This world sucks. Let's visit one that arguably has even bigger problems.
Fly?
When I began reclaiming my memories, the Nightmare took notice.
It started with Sera, likely sensing how deep her fear of demons ran. "Sera, Sera, Sera," it crooned. "If you shoot an arrow at me, I'll know where you are."
My head snapped to the side to look at her, and I reached out my hand to take hers, even as she spoke: "Out of my head, bitch-balls!" Her voice strained and frightened, and her fingers trembled in mine.
The rest of us exchanged grim looks. "Pretty sure it already knows where you are, Buttercup," Varric told her. "Otherwise we wouldn't be ass-deep in demons. Your best bet at this point is to make a pincushion of it."
Her jaw was clenched, but she looked as determined as she did frightened. She pulled her hand from mine in favor of readying an arrow. "Yeah - gonna fuck him up good, right?"
"That's right," I said, echoed by Varric's, "That's the spirit - "
He was cut off by the Nightmare's voice. "Ah, Varric - you know, Hawke is once again in danger because of you. You found the red lyrium. You brought Hawke here…"
"Sure, Smiley - just keep talking," he muttered in reply, and it was clear that the accusation had struck him.
"As though I would have missed any of this once you told me about it," Hawke scoffed. "I was already planning to go to Crestwood - we would have put it all together before too long. You just made things more efficient."
I didn't know whether it made Varric feel any better, though I thought it was probably true. I tried to catch his eye, but his jaw was still clenched, and he stared stubbornly ahead.
"Hawke…did you actually think you mattered ?" the demon asked her as she apparently drew its attention. "Did you think anything you ever did mattered? You couldn't even save your city. How could you expect to strike down a god? Fenris is going to die, just like your family, and everyone you ever cared about."
"Well, this is already growing tiresome," she sighed.
Cassandra laughed shortly. "As though you haven't already changed the world. The Left and Right Hands of the Divine both came to Kirkwall looking for you precisely because you already mattered - and what you have done for the Inquisition since has been invaluable. If we ultimately fail, it won't be because you failed to do your part."
"Thank you, Cassandra," Hawke replied.
"Besides," Varric muttered, the demon's attack on Hawke breaking through his silence as little else probably could have, "if anything gets Broody killed, it's gonna be attempting to single-handedly disrupt the entire slave trade along the coast of the Marches. You'd have to be delusional to think you could stop him - or that he would let you help."
Hawke's laugh was rueful. "I'm not sure that's a comfort , but I can't deny it's true."
"Now I suppose it will be my turn," the Seeker said, resigned.
"Your Inquisitor is a fraud, Cassandra," the demon told her, right on cue. "Yet more evidence there is no Maker, that all your 'faith' has been for naught."
I stumbled as I began to laugh, and had to stop walking. To my surprise, Bull started laughing, too. "Can you tell this thing is getting desperate?" he asked.
Cassandra was walking ahead of me, though she paused to toss a grim smile over her shoulder, the line of her back neither stiffening nor bowing. "Hard for my Inquisitor to be a fraud when she has disavowed any specially-ordained purpose from the very beginning," she agreed wryly. Of all the demon's verbal attacks, I thought Cassandra's was the one that had so far shot widest of its mark.
"Wonder what it's got for me," Bull said.
"Won't you make a lovely host for one of my minions?" the Nightmare asked him. "Or maybe I will ride your body myself."
This time it was Sera who giggled, the sound still strained and at least half hysterical, but her words were true: "Stupid idiot doesn't even know we already covered that!"
"Guess it wasn't listening," I agreed. "I suppose that just leaves, me, Stroud, and Solas. I wonder what mine will be. My blindness getting you all killed? My clan's disappointment in me?"
"Ah, yes, the blind Inquisitor," the demon sneered. "Of which blindness will the stories speak, do you think? Your physical inability to see, or your willful trust in a man you know is lying to you?"
I let out a breath, wondering if the demon had managed to cut this close to the bone for the others, no matter what responses they had given. "Well," I said, deciding to simply answer the question, "knowing the way legends go, they'll probably conflate the two."
"As long as we speak of blindness…" the demon went on. "Ahnsul suinala, harellan?" it chuckled. "Dirtha!" It laughed again, mockingly. "Ma banal ensalin, thuast nuvi'sulenas. Mar solas ena mar din."
" Banal nadas ," Solas replied.
In my head, I translated - or tried to. Elvish was slippery, especially when a listener didn't understand the subject being spoken of, though I found that being in the Fade helped. It reflected the intent of the words, to a degree. I could almost see their meanings - like trying to match objects to their silhouettes.
Ahnsul suinala, harellan ?
Why silent, traitor?
Traitor? The word didn't quite match the intent I had read in the Fade as it was spoken. Defector…renegade, perhaps? That seemed closer, if still not quite right.
Dirtha!
Speak!
Ma banal ensalin, thuast nuvi'sulenas .
This one was more difficult - perhaps more deliberately vague. The first part might mean either "your victory was for nothing" or "you care for nothing but victory." Or both. The second part was "whatever you pretend."
Mar solas ena mar din .
Your pride will be your death.
Banal nadas .
The literal translation would have been "nothingness inevitable" or "destruction inevitable." Reaching, it might also have meant "Blight inevitable" as a secondary implication - banalhan was the word for Blight, but Elvish punning allowed for and often encouraged reading meaning into words with the same sound or root. There was no action word, which usually implied the action of existence, but without regard to time. So a translation might be: "destruction is, was, and will be inevitable."
That was, on the one hand, ominous, but it was also true in a philosophical sense. Solas's meaning, as reflected by the Fade, was vast in its scope, which made me think he meant it philosophically.
Still…victory over what ? Defector or renegade from what? The pairing of those two ideas made me think that the Nightmare wasn't speaking of Corypheus. And when had he been marked with vallaslin ? How and why had he removed it?
I was so involved in working through the translation, I didn't even really hear what the demon said to Stroud. Instead I found myself, as we walked on, stealing glances at the man who was somehow both my heart and almost entirely unknown to me. Solas knew how hard the demon's words had struck me, just as I knew that his stoicism covered gnawing doubt and terrible loneliness. He likely also knew that I was turning over every possible translation, seeking to understand the words he and the Nightmare had exchanged. And how did he feel about that ?
I couldn't tell. There were a great many emotions he simply refused to entertain, and the rest were too jumbled together for me to pick out responses to specific provocations.
Only when several demons attacked us did it fully break me from my reverie, forcing me to refocus on the task at hand: defeating the Nightmare.
Reclaiming my memories at least had the effect of making me less viscerally terrified of the demon. It still scared me, and I still wished we had taken another way out of the Fade, but I wasn't paralyzed once it no longer possessed a part of me. On the less positive side, everyone accompanying me apparently got to experience my memories, too. Hawke noticed a detail that the rest of us overlooked: the ones holding the Divine for the ritual Corypheus intended to perform were Grey Wardens.
"Whatever piece of the Divine may still reside here in the Fade," Hawke said, gesturing dismissively when Solas tried to explain how someone's physical body could die while a part of them lived on, "the mortal Divine perished at the temple," she turned to pierce Stroud with an accusing glare, "thanks to the Grey Wardens."
"As I have made clear, the Wardens responsible for that crime were under the control of Corypheus," he reminded her. "We can discuss what is to be done further once we return to Adamant."
"Assuming that the Wardens and their demon army didn't destroy the Inquisition while we were gone," Hawke retorted.
"How dare you judge us?" Stroud fired back. "You tore Kirkwall apart and started the mage rebellion!"
She rounded on him. "Kirkwall tore itself apart, and what I did, I did to protect innocent mages - not madmen drunk on blood magic! But you'd ignore that, because you can't imagine a world without the Wardens - even if that's exactly what we need!"
"Agreed," Solas chimed in eagerly. "The Wardens may once have served a greater good, but they are far too dangerous now."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Did my beloved even know what the word "circumspect" meant ? "Merciful Creators, stop!" I snapped at both Hawke and Stroud as the Warden sucked in a breath for a retort, coincidentally letting Solas's comment pass without drawing further attention to it. "You really want to have this out here ? Now ? We are trapped in the Fade, in the lair of an ancient fear demon!"
As if to underscore my point, several minor demons appeared, having picked up the trail of our emotions.
"Live now, argue later," I advised them.
They exchanged a half-guilty, half-resentful glance, and helped me kill the demons.
After, we followed the now-gently-glowing form of Divine Justinia through the Fade, first as she led us to the rest of my fragments of memory, and then as she bypassed or disarmed the traps the Nightmare had littered across the path. There were demons to fight, of course, and minor manifestations of the Nightmare, which appeared to most of us as spiders, but to Cassandra as maggots, and to Sera - well, she refused to say.
At last the spirit of the Divine led us to a barrier across our path forward - the Nightmare's final defense, or so it appeared. We held off waves of its fearlings and of demons drawn to our presence as she worked to dismantle it, quickly finding a rhythm that allowed each of us to take brief rests while the others held off our attackers. It was as much a test of endurance as skill, but we had taken only minor wounds by the time the barrier fell, all easily healed before we went on.
All of us could sense the Nightmare by that point - it knew we were coming and knew what we wanted. It was waiting for us.
Even so, I don't think any of us were quite prepared for how massive it was.
The Nightmare held the shape of a giant spider, the tops of its legs as tall as a century-old fir tree, though its carapace was more crab-like than spider-like. I realized, looking more closely, that it was covered in twitching eyes - all across its head, over its mandibles, and even down its legs - many of them weeping clear fluid.
"Nope," Sera gulped. "Nope, too big, too creepy, too - eugh !"
"The only way out is through," Cassandra reminded her.
Behind us, there was a flair of light. I had forgotten about Justinia, and it seemed everyone else had, as well. "If you would do me one final favor," she said, flowing around and between us as she advanced, "give Leliana a message from me. Tell her…I failed her, too." Then the former Divine - or whatever it was that remained of her - flew at the Nightmare, driving it back. It was only then that I saw its smaller aspects - a handful of fearlings and a hideous spider-headed darkspawn.
They didn't seem like much of a challenge after what I had thought we would be facing - and, indeed, relief made the fight feel simple, even though the darkspawn aspect was a powerful foe with considerable magical ability. We still struck it down with what felt like ease, and then there was nothing between us and the rift.
After a glance swiftly exchanged amongst the eight of us, we all simultaneously bolted towards the rift.
But it was then that the light Justinia had been shedding flickered…and died.
The Fade trembled as the Nightmare shrieked in jubilation. Its bulk shifted, one of its loathsome legs nearly turning Cassandra, running at the front of our group, to pulp.
"We need to clear a path!" Hawke yelled.
"Go!" Stroud replied, gesturing toward the rift. "I'll cover you." He turned to Hawke. "You were right. The Grey Wardens caused this. A Warden must - "
"Absolutely not!" I snapped. "We aren't sacrificing someone so the rest of us can get away. We leave together or not at all!" We had destroyed a powerful aspect of the Nightmare. It would be a little weaker now - or at least I thought it would be.
Hawke was muttering something, toying with a flask she had taken from her belt. "Varric," she said suddenly, "tell Fenris that if I learn to fly, I'll come back for him." Then, before any of us could even begin to take in her words, she threw the flask on the ground.
Alchemical invisibility.
Varric lunged for her - too late - but I wasn't bound by physical sight. I could track her aura regardless of what alchemical tricks she used. The only trouble for me was the way she moved - quickly, darting and weaving, tumbling one way before leaping another. "Tuelanen ghilaan ma'da'lav," I breathed, reaching for her with my magic.
I missed.
I tried again.
And missed again.
A third time - she was almost impossibly quick, and moving beyond my range - and still she slipped through my grasp.
"No," I whispered, unwilling to let the failure stand. If I could see, I could run, and Hawke had to stop at some point if she intended to face down the Nightmare.
I leapt into motion - and was immediately stopped by an arm thrown around my waist.
"Let go!" I demanded of Solas, the owner of the arm restraining me. "I have to go after her!"
"I certainly will not ," he spat. " You are not expendable!"
" No one is expendable!" I cried, struggling as he dragged me backward. "We aren't - we can't leave her!"
Giant hands closed carefully over my shoulders. "She made her choice, Boss - a selfless one. Let her die as the hero she wants to be."
"Vanish," Varric said, his hand briefly touching mine. "There's nothing you can do. Throwing your life away won't get her back."
I stopped fighting and stared down at the dwarf, his face a mask of shock and, rising swiftly behind that, terrible, unspeakable grief. If even he was against me…
"No sacrificial pyres for you today, kid," he sighed heavily. "Let's go home."
Tuelanen ghilaan ma'da'lav: Creators guide my hand
Even though making the Inquisitor choose between Hawke and the Warden made sense from a gameplay perspective, it never made even the smallest bit of sense to me from a narrative perspective. Have you met Hawke? Taking orders doesn't seem to be one of their strengths.