I've been meaning to write a story focused on Oswyn ever since a teenaged version of him appeared in my "An Unquenchable Flame" story about young Alistair, though I had only the vaguest of ideas of what I wanted to explore about his character. Just recently I was looking at an elven NPC named Varel Baern, the elven recruit at the alienage entrance for the "Scraping the Barrel" quest from the Blackstone Irregulars, joked that I'd like to write a story about him, and then suddenly found myself with an idea for a post-game fic in which he and Oswyn meet. So the Varel we'll eventually be seeing in this story is not Seneschal Varel from Awakenings, but an entirely different Varel.

Oswyn walked slowly down the hallway, his cane ticking quietly against the stone floor each time he moved it. He ignored the occasional armsman or servant hurrying by, concentrating on keeping his balance, on putting one foot before the other. He also ignored the concerned glances some of them gave him, was merely thankful that they'd learned to leave him alone, to not offer their help. Help he didn't need, nor want, now that he was able to walk on his own again.

He hesitated at the door to the dining hall, then grunted and turned, making his slow way inside to the sideboard. He helped himself to bread, cheese, a few sausages, wrapping them all together in a napkin and shoving the resultant bundle into one of the deep poacher's pockets in the heavy thigh-length cloak around his shoulders. He balanced the weight with a couple of apples in the pocket on the other side, then made his way back out of the room, feeling his father's eyes on him from the head table, but choosing not to acknowledge him. Easier to ignore him, too, then to look his way and have to exchange greetings, perhaps be drawn into conversation, when all he wanted to do was to get away somewhere where he didn't have to deal with people, not even to hear them walking along the corridor outside his rooms.

Oswyn continued on, out of the central keep by a side door that led to the stable courtyard. Only there did any of the servants pay him attention, a stable-boy who was busy cleaning the cobblestones straightening up and taking a few steps in his direction. "D'ya want your horse, ser?" he asked.

"Please," Oswyn stood, and stopped where he was, leaning heavily on his cane and waiting. Once he would have waved off any groom or stable-boy, strode easily into the stables to tack up his own mount, a fractious young stallion that had been his pride and joy. But that stallion was a thing of the past now, along with his ability to walk without pain, or to lift a heavy saddle onto a horse's back. So he waited, until the boy returned at a trot, leading the gentle-paced gelding that was his mount now. Its head lifted in recognition as it came close, and he smiled, already reaching into his pocket for an apple for it. It was a good horse, just not the one he wished he was still able to manage.

He managed to mount by himself, at least, wincing at the pain of protesting joints as he climbed up into the saddle. It was better once he was up, his weight off his legs, riding being one of the few activities he could still perform without excessive pain. He thanked the stable-boy, asking him to put his cane away inside the stable doors to await his return, and set out, riding at a slow pace along the road heading south-west from the castle.

It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and he found his tension ebbing away as he rode along, away from the castle, away from his worried father, and the stares and glances of the people who'd known him all his life. Looks that he was sure held too much of pity or horror, since the events of the Blight Year. Looks he was always painfully over-conscious of the few times each week that he had to leave his rooms.

Abruptly he changed his plans, turning off of the main road and onto a track, and from thence into the maze of forest trails, taking a route that circled to the west and then north again, circling well away from the castle before wending his way up the mountain in back of it that gave his father's castle and bannorn its name – Dragon's Peak. He rode at a slow but steady pace, and a couple of hours later reached the place he'd had in mind – a bare stone slope at the top of a towering cliff, with a bird's eye view down over the city of Denerim, crouched as it was at the mountain's foot to the north. A high spot, higher even than the famously tall spire of Fort Drakon.

He dismounted there, hissing at the protests of his legs, carefully looping the horse's reins around one branch of a handy sapling at the forest edge, then hobbled closer to the edge of the cliff, wishing he had his cane to steady himself. At least the rock was smooth and reasonably flat, though speckled with lichen and loose clumps of moss, with grass sprouting out of the cracks in its surface and a few drifts of fallen leaves which he carefully avoided, not liking to have anything loose underfoot. He stopped a couple of feet back from the edge, not bothered by the long drop before him – heights had never been a fear of his.

The marks of the darkspawn invasion were still clear from this height, some areas of the city still in ruins, others showing the signs of rebuilding – a mix of neat new well-laid streets in the better areas of the city, and maze-like warrens with narrow streets in the poorer sections. In the worst-off areas, he knew, people were still squatting in the ruined buildings, shoring them up as best they could to make them at least semi-habitable, building little sheds and shanties in whatever reasonably flat space remained. It would take years to rebuild it all; not that it would never be the same. Not with so many having died, trapped in the city by the sudden advance of the darkspawn horde. The streets had run with blood, it was said, both of its inhabitants and, later, of the darkspawn, as they were killed by the relieving army from the southwest.

He'd been well out of it by then – not only out of the city, his father having taken him home to recover as soon as the Landsmeet ended, but out of it, lost in the fever-dreams his infected wounds and weakened state had thrown him into, following his part rescue, part escape from Howe's hands. He shivered, eyes moving unerringly to the roof of one of the undamaged buildings far below, one that seemed but a stone's throw away from the base of the cliff, set in a small walled enclosure nestled against the sprawling grounds of the royal palace. The estate for the Arling of Denerim, a seat that had been vacant since Rendon Howe's death.

Even the thought of the man, dead over a year now, was enough to make Oswyn feel ill; both nauseous and afraid, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin. Nauseated at the memories of his time in that sick bastard's hands; afraid, because he hadn't seen Howe die, and part of him still feared waking up to find his current freedom a dream, feared finding himself back in the nightmare of pain and stinking darkness, in the dungeons hidden away under the estate far below.

Memories came rushing back; of how simply it had all started, with him heading off to Denerim to look for his milk-brother Miles, who'd disappeared there following a brief visit home after his return from Ostagar – one of very few Dragon's Reach men who had survived the debacle there, and only then because he'd been among the reserves, not with the main force. The reserve soldiers that Loghain had ordered to quit the field and retreat northwards, rather than attempting a rescue of the embattled King Cailan and the other half of the army, something Miles had spoken bitterly of during his visit home.

His search for Miles ended in a dock-side bar when he accepted a drink from someone who'd seemed sympathetic about the loss of his friend. He'd woken some time later to find himself in a stinking cell with a pounding headache, and quickly realized he'd been drugged unconscious. He hadn't been scared at first, he remembered, just angry and disbelieving. He'd been sure some kind of mistake had been made, and waited impatiently but quietly for someone to show up so he could get himself freed again.

Not that it would have made any difference even if he'd made a commotion and shouted his head off. He'd been disappeared, kidnapped off to the private dungeon of Arl Rendon Howe who, he learned over the long weeks of his imprisonment, had very sick ideas of entertainment, most of them revolving around pain; the pain of others, not of Howe himself.

He would have died there too, eventually, if it hadn't been for the Grey Wardens. He still remembered the look of horrified recognition in Katherine Cousland's eyes as she and her companions cut through the leather cuffs around his wrists and ankles, freeing him from the rack where he had been in the process of being tormented yet again. They'd done what little they could for him before continuing on in search of Howe, leaving him to either await real rescue – if it came – or attempt escape as he was. The choice had been an easy one. Before they were even out of the room he was grimly crawling for the door. He'd only made one stop on the way out, to remove a knife from one of the bodies they'd left scattered across the floor when they'd burst in and killed his tormentors. If Katy and her companions failed, he had felt that he'd sooner kill himself then fall back into Howe's hands.

He'd managed to crawl up out of the dungeons, finding the ground floor of the estate inhabited only by the dead. He'd been halfway along the hallway to where he remembered the main entrance as being, from past visits here when it had been the home of Arl Urien and his son Vaughan. Then he'd heard armoured feet running, and loud excited shouting, and quickly crawled into a side room to hide. An open window and a short but painful fall got him out into the grounds of the estate; there he'd found refuge in a drainage tunnel under the wall, blocked with a grate partway through and barely wide enough for him to squirm into, feet-first, but at least getting him hidden away out of sight. Only then had he finally let himself pass out for a while, exhausted from the effort it had taken to get even this far.

Cold and wet woke him; it had been night, and raining, a cold drizzle. He was burning up with fever, the filth in the tunnel having already started infections in his open wounds, at the same time as his body was shaking from the chill of the water flowing under and around him. He'd somehow crawled back out of the tunnel, then along the base of the wall, up a set of external stairs to a watchtower at one corner of the grounds, and from there dropped down over the wall, a much longer drop than the one out of the window had been, with a subsequently harder landing, on cobbles, not soft earth. The sudden additional pain of a badly twisted or perhaps even broken ankle had actually been a minor blessing, snapping him back out of the dazed state he'd been slipping into. He'd rallied enough to begin crawling again, dragging his useless legs behind him as he moved away, away from the estate, away from the palace, towards the smaller estates and the clustered townhouses of the nobles.

He remembered pulling himself along the street, fingers digging into the seams between the cobblestones for surer grips. He remembered darkness, and startled voices, and the pain of being lifted and carried. His father's horrified voice, briefly, and then nightmares and fever dreams.

His next sure memory was not until some two weeks later, finally wakening again in his own bed at his father's castle, weak, half-dead, and still sick and in pain, but at least lucid enough to be aware of events again. Of the events that had happened while he was unconscious – the Landsmeet, Loghain's defeat, the march of the darkspawn on Denerim, the battle there, the death of the Archdemon – he only learned later, during his long, slow convalescence.

He had, eventually, been able to walk again. But never without pain; not after the things that had been done to him in that dungeon, at Howe's instigation and often directly under the man's hands. Not just the injuries from being racked, which would have been bad enough on their own, but other things Howe had done, involving sharp little knives carefully applied; his intent, as he'd made very clear to Oswyn, had been to cripple and maim, not to kill; at least, not to kill just yet. Not until he'd thoroughly broken Oswyn, and was certain there would be no further need of him, alive, to use as a means of controlling Bann Sighard.

Howe had succeeded at least in part, Oswyn found himself thinking, bitterly. He was broken, in body if not quite in spirit. He'd been healthy, a talented warrior, his body responsive to anything he wished to do, his father's pride and joy. Now... now he was a cripple, in pain every day, his legs only barely able to carry his own weight. The weight of armour would be tortuous; handling the great two-handed sword that had been his favoured weapon was now impossible, his arms no longer having the ability to lift such a weight, much less move it through the necessary range of motions. The sword now hung on the wall of his room, a reminder of all he had lost in Howe's hands.

Oswyn took another step closer to the edge of the cliff, looking calmly down the dizzying distance to the rocky slopes far below that backed onto the grounds of the palace, Fort Drakon, a public park, and several of the larger noble estates. It would be so easy to just take that one extra step, to fall and never rise again, ending his pain. But it would kill his father if he did so – the only thing that honestly kept him from working up the nerve to take that single remaining step. He shivered, and abruptly stepped backwards, then shouted in surprise and fear as his heel came down on a slick patch of wet leaves and skidded out from under him. He fell backwards, his arms flailing, and landed hard on his back, his head impacting against the ground. For a long moment all he could see was darkness with random flashes of light, hear nothing but a roaring in his ears, couldn't even breath after the shock of the fall.

He finally took in a great gulping breath of air, felt the blackness recede. He was sprawled out on his back, every joint protesting the abrupt movement and the impact with the ground. His head ached abominably, and he realized his lower legs were stick out beyond the edge of the cliff. He pushed himself backwards in heart-thudding fright, well away from the edge, before shakily sitting up. He swallowed, fighting back nausea as his head swum from the change in position, then reached up with shaking fingers to touch the back of his head, hissing as he felt a swelling already forming there. And dampness, which frightened him until he looked at his fingers and saw them damp with squashed bits of moss and black mud, not blood; his head had apparently come down on a mossy patch, not bare rock.

Too shaken and in pain to rise to his feet, he dragged himself further back from the edge of the cliff, to the eaves of the forest not far from where his horse was tied. He leaned back against a tree, hissing in discomfort when his head pressed momentarily against the bark. His back was protesting too, as well as most of his joints. He wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to mount his horse, much less ride it the long distance back to the castle. He definitely needed to rest for a while before making the attempt, give himself time to recover a little first.

It was cool there in the shade of the trees. He wrapped his cloak around him as best as he could for warmth, and sat quietly, though what he mainly wanted to do was cry. He hated feeling so damned helpless. Hated the pain. Hated his life.

Despite his intention of remaining awake, he nodded off a short while later, too exhausted to remain awake.