Characters/Pairing: F!Hawke/Fenris
Rating: G
Word Count: 1600
Prompt: from anonymous: "Fenris/Hawke, Riddlemaster of Hed AU."
Notes: The Riddlemaster trilogy, by Patricia McKillip, is my favorite book series of all time, and oh, God, I loved writing this. It's nothing to the original, but sinking back into that place even for a few minutes is one of the most wonderful things in the world.

Soundtrack: Healing Katniss, from the Hunger Games OST. (watch?v=V5kfPFBRy6M)

—

Three years after Fenris went into the heart of the Fading Mountain and did not return, a wolf fled south through Arlathan.

He barely knew his shape. His mind burned with darkness, with the unhinged terror of flight without purpose; his veins burned with the fire of the mountain's deep and dayless ore. Trees flew by him in the night, great black hands that reached through the snow for his heart, as if it had not been torn from him in Isig.

A halla lifted its head behind a tree, a crown of gold antlers glittering in the cold light of the stars. Fenris shied from her, blindly drawing silence from a forest that had known a hundred years of it; the purple eyes turned to him and passed over him, and when Marethari had gone again in shadow he crept forward from the trees' shelter, continued south.

Fear caught him like a swollen tide. The snow pitted silently beneath his feet; wind crept in his wake and turned even those signs of his passing into nothing. Isig had held no answers, not to his past, not to a single riddle in the locked spell-books of Cumberland's Circle; instead in the Golden City there sat a magister on the Maker's throne, the gold tarnished dark where his hands rested, where his velvet robes embroidered with the sun fell across the uncut jewels in its face.

Memory rose like a toothed thing, made of darkness and of fire, and of pain, and Fenris shuddered.

He ran through the night. Arlathan's forests yielded to its plains, where it was harder to keep the wolf's shape. Ice bled his toes and fatigue beat at him like the winds of Isig Pass, but he did not dare rest. A magister held the seat of the Maker's power, in the Maker's city. Shapechangers walked the world in the forms of men, with the minds of things that were not men, that were as ancient and terrible as fire, as the sea. Power had been stripped from him and given him back again in a twisted mockery of strength, as if Danarius had known that to strike him deepest would take no more than the wrenching loose of his name.

His forefeet splashed suddenly into water, and the shock tore him from the wolf-shape into his own. Fenris staggered forward, two steps, three, his skin alight from throat to heel with naked fire, burning all the greater for the ice-water that eddied at his ankles.

He had reached the Hunterhorn. He could not see its breadth in the dark; he cursed and ran his fingers wildly through his hair, turning behind him to the starlit plains, returning to pace the river he did not dare cross in the dead of night. He covered his face with his hands—and stopped, arrested once more by the silver lines that striped his palms, that ran the length of each finger to his wrists, to his shoulders, across his chest. Power thrummed in them, sealed with Danarius's name. Bound to him even now, even here, in the lands where the roots of the Dales stretched deeper than memory into the earth.

Betrayed at the door to the Golden City, his sister's eyes a falcon's eyes, hooded and impenetrable as Danarius had stretched out his hand and smiled…

He could not risk a fire. He reached wearily for the wolf-shape and had no strength for it; wind howled across the empty plain as if in sorrow, and loneliness, and grief of one make with his. It carried with it a name he had not allowed himself in three years, and a memory of laughter that cut keener than the cold.

Beyond caring, Fenris sank himself into the snow and slept.

—

He woke in the hour after dawn wrapped in furs. At first he thought he had taken the wolf-shape again in his dreams; then he felt the cured hide against his cheek, and the softness of rabbit-pelt beneath his fingers, and his heart jumped with fear.

A woman sat beside him, arms wrapped around her knees. Her hair was dark, bound in a loose braid that even now held flakes of snow in its weaving. Her cloak was dark, too, thick wool clasped over her heart with a silver griffon its only decoration. She sat on an edge of his borrowed furs; when he rose she looked to him without speaking, her eyes more lined than he remembered, her mouth more marked with too many sleepless nights. Her eyes, blue and brighter than the sky, held him fixed to the earth like an arrow.

With a voice three years hoarse, he said, "Hawke."

Her mouth tightened and he realized at once he was not dreaming, that Danarius had not conjured this image from the lightless hole of the Maker's mountain. His hands trembled and he gripped the furs, abruptly cold; Hawke said, "I looked for you."

Her voice struck him like a blow. She stood and his chest ached with the cracking of stone; she turned to survey the broad grey ribbon of the Hunterhorn as it hurried past, ice chipping its surface like glass, and he struggled to his knees. "Hawke."

"They said you went to the Fading Mountain. They said you went with your sister, and you were betrayed, and I have spent three years grieving for you only to be called from my bed in the middle of the night by winds, carrying your face and your hair gone white and a wolf's heart, and a glimpse of markings I can't begin to understand."

"The Maker is gone." Perhaps this was yet a dream. "A magister holds power in the Golden City without challenger."

She looked at him and his heart leapt, even with an expression in her eyes that he could no longer read. "He held you."

"Yes."

"For three years."

"Yes."

"Three damned years," she said, her voice breaking, and when she reached for him he saw tied at her wrist the favor he had once claimed as his own.

Her hands were cold. Her mouth was cold too, and her cheeks, and though his arms tightened around her shoulders it could not check her trembling. "I looked for you. For three years. I took shapes no daughter of Ferelden was meant to know; I went to the wastes. I learned fire. And the sea, I learned that too. I asked the Dales for help, and Orzammar, and the islanders in the east. No one knew where you were. I was halfway to the Fading Mountain to demand an answer from the Maker himself when winter came, and not even that would have stopped me if the winds had not brought me your face last night."

Overwhelmed, Fenris buried his face in her neck. Three years had robbed him of his speech; this robbed him of his mind, leaving him no thought but the wild piercing ache of twinned grief and joy, their edges bright as any blade and driven deeper in his heart. He held her closer; roughly he said, "Forgive me. I did not wish to go."

"I mourned you," she whispered, and he felt her tears seep hot into his hair. "Fenris, where were you?"

Slowly, stilting, he told her. She touched the lines that glinted silver in the sunlight thrown back from the snow; she hissed like oil in flame at the empty City, at the magister who sat on its throne and smiled even in the dark. He showed her the wolf-shape; she shaped fire from the glinting of ice and cupped it in her hands, a white-hot flame that warmed and did not burn.

"Lothering cannot hold me any longer," she told him, sorrow shot through her pride.

He nosed her fingers with the wolf's nose, curling them around the fire until it died; he took his own shape again on the white plains and spread his scarred palms before her, a yielding and a plea. "I went to the Fading Mountain to find my sister and my name. Three years have gone, and I have returned to you with less even than that."

Her breath caught. Light shook from her hands into her eyes as she reached for his face; a blade of fire touched his mouth. "You returned to me," she whispered, holding him, rooting him deep in truth. "You think I need anything more?"

Fenris shuddered, a quick thing like the shiver of a horse's withers. The Hunterhorn slid placidly behind Hawke, caught in dawn-light; at his back the plains of Arlathan stretched north, unbroken fields of snow like a painter's brush beneath the sharp blue of the sky. Pine trees speared upward in the distance, marking the edge of the Planasene Forest, and Fenris startled at his sudden longing for the city he knew lay tucked beyond it, for the wide green-glass gleaming of the Waking Sea.

He took the wolf-shape. The river glittered in his eyes, cold and crisp and clean, and Hawke laughed at his eagerness. He shook himself again at the sound, past joy, snow dusting from his fur in a cloud; then a hawk shot skyward with a piercing cry, its wings spread in a scarlet slash. He snarled in reply and Hawke shrieked again, fiercer than the first, and when she arrowed south he followed, the silent snow-bound fields eaten by her flight, by his feet, no sound in his ears but the wild strong beating of the wolf's heart.