norroendyrd:

ma-setheneran:

Dragon Age Daemon AU, featuring the Origins and Awakening companions. Inspired by this amazing post by @piedpica (who tumblr won’t let me @ for some reason? but go check out their daemon headcanons, they’re amazing). Not included are Leliana, because I can’t top the idea from the above post, Anders, because he’ll be addressed in the DA2 instalment, and the dwarves, because I’ve adopted the idea from other Daemon AU makers that dwarves wouldn’t have daemons.)

~

Alistair

You wouldn’t think to look at Cara that she was the daemon of a King’s son. And that’s just how Alistair likes it.

He’s never asked anyone what Maric’s daemon was, and honestly, he doesn’t care. No doubt it was something very heroic and glorious, an eagle or a stag, fit to stand alongside his father in portraits, fit to be sung of in tales. But Alistair grew up sleeping in a kennel, and Cara was always going to settle as a dog.

She doesn’t stay as a dog all the time, of course, no child’s daemon can ever stay still. After he’s sent to the Chantry, after he hurls his mother’s amulet at the wall, they both go out of their way to cause as much trouble as possible. When the sisters gather them to pray, Cara pads in quietly as a cat or a little terrier. Then, halfway through the Canticle of Exaltations, she transforms into a great snorting druffalo or an ugly-faced wyvern or even a ridiculous nuggalope, and the drone of voices transforms into yelps of shock and shouts of anger. Alistair doubles up laughing, and keeps grinning even during the chores he’s given as punishment. ‘Worth it,’ Cara whispers, and he has to agree.

But for all the jokes she plays with her changing, she always seems to come back to dogs. Perhaps she’s simply trying to be as un-King-like as is physically possible, perhaps she’s just being a true Fereldan. It doesn’t matter. There’s a comfort in it that he finds nowhere else, in having her curled against him at night, warm fur against his skin to remind him that he is not quite alone.

He doesn’t even notice that she’s settled for days, the form she takes is so very like her. It takes him some time to realise she’s stopped shifting, that she’s taken on the shape of those Storm Coast retriever dogs. One of those none-too-smart looking ones, with the folded-over, floppy ears and the big brown eyes. ‘I wanted a mabari,’ he mock-moans, and Cara opens her mouth and hangs out her tongue in a dog’s way of laughing. ‘I wanted someone with brains,’ she sniggers, and Alistair pounces on her and wrestles her to the ground and they tussle like puppies, letting out breathless gasps of laughter.

It’s Cara that Alistair looks to for reassurance every time the insults fly his way, every time he hears a voice sneer idiot or sees the curl of a lip betray the thought of worthless. Cara is a creature bred on the wild seas, to drag in nets from icy waters and to retrieve hunters’ kills from tangled undergrowth. She rolls around with her eyes laughing and her legs waving in the air, a jester of a dog, but there’s a soldier underneath the creamy pelt. There’s strength and endurance there, things that no one sees in him until the Templars press a sword into his hand and the weapon somehow feels like a perfect, natural extension of his arm, things that no one respects until Duncan passes him his Joining chalice.

And Cara’s pelt is thick, to hold out the cold of a frosted sea. Over the years, Alistair’s skin has grown just as thick against the whispers of bastard and fool.

Loghain betrays them, and Alistair feels like he’ll be snarling inside forever. Never betray a Fereldan, never betray someone with a dog-daemon, never incur the wrath of a man to whom loyalty comes before all else. The murmurs start, that the crown might fall to him, and he wants the earth to swallow him. His daemon is a dog, and dogs don’t rule nations. They follow and they serve. ‘We’re not leaders,’ he whispers to Cara.

She rests her head on his knee. ‘We could be.’

And Alistair looks at her, and knows she’s right. For all their games, for all their playful tail-wagging and soft fur, her breed are only jokers on the surface. At their core, they are workers, hunters – even guides to the blind. Dogs are made to serve, and surely that’s what a king does, just as much as a Warden? Perhaps there’s more to him than he thinks. He already knows there’s more to him than people say.

No one with a dog-daemon is a fool.

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Gotta promote it everywhere, yusss!

@effelants if you will kindly consider reblogging this on your awesome fan content promo blog? 😀