Yearnings are much more difficult to bear than simple wants. A want can be handled, suppressed, but a yearning is something so much stronger, so deep that it is like a hole in the heart, one that needs to be filled; or it will consume you instead.
He has never yearned for the Anderfels like this.
He has never yearned for friendship like this.
He has never yearned for love like this.
He has never yearned for Anders like this.
There is nothing in life he has ever yearned for as much as he yearns for change. Change for mages everywhere but perhaps most of all for those here, for change to start in and spread from this place, where it surely must be needed the most.
In a place like the Fereldan Circle, mages could afford to wait, much like he had once done. But the Gallows here in Kirkwall is a very different place; he has never been able to loose that nagging sense of wrongness at the back of his mind. It is no longer fear, but it is a constant and utterly inescapable unease. The veil is thin here, thinner now than it was when he arrived, and no wonder; during his time here so many has given in to despair, one way or another. Throats slit for the only escape there is, arms cut for the power to survive, all bloodshed weakening the veil further. Not much each time, but little by little.
He does not blame any of them. They are treated harshly here, by certain templars more like cattle than people, and when you do not only feel cursed but not even as a person any longer, then what do you do with yourself? How do you hold on with nothing to hold on to?
Karl does not give in to any of it. He does what he can for others, the same way he has done so many times for Anders. Heal a flogged back, or something even worse, if it is something that can be soothed with healing magic at all. Bring what hope and what light he is able, refusing to give in to anything, and not giving up on hope. It is difficult, in a place where there is not much to hope for at all.
Then a letter arrives, written in a hand so almost completely undecipherable most would be unable to read it, and signed with what could either be a very sloppy A or an upside-down V, standing for a name no one else in here could ever know.
Then there is hope.
And more yearning than ever before.