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The Chargers are setting up camp enroute to the Storm Coast when a high-pitched scream soars through the dark wilderness.
Krem startles, immediately dropping the tent pegs in favour of his sword. It sounded like the scream came from the lake but in the fading daylight all Krem can see are thatches of reeds and a few bobbing ducks. “What the fuck was that?!”
A deep chuckle sounds from behind him and Krem turns around to stare at Iron Bull in disbelief. Krem keeps his sword raised, just in case. He learned a long time ago that just because Chief isn’t jumping into action doesn’t mean there’s no danger. The great big hulking qunari thinks that battling high dragons is all fun and games so his scale for danger is blatantly very skewed.
“It’s a loon,” Bull states nonchalantly as he stoops down to pick up Krem’s discarded tent pegs.
“A loon?!” Krem exclaims with no small amount of anxiety. He glances around the campsite to gauge the reaction from the rest of the team. He doesn’t know what a ‘loon’ is, and from the looks of it, neither do most of the Chargers. All of them are watching the proceedings with a frown and a cautious hand on their weapons. Krem tightens his grip on the sword. “What’s a ‘loon’ exactly? Some kinda… vengeful water spirit?”
Bull laughs again, so full-bellied this time that he actually clutches his massive bosom as he does so. Then he stands up and throws an arm around Krem’s shoulders, still chuckling to himself. “Oh, Krem,” he sighs. “My sweet innocent little Vint –”
Krem doesn’t blush.
“– Allow me to introduce you to the great, fearsome… storm coast loon.”
Bull gestures out towards the water and Krem narrows his eyes as an average sized black and white bird comes swimming into focus, gently bobbing on the surface of the water.
A loon, it turns out, is a fucking duck.
Bull walks away, still chuckling to himself, and Krem sighs in disappointment (because he was fooled by a bird not because the warmth of his friend has been replaced by the cool evening air). Krem should probably turn around and defend himself from the inevitable bollocking to come but instead he watches, strangely fascinated, as the innocent-looking duck-creature opens its mouth and lets out another blood-curdling scream.
“The fuck,” Krem mutters under his breath, utterly enchanted by the odd display.
Krem watches as the bird gracefully dips underwater and ruffles its black and white feathers. The moonlight makes the displaced water sparkle and the creature’s distinctive red eyes shine uncannily in the near-dark. It’s the most freakish animal he’s ever seen, but it’s also… so… beautiful?
“Huh,” he whispers, stricken with awe.
An amused snort startles Krem from his peaceful contemplation and he tears his eyes away from the strange creature to glare daggers at Chief. “What?” he snaps.
Bull raises his hands in defense but the bastard is still chuckling. “The last time you sounded so smitten, Krempuff, we ended up leaving a shitty Fereldan village at the crack of dawn with our tents in the ground and our pants around our ankles because the innkeeper caught you in bed with his daughter. If you’re gonna start fucking loons –”
Krem throws an abandoned tent peg in the direction of Chief even as the rest of the Chargers begin to hark on about the fucking Fereldan incident. “I was looking at a single fucking bird!” Krem exclaims over their boisterous bickering, “I’m not gonna become a birder!”
Now Krem is familiar with the source of the horrifying screech, he sees loons everywhere on the Storm Coast. He decides to make a game of it, trying to count as many loons as possible when they’re passing a body of water because he’s bored and damp and it’s something to do. He sees some small brown birds hiding in the hedgerows too. Dalish tells him it’s a sparrow of some kind. There’s some seagulls on the Coast too, which Krem recognises because they had gulls in Tevinter even if they were different kinds of gull. And then, at night, there’s a really weird bird call that Krem drunkenly imitates to a local who informs him it’s a “whippoorwill”. Krem has to ask the poor man to repeat himself three times before he’s sure it’s a real word. Whippoorwill. Birds are so bloody weird.
One day, Krem sees a big white bird when he’s out scouting the estuary and stops dead in his tracks. It looks so majestic… so beautiful. Krem huddles down and watches the bird for a few minutes – admiring its long slender neck and perfectly poised body; its long beak ready to strike into the water at a moment’s notice to snare its prey. But then the rest of the Chargers come clanking down the hill like the madmen they are and startle the bird into flight.
Krem gasps as its massive wings unfurl and the beast takes off into the sky; its wings beating as wide and as loud as a dragonling. Krem stares up at it, utterly enchanted. He must look like a right dweeb because once it’s out of sight, he turns around to find Bull and the rest of the Chargers smirking at him with knowing smiles.
“I’m not a birder,” Krem insists, grabbing his gear from the sodden ground. “It’s just… big, is all. Hard to miss. I don’t give a –”
“It’s an egret,” Dalish interrupts.
“Oh… right,” Krem says, mentally mapping the word onto the elegant bird. “Neat.”
Loon. Sparrow. Gull. Whippoorwill. Egret.
Krem smiles to himself as they set off from the Storm Coast. It’s nice to learn new things, is all.
–
Krem never really gave a shit about birds before. They were food, mostly. Growing up, if a pigeon or a gull was stupid enough to land in the streets of Minrathous then they weren’t long for this world. Then, at war, the only bird Krem ever saw were crows picking at corpses on the battlefield. Sometimes a big bird would swoop in if there was a massacre that day but he never stayed around long enough to learn the names of them.
It wasn’t until Krem joined the Chargers that he started to see outside his own periphery. He’d notice a nice flower sometimes. Or, yeah, a nice bird. The Chargers travel through nice places sometimes and although they’re always on the lookout for mercenaries or bandits or fucking wyverns there’s also long stretches of wilderness where the only thing to look at is fauna and flora. With the Chargers, he doesn’t need to constantly think about where to steal his next meal or how to pass through the next military health inspection. There’s moments where he can just sit, and look at nature, and maybe, even, feel like a part of nature…
It’s a luxury he’s never had before.
–
When the Chargers join the Inquisition, Krem gets assigned to all sorts of weird places with all sorts of weird wildlife. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees a flash of red on a snowy mountaintop because despite the years between him and Tevinter battlefields he still sees red, sometimes, and expects it to be the heraldry of the Antaam.
Bull knows this, though. Krem is staring into the dense snowy forest, breathing raggedly with his fingers tight on the hilt of his sheathed sword, when Bull cracks a joke about him being anti-Chantry.
It takes Krem a moment to understand the joke but when the red flutters between the trees once more, Krem sees the flash of colour for what it is – a red cleric; an iconic bird in the Frostback mountains, just not one that Krem’s seen before.
Krem breathes out steadily and loosens his grip on the weapon. “Lay off, Chief. Just didn’t realise birds came in that colour. Why’s it so damn red anyway? Pretty shitty camouflage if you ask me.”
Bull grunts. “Remind me to take you to Rivain sometime. Lots of birds with shitty camouflage there.”
Krem raises an eyebrow, more interested than he wants to admit. When he gets back to Skyhold, he finds a book about Rivain fauna in the library and browses the illustrations for hours. There are strange looking birds in the brightest of colours – reds, and yellows, and greens, and oranges, and purples – and Krem wonders how such a thing is possible. He didn’t know that birds could vary so much from one place to another. He pulls another book down from the shelves about birds in the Frostback Mountains and starts reading. If anyone asks, he’ll say it’s useful to be familiar with the local wildlife.
–
Krem doesn’t mean to become a birder. It’s not a conscious choice by any means. But there’s a lot of downtime at Skyhold, waiting around for orders, and sometimes when he’s bored of the pub, Krem finds himself patrolling the battlements or walking the grounds in search of entertainment, and he can’t help that there’s birds just perched about the place, begging to be looked at. There’s a squawking flock of starlings just screaming for attention every minute of the day. There’s gulls, of course. A scattering of songbirds. A sole pigeon growing fat off pub scraps. There’s even a pair of owls that you can hear some nights calling to each other across the Frostback mountains.
One evening, the owl sounds suspiciously close to Skyhold. Krem loses three rounds of Wicked Grace to the distracting noise until he admits defeat and sneaks out of the pub to track down the culprit. He finds the bastard roosting in an abandoned corner of the fortress, and finally identifies it as a barred owl, which is much rarer in these parts than the great horned owl that he’d expected to find. Krem feels oddly proud as he gazes upon the round face of the owl. Peaceful. Satisfied. And… giddy, almost. He feels like he’s just slayed a great beast, or stumbled across a great and powerful secret, when all he’s done is identify a bloody bird.
Krem whistles to himself as he ambles back to the pub, still high on his discovery. The Chargers think he got laid because he’s smiling so much and Krem’s not going to correct their assumptions. Krem catches Bull’s scrutinising gaze though and ducks his head with a bashful smile. He may have the others fooled but the qunari spy, he thinks, sees right through him.
–
“So what do we know about the local fauna?” Krem asks when the Inquisitor approves his investigation of Redcliffe Castle. “Dragons? Beasts? Wildlife?”
“You mean birds?” Bull asks with a wry smile.
Krem blushes and instinctively moves to defend himself from incoming verbal attacks, but they’re alone – no other Chargers to rib him for his birding. He smacks Iron Bull on his stupidly big arm anyway. “Fine. Yeah. The birds, too.”
When Krem retires to bed that night, there’s a guide to the local birds of Redcliffe waiting for him. That big old softie, he thinks.
–
Krem challenges himself to find new birds every time the Chargers travel somewhere new. He’ll source a local identification guide and ask the locals for tips and then, when the others are still sleeping at the crack of dawn, slip away from his bedroll to do a little birding.
He tells himself that the birdwatching thing is just to pass the time. Otherwise his life is a lot of walking and a lot of gore with not much excitement in between. But, he knows it’s more than that. He gets excited every time he hears a birdcall or a flap of wings. He gets a little thrill every time he correctly identifies a new species. And then there’s the indescribable peace he feels when it’s just him, and the birds, and an early morning cup of coffee at sunrise. It’s made him see the world in a new way – a better way – and his life is so much richer for it.
The Chargers rib him every time his ears perk up at birdsong and he goes diving towards a bush in search of a sparrow but he knows it keeps the boredom at bay for them too. They call him a birder and he no longer denies it. Sometimes Stitches will sit with him at sunrise, or Dalish will include birds in scouting reports. One time Grim even gave him a leg up to some abandoned ruins to get a better vantage point for the circling bird of prey. They’re supportive in their own, weird, way, even if no one understands why it matters to him.
–
Krem tries not to be too downtrodden when his personal mission to find new birds is unsuccessful. Nature is unpredictable. And as long as the Chargers succeed in their actual mission, it doesn’t matter if his little birding sidequest goes unfulfilled. But his heart is still heavy when the Chargers have to leave the Western Approach before he’s located a dust wren. He really wanted to see one.
He must be sulking loud enough to hear because one of Bull’s massive hands slaps down on his shoulder and it’s only years of practice that keep Krem’s knees from buckling. “You said this wren thing hides out in bushes?”
Krem feels his heart pound and his cheeks burn hot with yearning. He can’t believe Bull remembered his silly little bird facts. Sure, he listens when Krem has a battleplan or is telling a funny story or something but he doesn’t expect anyone to listen when he’s prattling on about birds. Bull’s got no reason to care about that at all. Unless –
Krem clears throat. “Yeah,” he says. “The dust wren relies on scrub for shelter and food. They’re fast little buggers too. I heard several calls down in the canyon when we were chasing that quillback but they’re small motherfuckers and well camouflaged so we don’t stand a chance of seeing one now we’re up on these ridgetops.”
Bull hums thoughtfully, and the conversation moves on, but when the sun dips low, he orders the Chargers to camp in the canyon down below – “I’m tired of getting sand blasted directly into my eyeballs and there’s a stream for your waterskins” – is his reasoning, but there’s scrub in the valley. There’s trees, and birdsong, and a babbling brook to attract wildlife.
Krem sees a wren dancing in the grass at dawn and smiles the whole way back to Skyhold.
–
It’s not even his birthday when Iron Bull gets him a spyglass. He just tosses it to him one day over breakfast – “For your birds.”
Krem is speechless, so he falls back into old habits – “I’m not a birder.”
Chief’s face does something weird, like he’s actually bothered by something for once. “It’s no bad thing to have a hobby, Krem. Just take it. And report back when you identify that critter in the garden. I know it’s been bothering you.”
Krem is speechless, again. He looks down at the spyglass. It’s really nice, actually. Antique or something, with a chain attached so he can hang it around his neck and climb the fortress at the same time. It’s the most thoughtful gift he’s ever received. “You, uh… you’d actually want to hear about all that then? The birds and whatnot?”
Bull smiles. “Don’t got much of a choice, do I? You care, I care, Krem, that’s how it goes.”
“Oh,” Krem says. “I… same. For the record.”
Bull locks eyes with him and nods. Krem feels like there’s something he’s missing. He stutters out a thank you anyway.
Krem climbs to his favourite spot overlooking the Skyhold garden and watches the dawn chorus through the spyglass. He sees a black-capped songbird having a drink from the well and a red-winged blackbird searching for treasure in the herb garden. The fat rock pigeon picks at the fallen crumbs of his breakfast while a golden eagle flies overhead towards the mountains.
Krem watches the sky turn steadily from indigo to pink to blue and he sees the beautiful details of the world unfold before him like never before. He sees Iron Bull spar in the courtyard below and feels a flutter of excitement in his gut, like the thrill of a new discovery… Maybe, if he’s brave enough to look, there might be something beautiful to be found there, too.