#[ ao3 link pending b/c tumblr hates links ]

[ourdawncomes]

Stories of Thedas. Volume II.

Prompt(s): Shooting stars & Flowers.

One moment the heavens are silent, stars suspended in the sky overhead exactly as they had been the first night Gorim saw them. The next, a streak dashes through a cluster of stars and he jumps up in his bedroll, grasping for a sword that isn’t at his side. It is gone as quickly as it appeared, vanishing into the darkness as though it was never there. “Ancestor’s mercy,” he sighs, chest heaving from withheld breath. “Just when you grow used to all those— things up there, they start moving.”

Tamar pauses mid-way through loosening her braid to look up with him, sweeping the skies with curious eyes. “They’re always moving,” she says as she settles down beside him, feet tucking neatly beneath her. A warden in name but a princess by birth, he doubts any amount of time on the surface can hope to hammer the noble out of her. “Most, to my understanding, are too slow to see.”

“Is that so?” He searches the spot where it had fallen to see what was left behind. Finding nothing, his attention turns to Tamar’s half-undone braids, threading his fingers through the places where her hair still wove together. “I suppose I’ve never looked close enough to notice.” Even after all these months he tries to avoid looking when he can help it. At night it isn’t so intimidating, he can almost fool himself into believing he’s looking up at the tall ceilings of the untamed tunnels past the rune-lit Deep Roads, and then looking up doesn’t feel so much like falling.

Tamar lays her cheek against him, hair spilling over his shoulder. “They move like the sun in the sky, from east to west, sometimes vanishing beneath the horizon for months at a time.”

Gorim wonders (but does not ask) if that makes the sun just another star in the sky, just one in a million, and if that is the case, he wonders what that makes them. “Where did you learn about this?” His attention turns, eyes moving to their corners in time to see her cheeks redden. The shade of pink they turn tells him all he needs to know. Their answer waits on a shelf back in Orzammar, tucked out of sight where lordly eyes will never look.

“Do you remember that book I read a year ago? By the Summer Skies?”

The name stirs vague memories, words on pages describing humans making prolonged eye contact across a crowded ballroom, or maybe that was the one that came after the one she means. Or before. Only the best and worst the humans have to offer sticks out in his mind, everything else lost in a cloud of wistful stares and heaving bosoms. “I can’t say I do.”

“They swore if they were ever separated they’d meet under the Maiden’s crown. Each night another star appeared in the night sky until the constellation was whole again.”

“Constellation?”

“A group of stars that together make a picture. Like—” She sits up to scan the heavens, tongue pushing to the side of her cheek before she finds one she recognises. “There.” Arm extended, she traces a line through a cluster of stars. Despite his best efforts, he fails to recognise the shape she’s making. “That’s Draconis up there. By springtime it will have disappeared entirely behind the horizon.”

“And it’s supposed to be the shape of a dragon?” He tilts his head to one side, examining the trail of stars he thinks are meant to be webbed wings extended to both sides of its torso. The resemblance is slight, as a child’s drawing might be, though he’s yet to see a dragon on the Surface near enough to say with certainty.

“With a little imagination.”

“Ah, I see.” He pulls her against him, anchoring his hand on her waist, considering the sky with a different question in mind. “And which stars should be ours? Those?” He gestures towards a smattering of stars hanging over the distant Frostbacks. Towards home, he thinks.

“I don’t think that’s a constellation.”

“Not yet, but surely the ones the humans have now had to start a similar way.” Gorim squints his eyes, blurring the stars between his lashes, hoping he can make a shape from the collection he’d chosen. The thin line that formed the base could be a tail, or a handle, he sees the outline of a mace and muses to himself that his warrior’s blood hasn’t abandoned him yet. Unsatisfied, he looks again, thumb playing beneath the hem of her shirt as he tries different shapes: a scepter, a ladle, a— “A flower.”

It seems trite, but her smile against his shoulder tells him he’s on the right path. “Like the bouquet you smuggled into my room.”

He knows just the one she means. A humble bouquet of bright red flowers with broad, round leaves that had been more trouble than he could’ve ever imagined. “Those flowers,” Gorim chuckles, “they nearly tore the Assembly apart.”

“Most were only sore they didn’t think of it first,” she says. “Nothing they’d tried worked half as well.”

“I never told you this, but when I first left Orzammar, those flowers were one of the first things I saw.” Remembering brings a humorous tear to his eye, which he wipes away with the tip of a finger. “My first thought was that it had to be a sign, a sign that I would see you again. I’m not sure the ancestors send signs above ground, but if they did, I reasoned that they were probably the sort that grew out of it. My second thought was: that sodding merchant charged me that much for some weeds he picked off the side of the road?”

Tamar snorts against his shoulder, grin tempered by how she pushes it into the sleeve of his shirt. “Weeds or not, he picked them well. They were beautiful, even when they started wilting.”

“I was afraid you’d never throw them away.”

“I haven’t. One’s still pressed between the pages of a book somewhere, but if Bhelen ever finds it….” When she lapses into silence, it’s less warm than before. A slow sigh issues from her nose as she sits a little closer against him, nose pressing against his neck so every breath tickles his skin.

“They’ll be safe in the stars.” Gorim tugs her hips closer to his, planting a kiss on her hairline. “Not even your brother can reach them there.”

#gorim saelac #Warden Aeducan #storiesofthedas2 #writingdragonage #storiesofthedas #( my writing ) #[ my gorim is so rusty rip... ] #v; not even a warrior anymore ( gorim | origins ) #vital as ore ( gorim | ic ) #i will always be your man ( tam x gorim ) #[ ao3 link pending b/c tumblr hates links ]