This was written in response to an LJ kmeme prompt requesting Anders in Tevinter robes and Fenris reacting poorly. From that relatively cracky prompt arose 12k words of a plot. I took a few liberties with Darktown, dividing it into the Upperdark, Middledark, and Lowerdark and creating pseudo-neighborhoods in those areas called wards.

Summer had laid itself on Kirkwall like a wet wool blanket. Residents said the city had not seen heat like this since the Blessed Age. The air was so thick from moisture that sweat simply clung rather than cooled, and respite had not been had in weeks. Those who could, left the city for cooler climates, leaving Hightown a veritable ghost town, and the merchant quarter stood empty save for a few die-hards desperate to unload their stock. The wretches in Lowtown's slums hid in the shadows, fanning themselves and praying for the Maker's mercy from the swelter.

Hawke had chosen to take Isabela, Merrill, and Aveline on a trip up to Sundermount to do a fool's favor for the little blood mage and to not coincidentally escape the blast furnace called Kirkwall. Varric was embroiled in a trade dispute with the Carta and was rarely seen without one angry dwarf or another at his side – or in his face. Grand Cleric Elthina had sent Sebastian to escort a small party of Chantry sisters and brothers to Ostwick. Presumably Anders was still working in his Darktown clinic.

With no one in Kirkwall to draw him out of his isolation, Fenris had taken to living almost full time in his mansion's cellars, where at least the damp carried a hint of subterranean chill. It did little to make him more sociable, left alone with Danarius' wine, the Book of Shartan, and an illustrated book of the alphabet that Hawke had gifted to him when he began his quest to help Fenris learn to read.

The alphabet book had wine stains, dirty fingerprints, creased pages, and had been pierced by a knife late one night when Fenris, deep in his cups, grew too angry to endure its taunting promises of literacy any longer. Despite that, it was still one of the elf's greatest treasures and he was determined to show Hawke his progress when the man returned from Sundermount with a new mad tale of near death.

After days of isolation, rarely venturing out of the cellars, Fenris was not certain whether it was day or night when a scrabbling noise jerked him out of a fitful sleep filled with dancing, taunting letters that flitted away every time he reached for them.

His hand was on his sword before he was fully aware that he was awake. He scanned the large chamber for some sign of movement in the dim light of one guttering lantern before he pushed himself up out of the nest of blankets and pillows he had made for himself. He padded silently deeper into the cellars.

He had searched the cellars when he first took possession of the mansion and found nothing of note other than the extensive wine collection, but in Kirkwall, it seemed that sometimes surprises came out of the very walls.

In this case, the surprise was the sound of voices on the other side of a wall that Fenris had been certain was solid stone.

"—lock here. Just need to—"

"Hurry—says the bird died!"

"Doing—Void, woman."

The words faded in and out, blocked by the wall and by the speakers' attempts to keep their voices down, but Fenris heard enough. The scrabbling on the other side of the now obviously false wall continued until, after a click, it started to swing out into the room where Fenris waited.

The man who had opened the lock found himself facing a sword longer than he was tall pointed straight at his face.

"Who sent you?" Fenris snarled before noting the people huddled behind him, a woman with a baby in her arms, two boys barely old enough to hope for the first wisps of facial hair, an old woman leaning against an even older man, all illuminated by one lantern held by a filthy little girl no older than seven.

"Please, serah," the man said, raising his hands to show himself unarmed. "We don't mean no harm. But the chokedamp took the Lowerdark ward below us. Me and my family only just made it out before it made it up to our ward. Everyone's dead, serah, and it's still spreading."

"Please," this from the woman holding the baby. "We'll just go through and out. Won't stay and trouble you, but the choke's still coming. Our sparrow died before we made it up the stairs to here."

The old woman held up a wicker cage to let Fenris see the tiny still figure lying in its bottom.

"And there's thingsin it," the younger of the boys hissed before the old man slapped the back of his head.

"Don't mind him," the old man rasped. "He was always a liar."

"Am not," the boy said sullenly, rubbing his head.

Fenris considered the pitiful refugees for a long moment, his sword not wavering an inch despite its great weight before he lowered its point and stood aside.

"Through that door. Stay there. Touch nothing."

He watched them closely as they filed past him with murmured thanks, searching each face for some sign that they were anything but what they claimed to be. The babe in arms would have been a good touch for an assassin to put him off his guard, but the elderly couple and children would be liabilities. Though you never could tell with boys that age; he was willing to bet they both had knives somewhere on them.

He took the little girl's lantern, though she tried to protest until her mother – he assumed it was her mother – shushed her.

The space on the other side of the false wall was barely more than a landing at the top of a long flight of stairs that spiraled down into darkness. Fenris descended far enough to see an open door at the bottom and narrowed his eyes at the thought that he had left this opening into his home all this time. Danarius could have sent assassins through it at any point and taken Fenris unawares.

He trotted down to the bottom of the stairs and closed the door, jamming his belt knife into the door jam to make it harder to force open. Later, perhaps, he would install a locking bar across it just in case he ever needed a back door exit of his own.

He heard murmurs from the family as he took the stairs three at a time to the cellar and pushed the false wall closed. Later he would secure that door as well, but first there were strangers in his home.

"Please, serah," the man, who seemed to be the family spokesman began, "If you'll just show us a way out, we won't never bother you again."

Fenris returned the lantern to the little girl and slung his sword over his shoulder in a practiced motion that made the two boys nudge each other and point. "First you will tell me what happened. Then I will show you the door."

The man moved in front of his family a step and ducked his head. "My name's Jameson, serah. My wife, Moira, the babe's Anna, my daughter Bess, my boys Wilf and Sam. Moira's mum and da, Luisa and Wilf."

"The First," the old man interjected. "Wilf the First. Not like the little lyin' bugger here, Wilf the Third," he said, cuffing the boy who had spoken of "things" in the chokedamp.

Wilf the Third shot his grandfather a look that eloquently spoke of how he wouldn't mind being Wilf the Only.

Fenris ignored the family byplay and pointedly did not offer his own name. "Just tell me what happened."

"We was sleeping, but Anna don't sleep so good yet, so Moira was up with her. She saw it first."

Moira held the baby a little closer to her chest. "It was the choke," she said. "You could see it. Everyone said you couldn't see the choke, but it glowedwhere it was thick. I saw it in the Lowerdark ward below ours. We had a good place in the Middledark, had a view of the Lowerdark from our spot."

She said that almost defiantly. A good place in the Middledark wasn't even as good as a bad place in Lowtown, but people still clung to some sense that no matter how bad things were, someone else still had it worse.

"Just get to the point," Fenris said impatiently. Having these strangers in his home practically made his skin itch. He could feel their curious eyes tracing his tattoos and practically hear their inward judgments about the strange elf.

Moira frowned and shifted the babe to the other side of her chest. "There was the choke. It was kind of greenish, like fog, but I never seen a fog that had its own light. It turned the torch fires blue and I could hear people coughing down below. So I woke everyone up and we ran."

Wilf the First spoke up. "Choke ain't supposed to look like nothing. In all my time in Kirkwall, ain't no one said they seenthe choke. They says the rock sweats it out when it gets hot. That's why we got the bird. Little thing'll die before we do."

Luisa shook the cage to make the limp little body loll pathetically in the bottom. "We didn't see the choke when it died. Might be on your stairs right now."

"I did not die," Fenris said. "Nor did I see anything stranger than a door to my cellar of which I had been unaware until now."

"About that," Jameson said apologetically. "We didn't mean nothing by coming up your stairs, but I found them a few years back. They went so high up I knew they had to go up to Hightown, so I never dared nothing. I didn't even tell anyone, but when we was running, it was the fastest way I knew to get us up."

He gave Fenris a pleading look. "I did it for my family. We wasn't going to steal nothing. We was just going to try to get out and find somewhere to wait until the choke was gone and we could go back."

Even faced with a foe that they could not fight and that might take their lives in the night, these people could not think of doing anything more with their lives than returning to the Middledark. Fenris regarded them impassively, seeing them as little more than slaves to their own lack of ambition.

"You," he shifted his attention to the younger Wilf. "What things did you see?"

"He didn't see—"

Fenris turned a sharp glare on Wilf the Elder and the man shut his mouth.

"What did you see in the chokedamp?" he asked again.

Wilf shook his head. "I don't know, serah. Shadows in the fog, but they wasn't people. They was…" He held his hands up, miming something taller than he was, arms held wide to indicate great size. "People-shaped. Not like spiders. I saw a giant spider once when Sam and me snuck into Lowerdark…"

"You did what?"Moira rounded on her son and raised her hand to strike him, but Fenris caught her wrist in an implacable grip. He held her until she relaxed her arm and then released her.

"Enough," he growled. "What you do to each other outside my home is your business, but I will see no more of this. Leave the boy alone."

He nodded to Wilf. "Go on."

The awe with which the boy regarded him after his intercession made Fenris uncomfortable.

"That's all, serah. The things in the fog. I don't know what they was doing, but they wasn'tspiders and I don't think they was people. They didn't look like they was coughing, and everyone else down there was."

"Do any of you have anything else to add?" Fenris asked, sweeping the group with a glance.

"Serah?" It was the little girl, Bess. She cringed back against her brothers when Fenris looked at her.

He had absolutely no idea how to respond to that. "Yes?"

Sam nudged his sister. "Are you a spirit?"

Well, that wasn't useful.

"No," he said crisply before turning away. "Follow me."

He led the family up the stairs and out of the mansion. He knew they were staring at the open space cluttered with debris and the now long-decayed bodies of slain slavers, but on the bright side, fear made them all completely silent.

He caught Jameson's arm on the way out. "I will be blocking that door. Don't think to come that way again."

Jameson looked down at Fenris' bare, tattooed hand – he had not been wearing gauntlets while sleeping – and nodded.

"I've already forgot it exists," Jameson said before carefully, gingerly extricating himself from Fenris' hold and hurrying his family out into the pre-dawn light, away from the mad elf with the enormous sword, and away from Hightown before the city guard challenged them.

Fenris closed and locked the door before returning to the cellar to regard the false wall again while he turned the tale over in his mind – glowing fog, mysterious figures, dying birds, and people dying in the Lowerdark.

He retrieved his gauntlets from his nest of pillows and blankets before he ran back upstairs to fill his belt pouches with tiny vials, healing on one side, grenades on the other.

If nothing else, it was probably even cooler in the Lowerdark than it was in his cellar.