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Rain hammered the gorund outside the cave mouth, a steady, soaking roar that blurred the world into motion and sound. Merrill crouched near the wall, unbuckling her pack with careful fingers, laying things out in a neat line. Old habits. The checking and double checking made her feel calmer.
Hawke and Varric were further in, arguing quietly about whether wet wood would burn if you shouted at it enough. Merrill tuned them out without meaning to, their voices flattening into background noise. Her attention drifting back toward the entrance.
Fenris stood just inside the cave mouth, half-turned toward the rain. He hadn’t sat, hadn’t leaned, hadn’t done anything that suggested rest. And, inevitably, her eyes traced the markings along his skin where the light caught them. Pale lines, luminous even without magic.
Merrill frowned. She’d noticed them before, of course—anyone with eyes would—but something about the way the rain traced their edges made her eyes catch on them more tonight.
"Why are you watching me like that?"
She hesitated. Fenris was not… approachable, exactly. But that had never stopped her before.
“Oh. I wasn’t watching you like anything. I just noticed.” She gestured vaguely. “You have vallaslin."
Fenris stiffened immediately.
For a moment she thought he might ignore her. He did that. A lot actually.
But then instead, flat and clipped, “Yours are not made of lyrium.”
“No,” she agreed, a little too quickly, getting to her feet. “They’re made of blood. Our blood.” She smiled, small and earnest. “That’s what vallaslin means. Blood writing. It’s a mark of adulthood.”
That was neutral information, right? Context. Helpful.
Fenris turned fully toward her then, the expression on his face sending something cold and tight around her ribs.
“Mine were carved into my flesh against my will,” he stated. “In a ritual I remember only for the agony it caused me.”
Merrill’s ears drooped. She hated that about herself—how her body betrayed her thoughts—but there it was, emotion written where she couldn’t hide it.
She swallowed.
“I’m… so sorry,” she stammered, because what else was there to say? Pain acknowledged was pain shared, at least a little.
Fenris looked away again, shoulders tight.
"You can keep your sorrow."
Her brow furrowed. “I only meant—”
“You had the freedom few of our kind enjoy,” he cut in, voice rising slightly, edged with something raw, “and you threw it away. On what?”
“Our people need to reclaim their heritage."
“A heritage of defeat?” Fenris scoffed. “To what end?”
She felt herself bristle then, moving closer without quite realising she’d done it. She was used to such dismissal, used to being told that her care and curiosity were indulgences, “Would you truly turn your back on your own history? There’s so much we don’t know. So much that was taken from us.”
Fenris’s mouth twisted. “It’s not my history. It is simply history.”
The words echoed strangely in the cave, almost hollow, like something dropped down a well.
Merrill opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d been ready for anger. For further dismissal. Even mockery, if she was honest—she’d had plenty of practice with that. What she hadn’t expected was… a lack of engagment.
Not my history.
She tried to fit the idea together in her head, a pattern that refused to align.
“But you’re—” she stopped herself, frowning. “You’re an elf,” she tried again, slower now, careful where she put the emphasis. "History isn’t just—stories. It’s how we know who we are. How we know what was done to us.” She hesitated, then added, more quietly, “How we know what was taken.”
His shoulders tightened at that, but he didn’t turn around. Bracing.
“I know exactly what was taken from me,” his voicde flat. “I don’t need ancient names or broken relics to prove it.”
Merrill stared at his back, rainlight outlining him in pale silver. She felt suddenly off-balance, like she’d stepped onto ground she’d thought solid only to find it slanted away beneath her feet.
“That’s not… what I meant either."
“I understand obsession,” he muttered, voice quieter now. Warning, perhaps. Or resignation. “I understand people who convince themselves that suffering is acceptable, so long as it serves some greater truth.” His head tilted, just slightly. “I have seen where that ends.”
Something in her chest tightened,
“You think that’s what this is."
Fenris turned fully then, and for the first time his gaze held hers. No heat in it. No contempt. Just certainty—immovable and cold.
“I think you had a choice. A family. A place. And that you walked away from it, chasing something that can’t be brought back.”
“I didn’t walk away,” she corrected, baffled. “They sent me away.”
He didn;t react, just continued to watch.
“My clan told me I’d gone too far,” she continued, the admission coming easier once it started. “They told me I was dangerous. That I was risking everyone for knowledge that wasn’t meant to be touched.” Her mouth twisted, wry and sad. “That didn’t make them wrong. But it didn’t make the work meaningless either.”
Fenris said nothing.
She watched his face closely now. Trying to see where the shape of his anger actually lay, if it was anger at all or something harder to name
“I thought,” she added, slowly, “that maybe you’d at least be willing to talk about it. Because you’re… because you know what it’s like to have things taken.”
Fenris turned back towards the rain.
The conversation, evidently, over.
Merrill s nodded once, a small, precise movement. “I see."
She stayed where she was, staring at the neat line of her belongings on the stone. They looked very small, laid out like that. Fragile. Worth protecting.
She walked back over, gathered them back into her pack carefully, one by one.
Carrying history was lonely work—especialy when others refuse to help shoulder the weight.
Behind her, the fire caught. Varric let out a triumphant whoop. Hawke laughed.
Life went on.
Life always went on.
She tightened the straps of her pack and did not look back toward the cave mouth again.