Chapter Text
There was a hot second, between killing Beraht and leaving his shop, that Brosca entertained the possibility of running the Carta herself. Being a criminal was the only thing she’d ever known—that’s all she aspired to be, even with a Grey Warden sniffing around Orzammar. She’d paid Duncan no mind at all, until he showed up outside Beraht’s shop with the king and his guards.
From there, it was either immediate execution or join the Grey Wardens, so…
She headed up with him. Way up, up to the surface for the first time in her short, dusty life.
She looked like an idiot, she knew, with her face to the sky the whole trek to Ostagar, gripped with the certainty that if she turned away for a moment, she’d tumble into the clouds. It was stupid, an old dwarven superstition. She thought she'd be better than that but, as usual, her high expectations of herself fell short.
She was just glad that Duncan and the Wardens they travelled with took her silence as wonder and didn't pressure her for conversation, or else they would’ve kicked her right back to Orzammar. She'd said few words to Duncan when he offered her a place in the Grey Wardens, and she'd stuttered her ass off, but he seemed to dismiss that as death-related nerves rather than a life-long condition. It shouldn’t be hard to keep that a secret; it’s not like fighting darkspawn would require scintillating conversation.
That’s what Brosca had convinced herself, until they reached Ostagar and she met a grinning human prodding an old mage into an uproar.
Trepidation clenched her chest when he caught sight of her, because this was the Alistair who Duncan spoke so highly of. The junior recruit who was to acquaint her with the Grey Wardens. Her thoughts were stumbling before they ever reached her mouth.
“You know, one good thing about the Blight is how it brings people together.”
It took her a moment to comprehend the words as a joke, because there was nothing good about the Blight, and the suggestion otherwise had her blinking stupidly.
After waiting too long for a clever response to occur to her, she said, “You're Alistair?”
Followed with a smile, because the words came out exactly as she'd planned them.
He smiled in return. “Am I everything you expected and more?”
More jokes. And not at her expense, yet.
She tried a joke of her own. “I thought you’d b-b-be taller.”
Her cheeks flushed with shame, regretting speaking at all. She needed to stop trying immediately, and establish a communication style based solely on grunts and nods. That’s the only way she’d survive.
To her surprise, Alistair didn’t immediately laugh in her face.
His easy-going smile didn’t waver. “And you’re the new recruit. Brosca, right?”
She nodded, grateful that she didn’t have to introduce herself. Certain sounds were always more trouble for her, and ‘b’ was one of them, like a funny little curse from the ancestors every time she tried to say her name.
“Welcome to the Grey Wardens! If you have any reservations about joining, flee now while you still have the chance.”
She squinted up at him. Was that a customary human welcome? She didn’t get it. “I have nowhere else to g-g-go.”
“Yeah… We’re good at that.” He ducked his head, perhaps feeling some sort of way about having to scoop up recruits at the most vulnerable point in their lives.
She’d heard a handful of good things about the Grey Wardens. Heroes to be sure, but self-involved with big heads. And redundant unless there was a Blight—Ancestors, she wished they were redundant right now.
Then again, if the Grey Wardens weren't recruiting in anticipation of a terrible war, she'd be dead, or exiled to the surface as a casteless dwarf. And that’s similar enough to be the exact same thing. She was surprised that all the humans so far had accepted her presence. They claimed not to have castes, but there were still nobles and beggars. And she was worse than a beggar.
Maybe dwarves were just all the same to humans—short, stout, dirt-streaked makers of fine crafts.
“You know, it occurs to me there have never been many women in the Grey Wardens.” Alistair switched the subject. “I wonder why that is.”
She lifted a dull brow. “Sexism?”
He snapped his fingers. “Maker, you’re quick. Every other recruit insists it’s because weapons aren’t made for dainty, feminine hands.” He winked at her. “You’ll show them, though, eh? What are you working with?”
Brosca slid an axe and a dagger off her back and gave them a lazy twirl. She was perfectly skilled with a bow as well, but that wink had stolen any chance of her responding intelligently.
“A rogue! Perfect.” Alistair waved at her to follow as he headed into camp. “Duncan’s got a locked chest in his tent, and I’m dying to know what he’s hiding from me.”
It turned out Alistair was kidding, which was for the best, considering that Brosca had no qualms invading the privacy of a man who’d just saved her from execution. Rummaging through a superior’s things seemed the exact type of immoral, shady behaviour that she should be cutting out of her new life as a Grey Warden.
They hadn’t been in the Kocari Wilds for long when Brosca heard the snap of twigs. As easy to hear as the scrape of pebbles against stone, and just as incriminating.
“Incoming,” she announced before slipping into the thick protection of trees. She decided she liked forests. Big and dangerous, sure, but the great, wide boughs of the trees hid the sky from view so it couldn’t swallow her up.
She scrambled up to a high branch as wolves descended on the others.
She nocked an arrow as Alistair looked around in alarm. “Where's Brosca?”
Daveth scoffed. “Just like a dwarf to duck out when the going gets tough.”
She sent an arrow whizzing past his ear into a wolf's throat.
“What the—”
She continued spitting out arrows, launching a fresh one before the first had even hit its mark—and she always hit. “Am I t-t-to kill them all myself?”
Alistair couldn’t see her, hiding among the leaves, but he turned toward her voice and grinned. She smiled back.
After the last of the wolves fell, the other recruits weren’t as impressed.
“What the hell was that?”
“You’re an archer, Daveth. What’d it look like?” Alistair laughed and slapped Brosca on the shoulder. “Nice work.”
She gave a curt nod, blaming her heated cheeks on the excursion of a fight.
“Nice work?” Ser Jory asked incredulously. “She hid in a tree like a squirrel.”
She turned slowly to look at him, giving her time to plan out her words but dreading them all the same. “They c-c-can’t kill what they can’t see.”
He snorted, and Daveth said, “So you cower in the shadows to save your own skin?”
Her words were hard as ice. “Sorry I’m smarter than you.”
Alistair bit his lip, doing a terrible job of hiding his grin. “Now, now. We all play to our strengths. I’m not cowering just because I use a shield, am I?”
The men grumbled and went about skinning the wolves for their fur. Brosca got nowhere near that. She’d killed the things; she didn’t need to bury her hands in their blood, too.
“No blades today?” Alistair asked, electing to clean his sword instead of tearing apart flesh.
“I had them for the b-b-battle arena. B-b-but—” She held up her bow instead of trying to say the word. “Usually more practical.”
“B-b-b-battle arena?” Daveth repeated with a laugh.
Jory frowned. “Wait, battle arena? Where’d Duncan find you?”
Brosca crossed her arms.
“I think we’ve established in a battle arena.” Alistair let his tone point out the redundancy of the question. “Go on, tell them, Brosca. Duncan was impressed.”
She gestured for Alistair to explain instead. In no world was she a storyteller, and she refused to fan the flames burning between Jory and Daveth.
“Yeah, t-t-tell us, Alistair!” Both the men laughed.
Alistair scowled. “Not if you’re going to be like that.”
It took her a moment to understand what he was suddenly annoyed about—he didn’t like that they were mocking Brosca.
That was hard to wrap her head around; her own family mocked her for her stutter. Her mother was a drunk. She and her sister hadn’t gotten along since they were infants, both engaged in a quiet, futile rivalry for their mother’s approval and affection. Beraht would egg them on for his own benefit. If they’d just do this, or managed to do that, everything would change for them. Her sister, Rica, got lessons on how to be a proper lady, to woo a noble with her feminine wiles long enough to get pregnant and haul the family up the social ladder.
Brosca got different lessons. She ran all around Orzammar with her partner, Leske, causing whatever type of havoc Beraht wanted that day. She was quiet out of necessity, not the polite demureness that men expected of their wives. Hers was a cold silence, an unspoken threat. It was perfect for the streets, but it never bred any sympathy.
Until Alistair, apparently.
“She’ll remain an enigma,” he continued, never serious for long. “A classic rogue, slipping into the shadows. No future and no past—that you know of, because you were both being dicks.”
A laugh slipped out of her. He threw her a wink.
That’s when she knew that whatever ended up happening to her on the surface, she’d made the right decision joining the Grey Wardens. She’d follow this man anywhere.
It would come as quite a shock when, months later, she discovered that she wasn’t the one doing the following.
They continued on, actively seeking out darkspawn so they could use their blood for whatever terrible reason. Brosca wasn’t raised to ask for details, and this wasn’t the time to start.
Luckily, you couldn’t swing a nug out here without hitting a darkspawn.
Brosca kept up her strategy of disappearing into the sanctuary of the trees, which would’ve worked except the darkspawn were spawning too quick for her to climb up. Even then, she would’ve been fine if she weren’t too focused on protecting the idiots running face-first at darkspawn to notice the one creeping up behind her.
She’d just sent an arrow through the eye of a genlock heading for Alistair when her spine got struck hard enough she lost breath.
Worse, she was slammed into the dirt.
“Shit!”
She flipped over, bow brandished to protect her jugular as a hideous, slack-jawed hurlock swiped its jagged claws at her. She struggled to grab a dagger off her thigh, kicking at it to get off her. She was failing at both rather miserably.
It grabbed her by the hair, which only made her wish she’d shaved off both sides, her whole head. Less, she needed to be less so she could do more.
She found her dagger and stabbed its wrist, but that still left its other hand with a honking big maul.
Well, shit. She was going to get squashed into the fucking ground before she ever became a real Grey Warden. That was just her luck, wasn’t it? Saved from execution just to end up dead in the dirt.
But then a gleaming silver thing came streaking at the darkspawn. It was Alistair, sword swinging, racing to her rescue.
She watched in an embarrassed sort of awe as he cut the thing’s head off and sent it crumpling to the ground in a heap.
“Thank you. Sorry, sorry,” she muttered as she got to her feet. Her eyes were stinging from the initial blow but she was not crying.
“Are you okay?” He reached a hand out as if to assess damage.
She waved him away, stuttering out that she was fine. “I’m sorry.”
“What’re you sorry for?”
She pointed at the darkspawn corpse with her dagger. It had overpowered her so easily, like she was never a threat at all. So fucking stupid. What made her think she could ever take on a darkspawn?
“Hey.” Alistair laid a hand on her shoulder.
Her armour and his glove blocked any real intimacy, but he’d touched her more since she’d arrived at Ostagar than she’d been touched in the past year. Was that a human thing? Incessant touching? She wanted to be annoyed, but instead she felt grounded, safe from the darkspawn and from falling into the sky alike.
He waited until she dragged her gaze off the ground to speak. The earnestness radiating from the concerned furrow of his brow nearly blinded her. “Nobody expects you to take on a whole darkspawn by yourself. You haven’t even completed the Joining yet. Please call for help if you need it.”
She hadn’t known Alistair long, but she could tell the seriousness he insisted on now wasn’t common for him. The worry lines didn’t fit his face.
So she said, “Okay. I will,” in hopes that he’d crack a joke.
Instead. he squeezed her shoulder and said, “We’re a team, alright?”
Brosca nodded. That’s why she’d been so intent on protecting the rest of them from the darkspawn. Even though Daveth and Ser Jory were assholes, she understood the importance of watching the backs of the people you were working with. She just didn’t trust anybody but herself to do that for her—even though apparently she couldn’t even handle that.
After a final, worried look from Alistair, they headed back. Through the trees, Brosca saw Daveth and Jory sitting on a fallen log as far from the darkspawn corpses as possible. Jory looked more than a little green.
Daveth slapped him on the back. “Ah, buck up. You did better than the dwarf.” He pitched his voice higher. “Oh, A-A-Alistair, save me!”
Jory did his best to overcome his freak-out, responding in kind, “M-m-my hero!”
Daveth smirked, greasy and mean. “Bet she’s out there sucking his dick right now. She’s at the perfect height already.”
Even though she was very clearly at elbow height.
Brosca whipped her crossbow off her back. Alistair , blushing like a tomato, had already bumbled out of the trees by the time she’d shot off two arrows. One struck the log under Daveth’s crotch, the other under Jory’s.
They both paled.
“F-f-fuck you.”
Darkspawn blood wasn’t the only thing that brought them into the woods. They needed official Grey Warden documents, safely stored in a crumbling tower—or, ruins, was perhaps the proper word to describe it.
And the treaties weren’t even there, thanks to some mage.
Brosca wasn’t sure if the woman was attractive, but she was half-dressed. Her breasts were barely hidden behind a piece of fabric that you’d be generous in calling a shirt, and that was enough to distract Brosca just as easily as Jory and Daveth, much to her dismay.
When Daveth’s sense came back to him, he called the stranger “Witch of the Wilds”. Brosca elbowed him in the stomach to shut him up. She’d never heard of such a thing, but it had the whiff of a fairy tale, a lie.
Thankfully the woman did not take great offense.
Then Alistair called her a “sneaky witch thief”, and Brosca was ready to turn heel and leave them all to the mage’s mercy, because obviously they were trying to get turned into frogs, or whatever mages were capable of. Brosca couldn’t recall ever meeting a mage back in Orzammar, but Morrigan, as she introduced herself, was not at all what Brosca would have imagined.
“You, dwarf.” Morrigan met Brosca’s eye. “What are you doing here with these men? You look smarter than them by half.” Brosca nodded in agreement and Morrigan’s lips pulled into a smirk. “So tell me, why are these treaties so important to you?”
Brosca looked to Alistair to answer and Morrigan’s amusement turned to disdain. “Oh, my mistake. If you plan to let this man speak for you, then you cannot be very clever at all.”
She turned her cool gaze back on the mage. If she wanted to hear Brosca talk so bad, she would, but they’d both regret it. “I’d rather not d-d-die in this Blight. We need b-b-b—” Scowling at herself, she scrapped the word ‘backup’ and went with, “Recruits.”
Morrigan lifted a thin brow. “No need to be so nervous, dear. Twas merely a question.”
Daveth scoffed. “Not nerves. She’s been doing that the whole trip. I think her tongue’s too big for her little dwarf mouth.”
“And your brain’s too small for your head,” Alistair immediately cut in. “But you don’t see us complaining about it.”
“Discord in the ranks already?” Morrigan mused. “The Blight’s barely begun.”
Brosca pinched the bridge of her nose. “Can you g-g-get us the fucking treaties, or not?”
An appreciative spark flashed in her odd golden eyes. “Indeed I can. Follow me.”
Big, baleful eyes stared up at Brosca, a heavy head weighing down her palm.
“Are you two having a moment?” Alistair leaned on the fence next to Brosca, where a Mabari was sighing at her like it was the end of the world.
“It’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“What?” He crouched down to get a better look at the animal. “The itty bitty puppy?” he cooed, as if it wasn’t clearly a fully grown dog.
Brosca let her hand fall from its jowl and it immediately started whimpering.
“What did you do?” Alistair gasped.
She rolled her eyes and resumed rubbing her thumb along the dog’s soft ear. It eagerly drove its skull into her palm. “It was sick. Its master asked for a f-f-flower to cure it.”
“That blue flower from the forest?” he asked. She nodded. “Aw. You’re his hero.”
He tried to pet it, but yanked his hand back right quick at its growl.
She laughed. “It’s still recovering.”
He straightened. “Well, hopefully he’ll be all better by the time you’ve finished the Joining.”
“Now?”
He nodded, a coin flashing between his fingers for no explicit purpose except to be fiddled with. “Ready?”
She shrugged. She still had no idea what the Joining entailed.
And not ten minutes later, she discovered the reason behind all the secrecy.
She should’ve seen it coming.
The darkspawn blood’s stench nearly gagged Brosca across the circle from where Duncan handed it to Jory. He still drank it, like a good soldier.
He died.
Daveth died too, at Duncan’s hand. There was no room for quitters in the Grey Wardens.
With hands dripping red, Duncan passed Brosca the goblet of darkspawn blood. It was viscous and dark and she couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to put in her mouth less than this tainted life force.
She looked at Alistair, solemn and serious and still rubbing his thumb across that coin. He could’ve told her. She would’ve stayed. She had nowhere else to go.
Death as punishment in Orzammar, or death as an unfortunate side effect in the Joining. What difference was there, except for the stars shining down on her?
A keen hope drew tight across Duncan’s face. He needed more Wardens. He needed her to survive.
She scoffed. “Good luck.”
She tossed the blood down like a shot.
Agony ripped across her, bringing an all-encompassing darkness and a roaring, horrifying dragon. She died, she was dead, she was sure of it. And then…
Alistair’s bright face hovered above her, nodding fervently as a relieved smile caught his lips. “You made it.”
Which was easily the most surprising thing to have happened to her so far.
They were on a mission to light… something. She hadn’t caught a word from Duncan after drinking that blood. Her mouth tasted like swamp water, and her stomach fought her so badly that she wondered if she might die yet.
Still, she managed to follow Alistair up the tower, shooting anything that moved, and it was going okay until they reached the fucking ogre.
Its size was frankly excessive for this little room, and its skin was too thick for her arrows to really penetrate. So she whipped out her daggers and started tearing up the backs of its knees. Its agonized howl rang in her ears as Alistair leapt onto its chest to stab out its heart.
And that worked great, but then it was dead, with all its deadweight tilting forward and crushing Alistair to the ground.
“Idiot,” Brosca grunted as she tugged him free by the armpits. She couldn’t tell what was impeding her the most: the immense bulk of the ogre, Alistair’s own mass, or her sweaty, bloody palms slipping off his armour. A ruckus was growing behind the stairwell door. More monsters. “G-g-get up!”
Alistair groaned, consciousness rolling back in. “The beacon,” he coughed up blood. “Did you light it?”
Right. The noble reason behind their inevitable deaths.
She left him bleeding out on the floor and lit the beacon. She didn’t have the chance to watch the troops retreat before the stairwell door slammed open.
Darkspawn spilled into the room like rats.
She lifted her bow and made peace with death for the second time that day.
Instead, Brosca woke up in an unfamiliar cabin. Wonders would simply never cease.
She sat up in a bed with scratchy sheets, stomach somewhat settled. She wasn’t bleeding as profusely as she expected, but every last part of her ached.
Morrigan was there. Brosca’s clothes were not.
“Hey,” Brosca began, voice rusty from disuse. There were a hundred more pertinent questions to ask, but her first one was, “Where’re my c-c-c—” She swore and tried again. “Armour. Where?”
“Your clothing,” Morrigan said pointedly as she toed the chest at the footboard, “is in here. I find it difficult to apply bandages through multiple layers of leather. Count yourself lucky; my mother tended to your companion.”
Companion? Brosca had a companion?
“The blonde one?” Morrigan added in response to Brosca’s blatant confusion. “Rather simple?”
She leapt from the bed. “Alistair? He’s alive?”
“Yes. Do you not want to hear how you survived? How you ended up here? What became of the Grey Wardens?”
The last question gave her pause. “What?”
Morrigan explained; it was a massacre. Loghain turned out to be a slippery bastard. He recalled the troops and forced Duncan, King Cailan, and every Grey Warden save for Brosca and Alistair to perish in battle.
Suddenly her stomach felt just as sickly as when she drank the darkspawn blood.
Brosca rushed into her armour and met Alistair outside. He was staring sightlessly across the swamp, alone and far too fragile for all the muscle on him.
When she reached him, he sank to his knees to embrace her. A hug, she understood belatedly. Alistair was hugging Brosca, fiercely tight. She patted his back, not quite sure how to comfort this heavy, shaking man in her arms. He’d lost everything, and he was clinging to her like she was the last hope he had left. In his position, she’d be upset, too.
His shining brown eyes drank her in when he pulled away, still desperate to confirm she was real and alive. He let out a ragged breath. “What—what do we do?”
Which was exactly what she’d been about to ask.
She swallowed back spit, and even that hurt. “Start by standing up.”
He nodded like she’d imparted some great wisdom, when really she just didn’t like people kneeling in front of her like she was a child.
Flemeth, Morrigan’s mother, joined them. She offered the guidance they desperately needed.
Duty came first. They had to continue the Grey Wardens. They had to snatch up other poor souls with nothing left to lose and force them to fight the Blight with them, or all would be lost.
And also Morrigan was going to help.
Alistair tilted his head when Flemeth started to foist her daughter onto them. “Uh, that’s very… thoughtful of you, but I’m not sure if we—”
Brosca cut him a look. They were in no place to turn down aid, even if it was from a weird, snide mage who’d lived in a swamp her whole life.
His shoulders drooped. “I mean, thank you. We need all the help we can get.”
Morrigan protested but, like Brosca and Alistair, she had little choice. Someone had to stop the Blight. Someone had to save Thedas. And through a series of unlikely and upsetting events, it was up to three of them, specifically.
“Ancestors help us,” Brosca muttered on their way out of the swamp.