Dragon Age: Origins #8 - Unhappy Returns

[andraste]

So on the way to Lake Calenhad to look for Brother Genitivi, Wulfric and his companions happened to be passing through Bann Loren's lands when they spotted an altercation and ended up talking to Elric Maraigne. Wulfric was honestly pretty happy to have an excuse not to continue with the wild goose chase for a bit, so he took Alistair, Wynne and Zevran with him and set off for Ostagar. (By this point he had started keeping in the assassin in the party most of the time, for some reason he was definitely not ready to admit to.)

Going back to the sight of his first large battle was certainly sobering, although he wasn't as deeply affected as Alistair seemed to be. But then, Wulfric's brother didn't get killed by darkspawn and have his corpse displayed as a trophy. I mean, he wishes that would happen to Bhelen, but so the ancestor's have not listened to his prayers. He cut the corpse down and burned it because if dwarf royalty died in human lands he'd want them to respect dwarf customs the same way, no matter how odd they thought they were. (Interestingly, Zevran disapproves of that choice. He doesn't think it's worth the time to take the body down and gather firewood when it's freezing cold and there are darkspawn everywhere, I guess?)

After that, it was back to hunting for Brother Genitivi, who was definitely not at the Spoiled Princess. Wullfric was NOT PLEASED that he had to walk half way back across Ferelden to Denerim and then all the way back across to get to Haven. Why are things so far apart on the surface???

Haven was even weirder than the rest of the human villages he'd been in, which is to say that he took all of his frustrations out on the cult members and slaughtered Kolgrim and his cronies before he even heard what they had to say about tainting the ashes. (I mean, he probably wouldn't have done it anyway because killing Kolgrim was more satisfying than pouring blood on a dead woman could ever be.) He killed the dragon while he was up there, just for good measure.

In the Gauntlet, he admitted that he felt bad about what happened to Trian - insofar as he should have seen that Bhelen was out to get them both. Which I guess is progress in a way. Then he set aside all worldly possessions to reach the ashes.



He took some of them and told Genitivi he could do whatever he wanted with the news of their location. Not his religion or his dead woman, not his problem.

The good news is, the ashes actually revived Arl Eamon! Which is just as well after all that trouble. Wulfric would have preferred to go after Loghain right away, but since Eamon said he had to have a whole army first instead of just half of one, he reluctantly started back east again ...