The prospect of execution focuses the mind wonderfully. Anders' was focused on two hands. One was his own pale, with long, calloused fingers. Atop it was a hand he had come to know nearly as well as his own, a swarthy, elegantly proportioned appendage, crisscrossed with pale scars and clad with gray silverite claws.
He remembered the first time he had laid eyes on Hawke, the day she barged into his clinic and demanded to speak with him. Her hands had been clad only in frayed traveler's gloves then, and unmarred by scars. He had watched them accumulate over the years until she was gauntleted to her elbows in white. She had joked that once she ran out of room, she would have to hang up her Champion's spurs. But he had fussed and worried over her as he patched up the wounds she shrugged off. Each one was a permanent reminder he had not protected her.
Now, he suddenly realized he wouldn't see her get any more. That made him sad, beat against the dam that held the fear out of his guts. Maker, no. No regrets. No, I love her!
Hope flickered briefly. She will see. She will save me, he lied desperately to himself.
His torment ended as it always did. A voice, alien yet inexplicably familiar, made itself known in the tumult of his mind. Irrelevant. Foolish.
VENGEANCE.
And just like that, Justice put the dam back, and Anders was sure again.
He looked up at her.
"You've really done it now, darling," Evelyn Hawke said softly.
"I have. Finally." He had deluded himself that she would rejoice and rally to him now that the deed was done. Surely his glorious purpose was as clear to her as it was to him? But now that her disgust and fear had cooled... he could see the wheels turning in her head.
She pulled him closer and rested her head on his shoulder."You realize this complicates my plans. Meredith is looking quite reasonable now."
"Maybe they could have seen she was mad, love, but if you thought for a second the nobles would allow a mage in the viscount's seat, you're crazier than she is."
"You underestimate me."
"You overestimate them. One fireball in the wrong place, and you'll hang. They fear you."
She smiled. "They love to fear me. They know their enemies have even more to fear."
Anders looked at her sadly. "You'll never be one of them, you know. It doesn't matter what you do."
Hawke pulled away from him and gazed out at the Lowtown square. The templars had herded the crowds into a corner of the market and stood watch with swords drawn. There was always a turnout for Meredith, Orsino and the Champion's three-man shows, but instead of street theater these people found the world turning under their feet. Anders suppressed a smile; it was only fitting, he felt, that the masses should find themselves corralled by the templars they supported. The noises of commerce were unnaturally absent, but Aveline was in a shouting match with the templar lieutenant, and Sebastian was still praying where he had fallen, and the sound of unrest filtered up from the docks. Fires burned wherever debris from the chantry had landed.
At length Hawke turned back to him. "You didn't do this for me. What is this about?"
"I did this – I destroyed the Chantry – for all mages, everywhere."
She narrowed her eyes. "Really? The Circle is doomed. "
"Yes! You understand."
"No, I mean this Circle." She pointed across the bay to the Gallows, shrouded in smoke and magical lights. "They'll all die. Nothing will change," she said.
Anders perked up. He had thought about this; indeed, for as long as he could remember he had thought of little else. He could sway her.
"It will. I know it will." He turned to her, his face lit with fervor. "You've never been in the Circle. You don't know how ready the mages are for a revolution!" He swallowed, and pressed on. "That's why you have to back Orsino. The magisters built the Gallows to be defended by mages. I know you're afraid, but you can win this for our people!"
Hawke sighed."Our people?" she asked. "Mages."
"Of course."
"What are they to us, darling?"
"What are they to us?" Anders blurted out in disbelief. "We may not be in the Circle but we share their fate! You shouldn't have to strap a kitchen knife to your staff and pretend to be a sellsword, and I shouldn't have my clinic tossed every month by bigots. We're all pariahs."
"I'm not a –" Hawke sputtered. "Anders, you don't fit in because you don't even try! You don't hate Isabela, you talk to Varric sometimes. You've driven everyone else away."
"I took a spirit into my soul and changed myself forever for this." His eyes flashed blue. "I have nothing to say to anyone who lives for anything but revolution. I only stayed because I thought you were with me."
Hawke pressed her head against him so that her brown hair hid her face. "I care about you."
"This is bigger than me or you."
"It is not." Hawke stood and faced the crowds. A squad of city guards had arrived and Aveline's shouting increased in volume. "I don't give a damn about people I've never met in places I've never been to."
She turned back to him, flames shining on her dark skin. "My people are the ones in Lowtown getting burned and trampled to death. Tomorrow, without the chantry to pass out the grain dole, they'll starve and murder each other for crumbs. I can't save many now, not after what you've done. But I'll cut down a hundred mages if it means saving Merrill from being made Tranquil or Varric from being lynched. I'd kill a thousand more before I'd let the Amells fall." She walked behind him. "You," her voice hitched. "You have to pay for what you've done."
"I know."
There was a silken sound, and he knew her black knife was in her scarred hand. She had told him once how that small blade had warded off the rats that had prowled the hold of the ship that brought the Hawkes to Kirkwall. Anders shivered to think he was only be another faceless threat for Hawke to dispatch. For the first time in months, he feared his own death.
His torment ended as it always did, with an alien, familiar voice: Irrelevant.
VENGEANCE.
"I'm sorry it has to end like this," said Hawke, in a voice he had not heard since she clung to him the night her mother was taken. "I'm sorry for what I have to do. I should've stopped you. I just..."
"Do it," said Anders, and Hawke's knife shot out like a whip.
As Anders' body pitched forward into the Kirkwall dirt and his spirit took flight, he knew Hawke was wrong: it was not the end at all.