The night before, they had reached the Crossroads and met the "famed" priestess, who assured them she would depart for Haven and contact Leliana to facilitate an approach with the Chantry.
Truthfully, Elentari did not care much.
She knew it should be a priority—or so the shems had told her—but her heart was broken. She had never witnessed so much cruelty in her life. And the worst part was that all of this was only beginning. She, who had yearned for freedom among her own, now that she tasted it for the first time found only a bitter, rotten flavor.
It made her sad.
That gaunt child she had carried in her arms ended up in the hands of Corporal Vale, the person charged with coordinating the Inquisition's operations in the area. She had feared for the boy's life throughout the entire journey, because he had felt so weakened and malnourished. She had begged Mythal for mercy, for protection, had implored Falon'Din with fervor not to take him… and then she had wondered if it was right to ask her gods at all, or if she should look up at the torn sky and demand an answer from the Maker.
Right now, she wanted to collapse into tears and pretend this was not her life.
In about an hour, dawn would break. Elentari knew it, because she had witnessed countless dawns alongside her people's harmonious steps as they migrated to new places. Planting season was approaching in the surrounding fields. The first rains had fallen and the earth was soft. Birds had begun to build their nests in the trees, and her eyes clung to those small, hopeful details to gather the strength this new day would demand.
Day by day, Elentari. Day by day. You can… you can endure all this…
The Herald was deeply shaken. She longed for Desh's tight embrace, the laughter of her best friend Idril, and the nightly chases with Thengal when he taught her the secrets of stealth. Each day it became harder to summon those memories; the faces of her clan felt distant somewhere in a corner of her mind, and to reach them she had to pull up painful recollections.
Because it hurt to be aware of what she had lost.
Long before the explosion at the Conclave—but she was not ready to think about that.
It hurt too much. Far too much.
She had had family, love, safety—and now she was alone. She had to accept it, once and for all.
She was afraid to ask herself honestly whether she would ever return to her clan… because this war, all this madness, seemed capable of devouring her. And even if she survived—would they accept her back?
So she focused on the dew on the grass, leaving the leaves wet and soaked against the ground. It was beautiful to watch. It made her want to roll in it and pretend she was happy again under the shelter of the elves… without the Chantry's chains or the demands that weighed on her name. Elentari lowered her gaze and watched ants hauling food toward their little holes. She smiled. Living nature. The hope of tomorrow.
And yet, far away… a war between two factions was brewing…
…and that same war was brewing inside her as well: between the peaceful memory of her people—the thing she clung to in the desperate hope of returning—and the relentless death of this chaos, and the green Mark in her palm.
What had happened? No—why? Why her?
Her clan, Clan Lavellan, had been known for trying to live in peace.
Deshanna had always taught respect toward outsiders and kin alike, and that was what Elentari herself had been raised on. To her, it was strange to watch the indifferent inaction that surrounded her in these times. Perhaps that was why, when she saw in the distance a young woman lift a machete with a weak hand to hack at weeds in a field, she decided to approach.
She could tell the girl was not doing it properly. Not that Elentari would have done it better in the past—she had always been cared for as if she were made of glass—but the Dalish woman had watched fieldwork countless times. Not because the Dalish had the privilege of staying in one place, but because her clan maintained good relations with certain people who allowed them to camp near their fields during harvest season to ease trade.
When she drew close, she noticed the caution the woman adopted with her. First, the girl could not stop looking at the vallaslin of Ghilan'nain—the "savage" seal on Elentari's face that shemlen feared so much. But Elentari also noticed the girl's palms: flayed, swollen, blistered. That made the Herald arch her brows and want to heal her wounds, though she had been warned that humans feared magic too much and she should not use it openly. In any case, she was a mediocre healing mage, but she knew the ingredients for potent medicinal salves.
The farmgirl broke her thoughts.
- You're the one they call Herald.
Elentari judged that the young woman had not yet seen twenty springs. She nodded, but answered anyway.
- My name is Elentari. It's a pleasure.
The girl watched her in silence, and then chose to behave as if Elentari did not exist.
Elentari had already noticed that in wartime people stopped trusting, and every stranger became an enemy.
Especially a Dalish woman.
Clumsily, the shemlen grabbed the tool and began striking at a tree trunk to learn how to handle it. The attitude, of course, displeased the elf. That tree was becoming a victim of incompetence born of ignorance.
- Hey. Stop. I can help you. - the Herald said.
The woman looked at her with suspicion. Elentari held out her hand, and when she took the machete she demonstrated how to cut the weeds. Only then did she realize how difficult it truly was—the weight was oppressive, and her hands were not used to field labor either.
- By Mythal! - he muttered, and immediately thought it was not proper to mention her goddess before worshippers of the priestess whose Herald she was supposed to be. Though… did humans even know who Mythal was? Most likely not.
- How do you do this work? - she asked the girl with a sympathetic laugh.
The shemlen seemed amused and smiled back.
- Did you come to help?
- I think I came to bother you. - Elentari joked, and the woman laughed.
They looked at each other with a hint of complicity—perhaps that trust two unknown women could share when trying to offer a friendly hand.
- If you want to help me, you could put salve and a bandage on my hands. What do you say?
The Herald nodded, a little enthusiastic, and just as the girl smiled, Elentari saw her glance at the vallaslin and ask:
- Is it true the Dalish travel all the time?
- Yes. We can't stay in one place.
- That sounds… strange. But beautiful. - The farmgirl's eyes shone with longing. - I wish I could see the whole world too… travel everywhere. - Then she laughed easily.
It tugged a small smile from Elentari, and she realized she had no idea what the life of a human farmgirl was like. Was it a good life? She had no way of knowing. What she did know was that she felt comfortable in this conversation, and that—apparently—she did better talking to peasants, unimportant people…
- You have roots in the earth. We have roots in the road. - the Dalish woman confessed.
The girl laughed again.
- Not the same… but I guess it's beautiful too, isn't it?
Then Elentari watched her crouch and pick up the tool again.
- You're right. Oh! Well, wait a second. - I'll go get the bandages and the salve… my hands hurt. - She said it as if she were confessing a well-kept secret. - Will you help me?
She held up her hands, and the Herald nodded—this time not hiding the joy in her face.
Not much time passed before the young shem headed toward her little house... and the newborn morning filled with shouting and the clash of steel.
The sun barely hinted at the horizon when a group of templars in heavy armor cut across the plot of land meant to be cleared. Ahead of them, two rebel mages fled in panic. Or so the Herald thought, until she saw one of the mages hurl himself at their enemies to buy time for the other—who, unable to consider his surroundings, began to cast a spell.
There was no warning.
No mercy.
Only the flash of a flame igniting in the palm of a rebel mage.
Elentari watched the fireball tear through the air in a moment that felt eternal, as if the whole world had slowed so she could witness, powerless, the disaster about to happen.
And then the cruel impact came too fast.
Fire wrapped the farmgirl in a burning embrace. The air erupted with a dry, ravenous sound. A scream tore the dawn apart—an inhuman sound that sank into Elentari's bones—and then she felt it:
Heat.
A scalding wave struck her like a slap, suffocating and thick, stealing her breath. The smell was worse. First, a sweet-bitter note, like skin blistering under flame. Then the nauseating stench of burning flesh, the reek of singed hair, the sharp perfume of desperation. The farmgirl staggered; the machete slipped from blackening fingers. Her screams turned to ragged gasps, then whispers.
And then she fell.
She did not move again.
But the world, too, seemed to stop moving.
Elentari did not move either.
She only stared.
The woman's skin twisted and darkened before her eyes, a nightmare she could not look away from. Because that farmgirl had not been a demon, nor an enemy. She had not been a soldier on a battlefield…
She had been a girl who, minutes earlier, had smiled at her with the simple hope that someone would bandage her hands.
No—she was no longer "was."
She had been.
After that, Elentari's memories became vague flashes: Inquisition soldiers and Crossroads fighters rushing the troublemakers; she recognized her companions too; she heard Cassandra arguing with Solas about who the true victims were, and who the guilty: mages, or templars?
The answer, however, was clear to the Herald.
The victims were the innocents. The unprotected. The peasants—those who could not hold a weapon and take lives.
And in the middle of that thought, the elf realized a truth that made her go cold:
She was a murderer too.
Not because she had thrown a fireball.
Not because she had swung a blade.
But because she was the Herald of Andraste.
Because she was the only one with the power to close the Breach.
And she still had not done it.
And as long as this chaos kept devouring everything, every life lost would weigh on her soul.
She was guilty too.