The sky above the Hinterlands was velvet black and pricked with a thousand stars. The Breach leant one horizon a soft greenish glow that was more beautiful than eerie, streams of colour twisting gently into nothingness. The crackle of the fire and the murmurs of the soldiers leant the camp an almost homey feel. Around them the sounds of the forest carried on its symphony of the wind in the trees and the occasional clash between two animals that had trespassed territories.

Varric really did hate the Maker-damn countryside. Even without the discovery that both templars and mages had abandoned all sense of righteousness in favour of attacking anybody who crossed their paths, he'd been bitten half to death by insects, schlepped up more hills than he'd ever encountered in his life and chased a damn druffalo almost directly into a rift. They'd found the Revered Mother just fine but as always, she'd had a laundry list of stuff for them to do in order to earn the local populace's trust, and the horsemaster that Cullen had sent them to find had refused to budge until they organised watchtowers and got rid of a pack of wolves. That meant more time out here while messages were run back and forth to Haven, and normally Varric would have long since returned to his tent with a flask of the strongest liquor available and a book to read by lantern light.

However, he wasn't the person who was feeling the worst right now, and with Solas off doing some apostate thing and Cassandra having the sensitivity of a plank, it was up to him to check on their Herald. Nicolette was sitting a little distance away from the fire, knees pulled up to her chin as she stared into the flames. The light brought out the golden hue of her eyes but she had the distant, tired expression of somebody who had seen too much and knew worse was to come.

Every single time somebody had attempted to attack them, Nicolette had tried to reason with them first. During their first fight, she had managed to avoid actually dealing out the final blow to anybody, and for the most part had hung back, still too wary of her magic to do any real damage. But the third time they were attacked, a young man had got close enough to make a stab at her and she had swung the staff Solas had sourced for her, cracking him hard on the side of the head and snapping his neck.

She had thrown up directly after the fight, and had barely said a word since.

People could disappear down a long, dark tunnel into themselves, and once they were in there it was hard to get them out. Varric had seen the gradual dimming of their light, he knew it far too well, and he knew that people too far gone no longer much cared if they lived or died. Nicolette was sliding down that slope and Varric knew he needed to remind her that there was reason to keep going. Of course, he had his own style of intervention.

"You look like you need a drink."

Nicolette pulled her gaze back slowly from the point in the middle distance where she had been staring, lips reflexively pulling up in a smile that sat oddly on her face, clearly too polite to tell him to go away. "Oh - thank you, Varric. That would be appreciated." She took the skin he handed her and knocked back a considerable mouthful.

The wan expression disappeared as her eyes bulged, and she rocked back as if she had been slapped. Her mouth worked, failing at words but producing a sound rather like a bagpipe deflating. When she could finally speak, it was with more energy than he'd heard from her all day.

"What in Thedas is in that?!"

"Blessed 8:95 Anderfels. 80 proof whisky, aged for fifty years with a secret ingredient added by the local shamans that no outsider knows of." He grinned. "You're meant to sip it."

"Batard." Nicolette was actually smiling now, as she knuckled the tears from her eyes. "That's not a drink, that's the base of an explosive."

"Technically, all alcohol is, if it's near an open flame." Varric took a delicate little mouthful of the contents, enjoying the warmth rolling down to his stomach.

"You've moved up from the dregs they used to serve in the Hanged Man."

"It was part of the ambiance. You used to drink that wine that could skin a dragon, if I remember."

"Was it wine? I'm not sure I remember."

"There's probably a good reason for that," Varric responded to her playful smile with one of his own. He held out the flask to her again, but when she reached for it, pulled it away a little. "Ah-ah. Payment. A story for a drink?"

Nicolette was emerging from the depths, looking rather more like the woman he'd met a few years previously. At the first she'd seemed young and dangerously naive, wandering through Lowtown and into the Hanged Man unescorted. The moment she'd got up on the stage, however, she'd owned the room. The denizens of Varric's favourite haunt knew what they wanted; loud, energetic music to get drunk and dance and fight to, with the occasional heart-rending song so they could fall on each others' shoulders and weep, and Nicolette had delivered.

It didn't hurt that when he later spoke to her, it turned out she already knew his books quite well. They'd got along immediately, and after a couple of months he'd even offered to set her up with a patron, but she'd declined. A few weeks after that, she had come to say her goodbyes before joining a ship headed to Rivain - with impeccable timing, as it turned out, only days before the qunari lost their minds and ransacked the city.

"What stories do you want to hear?"

"What you've been up to since we last met, for a start. How was Rivain?"

Nicolette's shoulders loosened and she sat up straight, a soft gleam in her eyes. "Beyond what I'd imagined. It's hotter than anywhere else, and the people dress in the most astonishing range of colours, with jewellery beyond imagination. And they have an incredible oral tradition of stories. Telling tales is taught as an art form there and there are competitions for it. To be in the marketplace, listening to a woman weave her tale to a hushed crowd as the smell of stone cooling at the end of the day and spiced meat drifts through the air…if I were to stay anywhere, it would have been there."

"Why didn't you?"

"The same reasons I didn't stay in Kirkwall. There's still too much of the world to see. And the qunari. I travelled towards the north at one point, where more of the population follows the Qun than the Chantry, and met qunari who aren't the stoic, silent types I knew from Kirkwall. They're so much more than the soldiers most of Thedas sees. But after the sacking of the city, tensions rose again and there was talk of a preemptive strike by the Chantry against the north of the country to discourage the qunari there from doing anything similar. I decided it was time to go."

Varric rewarded her by holding out the skin, and this time Nicolette took a smaller mouthful, letting the liquid roll slowly down her throat. "I can see the appeal now. Thanks, Varric."

"You're welcome. And how did you end up at the other side of Thedas in this armpit of a place?"

Nicolette chuckled. "Well, I knew of the discovery of the Ashes from your tale of the Blight, although - forgive me - I took that to be an embellishment to the story."

"Not to worry." Varric grinned broadly. "I'm not always lying, but it's generally a good idea to presume I am."

The colour had returned to Nicolette's face now. She really was extraordinarily pretty, a fact that had helped her keep sway over even the most difficult of audiences. However, she'd never had an audience as difficult as a hostile Chantry. It would take a lot more than looks to influence the current situation in her favour.

"Anyway I did eventually hear about the Chantry declaring it an actual religious site, and then much later on about it being the venue for the talks between mages and templars. I was already in Ferelden at the time and decided to see if I could get my stories straight from the source for a change. Maybe have a front row seat to history." She pulled a wry expression. "At least I'm alive to experience my own hubris."

Varric, to his shame, realised that he'd already been scripting out the first few lines of a new tale in his head. He hadn't felt the same way when he'd started The Tale of the Champion - back then, it had simply been a series of amusing vignettes about his friend. And then his friend turned out to have a habit of doing incredible things and the collection of stories started to become a book. It had been a joke, almost. Hawke would have found having a story published about her hilarious, especially with the spin he gave everything, but then the bad bits started to creep in. Sunshine going to the Circle. The qunari invasion of the city. Leandra's horrific death.

Eventually it had stopped being a few amusing stories and became a proper tale of a hero who paid a penalty for every success. Varric kept it going as a tribute. There were those who saw Hawke either as a jumped up refugee or as somebody who had forgotten her roots, and the book was meant to prove how much she did for everyone else. And after they'd all fled the city he'd finished it as eyewitness evidence that Hawke had done everything she could to prevent Meredith and Orsino from losing their minds.

Of course, that had resulted in him being pulled in by the Chantry to give testimony in person. So he could sympathise with Nicolette on the matter of irony.

Nicolette appeared to have divined his thoughts. "And what about you? What happened to you and your friends, after leaving your own front seat?"

Varric settled back in his chair. "We got Sunshine - Bethany - out of the Circle in the nick of time, and after the templars let us go we headed straight to the docks, picked a ship and left. Most of us. Hawke spared Anders' life but left him behind. I don't really blame her for that. Fenris chose to stay as well to hunt him, and the little princeling decided he did want to be a prince rather than priest in the end and headed back to Starkhaven. As I gather he's been making attempts to bring Kirkwall under his city-state's control ever since."

He could still remember Hawke taking aim at Blondie, the tendons on her arms standing out as the mage just stood there pathetically, no doubt awaiting his martyrdom. She'd eventually lowered the weapon, but Varric still wasn't sure if that was down to the decade of friendship before that point or because she wasn't going to give him another thing he wanted. It was easy to commit atrocities if you were determined to die in the process and not face your own actions afterwards. Making him live and feel the weight of what he'd done was possibly Hawke's version of punishment.

"As for the rest of us, we got to Antiva City and I decided to set up shop there for a while. It's not Kirkwall, but it's warm and mostly clean. I haven't seen the rest of them since then. I gather Hawke and Rivaini are still together, and Merrill's off doing…something with elven artifacts. It's safer that they haven't told me where they are, to be fair."

Nicolette rested a hand on his shoulder. He realised that he'd stopped telling the tale to her after a little while, and was staring into the fire. He missed Kirkwall. He missed his friends. Nicolette had clearly seen that and was now offering the sympathy he'd come over to give her. She had that affect on people, he'd noticed. She created an odd, confessional urge. Complete strangers just seemed willing to tell her anything.

"We can keep an eye open for them," she offered. "I'm sure you don't really want them to come to the Inquisition's notice, but we could set up some sort of communication that they can choose to answer in a secure way if they want."

"Thank you." Varric was genuinely touched, even though he actually knew exactly where each and every part of his former coterie was now (although buggered if he was letting the Seeker know that). He didn't need Nicolette's help, but he was grateful for it.

"Now. Tell me a funny story. How did that one with the cocky chevalier and the weasel go again?"

Nicolette grinned, not fooled by the distraction but happy to go with its, and leaned forward a little to begin the tale. As she span it, Varric could see out of the corner of his eyes that a few of the soldiers were turning to pay attention, some in a manner clearly meant to be surreptitious and others more overt. Gradually Nicolette's body language opened up, including others beyond Varric, and a couple who had no particular duties settled on by the fire with them.

Nicolette wasn't a fighter, and she was insistent on not using the title of 'Herald.' But she could inspire loyalty by other means, and Varric knew this was the first step there.