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The True Tale Of The Fifth Blight	By : Serena_Hawke-Theirin Category: +A through F > Dragon Age (all) > Dragon Age (all) Views: 13108 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age or the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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The young woman ran as fast as her short legs could carry her. It was getting harder to breathe, but she couldn’t stop. Couldn’t let up, not even for a moment. She already delayed too long.

Maker, please let him be alright.

Two weeks. That was all it took. For two weeks the young woman watched the strongest man in the world wither away. How could he have gotten so sick so quickly? He was the best healer she ever knew. The best she had heard of. He was dying. He mixed potion after potion. They didn’t help. Nothing did. They just made it worse.

He had a cough the day he returned from the Wilds. He had gone to a Chasind village that was plagued with influenza. The villagers got better. He got worse.

Her mother wanted to go to the physician. Her father refused. He called the man a charlatan. A quacksalver. Her father couldn’t get out of bed that morning. He could barely speak. He finally agreed to calling on the physician. Her mother sent the young woman to fetch him. She was the oldest. It was her responsibility.

The physician wouldn’t come. He made her wait outside. It felt like an eternity. She wondered if he was going to return. When he opened the door he shoved a vial of green liquid into her chest.

“Tell your mother to give him this potion. If it doesn’t help, come back tomorrow and we’ll try a different one.”

He didn’t care. He slammed the door in her face. She kept knocking. He didn’t answer. She tried the handle. The door was locked.

She screamed at the door. Kicked it so hard she thought she may have broken her foot. It did no good. He ignored everything.

The door to her home was in reach. She turned the handle and sprinted inside. Through the kitchen and to the left down a narrow hallway. The door at the end was open.

The young woman’s mother lay next to her father. His face was ghostly white, mottled with grey. His lips were blue. The girl’s mother was sobbing into his chest. He was gone. She was too late. She didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

“What took you so long?” her mother asked.

She was angry. The girl couldn’t form the words to explain. What would she have said? There was no good explanation. No excuse for her delay.

She had stopped to talk to a young man. He wasn’t a bad looking sort. He smiled at her. Told her he wished to call on her soon. No boy had ever said those words to her before. It was only for a few minutes. She should have kept running.

“This is your fault, Gabrielle” her mother wailed. “Where were you? Why weren’t you here? You should have been here. He’s dead…Your father is dead because you were too busy gallivanting around the village.”

The mother scanned the room behind her daughter. Her eyes were red and puffy. She shook her head.

“And you didn’t even bring the physician?”

Tears streamed down the young woman’s cheeks. Her hand was trembling. The vial in her fingers quaked. She remarked at the paleness of the color. Her father’s potions were always much darker.

She stepped closer to the bed. Her mother glared at her. There was fury in her grey eyes. Hatred. The young woman held out the tiny bottle.

“He…he wouldn’t come. He gave me…he gave me this.”

The mother snatched the vial from her daughter’s hand. She hurled it across the room. The bottle hit the wall and shattered. Tiny shards of glass littered the floor. Pale green liquid stained the ecru wall.

The young woman stood there. She didn’t know what to do. Her father was dead. It was all her fault.

“Get out of my sight!” her mother screeched.

The older woman threw herself onto her husband’s lifeless form. The young woman didn’t argue. How could she? Her mother was devastated. It was all her fault.

The young woman’s head drooped in shame and sorrow. She wondered if her sister and brother were aware. She had to tell them. She had to be there for them. It was her job to take care of them. Her father was gone. They were her responsibility now. Her sole responsibility. She made him a promise. She intended to keep it.

She turned to find her siblings. The room began to spin. Thick, black smoke curled around her. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. But dear Maker, the smell. The putrid mixture of brimstone and rot permeated the air. She gagged.

The silence was split by the sound of a fist pounding on wood. The dark fog cleared to reveal a door. Her front door. She jerked it open. She didn’t even think to check who or what was on the other side. It was him. The handsome Grey Warden. His face was filled with worry.

“The darkspawn are on their way,” he told her.

His voice was calm. An eerie inflection considering his warning. His tone didn’t match his expression.

“You must get out of Lothering,” he warned.

Panic. That was the young woman’s immediate reaction. She had to save her family. She ran to her mother’s room. Her father was gone. Her mother lay on the floor. Her grey eyes were silver. The black of her pupils were gone. Her skin was pale. Lifeless. There was an odd pattern on her throat as if someone slit it and stitched it back together.

The young woman dropped to her knees. She gathered her mother in her arms. She couldn’t catch her breath past her tears.

“Leave her,” the Warden said.

His voice was still calm. Too calm. He tugged at the young woman’s sleeve, urging her to rise. How could she? She had to. She had to do her job. Her duty.

Carver and Bethany. Perhaps they still lived. She had to find them. To save them.

She moved to Carver’s room. His body lay bleeding. His limbs positioned in odd angles. His legs and chest were wider but thinner. Crushed under a tremendous weight. But how?

Fresh tears began to spill. They washed away the ones she shed for her mother. The Warden was at her side again. His brow creased with regret. With sorrow.

“You need to find your sister and leave,” he reminded her. “They are coming.”

The young woman picked up her feet. They wouldn’t move. They were stuck to the floor. She struggled with all her might. It was a fruitless endeavor. She wailed with anger. With frustration.

She looked down at her feet. Her old brown boots were gone. Replaced by the slippers of a much younger girl. She recognized them. She hadn’t seen those shoes since her family left Redcliffe when she was thirteen.

She peered up to regard the man at her side. To beg him for help. The Grey Warden was gone. Her father towered over her. His face was stern. Hard.

“Gabrielle Emily Hawke!” he bellowed. His voice was deep. Resonating. “Pull yourself together! Go get your sister. Do your job.”

The young woman pulled her feet out of the shoes she wore as a girl. She struggled against an unseen weight that tried to push her back. Unseen hands that tried to pull her down. She propelled herself to move. Her determination driving her ponderous steps. An eternity passed as she progressed toward that final door.

She reached for the handle. Fear of the unknown gripped her. Paralyzed her. She could feel her father’s green-blue eyes boring a hole in her back. She had to do it. She had to press on. On the other side she heard her sister’s frantic whispers.

“Gabs…Gabs…Gabby!”

Bethany needed her. The young woman had to save her sister. She turned the knob.

Gabrielle’s bolted upright in her bed. Bethany lay next to her, gripping her arm so tightly the girl’s nails were digging into her older sister’s skin. The younger woman’s brown eyes were wide with horror.

“Something’s wrong,” Bethany whispered.

Gabrielle knew exactly what her sister meant. The dream she had was a warning that the darkspawn were on their way. She could feel it to her very core.

“Hurry up and get dressed then grab as many healing and lyrium potions as you can,” she ordered as she pulled her boots on. “And don’t forget your staff.”

Bethany nodded her understanding and began scrambling to do as her sister told her. In the meantime, Gabrielle retrieved her own wooden stave from under the bed, grabbed her pack from the floor near her bed, and ran from the room. She went to her mother’s door first and banged the heel of her palm on the wooden surface.

“Mother!” she yelled. “Mother! Get up.”

As soon as she saw the glow of candlelight beneath Leandra’s door, Gabrielle headed to Carver’s room. Knowing her brother would ignore her if she pounded on his door, and knowing it would be locked, she used a Force Push spell to blast her way in. The noise woke Carver so abruptly he fell onto the floor next to his bed in a heap. When he saw his older sister standing there, he tightened the blanket he was tangled in around his waist to cover his nudity.

“What the fuck?” he screeched.

“Get up!” she hollered. “Get your shit together. We have to leave. Now!”

“Who do you think you are barging into my room?”

Gabrielle glowered at her brother. “Get your ass up, get dressed, throw your shit in your pack and get into the kitchen. You have five minutes, or so help the Maker, I will drag your naked ass out of this house and kick it all the way out of the village.”

Carver returned his sister’s murderous glare with one of his own. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

Gabrielle took a deep breath, then let it out slowly through gritted teeth. “You smell that?” she asked. “That’s the smell of the village burning to the ground. Do you know what caused it?”

Her brother’s brow creased with concern before he quietly uttered, “Darkspawn.”

While the others were getting their things ready, Gabrielle ran to the kitchen. Someone had attempted to close the broken front door, but it still remained slightly ajar. The young mage scanned the room for something to use to impede intruders from easily invading their home and spied the heavy dish cabinet nearby. Using force magic to aid her own muscles, Gabrielle inched the heavy piece of furniture across the floor to the entrance and hoped it would be enough to allow the family time to escape.

She then went to the kitchen window, moved the curtain aside just enough to see and took a peek outside. The sight nearly took her breath. Fires lit the night sky as the shadowy forms of countless creatures skulked about around them. Gabrielle quickly closed the curtain and pressed her back to the wall. She shut her eyes in an effort to calm herself and hold back the panic building within her chest. She nearly jumped from her skin when she heard Bethany’s voice.

“How close are they?”

The older apostate gulped back a ball of vomit that had risen into her throat. “We’re going to have to go out one of the back windows if we’re to have any chance of escape.”

“Go. I’ll seal the door with magic,” Bethany offered. “Maybe it will buy us a little extra time.

“Good thinking, Bethie” Gabrielle said as she skirted past her sister, headed to their room. “Don’t be too long.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Bethany called after her.

When she reached their bedroom, the apostate pushed her bed to the window, blew out the candle on the nightstand and opened the shutters. By the time she dropped the packs outside, Bethany had joined the rest of the family. Gabrielle helped her sister clamber through the opening, but as soon as Bethany’s feet touched the ground, a resounding crash echoed throughout the small cottage alerting the family that someone or something was trying to break through Bethany’s seal on the front door.

Leandra was nearly halfway out the window, when she dropped back in onto the bed. “I have to get it,” she cried in a panic. “I can’t leave it behind.”

Gabrielle shook her head as she held her mother by the shoulders. “Whatever it is, Mother, just leave it. We have to go.”

Leandra pushed her daughter away. “No! I have to get it. I will die before I leave your father’s staff behind for those filthy beasts.”

The apostate knew exactly which stave her mother meant, and she knew that Leandra would never make it out if she went to retrieve it herself.

“Carver,” she ordered, “Get Mother out. Then you go. Head toward the bridge. If I’m not there in ten minutes, start making your way north. Don’t stop for any reason. Keep going until sunrise, then find somewhere safe to hide.”

She was relieved when, for once, Carver didn’t argue with her, choosing instead to respond with, “Yes, Sister,” before guiding Leandra back to the window.

Gabrielle raced to her mother’s room with the incessant sound of rattling dishes and the wood of the front door cracking ringing in her ears. She slid under Leandra’s bed and grabbed the long, dust laden, wooden box hiding there. The container was too big and bulky to carry, but the hasp was locked. She frantically searched her mother’s bedside table for the key for several minutes without luck, but the crashing of the front door giving way and that of the cabinet toppling over made her give up her quest. She closed her eyes and unleashed a haphazard force blast at the box, praying it wouldn’t damage the contents. The container flew across the room and hit the wall, splintering it into shards which scattered throughout the room and covered the velvet cloth enveloping the stave.

The apostate moved the cloth aside and seized the staff. She then clambered up onto the bed and forced the shutters of the window open. She threw the staff out first, then jumped toward the opening, but toppled over when something grabbed her by the leg. She rolled over and landed the boot of her free foot to the most grotesque face she had ever laid eyes upon.

It looked like a large man whose skin had all been peeled away to reveal the muscle beneath which had begun to rot. Its dead eyes were milky white like those of a corpse, and when it opened its wide mouth with a howl of pain, it displayed a full set of blackened, razor sharp teeth. Gabrielle hit the monster with a grease spell, followed by a flame blast lighting it ablaze as she scrambled to the window. As her feet touched down on the grass below, she threw a fireball into her mother’s window before retrieving her father’s staff. As she ran past the house, she continued to cast fire spells at it until the thatched roof finally caught. The roar of darkspawn reverberated through the air and the stench of acrid smoke filled the young apostate’s lungs as she raced toward the bridge.

Once she was clear of the cottage, she stopped only long enough to remove her own staff from its sling on her back and replace it with her father’s. As she ran from the chaos of the village and the path beyond, she had to fight her way through until, by the time she reached the bridge, her magic was all but spent. Her mana was low and it had weakened her tremendously. She only hoped her family hadn’t left without her and that Bethany had found enough lyrium potions to sustain her until she had the chance to rest.

Fortunately, when she arrived at her destination, her mother and siblings were just getting ready to leave. Gabrielle fell to her knees, struggling to catch her breath. Within seconds, Bethany was at her side with two vials of thick blue liquid, their corks already pulled. Gabrielle sucked down the potions and immediately began to feel her mana return.

“Gabs!” Bethany gasped. “Your leg!”

Gabrielle inspected her lower limb and found blood pouring from a deep gash just above the line of her boot. In her haste to flee the village and the darkspawn, she hadn’t even noticed. She had felt a slight sting as she ran, but now that she finally had a moment to relax, she was aware of the full impact of the damage. She sucked in a hard breath through gnashed teeth.

“That thing must have scratched me with its claws when it grabbed my leg.”

“That thing?” Carver questioned, concern miring his lapis blue eyes. “You mean one of the darkspawn?”

“Yeah, it caught me when I was trying to climb out the window.”

Her brother backed away. “You could be tainted. Only Grey Wardens are immune.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Carver. I’m fine.”

Bethany reached out to put her hand over her sister’s wound.

“Don’t touch her!” he cried. “You’ll be tainted, too.”

“Afraid you’ll be left alone and actually have to work for a living?” Gabrielle retorted.

“I’ll be fine, Carver” Bethany interceded as she put her finger’s over the cut and closed her eyes.

Within moments, Gabrielle could feel her skin fusing back together and the pain in her leg subside. She put her hand over her sister’s.

“Thanks, Bethie. I take it you didn’t detect any taint?”

“No,” replied the younger woman. “Your blood appears to be clean.”

Gabrielle cockled her lips and raised a brow at her brother. “See. I told you I was fine.”

He scowled. “Whatever. Can we go now before those monsters catch up to us?”

The apostate stood, brushed the pebbles and dirt from the seat and knees of her trousers, and gazed at the sun rising over the tops of the nearby hills. They couldn’t go back to Lothering. The only thing they could do was push forward. She thought of the Grey Warden and wondered what he might have been doing at that moment. Then she surveyed her family. Where would they be if she had run away? Lost to the darkspawn no doubt. In her heart, she knew she made the right choice. They were her responsibility, and hers alone.

She pushed past her brother toward the hills and walked a few steps before stopping and turning her head. “You know,” she said over her shoulder. “That may be the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard you say, Carver.”

For years Gabs felt responsible for our father’s death because it took her too long to get back with the potion she was given. She wondered if she had done a better job of conveying the graveness of father’s illness, the physician might have taken it more seriously. In my opinion, Father wanted Gabs out of the house so she wouldn’t have to witness his passing. I’ve never been very good with healing magic, but I do know it takes a bit of time for a potion to work. For Father to die that quickly after sending Gabs for aid, he was beyond any help that a potion could have offered.

When Gabs told me about the dream she had that night, it made perfect sense to me. Something was telling her it was time to grow up and finally take full responsibility for her family. Gabs had to step out of the shoes of the little girl she had been clinging to and slip into her role as sole leader and protector of the family. It was a constant struggle for her, and Carver never made it any easier. Before that night, part of her was still struggling with the idea of running away and living her own life. After that night, she realized it was never going to be an option for her.

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The True Tale Of The Fifth Blight