Chapter Text
Mahanon Lavellan, like every other dumbass that plays a morally gray hero at some point in their life, has an unfortunate backstory. As a not so brief recap:
Born under the name Mahina as a fraternal twin to the lovely Ellana Lavellan, Mahanon was a menace from the moment he was able to form complete thoughts. As a toddler, his favorite hobbies were wandering aimlessly into the forest and attempting to throw himself into bonfires. His lack of success led to quite a few raging meltdowns.
‘Angry’ has always been a generally good way to describe him.
Keeper Deshanna Istimaethoriel Lavellan was a blessedly patient man, but Mahanon is certain that his behavior pushed the leader’s limits right up to their breaking points. His poor parents probably had to argue until blue in the face to keep bringing him along every time the clan packed up their aravels. Jokes were occasionally made about abandoning him at a camp just to see how he would manage to find the clan and continue his chaotic reign, but Ellana Lavellen — the sweet, chubby cheeked angel that she was — always insisted she would stay behind with him.
If he ever sees her again, Mahanon should probably thank her for his continued existence.
To the relief of their clan, Ellana was almost his opposite. She was gentle where he was abrasive; patient where he was restless; flexible where he was stubborn. She was the calm, cool water of a mountain river whereas Mahanon was a raging forest fire caused by a careless strike of lightning. She had the beginnings of a princess from some sort of flowery bedtime story and likely would’ve become the Lavellan clan’s halla keeper if she hadn’t decided to mirror Mahanon’s mischievousness.
Whenever Mahanon caused mayhem, Ellana was no more than two steps behind him. Or ahead of him, where Mahanon would shove her when they had to run away from any particularly irate clan members. Sometimes, she would create chaos all on her own, and Mahanon happily took the fall for it each and every time in the face of her wild, mismatched eyes and wide, toothy grin.
Their habits of causing havoc led to them quickly being pushed into weapons training, and when their unruly energy lended itself to making them fast learners, they were given hunting positions. They were great. Ellana took to a bow like stars took to shining and had been able to outshoot even the eldest of hunters with less than a year of practice.
Mahanon’s aim was atrocious; somehow, practice seemed to only make it worse. He couldn’t hold a shield considering they were damn near two thirds as heavy as he was, and he couldn’t wield a sword because the ones the clan used were half his size in length.
He flourished with daggers. He could slice cleanly, he could stab quickly, and he could even throw the blades with pretty acceptable accuracy. Why he was able to do that but not use a bow will forever remain a mystery. He could also creep through the forest unseen like nobody’s business. Years of being described as a ‘sneaky little shit’ paid its weight in gold and then some when he could use the abilities he gained from sneaking salt into tea to creep up on an elk so silently that the animal didn’t see him coming until it was already laying lifeless on the damp forest floor.
Blessed, the clan had said about them. They must’ve been blessed by the Creators. Ellana by Andruil, and Mahanon by…
…Somebody?
A teenage hunter made a joke once that his patron was surely the Dread Wolf, and he was smacked so soundly up the head that the clap of it echoed throughout the woods. Nobody dared to make that joke again.
Mahanon thought it was funny.
When he was around seven, he got his very own set of knives as a gift from the same teenager that likened him to the Elvhen god of rebellion. His parents weren’t pleased, but young Mahanon was over the moon. He named them Stab and Jab — fitting names for a seven year old to give knives, in Mahanon’s opinion — and he felt bad when all Ellana got was a stupid halla stuffie.
He made her a bow in consolation, and only she was able to make the poorly made weapon work. Being a savant pays off, apparently.
He treated his daggers as if they were his babies; always sharp, polished daily. They were constantly strapped to his body, and his parents were only able to convince him to take them off when he slept by building a stand that he placed right next to his bedroll in their aravel. He practiced with them every chance he got — usually multiple times a day — and he was soon sent out every time a hunting party went searching for food just so he had an excuse to actually use them.
Mahanon was nine when everything went to shit.
Most shemlens Mahanon had met up to that point — and there had been very few — had at least tolerated his clan. Some had even been friendly enough to initiate trading instead of just staring awkwardly at Keeper Lavellan until he asked if they would like to barter. The town that they walked too closely to, though, did not have the same tolerance. The citizens made it quite clear that they didn’t appreciate a bunch of ‘knife ears tainting the land and children with their untrained, rabid habits,’ so the clan tried to move quickly away from the rural city in an attempt to avoid a fight.
It didn’t work. A small militia composed of the most aggressive town members stalked them half a day out from their settlement and attacked with pitchforks and torches. It escalated to Keeper Lavellan ordering lethal combat — the man usually tried to avoid bloodshed in an attempt to lessen the human belief of Dalish elves being savage — but the permission was given too late.
Almost a quarter of the clan was killed. His parents were among the fallen.
The following months were an ode to self destruction.
Ellana — soft, kindhearted Ellana — began to fade, and Mahanon hardened to stone. Silence replaced the gentle laughs of his sister, and Mahanon’s quips went from teasing to malicious. Anybody he deemed a valid target fell victim to Mahanon’s unpredictable outbursts, and both twins created an almost immeasurable distance between them and the rest of the clan.
This, of course, was when Mahanon’s magic decided to begin manifesting, but the boy’s mind was too occupied with agonizing over his identity to really take note of the strange haze his dreams were taking on.
Life in a Dalish clan is one of constant movement. The nomadic choices are the largest aspect, of course, but even when aravels are set up, there’s no time to stop and think. Hallas have to be cared for; food has to be caught; training has to be run; plants and wood and ore need to be collected to create the salves and potions and weapons that the clans sell for crumbs of gold. While the twins created the space between them and the rest of the Lavellan tribe, the other elves allowed them to make it.
This led to a lack of movement and too much time to wonder what Mahanon was now that he wasn’t somebody’s child. Not a daughter anymore, he thought, and not really a girl at all. He twisted his name to better suit him, and Ellana didn’t even blink when he shared it with her.
Duh, had been her response to his earth shattering revelation, and then she turned over and fell asleep. It was all quite anticlimactic.
The slavers struck a month after that.
It was the middle of the night when one of the clan’s watchmen sounded his horn. The warning was cut off abruptly, but it was enough to shatter Mahanon's dream. He all but threw Ellana’s bow at her as he strapped on his daggers, and he helped his sister when she struggled to equip her quiver. They rushed out of the aravel holding hands and trembling while older members of the clan succeeded in holding the Tevinter traders off.
A small group, however, had snuck around back for an ambush. Ellana screamed as she was ripped away from Mahanon, and she was only able to send a single arrow through a shemlen’s jaw before the weapon was snatched from her hands and tossed off to the side. Her eyes glinted in the dark as she was dragged past the treeline, and none of the parents in the clan could get a solid grip on Mahanon to keep him from chasing after her.
The woods were dark and wet and suffocating, but Mahanon had two advantages. He knew the woods and how to creep through them effectively, and he could see. One of the humans tripped over an obvious root in their dash away from the aravels, and Jab ended up deep in his chest. He died before he could make a sound, and Mahanon wiped his blood off on his pants as he continued after his sister.
He sent Stab flying through the air, and it landed solidly in the throat of the man carrying Ellana. He dropped immediately, and Ellana’s bloodshot eyes tracked the glare of Mahanon’s as she slid between the two men that were behind her captor. Mahanon made sure to make sound as he began racing back to camp, and he lagged when Ellana caught up so he could shove his sister ahead of him. Sticks cracked and leaves crunched underfoot as they darted through the underbrush, and the sound of heavier steps were closing the distance behind them.
The desperate shouts of other members of the Lavellan clan were within earshot when one of the slavers dove out of a bush from their right to wrap an arm around Ellana. Mahanon cut him down the middle of it with his remaining knife, and the man let go with a loud scream. Immediately, the voices of the other elves started coming closer, and Mahanon shoved his sister desperately to run. She followed the order, but Mahanon’s leg was grabbed by the shemlen’s uninjured arm when he tried to dive over the man.
When Ellana looked back, it was to the sight of Mahanon barely managing to shove his dagger between the shemlen’s eyes as he attempted to pin him against the dirt. The man was heavy, but Mahanon managed to shove the body off of him and drag himself back to his feet. The twins could fully hear the rest of the Lavellan clan, and Mahanon began shouting at the top of his lungs. The humans knew where they were already, he had to make sure his family did as well.
In the middle of screaming at Ellana to run faster, Mahanon was hauled off of the ground by an arm wrapping around his stomach. The momentum of the grab took both him and his captor to the ground, and Mahanon didn’t waste time digging his nails and teeth into whatever he could reach; a hand, an arm, an eye and throat when he twisted around to deal real damage. His hair — long at that point — was grabbed roughly and pulled so he would release the shemlen from his jaws. Ragged snarls were pulling themselves from Mahanon’s chest — so loud that he barely heard Ellana’s desperate scream. His eyes snapped to his sister, and the image of her being pulled back to safety by another member of his clan began to pull away from him. The world went black with a crack.
It was quite a traumatic start to his life, and Mahanon is probably lucky that he doesn’t remember the months following his capture clearly. There was pain and needles and chains holding him against cold walls, but the rest of what happened is stuck inside of a black void. Mahanon can’t even guess at what he’s supposed to be remembering.
Another elf enslaved by the magister he was sold to told him once that it was a trauma response.
It’s probably best that those memories are left blank, dear. Do your best not to think about it.
Mahanon was thirteen when he begged for somebody to scar a vallaslin onto his face.
The magister he was sold to was a monster. He killed without warning or reason; his punishments left deep scars and shallow burn marks across bodies; he drained the blood of any elven slave that manifested magic in an attempt at some sort of grab at power. Mahanon prefers not to speak of the man past that.
The Dalish boy had never gotten the chance to pick a vallaslin while in his clan. He’d been half the age required for the ceremony when he was abducted, and he would have still been forced to wait another five years to go through the experience if he was with his family. His face was bare, his body bore no marks, and the magister that owned him made a comment about him not yet being claimed.
He was scared.
The woman who knew how to make the ink stay didn’t know all of the patterns of the gods, but Mahanon didn’t want one of them anyways. He’d begged the Creators for help — strength, an opportunity to escape, the sudden death of his master, for him to push a punishment too far, anything — for three straight years before deciding that they’d abandoned him. Why should Mahanon have shown them honor? Dedicated pieces of his body and mind to deities that show no mercy to their devotees?
It was a stupid decision. The cause was just and the reasoning was sound, but with how the world has unfolded, Mahanon all but damned himself with his decision. What better way could a Dalish boy have shown rebellion, though, if not by paying homage to his alleged patron. Blessed by the Dread Wolf, the hunter had joked. He drew up a lupine vallaslin depicting the many eyes of Fen’Harel and requested white ink. The woman carved it into his face the next day.
Like he said: it was a stupid decision.
The magister was livid, to say the least. Mahanon can’t quite remember anything from the two weeks he took attempting to remove it except for pain. He’s pretty sure the woman who gave him his bastardized markings laced some sort of strong magic into it, but he doesn’t really have proof to support his theory past the fact that it wouldn’t budge.
Healing magic couldn’t remove it; fire couldn’t remove it, but left blisters across his face for almost a month; not even blood magic could take the ink from his face. His master considered attempting to carve it out with a knife, but realized quickly that all that would lead to were twisting scars in the exact same pattern he was trying to get rid of.
The torture didn’t stop after his two weeks of agony passed. He was put to work immediately, and the only reason Mahanon survived the following month was due to the fact that he was put in the kitchen. The other slaves took one look at the child that couldn’t manage to stand on his feet for even a minute before listing dangerously to one side and quickly decided that he would be left to rest on the bags of flour thrown into a corner of the room. He repaid them in the form of letting them take breaks.
Soups and stews and breads were made day in and day out on top of every other meal of the day, so there was always something to look occupied with. Even when everything needed to be boiled or rested, hands always had to be busy, or you risked them being cut off. Mahanon, though, spent his childhood sitting in the woods just listening.
He could identify the type of birds near him by their calls; he could identify if an animal was a carnivore or herbivore by the way plant life shifted against them as they walked; he could identify what animal his clan would be eating for dinner by the sound of their steps — all from miles away, at one point. He could identify the sounds of the predator in the house moving from the other side of the building, and could tell the rest of the kitchen when they had to be back on their aching feet.
Whenever Mahanon gave the warning, somebody would gently place him in front of a boiling pot to stir. He was only punished twice for not giving the magister something to rage about.
Mahanon’s magic progressed at an incredibly slow rate. It might’ve been another trauma response or the needles he couldn’t quite remember; Mahanon isn’t sure which he’d prefer. His dreams had shifted so slowly to include the fade that he couldn’t remember not needing to speak with spirits to fight boredom. He wasn’t able to twist the fade to make more pleasant dreams at that time. Honestly, he’s still awful at it.
When his abilities began to manifest more intensely, he found himself arguing with or battling demons at least twice a week. Exhaustion had been creeping up on him the day it decided to burst into the waking world, and it’s a miracle that one of the older Dalish elves enslaved in that prison of a house caught him before the magister did.
He’d spent the night before in a fight with a rage demon, so he had been dead on his feet and unbelievably irritable. Mahanon isn’t even sure what had triggered him, but frustration flared and so did a nearby fireplace. A hand was immediately clamped around the back of his neck as the older slave dragged him into the kitchen’s storeroom.
His name was Faelor. His hair was cropped and graying, and he had dark eyes — a shade of purple Mahanon hasn’t really seen again — surrounded by crows feet. Elgar’nan’s vallaslin was inked into his face in a soft shade of red, and Mahanon often wondered what he was like before he was forced into slavery. “Find a spirit of wisdom,” he had said. He slammed a dark band of a ring into Mahanon’s hand and closed his fingers over it carefully. “This is the most I can do to help. You need to gain control of yourself before he finds you.”
Mahanon equipped the piece of jewelry whenever he slept, and his forced interactions with demons lessened. Unfortunately, so did his meetings with spirits, so encountering one took a lot more work. He found a spirit of wisdom to help him calm his magic that lived somewhere in the Exalted Plains, but it took great effort for one to find the other due to whatever charm was in Faelor’s ring.
She seemed concerned about the way Mahanon’s magic was progressing — going from almost nothing to the beginnings of it rattling around his ribcage with its lack of use in only five years — but she did her best to teach him about controlling it. The spells she taught him were from the time of ancient elves, and Mahanon didn’t even know most of the spells even existed, but like everything else, he learned quickly.
They still didn’t meet as much as they should have, but they did their best. Her teaching is probably the only reason he’s still alive; not only could he effectively fight off demons using a lot less energy, but she taught him how to release gradual amounts of his magic through mundane activities to keep it from weirdly bottling up in an attempt to escape with an explosion.
It was dumb to build any relationships in the manor they were trapped in — it made it all too easy for the magister to create a new sort of torture — but Mahanon was young and afraid and he missed his family. He missed his parents. Faelor must’ve missed somebody, too, because he took Mahanon under his wing.
They didn’t get many moments, but if Mahanon was stressed, Faelor was there. If Mahanon was hurt, Faelor was there. If Mahanon was scared, Faelor was there. He became some sort of pseudo-father to the Dalish boy, and Mahanon is sure that he probably filled a hole that belonged to a missing — possibly dead — child. He was the only consistent comfort in the prison they were trapped in, and Mahanon became attached.
Mahanon was seventeen, and his world almost ended again.
He can’t quite remember everything that occurred — and yes, it’s incredibly frustrating to have almost an entire half of your life wiped from your memory because of shitty situations — but it happened at a dinner party. Faelor was somehow exposed as a wielder of magic, and Mahanon and the other slaves had watched in horror as plates of food and full cups of wine were thrown to the floor carelessly in the shemlens’ haste to pull the man onto the table.
One of the guests had pulled her steak knife from her plate, and Mahanon moved his body as if he was throwing a punch.
A fist made of stone and the green glow of the fade shot past his head with a burst of golden light. The guest’s neck broke upon impact, and silence fell over the room as she slumped to the floor.
Flashes of lightning crackled from Faelor’s body to send the guests and the slave owner flying across the room, and chaos erupted. Some slaves grabbed knives, some grabbed broken planks of wood from the now destroyed table, and Mahanon felt a wave of power rush through his body as he raised his hands. Golden shields flashed to life around the slaves as blood began to splatter across the room. There was screaming and gurgling and flashes of fire and electricity, and Mahanon grabbed onto the fade and warped until green flared around the room to manifest hands that broke bodies into their individual pieces.
Mahanon let out a scream, and the veil tore open above his owner with a screech. A stone surrounded by fire blazed down to the man’s body, and the magister was crushed into the floorboards. The rip closed and Mahanon felt his body fall to the floor as cheers erupted around the room.
When the world came back into focus, he was on a bed in one of the guest rooms, and Faelor was holding a compress to his head. Mahanon had tried sitting up, but the older man gently pushed him back onto the bed.
“You hit your head when you fell,” he said quietly. A lick of light from a brazier in the hallway flickered over Mahanon’s face, and it felt like his head was about to blow up. After a moment, Faelor whispered, “What you did was foolish.”
“They were going to kill you,” Mahanon croaked, and Faelor sighed, looking down at the floor.
“You’ve worked with Wisdom, but you are still untrained. I am old, and you have a life ahead of you.” Faelor paused, letting out a small hum. “Please do not think of me as unappreciative. I am grateful. We are grateful, but using your magic like that could have destroyed you.”
“I couldn’t watch you die.” Mahanon struggled to make eye contact as the world spun around him. Faelor brushed his hair from his face, and frowned. A cold cloth was wiped against his forehead and dragged down to his neck.
“Rest now, Mahanon. We cannot stay here long, and you need your strength.”
Faelor was right. The now freed slaves were only able to remain in the mansion for a week before other Tevinter nobles came knocking. The house was cleared that day, and most of the freed elves ran for the hills.
Mahanon, however, could only think about the other souls that were, at that very moment, trapped like he had been. Thoughts of those already enslaved and those forced into rusted cages on their way to Tevinter kept Mahanon up almost nightly, and his magic was going into overdrive with the restlessness that plagued him as a result. All of the small spells Mahanon used throughout the day barely skimmed the top of his reserves, and even Wisdom struggled to help him figure out what to do to keep his magic from consuming him. He’s still not really sure how he survived that period.
Faelor had a connection in Minrathous that worked with body modifications, and he put the young Dalish man in contact with her. It was overwhelming to figure out what specific changes he wanted made — just describing his wants as ‘more masculine’ wasn’t actually very useful — but he went with minimal changes to his face and body. It was the body that helped him escape hell; he didn’t want to get rid of it entirely. He left with sharper features, thicker eyebrows, and two distinct scars on his chest.
His almost-father had gone with him to the appointment, and when he came out of the surgical room, he’d been sitting with his head in his hands — clearly fast asleep. The procedure took just over nineteen hours, apparently, and the graying man had been sitting there the entire time. There was a sturdy pack sitting on a pile of newly made clothes on the chair next to him, and when he woke, he passed it gently to Mahanon.
“I have business in the city I need to deal with,” he had said. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
It was a lie, and Mahanon knew it as the words passed his lips. He wore the expression of a man in mourning — missing an almost-son that was still living and breathing in front of him. I love you, Mahanon wanted to say, but he couldn’t make himself choke it out; wouldn’t have been able to bear it if Faelor didn’t say the words back. They shared a brief hug instead — Faelor holding him so tightly that it took the breath out of his lungs — and the older man took a deep breath and stepped back.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, and then he was gone.
Mahanon hasn’t seen nor heard from him since, and none of his contacts have been able to find Faelor either. He hopes the older man is okay; hopes that if he passed, it was a peaceful event.
Mahanon was eighteen when he started attacking Tevinter traders, and he had been nineteen the first time it almost killed him. The sword that ran him through left a jagged scar on both halves of his body, and if there hadn’t been a spirit healer in the group of slaves he was helping, he would’ve bled out almost immediately. It didn’t stop him.
When he was twenty, he ran into a face he recognized from the dinner party, and she offered him a gift for starting the bloodbath it became. It was another ring. The band was an even darker shade of black than Faelor’s, and the rough cut of the opal on it muted the kaleidoscope of colors that made up the gem. It was perfect; no light could reflect off of the matte surface, and it had an illusion spell crafted into it.
He found an inordinate amount of joy when he first activated the enchantment during an attack. The look on the slaver’s face when halla horns sprung from the sides of his head was worth the stab wound he’d received as payment.
With the illusion, the legend of The Halla of Tevinter was created. Mahanon had to try extremely hard not to let it get to his head, and he had to try even harder to cover his face and distort the way his body looked. He wore a mask to cover the lower half of his face and did his best to keep a hood up over his head during battles. It didn’t work very often, so he took to scrubbing charcoal over his uncovered features. It was a mess, and it left him feeling gross, but his poor decisions made him a little too identifiable to risk being seen.
The constant fights that Mahanon threw himself into both helped and hurt his magic somehow. His skills improved greatly, and he was able to burn through his stores faster than they could attempt to overflow, but it also seemed to make it so his reserves filled up even faster than before. Wisdom’s only advice was to practice a lot while he wasn’t at actual rebellions to burn off the excess magic. She told him that she had to search the fade for more information before she could tell him anything; damn wisdom spirits and their inability to share theories until they have infinite proof to back them up.
Mahanon was twenty-three and thought everything in his life had finally settled down. His body is littered with scars; his chest, his limbs, his back, his legs. Even his hand has a large gash across the back of it, but he looks exactly how he wants to and takes pride in the marks he bears.
Most importantly, he’s free. He’s made an almost mythical name for himself helping slave rebellions, his magic only tries to kill him sometimes, and he has a daily rhythm that works out just fine for him. Who cares if his life is completely void of friends, acquaintances, or lovers — he’s a little too busy to care about that anyway.
Mahanon was twenty-four, out of breath, covered in blood, and about to fall over when his life decided to fall apart again. One of the elves from the rebellion he just helped walked up to him warily, and he was hoping it was to thank him because he could just tell he was going to hate what the other man said otherwise.
Of course, the elf asked him, “Halla, are you with the Inquisition?”
A heavy sigh followed a pregnant pause. “The who? ”