his gaze, she looked up.
Across the little ruined pavilion, through strips of gold light, her eyes found his. There was no smile on her mouth then, only warmth, startling and direct in her eyes and a quiet wind that felt like magic and beginnings on his skin.
