Previously: Hawke's triumphant return to the Hanged Man is somewhat marred by Aurelia's arrival. Fenris is furious at himself for not killing Aurelia, but Hawke now has the means to turn an old trick on its maker.
Notes: this chapter contains mentions of graphic injury, violence, and death, as well as body horror and unreality.
So, so many thanks to Rannadylin for her help with the Latin (aka, Tevene) in this chapter! 3 Translations will be in the end notes.
Onward…
If asked, Orsino could tell Hawke precisely what the noise has done to her — and possibly is still doing, if her pallor and the faint tremor in her hands is any sign. Though precisely might be a stretch, seeing how he never came across a situation where he could test the damnable thing, but he was meticulous when he designed it. So, if asked, he could hazard an excellent guess. He could tell her how the noise itself is just a way to put precious seconds between yourself and your pursuers, and the spell's real prey is the lungs of the uninoculated, the delicate nerves of the fingers and face. Little horrors, easily dismissed — but a templar needs lungs to call out their commands, and a steady pair of hands to hold their sword.
A weapon of last resort. Not a hoarded coin but a nocked arrow.
If asked, he could tell Hawke so many things. And then she would splatter him across the crumbling wall of his office, and walk out of here as invisibly as she arrived. He doesn't dare wonder if it's pride, horrified or otherwise, writhing in his chest. But the spell worked, it worked —
He holds his breath to calm his heart. Hawke is watching him through her lashes while she toys with the chain. Who knows just how much she hears or sees, with that pearl — that egg — sitting next to her skin?
And what in Andraste's name is that egg capable of? His spell was designed to pull enough from the Veil to give even the most timid mage a fighting chance; Aurelia brought an entire tavern to its knees. And, if Hawke's told the truth, then the egg is behind the riots, and Maker knows what else. Unending fuel for the engines of Aurelia's magic.
He shivers. There's a taste in the back of his mouth, a dry-dust want he hasn't felt since Maceron died. Then, he could tell himself he longed for justice, and that his desires had a noble bent — but he's too old to lie now, and too tired. What he wanted then is what he wants now: power, and a way out of this hell.
So, when Hawke's eyes slide away, grow wide and distant, Orsino gathers his awareness and reaches out.
The Veil shifts about him in welcome. Cool, tattered silk brushes his cheeks. When he was a boy, he imagined streaks of iridescence wherever it touched him. The Gallows took that away soon enough, and now he feels something more like a shroud than a gift.
Be morbid later, old man.
He reaches out. He reaches out and feels the Veil flow about him, its voice just below his hearing. And something reaches back, a gentle pressure, like a soft hand against a fevered brow.
Pride is just the second-greatest of his temptations; the first will always be curiosity. The desire demon from his Harrowing promised him everything he could wish to know, if he'd only rest with them a while — he'll never know where he found the strength to say no, and trap them in a vein of light. Curiosity has lured him in a thousand forms — the demon, Aurelia's letter, the unmapped rooms beneath Darktown — and lures him now, in the steady pressure against his mind.
The only answer to curiosity is control, or so he's told the hundreds of mages who passed into his care. His first, best lesson — and he ignores it entirely. When will he come so near another miracle?
The closer he lets the presence come, the more he senses its central tension: the possibility of movement, like the moment before the harpist plucks the first string, and the moment after all sound dies, and only the memory of music remains. A paradox, small enough to be held in a gold locket, or cradled in one's hand.
Let me see you, he whispers to it, and opens his mind wide.
Hawke's head jerks up. "Orsino."
The Veil shudders around him, and power rises, trembling with interest. Too late, he thinks of the eye — the mouth? — the terrible weight of its regard crushing him, and tries to retreat. But he was too welcoming, too trusting, and when the flood comes he offers no resistance.
His eyes go dark as he's torn from his body and thrown aside like a bundle of rags. No pain, but a vast sense of displacement, and then suffocation as he's compressed into a space too small to allow breath, or thought.
When his sight clears, he sees a thin man in grey robes, spittle on his chin and skin the color of wet ash. His hair covers one eye, but the other is rolled back far enough to show only the white. A spasm wracks him from head to foot, baring threadbare shoes beneath the old robes, and a bloody wrist half-hidden by his sleeve.
"Orsino!" The voice fills the world, shoves him against the boundaries of his prison till the walls creak and threaten to break. "No — you can't — you're hurting him. Stop!"
Enough, he pleads, in the one part of his mind not screaming for air. Let me go, let me die, I can't bear it.
The man twitches and nearly falls from his chair. His mouth moves, drooling, his tongue caught again and again between his teeth while the flesh sags low along his jaw. With another spasm, his head comes up, and their gazes meet with a shock.
"Home," says the man, in Orsino's own voice. But has he ever sounded so lost? Maker, he hopes not. No voice should hold so much grief, or so little hope. "Home. Hawke."
"I know." Warmth invades the tiny space around him — Hawke's hand, closing tight around the pearl. He still sees his body, blood on its chin from a bitten tongue, and tries again to scream. "I'm sorry, just — just a little longer now. We need him to understand. Come back."
His body whines. Its feet beat at the floor, but slowly — slowly — Orsino feels the pressure lessen. He is lifted, with care, and then once more the weight of bone and muscle settles around him.
Oh, Maker, he's so old. He tastes his age, something between dust and rot, his heartbeat the awkward ticking of an unwound clock, and he'd take back the prison if he could just forget what his body's decay feels like.
Hawke says his name, close enough he smells her fading perfume, but the faint heat of her hand on his shoulder is intolerable. He pushes her away, ashamed to find himself weeping, and curls his arms around his chest as he sobs.
"I'm sorry," Hawke whispers. "I should have warned you."
He shakes his head. Not in denial, but in the awareness that knowing wouldn't have helped, and probably wouldn't have stopped him. At least he knows now why Aurelia wanted the egg so badly. Not once, in his long life, has he felt such power.
"What —" His voice betrays him by breaking after a single syllable. Another spasm builds in his legs, so he locks his knees and holds his breath until it passes. A delay is all he earns, not a reprieve, but with luck he can hold off the echoes a little longer. "You knew. It's…happened to you."
Not a question, but Hawke nods, eyes on the floor.
Old man, old man, sings a grey voice, close to his ear. How old you're growing.
"What came next?" he asks, when he feels secure enough to open his mouth.
Hawke still won't look at him, but she sighs, and says, "Something told me a story."
One of the many points in the Hanged Man's favor is its complete predictability: it will always be cheap, filthy, and dangerous, and because of these things, no one — be they city guard, templar, or neighborhood resident — will look too closely at the bodies being methodically stripped of valuables on its doorstep.
Hawke hears Isabela's cries of delight mingle with ripping fabric and the sound of Bianca being holstered. She's still on her knees, watching Fenris' stricken face and willing him to understand, though she's now acutely aware of how dirty she is, stained by sweat and at least two different layers of blood. Her left side is fairly agonizing, and she probably pulled a muscle with all the ducking and weaving she did, but still she smiles, because at last she can turn one of Aurelia's own tricks against her.
"All I need is some thread and dragonthorn," she says. "It's really simple, even I can figure it out, and Merrill and Anders both know what to do. Or we can guess. Three heads are better than one, right?"
She has to pause for breath; there's a new tightness in her chest, like the beginning of a cough. Fenris opens his mouth, the horrible blend of self-loathing and fury clarifying into bemusement, before he abruptly drops his sword and takes her by the shoulders.
"What? What is it?" Something wet drips over her mouth, thick and too hot, and when she wipes at her face, her hand comes away dark with blood. "Oh, that's just — it's nothing. Aurelia — it's fine, love."
But Fenris is already steering her back inside, leaving the others to clean up the bodies. Not that there's much to do — the rain has returned, which means all the blood will be washed away within the hour, and it doesn't take much work to drop a body in the harbor.
Inside the Hanged Man, Nella and Edwina are hard at work: mopping the floors, righting tables, with Corff sweeping bits of glass into a glittering pile. Two tables already have card games going again, though the players look a bit frayed and wild about the eyes.
"All we need is some music, and it could be any other night," she says, still letting Fenris steer her toward the stairs. "Funny, isn't it? The maddest things can happen here, and there'll still be diamondback in that corner, and no one will know what's in the stew. The maddest things."
She's doing quite well, she tells herself, in spite of the bloody nose and ruined dress. Didn't even look twice at that stain on the floor. And, she still has the silk and the hair clenched in her fist, and no, it's no the egg, because she can never really quite succeed at anything, can she, but it's almost as good. A bit of thread and some dragonthorn, and she'll finally be getting somewhere.
It isn't until Fenris gets her back into Varric's suite and shuts the door that Hawke realizes how tightly he's gripping her hand. She wonders, rather too late for it to matter, if she was saying all that nonsense out loud, and then she hears her own voice, humming lightly.
The song — well, it was only going to ever be the one, wasn't it?
oh what will you cut her up with says Miller to Mulder
She forces herself to stop, though her throat keeps trying to form the notes. Maker, she'd sew up her own mouth if it would get Fenris to stop looking at her like that, all the anger gone and something far past worry taking its place.
"Sorry," she says. "It's — it's fine. Or it will be. I just need a moment to get…get my head together."
She'll need far more than a moment for that. What dreary irony, to know she isn't mad, but that it really doesn't matter, that she still might be, by the end.
Without another word, she pulls away from Fenris' hands, and locks herself inside Varric's water closet. She lights no candles, conjures no flame, but stands facing the mirror in the dark until she hears the rest of her friends coming up the stairs.
Isabela kicks the door shut with a put-upon sigh. "You'd think I was asking Martin for every tooth in his head instead of some musty old herbs." She dumps an armful of tiny, clinking bottles on the table, then stands back with her hands on her hips. "Be careful with those, Hawke, he's not much for labeling. If they're wrong, I'll take it out of his hide, and not in the way he keeps asking me to."
Hawke nods her thanks, already sniffing at the first bottle. The twigs inside are an encouraging grey, but the smell tells her it's just a bit of ancient embrium. In fact, most of the bottles seem to be embrium, though one contains some very rotten apple peel.
There's still plenty of elfroot, and eventually she does find dragonthorn, though the peppery smell when she breaks the stem makes her sneeze. The thread worries her at first, since the only kind Varric had in his trinket-box of a suite was waxed, but beeswax is a neutral element, and shouldn't affect the working of what she's about to do.
It's probably not necessary to use the silk, but it's got Aurelia's perfume all over it, and may help focus the search. No such thing as too much help, right?
She's admiring her stitches — neat as ever, and wouldn't Mother be so proud? — when Varric clears his throat. Hawke looks up to find everyone watching her, with varying degrees of interest and alarm.
"I wasn't talking to myself again, was I?" She bites off the thread, knots it. "Or humming? If I was, sorry. Can't seem to help it these days."
Fenris doesn't shudder, but his eyes harden.
Varric looks around at everyone else, then sighs. "I'd just like to know what the hell you're doing."
"She's making a charm," says Merrill. "Because she's going looking for that woman. Aren't you, Hawke?"
"Right you are." Hawke turns the little bundle over in her hands, recognizing what she feels as disgust. Oh, and disappointment, though that's part of the bedrock by now. It's not the egg — but it's more than she's had, and she'll keep telling herself that till it feels true. "You know, my father told me a story about this sort of thing. I can't believe I didn't remember it before. He called it a maumet, though."
"A what?" This from Anders, who can't seem to take his eyes off the charm.
"It means poppet, or doll, not that you'd want to give one to a child."
"I'm going to regret asking," says Varric. "But — why not?"
Hawke rifles through the Darktown maps. Finding one that isn't stained by spilled ink or grease is a challenge, but she eventually discovers one toward the bottom of the pile and lies it flat on the table.
"There was a woman, once, whose husband was a hunter, and he was gone from home for weeks at a time. So she was lonely, but there was no help for it, because how else would they eat? One night, before he left again, she cut a bit of his hair as a keepsake. And then, once her husband had kissed her goodbye, she took a bit of clay, and a few herbs from her garden, and shaped them with the hair into a little man. She baked it in the oven, and sang over it, and the little man woke up and sang back to her, in her husband's voice."
Merrill props her chin on her fist. "We have a story like that, too, but it was a Keeper making the charm, because one of the hunters kept going too close to human towns."
In the tones of a man resigned to not liking what he'll hear, Anders says, "And then?"
"And then they quarreled." Hawke weights down the corners of the map with a few stray mugs. "When he left the next time, the woman threw the maumet down the well."
"Oh, I remember this now." Isabela blows a curl out of her eyes. "They found him miles away from water, drowned."
Anders stares at her in horror, then turns to Hawke. "Andraste, did your father want you to have nightmares? That's awful."
"That's why you don't give these to a child," Hawke says reasonably. "Father never told us what herbs the woman used, but Aurelia used dragonthorn, so…" She licks her dry, dry lips. "Well. Let's give this a try."
The moment she closes her hand around the maumet, a bright shock runs up her arm and lodges in her shoulder. It's not painful, but it is unbearable. She bites out a curse as her very bones seem to shudder, though she manages to slap her free hand down on the map and think Show me, show me where she is.
A twist of mana, the Veil rippling cold about her — and her right hand slides across the map, only to tumble off the table. Hawke lets go of the maumet, not trusting the hints of violets edging her breath to not be wishful thinking.
She's not here. She's gone. She's gone and now what chance does Hawke of finding her?
Keep trying. Don't you dare stop.
"That didn't look pleasant," says Varric. He probably would have said more, if Hawke didn't snatch up the maumet again. "Wait —"
It's worse this time, because she knows what's coming. There are teeth inside her, grinding against bone. Now she does smell violets, but only as a thin layer over a fug of rotten fruit and ash. Her right hand skids along the map, and off the table once more.
Hawke opens her eyes, winces in the light. Her teeth are chattering.
Show me, show me where she is.
"Let me try," says Anders, almost pleading. Hawke snatches the maumet away before he can touch it.
"No," she says. "No, Anders, I'm — it has to be me."
"Why?" says Fenris, the word like frost upon glass.
Because this is not what they teach in the Circles, she wants to say, nor to the Firsts of any Dalish clan. In Lothering, new husbands would leave out bowls of milk and wine for the three nights after their wedding, and hunters wore their shirts inside-out when laying traps in the deep woods. They still told stories, in the tavern, about antler-crowned women and sly laughter in the night. Wherever those stories are born, the sea lies within their sight.
Her father told her those stories, his hands casting shadows in the light of a single candle, and she wonders now — too late, always too late — how many of those stories had been lessons he couldn't teach her in the day.
And - because this sort of magic requires upfront payment, and if you make the wish, the cost is yours to pay. Make your demands, and know your price. Never offer more than you are ready to give.
She smiles at him, bright and wild. "Who else but Kirkwall's Champion?" she asks. "Part of the job description."
"Hawke." Fenris squeezes her wrist, and does not let go. "She is not your responsibility."
Her smile falls apart, like rust-eaten steel. "Then whose?" Before he replies, she closes her hand around the maumet again, and shoves.
Show me where she is.
Violets, violets in her nose and her mouth, violets rotting under a high clear sun. Hawke's right hand moves across the map, inexorable, and the buzzing moves into her neck, her jaw, but she will hold on till her hand stops, till she knows —
— and then her hand stops, and sticks. Hawke can't help laughing despite the pain. She hears the song again, but she has an answer, at last, when it asks where she's going.
"Found you," she whispers, without opening her eyes.
A gutter playwright, whose career trading in verses about Hightown nobles and their gardeners came to an emphatic end at the tip of a qunari spear, did write one line that yet lingers in Hawke's memory, three years after its author returned to the Maker's side.
Oh, all glory to Kirkwall,
The stone-clad lady of mazes;
But forget not the silent mirror,
The hive ever-buzzing
Beneath her bare and bloodied feet!
Privately, Hawke has always thought of Darktown as more of a nest than a hive, and it's rarely silent, thanks to all the screams echoing off the ill-planned walls, but the doggerel masks a very real warning; no misery runs through Kirkwall's streets without its twin lurking somewhere below.
For three years those words have echoed through her head as she laughs with Tomwise over Meeran's latest attempt to woo her back, or as she beat a spider to death with her staff after her mana ran out. And now, when she should be enjoying some well-deserved sleep, they shape her dreams, and lead her through the reeking tunnels far below hope of fresh air or sunlight.
She walks alone, through halls ill-lit and silent. And familiar, though she can't place how, or why. But certainty drives her forward, through one bleak room after another: she has been here before, and still has far to go. So she walks, and walks, and each room has something new to show her.
In one room, nine elven children lie on pallets, deathly still in sleep. Three are injured, though their wounds are bloodless, and two others have gauze wound about their mouths. When Hawke tries to go to them, the air thickens around her, heaviest at her throat. She staggers back to the path, leaving them behind.
The next chamber is nearly the size of a cavern, empty save for the staffs and empty hilts piled in one corner. Scorch marks cover the walls and floor. The smell of smoke settles on her hair and clothes as she passes through, but the weapons themselves are untouched.
On and on, unending. Whenever Hawke tries to look more closely at the rooms she passes through, silent pressure forces her onward — a blessing in disguise, because the rooms grow ever more alarming the farther she travels. One room boosts an entire feast, roasted meats and fresh fruits and cakes taller than Aveline, but a featureless, naked giant stands over the table, smearing food across its blank face. A wall of bones, faintly rattling. A room empty but for a man's low, booming laugh. A tapestry woven from human hair. On and on.
Where am I going? her dream-self screams. What do you want?
Nothing answers. Even her footsteps are silent and her heart is quiet in her chest. The rooms are shrinking, the walls closing in on either side, and when her hand brushes against them, her fingers come away wet and dark. No sound at all, not even the sea in the back of her head. Alone, alone, crouching now to fit through a door, feeling the warm press of the walls, the walls that aren't stone but soft as damp paper, shredding at a touch, at a look, and beyond them gleam white veins and red muscle, the heart of Kirkwall, beating slow and sure all around her as she walks, and creeps, and finally crawls.
And then — a room, of stone and wood, a real room. A small room, no larger than the main space in Gamlen's hovel, with a low ceiling and thin green light threaded through the rock. An empty room, except for the hole at its center, as wide as she is tall.
Not a hole: a well. The green light shines on glass-smooth water, dark as pitch, a fleshy smell rising from the surface like steam. A dark smell, alive but not - an implication of sweetness.
Hawke pushes to her feet and presses her back to the wall, where Kirkwall's heart batters against her spine. Despite the insistent rhythm, the water doesn't ripple, and the light's reflection is unbroken.
There's enough space for her to make her way — carefully — to the other side of the room, where an opening is gouged in the stonework. Faint symbols cover the walls, but the light is too weak for her to make them out. Still, they're familiar, as nothing in this place has been, so she leans forward to look at the closest set — and freezes, as someone begins to scream.
The water shivers, just once, and then the room blurs. When it solidifies, Aurelia lies on the other side of the pool. Her green silks are soaked with water and blood, her hair falls in a matted tangle to her shoulders.
"It's here, and - I found it, it's here, it's not over -"
A mass of red-robed figures eddies behind her, whispering, reaching for her, but she evades their hands, and lies twitching beside the water.
"Once upon a time," says a voice, cool and green, the voice of the light overhead, "there was a city made for a great purpose, and miracles were born there in blood and salt. There, men could walk on water and sleep within great fires never allowed to go out. Some called it heaven."
Aurelia stares at the still water, tears tracking through the dried blood on her face.
"Once upon a time there was a doorway," says the voice. The light overhead flickers, and the sweet smell grows heavy. "No one knew but the ones who guarded it, and they had no mouths to tell. So the miracles went on, their cost weighed out in lives, and the doorway — grew — thin."
Now Aurelia smiles. Behind her, the figures waver and go out like snuffed candles.
"Someone looked. Behind the door they saw a garden. The Maker's garden, ever-blooming. They reached out to take a bloom, a rose, two roses, but there was no Maker. It was not his garden."
Aurelia sits up. Now her robes are clean, now her eager eyes glow. She presses her palms flat against the water's surface. It ripples at her touch and the reflected light disappears, though it still lives within the rock overhead.
"Let me through," she hisses. Her teeth have bitten her lips raw.
"Once upon a time," says the voice. "There was a narrow place, old and narrow and cold, with a door at its end, and a guardian was set upon it. The sea was hidden away and a new one raised to take its place, and the guardian slept, a snake coiled about a branch."
Aurelia waits, still as a mountain, her slender hands resting against the shifting water.
"Once upon a time the door was opened, and there was no garden behind it. There was an eye. A mouth. A tongue flicking at a keyhole. The guardian woke alone and the door was shut but the world is thin now, and the city lies dreaming over the narrow passage. Hawke, can you hear me?"
Yes, Hawke breathes. The voice keeps going, without waiting for an answer.
"Once upon a time there was a city made of stone and mortared with blood. The garden is hungry. It smells — are you there?"
Yes.
"It is not the Maker's garden. It is not a garden. It has eaten all that lives beyond the door and if the door is opened now the guardian cannot dream it closed again. Where are you? Where did you go?"
Maker help me, what do you want me to say?
"Once upon a time —"
Aurelia lets out a glad shriek. She searches under her tattered robes and pulls free something dark and glittering, then plunges both hands into the water.
"Once upon a time," says the light. The water thrashes and spills over the edge of the well, drenching the stones in an icy flood. "There was a child. Its mother dreamed it to life. And there was peace in the dreaming. The door was thin but closed. Noli ire quo sequi non possum. Then came a thief, and now comes the unraveling. If the dream is ended then there will only be the garden and the door will not be closed. Are you there? Hawke? Please answer me. Stay with me."
A form begins to move in the water, grey listless spinning lines. It's a trick of her eyes, Anders tells her, from a long way away, just her mind trying to put a form where there is nothing at all. But the form still spins, and when Hawke moves her head — thinks she moves her head — it moves with her, sliding into sight and twisting, knotting around and around itself. Aurelia's hands grasp seize it while her knife slashes through the water.
"An end," whispers Aurelia. "For all of it. Her whole fucking city." She's weeping, and smiling. "That's all I want."
"Te inveniam, etiamsi vita mihi requiratur. Find the narrow passage," says the voice. It runs along the light, within the light. "Where did you go? Come back. Hawke. Come back to me."
An eye. A mouth. A tooth buried in the center of a rosebud. The images collide in Hawke's mind, and shatter, as the floor beneath her drops away.
Aurelia rises. Her knife drips silvery blood, and her hand is clenched around something very small, and bright.
First to come into focus are Hawke's feet, lashed into small black boots with many hooks and laces. Then her legs, sheathed in dark grey stockings, faded and pilled from many washings, with her dagger in its sheath on her calf. Then her dress, heavy black wool, the hem mud-stained. It all reeks of blood — hers, Aurelia's — and some of the fine gold embroidery is coming loose. She stares at her legs, and her dress, and the pale hands lying clenched on her thighs. Both hands are bandaged, both are reddened by the cold. Her hair straggles over her face and chest in damp tangles, all but one of her ribbons torn away. As she watches, Fenris brushes back her hair and says something, indistinct, yet urgent, and holds her when her head falls limply to the back of the couch.
Where are you?
Up here, she answers. Then: What?
Her body, far below. Her eyes, wide and staring, unblinking as rain falls from a hole in the ceiling and splashes on her cheek. Hawke, above the lamp-flame, hears Fenris say Rhyssa in a voice she heard only once before, and descends.
It is not, to say the least, a comfortable landing. Her body compresses her, tight and sore and hot, where before she was cool thought floating on air. The wound in her side aches ferociously, her eyes are full of grit from not blinking, and her lungs very badly do not want to work when she draws her first breath in an age.
She groans — Maker, this body lies so heavily around her — and clutches blindly for someone, anyone. Fenris gathers her in, breathing hard and trembling, and though his grip makes her breath twist, she lets him.
"I don't…" Her tongue is a dry root, as gnarled as a bit of ginger. She works up a mouthful of saliva and tries again. "Do I want to know?"
"You were gone." She lifts her head enough to see Anders, watching wild-eyed from the far side of the room with the others. "You started laughing, and then you just - you just stopped, and said, It's very deep, isn't it?, and then —"
"Enough," says Fenris. He's shaking, wet-eyed.
"It's not nearly enough." Anders strides forward. "What happened. Hawke?"
Once upon a time there was a mother who lost a child, and so ended a dream that held closed a mighty door.
Instead of replying, Hawke wraps both arms around Fenris' shoulders and holds tight. The tension in his body remains until she slides her hand into his hair, and then he uncoils at once, almost slumping over her.
"I'm here," she whispers against his ear. He shudders. "I'm — oh, Maker, I'm sorry. I'm here, love."
He whispers back, in scattered Tevene. She recognizes the words now: Don't go where I can't follow, the last unconquered fear reduced to six quiet words.
"I'm here," she says again. And again, until Fenris sighs and sits up, leaving her blinking, mole-like, in the light of many lamps and candles.
"Hawke," says Varric, wearily. "An explanation would be nice."
"I'm sure it would." Hawke finds her left hand is still closed in a fist, and forces her fingers open. The maumet nestles in her palm, damp and smudged by her sweat. She waits, for the sea, for the egg's small voice, and hears nothing.
So, where to begin? Again?
Once upon a time there was a city, and it was never far from danger. Once upon a time there was a garden and it was no garden at all.
Once upon a time, there was a woman named Hawke, and she thought she might be useful.
She stands up, with her arms still about Fenris' shoulders, and decides to figure it out on the way - the way she's walked once already this night, into Kirkwall's dark, living heart.
Translations
Noli ire quo sequi non possum: Don't go where I can't follow.
Te inveniam, etiamsi vita mihi requiratur: I will find you, if it takes my life.
