Forward
Part Two

Fenris was right about the Arishok, thankfully. The Qunari wasn't exactly happy to learn the status of his delegation, but he appreciated the courtesy Hawke showed in informing him. She told him she had a lead she was following, so he left it in her hands… for now. But she knew it was just a matter of time before he decided enough was enough.

For the moment, they had one other stop to make in their quest to find out what happened to the missing delegate.

Meeting Sister—or rather, Mother Petrice at the Chantry was enough to make Hawke want to turn around and go back home. Hawke was understandably unlikely to trust the woman given that the last time she did so, a contingent of Qunari ended up dead along with one of their mages—something Petrice had personally arranged. The insufferable woman was indignant when they requested an audience with Grand Cleric Elthina, but the moment Hawke mentioned that the grand cleric's seal was used to authorize the abduction, she changed her tune and suddenly fell silent.

"A pause that says you knew," Hawke surmised, narrowing her eyes on the woman, "but does Her Grace?"

Petrice's shoulders stiffened, and her chin lifted in defiance, "The grand cleric trusts her stewards to enact the wishes of The Maker."

Hawke's brow shot up, "Well, it sounds like you've been bad! This will shock Her Grace, no doubt."

Seeing the way Petrice's jaw visibly clenched as she forced a controlled breath out through her nose, the word "stubborn" escaping her lips in a huff, Hawke just smiled sweetly.

"Yes, it's one of my finer—and more frustrating qualities, I've been told." She made pointed eye-contact with Fenris, whose shoulders tensed before he looked away.

She turned back to Petrice, and the two women stared one another down, a battle of wills the Mother knew she couldn't win as Hawke's arms folded across her chest.

"All right, Serah Hawke," the woman said finally. "If you won't abandon this, let me offer you something. The templar you seek is a radical who has grown… unreliable. Confronting him may do us all a favour."

"And you know this… how?" Hawke asked.

"He is my former bodyguard, Ser Varnell," she explained. "Assume what you wish. But I offer him to you as… reconciliation."

I sincerely doubt that, Hawke thought sardonically.

"Meet me at this location," the woman continued, pulling out a scrap of parchment from her robes and handing it to her. "I invite you, Serah Hawke. Come see the unrest these Qunari have inspired."

And with that, the Mother left them in the hall as Hawke looked down at the parchment in her hands. Darktown. Colour me unsurprised.

"Need I say I'm skeptical?" Aveline mused from behind her.

"Yeah," Varric agreed, pointedly clearing his throat, "that's a set-up."

Hawke could only sigh, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "It's her game… for the moment."


When Hawke and her companions made their way to the undercity, and finally came upon the wayward templar, they watched quietly from the doorway, unwilling to draw any attention until they had gotten a decent survey of the situation. Varnell had the Qunari delegate and his guards chained helplessly to a wall. She could spare only a moment to wonder exactly how he got them there—even with their weapons bound into their sheaths, Qunari were fierce warriors—three of their guards and likely even the delegate should have been more than capable of taking down a single templar. The man must have enlisted help from the crowd of zealots gathering in the room to separate them long enough to entrap them. Many of said zealots had probably died in the process, but Varnell seemed too far gone to care.

"Like any beast, remove the fangs, and it is lost," the templar was saying, preaching to his gathered congregation as he stalked in front of the Qunari. "They are weak before the faithful of the Maker. The only certainty in their precious Qun is death before the righteous." As if to emphasize his point, he propelled his fist right into the gut of one of the delegate's guards. The Qunari jolted in pain, but his eyes narrowed fiercely on the man once he recovered, and even at this distance, Hawke could hear the growl he emitted.

Of course, that would be the moment Petrice chose to show up. "Ser Varnell!" the woman shouted, stalking out past them and into the room, drawing all eyes to the doorway as she entered—effectively ruining Hawke's element of surprise. Looking back at her companions with a shake of her head, Hawke rolled her eyes and threw up her hands in exasperation before stepping out into the room as well.

"Take a knee, faithful," the templar said. "The Chantry blesses us."

"You claim a blessing when you have used the authority of the grand cleric so openly? You have brought wrath down upon you! You remember Serah Hawke?" she asked, creeping around Hawke from behind like the venomous snake she was.

The glare that Hawke shot the woman was positively murderous.

"The Qunari have friends, templar," Petrice continued, gesturing to Hawke. "How will you answer their allegations?"

"And she uses us, once again," Varric muttered. "Surprising no one."

"You want a fight?" Hawke asked the templar. "Then face someone whose weapons are not bound!"

Varnell suddenly stepped up to one of the restrained Qunari and held a knife to his neck. Hawke took a futile step forward, her hand reaching for one of her blades, but Varnell slit his throat before she or her companions had a chance to save him. "Righteous!" he exclaimed, before moving down the line to the next prisoner. "Destroy them!"

"Varric, stop him!" she shouted, whipping her blades out of their sheaths and jumping into action.

Hawke had been expecting a fight, and she had expected to be fighting zealots, but she had not expected to be fighting so many of them. She could see the dwarf moving along the edge of the battlefield, swaying Bianca about wildly as he tried to find a good vantage point, but unfortunately, his short height had him at a disadvantage, and there were no decently elevated positions in the room. Varnell's congregation seemed determined to block the templar from the archer's view, and there were so many of them that by the time they'd have managed to thin the horde enough for Bianca to get a shot off, it would have been too late. "I can't get a clear shot!" Varric yelled.

Hawke kicked out the knee of a zealot, feeling it crunch unpleasantly under her boot, and slammed the hilt of her dagger into his temple. When he crumpled to the ground, unconscious, she turned to see how far away she was from the Qunari and Varnell.

Too far.

He had already killed the second guard, and was moving onto the third when Hawke held her breath, smashed a smoke grenade at her feet, and shrank into the shadows, trying to get closer as she pulled her shiv from her belt.

She was taking aim, when she felt someone behind her. The mere moment it took her to simply slip behind the untrained swordsman and slit his throat was still too long. The third guard was dead, and she cursed bitterly to herself.

Three more zealots noticed what she was doing when they saw their comrade fall, and converged on her just as Varnell was approaching the Qunari delegate. Her shiv in one hand and a dagger in the other, she shook her head, strategizing, prioritizing, wondering how she could possibly take the three of them down fast enough to clear a path to Varnell.

Suddenly, there was a flash, and a blur of blue light as Fenris appeared before her, knocking back one assailant with the flat of his blade and shoving his foot into the gut of another. Hawke used the distraction to slip her dagger into the lower back of the third, withdrawing it without sparing the downed zealot a glance before whirling back to her clear view of Varnell. "Stop him!" the elf shouted from her left.

She wasted no time letting her knife fly, and it sailed through the air, embedding itself right in the back of the man's head at the base of the skull. His body pitched forward, and slid to the ground in a heap, but not before using the last of his strength and his body's momentum to shove his blade into the delegate's chest. The restrained Qunari went tense for a moment, before falling limp.

"Damn it!" she shouted, but didn't have time to dwell on her failure while the battle still raged around her, so she turned and jumped back into the fray.

By the time they finally cut through the last of the untrained zealots with few injuries to speak of, the delegate was already dead, and Petrice was nowhere to be found.

The lingering silence that followed was heavy with the weight of their failure.

Hawke surveyed the scene before her, taking in the four dead Qunari and the dead templar before turning to regard the rest of the room, shaking her head at the number of bodies left on the ground. Some were simply incapacitated, others bleeding but not terminal, but most left her and her companions no choice but to kill them. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she let out a sigh. She couldn't decide if it was fortunate for her and her companions that most of their opponents were grossly untrained, manipulated into picking up a blade for a cause they didn't fully understand, or if it was simply a pointless waste of life.

One-on-one, the zealots never put up much of a challenge, but the sheer number of people who took up arms against Hawke and her friends was so large that it still presented a very difficult fight. The fact that so many people agreed with Varnell's claims about the Qunari was worrying, to say the least. Getting the giants out of Kirkwall without a war breaking out was getting more and more unlikely—especially with Petrice and her lackeys provoking them at every possible opportunity. The crazed woman was determined to drag the whole city into a holy war, and Hawke was running out of ideas of how to stop it.

It was a sad reality that it had come to something so drastic, and now the Qunari delegate and his guards were dead, killed under proposed Chantry authority while they stood restrained and defenceless before Hawke had a chance to save them.

She did not look forward to explaining this to the Arishok.

"Maker, why is this city so insane?" she grumbled to herself, shoving a hand through her hair with a frustrated sigh. "Ferelden was better than this, and they had a Blight."

Fenris approached her quietly, his brow furrowed in concern. "The Arishok needs to know what happened."

"And I'll tell him," she replied. "But first, the Viscount. Aveline?" she asked, massaging her temples with her thumb and forefinger.

"Of course," the woman responded with a curt nod before starting off for the door. "I'll bring a contingent of my guards down as well."

"Varric, could you get Anders?" She gestured to the bodies of the zealots littered all across the floor—particularly the ones who were still… writhing. "Some of these people could use some healing."

"So long as they don't try to kill us again afterwards," the dwarf muttered, but ambled off into the undercity anyway.

"Right," she mumbled to herself as they left. Looking up at the dead delegate, she hefted out a sigh, shaking her head, "I'll just be here… trying to figure out how to explain this to the Arishok without starting a bloody war."

"The Qunari respect honesty," Fenris said. "Lying to him will only make it worse."

"Of that much, I'm aware," Hawke responded, still not looking away from the dead Qunari. "I don't plan on lying to him, but soon, what I say to him won't matter anymore. Kirkwall's been digging its own grave this whole time. At this point, I'm just trying to keep it from jumping in."

"Or being pushed?"

She met his eyes, folding her arms over her chest, "Exactly."

They stared at one another for a moment, and Hawke was keenly aware of the fact that they were alone again—well, mostly. Before she could dwell on it any longer, she pulled two vials of elfroot potion from her belt and handed one to Fenris. "Here," she said, withdrawing a roll of bandages from a pouch, "let's see if we can do something about the minor injuries before Anders gets here."

"You… want to help the people who just tried to kill us?" he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"Well, if one of them tries to kill you as you're attempting to save their life, feel free to let them die."

He sighed, but nodded silently, and they both got to work, stooping warily beside two of the zealots still alive on the floor.

After a moment, she found herself laughing mirthlessly, "You know, just a few hours ago, I was sipping tea with my mother and Comptesse Baudelaire, bored out of my tree, and waiting for something exciting to happen." Fenris looked over at her curiously as she wrapped a bandage around a young woman's arm and tightly tied it off.

Shaking her head, she continued the thought with a bitter sigh: "The Maker has a damned awful sense of humour."