Work Text:
Lowtown was always riotous with color and sound. Merchants hawked their wares on every corner, and children darted between shoppers and workers, playing games in puddles and beneath the shadows of banners. Lowtown was the liveliest part of the city, free of the despair of Darktown and the repression of Hightown.
But today, Lowtown was silent save for the crackling of the morning’s funeral pyres, burning low in the afternoon sun.
They had allowed Meredith to visit the funeral. It had been a rushed affair, a quiet mass burning overseen by a handful of revered mothers and the few remaining inhabitants of Strauss Street. She had feared that they would drive her off – part of her had thought that perhaps they should have driven her off. She had not been the one to slaughter the Stannard family’s neighbors, but she could’ve stopped it, couldn’t she?
If she’d turned Amelia in, their parents would yet live. Amelia would yet live. Old Meg and Timothy and Jory and sixty others would yet live.
(Except… someone had turned Amelia in. Perhaps it had been one of those neighbors she’d slaughtered in the end, alongside a dozen templars. If Meredith had done it – if Meredith had done it and warned her big sister, might the outcome have changed?)
Her knees ached. She’d been sitting vigil here beside the pyre of her parents and her neighbors for hours, and she intended to sit for hours more. No one was left to tell her to come in for dinner, after all, or to tell her that it was time to walk to the Chantry for prayer. She could pray here. She’d been praying here, and she’d heard no answers from Andraste yet.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time – Andraste had allowed this to happen for a reason, hadn’t she? She allowed mages to exist for a reason. It had to be – there must have been a good reason, a solid reason, a holy reason that a dirty little girl kneeling in the streets couldn’t really hope to understand.
She bowed her head and clasped her hands together, beginning to pray anew, reciting all seventy of the names.
Mother – Father – Old Meg – Timothy – Jory – Cassala – Edric –
This time, the only name she left out was Amelia’s.
Andraste would understand.