Chapter Text
Even though the Vikings hadn’t been big on bedtime stories, Erik had heard enough tales of the Luminary, even before he had met the Seer. The rare times he had gotten to see a picture or statue of the fabled hero, it had always matched with his mental image: A muscular man wielding a magic sword and fighting back the darkness.
The Luminary he dug out of Heliodor’s dungeon was the opposite of that description in every way possible.
Erik knew that somewhere along their trek through the sewers, his brain must’ve twigged that the slim, soft spoken boy he had guided through the dark was actually a girl, but it wasn’t until after they’d jumped off a cliff and he was pulling her out of the river that he had a few seconds to take it in. Even then it had to wait until he’d delivered her to the old nun before he could finally sit down and say “Huh.”
Outwardly, nothing had changed. They were still going to be hunted, he needed to get back into Heliodor and find the orb, and she needed to get back to Cobblestone to check on her family. Most importantly, he would still follow the Luminary to the ends of the world if it meant he’d be forgiven.
Ellie. He heard it as easily as he had when she’d told him up on the cliff. My name’s Ellie.
And there was the problem. The Lumin- Ellie, looked barely older than Mia was. She still had traces of baby fat in her cheeks and an innocent sparkle to her eyes that in his line of work, he hadn’t seen in a long while. Heck, it had been a while since he’d seen it outside his line of work.
Of course she was the Darkspawn come to destroy them all. There was no possible way that Ellie could be anything but an evil mastermind, marching into the castle to meet the king and show him the mark on her hand. Clearly she was a monster of the worst imagining, and Erik would do well to leave her to the mercy of Hendrik and Jasper, shortly before he threw himself at the roots of Yggdrasil and begged her forgiveness for releasing such a fiend on the world.
Erik shook his head, unable to understand the king’s reasoning. Ellie wasn’t dangerous, she was just a kid. And even if she was this Darkspawn, surely the worst thing he could do was lock her away in the dark and let her be forgotten about until that naïve hope turned into a desire for revenge?
Something stunk about the entire situation, but there wasn’t much Erik could do sat on a church pew. As soon as Ellie woke up, they’d get moving again. With his hood hiding his hair, nobody would look twice at him, but the guards would be on the lookout for Ellie by now. He needed to find her a cloak or something, maybe some gloves to hide her birthmark…
Calmed by the familiar feeling of planning ahead, Erik leaned back on the bench, falling asleep before he caught himself.
There wasn’t much Erik could say when they finally got to Cobblestone. He’d only gotten more uneasy as they’d gotten closer and he couldn’t hear any of the sounds he usually associated with small villages. Ellie had mentioned it was tucked away, and at first he was happy to blame the lack of sound on all the cliffs surrounding the place.
Then they turned the last corner and he saw the cannon.
Erik had stopped dead, keeping his eyes on it like it would disappear, but Ellie had carried on walking, keeping up her stream of chatter. He closed his eyes, waiting for the scream that he knew had to be coming, but it never came. When he opened them again, Ellie was almost out of sight, moving from spot to spot with a confused expression on her face that only got deeper, before she suddenly bolted, and Erik was forced to run after her, with no success.
He was left standing awkwardly by a huge tree that had somehow survived the onslaught, staring around at all the wreckage and searching for a flash of purple that would tell him where she had vanished to. He didn’t know whether to pick a direction and hope for the best, or stay where he was, and hope Ellie came back. Neither particularly appealed, given that it meant staying here and trying to keep the thought of what had happened at bay.
Not for the first time in his life he cursed Jasper, knowing full well that the knight wouldn’t have been conflicted in the slightest about attacking a village of innocent people out of fear of an innocent girl.
Trapped by indecision, he was relieved when Ellie stumbled up the path towards him. Her eyes seemed to see right through him, and while that could’ve been blamed on the shock, Erik got the feeling that it meant something else here, especially when he saw a faint glow coming from under one of the gloves she was wearing.
He’d never heard of the first Luminary phasing out like this, but since this was now the second time it had happened, Erik put himself in her path, and as the haze started to clear from her eyes, planted his hands on her shoulders and made sure that she could only see him and the tree, not any of the surrounding rubble, “Are you okay? Did you have another vision?”
“I saw…” Ellie blinked a few times, “I saw me and Gemma when we were little, and my Grandad. But he died years ago.”
“Must’ve been good to see him then.” Erik had no idea what he was trying for here, but Ellie just nodded, not fighting his grip.
“It was. I told him about King Carnelian, and about the dungeon. He was sorry for getting me into that situation, but then he told me to go to Cobblestone Falls, because he was going to leave me something there. It was really-“ She cut herself off, eyes caught on something she could see over Erik’s shoulder.
He didn’t fight when she pushed his hands off her and started looking around. She seemed to take it all in at a glance, and as understanding set in, that rare sparkle in her eyes dimmed until it died. Her breath started coming in short bursts, tears forming but not falling. Erik waited for her to make a sound or scream, but nothing came. She just started walking away, with slow, shaky steps, and with nothing else he could do, Erik followed, wishing he knew what to do.
They came to a halt in front of one of the buildings. It didn’t look much different from the others, but something in the way Ellie pushed on the door instead of climbing through the gaping hole in the wall told him everything.
He cursed Jasper again, throwing in a few towards the king and Hendrik too when he saw Ellie start to crumple, clinging to the remains of a dresser. She was murmuring names under her breath like a prayer, and with each one the tears built higher until they finally fell, and the words were swapped with a horrifying scream that was all too familiar to him and seemed to have no end.
He moved without thinking, and even though Ellie fought him this time, he held on, running a hand through her hair like he used to do for Mia after a nightmare. After a while he started to rock with her too, murmuring all the reassurances that he thought he’d left in that cave, and though it took some time, Ellie let the dresser go and grabbed his arm instead.
When she did that, Erik adjusted their position, starting to stand up with her. It felt heartless, pulling her away when she still needed to grieve, but the side of him that was more thief than big brother knew that while they had a head start, Hendrik and Jasper had to know they’d come here. If Erik had any ideas about pleading for mercy, they’d been killed when he’d first seen that cannon. They needed to move, and they needed to move now.
Ellie seemed to understand this when he whispered it to her, but she still kept her eyes closed as they walked back through the wreckage, pointing him in the direction they needed to go to get to the Falls, and half-heartedly reminding him the Kingsbarrow was there too.
“Two birds, one stone.” She murmured, trying for a giggle and failing miserably.
Hendrik caught up with them just as they were about to get away because of course he did. They weren’t allowed a few seconds to breathe or try to guess where the Door of Departure was going to drop them off, just run to a few horses left by the campsite and hope they’d be able to outrun that beast Hendrik tried to pass off as a normal horse, as well as the other soldiers.
Then they started firing crossbows, and Erik really started to hate his life. He’d had a few arrow wounds in his life and whether it was just the principle of the thing or because Derk was a lousy medic, he had no interest in getting any more and the idea of pulling bolts out of Ellie was even less appealing.
But Hendrik clearly had other ideas, or his men terrible aim, because when they finally hit something, it was Ellie’s horse rather than her back, with the result that she still went flying to the ground with a yell. Erik was only slightly relieved that no more bolts were shot as she struggled to sit up, but the fact that they wanted her alive still wasn’t exactly comforting, and the threat of what it meant lent Erik a little more skill at turning his own horse around and charging straight for her.
For a few seconds, her eyes were on the approaching Hendrik, but when Erik shouted and started leaning out of the saddle, she turned back to him, stretching out her hand at his instruction. Just like before it was too familiar, and for the briefest second, Erik wasn’t looking at the Luminary, or the Princess of Dundrasil. It wasn’t even Ellie.
He pushed the thought of Mia away (He was going to help her, he just had to survive this first) and focused, and he was rewarded by Ellie’s fingers wrapping around his, letting him yank her off the ground and onto the saddle behind him. Hendrik was just inches behind them now, and Erik could hear the crossbows getting pulled out again.
He didn’t care. Ellie’s breathing was short and sharp again, but it was there. He hadn’t failed like he had before.
And he wouldn’t fail again.