Foreword

This is an ambitious project that I could never have sustained without the help and encouragement of two people. My friend and beta, strangegibbon whose sense of humour and joie de vivre is as fantastic as her eye for stray commas and wayward punctuation is hawkish; and Fever Dream whose poignant insight has been a continuing inspiration.

I must also thank the scores of wonderful writers that populate this forum and fill its pages with such excellence, they are the glittering example that the rest of us strive to follow.

Lastly, I must thank YOU, the reader. We do this for you. To reach out to you, to touch, to evoke with word and metaphor that commonality of experience, feeling and emotion that so infuses us that taking pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) becomes quintessential to the catharsis for which we yearn. We want to tell you our story. Please don't remain silent. Please review. A word, a sentence, a pm - just to let us know, that you're out there, listening.

The Dragon Age Universe and everyone in it belongs to Bioware.

00. Testimonies

Carver

"I loved Bethany. I remember the first time I realised just how much.

We were 10 and Hawke was 14. I never called my older sister by her first name. It was such a pretty name, so feminine and soft – everything that Hawke was not – not if you were her younger brother and watched her spin her wiles. Somehow I could always see through her. Even when I was 10 and she was clutching at the cusp of womanhood. All the kids in the neighbourhood called her by our family name. It wasn't common practice. There were kids like me and Bethany who played tag out by the pastures or drew chalk circles in the dirt outside our home for hopscotch. We were Bethany and Carver and Matt and Lily and then there were the kids that Hawke hung out with. I didn't know all that they got up to when I was 10, but there was something about their gaze, something harsh and predatory, like the time I saw Gale-Barker hit on the Harmans' little servant boy. She didn't know I'd seen her, but I watched her from behind the hay bale where I was hiding.

Jarven was crying, his huge elvish eyes were red and his hands were bloody from taking the blows meant for his face. Gale-Barker's face was scrunched up in determination and she beat the little boy until she ran out of breath. Then she stopped and waited while he heaved himself back to his feet and scampered off toward the Harman farm. She watched him flee with that look in her eye. And it scared me to death.

Gale-Barker was my older sister's best friend. She was a large stout kid with a crop of dirty blonde hair and a permanent scowl; my sister was her opposite, tall, slender, raven and coy. And there was Wilker and Dirk and Wintborne. Last name only kids. They were cruel, they snuck off to the Refuge in the afternoon and stole ale when Barlin wasn't looking. They beat up the other kids for money, for kicks – just because they could. All of them were brutish and crude and they flanked Hawke wherever she went.

That afternoon, I watched my sister's best friend beat up a pauper kid and I knew, much to my sick horror, I just knew that my sister had put her up to it. I turned around and I ran back to the farm as fast as I could.

I stumbled straight into Bethany under the oak at the end of the garden. She'd given up looking for me and she and Lily were stringing blue irises for Mother. I was so happy to see her. I hugged her tight with a desperation I couldn't voice. Bethany was sweet, Bethany was nice, Bethany was good and Hawke was evil.

Growing up half afraid of my sister was not easy but then our lives had been difficult from the start. My earliest memories are so fragmented from all the moving around we did that I can scarcely recall a home before that farm in Lothering. We were always on the run because out of the five people in our family, three of us had magic. It wasn't really Hawke's fault that there was magic in the family, but I couldn't help but feel as if she'd brought it down upon us.

My father was on the run from the Circle and my mother had given up a life of ease and comfort to support him. Both my sisters had magic in their blood. Bethany was timid about hers and her streak was comforting and pretty. When I busted my knee, she could make it stop hurting with a gentle caress. She could coax a flame out of spent coal and on hot summer days she'd dip her hand in water and blow snowflakes in my face. It was a perfect reflection of my twin sister.

My older sister's magic was a reflection of her too.

I was nine years old. We had just moved to Lothering and father had been taken ill for the first time. Mother had rushed him off to Elder Miriam since we couldn't take him to the Chantry. Hawke was supposed to get us into bed but I was being difficult. I loosed a frog under her blanket and when she got into bed it gave her a scare. She tore after me, dragged me to bed and touched my head. I fell asleep instantly.

And I had nightmares. I don't even recall what I dreamt but the residual memory is enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end, even now.

Bethany had an aura about her that lightened the heart and uplifted the spirit but Hawke - being around her was simply unsettling.

I can't really say that everyone felt the way I did about Hawke. Bethany adored her, but then Bethany loved everyone. My mother, I think, shared some of my misgivings. She never said anything but did all she could to rein her in. She would stay up when Hawke was out late. Yell at her when she got into mischief, but Hawke was nothing if not smooth and Mother, I think hesitated – everyone hesitated with her. Sometimes, I think we were all a little afraid of her.

Father battled with malaise for six years before succumbing. There were long periods when he'd be fit and I remember, he spent a lot of time with Hawke before he became too ill. I don't know what they talked about during those sessions but my sister went along enthusiastically enough that I suspected he was teaching her magic.

We were an apostate family. Magic was the elephant in the room, an unspoken secret for much of our childhood. Our parents didn't speak of it in front of us so that we wouldn't grow comfortable talking about it. It was something that no one outside of the five of us could ever learn about – all our lives depended on it. It was the ultimate taboo, the deepest, darkest secret of our family.

I knew my father kept a staff under a loose floorboard in the kitchen, we always had hot water even in the dead of winter and our hearth was never cold. In the evenings, at home, he would show Bethany and Hawke little tricks to keep the unspoken out of sight. Sometimes, he would talk to them about the Fade and Mother and I heard but tried not to listen.

Then, about a year or more before he died, he started taking Hawke and Bethany out for long walks in the woods. I stayed home with Mother and we both knew what was going on but neither of us spoke about it.

After a few months, Bethany stopped going. She didn't say much about what Father taught her but only that she was happy the way things were. She wanted to grow an orchard down by the stream that formed the boundary between our farm and Elder Miriam's stead. I helped her plant the trees.

My other sister had no such plans. She went out with Father diligently every week. When he was too weak to go out, she'd lock herself in the house alone with him for her lessons. Sometimes, I wonder if she hadn't been so persistent, he would've lasted longer. Magic was taxing, it drained him. I could see it in his face every time.

Then Father died in 927 and we were on our own. Beth and I had just turned 14, Hawke was 18 and Mother wanted her to settle down. There were plenty of offers for her. She had been a beautiful child, a precocious girl and as a young woman, she was the fascination of every man in Lothering. She was of average height but slender limbs made her look taller than she was, with the perfect features and dramatic upturned eyes so blue they popped out of her face and though they called it a sultry, ready smile, I knew it to be an ever present sneer.

With Father dead, our mother became even more insecure about the magic and her widowhood. It was very difficult to make ends meet. She struggled with the farm. Bethany's produce garden took up all her time and when I turned 16, I signed up with the militia. I wanted to be a warrior and to ride into battle with glory on a magnificent destrier. I was fascinated by stories of King Maric and Teryn Loghain MacTir was my hero. I think in retrospect, I wanted to distance myself as much as could from magic and apostasy and the ever present shadow of the Circle on our family. Most of all, I wanted to get out of a house full of women.

Bethany was happy for me, though she confided that the idea of war and fighting made her fear for me. Mother was worried about that too, but I think she also just didn't want to let me go. I was the only man left in the house.

Hawke of course was livid. She raged for days, lashing me with that scathing tongue of hers, of how I would bring attention to the family, drag us into public view and all that – but it wasn't as if she had escaped anyone's notice herself.

My sister loved attention. She loved being in the centre of it – no matter how much she protested otherwise. Why else would she work tables at Barlin's every night, casting her glamour on every wandering merchant through town. Why else would she bleach out the raven hair that was a Hawke family trait and colour it a flaxen gold or rouge her lips and cheeks to the offence of every decent, chantry-going matron in town and the adoration of every adolescent. She did it because no one else would dare. Lothering was a small village in the deep south, and the fashionable salons of Val Royeaux where it was rumoured the ladies did such things were fantastic stories from another world altogether – a world my sister hoped one day to grasp.

The truth is she revelled in the spotlight, but only as long as it was firmly trained on her."

- Extract from the testimony of Knight-Sergeant Carver Hawke,

Reproduced with permission from the notes of Chantry Seeker Cassandra.

TBC