A Quick Author's Note: Hello!

This story is rather organically "stream of consciousness," so if you find that style annoying and rambly (two things I admit to being) then this is likely not for you. It begins in very short snippets, but the chapters will become longer as we go further along in the story; after all, you don't remember much from your childhood (with clarity at least) do you?

Please feel free to review, criticize, or flame so long as you do so intelligibly. "Sticks and stones" and all that.

A Disclaimer: Of course, I do not own these characters (though the Cousland in my story was poked and prodded in my character creator the first day we could download it!). Equally not mine is some of the dialogue which comes directly from the game itself, because it is truly what made me fall in love with this character – and all the others. I try to use the dialogue in a manner that reflects my respect for the people who spent many hours writing it, but please do take me to task if you find it jarring.

Thank you!

Part Two Note: In the course of editing and re-writing certain parts, I came to the beginning and decided to change the consistency of the first few chapters. Originally, the very beginning was incredibly short (500 words), essentially a drabble written while I should've been working (oops). It didn't end up matching what the story grew to, however, so I said: Begone, you blaggart! And thus, it was gone.

If only my taxes would take the same hint. SIGH. Without further ado or mention of filthy things like taxes, enjoy!

Life was hard.

Life was hard: children were not supposed to learn this fact until much later in their lives. Life was full of difficult choices and insurmountable odds. Impossibilities that rose before you as you watched in horror, unable to move, speak, react. Children were supposed to be protected from these truths and told little lies that made things better for a while. Anything you dream of is possible if you try hard enough!

In Ferelden, however, children did not receive these luxuries for many years. Children would grow up to become rebel kings and farmers-turned-generals or even Templars-turned-Grey Wardens. In Ferelden, children needed those harsh truths so that they could survive to understand them. They succeed if they try hard enough, but sometimes they fail even if they never give up, because that is just how the world works.

And so it was that my life began, not with a happy tale of a mother and father who loved me and told me little white lies, but of a father who had been urged to hand me over to one of his loyal nobles, Arl Eamon. While my half-brother lived with pomp and circumstance in the palace at Denerim, I lived first in Eamon's Redcliffe Castle with the maids and servants, comfortable and quiet, until Isolde came. After that, I was shoved off into the stables, an area less visible, less shameful for the new woman of the house.

Eamon's wife assumed that I was a threat to her home, which inevitably became true in the course of my life, when danger and necessity called for me to announce my true heritage to the entire nation. But she incorrectly assumed that I was Eamon's bastard child; I was a royal bastard, it turned out, not a noble one – how dare she underestimate me?!

I kid! True, my life was not peaches and cream for many years, but to spell it out as though it were a dirge? That's too dramatic, even for me.

My name is Alistair and my father was King Maric Theirin. My mother was a star-struck maid with whom he had an unfortunate dalliance, but I never met either of them; she died in childbirth and he never acknowledged that I ever existed; to me, at least.

My life is a culmination of failures, but it turns out that if you fail enough times…eventually you have to succeed at something. In my case, I succeeded at saving the world.

Go figure.

My very first failure, however, was in learning how to roll with the punches. Isolde demanded me cast from Redcliffe and Eamon's care by the age of ten. When I learned the truth of the situation, I lashed out in anger at the man I felt was betraying me; the haunting sound of my mother's amulet crashing, splintering against the stone castle wall is the sound that ended my childhood and any chance of believing those little lies people tell out of love.