#maevra lavellan

[thecryoftheseagulls]

reading back through my own Maevra Lavellan tag from 2015 like

I remembered the ficlet where she accidentally starts her own vallaslin-less clan but that was about it. The problem is that the Solas romance didn't really stick for me in the intervening years in the way that Anders (and Alistair and Fenris) did... I think Solas is just not as much current day me's type?

Damla will probably be my "canon" Inquisitor for the purposes of my first Veilguard run, but with Solas playing such a heavy role, I want the possibility of that solavellan angst. Much to think about...

[thecryoftheseagulls]

I have done ten minutes of poking around the Trespasser dlc and I’m already screaming

VARRIC AS VISCOUNT???

BRAN WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR HAIR OH MY GOD

KREM AND MARYDEN??? I’M 

(this opens up really lovely ideas for threesome with Damla and Krem though?? I haven’t had much opportunity to explore her being poly but like...THROW MARYDEN IN THERE DAMLA IS DEFINITELY DOWN)

[thecryoftheseagulls]

so! happier headcanons!

Maevra has a natural affinity with the Inquisition mounts, especially the harts. When she finds so many halla roaming the Exalted Plains, she is able to tame a few. She brings them back to Skyhold and keeps them on the slopes below the hold. Eventually the harts get stabled with the smaller halla, and Mae even adds a pair of august rams to her growing herd after a long visit to the Emerald Graves. Dennet offers his expertise, but it’s Maevra’s pet project. She and Loranil, who quickly becomes a close friend after he joins the Inquisition, spend a lot of time with the herd, talking about the history and future of their people while tending to the creatures. 

After...with Solas gone and Corypheus defeated, the herd offers a kind of solace. It has become easier, over time, for Maevra to adapt to the human customs of this place. Diplomacy becomes second nature - she even takes to sleeping in her actual bed on occasion. But still, with the power of the Inquisition on the rise, kings and nations vying for her favor, the might of an army at her back and no unified threat to save the world from...Maevra begins to feel restless. She has never spent so long in one place before, and while Skyhold has become something of a home (indeed, there is no other home to go back to, now), she still feels misplaced. She tends the herd and helps set the world to rights, when asked. 

Purpose finds her, not the other way around, when the first of the new elven recruits arrive to join the Inquisition. Dalish and city elf, mage and non-mage, they come to swear themselves to the cause of the elvhen hero who saved the world. And with them come questions - what happened to her vallaslin? what is the Fade like? what did she find at the Temple of Mythal? what do the voices of the Well of Sorrows tell her? They all wish to learn from her. 

Informal lessons start, on the slopes of the mountains among the halla and their kin. Mostly Maevra tells them stories  - she is no teacher, but she can speak of what she has seen. She learns their names, their hopes and dreams, their talents. Here, a young hunter who tended the halla of his clan to aid her with the herd. There, a group of teenagers who want to learn to defend themselves. She sets them up with Cullen and helps train the warriors herself. One of Fiona’s elven mages, taken from his clan as a youth, wishes to relearn what history of the People he has forgotten. And always the question why she no longer wears the vallaslin of their people. She tells them about Solas, the apostate who spent his life studying the Fade, walking amongst the living memories there of their past. She tells them how much he taught her, what the true meaning of the vallaslin is. It is not long before one of the hunters comes to her, wishing that his vallaslin too be removed. At first, Maevra tries to dissuade her - the looks she has been given by those of the People who feel she has dishonored their heritage, no matter the truth - these she does not wish on anyone. But she is determined. Maevra and Dorian spend weeks combing old tomes for the spell Solas might have used to take away her vallaslin, eventually managing to cobble together one of their own devising which does the trick, if not quite as neatly (sometimes the blood writing lingers, and the spell must be applied several times). Dorian teaches it to several of the elven mages. 

“Ar lasa mala revas,” Maevra whispers to each who come forward to have the vallaslin taken away, just as Solas did for her. “You are free.”

After that...things progress quickly. Some of the younger ones start calling themselves part of ‘Clan Maevra’ - at first in jest, then in earnest. It spreads. Mae doesn’t like being the unofficial leader of a makeshift new clan, but it does soothe the ache left by a clan that no longer exists. Eventually, they make her their Keeper - the first in memory without magic (unless you count the Anchor, of course), and she finds she cannot refuse. A new clan is born - free elves given respect under the banner of the Inquisition, who do not distinguish between city elf and Dalish (this, Maevra insists upon) and who wear their faces unmarked. They pay homage to the old gods, but they don’t quite worship them (”I don’t think they were ever truly gods,” Maevra says). They seek out and preserve what history of the elvhen they can, but recognize that their attempts to reconstruct the past can be flawed. It is a new day for the People. 

[thecryoftheseagulls]

okay so thebearmuse​ sort of indirectly tagged me with this one - mostly I just had thoughts and wanted to do it for Mae. 

1. Origin/class/gender/age. Do you have headcanons about their origin that inquisition doesn’t cover? Expand it.

Maevra Lavellan, two-handed warrior, cis female, 24. 

she looks like this:

So obviously she’s Dalish, but she’s not what Sera would call an ‘elfy elf’. She was orphaned at a young age (maybe four or five? i haven’t quite decided yet) when her parents, both hunters, were murdered by some human nobles when they were off on a hunt alone. She basically spends her childhood on her own - theoretically the clan as a whole raises her but in practice that means she’s just always on the outskirts of everything. She’s a loner, for a myriad of reasons - she’s a terrible archer, which isolates her from the rest of the hunters and future hunters, she’s this really independent orphan, and she doesn’t always agree with the rest of her clan in regards to the typical superiority complex the Dalish have going on. This isolation leads to her befriending the young First of the clan, Zukkan - he’s older than her by about 8 years, but his magic and training sets him off from the rest of the clan as well, so they end up banding together. It’s strictly a platonic relationship (they’re both bi, but Zuk tends to prefer men), in a lot of ways because of the age difference. By the time they’re old enough to overcome that, it would just be weird for them to be romantically interested in each other. 

Both Zukkan and Maevra get sent to the Conclave (by this point, Mae is kind of Zuk’s unofficial bodyguard, so there’s no way the Keeper is going to send him on his own). In Mae’s canon, Zuk survives the explosion but goes back to the clan with news of her status as the ‘Herald’ and stays with them. 

2. Meaning behind their name, or at least reason why you chose it. Any would do.

Okay so originally I conceived of an elven Inquisitor dude with Fenris’s coloring to romance Dorian, and I was going to call him Maevros, which was my slightly altered homage to Tolkien’s Maedhros, one of my faves in the Silmarillion. And then my male Lavellan ended up as a older, somewhat sleazier version of ATLA’s Zuko, instead, so I feminized the name and gave it to the lady I was creating to romance Solas. 

3. Any extra AUs they’re involved in?

Obviously Mae exists in Zukkan’s canon, too, though in that case, I envision her surviving the Conclave and then refusing to leave Zukkan’s side. She joins the Inquisition alongside him, to watch his back, and I’m pretty sure she still ends up in a relationship with Solas. (Probably. She’s eyed Sera and Cullen a few times, sooo it’s possible in that world she might end up with one of those two). 

4. What nickname Varric gave them (or would if they ever met)?

Varric calls her ‘Sparrow’ because she’s small and ordinary, even a bit plain, but fierce. 

5. Favourite scent. Do they use it as a perfume? (I’m probably weird for wanting to smell your oc- I know that)

She’s not a very...flowery sort. I strongly doubt that she wears or even thinks about wearing perfume. She smells like earth and leather and sword polish, generally. When she gets to Skyhold, she finds she misses simple smells - forest air and creek water, campfire and wilderness. She takes to sleeping outside, on her balcony, because her bed’s too soft and the room too confining. She misses sleeping under the stars. After that, she smells almost perpetually of brisk mountain air. 

6. Fighting style, preferred weapons, favourite spells. You can use all Dragon Age classes and specializations in DA universe as long as it sticks to canon.  

Maevra wields a greatsword about as long as she is tall. Most people tend to underestimate her - she doesn’t look like she would even be able to lift it, really, as short and chunky as she is. The one she starts the game with, which disappears during the Conclave explosion, is one she saved for a loooong time to special order from a blacksmith in Tantervale. She tries a bunch of new ones before Dagna finally makes her one with a blade made of veridium, which Mae dubs ‘Remembrance’. 

Her fighting style is inelegant and pieced together from techniques she more or less taught herself, lacking as she did a real teacher. It’s brutal and unrefined, like an all out brawl with a giant sword (but effective). Later, she gets some actual instruction from various members of the Inquisition (Bull, Cassandra, and Cullen, mostly) and that serves to make her a bit more skilled, but not really more graceful. It takes her a long time to choose a specialization, but ultimately she settles on Champion (the idea of an elven champion leading the Inquisition appeals to the part of her that believes Solas when he says her position can make a real difference for elves around Thedas). 

7. Sum up their personality. Diplomatic, humorous or aggressive? Do they enjoy violence? What’s their philosophy on killing?

Maevra tends to deploy diplomacy in conversation more often than not, because she’s a very empathetic sort, but in battle she’s ruthless. Killing doesn’t phase her, especially not when her friends are threatened. People who hurt her people, as the members of the Inquisition quickly become, get dead. It’s perhaps telling that in both Solas’s and Sera’s personal quest, she lets them kill the people who have wronged them. A lot of this has to do with what she wishes she could have done for herself - if she’d had the opportunity to get revenge on her parent’s murderers, or save her clan from being wiped out? She would have soaked the ground in blood. There’s a reason she becomes Zukkan’s guard dog, in a lot of ways, while they’re still children - he’s a mage with his head in the clouds, and she’s both tougher than she looks and willing to do whatever it takes to defend people she cares about. 

8. Do they appear attractive for their own brethren? Are they attractive by human beauty standards?

Maevra is short even for an elf. She’s far from the usual lithe ideal that most elves (and humans lbr) think of. She’s got a square jaw and a big hooked nose (broken in two places). She looks chubby, frankly, until she flexes, and then you realize that she’s pretty much solid muscle under all that. So no. She’s not attractive by traditional elven standards or by the human idea of what a beautiful elf should look like. I think she’s extremely cute, but thedosian society might disagree. 

9. Place them on D&D character alignment chart.

Chaotic good. It’s important to her from the beginning that she aid the Inquistion - she sees a lot of people lost and hurting, and she wants to help them. She’s always had a problem with the idea that all Dalish should be aloof from the rest of the world. She mistrusts human institutions for obvious reasons, particularly those which involve human nobles, but she also dislikes some of the traditions among the Dalish. This leads to a lot of conflict within her, because she strongly believes that the Dalish mission to preserve and restore their people’s history is important, even while she doesn’t 100% agree with their methods. 

10. Give me the link to their inspiration/development tag. Pretty please :)

Maevra Lavellan is her main tag, though there’s not a lot there right now. Stuff for her and Solas goes in the otp: don’t wake me up tag. 

[thecryoftheseagulls]

Blackwall halts the motion of his whetstone and lays his naked blade across his knees, looking over the campfire at Maevra Lavellan and that Dalish elf they’ve just recruited, Loranil. They’ve been over there for hours, sitting out of the way and so close their knees are almost touching, just...chattering away.

"The Inquisitor seems awfully taken with our newest companion,” he observes, lifting both thick brows and giving Solas a pointed look.

“It is only natural that she enjoy the companionship of someone like herself,” Solas comments, unfazed. “She is Dalish, after all.”

“The memories are sharp, catching, tearing, but so bright,” Cole interrupts, his voice soft. They both turn to look at him. “She doesn’t want to let go. The First’s eyes are bright as firelight when he laughs. He calls her da fenlin, tousles her hair like she’s a child still. She can’t remember her parent’s faces, blurry, fading, soft-edged, gone. They’re all gone now, the Keeper, Zuk, Nonyla, the rest. She’s afraid she won’t be able to remember them either. What if she forgets? She can’t forget. She is the last (last of the Elvhenan) she has to remember. 

“The arrow never quite hits its target. The other children laugh at her. Flat-ear, they say. ‘Bout as good as a shem. She doesn’t belong, doesn’t quite fit, like the one brass key on a ring of silver ones. But now they are gone, all of them, and it hurts, like a hole inside her. She could fill it - friendslovevhenantakethefighttoCorypheusstandtallstandproudabeacon - but that would be to give them up, and she can’t. She can’t. Never again. She is the last, last of the Elvhenan, last of the Lavellan, walker of the lonely path.”

Cole opens eyes he has closed. “He makes it hurt less,” he finishes, gesturing at Loranil. 

Blackwall swallows thickly.

“There you have it,” Solas says, rising gracefully. He goes to stand beside the Inquisitor. Maevra smiles at him, grips his hand until he folds himself down beside her, leaving Cole and Blackwall in silence on the other side of the fire. 

[thecryoftheseagulls]

#7 for any 4 OCs (childhood meme)

heyyyy look I forgot to finish this. whooops. 

(question was: What is one moment as a child or teen that your OC felt rebellious?)

Zeryn Brosca

Zeryn hates life in Dust Town. She hates that she has to make sure her mother doesn’t choke on her own vomit in her sleep, hates the hours Rica spends before a broken mirror with borrowed cosmetics, hates the silence her sister keeps when she returns, late, from some noble’s bed. She hates the dirt and the smell and the closeness of it all, the way merchants clutch their wares and mother’s clutch their children when she dares emerge from her assigned place in the muck. She bears it because she has to. 

Duncan’s arrival gives her the chance to escape she’s been waiting for, and taking that stone-cursed warrior’s place in the Provings is, most ways, the first time she’s out and out rebelled against Beraht’s commands and the expectations of the caste system. But four years before, at the age of 17, she came close. That was when she’d found Letty again. 

Lettia, raven-haired, bright-eyed, beautiful. The first person Zeryn ever kissed. The first she ever loved. Letty didn’t like boys, not like Zeryn did, only girls, but that didn’t stop Beraht’s predecessor, Garam, from dressing her up like a painted doll and selling her off to the highest bidder. Zeryn never knew which noble it was, not till she’d worked her ass off for two years and ‘earned’ the location from Beraht. When she went, creeping all the way up to the Diamond Quarter one night, she found Letty with a toddler on one hip and an infant on the other, with a sister too young to be a noble hunter yet to look after as well, and Garam masquerading as a beloved uncle to make it into the household. Letty looked half dead, a shell of her former self, a pretty bird in a cage no more free than the streets of Dust Town. For that, Zeryn would have killed them all, struck Garam down and slit the bastard nobleman’s throat in his sleep, taken Letty and the babies to the surface or died trying. But Letty said no, said she was happy, said this was the way it was, and Zeryn knew she was lying, but dammit if she couldn’t do anything about it. So she left them there, the lot of them, because Letty asked her to. 

Lettia was dead by her own hand within the year.  

Logan Hawke

At 18, Logan packs his bags and leaves Lothering. This staying settled in one place doesn’t agree with him - the years as a child spent on the run have formed him, irrevocably, into a wanderer, and he figures the family will be safer with one less mage around. (It’s Carver, of course, the boy’s eyes damp and chin quivering, that Logan regrets leaving the most, not Leandra with her sobs and her loud pleas for him to stay, nor Malcolm with his stoic acceptance, or Bethany with her many hugs). He wanders Fereldan for three years, stopping in to visit the family only when he’s in the area, and only returns ‘home’ when news of Malcolm’s final illness reaches him. It’s during those years he falls in love with a human hunter named Rowan, in the forests of the lower Frostbacks, until the man learns that he has magic and abandons him. Logan rescues a mabari pup from a flooded river one spring and Maelstrom stays with him thereafter. 

Maevra Lavellan/Zukkan Lavellan

For all she’s supposed to become a hunter of the clan, Mae is a horrible shot. Sometimes she hits what she’s aiming at, but never with any great accuracy. She’s terrible with throwing knives and slings too, and if she didn’t know how to fish and set up snares, she probably would starve were she on her own. But with staves? There she’s a natural. Zukkan finds her fighting off some of the bigger kids who are picking on her when she’s only a little thing, and since she’s not afraid of his magic and he doesn’t call her a flat-ear, they get along just fine. Eventually, Zukkan decides his young protege needs to learn how to wield a sword. They start sneaking off to the human cities to watch the guardsmen training, and learn to pick up the less lilting speech of the city elves so they won’t be immediately picked out as elvhenan. It stops, of course, about the time Zuk gets his vallaslin, which is a bit harder to hide than an accent, but Mae keeps at it. Once or twice she even gets lessons - one alienage has a group of makeshift guards of their own who give her her first taste of the feel of a broadsword in her hands. The method she picks up by watching and listening and teaching herself is crude, but it’s effective. Keeps her and Zuk safe on more than one occasion, and serves her well when they get to the Conclave. 

[thecryoftheseagulls]

my gawd it’s like 12:30 okay one last thought before I retire - I am really looking forward to Boulder Adaar’s playthrough, actually. I put him on Adelen Aeducan/Logan Hawke’s world state because I already had that one all set to go, but actually I think he fits the whole ‘untraditional men’ theme that we are going for perfectly, so he might end up being the one who stays there. I didn’t realize, in playing a Qunari my first playthrough, how strong of an opinion Bull has against the Tal Vashoth, but some dialgoue with him and Maevra showed that he really projects his fears of becoming a mindless brute without the Qun onto them. I don’t know how other people who have played out Bull x Adaar romances reconcile all of that, but I’m kinda looking forward to the tension it will create. WIth Boulder, anyways. With Damla, the pairing was kind of out of the question because there was the whole issue of her being a mage on top of Vashoth, and Damla was just so wary of him as Ben-Hassrath that it would never have worked out.