The house was small, by all standards, and simple, so much so that even the poorest of peasants would have called it humble. Yet it was warm and cozy, and theirs, nestled in a forgotten valley in the Fereldan Hinterlands, away from everything, and everyone. Little else mattered.

They had nothing, or close enough that anyone but them would have called it nothing, but they did not need more. They grew and hunted and made what they needed, and what few goods they could not find by themselves they bought, with gold from another life, a life they would never forget but had no desire to return to. Others would have called that life ‘better days’, yet there were no days better for them than those spent there, at that small wooden house, with nothing but sun and sky and grass around them, and only each other for company.

She always liked feeling his fingers in her hair. She had not wanted it cut, not even to make it more manageable for a one-armed woman. He had taken to the task of braiding her hair every morning and every night without her even needing to ask; it was the most natural thing in the world. And every evening, when he was done brushing and braiding, he would lay a kiss on her shoulder, the one where the arm ended just above the elbow, and she would smile. Later, she would laugh. But never did she cry, or frown. They both had had enough of tears.

It was a good life, all they had ever wanted. Time went by slowly in the valley, summer and winter and summer again, month after month, year after year, undisturbed, unchanging, even as their memories wore into tatters and their bodies became cumbersome and frail. It was good. It was full. And when his beard was as white as her hair had always been, and their skin turned as thin and fragile as ancient parchment, they looked over all that they had built, and laid down one last time by the stream where they had fished and splashed and loved, and slept, their fingers twined for eternity, with only the sun and moon to bear witness to the end of their days.