In the end, they did walk back to the chateau. Fenris couldn't be more tense, walking half a step behind her, as if to catch her if she would run. The air became cooler, though at least three fourths of that was thanks to the morbid silence between them. She felt as though a hidden blade pushed at her back and she was walking at the assassin's behest to her quiet little death.

He unlocked the door and waited for her to get inside. The servants left fresh towels and chocolates on the bed and there were pink and violet and blue candles aswarm on the table. There was a piece of paper near the candles neatly signed by Édouard.

Fenris gave away nothing. He merely started up the fire. To put it in the simplest terms, a bad feeling came over her, a feeling of falling. How could she explain herself when she could scarce believe what she was seeing?

At once she began to talk to him. She couldn't even remember precisely what she was saying after she'd said it. She was asleep in the carriage on the road back from Antiva. She saw Constantine, the soldier whose brother was thought dead by Fenris' hand, but who he actually freed. She saw Fenris taken out of solitary, and almost skeletal. She saw Danarius' ugly shoes and how he made Fenris count the lashes. She was so flustered that she didn't know what she should say to explain it all, and very slowly she sensed danger just as surely as she had before with Fenris. In fact, his smooth and calm face with its large green eyes seemed suddenly filled with pure hatred. Then a wall went up behind his expression. He closed down.

She realised with horror that he could throw her in the Spire in less than two hours if he was really determined.

Fenris turned away and rested his arms at the window and watched slowly, thoughtfully, as the sky lost its colour and its light.

"Were there others?" he said in a low voice. She barely made out what he said. "Or was that the only time?"

There was a long pause from the rocking chair where she sat. She saw him lower his head in the moonlight.

"It was not… it was not the only time," she said in a weak voice.

"What else did you see?" he said in a threateningly monotone voice.

Her face tightened. "Fenris—"

"What else did you see?" he reiterated.

"I…" she said. She felt a wave of unbearable heat at the base of her skull, and quite suddenly it was everywhere. "I can't breathe!" She sat up and with anger, tore out her girdle and then the dress entirely. Then she went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Fenris took a look behind him at the torn dress on the floor. He thought, how ironic it was that he had wanted to do exactly that ever since she put it on, and how quickly that became a giant flop. He felt sick to his stomach. He wanted nothing.

Then he saw her suddenly rush back into the room, all flustered and red, her tail almost undone with the ribbon very low, and barefoot, only in her black tight shorts and a teal shirt.

"I saw a jungle. A-a tropical forest of some sorts. I knew because it was very hot—". She stopped as Fenris turned back to look at her, his mouth open, his eyes a mess. "—and the forest was sort of coming down on you with huge vines and thick eucalyptus and banana trees and there were monkeys and—"

"Seheron," he said, his eyes moving in that way as though they were beholding something completely other than what was right in front of him.

"I saw a boy with a sword over his shoulder… walking through the forest. He had the same… the same hair as you. In that mirror…"

She saw a raw glimmer of fear, and then a look of desperation. Maybe it was just the candlelight, but his eyes seemed to gleam as though they were watering slightly. She felt this catch in her throat. He looked away from her, humiliated, shattered. He stared into the fire, while Hawke stared at him with obvious concern. She was still shaken. In fact, she was beginning to panic. Everything is coming to an end, she thought. But what did that mean? Why did she say things to herself when she didn't even know what they meant?

"Was there glass?" he asked, his voice frail and weak. "Were there glass buildings, in the… in the dream."

Her eyes moved in the different directions, and he knew she was trying her hardest to remember.

Soon her scared little mouth cracked open: "There was… a lot of light. In the distance… it looked like towers, yes, giant translucent towers… as if made out of glass."

Something dark and terrible and painful went over his face. He looked the other way. Silence. Dim distant voices from the boulevard below.

No. How did she see these things? Help me. She tried to raise a hand to her mouth but could barely feel it.

"That was… that was everything I saw. I don't— I don't know how! I swear."

Fenris stared into the fire. He did not appear rude or hostile, but preoccupied, preoccupied enough to ignore her, preoccupied and anguished. His eyes moved uneasily over the burning logs.

"Was this before or after we supposedly met in a dream?" he finally said. He caught that commanding tone again.

"Before… and after." Then she went dim. "All those times we slept next to each other."

He continued to stare, clearly thinking.

"What am I to make of this?" he said in a deep, crisp tone. "That you go to sleep, and wake up in my head?"

"I don't know," she cried. She put her hands to her temples. It was as if the thoughts were hurting her head. She made a sudden, defeated movement. "Probably. It is as foreign to you as it is to me, Fenris. Such things have never happened to me before."

"What makes you so certain?" he asked meanly.

"I can't be certain. Sure, I'd see some people in my dreams… but they were just dreams. How do you go about asking random people if what you dreamt of them the other day is in fact true? Hey Carver, I had a dream last night. Did you really unbuckle your pants and compare penis sizes with Andrei?"

"Then why were you so certain what you dreamt of me was true? When you slipped earlier?"

She gave a sigh. "It was too much." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Too much… and too vivid."

Too frightening that. She didn't want to see it. She didn't want to feel what he felt!

He looked up at her in silence. He felt like he was going to suffocate. He took off his navy coat, tossed the breastplate, tossed his boots aside.

Then a weariness took hold of Fenris and he settled in the dark burgundy armchair and looked up, perhaps at the peacocks painted on the ceiling, and he closed his eyes.

She stood there, stiff and unsure of what to say, what to do. She quickly disappeared into the other room, and came back with a shirt in her hands.

"I- I got you something," she said in a soft voice. "I really liked that blue-green shirt you sometimes wear. It really does suit your eyes… I thought you could use another like it."

He said nothing. She stood there, again, unsure of what to do. She tossed it on him and immediately he felt the cold satin soothe his skin. He continued to say nothing and changed into it, leaving it open. It really was cold and just nice.

Then she flashed away again. She brought two bottles of wine and set them on the little table next to him. She brought out one of the rocking chairs closer to him and blew out the corks.

He rolled up his sleeves and devoured straight into one of the bottles. Then he simply stared at it.

"Don't worry. You can throw this one at the wall too. We've got a whole carriage."

He gave a faint little scoff. "How comforting."

"Would that I could repair even a little of what I have broken," she said and drank up.

"Would that I could understand how we even got here," he said with a blank expression towards the fire, drinking up too.

"I have not done this with intention," she said. "I did not even know one could do this without intention."

"So one could do such a thing as go into people's heads?"

"Somniari do. They literally go into people's heads. I mean…" She pondered and pointed the bottle towards the nothingness. "With blood magic you can invade someone's subconscious, surely. Without it, the closest I have experienced was being invited into someone's subconscious."

He frowned.

"My father and I would go into the Fade and walk inside his memories… he showed me places he had seen, fighting techniques he'd seen, all manner of magic and mages he'd seen… He considered it the best education he could possibly give." She shook her head. "But that was a deliberate, conscious invitation which required a clear, deliberate and, indeed, conscious use of magic. Just like our bodies are paralyzed during sleep so we don't injure ourselves, mages cannot spontaneously use magic while they sleep. Nobody has ever set a shed on fire in their sleep. And of course, you are not a mage and, and a mage cannot enter an unconscious person's Fade-mind without buttloads of lyrium around, and a glyph and a ritual. We've done this with Feynriel."

"Smashing," Fenris said in that deep voice of his. "Another bloody riddle."

"In the Constantine-Danarius memory, as soon as I realised I was dreaming, everything became powerfully vivid, so vivid that I'd… felt the lashes."

He painfully closed his eyes.

"But the Seheron memory was totally different. It took ages to realise I was dreaming. The images in front of my eyes were mingled, diffuse, constantly shaking. There were tremendous gaps. One moment you were in the jungle, the other moment you were in a village. I kept losing you, losing sight, losing track of who I was. It was painfully difficult to concentrate."

"Well, now you know how us ordinary mortals feel inside the Fade," he said in a monotone voice as he drank.

"I think it's more than that," she said eagerly, and tucked her leg under her bottom. "I think this means your amnesia is merely an artificial wall built between your waking self and the memories before the ritual. The memories have never truly vanished, rather they lie underneath, distantly alive like old ruins."

All this time he had a hand over his face. "I tire of this," he said in a low voice.

She closed her mouth and watched him thoughtfully. "I will say no more." She drank up, and with a painful expression, added in a soft voice: "Just know, never under any circumstance would I deliberately seek to invade your mind or your thoughts. I may not be an abomination, but … I've done enough. I… will get you back to Kirkwall tomorrow and we can… I will stay away."

He took his hand away from his face and stared at her. It came to him in a silent flash that she meant every word and she knew she was different in a horrible and mortal way. He had almost forgotten who he was speaking to. She knew it and the knowledge sealed her up as if she were buried alive inside herself.

He came up in the chair and softly, wordlessly, took her hand in his. He locked the knowledge of the boy in Seheron into a dark box in the recesses of his mind. He would not think of it. If he was being frank, the knowledge had hurt her more than it did him.

"That will be unnecessary," he said in forgiving voice. The little traceries around his eyes designed just a little anguish. He tried to produce words and when he failed, he slowly shook his head. "You are no ghastly thing to me… but merely that which is strange," he said in a deep voice that softened towards the end.

"You don't know me," she said. She was tearing up. "You think you do. But you don't." She looked terrible and beautiful. Like somebody at a funeral looks terrible and beautiful.

"I don't care…" he said. It was a tone she'd never heard from him before. His voice was low, markedly soft, but rather hard.

Hesitation. She looked suddenly blank, lost. He broke off as if unsatisfied, and looked into the fire. No wonder they gathered around fires so much. They gave them something to look at when they couldn't look at each other.

"You think you saw something in those dreams," he said. He was shaking his head. "You saw nothing." He tightened his hands over hers. "Just… stop giving me heart attacks."

She broke into a little laughter between tears, very pretty laughter.

"I don't… I only…" She was looking to say something, but couldn't. Her face was rosy and her eyes glittering against all the tears. And her hair was a beautiful mess.

"You only…?"
She looked dreadfully lost in some ugliness inside her head. "I don't know. I don't know what I want to say." She started to drink again. "Just ignore me."

"You can take your 'I'm okay' hat off," he said. "It's me. Fall apart. I'm not going anywhere."

He pulled her suddenly, so fast that she could scarce notice when she ended up in his lap. He took her arms and planted them around his neck. The crackling candlelight mingled with that odd and intimate way in which he looked at her. He wrapped one of his arms around her waist, and with the other he brought her legs up on top of his own.

"There was always the promise behind that mocking smile that you knew great things or terrible things, had commerce with levels of magic I could not possibly guess at," he said. He looked thoughtful, and the blaze of the fire merely coated his warm gaze. "And I knew I would one day come to find out, but how it came about, I could not quite guess. And from this whole matter, I achieved a somewhat consistent detachment."

"Consistent detachment?" she said in surprise. "This is not just some new piece of strange knowledge. This is nothing you could have prepared yourself for. It affects you personally, in a manner I could have never imagined."

But there was something deliberately serious in his expression as he looked up at her, his lowered lids rising languidly, his eyes almost black. "You affect me personally, in a manner I could have never imagined."

She sat silently, weighing that for a moment. She felt herself gently transfixed, unable to do anything really but look into his eyes. Her heart was speeding up and she looked raw and curiously innocent, and for a moment he just held her, aware that he wasn't hiding too well all the things that were on his mind. But then he had a sudden scary feeling she was going to cry. If there was a tuba in the room at that moment he wouldn't have heard it. He would have heard only this pumping of his own pulse in his head.

But then her hands at the back of his neck lightly brushed through his hair and she brought his forehead to hers. He held onto her wrist and they sat there with their eyes closed. Everything was rolling together, this old insane need to invade her with affection, with all his thoughts, to have her close, close enough that he could protect her, and then there was only this perfect, intimate warmth between them, like a chamber of the heart. Her lips gave a bitter twist of a smile. "I'm gonna bake Anso a pie."

He cracked into a low, husky laugh that vibrated through her forehead, and the fire was crackling and the air filled anew with an icy draft moving along the room that meant it was colder outside, and maybe it was snowing. He couldn't see out the windows from his position, but he could feel that it was snowing.

"Fenris, I brought you here because I wanted to tell you things before you make any promises," she said, as she played with his hair.

"There's more?" he said in a voice too tired to be surprised. It was getting really chilly in the room and he wanted to close the window.

She caught his face and brought it back to look at her. "There's more," she said softly, caressing his cheek. "And if it serves as any comfort, what you're about to see is no unsolved mystery."

"See?" he said, with the same languid move of the eyelids. A tiredness came over him. He didn't care for stories. He wanted to scoop her up and throw her and himself in the bed.

"I am no storyteller," Hawke said with a bitter smile. "If you trust me, I think I could do much better than that."

And then he saw her eyes, clearly, as they shimmered blue by a force emanating from outside. It was his markings blazing up like a lighthouse. But they weren't burning. Rather they glistened merely to inform him that magic was about.

"What… what are you doing?" he asked. He felt weakened, drugged. He was freezing.

"It's not fair that I was in your mind," she said. She looked saddened and eager all at the same time. She took a hold of him again, brushing her warm fingers gently over his forehead, and kissing it. "I'm inviting you into mine."

The cold flesh surrounding Fenris's green eyes quivered, and there was something both skeptical and imploring in his expression. He took a deep easy breath, the silent semblance of consent. "One last heart attack," he said in a deep tone.

"Take my hand," she said with a smile that said he was safe. "No more rookie transitions. You're gonna fly with me."

As if to the moon… because a white light blinded his eyes.

And then a velvet blackness took over. Low murmur of voices, talking, arguing… A flash of wings. He was getting dizzy. He was going to fall. But then he saw the glistening wings rise up over him, out of her. He held onto her elbow now. There was but a mountain in the distance, but how far away it was he could not make up in the dark. But then from every side the darkness took shape into faces, horrible faces, terrible demons with red holes for eyes and indistinct bodies, merely tethered to the darkness. Yet even this ugliness was curiously outside of him, like an insect pressed against a glass which caused no fear because it could not touch him. He saw the immense obliterating darkness shoot up as if from a volcanic rip and then the light swallow it up. Blinding, beautiful light. No glass city.

Only snow over lifeless mountains and the sound of wings.