Title: Take It With You When You Go
Summary: You don't write a book about a woman if you've said everything you wanted to say to her.
Rating: T
Words: 11k
Notes: Written for tetrahedrals and originally posted July 2017 for the Hightown Funk Exchange.
Marian wakes every morning at sunrise to feed the chickens.
She dresses in the dark, because new neighbors have moved down the road, and they will notice a light in the window. The Hawkes are not a family that have the means for a fireplace, and they cannot afford to waste candles in the morning.
She gropes blindly in the dark for her dresser. Carver is awake earlier than Beth, and Father is outside checking on the cattle, but Mother should be in the kitchen, and she smells breakfast, ham and sourdough bread and goat cheese. She grasps out at air for the nightstand for her hair tie, and she hears ―
― a lantern on the night shelf falls to the floor, shattering upon impact. The sound is catastrophically loud in the darkness, but Marian has only a moment to think that that is the sound of polished floor, not the cut wood of the Hawke homestead. But in the dark, it doesn't matter; in the dark, her family is just next door.
Something scuffles in the other room, and she hurriedly bends down to sweep up the pieces of glass in the dark. Her fingers brush against the sharp edges, prickling skin, and her soles of her bare feet twinge on the shards as she gathers them up.
"Oh shit," says a low voice in the doorway, where a figure stands, barely illuminated with a flickering candle. She spies deep maroon nightwear before the stranger's back turns as he heads to the other end of the room. He fiddles with something at the low end of the wall, and a fire springs to life behind the iron grate, lighting the room. It illuminates not the humble thatched room that Marian shares with the twins, or the rickety farmhouse where she enjoys dozing in the rafters, but a small yet elegantly furnished room with thick stone walls to trap in the heat.
And Marian isn't Marian. And this isn't Ferelden. This is ―
The dwarf is looking at her.
"Sorry," she says immediately, but he waves it off.
"Don't worry about it," the stranger says, "I get one of those things every Satinalia and business holiday."
"You're a popular man," she says.
"You would know." There's something pointed in his smile, as though they're sharing an inside joke.
There's a bit of a pause as she wonders what, exactly, he means by that.
"Ah ― forget it," he says hastily. "Bad joke. Sorry."
He bends down to help her with the broken glass. Accidents like these happen occasionally. She's getting used to it. She's always getting used to it. She picks up the ironwrought handle, elegantly curved to hold a glass bulb that no longer exists, and tries to think about what the Marian he knows might do.
"Hey," he says around another yawn, and she sees now that his night robe is maroon tinged with gold filigree that wraps around his cuffs and neck, and it suits him, she thinks out of nowhere. Red and gold is his.
It just looks so familiar, doesn't it, does this look familiar Hawke, do you remember ― ?
"Hawke." His hand is on her shoulder, and she looks into his eyes, dark amber in the firelight. "You all right? What are you doing awake this early?"
She doesn't know how to explain. Marian Hawke feeds the chickens, Carver cuts wood, Leandra makes breakfast, and Malcolm checks on the cattle. She knows very little, but she knows the Hawkes have always woken at sunrise. It makes no difference that she is the only Hawke left.
On the edges of the Hinterlands, a league east of the Castle Skyhold at the base of the alp that shook the world, a body fell out of a rift.
Too impersonal.
Shit. I suppose it's a better opening than "We lost her in the Fade."
You're not the last Hawke, the dwarf reminds her often. She has a brother. Carver Hawke is twenty-nine years old and a fearless Grey Warden now, currently hunting darkspawn somewhere along the Antiva border, and he no longer chops wood, and he no longer pins Bethany's braid to the bed.
Now he writes.
She finds his letters in the dwarf's desk, but they're an unrecognizable hand, and he writes about things that do not seem to concern her.
What happened, dwarf? A splash of ink here, angrily spilled, as the writing grows more furious. The Inquisition tells that she pulled some stunt in the Fade. No one answers my letters and you continue to talk in circles. Has something gone wrong? Has Trevelyan's mark done something to her magic? I can't find the time to come until the new year, Varric. Please.
The logic that Warden Carver describes make no sense when held up to the facts she knows to be true. The Carver she knows would not pick up a pen to save his life. Marian is not a mage and she does not know a soul named Trevelyan. She has never walked the Fade. The dwarf looks at her with a sad look every time she mentions this, but it disappears as it always does, like they all do, behind jokes and filtered tension.
It doesn't matter if there is a man in Thedas with the same name as Carver Hawke; it's not her brother. Like the rest of her family, wherever they may be ― the brother she knew is gone.
What did I tell her? Hell, Seeker, what would you tell her?
Would you tell her about her dead family first? Or how she's still wanted in five cities in the Marches? That many in Val Royeaux still blame her for not preventing the mage rebellion? That she was close friends with the man who blew up the Grand Cleric? That she sacrificed herself for a paramilitary organization that kept her on the run for years?
Our arguments are behind us, but consider that Hawke's fate in the Fade is why I
As far as the world is concerned, we lost the Champion at Adamant. That story suits the both of us fine. Trevelyan has agreed to draw the political eye away from Kirkwall as she recovers, and your spymaster has ears to the ground for potential remedies for magical amnesia. Unless you've a miracle none of the Inquisition's experienced mages have already thought of, nothing else needs to be said.
Guard-Captain Aveline Vallen is an orange-haired shield of a woman with bold freckles and the look of someone who has seen too many battles for a soldier meeting middle age. Marian is immeasurably grateful for the lack of pity in her eyes when she introduces herself, as has become irritatingly common when approached by strangers on the streets of the city.
"My husband, Donnic Hendyr." Behind Vallen stands a brown-haired junior captain several inches taller than Marian herself. He has kind brown eyes, and a gentle smile that reminds her of her father.
"Messere Hawke," he says. He uses both hands to shake hers in a firm grasp that covers her whole hand. "It's good to see you well again."
"We've met before, serah?"
"Donnic assisted in getting you to the viscount's estate while you were unwell," the guard-captain says, and Marian finds it in herself to admire this woman's resolve: she betrays no hint of emotion at the thought of the time she had spent unconscious. Unwell has become the euphemism for the time Marian is told she had been delirious with fever and invisible demons on the journey north to Kirkwall, poked and hovered over by Circle mages and physician alchemists once she arrived in the city, as the viscount himself worried and paced from the next room over. Until she woke for good, snapped awake in the middle of an unfamiliar land surrounded by unfamiliar people, and the alchemists realized something was terribly wrong indeed.
"I'm glad to see you up and about, is all," Donnic says. "It sounds like the trip from Skyhold took quite the toll."
"So I've been told," Marian says, and bites her tongue from letting out, I wouldn't know. "Guard-Captain, you wished to show me this city?"
Varric, it's a delight to hear from you! I'm always forgetting how much I miss your handwriting. I suppose that sounds silly to say. I miss so many things about Kirkwall, really, I only seem to remember them in dreams or letters.
It's so chilly along the coast this time of year, I've developed a bit of a cold. Isabela always said I'd never make a good sailor, I always seem to fall ill with the weather. I've got lots of blankets and a very nice woolen hat that even covers my ears now, don't worry.
I've joined a group of elven mages just outside of Ostwick, and they need my help to reach their clan in the Exalted Plains. I've never been to the Plains! I'm quite excited. Our caravan never traveled that far west. I wish everyone could come with.
But Lethallin, I've heard word Hawke returned with you to Kirkwall after Skyhold. I was so relieved, I thought she might have been lost at Adamant! Rumors from the south claim she's been unwell. Is this true? Have you seen her? I miss Hawke so much some days it feels like an ache in my heart. Has she recovered? Do you have need of me? Has she developed any new allergies, or a preference for dawn lotus in her tea? If there's anything I can do, anything at all, I'll be there as soon as you need. Please, please write soon.
The city of Kirkwall is a mess of equal parts construction and destruction. Guard-Captain Vallen is a woman who wastes no time on pleasantries or pacifism; from the gleaming marble of Hightown they walk southward to alleys of Lowtown, where some districts still lay in ruins, and others have been quarantined for demolition. They travel the safer roads, pass by greetings from locals.
"Your uncle lived here," Vallen mentions once as they pass by a small, dilapidated square in the heart of Lowtown. Several buildings here still lie in ruins: this is one of the few still standing, a modest hovel. It appears to Marian as though a human-sized entrance had been carved out of a wall of piss-stained stone and a door had been slapped over the hole.
"Lived?" Marian asks, once the silence has stretched a bit longer for her comfort. Her companion is staring at the door, undoubtedly remembering some person or event or time that has been lost to her now.
"I'm afraid I don't know what became of him," Vallen says, shaking herself from whatever memory that had swept her up. "He disappeared in the chaos of the rebellion. Varric has kept quiet, but if you ask me, I believe Gamlen might have taken up with his daughter out in Tantervale."
"No loss either way," Marian says dryly without thinking. She had intended it as an acknowledgment on her own ignorance ― but Aveline Vallen laughs loudly, startled, and then stops suddenly and adopts a surprisingly guilty look. Marian, lost, stares back.
"Apologies," she says. "It sounded like something you might have said. Hawke might have said. I forgot myself."
"...Right." Marian bites her tongue on the rest.
Vallen shakes her great orange head as if to clear the air, and then leads her deeper down into the city, where the charmingly named "Darktown" stretches into the docks, which eventually lead them out into the harbor. The smell here is unbelievable: seafood and rotting meat and grime from the ship underbellies, body odor and the faint smell of magical residue. Several ships here are untenable, several more look abandoned ― she spies several stone blocks between the waves that might have once been docks ― but a select few in front of the western warehouses are very busy indeed, sweating sailors and harried merchants shuffling about between cargo, almost as if trying to make up for the deficiency of activity in the rest of the city.
"Believe it or not, this is Kirkwall on a good day," Vallen says, "after the rebellion."
Marian finds herself struggling to come up with something polite to say, and finds herself saying roguishly, "Would love to see it on a bad day, then."
The guard-captain catches the look on her face and smiles. "Hardly anything to write to home about. I had the same thought, the first time I arrived. The gallows are in a worse shape, if you can believe it."
"The site of the Knight-Commander's defeat?"
"Varric enjoys joking that 'getting to know Kirkwall' is a bit like getting to know the merchant's guild," Vallen says distastefully. "Moody, ever-changing, nearly impossible to navigate if one doesn't bring a map, a clever tongue, and a bit of coin." She coughs into her fist, almost embarrassed. "But then, that's Varric for you."
Marian nods, as though she knows what Varric is like at all, and then wonders in a rush why she is pretending. She finds that despite her demeanor, she likes the guard-captain, respects her professional candor and emotional discipline, and hopes vaguely that this day has not been too hard for her.
They head uptown once more, back to Hightown, where Aveline has a job and responsibilities, and Marian has nothing waiting but a dwarf to pacify and a million questions without answers everywhere she turns. They are silent on the journey back and she finds herself wondering what this stranger is thinking, what she knew of her, why she had offered without hesitation to show her the city she had once called home. Hoping that familiar locales might trigger some dormant memory, perhaps? Waiting for the friend they lost, the woman they knew, to emerge from this new woman that nobody knew quite what to do with?
They're stomping up the streets to the Hightown bazaar when Marian says "Aveline," and the woman turns to her, slightly wide-eyed. Marian realizes this is the first time she has called her by her first name. "I'd like to ask you some questions that I don't trust the dwarf to answer honestly."
Something funny happens to Aveline's mouth, almost as though she's close to a laugh ― but something in her eyes, the read of her brow, the pause before she speaks, looks somehow regretful all at once. "Of course."
Before she can stop herself, she says, "Were you and I close, before?"
Aveline swallows before her reply, but nothing else betrays her. "Yes," she says, looking Marian straight in the eye. "You helped me earn my position, in fact. Along with ― " Here, she looks slightly flustered, but her mouth twitches upward in a hesitant smile. " ― my marriage to Donnic."
Marian smirks a bit, not unkindly. "Not sure I believe that. You look like the kind of woman who could pull her own weight."
That seems to leave Aveline lost for words. They walk for a few seconds in silence, past once-grand mansions steeped in overgrown vines and unwashed rain marks, before Aveline speaks. "Well," she says, collecting herself, "you helped a lot of people. Rather ― Hawke did. I wouldn't be surprised if strangers approach you around the city. Just let me know if there is any trouble, or you have any questions about them. Or anything else."
"The seneschal," Marian says immediately, thinking of the irritable red-headed curmudgeon that follows Tethras everywhere, and she laughs.
"You've butt heads a fair amount of times," Aveline says mysteriously. "He lost quite a few of those battles, which I doubt he's forgotten. Don't mind him."
"Considering that, it's a wonder he's avoided me," Marian says warily. "Was he afraid of the woman he knew, perchance? Were I the unsavory sort, I might take advantage."
"The woman he thought he knew was a rich mercenary with large public support, who defeated the Qunari Arishok in single combat. You often joked you might have crushed his head like a grape and would have received a medal for outstanding displays of citizenship."
Marian grins as they come to a familiar area, and she realizes they are nearing the Keep once more. The neighborhood here is well-kept and maintained, likely a result of surviving in close proximity to the seat of city power, but one house looks abandoned. Surrounded by beige stucco and covered by the dark-patterned rooftops that stretch across the buildings, the estate on their left has been polished to match its surroundings, vines trimmed to maintain the aesthetic of the neighborhood, but it takes little study for Marian to notice signs of vacancy: wooden planks stacked up inside the windows, an empty board where the family crest might have once sat.
Something in her knows this house, though for the life of her she can't say how or why or when she might have ever stumbled across it, in the wide gaping hole that is now her memory. These sudden, shivering feelings of déjà vu still leave her paralyzed at the oddest times ― at a sister's face outside the Chantry, at passages from books out of the dwarf's extensive library, and once, at a curved dagger with a golden handle tucked away in a drawer of the estate ― but this sense of familiarity doesn't pass. She can't dismiss the feeling that she knows this mansion better than she wants to, that if she were to perhaps just step inside, she might find someone from home waiting at the hearth.
She says, "This is ― "
"The Amell estate," Vallen says from behind her. "Still highly coveted on the market, even after the rebellion. Varric keeps it out of foreign pockets."
"Amell," she repeats, and looks back at her.
"Yes." Aveline's face is neutral.
"Any relation to Leandra?"
There's a moment of silence before Aveline sucks in a breath between her teeth, then says hurriedly, "Hawke ― " She breaks off, shaking her head. Undoubtedly she's remembered that is a name for another woman, a title to use for another more deserving, and Marian waits with tense impatience for her to find her thoughts.
"Yes," she says finally. "Your mother's old home. Before she left the city with your father, all those years ago."
"You knew her."
"We met on the outskirts of Lothering, escaping the Blight." Aveline looks at her straight in the eye. "Where I met you, in fact. We came to Kirkwall as refugees together."
Marian is hit once again by the thought that this is part of a rich tapestry of history that everyone in the city knows, that everyone has been a part of, save for her ― her and her faulty memory and whatever else she had left. That this is a woman who had once been a friend, who describes their history together with the calm gaze that betrays nothing. She knows why Varric had chosen Aveline to show her around the city. For all these explanations and history lessons and sympathy, there are things she doesn't know ― will never know again, and this woman named Aveline Vallen has already contented herself with that.
She looks at Aveline now, the guard captain of a city that had once called her its Champion ― the both of them, defenders of a city to which they had once been refugees, and tries. She tries to see ― tries to imagine what it might be like to know this woman, know this city, know the dwarf called Varric Tethras as much as he knows her, and she doesn't know what to feel when her heart comes up empty once again.
Does she envy the woman who had been Hawke, or pity her? Does she even want to reclaim whomever, whatever, that woman had been ― and how does a girl from Ferelden farmland ever fill those shoes at all?
Her mouth is dry when she says, "I've another question."
"Yes."
Marian looks back to the mansion, all its green ivy and great stone walls, to avoid the lump forming in her throat. "Carver is with the Wardens," she says. "But the dwarf refuses to tell me where my parents and sister have run off to. What's become of them?"
Varric,
I've kept from communications to avoid the Seekers. That's a lie, really, I've just never had the hand for penmanship or the memory to keep at it. I've exchanged several words with your ambassador Montilyet after you left Skyhold, in fact. She tells me you've kept busy as the new viscount of Kirkwall (You didn't tell me she was funny!) and Trevelyan's triumphant victory over Corypheus in a battle to shake the heavens, and, oh, yes, she tells me Hawke is now in your care in your estate in Hightown.
I'd very much like to say I imagined the letter you sent after the Inquisitor returned from Adamant without her. But it's sitting here staring at me from the desk in my cabin, and it's your handwriting, and I'm at a loss for words. Messere Montilyet has been unable to satisfy my curiosity. And, yes, my worry.
There. I don't mind if you let slip to our esteemed guard-captain that everyone's favorite pirate admiral has written out of concern. Shout it from the rooftops, for all I care.
Just write back soon. Tell me what's become of her.
Isabela
At Aveline's insistence, Tethras delivers the news of her family that evening. He sits her down at the long table in his estate, and his hand folds over hers ― he sits her down like a child and he talks.
He talks for a very, very long time.
She doesn't hear all of the details. She grows slightly dizzy after hearing about the ogre, and Beth ― she's going to be ill. She's going to slam him against the wall and tell him exactly what's on her mind, tell him this isn't funny, this isn't ―
Through the fog that clouds her brain, she thinks she yells at him, more than once. She might have thrown things, or maybe cried, and nearly stormed out, and then, she might she had been struck in the doorway with the realization that she has nowhere to run to, no family out there waiting for their missing daughter or sister. That this man and this city are all that she had left, even when she doesn't have herself.
"You're free to go," the dwarf says as she stands in the doorway, wondering if jumping off the tower of the keep might be terribly painful, wondering if it might be any easier than drowning herself in the harbor, or wandering into the Vimmarks without looking back. "You're not a prisoner here."
She turns. Her vision is blurry. Maker. "Then what am I here, exactly?"
"You're ― shit." Varric Tethras shakes his great blonde head and won't meet her eyes. "I don't know. I hoped you might get your bearings here before you decided. It was home for you, Hawke. Even if you don't remember it."
"I don't remember anything," she snaps, and her hands are shaking, and her heart's thudding because that's a lie, isn't it, doesn't that estate outside feel so familiar, doesn't she still have nightmares of something great and terrifying looming over and swallowing her whole ―
The dizziness has her wobbling, slightly. She's going to be sick. She's going to pass out. Her parents are dead. Her sister is dust on a cliff.
Varric is watching her with alert, steady eyes.
"I've given up hope that I ever will, and I suggest you might do the same."
"Hawke ― "
"Stop calling me that," she snaps, and now he's giving her one of those looks again, and Maker, doesn't he know that some part of her wants to feel guilty, wants to feel sorry for him and his lost friend and wherever she may be now ― doesn't he wonder what she's feeling, or will he only ever look at her and see someone else, a woman whose face she wears?
"I only meant ― " Marian swallows, and takes a shaky breath, and some strength begins to return to her. Whatever. "Hawke is my family name. My father's name. I may look like the woman you knew. But I'm only Marian."
It would be amusing to see such a loquacious storyteller at a loss for words but there's nothing in his face that inspires humor. If she had thought speaking plainly would have resolved the matter, she had been sorely mistaken; he looks at her now as though he has never seen her before, as though he's realizing just now that she is indeed a stranger, and that he has made a colossal mistake by inviting this lost and unfamiliar woman into his home, his city, his life.
He's standing across the room, far enough that she barely hears what he says next. "'Only,'" he repeats, but doesn't continue the thought. She thinks ― she thinks might have had an idea of what he wanted to say, anyway, and in the moment, with her family's deaths hanging over the room like storm clouds preparing for a downfall, she's grateful beyond words for his restraint.
Dwarf
I write for news of Hawke.
F
She dreams of the Nightmare again that night.
She doesn't remember anything, but in her dreams, she remembers the Nightmare.
Did you think you mattered?
The Fade is a thick, oppressive fog, but her feet wander without instruction, and by now, she knows this path better than she knows herself. A large, hulking beast the size of the Keep waits for her at the bottom of its grimy, dark lair. She walks calmly to its entrance, and a dozen hairy legs stand ― it towers over the landscape, blocks out the sky ― and a thousand blinking eyes center down onto her and she feels terribly, terribly small ―
Did you think anything you ever did mattered?
And the smell. A thousand rotting corpses and the stench of darkspawn (how does she know what darkspawn smell like?) rolls over her senses ― her eyes water from the stench, she's swallowed by it, she coughs, she can't breathe, and her throat burns from the coughing ―
And she is struck by the thought that she will die, alone, what would Varric think, how would Carver get on, what happens when you die in the Fade, do you get to see them all again ― ?
Marian wakes up panting. Her eyes are wet; her throat is hoarse from coughing.
She closes her eyes and forces her heart to calm; she catalogues what she knows.
The list is not very long at all.
When she opens her eyes again, sees a dark sheet; the canopy of the unfamiliar bed she lays in, a guest in a stranger's home. The second thing she recognizes is the sound of rain pattering on the windows on her left. A flash of distant white light outside accompanies a faint boom. Low on her right, somewhere past her feet, the dying fire crackles, embers smouldering low behind their grate.
Marian turns her head, looking out through the windows that stretch to the ceiling. She feels a bit unreal in this space, still lightheaded from the force of the memory, watching the outside world from a home that isn't hers. Without moving her head, she can see the rain sliding down the glass, the roofs of other Hightown estates, and far in the distance, an empty hill that might once have held the Kirkwall Chantry.
Inside, the fire spits out a glowing orange ember onto the rug, and fizzles out.
She might still be trapped there. The real one.
A warm bed in Hightown. A fire in the hearth. Clothes, and food, and friendly faces, and people who say they care, people who cared about her before she became who she was ― whoever this is ―
It isn't that she isn't grateful to him. Never that.
…She knows about the book. Of course she knows about the damn book.
But she hasn't brought it up, so you're daft if you think I'll be the first.
And it isn't as though she believes there is nothing wrong. If it wasn't the way the seneschal looks pityingly at her when he thinks she's unaware, or how the Aveline occasionally seems strained by some great emotion when they speak, or the way the women in the Keep whisper when she passes ―
How was she to know the city had gone up in flames twice by its own Champion's doing? How could she be blamed for the actions of another woman, this stronger faster brilliant whirlwind of a stranger named Marian Hawke? Who are they to call "this" a punishment ― for what? What is it that she deserves?
"Who said that?" the dwarf asks sharply when she mentions this one evening. They're eating dinner in his suite, alone as they are most evenings as Varric spins another of his infamous tales, and Marian has a sensation of sickening whiplash as his pleasant storytelling grinds to a halt. "Who said the rebellion was your fault?"
"No one whose opinion I value," she says, because it sounds a very Hawke thing to say, and gestures dismissively with a utensil, because it feels a very Hawke thing to do. "Please continue. If the viscount's dog wet the carpet in the middle of mass, how did none of the clergy notice by the smell?"
Really, she figures as Tethras reluctantly continues ― really, if it weren't in the way everyone else treats her, it's in the way she treats herself.
Benign spiritual possessions are as common as demonic incidents, though examples of such are rarely recorded, as the mages serving as hosts are reluctant to come forward for fear of being branded abominations. In rare occurrences, mages have been lost to the temptations or dangers of the Fade; passing spirits of compassion or friendship might be attracted to the soul left behind behind, and some have been known to take on the form that remains in the material world.
One incident of a mage from the Orlesian Circle comes to mind, in which a spirit of forgiveness discovered a young woman that had fallen prey to a desire demon in her Harrowing. Trapped in the demon's realm, the grief of her guilt was such that it attracted the spirit, who gave her clemency, and decided to comfort the friends she had left behind in the Circle. Failing other methods of communication, the spirit took hold of the young woman's body from the other side of the Veil…
― a preserved letter to a Denerim Chantry scholar, penned by Sister Matilda, 6:45 Steel
"I know who you are," a young boy says in wonder as she leaves the library.
Marian glances around the entrance, eyes peeled for a lost parent or guardian who might be hunting for a wayward son, but no help appears. Before she can stop him, the boy says loudly, "You're the champion! You saved my mum from the qunari!"
"Sorry, kid," she says stiffly, and pats him on the shoulder for good measure. Blue eyes and dark hair like her brother, this one, calluses on his fingers, and a skinny frame that suggests hardship and hunger. Marian has always been good with children, the result of growing up an older sister, but she's an older sister no longer. Before he can reply, she turns and heads down the steps into the main square. "You're thinking about someone else."
"Marian," Varric says to her when she arrives back at the viscount's quarters. He looks exhausted, and she wonders vaguely if he's been having as much trouble sleeping as she has. "I've wanted to ― "
"I owe you an apology," she says stiffly.
Varric blinks, looking fainly stunned, and laughs a little nervously. "Beg your pardon?"
"I've been meaning to say." She sucks in a breath through her teeth, and suddenly she can't meet his eyes, suddenly it's hard not to stand in the center of this hallway and wish she wasn't who she was meant to be, or do anything but cry. "It's not that I'm ungrateful."
"Hey." His eyes are concerned now, and Maker help her, she can't stand the thought of any of it anymore ― "Hey, Marian, c'mere."
He takes her to a large armchair in the parlor and she does cry there. For an instant, the curve of his neck brings her back to another time ― a flash of another time of mourning, a younger Varric and another Marian ― but here in the present, nobody disturbs them, and his hands on her back are warm and forgiving. She doesn't know what she is or why she stays; the list of things she doesn't know is so long it feels like a weight she'll never be rid of, and she's pained by the knowledge that that he'd be there to help her through it, that he's been there through it all.
She locks herself in her bedroom that evening, long after her heart has calmed and her face has dried. The fire is banked and she lights a single candle on the nightstand to see by.
She pulls out the pieces of the ornate lantern that had once shattered to the floor. She and Varric had swept them up into the drawer that night; he had not cared enough to even call for anyone to restore it, already long forgotten by the morning.
He didn't care about the lantern, but sometimes it seems so important, to prove, not to him but to herself, that the devil is in the details, and she is nothing if not the details that are remembered.
That this kind and desperate stranger, Varric, has taken it upon himself to be the one to remember those she has lost ― it touches something within her that she doesn't quite know how to pull apart. The thought of continuing as she has been, watching Tethras grasp for a dead woman in the lives she changed and the stories she led, seems suddenly inadequate, disrespectful. She can't bring back the woman he knew, but she can try to find her in what she left behind.
She unfurls the little sack in which she's kept the pieces; all of the tiny sharp edges, the shards of porcelain and glass, lie unmoving in a spiky pile of red and silver ceramic.
She sits on her bed and breathes, then wills them together with all her might. She loses track of the time, waiting as long as she does, wanting as hard as she can. She wants it with everything in her, any hint at all that the woman they all knew might not be completely lost. She wants it more desperately than she ever has wanted anything in this new, old, impossible life.
On a crisp autumn morning, a ship with black sails pulls into the harbor. Varric pales when Aveline relays the news over breakfast.
"You're shitting me. No, don't get up," he waves at the seneschal, who had moved to the door. "This's been a while coming."
"The last time this ship arrived, messere," the seneschal says stiffly, "there was an issue of the captain's docking fees ― "
"Maker's breath, Bran, wouldn't you rather I concentrate on rebuilding infrastructure and stabilizing the market than a few late docking fees? It's like you don't know me at all."
"Varric." Aveline cuts through the conversation sounding very much like a disapproving mother. "You couldn't have hid this forever."
"Who's hiding?" Varric rises from the table, leaving his breakfast half-fished, and shrugs into the faded red duster he'd draped over the chair. "We're right here." He pauses, as though preparing himself for a difficult talk, and Marian decides to have pity on the conversation.
"It's fine," she says, spearing a sausage with a fork. "I'll keep out of sight, shall I?"
Varric looks at her tightly, then sighs. "Let me just… soften some expectations."
Two hours later, Marian is tucked into a corner of the library with her ever-growing stack of texts when a dark-skinned woman bursts through the wooden double doors, takes one look at her, and plants her heavily ringed hands on both hips. She lets out gust of air from one side of her mouth; the black feather that dangles over the edge of her large red hat flutters.
"Well look at this," she says eventually. Her voice is rich, friendly, but the pause between her words speaks volumes. "Sitting there all not-dead. Well done, you."
Marian closes her book on magical theory and puts it aside.
"Don't suppose you know who I am, then."
"Trust me," Marian says, eying the length of her long, bare dark legs, "I think I'd remember you."
The woman laughs; Marian thinks that this might be the first time she's met someone from Hawke's past that in which she hasn't felt that she owes them something she couldn't provide. "Too right, you would."
Captain Isabela of Rivain is a pirate of the Eastern seas, and she offers to show Marian the rest of Thedas from a bowsprit.
"Well what're you doing now?" she asks indignantly as Marian laughs. "No, come on now. What's keeping you in Kirkwall?"
"Damn good question," Marian says. It is surprisingly easy to feel like a normal person around this Isabela, and she tosses back a swig of the bottle from the pirate's private stocks of brandy. She brings the bottle back and makes a face; it tastes like something that's dripped out of a Lowtown sewer grate. "I suspect the answer has something to do with having nothing for me anywhere else."
"You think you're the first poor soul in all of Thedas to lose everything?" Isabela says the words kindly. She reaches out her hand, wiggling her fingers, and Marian gratefully passes the bottle over the library table. Her books have been swept aside, some papers spilling across the table and onto the floor. "Now you've got something in common with the cranky elf over there, and look, he's doing just fine for himself. How long ago was it for you, Fenris?"
A deep, irritated grunt sounds from the corner. Marian glances back; the silent elf that had greeted her with a polite nod is now sitting on the armchair she had occupied that morning, polishing his dark broadsword with quiet diligence. He has tied his long white hair up in a band at the back of his neck, tunic sleeves rolled to his elbows as he works.
"At least ten or fifteen years, now, must be," Isabela answers her own question and downs it with another swig. "Some rough hurdles, sure ― a couple hundred slavers, a few angry magisters, family betrayal, the usual ― nothing we couldn't handle."
"And that's it?" Marian decides to humor her. "Drop everything, and run off to go pirating?"
"It's your call, love." Isabela levels her a look over her over the rim of the bottle. "It's a free country."
Another snort from the corner of the room. The pirate rolls her eyes and gets to her feet; she locks her fingers into each other and stretches her long dark arms toward the ceiling, elbows cracking. "If you'll excuse me, it's been far too long since I've dropped a visit to the dear guard-captain. I'm sure she's out of her head with worry wondering after my well-being."
"She's usually holed up in her office in the barracks," Marian says.
"Oh, I know." As she moves to the door, Isabela's eyes glint with something Marian suspects is less anticipation and more akin to mischief. "You going to finish this bottle or shall I? No, don't answer that, Hawke never did."
She leaves the brandy on the table as though she knows the answer. Marian supposes that for a woman who travels with the wind, perhaps it is that easy, to pick up and leave things behind as you please.
With Isabela's departure, the library is quiet, and Marian feels unnerved, as though she is being watched. She turns: the elf is looking at her cautiously from his chair, as though sizing her up. She meets his gaze head-on, an unspoken question.
"Hawke," the elf says, then pauses. He seems to consider, or perhaps realize something, and then he says again, more resigned, "Hawke."
"Fenris," Marian says. She isn't sure what to make of this one. The people that the Champion had once called her friends had certainly never struggled to reintroduce themselves, though she can appreciate how it might be a difficult conversation for the unprepared; but despite herself, she can't find it in herself to make it any easier on them. She is what she is now; there's no pretending otherwise.
"You have been studying magic in broad daylight," he says frankly. It almost sounds like an accusation. "In the middle of the Viscount's Keep."
Marian glances to her pile of books she had left next to the armchair; they now sit innocently next to his right elbow as he balances the sword across his knees.
Of all the painful truths to this new reality she had been forced to contend with, Varric's speculation of her magical ability being lost in the Fade had stunned her the longest.
"What magical ability?" she had asked at the time, and he and Aveline had stared back at her, at a loss for words ―
"How much did Varric tell you?" she says tightly.
His lips tighten. After a moment, he says: "I would prefer to hear your telling."
"My telling," she repeats, and laughs, because ― how ludicrous, it seems, to ask at all. "I remember none of it. There's nothing to tell."
"You remember nothing of Kirkwall? Or of your life at all before?"
"I remember my family," Marian says tightly now, to this strange dark elf with demanding eyes, and wishes quite strongly now that he would return to his silent brooding instead of this disquieting interrogation. "I remember Lothering. I remember my dog, and the twins, and a simple life. I remember waking up as an adult woman to a dozen strangers in an unfamiliar city. And I remember Tethras telling me that I'm the Champion of a dying city, and that my entire family is now dead or worse. But if I'm lucky, you know, some days I wake up forgetting that last part."
Fenris is quiet, considering. "And how do you contend this with what was penned in Varric's Tale?"
"I wouldn't know," she says tiredly. "I haven't read it."
"You haven't read the book?" Fenris asks, surprised.
She narrows her eyes. "Should I? It's a story for a different woman."
Fenris is silent for another long moment, green eyes unblinking, before he turns his attention back to his sword. "If you are looking for answers to who you are, I would exhaust every window into your past before turning to new options." A beat, and then: "It is more than some would have."
"You know Varric better than I do," Marian says, curiosity now overcoming her lingering sense of irritation at this stranger's prying. "If he hasn't lied to the seneschal twice before breakfast, he considers it a morning wasted. How do I trust that what he wrote in that book isn't falsehood?"
"Varric is a storyteller," Fenris says cryptically. "He reveals more in his lies than his truths. As elusive as his truths might seem, you are… fortunate, to have him."
He retreats back to his work, and says nothing more.
She finds a worn manuscript of The Tale of the Champion in a bottom drawer of the desk in Varric's private office. He's downstairs, entertaining their guests, and as she stands, she feels a bit as though her mother might come around the corner at any minute, catching her hand in the cookie jar.
She looks around. The large office is dark and silent past sunset; she sees by the light of the moon shining through the thin windows behind his desk. His shelves are stuffed with books new and old, papers piling up with trading negotiations, reconstruction updates, letters from the Merchant's Guild secretary ―
Viscount of Kirkwall. A busy man with a busy life. A man who has intertwined his life into the city's history so irrevocably, whose heart beats for this city, who fights daily to make it what it might be again, to take on the additional burden of a woman who ― a woman like her. For an instant, Marian realizes that what others might see when they look at Varric Tethras is not a viscount, but something missing: his companion, his duty, his muse. A role she still wasn't sure she wanted to fill ― had no idea how to begin trying.
The Champion's role in his life is still undefined and vague to her, surrounded in jokes and half-truths ― she had been resolved to leave it that way. Varric has made no assumptions, pushed her to meet no demands, accepted her memory for what it is.
It's ridiculous, really ― the book had been brought to her attention long ago. Bran's occasional sniffing reference, Aveline's tentative recommendation. And she has feigned deafness and claimed ignorance, because ―
Because it's easier to pretend it doesn't matter, she supposes. She has learned the facts she knows from the guard-captain: Varric himself has never raised the topic. I used to write books, he'd once said when she'd brought it up. A while ago, now. Don't worry about it.
In his office now, she doesn't see a single book on his shelves with his own name. She wonders if there is something in that.
It's a bridge she hasn't wanted to cross, the topic of this Tale, for all it says without words; acknowledging it at all requires accepting of a history she doesn't know, acceptance that this woman whose life she took over ― a woman she might once have been ― was more than a friend or a companion. Acknowledging that the man who has taken her into his care has done so with that history behind him.
You don't write a book about a woman if you've said everything you wanted to say to her.
If the Champion of Kirkwall is really gone, then perhaps Marian is the only one left to hear it.
The first thing that she notices upon opening The Tale of the Champion is this: there is no dedication.
That night, the Nightmare swallows her whole.
She feels more than hears a low rumbling that might be laughter. She digs her nails into her palms and looks up; sees a dark, gaping mouth blacker than the night, circled by a million pinpricks of sharp teeth growing larger and larger, and she closes her eyes ―
When she comes to, she stands shivering on the ramparts of a fortress looking out at a vision of snow-capped mountains. They spread out and down into a low valley. She leans over, grows slightly dizzy from the dip, leans back ―
She wears unfamiliar armor: a thick fur collar to keep the cold away. Dark leather hide, spikes of steel armor encasing her right arm. A gold-tipped staff rests against the wall.
"You're as bad as the elf," Varric's voice says from behind her. "For a woman in hiding, you're not doing yourself any favors running around in that armor. D'you know how loudly that screams 'I'm very important and what I'm doing is probably illegal, call the Templars'?"
She smirks without turning around. "Thought I'd make an impression for your Inquisitor. Herald of Andraste, quite the title. Gotta impress."
"Don't worry," Varric says as he joined her looking over the edge. "She's heard enough about our merry band to dispel any ideas that either of us might be useful members of society again. She just keeps me around for moral support."
He stands on his toes to lean over the battlements next to her. Now that she has a look at him, she sees that Varric seems older, wearier, the lines around his eyes no longer indicative of restless nights spent awake playing cards or writing novels, but permanent features of stress and exhaustion in the topography of his familiar face. But Maker if it isn't damned good to see him again, something friendly to cling to in a world gone mad. She opens her mouth to tell him as much ―
"Hey."
A warm palm on her shoulder nudges her awake. She blinks away the sight of the clear Frostback skies to see Varric now leaning over her in the dark, brow furrowed. The gold filigree of his robe flickers in the candlelight he sets on the nightstand.
"You all right?" His voice is low and calm, rough with sleep. "I heard shouting."
She tries to answer; she doesn't know what to say.
Instead she finds herself looking toward the book she'd left on the nightstand; the page she left open is dog-eared.
He follows her eyes. "Ah," he says. "Right." He chuckles now, without humor. "You know, I suppose that would give most people nightmares."
He doesn't say anything more. The ocean of forgotten history separates them again, and she's painfully aware again that the list of things she doesn't remember is longer than she could ever reconcile or appreciate, and she's angry about it, angry it's been taken from her ―
"What happened to my dog?" she asks suddenly.
Varric blinks, and smiles; his storyteller smile. "He's with your brother. Doing just fine chomping apart darkspawn, last I heard."
She nods against the pillow, then hesitantly, sits up and against the headboard. She sees over the top of his head now; he doesn't move.
"Hey," Varric says now. He's staring back at the book. "Don't mind what I said in that, all right? Take it with a grain of salt."
The corner of her mouth twitches. "I know." She hesitates on her next question, and then plunges: "Did she ever read it? The, er ― Hawke."
"You know," he says now, and there's something pained in his face even as a corner of his mouth twitches upward. "I never thought to ask."
In the morning, she stares at the mirror over the washbin in the loo, and traces over Hawke's scars with her eyes. The blood-red tattoo on her left arm has always stung faintly when touched; in the mirror, when she turns it slightly, it forms an unfamiliar sigil. The shock-white scar across her stomach has never troubled her, but now she can't help but feel anything other than sadness for the woman who had gained it: where she had been, the enemies she had earned, what she had seen and done, the impossible direction that life had taken her.
Yet the most prominent scar is the one she sees every morning, the reason why she avoids mirrors in the halls and turns away from curious strangers in the streets. When she touches it, the faint welt rises against her nose like a ropey thread, with its long-damaged blood vessels and tightened skin that never healed right.
Nice scar, Hawke. Wait 'till they hear this one.
Good, right? Shame nothing came out of that mess at the Bone Pit… would you try giving me a big, nasty one on my elbow? Say the high dragon took a snap at me, that's the ticket…
She holds her face in her hands for just a moment, and then exits the restroom.
Hawke and I found ourselves in a thaig lost to the ages, without a shilling to our name. Bartrand had taken any hopes we'd had of leaving the Deep Roads rich as kings when he'd locked the door behind us. All we had left was a faint hope that we might survive at all.
We wandered for weeks in those tunnels, darkspawn greeting us at every turn. Our supplies were low. Morale was lower. Hawke was our guiding force, taking up the mantle of leadership as she did so much else: without question or hesitation, and the occasional wisecrack to lighten the mood. It was a trait that defined her as easily as her confidence or her laughter: already all of her associates in Kirkwall's underbelly knew, when you were pressed for time or help or coin, you called Hawke. She promised to lead us out of the thaig without saying a word, and she always came through.
So we pressed onward.
The guard-captain finds her in a bolthole deep beneath Lowtown, long forgotten in the reconstruction efforts and political scramble of mages and templars on the surface above. Down here, the dust is thick and the stench of corpses long decayed has sunk so thoroughly into the woodwork, the place feels thick with all the unnamed dead of the city. Marian wonders how many have been lost to the ages down here, matter for scavengers, bodies for looting, people that never made it back home.
The sound of running feet sound from behind her, and then a crack as someone breaks through the ancient locks. There is shuffling; the sound of an axe being taken to old wood before its owner climbs through the hole.
After she's broken through the door, there's a long moment before the speaker says, "Hawke." Aveline's voice is tight with something Marian doesn't quite register.
"This is where it happened." She swallows. "Isn't it?" She can't draw her eyes from a simple wooden chair left standing in the center of the dusky room. In her mind's eye, she sees a preserved white wedding veil hanging over the back; sees a woman stumble to her feet on shaking legs, and a stranger's voice boasts of the strength of his dedication, the victory of love over death…
Aveline is panting slightly behind her; Marian wonders vaguely if she ran here. Was there a search party? Did someone worry? Maker, how inconsequential all of the fuss and hussle of the world above seemed. That the world could go on while her mother rotted down here, died disfigured and in pain, another name lost in the city's long and bloody history with its own citizens. She might lie down and join them. Why hasn't she yet? Is that what she's come here to do?
"M ― " Aveline cuts herself off. She hears footsteps and when Aveline speaks again, she is closer. "This is no place for the living."
"She died alone here," Marian says.
"Hawke." A gauntleted hand grasps her shoulder. "You were there when it mattered."
"Tell me I killed him," she says.
"Thoroughly," Aveline replies.
"What were her last words?"
A release of air behind her. "She was proud of you, Hawke. And she wanted you to forgive yourself."
Aveline leads her back through the maze of underground tunnels, and when they see daylight again, she realizes that she hadn't protested the use of the Champion's name. She can't quite find it in herself to care about the distinction from Marian anymore.
Hawke feels as right a title as any.
If there were ever a death as gruesome as Leandra Amell's, your humble storyteller takes pity on the poor bastard responsible for documenting it. I include the following in my tale only because it would be a disservice to the Champion not to.
The woman we found below Lowtown clung to life like a drowning sailor to a lifeboat, and was failing fast. Quentin was dead, his shades defeated. Gascard lay next to him, eyes unseeing, a bolt lodged firmly in his neck. It was clear that Leandra would follow soon enough. All the magic in the world wouldn't change it.
For the first time in our acquaintance I saw Hawke falter.
It was never a question of whether Varric loved the woman from the tales he spun for her.
Once she opened that book, the answer could be read all over its pages.
Every morning now, Marian stares at the mirror and traces Hawke's old scar with her eyes. Where it once felt rugged and unnatural, she no longer notices the bump now; recalling who she was before it, her mind draws a blank. She might as well have had it in Lothering. It is as much a part of her as the short, sweeping lines of her new bangs and the pointed draw of her thirty-year-old chin.
And every evening, she pulls the pieces of the lantern out from her nightstand. She remembers everything she's read about latent magical ability and severed connections to the Fade ― and tries to make it all worth something.
On a crisp autumn morning, Marian heads down to the docks. She spies the black sails flapping against Kirkwall's clear blue sky, and follows the sound of a woman's hollered instructions. When she reaches the ship, she watches it bobble in the water a ways; it sits high in the harbor, rocking gently as sailors on the deck prepare for sail. Isabela is speaking with what looks like her first mate, another Rivaini woman wearing knee-high boots and a black tunic to match the dark tattoos that pattern her arms and neck.
"There you are," Isabela says. Her large, feathered hat is in her hands; she twirls it once through her hands the plants it eloquently on her head. The poor hat, Marian notices, has seen better days, the feather flat with seawater and the brim rugged and fraying at the seams. Isabela doesn't seem to mind.
"Here I am." Marian looks back to the ship, its three masts jutting straight up into the bright blue morning and the spiderweb of rope patterns that stretch from the crow's nest nest to the deck. "She is a beauty."
"Won her off a lad in Antiva in a game of Grace," Isabela smirks. "Blind drunk fool. His loss."
"Did you," Marian says aloud, amused. "Card sharp like you won it fair and square?"
Isabela chuckles and doesn't respond. "Last chance, pet," she tells her without turning around. Her eyes are trained firmly on the ship.
Marian knows the answer before she asked; she suspects Isabela does, too.
"I've got a few things to wrap up first." Isabela rolls her head to the side to peer at her curiously, and Marian catches her eye, smiling. "Maybe I'll see you out there."
Isabela drags her mouth out in a lazy smirk, then winks at her, and turns back to her men. She struts up the gangplank to her ship, calling out loudly, "Come breast the bars, bullies, heave her away!"
The crewmen sing back immediately, carrying the tune: "Weigh hey, roll and go!"
Marian watches the men ready to make sail. Within minutes, the crowd of people shuffling on the docks has trickled to a stream as they all gather onto their places on the ship, still singing.
Soon we'll be rolling her down through the Bay
To be rollicking randy dandy-O
In all the movement, she almost doesn't notice the elf slide silently up beside her. She nearly jumps when he does, but Fenris doesn't look surprised to find her standing on the docks at all.
"I suspect Isabela has already made her offer," he tells her, fiddling with the drawstring on his knapsack. He carries only the bag and his sword across his back. "I once declined out of pride, and reconsidered nearly too late. Consider this a second chance if you will."
Marian is struck by the idea that this is not a man prone to bouts of sympathy; his opinion of Hawke must have been strong indeed.
"What happened to you?" she asks him instead. Varric had dropped bits and pieces of Fenris's troubled past within the Tale, but nothing substantial, out of respect for privacy, possibly. Enough to let her know they were not entirely dissimilar. "Did you stop looking?"
"I ― " He pauses. He looks as though he hadn't been prepared for the question, and thinks for a moment before responding. "I made many attempts to rediscover my past. Eventually… perhaps what lay ahead of me proved more worthwhile than looking elsewhere for answers."
Marian thinks on that for a moment. Her eyes find the curious white lines of lyrium on his skin; they travel up his arms, under his armor, up to neck and end at his chin. She wonders if they hurt.
"It has been my solution," Fenris says. "It needn't be yours."
Marian catches his eye and exhales quickly. "Goodbye, Fenris."
Fenris nods at her, and then heads up the gangplank as the men prepare to set off.
She watches for several minutes as they set sail. The ship has nearly reached the massive twin bronze statues that guard the gallows before the sound of the shanty finally drifts into the wind:
Heave a pawl, o heave away!
Weigh hey, roll and go
The anchor's on board and the cable's all stored
To be rollicking randy dandy-O
The longer she stares at the debris of shattered glass, the more she can begin to make out images in its reflection. She sees her own face, the scar; when she lets her eyes unfocus, she can even see Bethany in her thick hair and temple, Leandra in her nose and jaw.
She always sees her father in her eyes. She wonders what parts of her now have become Hawke's alone. Or Varric's. How much of her has been taken from her family, how much had she freely given to the city?
As she stares, a small shard twitches. Stops. Wiggles again.
With a clink! it snaps like a magnet into another piece. She reaches out to examine it; they have fused together so seamlessly that she can't detect a line between them.
Marian heaves out a breath, feeling slightly light-headed, out of breath, as though she's just been running. She stares down at her hands. She doesn't feel very powerful. She doesn't feel magical. All she feels is like herself.
When the viscount rises that morning and walks downstairs, Hawke is waiting for him at the long wooden table in the kitchen.
"Haw ― shit." Varric's voice is loud in the dark. It's just before sunrise; the lamps aren't lit. She's surprised he'd even seen her in the dark. "Marian. What are you doing up?"
"You missed a few things," she tells him. "In that tale of yours."
Varric freezes, and doesn't say anything for a long moment. "What," he says hoarsely, then swallows. He moves over to the table, taking the low seat adjacent to hers at the corner. "What brought this on, then?"
Marian fiddles with her fingers, weaves them together and back out again. After the book, it's hard to look his way, even in the dark. It's hard even to put this to words, now that she speaks for her other self, what little she knows about that woman.
Varric puts a palm to his eye, left elbow on the table. Pinches the bridge of his nose. Breathes.
"Marian," he says, and his other warm, broad hand covers both of hers. He lets his left hand fall and his eyes meet hers. "Screw whatever everyone else might've told you. I want you to know, that's not how it's been for me. You don't owe me her history."
But her mind has been made. "I'm going to find her," she tells him. "The rest of her that I can. I might be gone a while."
The sun must be rising outside; she can just make out the tension in his in the bottom half of his face in the dark gloom. "Hawke," he says roughly. "We didn't ― they didn't pull you out of there just for you to walk back in."
"She's still there, Varric."
"You're right here."
Marian puts her hand to her forehead. "You know sometimes ― sometimes I can believe that, and I wonder why I bother. Other times… I don't know. When I dream, it's like her ― my ― memories are there, just out of reach. Sometimes I remember you and me, in a castle in the mountains, and thinking of this city like home instead of a place I barely know. Then I wake up and I don't know what I don't know anymore."
Hawke clasps her hands again, under his fingers. "I won't rest easy until I know again, Varric."
He breaths. "Okay. Okay. Let me pack my things."
"Varric."
"You're not going alone."
"It's not a matter of loyalty." She stares at their hands together and dedicates herself to remember this when she goes. "You know you can't."
Varric shakes his head. "…Suppose I should've expected you'd say that." He pauses, as if something has just occurred to him. Beyond the kitchen, they can hear the low sounds of the mansion rising, servants in the hallways, the city preparing for the day.
"The book," he says suddenly. "You said I missed a few things. What'd I leave out, then?"
Marian rises. Hawke had never hesitated once her mind was made up, and neither should she. "That she loved you back."
That night in her dreams, she thinks with more clarity than she has in ages. If she looks hard, she can see the cracks of the Fade begin to appear: the winding paths that only round into circles, the whisper of drifting spirits as they exchange shapes, memories, forms.
It is said that the souls of the dead pass through the Fade and sometimes linger…
What would the Seeker think of her now, she thinks out of nowhere.
(Who or what is the Seeker? A tall dark-skinned, short-haired woman with a comes to mind, a stern brow and a warrior's battle axe flash through her memories, but they pass as easily as anything does here…)
Off in the distance between the gloomy mist of the Fade, she sees the back of a dark-haired head. A young woman's silhouette, staff in hand, and the looming of an ogre behind her. They disappear into the fog, but the feeling of nostalgia lingers ―
Champion.
She walks.
Back again?
The Nightmare is now as familiar a presence as the sight of the Viscount's Keep. She feels its energy growing thicker as she approaches. Within its domain again, after so many nights, Marian can't summon the energy to flinch any longer. She feels anxious; she feels vindicated; she feels ready. She does not feel fear.
She travels down. Her feet skid down the rough rockbed, nearly trip as she descends deeper into its nest. Spiderwebs stretch across her vision; when she turns her head, she catches glimpses of eight-legged creatures scuttling just out of sight.
As she descends, the voice asks her what else she'd throw away her life for.
You couldn't even save your city.
How could she expect to strike down a god?
What is your life worth, farm girl? I can help you find out.
"Fine then," she tells it, "consider me yours."
The Nightmare is long dead. All that remains, all that she has seen since in her dreams ― is a thought, what remains of her memories reenacting her last known moments in the Fade.
The demon's lair was, after all, the last place Champion Hawke had been seen alive. It would be fitting that it would be the last place she herself might remain, trapped or lost, if ever in need of a rescue.
Marian makes her last step down into its lair, finding herself facing a large cavern, a wide and gaping hole surrounded by the rock. Down here, with web stretched thick above filtering the light from above, it is near impossible to see what lies within the cave; only the stench of horrid breath escapes it. The sight of something large and many-eyed moves in the dark ― Marian enters to greet it, and she doesn't look back.