Steve Holland

Steve Holland is a Healer whose role in Will’s Party is defined by contradiction. He first appears as a supposedly defective priest who falls to his death almost outside Skyhold, yet the same man later survives lethal circumstances, performs a powerful Full Heal, provides intelligence about dangerous territory, and settles into the practical work of keeping climbers alive. His arc turns an apparent failed purchase into an uneasy but productive alliance, while his own description of himself as neither the most powerful nor the most skilled Healer keeps his usefulness grounded in competence rather than exceptional status.

Identity and Introduction

Steve Holland enters the story as Will’s brand-new Healer, but his first appearance is inseparable from disaster. He is found at the bottom of a twelve-foot drop, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle, his face purple and his eyes fixed open. The corpse lies only a hundred yards outside Skyhold’s walls, making the death especially absurd: the Party has barely acquired its priest before losing him on the first rise. Will responds by treating the death as a failed transaction and proposes obtaining a refund for a better Healer, one who will not fall and break his neck immediately.

The purchase is more complicated than Will expects. Steve is level thirty-five and has an official retail value of fifteen thousand gold, despite still carrying Debtor status. The price becomes a source of comic disbelief and practical tension, particularly because Will cannot reconcile such a high level with Steve’s continued debt. Even the proposed replacement is discussed in transactional terms, with Will asking whether the priest would object to receiving a corpse full of stab wounds. Steve’s introduction therefore places him between sacred service and commercial inventory: he is a healer, but also an expensive liability whose value is measured in gold, level, and survivability.

Recruitment and Abilities

The apparent corpse does not end Steve’s involvement. Will reaches the temple and finds the ancient master of the temple eating lunch with Steve Holland, the pair laughing at the naivete of a Party until a one-armed man carrying a tomahawk enters. The scene reverses Steve’s initial status completely. He is not a dead purchase awaiting replacement but a living participant in the temple’s operation, capable of sharing in the joke at Will’s expense and of entering negotiations from a position of renewed usefulness.

Will then directly invites him to join the Party. Steve’s listed primary Abilities are Smooth Talker and Wandering Feet, a combination that suggests social adaptability and a tendency toward movement rather than a narrowly martial identity. His reaction to Will is revealing: when he learns that Will is only level eight yet possesses unusually high stats, he is astonished that Will has no counterspell Ability and cannot immediately explain how such a build is possible. Steve is therefore not merely a passive priest; he understands the system well enough to recognize an abnormal character configuration and to question it.

Steve is sworn to assist Will’s Party faithfully for a month, giving the recruitment a formal and temporary structure. Will uses that obligation strategically, asking him to help fake Will’s death. The request places Steve in a role far beyond ordinary healing: he becomes an accomplice in deception, helping Will manipulate the appearance of death rather than simply treating its consequences. When Will later regains enough breath to ask whether the plan worked, Steve is part of the hidden mechanism that makes the false death credible.

Knowledge, Recovery, and Survival

Steve also serves as an intelligence resource. Will asks him to explain everything he knows about a spawning ground and its inhabitants, with particular attention to the exact point where the danger begins. This request treats Steve as a guide and informant as much as a priest. His value lies in accumulated experience and local knowledge, the kind of information that can define whether a Party enters a threat deliberately or crosses its boundary without warning.

His own survival repeatedly challenges the expectations created by his first death. At one point Steve demands to know how Will is still alive, making the exchange reciprocal: Steve has already become a witness to improbable survival, while Will’s continued existence is itself strange enough to require explanation. The story thus links the two men through reversals of presumed death and through a shared capacity to frustrate ordinary assumptions about danger.

Steve’s background also includes a claim to practical climbing experience. He says he has traveled as far as the Fifth Floor and can help a Party Climb by warning it about dangers. He additionally presents himself as someone who can cook and make camp. These abilities broaden his function from specialized support to expedition infrastructure. He is useful before the fighting begins, during travel, and after an encounter, which makes his presence valuable even when he is not casting a spell.

Relationship with Will’s Party

Steve’s relationship with Will begins in suspicion and irritation but develops into a negotiated partnership. Will initially sees him as a defective product and attempts to reclaim the money spent on him. The temple’s ledger complicates that impulse by revealing Steve’s high value, and Steve’s continued survival complicates it further: the man Will wants refunded becomes someone Will recruits, questions, and entrusts with a dangerous secret.

The partnership is not sentimental. Steve joins because he can see that Will’s Party is going somewhere and wants to be part of it. He asks for a one-percent share, and the agreement is accepted on that basis. His decision is therefore both opportunistic and perceptive. He recognizes the Party’s trajectory before its success is secure, and he exchanges limited participation in its future for a defined portion of its gains.

Steve’s contribution is especially visible when Will’s Party reaches Coalton. He has been assigned a job requiring him to lounge around and talk to people, a prospect he considers ideal, and he earns additional money by healing Parties passing through town. This is a different form of adventuring from Will’s direct confrontations: Steve turns social access, professional service, and patience into income while waiting for the Party’s return. His comfortable room, Ashvine grapes, and side earnings show him enjoying the rewards of a relatively safe support position, even as the narrative prepares to disrupt that comfort.

Healing and Later Function

Steve’s later work demonstrates that his practical value is real despite his modest self-assessment. When a figure covered in ash-caked blood crashes through the ceiling of his room, Steve immediately throws off the covers and debris, rolls up his sleeves, and prepares a twenty-charge Full Heal. The ability is identified as Blessing of Andover: Full Heal. He uses it on Loth, whose body is suffused with Andover’s grace and whose burns across his entire body begin to fade.

The scene gives Steve a decisive professional identity. He is not presented as the strongest Healer, and he openly says that he is not the most powerful or skilled one by a long shot. Yet when an injured companion arrives through a collapsed ceiling, he acts without hesitation and applies exactly the resource the crisis requires. His competence is situational and dependable rather than glamorous: he knows what to use, has it prepared, and restores someone whose body has been extensively burned.

Steve also supplies the expedition materially. He brings meat, wine, and cheeses, noting that Coalton offers few vegetables. Ashvine grapes are delicious but expensive and not filling, so he insists that the injured pair need plenty of meat to restore their reserves. Healing, in Steve’s hands, includes nutrition and recovery rather than spellcasting alone. He reads bodily exhaustion as a practical problem and responds with provisions suited to rebuilding strength.

Change and Narrative Significance

Steve’s trajectory moves from disposable commodity to retained asset, from apparent corpse to conspirator, and from comic liability to reliable support. The reversal is not erased by his flaws; instead, the story makes his usefulness inseparable from his oddness. His Wandering Feet, his comfort with talking to strangers, his willingness to fake a death, and his readiness to negotiate a one-percent share all belong to the same adaptable character. He survives by mobility, persuasion, information, and timely assistance rather than by claiming superiority.

His position also exposes the economics surrounding healing and adventure. A level-thirty-five priest can still be a Debtor, a healing service can be treated as a purchase with refund terms, and a Party can monetize a Healer’s labor while traveling through town. Steve stands inside that system without being reduced to it. The Party eventually gives him a pre-payment, confirming that his labor and continued cooperation have become part of its forward planning.

By the later stages of the story, Steve is no longer simply the man who allegedly died outside Skyhold. He is the Healer who knows dangerous spawning grounds, understands unusual builds, can assist with camp and travel, earns money independently, responds to emergencies with Full Heal, and brings food to the wounded. His importance lies in this accumulation of ordinary and extraordinary services. Steve Holland does not dominate the Party through power; he makes its survival more plausible by ensuring that the Party has someone who can heal, advise, deceive, negotiate, and keep exhausted climbers supplied.