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He hadn’t been to a Joining since his own. He’d forgotten the solemnity of the situation. Maybe he’d been too nervous to properly pay attention last time, or maybe it was different because this time he knew what the price could be…
Oddly, Duncan seemed more at ease today than he’d been at Alistair’s ceremony. Maybe he knew that they’d all pull through. Maybe you got a sense for that kind of thing as you got older. He certainly hoped so.
He’d tried not to get too attached to any of the recruits; really, he had. But he’d been camping in the wilds with them for the past three days, and since there was little else to do around a campfire but talk, he’d inadvertently ended up getting to know them all quite well.
Once he knew them, it was really hard not to like them.
Jory was a bit of a stick in the mud – and, honestly, a bit of a coward sometimes – but time with the wardens would soon cure him of that. Plus, he was thoughtful, careful. Not to mention honourable. He’d probably be a good person to have at your back, once he’d loosened up a bit.
Daveth, of course, was almost the complete opposite. He was fun, carefree, and either very brave or very stupid. He hadn’t quite figured out which. If it was the latter, he was almost certainly going to be cured of it quickly once they were regularly facing darkspawn across the battlefield. If it was the former, well, almost foolish bravery was basically a requirement when you were regularly facing darkspawn across the battlefield.
Then, of course, there was her.
He hadn’t quite figured her out, which was the most frustrating thing, because she was the one he most wanted to. From the moment they’d met – when they’d teased each other over his ‘sassing’ of the mage – they’d had something of a… rapport. She’d actually laughed at his jokes and she always gave as good as she got.
Not only that but she led. He, Jory and Daveth were all experienced warriors (of a kind) but they soon found themselves following her directions. She just had a sort of … presence, which made you believe in her as if she’d been giving orders all her life.
Which, as far as he knew, she might have been.
She didn’t really say a lot about her past. Just the basics: that she’d been of noble birth, and that her family had been killed quite recently. Both of which Duncan had already told him, but he supposed that if he’d lost his family recently, he wouldn’t want to talk too much about his past either.
Not that he knew what having a family was like, of course.
But he had been imagining having one all his life, and maybe that counted for something.
Either way, he was curious about her past. About the place and people that had made her.
He was pretty sure that she, at least, would make it through. She wasn’t a coward. In fact, based on the way she’d laid into the darkspawn – with a mixture of grace and precision that honestly he felt privileged to witness – she seemed to have something of a death wish.
She also appeared healthy and strong, and her bloodline was presumably one with a long and proud lineage. Though, of course, he had no idea what actually governed surviving the Joining, these factors seemed like good ones to have when you were about to chug a goblet of darkspawn blood and hope for the best.
“Alistair, if you would?”
Right, he was the junior member of the order now. A position that, for some reason, seemed to hold a lot of responsibility. Or, at least, it had felt that way over the last few days.
“Join us, brothers and sisters.” He began reciting the words that had been burned into his brain by Duncan ever since he had started recruiting. “Join us in the shadows where we stand vigilant, join us as we carry the duty that cannot be foresworn, and should you perish, know that your sacrifice shall not be forgotten, and that one day we shall join you.”
He tried to ignore the way all three of them turned to him at the word ‘perish’. Jory looking panicked and scared as ever, Daveth looking shocked but somehow amused by the revelation, and Elissa… Well, Elissa looked downright angry.
He wondered why.
“Daveth, step forward,” Duncan intoned, carrying forward the large Joining goblet with both hands. The inlaid Grey Warden crest glittered ominously in the firelight. The liquid inside just as dark red, viscous and unappetising as he remembered.
Daveth, somehow still with a slight smile on his face, took the cup and drank a single gulp, which Alistair had to confess was probably the best way to approach the task.
There was a moment where Daveth swayed on his feet, then he let out a choked breath as Alistair held his own, waiting. Next, he fell to his knees, his eyes rolling back in his head, before he gasped in one more breath of air. His last, as it turned out.
“Maker’s breath,” Jory gasped.
He could well understand the man’s shock. It didn’t look like the most peaceful or pleasant of deaths. He remembered all too well that awful moment when Damian had succumbed; his death made all the worse by the knowledge that he and Conall could very well follow.
It was one thing to be told you might die; it was quite another to see it right before your eyes.
“I am sorry, Daveth,” Duncan said, looking somehow older, wearier as he then turned towards the next candidate. “Step forward, Jory.”
Instead, Jory took a step back. And then another, and another.
Alistair wanted to scream at him to stand, to take the risk, to believe he would come through it and then maybe he would. Maybe that was the way to ensure survival. Or maybe there was no way and no knowing. Duncan surely wouldn’t have put Daveth through the Joining if he had at all thought that he wouldn’t survive it, would he?
But Jory drew his blade and Alistair knew what came next. It hadn’t happened at his own Joining, but he knew the cost. In front of him, Elissa took a step forward as if to intervene, but he laid a hand on her shoulder and shook his head.
There was still a chance that she, at least, might survive. But not if she stopped Duncan in the execution of his duty. Thankfully, she heeded his warning, but the disbelief and anger in her eyes told him that she didn’t like it.
He couldn’t say that he didn’t understand how she felt. It was hard, sometimes, being confronted with the reality of Grey Warden duty. But at the end of the day it was worth anything to stop the blight, and anyone who’d faced darkspawn would surely agree, right?
“But I have a wife,” Jory pleaded, still backing away as Duncan stalked towards him. “A child! Had I known…”
“There is no turning back,” Duncan growled.
“No,” Jory argued as Alistair’s hand tightened on Elissa’s shoulder, an attempt to keep them both in place. “You ask too much, there is no glory in this.”
The ‘fight’ was almost laughably short. Seasoned warrior though he was, Jory was no match for Duncan. Within three moves, Duncan had plunged his dagger deep into Jory’s abdomen.
Odd to think that only last night he had been telling them all an amusing story from his days as a knight.
“I am sorry,” Duncan said as Jory fell at his feet, his lifeblood pouring out over the stones, eyes still widened in shock and pain.
Alistair stepped away from Elissa before Duncan saw, just in case it wasn’t allowed or something, all the while trying to cling onto the numbness that had overtaken him. Two deaths already, both horrific. He wasn’t sure he could take a third.
Not if it was her.
“But the Joining is not yet complete,” Duncan said, turning toward Elissa, the Joining cup once again grasped in his hands. “You are called upon to submit yourself to the taint for the greater good.”
She stood, her feet firmly planted on the ground as if to remind herself that she couldn’t run. Her breathing was heavy with a nervousness that he could well understand, but the anger still simmered there behind her eyes.
He wouldn’t exactly call himself on good terms with the Maker, given the way he’d hated the abbey, but he found himself muttering a quick prayer all the same as she lifted the goblet to her lips.
His heart was near pounding out of his chest as she handed the goblet back to Duncan before letting out a cry and cradling her head in her hands. Instinctively he made as if to help her, but Duncan’s warning stare kept him in place.
She threw her head back, nothing but the whites of her eyes visible, no hint of that deep green boiling in anger as a soundless scream burst from her mouth.
Then she collapsed.
Thoughts, plans that he didn’t even know he had crumbled around him. Some foolish idea of them both driving Duncan insane with their jokes and back and forth banter. The two of them building on that initial rapport and becoming something of a dynamic duo in the junior ranks of the wardens until maybe one day they’d become old comrades running the Fereldan Wardens together.
Maybe more than comrades.
She made everything lighter, more… fun, he supposed, which was hard to do when you were facing darkspawn. The thought of that light being snuffed out was almost too much to bear.
“Is she…?” he barely dared to ask as Duncan knelt down beside her.
He was more than a little afraid of the answer. Daveth and Jory’s deaths were both unfortunate but there was something different, special about her.
“She’s alive.”
He didn’t think he’d ever been so relieved in his life. At least until she drew in a breath, raised a hand to her head and pulled herself up into a sitting position.
“It is finished,” Duncan declared. “Welcome.”
“Two more deaths,” he mused, glancing across at the bodies still littered across the stones. “In my Joining, only one of us died.” He was trying to find something he could say that would ease her suffering, hoping that she found some comfort in knowing that he understood. “But it was… horrible. I’m glad at least one of you made it through.”
He decided not to say that he was glad she survived, specifically.
He hoped she knew what he meant.
And also he hoped that she never knew.
She was a warden now, like him. There would be time to uncover all those secrets about her past that he so desperately wanted to know. There would be fights where they could joke back and forth, and he couldn’t help but be buoyed by that. These were incredibly dark times. Difficult, dangerous ones for wardens. But it seemed to him that recently his life had gotten a little bit better with each passing day.
And maybe, maybe this might be one of the best developments yet…