No Moment Was Made to Last (for spectreromanoff)
A gift for @spectreromanoff from dreamerinsilico. Your prompt for a F!Warden/Morrigan piece made me very happy, so that’s the one I went with. I drew inspiration from how you described your Surana’s relationship with her for the piece, but chose not to use Phoebe specifically for this because I didn’t want to risk getting her not-quite-right (or completely wrong, for that matter) - I know it can be more than a little disconcerting to read your OC as written by someone who doesn’t really know them. The Warden here was invented solely for the purpose of this fic. I hope you enjoy it!
The apostate sorceress had frightened her, at first.
That fear was not as Alistair’s sullen distrust, which itched and grated like sawdust escaped from a pallet into the bedsheets, but a live, fluttering thing that cautioned against Aeris Surana’s immediate instinct to defer to the proud human woman. It was awe warring with a wariness born of being surrounded by strangers, nearly all seeming to demand her trust, her service, or both.
But Morrigan had not demanded any of those things, and that had made it hard not to trust her, which unsettled Aeris all the more.
Then the old woman who laid claim to the name of a legend had cast her unwilling daughter into the world with the pair of fledgeling Grey Wardens, and Aeris had seen that not even a Witch of the Wilds was granted all the freedom she could reach for. Fearful awe had shifted in that moment to a fascination that gilded an unlooked-for, but ironclad sense of kinship that she both wanted and feared to express.
“Did you grow up at that one place in the Wilds, where Flemeth lives?” Aeris had asked quietly one evening, after the two mages had already been sorting fresh-cut herbs in silence for ten minutes.
Yellow, predatory eyes flashed up at the Warden’s own peridot green, and Aeris bit her lower lip, realizing belatedly that this might not sound like the most earnest line of questioning in light of Alistair’s choice of retaliatory topic in his verbal duel with Morrigan earlier in the day.
