"You have a sudden urge to surrender, confess, offer yourself up as the Champion Apostate and beg for mercy and forgiveness because this war was never, ever what you wanted - but something within you snarls at the very thought, and then the urge is gone." Men may die, but spirits do not, and neither does their cause. Hawke finds that she must finish what Anders and Justice started - because it is right, because it is just, and because she has no choice.
Rated for violence, general disturbingness.
Warnings: Character death, loss of identity
The Chantry is burning.
Or rather it has burned, gone, leaving a sharp ionized taste of metal and ash in the air, chemical, and a gaping hole in the horizon which you dare not look up into for fear of falling into the sky. You keep your eyes down. You speak to the Knight-Commander, as you must. You draw on your years as Champion and noblewoman and your lifetime of staring down steel-eyed templars from the wrong end of a sword, and you keep your voice fierce and solid. Anger has kept you together all these years, grounding you through the loss of your sister and brother and mother and now all the rest, and it's this anger you turn on the templars and spit back in their face.
It's the only choice you can make. It's the only choice he's left you. Because it's right,and because it's what you're supposed to want. You imagine that the words are blood in your mouth and you keep your anger up like a shield. You'll be damned before you let anyone see it. Least of all him.
Meredith and the First Enchanter and even your brother leave, the former with vengeance burning blue in her lyrium-bright eyes, the latter with a hurried thanks, the last without a glance in your direction. And you are left alone with the taste of blood and betrayal on your tongue.
And him.
Anders, like you, is not looking at the sky. He is curled into himself, hunched on the steps that yesterday led to the Chantry and that now lead to nothing. His eyes are hollow and brown. It feels like a bitter-ash lie. The light of burning gold-gilded beams flickers over his robes, calling out the sharp blue in the blackbird feathers at his shoulders; but that's a lie, too. This is too impersonal for vengeance. This cannot be justice. This just is
You nudge a piece of broken tile away with your foot and move to sit with him, adjusting your robes around your knees. You do not look at him.
His voice sounds ready to break. "There's nothing you can say to me that I haven't already s –"
"Then don't say it." You watch frost crystals form and fade on your fingers. Beautiful and cold. It has always been your favorite spell. There's been half a hundred times when you've finished a fight with hands gone numb and blue under the nails, frost crusted in your hair from the force of the blizzard you brought down, and Anders would step over frozen darkspawn/bandit/qunari/demon/templar bodies to catch your hands in his own and warm them with a fire spell and an off-kilter joke. Your throat works; you draw your hands close to yourself. "Don't make excuses," you continue, quiet, "There isn't any excuse for this."
"I know."
"Hawke – "
"No, Anders. Just – don't talk." You swallow down the block of ice that wants to form in your throat. "You know what scares me? If you'd asked, I would have helped you. I would."
"Hawke –"
"Let me finish. If you'd asked me, I would have helped, because – you're right, Anders, your heart's in the right place, but I can't –"
Because the cause is right, the cause is just.
And yet the man sitting next to you has never spoken more than two sentences to Elthina in his life. Has spent the last six years hiding in Darktown, treating people who stumbled through his door and never venturing outside for fear of a templar threat that, according to Varric, wasn't even there. Has never known this city, never seen it burning, stayed holed up in his clinic all through the qunari attack and so never saw the flames that leapt from rooftop to rooftop and who now can't understand the future that's playing out in your mind.
And yet his cause is just, and you would have nodded and swallowed your hesitation, your reservations, and you would have helped him, because –
Because –
"If you'd asked me," you repeat for the third time.
Because you have spied for him and lied for him, you've fought with and for and beside him, because you have stayed up night after night in the clinic helping him write his bloody manifesto. You have stayed up later, brighter nights at the Hanged Man, when Varric wrote songs of glorious apostates and Fenris stalked off in disgust, while you and he laughed in drunken mock-horror, while Isabela put her arms around the both of you and leaned in to whisper suggestions that made you push her, stumbling and grinning, off her chair and onto the filthy floor.
You had even kissed him, once. When the two of you had tracked down Gascard DuPuis's traitorous hide and you'd stood there crying over the body, raging, how could he do this to me, until he'd pulled you aside and pressed his lips to each tear that clung to your face. Saying stupid inane things that didn't help, it's alright and it's not your fault, and then no one should ever lie about something like that. The memory makes you want to scream. You'd clung to him in the shadows of a Darktown alley because he was there and because he agreed and because he'd looked past your anger and the frost crackling at your fingertips and called you 'd pulled him into his stupid clinic and kissed him senseless for a minute, maybe two, before he pushed back and went brightunder your hands. And Justice had slammed the door in your face.
The almost-second time you'd found him in your mansion, feeding copies of his manifesto into the fire. He'd straightened and turned and taken your too-cold hands in his own and for a moment you'd thought he'd remembered, thought he'd kiss you again. Wanted him to. And then he'd asked for your help, which had been better – and now you sit on the nowhere-leading steps listening to the screams of mages far away and consider what your help has wrought.
He's used you.
Told you that you were beautiful, yes, despite the politics and things you've done. Despite the magic just under your skin and the way you have to hide it, cloth pulled high to hide your face, hood pulled low, fixing spearheads to staffs to make them look like polearms, ducking and hiding and scuttling away like a rat or a spider whenever the templars came calling, something more shrinking and vermin than human. And he'd understood. Worked the frost-spell chill from your hands and called you beautiful. Kissed your stupid tear-spattered face in a Darktown alley and held you to keep you from coming apart. And how he has used you.
"I swore to myself," you say, softly, "when I was a little girl in Ferelden and I made icicles form above my bed, and my father took me aside and explained what I meant – I swore to myself that I'd never let anyone use me. That means demons, and templars, and the Circle, and that means – that means –"
You see him glance at you out of the corner of your eye. "That's what you're angry about? I thought – "
Of course he'd thought (but he hadn't, not really, that was the point). Thought you'd be screaming about the dead,the innocent blood, murder and responsibility, all those stupid little words in his manifesto that never meant a damn thing and still don't. Because saving the mages had never been about the cause, not to you, it had been about protecting your own skin. Earning the right to hold your hold damn head up high, take off the hood and shrouding veil and cast spells in daylight for all to see. Be human. It had never been about the cause. It had been about you.
And he'd never seen it. And now it was just another stupid little conversation you'd never get to have. All the things you couldn't say had been blown into the sky.
"Well, that." The cause. Anders's damnneable cause, more important than anything. Than you. And there's your anger again, a wall. You watch the blood pooling out from a templar's body worm its way into the cracks between flagstones and spiderweb toward your feet, turning to red ice as it reaches them. "I meant it when I called you a murderer, Anders. I get what you're doing , I get why, but I can't – I want to let you run away and never see you again, but I can't – "
And that's a lie, because your mouth tastes like blood and bitter betrayal and there's ash in your hair and you swore, after magic and Carver and Gascard DuPuis and all the webs of politics that played you like a harp, that you would let no one betray you ever again.
You sit there, him with his head bowed, you with a hand on the hilt of your knife, as silence freezes solid and spreads out on the ground between you. He's the one to break it.
"At least –"
Ice crunches and snaps under your feet as you stand. "Don't you dare say that Justice would be happy."
You do not look at him, just as you do not look at the hole in the sky. If you don't do this now you will break, you will give in, and you – Champion Apostate – you do not give in. It is what you are. Sebastian is suddenly there and snarling in your ear that this is right and you try to tell yourself to agree, and that's a lie as well.
This is not Justice.
This just is.
You are no demon. You will not be like him. This is not for the thousands dead; this is for you, and the space in your chest as big as the sky. It is anger you hold in your hand. It is anger, not vengeance, never justice, anger that you make yourself feel as Anders shudders and the knife slides between his ribs. Words like justice and martyr and love fade on his lips and he slumps to the ground without a single sound.
He lies at your feet, in your shadow, smaller now, limp and broken and empty in the wake of all that he's done.
You tell yourself that you aren't sorry. You cannot scream, and you certainly cannot cry. So you turn away and take a moment to be quietly sick on the cobblestones. Then you straighten and you take your anger and you go and meet First Enchanter Orsino, as you must. Because Anders was right, and the cause is right. The cause is just. Smoke swirls around you as you leave, thrown up by the wind of your passing, soft and silent and blue.
You watch Kirkwall burn from one of the islands outside the harbor as you try to get the blood out of your robes.
There is much of it, too much, mage and templar both, Maker-knows-what from demons and whatever Orsino became when backed against the wall. Blood from Fenris when you struck him down after he turned on you, furious, your magic crackling along the lyrium under his skin and making him light up like a lightning bug in the dark. A long sprayed line of blood from the slash of Meredith's sword as it took off your brother's head. Anders's blood must be here somewhere, a few drops of it on your sleeve at least, but it's lost under all the rest.
Waves slap on the rocky beach and it's hard to hear the words under them; your companions are clustered far away, behind you, speaking in low whispers as if afraid you will come down on them in fire and vengeance at the first hint of a raised voice.
"You should come," Isabela is saying. You can imagine her grin and the tilt of her hip. "You and Donnic both. Have a proper honeymoon, feed each other grapes in the sun..."
"You just want to oggle my husband."
"Heyyy, no harm in a little oggling..."
Light and magic flicker around you and you look up and see a gout of flame from the city rise, unfurling wings, staring at you across the harbor with griffon eyes. It is swiftly joined by serpents, demons with coal-bright eyes, dragons breathing gusts of smoke. You watch them blaze and burn in the dark.
"No butterflies, Daisy?" Varric murmurs. "Don't get me wrong, they're pretty in that creepy mage way of yours, but how about making something happy?"
The spires of the Chantry rise again for a moment, glowing, before being swept away in a swirl of flame.
"This isn't a happy night, Varric," says Merrill.
Gravel crunches underfoot.
"You did the right thing," the rightful Prince of Starkhaven tells you.
You glance aside briefly to see waves lapping at his toes. " I thought you'd condemn me for slaying templars," you say, evenly.
"No," he replies, but there's hesitation there, and he says it again, softer. "No."
There is a dark stain on the collar of your robes, soaked with grime and sweat. It's from a mage, you think, an enchanter who'd tried to protect his Champion and gotten between you and a sword. His blood. Not yours. You work on scrubbing it out.
"I thought - I knew you'd do the right thing," Sebastian is saying. "You're not like him, Hawke. You never were. Whatever he was - whatever you..."
The choirboy is getting tongue-tied. In another life you might have laughed.
"Whatever you had," he manages, "it doesn't...I want you to know that the Maker understands."
The Maker understands. Just words. They don't seem to mean anything. The only one you can think of is go. You can only think of hiding, of scrubbing your robes to nothing until your brother's blood is all but gone and they disintegrate into the sea. Until you are no longer a mage. The Prince leaves and you dip your hands in the sea and watch the water sluice off them, black.
There is so much more to come.
Because you can think of nothing else to do, you run.
You shed your friends along the way, like leaves empty husks of skin. It's not sad. It just is. They banded together to help the Champion of Kirkwall, but (you tell them) you are no longer the Champion: you are just an apostate fleeing from her bloody robes and the shadow of a hole in the sky.
Aveline was the first, taking a boat back to Kirkwall at the next tide. It's what you expected; it's what you would have done, if you had a husband. Sebastian is the next. He turns north when you sail west, muttering about penance and prayer; you shake your head. Isabela deposits you at the Cumberland docks and leaves with the ship and a smile, and a minute after your feet touch the ground you're already hearing rumors that the Prince of Starkhaven is marching for the throne.
Yours is the last ship from the Marches that is allowed entry into the city. It's a familiar position, and you have to take Merrill aside and spend a moment explaining why you're laughing.
Varric vanishes into the criminal underground and soon, indeed, Merrill is the only one left, wide eyes reflecting back the thin silk tapestries and angular statues of the city like the mirror she once adored. She tugs at your sleeve, constantly, childlike, points out strange fruits and frilly Orlesian hats from the south, the pale stone doors to the catacombs, the glittering gates to the College of Magi where mages are kept, bejeweled, like songbirds. She sees luxury, gilded and shining. You see only the cage.
It's an odd realization, an Anders-like thought, but it stirs that old familiar anger that you've come to rely on. You killed your friend for daring to start a war, after all, and seeing it arrive here as only rumor and wind is terribly, terribly wrong.
Of course, you do nothing.
Or you try to. It's not so hard to get messages inside the Circle, not for someone who once stood by an abomination and told him he'd done the right thing. It's not so hard, even though you're supposed to be hiding, and so you do. Little notes and little news of the storm that must be growing in the east. You stop the harried couriers from the Divine that ride up the Imperial Highway and you question them, casually. You let them go. Most of the time.
There was that one.
You will not interfere. You will not turn into him. You will not turn traitor, become Anders. Justice. Vengeance. Whichever one of them it was at the end when it all came crashing down.
You will not interfere, but you will not forget the way your knife jumped in time with the beating of his heart as it cut between his ribs. And you are no coward. You are nothinglike him. And so you can at least give the mages a fighting chance; you can make sure they know, that they question and hope. Days and weeks slink by and you watch them start to mutter among themselves, watch apostates with bandaged hands scurry in the back alleys. Demons howl in the dark. The guard patrols grow thin, the streets grow bloody and shadowed. The templars grow restless and start to look at you with too-familiar eyes, grow numerous. It stirs memories. You pass a patrol of them at night and find your fingers twitching, hidden inside your sleeves, frost crackling from tip to tip. It would be so easy. So easy to make it just a little easier. Tip the scale. A little bit won't hurt, surely?
You take a deep breath and let them pass.
It's Merrill, at the end.
The people who take her aren't templars, thank Andraste. They're slavers. Tevinter. You've heard it muttered in the marketplace that they consider the Dalish to be prize pets, exotic, expensive, decoratively and delicately tattooed. You try not to think of what her magic will mean. You try not to think of her innocence and the words you heard a similar slaver say some years ago in Kirkwall before Fenris crushed his throat, break them to bridle.
You try not to think of Fenris. It's been months, and the fresh anger you feel at his betrayal startles even you.
And you try and you fail to ignore the sinking feeling that this is your fault. The guards are run ragged, after all, the streets are dangerous. Merrill has always been curious and the city is still unfamiliar and you can't, you can't be expected to watch everyone. You couldn't even watch Anders. Still, guilt gnaws at you, simmering under the anger, and you dust the cobwebs from the staff you took from Orsino's corpse and waste no time.
You track the slavers alone. At night. The Cumberland docks aren't nearly as familiar as those in Kirkwall, aren't nearly as haunted, but your staff feels good in your hands and the magic hissing under your skin is ready, eager, waking up after a long sleep. You've spent so much time ducking and hiding that you've half-forgotten how this feels - to call the Fade to your hands, take a man by the throat and threaten him, scream at him, see magefire reflected in his terrified eyes.
"Where is she?" you demand, shaking him. The air smells of fresh piss and ozone and he's babbling, and when don't kill me is the only thing that comes out you shake him again. Again, until he gives you an answer. Amid the names and the address he calls you monster, and for a moment you aren't thinking of Merrill - you're thinking of Ella, the little apprentice crumpled before those who would make her Tranquil, Anders tense at your side –
Help me, Hawke, he'd said, before the blueovertook him. Save her.
You will.
You leave the remains of the man on the floor, and you go.
The rage and the righteousness burn sharp and familiar as you tail the slavers to an empty warehouse and break down the door like the vengeful witch you are to discover only startled men and a far-away ship that is less than a dot on the horizon. To discover that the cages are empty.
You are too late.
You do not remember the rest of that night. Not clearly. It comes in flashes: the arch of a woman's back as light bled through and blackened her skin. The pure, bright note of a scream echoing off the walls. The spatter of blood on the ceiling, the crunch of teeth underfoot. The smell of blood and burning hair. Ice and lightning, the hissing rush of the Fade, darkness and blue fire in your hands. You came back to yourself in the morning with a broken staff, blood crusted over your skin, and a harbor choked with the charred and twisted corpses of the slavers, the guards who came to help you, and the templars who came to make you stop.
You touch a silver breastplate and watch it rust under your hands, watch the Sword of Mercy crumble into dust.
You know what this will bring.
It is easy to warn the mages. It's easy to sneak a letter to the Circle to tell them to prepare. You mean to tell them to run; the word you write is fight.
It is easy, then, to leave.
You are not running from. You are no coward. You are running to.
You run into the first patrol an hour across the Marcher border.
The templars march two abreast, a long column of silver on silver, Swords of Mercy (the irony makes you want to scream) swaying back and forth in the rhythm of their footsteps. They do not speak. They are silent but for the clank of metal on metal and the stomp of their feet. You cannot see their eyes staring out of the slits of their helmet. And yet you can't help but imagine that they can see you and see the magic waiting just under your skin.
It's impossible, you know. You veered off into the trees as soon as you heard them approach, and tall templar helmets do nothing to help peripheral vision. No one knows you're there. The thought does nothing for your nerves.
You crouch there in the bush, waiting, stolen staff clutched in white-knuckle hands and summertime flies buzzing in your ears. The smart thing to do would have been to walk on, uncaring, head held high. You could leave your staff and pass by anonymous, certainly. Ordinary and unscathed. And the right thing to do would be to destroy them all. To to burst forth in fire and lightning and hate. Show them why mages are feared. It goes against everything your father taught you and every argument you had with Anders. Everything you believe. And you have to bite your tongue and use the taste of blood to force yourself still.
And you have a sudden urge to surrender, confess, offer yourself up as the Champion Apostate and beg for mercy and forgiveness because this war was never, ever what you wanted - but something within you snarls at the very thought, and then the urge is gone.
Starkhaven is smells of ozone and blood, like the air before a storm. Or after. It is difficult to tell. You can see the smoke long before you see the city, rising in great pale plumes from ruined walls and spell-scorched courtyards. The tents of the rightful Prince of the city are fanned out around it - you see banners with Chantry sunbursts flying in the early-morning breeze, and you grip your staff until it creaks.
You wind your way down the hill and wait, and when a camp follower strays into the woods you grab her and shove her against a tree. (You could, of course, have shouldered your staff and walked among the troops yourself - but you have wandered for weeks in silence and fear and you don't want to hide, and you want truth, not rumors and propaganda, and there are too many Chantry sisters, there are templars camping amidst the common soldiers, and the magic under your skin is itching to get out)
"Tell me what happened," you say, sliding your hand from the girl's mouth.
"Who –"
"Tell me."
And because she can see the Fade in your eyes (and because you must look horrific after walking by night and sleeping on roads for weeks, sharp and starved and half a ghost), the girl finds her voice. "The – the mages – w-when they heard what Queen Anora had done they revolted, they've taken the city, they –"
"Anora?" Fereldan's unlikely queen is pale and cold and merciless and not well loved in the Marches, or Nevarra, or anywhere; this is all you know. You have heard no news on the road. "What did Anora do?"
"Sh-she – the Rite of Annulment – "
A strangled, rasping whine fills your ears. It takes you a moment to realize that it's the girl, that you've shoved her back against the tree until she can't breathe, that there is terror on her face and that the blue fire at your fingertips is burning and blistering her skin. You loosen your grip just enough so she can speak. "The – F-Fereldan – Circle –" she gasps out –
Her tears are sizzling on her cheeks but you have no mercy because dozens of your brothers and sisters are dead.
"Gone?" you ask.
"Gone – "
She crumples to your feet, hands over her face, shaking with pain. "You will tell me everything about the Prince of Starkhaven," you say, over the sound of her sobbing for breath, her whines and whimpers as her fingertips touch her face and come away wet with a thin layer of blood and a thinner layer of sloughed-off skin. "Where he goes, when he sleeps, who his guards are, his servants, what his plans are, what verses of the Chant he recites in prayer, you will tell me everything. You will lead me to his tent." Your throat works. There can be no compromise, after all; there is no going back. "And you will get me quill and ink and tell me where the postmaster is. There is a letter I need to send."
You find the Prince of Starkhaven at prayer.
He is kneeling at the foot of his cot, framed in the light leaking through the corners of the tent. There is not much; torchlight, mostly, and a little moonlight. The entire camp is asleep. Even his personal guards are asleep – it is a spell you practiced many times on bandits and templars, and your spells never go wrong.
Your stolen servants' garb itches against your skin and you shift, biting your tongue, listening to the words that your old friend sends floating through the air.
"Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter. Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the just. Blessed are the righteous, the lights in the shadow. In their blood the Maker's will is written."
"Meredith said that," you murmur.
Sebastian jumps to his feet, hands reaching for a bow and arrows that aren't there. The shout of guards! dies on his lips as you see his eyes narrow, straining against darkness and your roughspun tunic and weeks of road dust to see you. "…Hawke?" he says. Your name is half a laugh. "You - you look exhausted."
"In the Gallows. She said that. 'Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter,' she said, Benedictions 4:10. And then she cut my brother's head off."
It's enough to make him stand still, take a step backfrom where he'd moved toward you. "I haven't forgotten."
"Haven't you?"
You speak of everything but what you should.
Or, at least, that's the way Sebastian would have it.
You glean flecks of information, then, in between the orating, the Chant, the recited vows of vengeance - the way he gathered this army, banded them together in a world where everything seemed to be falling apart, got them to march on Starkhaven because it was order and right in a world where a mage can blow a Chantry into the sky.
"You should be thanking Anders, really," you tell him. "You wouldn't have been able to do this without him."
Sebastian's open-mouthed indignation is worth the glare.
And you learn, bit by bit, of the mages. You turn the conversation back to them again and again, as the angle of the moonlight shifts around the tent, as he begins to ask what you've been doing, why you were in Cumberland, if what he's heard of Cumberland is true (slaughter at the docks, a monster that incited the Circle into fire). As he asks of your old companions, Isabela and Aveline, Varric and Merrill. You brush his questions off with your necessity-learned and Hightown-honed skill, and you ask about the mages.
They have taken the city, he says, and they are holding it, and they are holding it badly.
Sebastian should thank them, you think. He honestly should. Mages. Anders. None of this could have happened without them.
He speaks of strategy, then, takes a fork and draws plans of attack in the dirt. They are poor. So very poor. Against any proper army this would be a disaster, you can tell; the choirboy has nothing of military training. But the mages have less, and you hear his stories of walls manned by unHarrowed children, of men and women fleeing in the night, of straw watch dummies and starvation and desperation - and while they reek of faith and Chantry propaganda, you know the stories to be true.
Your friend, your former friend, the rightful Prince of Starkhaven, can take back his city with the coming dawn.
It's not even about revenge anymore, because the ones who murdered his family are dead, burnt and frozen and cursed away. You bring this up.
"It's right," he says shortly. Corrects to "it is my right," "it is the Maker's will," but it's right hangs vengeance-blue in the air before you, the color of burning Chantry smoke.
And then he asks you to help him.
You still, hands on your stolen staff, magic sparking fingertip to fingertip.
Help him.
"Help me, Hawke," your friend repeats, that earnest accented plea you know so well. "The mages will listen to you. Go in there and tell them that this does not have to be a slaughter. Tell them to lay down their arms and surrender. Please, Hawke. Reason with them."
Because it will be a slaughter.
Oh, it will.
There are templarsin Sebastian's army, Chantry sisters in the tents and templars marching on the field.
Surrender, he says.
Help me.
Let me use you.
If Sebastian takes the city there will be blood and death and Veil torn open, buildings burning, ash and ozone in the air. Mages dead and mages turned to demons, templars at the vanguard of his army, magic and sword meeting to the hum of Chantry propaganda.
If you listen to Sebastian, slip inside the gates at dawn with the discretion you have learned so well and lead them out with staffs shouldered and heads held high –
There are Chantry sisters waiting, and templar swords, and small unHarrowed children who have helped to take a city and who will not be shown mercy.
"Help me," he says. Eyes vengeance-blue. He asks you to offer your mages to the sword of mercy.
Betray your cause.
Let me use you.
There is a dark splattered stain on the wall of the tent by the time you are done, and your old friends blood joins that of older friends - Carver, Fenris, Anders - on your robes. Smoking in the morning chill. You calm the lyrium-bright magic burning in your hands and pull up your hood and leave, before dawn, before chaos can descend upon the camp when they find the Prince of Starkhaven burnt and blackened at the foot of his bed.
By the time they question the camp follower and think to look for you, you will be far away, untraceable, heading south.
You have, of course, done the right thing.
You must always do the right thing.
It is hard to get a ship to Ferelden. You found a letter waiting from your Antivan friend when you arrived in Ostwick, warm and friendly and speaking of success. You'd sent ahead a significant advance, of course, to back the promise of a favor that Zevran had made after you'd helped him butcher his former comrades. A very significant advance. The last of your Deep Roads gold; but what is money, to avenge the mages of Ferelden's Circle Tower?
Of course the Crow had been met with success.
And so it is hard to book passage to Ferelden, what with the royal funeral making men nervous, the borders tightening down, rumors of war with Orlais being whispered dockside. You do not care. You find a captain with a harried and hard-luck slump to his shoulders and you give him gold, the last of it, everything you have. And when that is not enough, you tell him.
Not who you are.
What.
He turns the color of spoiled milk and he murmurs a prayer, but he nods in the face of the fire in your hands, and you have yourself a cabin.
It is a peaceful voyage and you spend it topside, watching the blue water and the pale blue sky. You think of Isabela, but only for a moment - she was someone from another life. Another you.
When you pass the distant cliffs of Brandel's Reach your eye follows their line south, into the mist. Towards Ferelden and Amaranthine, Vigil's keep, stories that Anders told you. Of life long ago and another him. Adventures, and Justice in the Fade, Kristoff's long-dead gaze, of the night he let an old friend in and woke with templar-blood hanging heavy on the air.
Anders told you this story only once. Amaranthine was not a memory to him; it was a dream, something more of the Fade than the world, something belonging to another man. Another self. And yet now, to you, the story feels familiar. Comforting. It resonates in your memory. It is the barest echo of home.
You watch the cliffs until the mist swallows them down and steals them from your sight.
By the time you arrive at Kinloch Hold night is falling, and you are sick with fever. You are shaking as you stand on the hill and stare at the tower rising high against the moon; shaking, chilled, as you find an old abandoned boat and row yourself across, speeding it along with magic when you are far enough from shore.
You could have stopped at the inn, of course. The Spoiled Princess is tattered, dripping with overgrown moss. It is clear that it hasn't seen a patron since the Annulment and you do not doubt that the inkeep will be only to happy to take what little coin you've salvaged from dead men. Feed you your first hot meal in days, let you sleep in your first real bed in weeks. Dig out the templars' old rowboat and let you take it to the Tower tomorrow. But that would be tomorrow,and something in you cannot wait.
The Tower is abandoned, silent. Empty of templars. Ever-so-empty of empty of magic; you can feelit here, magic and the memory of magic, tangible on the air. It is almost like you are back in the Fade.
So much magic.
It is almost like you are home.
You do not know why you are here; not really. Not properly, not in any conscious way. It is pilgrimage, perhaps. A tribute to your Fereldan kin turned Tranquil because of the queen's response to your fury in Cumberland and what it wrought. An I'm sorry.
It is the right thing to do.
You walk the empty halls, staff in hand, a mage among the ghosts of mages. A demon comes padding out of the library, click of claws upon stone, desiregiven flesh. It stares at you with bright purple eyes. It does not speak. It does not try to tempt you; you are not someone who can be tempted, so far removed from who you used to be.
It comes at you with claw and fire, and you meet it with fury and ice and conviction,and you leave it still and crumpled on the floor. You stand over it and watch its flesh melt, watch it burn itself away into nothingness and vanish back to the Fade.
There is a part of you, a small part, that wishes you could follow.
You step over the place where it lay, and you walk the halls.
There is something familiar about this place. Perhaps it is merely because it is a Circle, and though you have never been in a Circle yourself, not since that terrible night in the Gallows, you respond to the feeling, the magic in the air, the sense of solidarity. Of kin. Of self.
You find yourself drawn through certain doors - this classroom, this corner. This bed in the apprentices' quarters, broken and rickety. You run your fingers over the shelf of the top bunk, take off your glove and touch it with your skin. Find your way into the solitary cells down low, empty and dark, the floors grooved with the memory of pacing feet.
Anders had told you that one of these was his, so long ago.
Or had he? It was one of the things he rarely spoke of; there were so many things he rarely spoke of. The memory rings true. You chose a cell by instinct, get on your knees, find your fingers drawn to a little carving etched into the stone by the floor. Four legs and a tail, the careful points of ears, faint chipped-out whiskers and stripes. You stare at the little cat, this little comfort carved by your friend-who-wasn't so long ago.
You do not move for a long time.
You find yourself on the road to Orlais, in the company of mages. You are not entirely sure how you gained their trust - the memories are muddled, scattered, but (as they are quick to tell you) you are Hawke,Champion Apostate, liberator of Kirkwall and Cumberland and slayer of Sebastian Vael, and they now follow you as if you have always been one of them.
There are Tranquil among them. Two, a man and a woman, humans both. The Chantry sunburst is seared above the wide blank emptiness of their eyes. It's a brand that used to be only used in Kirkwall, you hear - Meredith's favorite intimidation tactic - but now the brand is spreading, the old Knight-Commander's doctrines with it.
One of your new mage friends has it as well. You've seen it once, in the morning before he donned his hood, red an angry as the dawn on his pale skin. He's no Tranquil, that much is clear, but his Circle must have decreed that no caution was too great. You wonder if that was what it took to make him run.
You wonder many things.
You find yourself sleeping less, wondering. On the nights when you do not take watch you still toss and turn and drift off only in the small hours. Your dreams have begun to feel more real than waking. The Fade is growing solidaround you, as familiar as Kirkwall streets once were. You walk it each night as a soldier proud and armored, a tall crusader, good and right and just. You slay demons, and you try to imagine that the demons do not wear the faces of your friends.
When you awaken each morning the Tranquil are staring at you, man and woman both, eyes wide, and there is a light in them that the Chantry did not quite manage to quench.
A woman walks the road before you, head down, shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. She's alone, which is dangerousthese times, what with apostates and demons and templars, maleficarum hiding in the woods, Ferelden and Orlais raiding across the border. She is alone, and so she is vulnerable, and that is why –
You cannot allowyourself to finish that thought.
Your little band of apostates and Tranquil melts out of the woods beside her, and the woman freezes like a cornered deer. Sunlight glints golden on her hair and she turns her head, watches you all with wide eyes widened further by fear, eyes set in a familiar fine-boned face –
"Aura!"
You do not even realize that you have spoken until she jumps, stares at you. "Do I know you?" Aura asks, wariness thickening the Orlesian tinge to her voice.
Yes, you think. The memory is moth-eaten, blurred - Vigil's Keep, a ring, living eyes in a rotting well-loved face. Yes.
But that thought is off, somehow, distant and confused, and so what you say is "no."
Your mage friends are watching. It is the branded one who steps forward, desperation making him sharp. He holds a ball of flame and flickering Fade-wisps in his hands. "Hand over your valuables, miss," he says. "Aura, or whatever. If that's really your name. Just give us your gold - and we wouldn't say no to a bit of food - and nobody gets hurt. No one gets turned into a frog."
It is business, cool and professional. It is understandable, somewhat, because your - their - little group is cold and threadbare and hungry, down to stale travelling bread and little else. It is necessity. It is something you yourself have done, many times, for Athenril and for others, for causes much less dire than this.
It is also wrong.
You do not remember moving; you do not remember the battle, either, the crackle of lightning across the sky, the way the earth shook underfoot. One minute you are shouting and the next minute there is screaming under your hands, high-pitched terror, a prayer to the Maker that turns wet and gurgling as you wrench and pull away from the man's throat.
It is the Tranquil, you notice.
Or, rather, it was.
He lies dead with all the rest, face twisted into fear, in a widening pool of blood on the cracked and spell-scorched road. And the woman - what was her name? You'd never learned her name - the woman has long since fled.
The illness that has been coming and going since Kinloch Hold resurfaces when you arrive in Val Royeaux, and you spend your first week in a haze of fever. Your days are full of blank spaces, riddled with holes like the flame-eaten pages of your manifesto. There is a woman who takes care of you - you're sure of this - a woman who owns the inn you've found yourself housed in, who brings you broth and tinctures of elfroot, who does not seem to care when you forget yourself, once, and set the curtains alight with your desire to get out.
"Mage Underground," is all she says, shrugging, "used to work in Kirkwall."
And there is something familiar about her, too. You met her. You know you never met her. Perhaps Anders mentioned her name, once; that does not explain the familiarity of her face, the lilt of her voice, but it is enough. You knew her in Kirkwall, in a life you used to have. That will have to be enough.
You and the friend who's name you cannot recall stand at the window one evening, watching the templars march out of the city. Orlais' armies are moving south, you know, towards a Ferelden that has no mages left to defend them, but these templars are headed north. Toward Cumberland and the College that has become a haven there. Toward Rivain and the apostates that have fled. Toward the ruins of Kirkwall, where (they say) mages still hold court in the burnt-out Gallows, puppet the new Viscount with methods both magical and mundane.
The templars are marching, silver upon rows of silver, and the bells of the cathedral are ringing, ringing. Ringing out the Divine March. You sip your bitter tea in between biting your tongue to curb the urge to scream.
You have killed your - you have killed your friend for daring to start a war, after all, but his side - the rightside - is weak and scattered, homeless and shunned, starving, faltering after nearly a year now with no Champion to guide them, no great sign in the sky to remind them what they stand for. And now the Divine has called a March, and is ringing out the doom of all that you have fought and sacrificed and died for on its gold and silver bells, and you know that the mages will fall before that silver sword of mercylike wheat to a farmer's scythe.
It makes you want to do so much more than scream.
The golden bells of the Divine are ringing, ringing, and your fever has not quite broken, and there are so many spaces in your memory, so much fog and Chantry-blue-smoke shadow, but this much is clear. You realize - you remember - what you are here to do.
You cannot betray your cause. You have to see this through, and finish what you stared.
It is easier, the second time. You have already mixed the potion once, in Kirkwall long ago, and even though you have no recipe before you it is simply a matter of doing what you did before.
When the templars catch you on your way out of the Grand Cathedarl, it takes them a moment to recognize you. You do not blame them. The stories of Hawke the Champion Apostate have travelled far and wide, true, but Hawke might as well have been another life. You are a skin-and-bones shadow of your former self. They hesitate, unsure. But then the next thing you know you are standing before the Divine herself.
Justinia V.
Justinia.
The irony is deafening.
The bells of the Cathedral are ringing up above, ringing out the hour, ringing out the Divine March, ringing in your head, and you are pale and feverish and starved, shaking so hard you can barely stand, skin so thin that when you look down you swear you can see light bleeding through. But stand you do. You take up your anger and your vengeancelike sword and shield and you pull yourself free of cold-gauntleted templar hands and you stand before this woman, chin high, because you must, because your cause is just, because you must.
The templars grab you again, hit you with a dispel that takes you to your knees. Try to empty you of magic. But they cannot, they cannot empty you of the Fade, of your faith, and you do not flinch as you stare up at this woman. This grey-haired rich-robed symbol of a woman. She has ordered the March for reasons that are understandable and wrong, and she is where the Circles begin and where they have to end.
"I hadn't thought to see you here, Hawke," she says. Her Trade Tongue is thickly accented and softened with age. With mercy. Your lip curls. Hawke, she calls you, but that name is not your name, has not been your name for a long while. You do not answer.
Justinia tilts her head. There is curiosity in her pale brown eyes, and concern. She speaks, quietly, tries to explain things that she thinks will help her case - that she tried to stop Anora ordering the Right of Annulment (a lie), that the templars marching north had been ordered to capture, rather than kill (a lie), that this way of solving things is the best, will cause the fewest deaths, what with mages preying on the fields and raiding homesteads, with Tevinter stirring in the north, with the continent catching alight with Fade-summoned fire.
A lie, all of it a lie.
The templars' tighten their grip on your thin shoulders. And you could escape, you could, but this is about so much more than your own skin. You have become the tool of a cause, yes. You have been used. Beacon and shield. Comfort and sword.
You find you do not mind.
The bells above are ringing, and the Divine Justinia V crouches down and looks you in the eye, brown to blue, and offers you a hand. "Surely we you can convince the mages to surrender peacefully, Hawke," she says. Her voice is soft with mercy, but all the mercy you have known in your life is a sword. "Surely we can compromise."
"No," you reply. You repeat. "No. There is no compromise."
And the Chantry bells and ringing, ringing, and then there is silence. Such silence.
This time, you look her in the eye as you turn the world red and open a hole in the sky.
You had forgotten what it is like to be.
Untethered. Constant. Whole. Death and the explosion of fire and faith in that burning Chantry was enough, finally enough, to return you to yourself. You walk the fixed points of home with the familiarity of one who has never been away, because time does not exist, because eight or nine years have passed and not passed. The mist here is so much more solid than anything you ever saw in Kirkwall, in Val Royeaux, in Amaranthine, anywhere - it is both less real and at the same time more, and it has not and will never change. It changes all the time. It simply is.
You see the Black City in the distance, infinitely far away and infinitely close, across your shifting country of ideas and absolutes.
And you are home, now; that much is certain. You are home, and free. Untainted by flesh or darkspawn blood or desire. Wholly yourself for the first time in years. You will no longer be used. You will no longer be tethered to the cause, because you are the cause.
You exist. Completely. You take up your armor, your helmet and your sword, lift your chin as one of your pasts once taught you. Spare a second's or a century's thought for her cause, his cause, their cause, your own and not your own.
And then you go out to walk to shifting paths of the Fade and mete out Justice and Vengeance, to be wholly what you are.
FIN.