[She glances down at her hand, gripping his arm like he's the one keeping her grounded on this earth, and then pulls away sharply like she'd just burned herself. She runs her fingertips across her palm as she makes a fist, opens it, and then repeats. She should probably tell Tony. Probably. But it's hard when she doesn't even really know how to tell herself it. It's a strange mental state of knowing something but not being able to understand it. So she starts as Hawke does, coming in from an angle that no one else could ever seem to quite understand.]
My mother and father eloped when they were quite young. It was quite a scandal, you know, the daughter of the most powerful family in Kirkwall, pregnant with the child of some lowly mage. [Her hand drops to draw a circle in the dirt.] They escaped in the middle of the night, like in some dashing novel, across the Waking Sea [A line cuts from the circle and another circle is drawn at the end] to Ferelden . To start a new life or something like that.
But, funny, it turns out that living a life on the run with a mage when you're used to luxury and servants is bit harder than my mother could have expected. Imagine that, hm? It was a cold winter that year. The coldest that Ferelden had seen in ages. And so my mother gave birth to me on the coldest, darkest day of the entire year. If my father hadn't been good at healing magic, I'm not sure she would have made it.
[There's a pause. It's funny to imagine her parents young and not made weary by the world and the hands that they were dealt. ] But when I was born I didn't cry like babies do out of the womb. I was just limp, whimpering, and ugly. Alright, all babies are ugly but perhaps I was exceptionally ugly because it makes it a better story if I am. [Everyone likes humor, right? Of course.]
Anyway, Mother didn't know if I'd survive the night. Apparently she cried and told my father she didn't want to see me in case I didn't. But I did. I survived that night. And the next. And the week and so on. A rebellion against fate or something like that. Which was fitting, my father would have been a rebel he hadn't married my mother and fucking an apostate is about the most rebellious thing Mother had ever done. They were proud. So that's how they got "Marian".
Rebellion. And I suppose I did rebel. Against everything that the Maker threw at me. Pneumonia, the Fifth Blight, the Deep Roads, enough blood mages to fill up an entire circle, murderers, Templars, a Qunari leader who stabbed me like a meat skewer. [She's not looking at him, she hasn't been looking at him, and she keeps her eyes on the dark ground.]
But here's the thing about rebellions. They either succeed. Or-[She runs her hand roughly through the dirt, destroying any trace of the drawings she had made.] are quashed. Brutally.
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My mother and father eloped when they were quite young. It was quite a scandal, you know, the daughter of the most powerful family in Kirkwall, pregnant with the child of some lowly mage. [Her hand drops to draw a circle in the dirt.] They escaped in the middle of the night, like in some dashing novel, across the Waking Sea [A line cuts from the circle and another circle is drawn at the end] to Ferelden . To start a new life or something like that.
But, funny, it turns out that living a life on the run with a mage when you're used to luxury and servants is bit harder than my mother could have expected. Imagine that, hm? It was a cold winter that year. The coldest that Ferelden had seen in ages. And so my mother gave birth to me on the coldest, darkest day of the entire year. If my father hadn't been good at healing magic, I'm not sure she would have made it.
[There's a pause. It's funny to imagine her parents young and not made weary by the world and the hands that they were dealt. ] But when I was born I didn't cry like babies do out of the womb. I was just limp, whimpering, and ugly. Alright, all babies are ugly but perhaps I was exceptionally ugly because it makes it a better story if I am. [Everyone likes humor, right? Of course.]
Anyway, Mother didn't know if I'd survive the night. Apparently she cried and told my father she didn't want to see me in case I didn't. But I did. I survived that night. And the next. And the week and so on. A rebellion against fate or something like that. Which was fitting, my father would have been a rebel he hadn't married my mother and fucking an apostate is about the most rebellious thing Mother had ever done. They were proud. So that's how they got "Marian".
Rebellion. And I suppose I did rebel. Against everything that the Maker threw at me. Pneumonia, the Fifth Blight, the Deep Roads, enough blood mages to fill up an entire circle, murderers, Templars, a Qunari leader who stabbed me like a meat skewer. [She's not looking at him, she hasn't been looking at him, and she keeps her eyes on the dark ground.]
But here's the thing about rebellions. They either succeed. Or-[She runs her hand roughly through the dirt, destroying any trace of the drawings she had made.] are quashed. Brutally.