Tagged by @teknon, who knows I love this shit.
1. Do you have a favorite character to write? Who and why?
Warden-Commander Lyna Mahariel Sabrae. She’s a workaholic with big appetites, my ENTJ babe deeply in love with two people, and has increasingly found she is willing to stretch her personal morals to rid herself and Alistair of the Taint and protect the people she loves, cultivating a discerning ruthlessness to get what she needs. She also believes she’s doing this for the Grey Wardens, but in reality that’s a secondary goal she won’t like admitting. Her grasp of politics is pretty good for someone who had to learn it in wartime and then later thrown in the deep end of Amaranthine, and always geared toward using connections and resources to affect solutions. But because all of that was also learned through some awful people or awful circumstances, she will lean into any excuse to act on her impatience and disgust when she’s done and rip into someone even when it’s ill-advised.
She has some unhealthy coping mechanisms and she fucks up her relationships by doing the wrong things for the right reasons, but she’s soft with her people, soft with close friends, soft at home with family. Family is a really big deal to her. She’s even a little soft with some of her Wardens, because they’re her family too. God help anyone who tries taking these people away. They’re the only people she feels comfortable being fully herself around. The rest of the world gets this:
I like exploring giving her what she wants and needs but also seeing the consequences of her actions past and present. She keeps getting insight into who she really is and what her limits are. And so do I.
2. Do you have a favorite trope to write? Or one you want to write?
On a regular basis? Scars, I'd say -- they’re among the many things that can help define a character, whether they were gained deliberately or accidentally. Comparing scars, telling stories about them, having a loved one touch or kiss one -- it has a feeling of validation and acceptance of “flaws” both seen and unseen. How one feels about their scars and how they react to revealing or hiding them to someone else says a lot about who they are and their priorities, and how they see specific people or even the society around them. Are they proud? Are they ashamed? Why or why not? Was it the specific circumstances of getting the scar, or is it how their culture views scars, and who is and isn’t allowed (or is supposed to!) have them? Are their feelings centered on the scar itself, or what the scar means?
I don’t know if there’s a trope I want to write. I guess you could argue that some scenes or situations I have planned for my longfic, or ideas for future fics, might fit into one trope or another -- for example, if I can ever finish my longfic, I have plans for a sequel that picks up with Lyna’s grown kids. Does that count as “babyfic” even if they’re not babies but (young) adults instead, and exploring their individual identities and legacies apart from their parents? Or that trope could apply instead to the one-shot I’ll tackle in future of the time Lyna gives birth to Merana, I dunno -- the plan there isn’t so much on “baby” but what baby’s arrival means to Lyna, Zevran, Junar, Alistair, Fiona, Ashalle, her clan, Ferelden, etc. (More focused upon Zevran, Junar, and Alistair than anyone else, but still.)
When I write, I don’t think in terms of what I’m writing fitting into a trope. I don’t plan that way. I just write what I like and what makes sense to me, and if it happens to fit into a trope, so be it. I’d rather consider themes and character development before anything else, and maybe I’ll lean into a juicy trope along the way. :)
3. Share your favorite description you’ve written?
My favorites change from time to time! And right now I’m digging what I wrote of Lyna’s dreams after she came close to dying from Avernus’s ritual to stave off his Calling, and he had to be killed to save her. (Trigger warning for graphic imagery and body horror.)
Her dreams were not kind. Avernus himself was a frequent focus.
“Did I serve well,” he said in one as she pushed him into Kal’Hirol’s breeding pits.
“Vigilance and sacrifice,” he said in another as he pulled dark ropes that emerged from under her skin and ate them, eyes gone white and teeth jagged shards. The Landsmeet, her clan, and everyone she had ever known watched and applauded as the mage then plunged his fingers into her eyes and hummed a lullabye.
Birds croaked and chased her through close, labyrinthine halls. “Fail, fail, fail,” they cried as the earth cracked open and the roots of ancient trees pulled her down into lightless, suffocating depths.
Cracked mirrors showed Alistair, black vines creeping up around his body, turning and walking away toward a dim candle reflected in a thousand shards.
“I am sorry,” said Avernus in another fragment of dream as she held his head under a darkening pool, and she let go with a choking cry as his face shifted to Zevran’s. She ran from the images and, hearing a familiar voice singing, followed the thread of the tune and sank further into dreamless sleep.
4. Share your favorite dialogue you’ve written?
Same as above -- my favorites change periodically. Right now it’s the dialogue between Avernus and Lyna (with Zevran and Falke) after she’s just returned to Soldier’s Peak with all the research goodies to set him to work on a cure. Avernus is in a bad way; even after all this time of staving it off, the Calling is still catching up with him and he’s increasingly losing himself. I’m gonna beg for everyone’s patience, because this dialogue represents an entire chapter, but I’m very proud of my treatment of Avernus and how this situation reveals more of Lyna’s ruthless and calculating side.
“Banalhan fenedhis,” Lyna muttered and rushed up the small set of steps to Avernus as the ancient mage tottered. She caught him, his frame thinner than she remembered under her fingers. One of his hands clutched at her arm for a moment, first too soft to register and then terribly firm and strong. He rallied and pulled up straight, waving her off with a withered scowl.
“Enough of that. I am old, yes, but I am not expiring. Yet,” he grumbled, the last word softer than the rest of his admonition. Avernus blinked, filmy blue eyes fixing on Lyna. “I’ve been waiting for you. Why has it taken you so long?”
“Brasca,” Lyna heard, then immediately after, “Maker!” She glanced back at Zevran and Falke, Zevran moving swiftly to join her and Falke standing, transfixed, halfway across the room.
“I was not aware…,” she said, frowning. “But I came as quickly as possible, regardless.”
“Too quickly,” Zevran said as he came to a stop before the mage, eyes narrowed.
Avernus flapped his hand at the assassin. “I can see your suspicious mind working, elf. You think I have so much precious blood to expend to bend her to my will?” He coughed a dry laugh. “I merely whispered as I did with Levi, although apparently it is much weaker these days.”
He sighed. “And yes, hearing the call is infernally distracting.”
“When did you begin hearing it?” Lyna said sharply. Her hope was ebbing with the blood mage’s life, suspicion and self-recrimination filling in its wake. She reached out and squeezed Zevran’s arm. I am fine. With Avernus’s revelation she understood why she’d felt pulled – they had indeed felt like whispers on the edge of her mind, but so faint she’d dismissed them as her own worry even as she let the worry push her along.
“Since before we met, but the voice grew so much louder during my experiments after the information you sent regarding the Architect,” Avernus said, finding a bench with his hand and sitting. Lyna let go and stepped back, hearing Falke slowly mount the steps behind her.
“That and my discovery were why I urged all haste. I feel myself slipping away and my years catching up with me.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “Your mercy has been a double-edged weapon, Mahariel. I have had time to atone with my studies, but only now do I feel the lash. It was inevitable, I suppose. All my arrogance come to roost upon my shoulders and remind me why the Grey Wardens do not go alone into the Deep Roads in the end.” He glanced up at her, a silent plea, and looked away in shame.
“And there are no entrances near here,” she said softly. If she had only opened the letter, or taken it to Weisshaupt herself…
“There is another way,” Zevran said quietly. He stood back, one hand at the dagger at his waist.
“No,” Falke blurted, and pushed his way between Lyna and Zevran to kneel in front of Avernus, taking the old man’s hands in his. “Maker have mercy on your soul and grant you peace, but please, not yet. We have come so far, and we need you. The Grey Wardens still need you. If there is to be atonement, there is one last thing you can do to earn it and your peace.”
“Aren’t you the passionate soul. You remind me of Sophia,” Avernus replied, eyes boring curiously into the young man before him. “What more would the Grey Wardens need of me, hmm? Have I not done enough?” He pulled his hands out of Falke’s grasp and set them in his lap.
“This is Warden Falke of the Anderfels, Avernus. A friend, traveling companion, and as interested as I am in finding a way to remove the taint and thus end the Calling from the Grey Wardens,” Lyna said, folding her arms.
“Are you, now?” Avernus said, watching Falke stand up and step back. “And what makes you think I have not considered that option already?”
“Because I know what you are, Avernus, and I knew when I judged you. Ambitious, more interested in power to extend your life than to face it,” she said. The mage’s eyes snapped up to hers. “Killing Sophia was right – a demon cannot atone and would have fed Levi half-truths. It was a threat. But you I knew would be useful, and had the capacity to regret as it did not.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Falke and Zevran shoot her looks she did not currently want to decipher. She continued.
“You may have found a way to slow the taint and to harness its power, but to control it? Not yet, or not enough to enable its eradication. That would edge too closely on seeing your own death, would it not? What would you be without the taint? Having lived so long with its help? Dead. If you sought that, you could have ended yourself at any point, or manipulated the others here to help you to it long ago.”
She stepped over to the bench and sat down beside him.
“But now the end is near despite your struggle against it. You have nothing left but your studies. Perhaps they can grant you freedom from the taint and death from old age instead of the quick death of a maddened dog,” she said. “And I have information that would be useful to the man interested in knowledge and true atonement.”
Avernus coughed his laugh once more. “A demon’s bargain you present me. A demon would have offered me more life, however. That is the only difference between you, Warden-Commander. You must need me very much.” He peered at her from under his bristled white brows, gaze piercing and eerie. “Eradicating the taint will not free your king from his obligations, girl, and Theirin history shows they will abandon what inconveniences them.”
“If that was the only reason I was doing this, that might have hurt,” she acknowledged dryly. “And your history knowledge is incomplete. If you ask him nicely, Falke might bring you up to date.”
“Would you stop? This is too important to fight about,” Falke said angrily. “A Grey Warden was freed from the taint, Avernus.”
“Impossible,” the mage said shortly. “The darkspawn taint, once ingested, feeds and grows. One may as well ask a chicken to revert to an egg.”
“Not impossible, and I have samples of your egg’s blood and her story, among other things,” Lyna said. “Curiously, her story is also connected to the Architect.”
Avernus’s hands fisted in his lap. “I must know more.”
“I thought you might,” Lyna said, rising from the bench. The mage looked up at her hungrily. “Will you study this, then? Discover the means and how to do so again?”
“With such a carrot dangled in front of me, how can I refuse?” Avernus said. “Very well. For as long as I am able to give them, the Grey Wardens still have my services.” He closed his eyes, relieving Lyna momentarily of his disturbing gaze. “In death-“
“Sacrifice,” she answered.
5. Scene you haven’t written, but want to?
I get this is probably asking me for scenes I don’t have plans to write but “it would be nice, someday” to write... but I don’t quite work like that. If I’m serious about writing a story, then there generally aren’t scenes like that I’m not planning on. If I want to write a scene, it’ll get written whether it fits into the longfic or has to be a related one-shot instead. Not all my headcanons about my characters will get written nor do I want to write them, aside from just sharing the headcanons themselves. (Like Junar accidentally learning a curse word from Lyna, and repeating it despite her trying to get him to stop, and Zevran just laughing his ass off at the situation. The idea in itself is cute and funny and I don’t need a whole scene or fic to enjoy it!)
So instead, scenes I do plan on writing and am looking forward to:
Falke nerding out with Brother Genetivi
Lyna, Falke, Zevran, and the two Seekers accompanying them inside the Aeonar
Zevran and Alistair talking post-Aeonar, expressing grief and having difficult but potentially healing conversations about their relationships
Ashalle comforting Lyna in her time of grief
Lyna, Lia, and Anora hashing out their problems and finding some solutions that have the opportunity for healing
Zevran’s continued brushes and struggles with the Crows, and his growing upset at how Lyna continually puts herself into danger not just for herself but for him as well
Lyna’s increasingly creepy discoveries in the tunnels of Kirkwall and the quarries
Lyna’s interactions with the Wardens at Kirkwall, and keeping an eye on but avoiding Anders and Merrill (to protect them), and pleading with Marethari to move the clan
Lyna and Zevran escaping the chaos of the Arishok’s rampage
I know this list is pretty spoilery of almost the entire rest of my fic, so apologies to readers who prefer not to be spoiled at all! But as you can see, there’s a lot I have planned and a lot I’m looking forward to, so perhaps that will be reassuring to you instead. :)
-- Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to also answer these questions @ma-suranas, @apostatetabris, @goblin-deity, @funkypoacher, and @dickeybbqpit. (I know some of my mutuals have already been tagged for this meme, which is why I didn’t tag you, but I am always interested in reading what you have to say about your writing! And for anyone else, if you want to do this meme and I haven’t tagged you, please do it -- I’ll try to be on the lookout for it, but you can tag me just to be sure I see it!)
