The disclaimer is this:
I can claim no part in the creation of the Dragon Age world or the character whose point of view I'm attempting to feel out. The character is someone else's creation. The idea for the vignette is someone else's. Even phrasing is borrowed from better author. This short-short should be considered an attempt at channeling some kind of Warhol-with-a-quill and making something cool out of someone else's soup can. May you be entertained for a minute or two. 
...With A Bouncing Doxy
I stare at the woman I have come for, unable to decide whether her face is annoyingly imperfect - mouth too wide, eyes too far apart, dry skin, freckles - or she’s the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. With each passing second I am closer to making up my mind.
At my request, she sits down at my side. She has just come in and is wet from the bad weather, her body smelling of fresh rain and fresh sweat. I can see she has been running. The flush it has brought to her cheeks is damned attractive and she smells good. Some locks of her hair have come loose from her elaborate style and these sway in front of her eyes. With a motion of one hand she pushes them aside. She smiles and I start to believe she shares an understanding with me that there is a limit to what one can hope for once plans have gone awry.
The state she’s in is certainly unladylike but in all other respects she radiates surprisingly good breeding. Breed of what though? She could be the daughter of foreign royalty deposed in an unexpected revolt driven through midnight forests in the pelting rain, head high, regal even while hair whips around her face, shoulders erect while a wounded servant tries to cover them with a cloak. I indulge myself a little. I’ve read a lot of racy Orlesian novels and I’ve already had a more than a few drinks.
She is starting to steam and a faint halo of vapor rises from her and her curls. She cocks her head slightly to one side as if to ask ‘Well? What now?’ Her neck, I notice, is longer than the high collar of her blouse can hold. Yeah, I’ve decided now. She is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
To my amusement I’m made shy by her appearance and demeanor. She appears so much the lady that it’s hard to imagine how I will soil that status with what I intend for the harlot. Her body, beguiling though it is, only complicates matters as she wears her dress like a second skin. Seamless and therefore irremovable.
The way I phrase the dilemma is this: “I don’t know that I deserve this honor”
She leans forward slightly looking to everyone else in the tavern like she’s making a comment about a mutual acquaintance who has just walked in. She says, “Don’t worry. You have made the right choice. I’ll do anything you ask of me.”
A simple exchange whispered under the babble of a crowded room but was there ever a marriage vow more explicit?
Gazing into her eyes, which are so large and shiny that I can see my face reflected I rediscover the joy of being me. There are a few behaviors of mine when I’m with her that I single out as being my true self, different from the thickening physical lump, traitor and coward I see in the mirror every morning. The mirror can’t lie, yet it does. It can’t reflect the burning destinies trapped inside my frustrated and misspent soul. It can’t reflect the man I want to be. It reflects the sorry man I never meant to be and shows only faint shadows of the one I pretend to be. Deep down I know that what is audacious promise in a thick-haired youth can be mocked in a man with greying sideburns as mere gasbagging but I have found a rare moment with her where I can light up a captivated audience with that glow of a youthful promise I still remember. I think she actually likes me. With her I listen to myself talk and am relieved to find that my own voice can still weave magic.
To my surprise and deep satisfaction I do actually talk with her and we talk about a great number of things. Though just a bawd she has an amazing knowledge of books. I find out in the conversation that she has read more than me although some of it is the sort of tripe written for her and by her own sex. Novels about timid girls afraid to take chantry vows and such.
After a while talking I tell her “I feel as though we’re courting, my lady”, thinking that will make her laugh.
Instead she says very solemnly, “Oh Warden Blackwall, it flatters me that I inspire such treatment.”
The last word hangs in the smoky air for a minute reminding me why I came here tonight and why I sought her out especially. I imagine new the treatment I am still raring to mete out to a woman. Can I still ask that of her? I recall the way she said she would do anything, anything I ask of her and I savor the exquisite gravity of her assurance.
“Maybe,” I say, “it’s time you took me home and …introduced me to your family.”
Screenie courtesy of Rinji the Bearded:
How old is Ana? Nineteen. How long has she been a prostitute? Five years. You do the math, and the answer is a disturbing one. Yes, but then Ana was always precocious and remarkable within least notable circles. Even when she was newly initiated into the trade, and even though she isn’t what anyone would call a great beauty, she stood out from the squalor from whence she came, an aloof and serious girl amongst a hubbub of crude laughter and drunken conviviality.
“She’s a strange one, that Ana,” her fellow harlots said. “She’ll go far.” And indeed she has. All the way to Skyhold, a paradise compared to where she came from in Denerim. Yet, if they imagine her sashaying through the Inquisitor’s hall under a jeweled Orlesian mask, they’re wrong. She’s almost always indoors, shut in her room in the Herald’s Rest, alone. The two other bawds of Skyhold, working in adjacent buildings, are scandalized by the small number of Ana’s rendezvous: one a day, or even none. Who does she think she is? There are rumors that she’ll charge one patron a few silvers, another five sovereigns, and another twenty. What’s her game?
On one thing everyone’s agreed: the woman has peculiar habits. She stays awake all night, even when there are no more customers to be had; what’s she doing in there with the lamp lit, if she’s not sleeping? Also, she eats strange things – someone saw her eating a raw tomato once. She fusses over her teeth after each meal, and rinses her mouth with a watery liquid that she buys in a bottle from the merchant who sells blank runes. She doesn’t wear rouge, but keeps her cheeks terrible pale – a consequence of her sunless, nocturnal existence perhaps? She never takes strong drink, except when a man-at-arms bullies her into it. And even then, if she can get him to turn his back for an instant, she often spits out her mouthful or empties her tankard into a vase. What does she drink then? Tea, and in precious quantities.
Peculiar? You haven’t heard the half of it, according to the other wh0res. Not only is Ana able to read and write in the languages of distant lands – some say she reads ‘old Tevinter’ (she never interjects the word ‘Tevene’), and she actually enjoys it. Her reputation as a lover may be spreading among those in the fortress, but it can’t compare with the reputation she’s earned among her fellow prostitutes and tavern-dwellers as “the one who reads all the books.” And not romance novels either – big books, with more pages than even the clever circle mages could hope to finish. “You’ll go blind, you will,” her colleagues keep telling her, or “Don’t you ever think, enough is enough, this one’s the last one?” But Ana never has enough. She buys decrepit old journals too, the ones that come in on loot wagons from the Inquisitions new territories, even books with hardly any pictures in them, even ones that have been banned by the Chantry.
Her main expense, though, is clothes. Even by the standards of the Redcliff or any other notable town, the quality of Ana’s dresses is remarkable; in the squalor of Denerim her garments were astonishing. Rather than buying a discarded old costume off of a second-hand broker, or a serviceable imitation of the current Val Royeaux fashion, her policy is to save every coin until she can afford something that looks as though the finest lady’s dressmaker might have made it especially for her. Such illusions, though they’re sometimes on sale in some of the larger cities’ shops, don’t come cheap. The very names of the fabrics – royale sea silk, king’s willow weave, and vyrantium samite, in colors of garnet and smoked jade – are exotic enough to make other whores’ eyes glaze over when Ana describes them. “What trouble you go to”, one of them once remarked, “for clothes that are stripped off in five minutes for a trick to tread on!” But Ana’s patrons stay in her room for a great deal longer than five minutes. Some of them stay for hours, some all night, and when Ana emerges, she looks as though she hasn’t even been undressed. What does she do with them in there?
“Talk”, is her answer, if anyone is bold enough to ask. It’s a teasing answer, delivered with a grave smile, but it’s not the whole truth. Once she has chosen her mark, she’ll submit to anything. If it’s her body they want, they can have it, or any other of her less visceral assets. Her husky voice is the result of a knife-point being pressed to her throat just a little too hard when she was sixteen, by one of the few men she ever failed to satisfy – a lesson learned and never forgotten.
But it isn’t simple submission, acts of depravity, or talk that Ana provides. Submission and depravity come cheap. Talk is cheaper. Any number of desperate, toothless hags will do whatever a trick asks if they’re given a few crowns for drink. What makes Ana a rarity is that she’ll do anything the most desperate alley girl will do, but do it with a smile of angelic innocence. There is no rarer treasure in Ana’s profession than a sweet-looking girl who can surrender to a deluge of ordure and rise up smelling like Andraste’s grace, her eyes friendly as a wagging mabari’s, her smile white as absolution. Her clients come back again and again, asking for her by name, convinced that her lust for their particular vice must equal their own.
Those who are inclined to dislike her, Ana strives to charm. In this, her freakish memory is useful: she’s able, it seems, to recall everything anyone has ever said to her. “So, how did your sister fare in the Free Marches?” she will, for example, ask an old acquaintance a year after they last spoke. “Did that fellow in Kirkwall marry her or not?” And her eyes will be full of concern, or something so closely resembling concern that even the most skeptical tart is touched.
Ana’s acute memory is equally useful when dealing with her patrons. Music is reputed to soothe the savage beast, but Ana has found a more effective way to pacify brutish souls: by remembering, and agreeing with, their opinions on the Orlesian Grand Duke or the indisputable merits of Fereldan ale over Dwarvish. “Of course I remember you!” she’ll say to the loathsome ape who, two years before, twisted her nipples so hard she almost fainted from the pain. “You are the gentleman who believes that your caravan was robbed by darkspawn!” A few more regurgitations, and he’s ready to praise her to the skies.
A pity, really, that Ana’s brain was not born into a noble’s body, and instead squirms, crammed and constricted, in the dainty skull of a commoner girl. What a waste. What a contribution she might have made to Thedas!
Modifié par Lindraen, 09 mai 2015 - 04:39 .
Didn't mean for you to start pulling punches. Put it back now?
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