faderift | Alas, so long as the music plays, we dance

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Alas, so long as the music plays, we dance

WHO: Morrigan, Alistair, Gwenaëlle, Thranduil
WHAT: The hunt for Flemeth moves into the final stage when Kieran is taken from Sundermount in the small hours with only one possible suspect, leading to a desperate race for one place Morrigan knows they might find her mother
WHEN: August
WHERE: Altar of Mythal
NOTES: stage i + stage ii

From Sundermount to the Arbor Wilds isn't nearly so far as to the Tirashan, but their small party - roused by a Morrigan in what might only have been described as a blind panic - doesn't fly as the dragon does, cutting clear across the sky from one to the next. Instead the journey is longer, across the Waking Sea, through the Dales, and then to the place Morrigan had described to them. Morrigan, silent and snapping by turns (only Thranduil knows after all) until they at last come upon a place that carries with it the weight of memory.

Too bright and too beautiful compared to near all other elven ruins but then this is older still, is it not? A statue that even beheaded is familiar to those who've seen it before as life blooms about it, as the dread coils in Morrigan's belly to force her to a halt.

For there is no dragon here.

There is a woman Morrigan knows. A woman Alistair knows. A boy all four of them know. The woman kneels before the boy until the intrusion is realised, standing with her gauntleted hand upon his shoulder, a familiar smile and greeting upon her lips.

"Well, well, well, what have we here?"

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A handful of half-formed potential comments swarm toward Alistair’s mouth—something something haven’t I killed you before, something about how dying apparently does wonders for your hair, something—but for once, they don’t make it out, because his jaw clenches at the sight of her.

The last time he saw her, she was a dragon. She got him good in the chest. Singed his hair.

He hates dragons.

He doesn’t say anything. She’s alive, she’s alarming, she’s Morrigan’s mother, she has her hand on Kieran’s shoulder, and Alistair has his hand on the hilt of his sword, in a casual sort of way that doesn’t threaten immediate violence. That’s Morrigan’s decision. Probably. For now. If anyone sprouts scales or scratches Kieran or breathes a single spark in Gwenaëlle’s direction, it will stop being a choice. But while it is, the choice is Morrigan’s.

Speaking of—he looks at her profile, or what he can see of it from an angle and a step behind her, checking her reaction but not lingering on it, and then he smiles at Kieran. It’s a faint thing, and his eyes are worried. But it’s the best way he has to say hello without opening his mouth and risking anything stupid coming out.

For anything short of this, Gwenaëlle almost certainly wouldn't be here; would still be resting the still-healing wounds in her thigh that she's been carefully favouring all the way here, running on healing potions and her own point-blank refusal not to come when Morrigan had called, panicking, for Kieran. Kieran, so she had ignored every raised objection on Thranduil's part and packed her things and only relented as far as riding his elk and not her horse because he was giving in and not her.

You are brave, says Aura's letter tucked within her vest, Do not be afraid. You are not alone.

Morrigan is not alone, she thinks, Kieran will never have to be. She can be brave, to make that true. She wants to speak up, and probably to say something slightly stupid, but the obvious recognition happening either side of her makes her hesitate, fingers curling around her bow.

Not her most reliable skill, yet. A feint, only; what she might resort to carrying a less obvious element of surprise. Are they going to have to fight this clearly very shady old woman.

Kieran looks unharmed; good. He's also far out of easy reach; less. Her mouth settles into a thin line and she raises her gaze from him to the woman only she seems to find a stranger.

She can absolutely fight the elderly, she decides. If need be. Fuck this old lady.

Thranduil, deprived of the sense of awe and fear that Flemeth or Mythal ought to instill in him by virtue of pride born from age, is steady. His only concerns are Gwenaëlle's healing wound and Morrigan's fear, her uncharacteristic halting manner. She is afraid for her son. He turns his head to take in the whole of the grove, the altar. It is as fit as a setting for this confrontation as can be expected. The stillness of it is ... calming.

"A retrieval," Thranduil says, calmly, his hands far from his swords. There is no need for this to come to blows. Keiran is small, still, even by mortal standards. Even if Mythal (because she is not Flemeth, not after his conversation with Solas) simply let him go, he could not be expected to make his way back to Kirkwall without trouble.

"By what right did you take him from his mother?"

"Hah! Old Flemeth a thief? Is that what you've told them of me now girl?"

The tales of Flemeth never credit any lines to those who play parts in them, so often do they leave out the sense of humour no matter the occasion though if that came from woman or god, well, perhaps neither of them can say now. Such a long time it's been after all.

Morrigan's hand tightens about Yavanalis as Kieran smiles back at Alistair looking for all the world remarkably untrouble by what's been a long flight from Kirkwall to this corner of the Arbor Wilds. Embarrassed, almost, as if he'd scuff his toes in the grass if it weren't the habit of someone younger and wouldn't disturb the grass.

"We have come to take him back mother--"

"And there cannot be a reunion? A mother, her daughter who leaves with two Wardens at the Blight and never returns," Flemeth's gaze cuts to Alistair with a smile that's too familiar to be anywhere near comforting, what with her hand on Kieran's shoulder as it is, "with a son she never introduces her to? With an...old friend alongside? I raised you better than that Morrigan. Come now, surely all this for one old woman is enough is it not?"

(That Morrigan makes no sound but the scrape of nails along her staff says much. The rage catches in her throat, the muscle in her arm shakes.)

Flemeth smiles again, her gaze moving. To Thranduil. To Gwenaëlle. Her daughter, Alistair, she knows, ah but these two strangers? Who are they to her daughter, to her grandson she might only guess at as she steps away from Kieran, her hand outstretched.

"Tell me then, you few who have travelled far, who have called to me," there is something in Thranduil that almost-- but no, surely not (but Morrigan is looking to him, that half-glance when not perhaps wondering if she might seize her son faster than her mother might move), "who are you?"

"Thranduil," he says, the name catching and lyrical and almost, almost Elvhen. "Son of Oropher, called Elvenking, Lord of Taur-e-Ndaedelos and Amon Lanc."

He bows his head in acknowledgement and formal greeting, aware of the gauntleted hand she offers like a lady. But he smiles, sardonic in the curl of his lip. There is no crown upon his brow nor army at his back nor elves who love him, and what is a title without that. He has only what he can claim on his own merit.

"But that was a world away. 'Thranduil' will do."

For her part, Gwenaëlle is much less inclined to introduce herself to Flemeth and be anyone to her at all; she holds where she stands, wearing stoic long-suffering familiarly through Thranduil's procession of titles and regarding the woman asking for it with suspicious dislike. No, why should there be reunion?

Morrigan wouldn't have hustled them out of Kirkwall fully armed to sit down to tea with her mother.

“Well, none of this seems remotely necessary.”

“At all,” Alistair agrees.

He was cheekier last time he spoke to the woman, but that was before, again, she was a dragon. His weight shifts. It’s a subtle thing, and a stupid one: he could go for Kieran if he needed to, but from there—what? And the boy looks unharmed. Sheepish.

Shifting is all he does. It’s more of a fidget.

Elvenking, though. He’s going to remember that one. For reports.

(Did they misplace one of their own, somehow? After all Mythal was very much dead before the fall of all that once was, how can she be expected to keep track of all of them, of where all the eluvians might have gone.) Morrigan, for her part, turns her head inexorably slowly in Thranduil's direction.

"Thranduil, well, they have called me Flemeth. Witch of the Wilds. Mother of Vengeance. Asha'bellanar." This time she will be leaving off the old hag, being around all her family as she is, they must know that one very well. "But it is, in fact, all very necessary, you see--"

And she would say more if Morrigan didn't step forward, anger getting the better of her as her finger points in accusation. "You have forgotten one in your old age." The hand and her voice are trembling, the rage coiled in her a pit of vipers primed to strike. "You are Mythal, how long you have pretended--"

Alistair, maybe even Thranduil might expect the laugh because that's what something that's never fitted inside the skin should do in this situation. To laugh. Morrigan's hand hangs in the air. She wasn't quite ready for it to be shrugged aside when admitting it to herself came at such a cost in the dark.

"Pretended, my daughter says? Oh, unnecessary this hardfaced girl says, and the Warden agrees. How little any of you know." Well, Elvenking if he might be that (and oh, he might, she can hold his gaze a long time but then it's to the girl, to Alistair, the unknown who might squirm and to see if a churlish boy has grown into himself at all) perhaps has the benefit that others do not but her mouth hardens. "How long have you pretended that he is but a normal boy?"

"I-- he is my son…" But it's faint, it rings hollow in Morrigan's own ears as Flemeth (if it's Flemeth alone) turns on Alistair next.

"And how rude of me, to miss you out of of the family reunion, Warden."

If she'd known a little more, or expected to, then Gwenaëlle might have squirmed beneath that gaze but acutely aware of how blindly she's walked into this (all but with one of Myrobalan's cloths folded around her face) the lines of her expression deepen into impatience instead, because the fact Morrigan's unfit mother is mother of probably all the Dalish spiritually is less important than the unfit part, and how far they had to travel, and that family reunions are ought to involve less kidnapping.

Morrigan surges forward and Gwenaëlle follows her only a step behind, bow dropped to her side. “She's kept him safe,” she says, a furious little thing, puffed up in defense, the jerk of her braid behind her like an angry tail's lash. That is what mothers are supposed to do, that is what Flemyth or Mythal or whoever she is should have done, that's what Anne and Guenievre couldn't do—

Morrigan is the best of mothers and who is this old woman to lecture her?

(But this is what family reunions always are.)

Mythal. The word only means so much to Alistair, in the sense of meaning rather than definition, and all of that meaning is secondhand. Dalish idols. Quiet prayers. Pel’s vallalslin. He’s never been reverent of his own god, let alone someone else’s, but the weight still hits. Because of what it would mean to his friends, to have their All-Mother be a conniving witch with human ears. Because he doesn’t have to worship anything or discount any of the wonders he’s already seen to feel excruciatingly small up against a life stretching thousands of years. Because of what it means if they have to kill her: that they most likely really and truly can’t, and Morrigan will never be able to stop looking back over her shoulder.

It’s Morrigan he’s staring at, with a mix of surprise and concern and mild offense at not being told, when Warden gets his attention again.

“Wait,” he says, a little too quickly—wait, don’t. There are better ways to tell Kieran, including never telling him at all. But Alistair transitions from that moment of panic to a more laconic drawl, quickly but not entirely seamlessly, like a man stumbling over a root and poorly hiding it by pretending he’s decided to start jogging. “Was I not invited? Well that’s embarrassing. Morrigan’s invitation wasn’t very specific, though. Next time you should write it down instead of kidnapping her child. Just an idea. Your...” hesitating, questioning, and somewhere on the tiny stretch of border between mockery and please don’t eat us, because he’s talented that way, “... reverence?”

"Mother?" Kieran asks, looks between Morrigan, Alistair and Flemeth, then says softer again: "I'm sorry, I heard her, I had to go--" (He dares to dart his eyes in Alistair's direction, not quite old enough to be good at hiding a guilty conscience, not yet, but no one was supposed to get in trouble because of it.)

It gives Morrigan time to be grateful that a girl peeked about her door years ago, here and brave and speaking up for something Morrigan isn't always so sure of herself because if it were true, Kieran wouldn't be here. He'd be out of Flemeth's clutches, and she has invited her, brought her here, and now she knows because of course she does. Her magic allowed us out of the swamp. There was the reason she sent me. She knows. There was only two of them and she knows his face.

"What do you know of safe, girl? All that Morrigan knows, I have taught her." A smile, a pause-- and no argument from Morrigan because she can't. She still has those damned grimoires, one of which was there mocking her the whole time, the symbol etched upon it that she clawed at when Thranduil came in the dark.

Morrigan looks to Alistair again later and far from here and where to even begin. (Who enjoys airing their family linens to anyone, not even she does outside correcting particular stories.)

"Ah, but here you are, remembering your manners. If Morrigan invited you, well, you are welcome. There are reasons that all of you are here but the lad is in no danger. So now you know that no demon or spirit came to me but Mythal, and I would have vengeance for her. After all, how far are they from one another? Justice, vengeance?"

"And what I found in the Tirashan? Geldauran's Claim of what a god is?" Morrigan almost laughs, hears it crack open, a hollow sound of the eggshell splitting as the yolk spills out about her feet. "A thing that people made through tales and worship."

Gwenaëlle who cut to the heart of it, because that's what Gwenaëlle understands. Knows stories and the shape of them and she wants to scream and claw at her mother as much as to grab Kieran and crumple to the ground with him. But she does neither.

"This is why I need the boy, or rather, what the two of you gave the boy."

She can say he’s in no danger all she wants. Alistair is going to look at her the same way either way, like he doesn’t trust her about this or anything else but thinks it’s sort of funny that she’s asking them to, except when he’s looking at Kieran and briefly wrinkling his nose in answer to that guilty look, like it’s all fine, although clearly it isn’t.

“No,” he says—and if it comes to a choice between protecting Kieran and letting an ancient being of unknowable origin and power run off with an Archdemon’s soul in her pocket then yes, fine, Flemeth or whatever her name is can have Urthemiel. But at the moment, to Alistair, that doesn’t look like the choice. Souls don’t just come out of bodies, in his experience. And even if they do, a Grey Warden doesn’t just hand an Old God over to a mysterious witch to do whatever she pleases with... twice.

The first time was different.

He says, “Morrigan,” in a rising way, like a warning, she can’t have it, except with a little bit of a questioning twist at the end, so it’s more like: she can’t have it, right?

And then he looks at Gwenaëlle and her giant Elvenking, who presumably aren’t looking back at him, because he’s the least interesting thing here—and there’s no telling what Thranduil knows or will think about anything, but Gwenaëlle is Thedosian. She’ll know what it means. He doesn’t know what she’ll think. Not about him, never mind him. But Kieran cares about her so much. If she’s horrified—

Wait, no, that’s stupid. It’s Gwenaëlle. She’ll probably shrug it off and have something clever to say.

So back to glaring at Flemeth like she’s trying to sell him moldy bread she claims was made by fairies.

"The father's claim supersedes yours," Thranduil says. "As does the mother's. Both parents are in accord," because that face from Morrigan clearly means no, even if Alistair has been the only one to actually voice it. "and the boy is not yet of age."

Or, at least, he thinks so. Morrigan would go by the rules of the Chasind, would she not? He is drawing upon the old Mannish laws, the sort of the thing that brought forth such things as blood price for reparations and then the old, old ones, the bones of which are elven law, written in their souls as this is not right.

They have so much in common before this, why not these old things too? If he is to make his case before justice herself, this is what he will rely on.

Steady hands, steady gaze. He does not look back to either of them, nor Gwenaëlle.

"You cannot take what is not freely given."

There, the oldest law, and he knows it to be true here too, if only in the margins, if one cares to look. Demons cannot possess without consent.

"She will take it, Alistair. She brought him here." She brought us here. Not entirely resigned since she manages to say it through gritted teeth, unhappy about it, about the choice she has to make, that it wasn't meant to come out like this. Not in front of any of them. If Kieran was ever to find out, if he was to finally ask who his father was in a way she couldn't step around then she'd have had time. Wouldn't have had it thrust upon her.

But then this was Flemeth's plan. This was always Flemeth's plan, and Morrigan might have escaped it, slipped through the eye of the needle for years but Flemeth has lived a long time patient as she is, and clearly she will take all that she believes is her due.

(She can hardly look at Kieran now that he knows.)

"Neither can she nor can it be given." Ah, and here is where an old woman's face softens with the weight of all her years to become mother and grandmother she never was at least to this woman. "You were never in danger from me - is a soul ever forced upon the unwilling?"

She kneels, settles by Kieran to make the point and her sigh is a sigh that carries echoes of the lives she has lived.

"Mythal came to me when I was alone in the dark, that much they remembered. I cried out for one who would listen. Oh and you, you speak of a father's claim what bearing does that have here and now? Long have I known the hearts of men, there is a reason Mythal chose me."

"Kieran comes with me." Morrigan steps forward, hand outstretched. "He will never go with you, your corruption--"

There is blue light, blinding. But no screaming, no cries of pain or contortions. But the light is very blue, very bright, and she pulls it from Kieran's chest as Morrigan shouts--

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Alas, so long as the music plays, we dance

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