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In the early stages of Kestrel Hawke's new life in Kirkwall, she encounters the strangest healer she's ever met. This is the second installment of the Kestrel Hawke/Anders series
Anders has long thought of the Chantry as a place of pain, its gilt and statuary and incense and lingering chants a thin gaudy glaze over anguish that cannot be assuaged by simple platitudes.
He just never realized how much anguish it could hold within its cursed walls.
The sunburst brand on Karl's head is likely days old, but Anders feels as if the iron has just run through his chest. He wants to moan Karl's name, he wants to cry, he wants to wave his hands and work magic and make it all go away... but instead he can only stand there, leaden and silently screaming, as Karl placidly turns him over to the Templars.
Karl, who had been his friend, who had loved him, betrays him, turning him in to his would-be executioners with as much emotion as a man wiping off a muddy shoe.
It was not supposed to be this way.
This is not justice.
But he is.
The spirit inside him writhes once, then rises in a thundering roar that Anders can feel scraping through his very bones. He falls to the floor, knees drilling into the worn crimson carpet, everything that he is , every black and hopeless thing that he feels collapsing into the gaping hole in his chest and exploding out of his skin in a crackle of Fade energy and pure rage.
Justice bares his teeth at the encircling Templars, but it's Anders' sentiment entirely that he voices. "You will never take another mage as you took him!"
And they don't.
They don't do anything but bleed out into the carpet. Justice is not content to merely kill. Driven by Anders' anguish, he massacres. He is brutal and thorough and the templars fall in gory ropes of flensed muscle and serrated armor fragments. The cloying scent of incense is drowned by the reek of charred meat and heated steel.
It is over too soon. The hurt in him, the rage in him, cannot let it be over so soon. He wants to bring the Chantry down around them, bury them, bury them all in the lies and the pain until it all stops.
"A...Anders?"
Karl. Justice gutters out like a candle, ceding control of the body, and the consequences of his failure, back to Anders.
Oh, Karl. I arrived too late. It's always been too late for us.
The recent, grisly additions to the Chantry fade into the background - even the thick stench is ignorable. Anders is acutely aware of only two things: Karl begging him for death, and the blue, blue eyes of Kestrel Hawke watching him as he fulfills his last duty to his lover.