Nyx Surana is eighteen years old, a mage barely out of her Harrowing, and looking out across the Korcari Wilds with the other remaining Grey Warden in Ferelden. Alistair is distracted, distraught, and Nyx doesn't know how to help him. The Witch of the Wilds is behind her, tossing barbs with her daughter, and Nyx barely hears them.

She's thinking.

Jowan and Lily. Jowan had betrayed her, yes, and she was angry…but he had been one of the first few human mages to accept her. Lily had loved Jowan, and it had only brought her pain.

Jory, Daveth. She barely knew Daveth before the Joining took him, but he had seemed nice. Jory was hesitant, but she hadn't disliked him.

Duncan. Alistair's hero, and Nyx's savior. She knows she didn't speak with him as much as she should have—didn't understand him. But she'd been grateful to be saved from Aeonar, after the Tower. She thinks she could have grown to like him, not just respect him. But he's dead now and there's nothing you can say to a corpse that'll make a difference.

Everyone who was at Ostagar is dead. The king, Wynne, the other Grey Wardens she never had a chance to meet…

Nyx taps her staff against the damp ground once, twice. She briefly rests her forehead against the steel of her stolen Acolyte's Staff, forcing her fear away.

She's so tired of losing people in her life. They force their way in, throwing all of her walls down and making themselves precious to her, and then they leave her behind. Her parents are probably still in the Denerim Alienage, if they're still even alive—she can hardly remember them anyway. Maker only knows where Jowan is, and Lily's as good as dead. Duncan's gone, and though they weren't close she can see how his loss tears Alistair to shreds.

Her fingers tighten around the only reminder she has of her old life. The Acolyte's Staff will serve her well, she thinks, and it's only fitting that the token she takes into her new life is a weapon.

She makes her way back over to the others, standing next to Alistair. When Flemeth brings up belief, she says, "Believed or not, some things must simply be accepted."

"That's the sort of answer I was looking for," Flemeth replies, and that seems to be that.

Morrigan is going to be tagging along, on her mother's orders. Doubtless, both of them have layers of hidden motives for it, but Nyx decides to think about it when she isn't up to her ankles in swamp muck. Alistair won't leave, ever—she's the last Grey Warden alive in Ferelden, aside from him. They can't afford to be separated.

Nyx thinks about this as they traipse through the Wilds, following Morrigan's lead.

Later that night, she forms a box in her head. It doesn't precisely reach into the Fade, not yet, but she's been thinking about it for a while. It contains her memories, but with the edges worn down by time and nostalgia.

Jowan and Lily were there, before, but they're gone now. They'd been there the longest—longer than her parents, in Jowan's case. Her parents had quietly faded away not long after her arrival in the Tower, some twelve years ago.

As she adds Alistair and Morrigan to that limited circle, she wonders if it's going to matter. People come and go without much input from her and have for all her life.
She raises her hand to her throat and toys with the Warden's Oath—the pendant she received after surviving her Joining. She's a Grey Warden now, even if the order is sadly depleted. She's not just an elf, just a mage.

Never again, Nyx thinks. I will never let anyone take what's mine. My friends, my freedom, my happiness.

It seems a good place to start. Being a Grey Warden will fall into place. Kill Darkspawn, kill the Archdemon, save the country.

Nyx decides to start leading, once they're out of the Wilds.

She ends up buried under two hundred pounds of gleeful mabari hound before she even sets foot in Lothering, and thinks that things are looking up. Rabbit joins their party with little fuss.

Leliana is…strange. Sten is stranger.

But as she talks to them, she adds them to her growing circle of precious people. Leliana wants to do some good in the world, apparently under the impression that Nyx is the catalyst for it, while Sten is on a journey to redeem himself even if he won't admit it. For Leliana, she agrees to keep an eye out for threats of the Orlesian kind, and for Sten, she embarks on a quest to find that bloody sword of his.

Sheer bloody-mindedness has always gotten her where she wants to go. Not necessarily safely, but it has.

It makes the return trip to the Circle Tower a lot more bearable.

Twelve long years make it a home, even if she wishes sometimes that it wasn't. It's hard to reconcile the home she remembers with the gutted, demon-filled halls she sees. The walls pulse with what Alistair dubbed "meat-moss," and Leliana recoils from it as though burned when Nyx theorizes on its source. Sten doesn't want to help, but Nyx doesn't listen to him. Morrigan seems to think that the Circle mages brought it on themselves, for which Nyx immediately cuts her off—complacent or not, cowed or not, the Circle was her home and its occupants were her family.

Even if, by now, it was broken.

Finding Wynne had been a miracle she never dared hope for—it's what she imagined reuniting with her parents would have been like, if they were alive. With one miracle under her belt, then, Nyx climbs the tower's levels to find her answers.

Because, make no mistake, she will end Uldred for what he's done.

She fights her way to the top, killing anything that dares stand in her way. She's learned while on the road—spells to stop attackers, to crush them where they stand, to heal, and to beat demons to death with their own mana. She can freeze enemies or set them aflame. She can turn them into walking bombs. And her companions can slice and dice with the best warriors she's ever known. She can do this.

The Sloth demon only slows her down because its part of the Fade is a maze. It dies like all the rest once she gets her feet under her again.

Uldred dismisses her from consideration. This is a mistake, but not just because of who she is—it's a mistake because of who she's befriended.

Rabbit is the one who tears his throat out, after Leliana plinks away at him with her bow. After Nyx goes through two lyrium potions to top up her mana and bring it to bear on Uldred's. After Wynne exhausts herself, keeping Sten and Alistair alive. After Morrigan sets him on fire and tears into him in the form of a massive spider. It might have taken a toss from Sten to get Rabbit high enough to reach it, what with Uldred being possessed by a Pride demon that made him grow to four times his size, but it's done.

And despite poor mad Cullen's snarled orders, born from days upon days of horrific demonic torture, Nyx refuses to allow the Rite of Annulment to proceed. She won't let the Templars kill what remains of her family.

Uldred is dead, and the Circle is saved.

Then, they move on to Redcliffe.

They spend the daylight hours preparing Redcliffe's defenses against the undead.

Nyx spends the night laying glyph traps while Alistair, Sten, and Rabbit tear into the walking corpses. Leliana shoots them from afar, while Wynne heals everyone as often as she can manage. Morrigan's taken to lobbing hexes over barricades, and Nyx sees their newest teammate—one Zevran Arainai—picking off whatever corpses make it through the barricades and melee fighters.

They fight well together. The next day dawns bright, and everyone lives.

It's almost enough to let her forget what Alistair confessed to her the day before.

She's not quite sure what to do about Alistair being a prince. If there's even anything for her to do—it's his secret, but he's handed control over everything over to her so far. Nyx doesn't know what Alistair wants, other than to tell her.

Somehow, this is probably going to mean his fate is in her hands.

Well, he's in good company, because she is rapidly realizing that so is everyone else's.

They bring the Circle to Redcliffe almost as soon as they last corpse falls. Nyx personally browbeats the demon possessing Conner into leaving, because she knows better than to deal with it any other way. She could have had Morrigan or Wynne or even Irving do the same, but she refuses.

After letting Jowan go free…this is the least she can do.

Arl Eamon is still deathly ill, however.

And this is why Nyx takes her friends—her mismatched followers, her minions, her pawns—off toward a village called Haven.

(Nyx is of the opinion that, unless one counts Uldred's coup, she has never been more afraid than when the high dragon Andraste flies over their heads. She leaves that beast well alone.)

They tromp back to Redcliffe two weeks later, splattered with dragon blood and a tiny packet of the Ashes tucked into Nyx's belongings. And if it involved cults, dragons, blood magic, trials no one expected, and enough lyrium to keep the Tevinter Imperium afloat for years on years…well, that's no one's business but theirs and the high dragon's.

She's shaking for at least half an hour after meeting the false Jowan and hopes that she's made the right choice.

Arl Eamon is happy to be up and about, at least.

He talks about the Landsmeet, about gathering armies (as though that's not what she has already been doing, with all the subtlety of a hammer) and of putting Alistair on the throne.

Nyx wonders what makes her bite her tongue. After meeting Alistair's sister…

Well, there's enough on that man's shoulders.

Sometime in the months between Ostagar and finding the Urn of Sacred Ashes, Alistair falls in love with her.

It's strange how she doesn't fully understand how deep his affection runs. She'd known he was attracted to her—that part had been hard to miss. But until she hands him his mother's amulet, which she'd only just noticed in Eamon's office, she doesn't understand.

Flirtations are easy—are easily forgettable, when it came to life in the Circle. When friends can disappear and come back…changed, permanence is hardly something she understands very well. Wynne had told her Alistair would give his whole heart to the woman he loved, and Nyx hadn't understood. Hadn't thought he could love her.

Alistair confronts her in camp and confesses and, for the first time in a while, Nyx is briefly at a loss.

So she kisses him back and doesn't have to say anything.

All the while, the voice in the back of her head—the one that will eventually lead her to crown Bhelen king, the one that will ally her with Anora—is telling her it cannot last. The rest of her just focuses on the love that went ignored for so long. On the rose, on the heat, and on him.

(It's interesting how the same urge toward pragmatism is strangely absent when they confront Marjolaine. In hindsight, Nyx feels they should have just let Morrigan's Storm of the Century go on for a little longer.)

And yet, while in a sense everything has changed—Alistair is to become king!—in another, nothing has.

Mine.

She'll protect all of them. It's just that Alistair is willing to do the same for her.

Another face joins them in Honnleath: Shale, the undersized golem.

In a party where the other three women adore jewelry, shoes, and romance novels, it's fascinating to find another that appreciates killing things that need killing. Well, behind a craggy face and some eight feet of height, Nyx is pretty sure that Shale is female—the fascination with crystals and her girth seems to indicate nothing else.

(This is only confirmed when they meet Caridin.)

In the Brecilian Forest, Nyx becomes an Arcane Warrior—one of the legendary banes of the Tevinter Imperium, in the days when the Dalish were more than just scattered remnants of the elves who once were.

It's hard to believe she has a chance at it. It feels like the opportunity should go to Keeper Zathrian's First, not some Circle-raised elf with hardly a clue as to the culture her race once had.

But then, she needs the power more than they do. She sets him free and goes on her way, working on a way to cure the werewolf curse once and for all.

She confronts the undead Sophia Dryden at Soldier's Peak. She takes the Warden Commander armor from the ashes that remain once the demon's gone, and wears it. She takes Asturian's Might from the ruins and has Sandal craft runes into it.

(It's funny—when she offered Alistair the armor, he jumped backward as though stung. It would have taken more work to get it to fit, true, but she's not sure why he's so worried. It's not as though they've been shy about wearing dead men's armor before.)

(Or robes, in her case.)

"It looks good on you." Wynne says, nodding her approval. "You look like a true Grey Warden now."

Nyx looks down at her breastplate—two griffons rampant, against the shining blue metal—and nods. "Yes, I suppose I do."

Looking the part.

Hardly anyone will believe she is a mage, at least at first glance.

(Nyx suspects that this is part of the reason why Loghain agrees to duel her—that if he knew ahead of time that she was going to rain fireballs and hexes upon his head, he would have agreed to fight Rabbit instead.)

In hindsight, perhaps she shouldn't have killed Ser Cauthrien.

Nyx knows why she did it—after an afternoon spent infiltrating Arl Howe's mansion, rescuing Queen Anora and pitching Arl Howe himself across the room with a fireball on his arse, the idea of being sent to rot in Fort Drakon's dungeons had snapped her last nerve. Alistair and Leliana and Wynne had been with her—and she was certainly not going to allow her lover, her sister-in-arms, and her foster-mother suffer the same fate.

But Ser Cauthrien could have been talked down, if Nyx could have spared any patience at that point. Possibly. Eventually.

Her nerves are fraying from more than just one afternoon.

It's exhausting, always being the one people look to. Even Alistair and Arl Eamon, the future king and his right-hand man, expect a tiny scrap of an elf to make all of their decisions for them. To do her best to assure their success.

…Granted, Alistair doesn't seem to want to become king, but Nyx is not underestimating Arl Eamon while she's still alive.

Nyx spends that night writing, sketching, and theorizing into a notebook, Asturian's Might at her side. She ticks off a list as she goes.

Marjolaine is on her way to Orlais, if she isn't there already.

Felsi and Oghren are back together.

Sten and Asala are reunited.

Taliesen is dead and Zevran is free of the Crows.

Shale rediscovered some of her memories and put yet more into the Shaperate.

Flemeth is dead—or at least as dead as Nyx can make her, given how little time they have left. Morrigan doesn't believe her mother will need killing just the once, and Nyx agrees—nothing with Flemeth's reputation is going to go down without a lot of fights.

Nyx sighs and rubs the bridge of her nose.

Anora wants the Grey Warden's support—her support—to gain the throne. Arl Eamon wants Alistair on the throne and will oppose Anora because he's a staunch royalist. Nyx doesn't think Alistair is ready for a command of his own, much less a kingdom, but she can see how each of the candidates are strong for different reasons. And, as the current leader of the Grey Wardens because Riordan also said no, both of them want her to decide.

It makes her want to beat her forehead against her desk, but that'd be a waste of the just-drying ink. She has enough ink on her face anyway.

Nyx looks at the facts again.

Thus far, her people have been safe and happy enough. Some of them even get along—not Alistair and Morrigan, of course, but Sten gets along with everyone better than she expected. Shale chats with Leliana, Rabbit is everyone's favorite heating fixture, and Oghren has been flirting with everything that walks.

And how the Landsmeet is bringing politics into their happy little world of darkspawn-killers.

She's going to have to deal with it. Her way, not theirs.

She'll get everyone out alive if she can stomach the cost. If she can't, well, there are going to be casualties. She just wants them to be on the other side.

That's why Nyx approaches Anora with the idea of marrying her to Alistair.

Nyx is under no illusions that if Alistair becomes king, she'll be his queen. She's a mage and an elf and an outsider, and no one will stand for it.

But she does love him, and Anora can ferret that out in moments.

So she goes to talk to Alistair as well, once Anora's come around.

And when Alistair says, "But what about us?" Nyx tells him, "Nothing has to change between us."

If I have to play this game to protect my people, I will.

She is selfish, sometimes, and hopes it won't damn them all.

She's brokered a marriage between two competitors for the Ferelden throne, secured the loyalty of three bannorns, and still hasn't gone into the Alienage yet.

Walking out of the Alienage a day later, Nyx can feel her blood boiling in rage at everything. At Caladrius, even after sticking him like a pig on Spellweaver's silverite blade, at Ser Otto for dying when he should have made it out alive, at the craven race-traitor Davera who she crushed under the weight of all the Spirit school spells she could think of.

Zevran doesn't say anything to her when they head back to Arl Eamon's mansion. Rabbit can't, and Wynne seems to know better than to confront her when she's in a mood.

She hurls Spellweaver at the wall, shaking with fury even as she leaves Eamon's office, and heads to her room. Someone will pick up that sword eventually, and return it to her—it's not like any of them besides her can use it.

Nyx wants it to be over.

But no. There's the Landsmeet, then Loghain, and then the bloody Archdemon.

Three more steps. Just three more.

She hides her face in her gauntlets and tries her best to breathe slowly, counting to ten in Orlesian because it slows her down further.

In, out, in, out…

Everyone who's stood in her way is dead. She remembers that, embraces it. Loghain and the Archdemon will be no different. By the time she leaves, she's composed again.

But she wishes that someone would have come for her, knocked on her door, and asked if she was all right.

No one ever does.

She makes it so they don't have to.

Three more steps, and she can let them go.

Nyx tends to keep her friends close, but when it comes to the Landsmeet, she stands alone.

It's amazing how simple it is, to cut down Loghain with a few well-placed words.

The Blight is the real enemy, not Orlais.

Loghain was conspiring with Tevinter slavers.

I didn't do anything to your daughter, Teryn. See, there she is!

And when he challenges the Landsmeet's ruling—power to the Grey Wardens—Nyx puts her hand over Alistair's sword arm and says, clearly, "I will face you myself."

She feels bad about taking Alistair's revenge from him, but she's a Grey Warden too. They were his family, and she would have liked to be one of them the right way. Maybe that pulls some of the sting from her actions. She only knows that Anora would never marry a man who executed her father, no matter the political game.

(She wouldn't trust a woman who did the same, but then, she's not Anora.)

She wears the Warden Commander's armor, bears Cailan's sigil on her shield, and takes Loghain's head with Duncan's sword.

Fitting.

After the Landsmeet, Alistair asks her again, "What about us?"

And Nyx says, "Being a king is not a punishment."

It's odd. At one point during the duel, when Loghain had forced her to retreat and heal her wounds, she found herself thinking that it wouldn't be so bad even if Alistair was forced to let her go. His marriage to Anora was what would carry the realm—who would care about the elf-girl he'd set aside? So she thought, then, that if he wasn't willing to love her after marrying the queen, she wouldn't insist.

Alistair had to make some decisions on his own.

Only, of course, he had asked her.

And her selfish heart had rejected the plan to keep him with Anora, safe and away from the Archdemon, and asked him to keep her.

Sometimes she wonders why she listens to that treacherous organ when so much is at stake.

Ferelden has its king and queen. The kingdom is happy as it can be, given the Blight. She'd like to keep just a bit of that…that happiness, for herself. She thinks that one of them isn't going to survive the bloody dragon, and doesn't worry too much. It's supposed to be dangerous—as one of the last three living Grey Wardens in Ferelden, it makes sense to consider that they're facing long odds.

At least until Riordan confirms it.

One dead Archdemon at the low, low cost of a dead Grey Warden.

Nyx looks at Alistair after that and thinks, He will kill himself for me.

The thought makes her ill.

Damn, damn, damn.

She needs him—all of them—to be safe. She can't let them just…go away. Not like so many before them.

To her surprise (but not great surprise, because Morrigan has always had an angle), it's her fellow mage that has an answer.

The Dark Ritual. A baby with an Old God's soul.

It's not that Nyx wants to talk Alistair into sleeping with Morrigan. While she can hardly begrudge him another partner, given that she's the one who talked him into marrying Anora in the first place, she knows that he hates Morrigan. Genuinely, completely hates her.

"Why are you telling me this?" Nyx asks, curious and concerned. At this late stage in the plan, Morrigan could have simply thrown the suggestion to Riordan and Alistair too. One of them might have agreed, just for the sake of the cause.

Morrigan, looking more genuine than she had after Nyx had given her that mirror (or her mother's death), says, "Because I don't want you to die."

Well, then.

Nyx talks Alistair into sleeping with Morrigan, because otherwise at least one of them will die. With only three Wardens left, it's not as though she can guarantee any of them even make it to the Archdemon. It'd be nice to say that at least one of them could survive after it's all over.

She loves Morrigan like a sister, and Alistair as a lover. If she can find a way to get everyone out alive, she will.

The day they fight the Archdemon…is hard.

Nyx takes Alistair, Wynne, and Leliana on the path to the Archdemon. They'll have some difficulty cutting through the darkspawn, of course—only Nyx can rain fire down on their heads—but they have armies now. Elves and dwarves and mages and even the men of Redcliffe are at her beck and call.

She knows that despite their precautions, they may not be successful.

Nyx leaves Sten in charge of the gate, even as she orders Rabbit to be his second. The mabari is smart and astoundingly fast besides, and only Oghren has any other inclination to lead. She personally thinks that Oghren will get more men killed than Rabbit can, so she skips him.

And she knows that Morrigan, despite wanting to joint hem in taking down the Archdemon, cannot be risked. If she dies, their failsafe is ruined.

"…Thank you, Morrigan. For everything," is what Nyx says to Morrigan's unhappy rant.

She won't see Morrigan after this. She knows that.

With Morrigan's "Live gloriously, my friend," ringing in her ears, she turns toward Fort Drakon and faces her destiny.

They miss one of the darkspawn generals, mainly because the bloody thing won't show its face, but clearing out the rest of Denerim is easy enough. The fiery tornado that is Inferno has a lovely tendency to keep killing long after Nyx has stopped paying attention to it, which means she can concentrate on the weaker, quicker beasts that get around her trap.

Nyx sees Riordan take the plunge from the top of one of Fort Drakon's towers, latching onto the Archdemon's back.

He falls to his death on the second pass, but in doing so he's crippled one of the beast's wings.

…Well, storming an unfamiliar castle teeming with hostiles isn't the hardest thing she's ever done, Nyx thinks.

Aside from running into Sandal and his room of dead darkspawn (and how he accomplished that, Nyx is sure she'll never know), everything flammable in Fort Drakon is reduced to ash as Nyx moves from room to room. She is fairly certain that the Archdemon won't be nearly as susceptible to tightly controlled burning as its horde of underlings, but that's a problem for when they finally face the bloody thing.

Some things have to be cleansed in fire.

When they find the Archdemon, it's already chewed through half the Redcliffe contingent. Somehow, Nyx isn't at all surprised—crippled as it is, it's still a dragon.

Nyx hefts Asturian's Might and smirks inwardly. Well, it's not like she hasn't killed dragons. She may have used a staff then, but the principle remains.

It's a long and bloody battle—by end, Alistair's been unconscious twice, Leliana is entirely out of enchanted arrows, and there are enough dead darkspawn to cover the roof twice over. Almost all of the Dalish archers are dead, while the dwarves and Redcliffe men are down to half their number, and Nyx has downed four lyrium potions in what has to be less than fifteen minutes. All of them are exhausted, covered in blood, and ready to take it down.

Nyx, who has never been one for running, cleaves right into the beast's back leg. As it finally falters, she clambers up its buckling leg, onto its back, and leaps.

Asturian's Might takes a chunk out of its neck, and the Archdemon bucks hard enough to toss her into the air. But she understands its fear, she knows its movements, and comes down blade-first. Again and again she hacks at the scales and into the flesh underneath, willing her sword to finally cut through the damn thing's spine.

The Archdemon bucks again and throws her clear. Asturian's Might flies out of her hand, but Nyx rights herself in hardly a moment.

Nyx pulls Spellweaver from her back—her backup, the blade of the Arcane Warrior—and charges.

And with it, she splits the beast's throat open wide while ducking under its jaws. The beast topples, hardly a foot away, and she brings the point of the blade down, down, into its exposed eye.

The resulting explosion as the Archdemon dies…well, it knocks her off her feet quite thoroughly, even as she's trying to pull Spellweaver out of its dead skull. When she comes to, she's lying on the ground with Wynne leaning over her, looking concerned. After a second, she realizes that her head is on Alistair's thigh, and that he's also giving her a worried look.

They're alive.

Nyx grins through bloodied teeth.

I win, you bastard.

She's not entirely sure who she's saying that to, but it doesn't matter. She passes out.