Chapter Text
The old-fashioned clock radio woke Ellana promptly at 5:45 in the morning, as it had done nearly every day for as long as she could remember. She rolled over and flipped the switch that would silence it, then grabbed her cell phone from where it sat charging on her nightstand. The blue notification light flashed insistently at her.
2 missed calls
5 Slack pings
“Shit,” Ellana breathed out as she pulled herself up to lean against the headboard. A decade ago when she was fresh out of college, she wouldn’t have silenced the ringer on her phone when she went to bed. Back then, she had been willing to take any assignment at any hour, just for the chance to get her name on a byline. But now, she knew better. Sleep was a stronger motivator than ambition.
She opened the Slack app first, scrolling back through the last six or seven hours of messages between the Thedosian Journal's editors and reporters. Thankfully there wasn’t too much extraneous chatter - almost everything was either editors requesting pieces or writers accepting assignments. Varric, she saw, had already claimed the morning opinion piece with a pitch about a scandalous new play being performed in Val Royeaux and had also taken an assignment for a listicle about Ferelden’s latest trends in hats.
“You’ve been around too long to be this much of an overachiever, Tethras,” she grumbled at her phone.
Shortly after Varric’s assignments, she found the notifications she was looking for. Her editor, Leliana, had started trying to get a hold of her a few hours ago. Ellana frowned as she pulled up her call log. Two missed calls, one just before midnight from Cassandra, the editor-in-chief, and another from Leliana about an hour later. She cleared her throat before tapping the callback button. It only rang once.
“Took you long enough,” said the heavy Orlesian accent on the other end of the line.
“Sorry, Leliana. I just got home from that assignment in Hossberg last night. I was trying to get a few hours’ sleep.”
"I haven’t even been to sleep yet,” Leliana replied with a clearly superior tone.
“You’re the night editor. It’s your job to have not gone to sleep yet,” Ellana said.
“Splitting hairs. Do you want this assignment or not?”
Ellana let out a sigh as she placed her head against the wall behind her. She had hoped for at least a couple of days at home before she had to head out again, but it wasn’t as if she had a pet to take care of, or a partner to miss her while she was away. There were clean clothes in her closet, and probably a load waiting for her down at the dry cleaner’s - she could just drop off the contents of her suitcase while she was there.
“What’s the job?” she asked.
“Long-form piece, or maybe a series, depending on how this goes,” Leliana said.
A series, she thought, her interest immediately piqued. Long-form pieces weren’t very common assignments at the Thedosian Journal these days, but they were exactly the sort of thing Ellana enjoyed writing the most.
“Cass has a source,” Leliana continued, “who says there’s an excavation underway in the Arbor Wilds-”
Ellana groaned into her phone and Leliana stopped abruptly. “Give it to somebody else, Leliana,” she said.
Leliana hesitated for a moment before asking, “Why exactly would I do that?”
“You know why, Leliana,” Ellana said as she got out of her bed, pinning her phone between her ear and her shoulder. “The last thing I want is to get pigeon-holed into being the Dalish woman who writes Dalish think pieces. It’s boring, and it’s 101. There’s no depth to it and I’ll just end up having to rewrite the same basic piece over and over again for the next five years.”
“So don’t make it 101, then,” Leliana said. “If you want to dig deeper, then do it. Write for the audience that will appreciate something beyond the basic.”
“And you’ll publish that?” Ellana asked incredulously, yanking her blanket up towards her headboard with more force than was really necessary.
“Hey, if it’s a good story, I’ll publish it. And when have you ever failed to write a good story?”
“Leliana, I honestly can’t tell if that’s a threat or a really weird compliment.”
“That’s the spirit.” Leliana’s tone was equal parts encouraging and sarcastic. “But if you’d have let me finish explaining this thing in the first place, I’d have told you it’s not a ‘Dalish think piece.’”
“You said it’s in the Arbor Wilds,” she shot back as she grabbed her laptop from her desk and shoved it back into her work bag.
“It’s complicated,” Leliana replied. “The land is in the Arbor Wilds so it’s owned by Orlais, but the excavation team is from Tevinter, and the site itself is probably of elven origin.”
Ellana stopped stuffing pens and notebooks into her bag long enough to let this register. “Sounds like an absolute nightmare,” she said.
“Gets worse,” Leliana replied happily. “Apparently this site may have been visited by the Final Inquisitor.”
Ellana let out a loud laugh before she could stop herself. “Yeah, right. It has that in common with at least half of Thedas, if you believe those old stories.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I believe,” Leliana said. “People love that sort of thing. How many documentaries and novels and terrible TV dramas about that time period come out every year? That whole era is shrouded in mystery and people can’t get enough of it!”
“I don’t know, Leliana. Mysteries and romance and all that nonsense? Sounds like a job for Tethras.”
“Oh, don’t pick on poor Varric,” Leliana said with a chuckle. “He knows what he’s good at writing, and something like this doesn’t quite fit.”
“Well,” Ellana grunted, leaning down to retrieve a pair of boots from the bottom of her closet, “I’m still not sure what sort of article you’re looking for. It sounds like something for an academic paper, or maybe someone’s historical fiction - not that I’m trying to talk you out of it.”
“Your angle is the bureaucracy,” Leliana said. “I want to hear everything about the way these governments and institutions interact with each other and step on each others’ toes. I want to know what impact this project is having on the community down there, and what the locals think about it. And,” she continued in a conspiratorial sing-song, “when this Tevinter crew finds some evidence of the Final Inquisitor, I want you to get all of it on the record. Anything you can find on her is newsworthy - I mean, we don’t even know her name!”
Ellana exhaled slowly, lowering herself onto a corner of her bed. She wasn’t sure there was much of a story, but Leliana seemed so certain and her instincts were rarely wrong.
“What do you know about Cass’ source?” she asked.
“They met in graduate school. He’s a historian or anthropologist - I forget which. She wants you to speak to him first before you head down to the Arbor Wilds,” Leliana explained. “She said he works at the museum in Lydes.”
“Oh,” she said, somewhat surprised. “Cass knows him personally?”
“Apparently they’re old friends,” Leliana replied. “She’s going to give you a call as soon as she’s on-shift later this morning. Think you can be on the train to Lydes by then?”
Ellana glanced back at her clock radio. A few minutes after 6 o’clock and she still had plenty to do before she could leave her apartment, let alone get on a train.
“Yeah, I’ll make it work,” she told Leliana.
“Perfect!” She could practically hear Leliana beaming at her from the other end of the phone. “I can’t wait to read your drafts. Inquisitive Hearts is one of my all-time favorite novels, you know.”
“Oh my gosh,” Ellana groaned, blushing despite herself. “I can’t believe you actually read that, Leli.”
“Listen, it was much more tasteful than the reviews would have you believe,” Leliana replied, giggling now as well. “Much more tasteful than if Varric had written it, for example.”
“If you say so.”
“If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find some ancient love letters scattered in the ruins!”
“Yeah - somehow I doubt it will be quite that interesting,” Ellana said as she rolled her eyes.
“Have a safe trip, Lavellan,” Leliana said.
“Thanks, Leli. Talk to you soon.”