"There is a place that waits for a force to hold it. There is a place where the Inquisition can build--grow. Skyhold."
3/3 of my postcards for @dragonageannual 2026! deeply pleased to have had the chance to make a card for this special place, the hole-filled non-osha compliant fortress of all time 🏰⚔️
Excuse my incredibly bare desktop lol
The art looks pretty as a wallpaper as well as a postcard! I'm in love <3
Thank you @sketchytea for your gorgeous work
Here is my first and main HoF! His name is Gorrick Brosca ^^
My rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good-time boy. The amount of theft and forgery this man committed cannot be accurately described with words. He's a silver-tongued little sewer rat and I love him very dearly.
@shapelytimber inspired me to try my hand at some pixel art of my own! It's certainly not as good as theirs but I had a lot of fun playing around with this.
Katoh did write, frequently. His letters were often accompanied by little souvenirs - a shiny, iridescent rock he'd plucked from the ground in the Frostback Mountains, a set of silk handkerchiefs he'd bought in Orlais, fragrant bath salts and oils from Antiva, a colorful Rivaini scarf that Reth was secretly very enamored by.
His parents were torn. On one hand, it was incredibly distressing to have their firstborn so far away from home, engaged in dangerous mercenary work. On the other, there was pride to be had in knowing they raised an independent man who was now traveling through Thedas on his own.
And they strongly suspected that Meraad, who anxiously awaited Katoh's letters and hoarded every trinket he sent like an overzealous dragon, would soon follow in her brother's footsteps.
As promised, Katoh returned in time to help with the harvest. He had a few new scars, a fuller frame, and wiser eyes. There was a sword at his hip and a shield on his back, and he looked more content than he'd ever been before.
Hissera and Reth's reservations faded away all at once. It was Hissera's greatest worry that giving her children a life outside the Qun meant they'd never find purpose, that she and her husband were depriving Katoh and Meraad of true fulfillment. Now, she was at ease, and so was Reth, who had a poor view of sellswords but was glad for his son's happiness all the same.
Meraad, on the other hand, was about ready to revolt. No amount of reasoning, arguing, or begging would move her parents' hearts; they wouldn't allow her to join her brother. She was 16, they said. Much too young to leave home. She pleaded, saying four years wasn't that great a difference. If it really was such a short time, they replied, then she could wait.
As was to be expected, Meraad tried running away with Katoh the day he departed once again. Unfortunately for the teenager, the young mercenary was in total agreement with their parents. "You're not ready," he told her, one large hand over her shoulder as he shepherded her back home. She bristled.
"I've saved your life before!"
"You have," Katoh acknowledged, "and I'm saving yours now. You're not ready, carrot." His eyes met hers, his sincerity clear. "Reth taught us well, but nothing can prepare you for what's out there. It's not for a child to experience."
Before she could protest, he stopped, leaning down so they'd be eye to eye. "Be patient. Wait four more years, and I'll take you with me. I promise."
Meraad wasn't happy, of course. But her brother had no reason to lie to her, and she knew that he'd keep his word - he'd never gone back on one before. So, unhappy but resigned, she let herself be led back home, and squeezed Katoh's hand tight before he turned to leave again.
"Four more years. You won't keep me away longer than that."
He smiled as he delivered her to their parents. "I wouldn't dream to try."
Hissera and Reth joined their neighbors in repairing the village's razed buildings and destroyed fields while Katoh healed. Once the boy could stand on his feet again, insisting he could help, too, Reth decided he was well enough to train.
Katoh and Meraad were clumsy at first, strong and steady from farmwork but sorely lacking in speed and dexterity. Reth devoted hours of his every day to correcting this. Fortunately, he didn't have to wait long to see results; his children were as talented as they were malleable, and took his lessons as the matter of life or death that they truly were.
Slowly, more and more people joined their training sessions. Fellow villagers who'd grown to respect them in the aftermath of the Tevinter raid, children who lost family in the attack, refugees who wanted to learn how to fight back so they wouldn't be so vulnerable once they inevitably took the path back to Ferelden. Reth allowed them all in, privately grateful to have others Katoh and Meraad could practice their newly learned skills on.
Time passed. News of the end of the Fifth Blight reached the Marches; the Fereldans thanked them for their hospitality and left, eager to return to their true homes even if all that was left of them was rubble. Hissera consoled her children, who were rather upset to see them go, and shook her head at Reth when he didn't understand why they'd become so attached.
He didn't yet know how much Katoh and Meraad had come to crave their companionship and stories; how small they felt their world was in comparison to theirs. Thedas was a vast, vast place, and the siblings knew but a fraction of it. Secretly, both wished to see more.
Katoh was twenty when one of the Fereldans came back to their village, looking for Reth. The blond man, remembering the Tal-Vashot's experience and prowess as a warrior, offered him to join his new band of mercenaries. "The pay is good," he promised, smiling an incredibly cajoling smile. "Much better than what you make as a farmer."
Reth declined. Politely, because he knew it came from a place of respect, but firmly, because he had no patience to deal with flatterers who couldn't take no for an answer.
But Katoh, who overheard the offer, went after the man and accepted. Before the end of the week, he was gone, packing light and leaving with the promise he'd write often and visit as much as he could.
"I'll be back to help with the harvest," he swore. Reth and Hissera were too shocked to argue.
The aftermath of the fight was beyond messy. The village's three chantry sisters and a refugee who knew the barest amount of poultice-making buzzed around the wounded, treating their injuries with harried looks and trembling hands. Hissera sat by Katoh's cot, stony faced, as her son had his belly sewn shut. Reth dared not approach, feeling, for the first time in his life, like he'd failed.
Meraad didn't approach her brother's bedside either. He suspected his daughter was still shaken from the fight; she was but ten years old. The most violence she'd been involved in before then was the scraps she and Katoh got into with the other village kids.
Wordlessly, Reth reached down and patted her head. She sniffled. "Will he die?", Meraad asked, not meeting his eyes. He didn't have to look at her face to know she was crying.
"No," he answered, finding peace in the fact that it was true. "He won't, because of you."
Just as Reth hadn't, because of him.
That should have been a comfort - and yet, he couldn't accept how close they'd all come to death from a simple skirmish. In an attempt to distance himself from the Qun, and out of fear he was molding his children into roles that weren't of their nature, he'd neglected to teach them how to fight.
Hissera hadn't committed the same mistake; she'd reared Katoh and Meraad as she'd done with many Qunari children before, and still managed to avoid letting the teachings of the Qun stain them. Why couldn't he do the same? Why had he been so sure any attempt to train their children would make them into weapons?
Reth resolved not to entertain that terrible spiral. He couldn't afford to drown himself in doubt and anxiety, not when the past was beyond his control. He needed to take action instead.
His much larger hand took Meraad's. Together, they finally approached Hissera and Katoh, a familiar and soothing sense of certainty solidifying in his mind. As soon as his son recovered from his injury, he'd do what he should have done a long time ago.
His children would know what it meant to be warriors.
It was a dark, rainy night when the raid they'd predicted finally came. Hissera, once Tamassran, was quick to guide those who could not fight away from the fray. Reth, Katoh, their neighbors, and every refugee who could still hold a weapon banded together to fight a smaller, but much better-equipped and much more experienced group of slavers that sought to capture the fit and slay the rest.
The villagers had numbers. The Vints had trained infantrymen and mages; two of them. Even as the other slavers were felled, the mages remained. Their cursed magic froze people solid, shattering their bodies into bloody, icy shards, and immolated those unlucky enough to step onto their fire glyphs in an attempt to reach them.
Reth glimpsed death at their hands.
In a moment of carelessness, he'd inadvertently put himself in the crosshairs of the cornered mages. Ice had already begun to encase his right arm when Katoh surged forward, adolescent rage in his voice and panic in his eagle yellow eyes as the blade of his axe - a regular axe meant for chopping wood, not rending bone - met the first mage's neck.
It wasn't a clean cut. The boy took four swings to completely sever the slaver's head, and Reth regretted not teaching his children the right way to fight; Katoh knew too little. So little that, in his panic, he hadn't bothered defending himself against the second mage.
The bladed tip of the Vint's staff stabbed through his belly, dark red blooming on Katoh's pale shirt. A scream caught in Reth's throat.
No. Not his boy. Not his son!
But he was not close enough to act, not fast enough to protect his firstborn as he'd been protected by him. An indescribable terror ignited in his chest with the first spark of energy that lit the second mage's staff.
And yet, nothing came. The energy sputtered and died before it could burn Katoh from the inside out, its source extinguished. The mage coughed and keeled over, a wooden spear ran through her chest. Behind her, Meraad panted, shaking, her eyes full of tears, her dark copper skin splattered with blood.
Reth took on mercenary work with other Tal-Vashot until he learned to speak the human language, strange and soft as it was. By then, Katoh was 4, and Hissera was pregnant again. With this newfound ability to communicate with others outside their own kind, the pair procured a small, decaying homestead in a new village further North. He quit the mercenary band; she gave birth to their second on the boat ride to their new home.
The new infant was Meraad, for the tempestuous tides that heralded her arrival. Katoh took to his new sister like a fish to water, always quietly holding the newborn in his small arms until she squirmed and cried to be fed. He looked after and fawned over her while his parents worked to get their overgrown plot of land back into passable shape. They did their best. Neither was a farmer.
Their neighbors were wary of them, only barely convinced they weren't spies or invaders because of the children. With time, they warmed up some, but just enough to be indifferent rather than openly hostile.
Then came the raid.
Word of a Fifth Blight reached the Free Marches. It hadn't even spread outside Ferelden yet, but horror stories traveled fast, as did the refugees. The massive wave of misery and fear that followed sowed chaos everywhere, and chaos attracts opportunists like carrion attracts scavengers. Highwaymen robbed and killed the displaced, and those who managed to evade them often fell prey to Tevinter slavers and blood mages.
Reth and Hissera's little village had been taking in as many refugees as it could hold, its homes and small chantry packed full of Fereldans and the odd Orlesian with nowhere else to go. They had no defense to speak of, and a single, aging Templar in charge of their protection.
Being besieged by those damned Vints was inevitable, in the couple's eyes. Reth, who was once Karasaad, took action; he quietly fashioned weapons for his neighbors, built barricades for their dirt roads, and stockpiled lamp oil. Katoh, then 14 and almost as big as his father, helped. Meraad, as fierce as she was precocious, had to be kept away from the makeshift spears by Hissera.
He, they called Karasaad. He had horns like a ram's, his skin a dark copper with spots where the sun hit him hardest. His duty was clear, his will unshakeable.
He was Karasaad.
She, they called Tamassran. Her hair was white as bone, her skin the color of hematite. With eagle yellow eyes, she observed and guided, as she was meant to. Her duty was clear, her will unshakeable.
She was Tamassran.
But when their paths collided, both ceased to be all at once. Par Volen no longer felt like home. The Qun no longer felt like the truth. No amount of resistance could lead them away from one another, and so they abandoned everything - the only purpose they'd ever had in life, the only life they'd ever known - and ran away, as fast and as far as feet and boats and wagons could take them.
By the time they reached the Free Marches, she'd given birth. Picking out a name, a true name, felt like an unbearable burden on both parents, who themselves had never had anything other than titles. He was Karasaad. She was Tamassran. That's what they had been before it all.
They decided to choose names for themselves, first. After a week, she was Hissera. After two, he was Reth. By the end of the month, the infant was Katoh, the end of their old reality and the beginning of a new one - terrifyingly vast and devoid of the certainty of purpose, but theirs and no one else's.
Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.
How long is too long when you're making an OC lore post? I feel like what I have saved in my drafts is waaay over the line of how much people are willing to read
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