At Your Side (A Dragon Age fanfiction)

In the Depths

"Your people actually choose to live down here?" Hawke asked Varric as they walked through the dripping, echoing caverns of the Deep Roads.

"Crazy, isn't it?" He looked around with as much disgust as she felt. "I'll be glad to get out of here and get some decent ale again."

Hawke looked over her shoulder at Anders. "Come on, poky! Aren't you supposed to be the experienced one?"

The mage shuddered. "I swore I'd never enter the Deep Roads again. I hate the bloody Deep Roads."

Fenris crossed his arms, glaring at Anders. "I told you we should have left him behind."

"Wait, elf, I thought you said we should bring him along to keep an eye on him. Get your story straight," Varric protested. "Hawke, far be it from me to question your judgment, but isn't this expedition likely to be miserable enough without dragging along a mage who hates the Deep Roads and an elf who hates mages?"

"You make a good point," Hawke admitted. "But what choice did I have? We needed Anders's experience; Aveline couldn't come, Isabela refused, and Merrill would have been very unhappy down here." Varric didn't argue that assertion. "I thought about bringing Bethany, but you saw the fit my mother had when I suggested it. And fair enough. Mother has too few eggs to trust them both in this extremely dangerous basket. So here we are."

"Let's just hope we can get in, loot the place, and be back out before they have time to kill each other," Varric muttered.

Hawke glanced back at the others, who were engaged in one of their endless arguments about the evils of magic versus the evils of the Templars. "We'll need to move faster."

"You know," Varric said, "you'd think they'd be best friends. Aren't they pretty much the same person? Both of them always brooding about taking revenge on the people who oppressed them."

"I'll pay you five gold to make that point to them ... if you survive," Hawke said, chuckling.

"No, thanks. I like my chest hair unsinged and my heart inside my body."

Bartrand had assigned the four of them to scout a detour around a cave-in that was blocking the path. Mostly it seemed to involve picking their way through shadowy corridors and fighting darkspawn, neither of which was on Hawke's list of favorite things to do. The darkspawn in particular were difficult to face—they brought back memories of fighting her way out of Lothering, of the destruction of her family's home and everyone she'd grown up with, of the ogre that had torn Carver to pieces.

The detour wasn't the only thing they were hunting. Bodahn, the dwarven merchant who had accompanied the expedition, had asked for their help in finding his son, Sandal. Privately Hawke didn't expect to find the boy alive, not with darkspawn everywhere, but she promised to look.

So she was startled when she came around a corner and found the young dwarf standing, apparently unhurt, in the midst of a pile of dead darkspawn.

"Hawke," Varric whispered, nudging her. "Look."

Following his gaze, Hawke saw a huge ogre hovering over the young dwarf's shoulder and instinctively she began to run forward, sword raised. But then she looked closer—the ogre was frozen. Somehow it had been turned into a towering statue of crystal. Slowly Hawke came to a stop, lowering her sword, her eyes locked on the wide blue gaze of the dwarf.