As the memory of her went back into the house, Fenris was prepared to be thrown into the vacuum again. Yet that didn't happen. Merely, she lowered her gaze towards his hand, touched it and pondered for a while.

It felt like skating on ice to him, the way he traveled through one piece of herself to the next, but it didn't matter. It was an illusion that he was in danger, and now the facts came, the things he had always known were there. Form is what they had lacked. But he'd known.

Undecided, she tapped the top of his hand several times, then grabbed it in earnest, and there came the blighted swoosh. Only it wasn't very... swooshy.

Instead it felt as if his shoulders were pulled slightly backwards, a coldness at the back of his neck and a hotness over the top of his forearms, and then... the best way to describe it was this: it felt like a whole layer of existence was lifted.

And when this curtain of being rose such that he felt it down to the last nerve in his spine did he see—they were sitting on a bench.

The bench was near a large gate. What was it gating? A garden by all sensible evidence. And it was a beautiful thing, the more he looked at it. The gate was guarded by two withering magnolia trees encased in their own fallen petals, and the iron lace railings covered in a blue tapestry of forget-me-knots. There was an ornate street lamp above their heads, but the light was azure rather than golden. The wind blew.

"Let's go," she said.

But Fenris seemed to lag behind, turn round, caught up in the scenery. Why? What could impress him that he hadn't seen before? He caught her disapproving gaze, and walked towards her.

"This is no memory," he said calmly.

She merely inhaled, not denying it outright, and took off.

He followed her along the small path swallowed in high greens and lilac. He thought he heard the howling of dogs. He looked up to the pinkish violet sky as it got blotted out by bigger, darker leaves and twisting branches, wreathed as they were by the blue swarm of flowers. The light would come in thin dusty shafts through them. Bees sang in the tangle of leaf and blossom above them. Never mind that it was so sombre here, so damp.

He thought he saw the lizard demon snaking his way between some rose bushes, and surely she'd seen that. She simply didn't care.

She took him slowly over cracked and uneven paths, under a broken archway of oak branches, the light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in those drowsy fragrant blossoms. But the decay here troubled him nevertheless. Spiders wove their tiny webs over the lacy iron fences and the leaves. In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch.

And when they reached the violet-grey house at the heart of it, with its own dilapidated little fence, very much choked in the petals of forget-me-knots, Hawke let go of his hand.

"This is as far as I can go," she said, quite deliberately forcing a smile.

And so Fenris broke out of his own sordid perusal and finally looked at her.

A dread came over him. She looked grey. The garden looked grey. Nothing smelled or felt good. It was as if an empty gloom had gripped his world, and all colours and sensations had paled in it. She looked as if she'd come in with him and stopped here, when in fact it was way behind that her soul had made the halt.

"I…" he said and looked behind at the house, "I don't understand."

And then he did see, clearly this time, how that blasted lizard was looking at them from atop a twisting branch, patient and grim and almost hungry.

"What is the meaning of this?" he said a little curtly.

"What?" she said, and looked in the direction he was looking. She crossed her arms around herself, as if she were cold. "Never mind him."

"I will always mind," Fenris said.

"He hopes…" she said and sighed. "He hopes I'll give him something to do, like I did Murmur. He thinks it will be the upkeep of this… place."

Immediately he frowned. "Upkeep? … Why?" He titled his head. "Why this place?"

"It doesn't matter," she said.

"Surely you haven't dragged me here to add more mystery," he said.

She nodded to herself and slowly walked past him to grab the tip of one of the little gate bars. She gave one look towards the house and glanced back at him, her eyes immediately tightening, her whole face curling in what seemed like a terrible hurt.

"It doesn't matter because I do not wish to forget."

And so Fenris' eyes slowly but surely doubled in size, as he took a better look at the object of her devastation, as he finally realised that the violet-grey house was in fact a mausoleum.

"As easy as it would be for this spirit to take away this pain, this—" she said, and swallowed her breath, trembling, "—this terrible nightmare that I have in my heart which could sooner eat me rather than leave me—"

She bowed her head.

"I… made—am making my peace with it," she said and finally looked up, somewhere far away, "with the fact that I will never know nor understand why it happened and why it had to happen in the way that it did."

Fenris frowned, and listened.

"I… will never forget," she said, her eyes closing and her temples tightening again. She seemed like she wanted to look back, yet she'd lifted her eyes onto his, terrible though they might be, and she clamped the pointy tips of the bars, and her voice seemed to hollow and tighten under a ball in her throat and she looked sick. "But that doesn't mean I wish to relive it," she said.

But Fenris said nothing. Absolutely nothing, at least not in words. She only saw Fenris' eyes, pure green and round, as if the blinds that covered them were lifted… and she saw the look of someone who knew, immediately knew the awfulness behind the meaning of her words even before any manner of particularity or fact revealed themselves. There was no brooding, no connecting of clues or dots, no speck of thought but the immediate recognition in his eyes of the kind of thing that would truly ruin a person.

The gate creaked open before she knew it.

The Mausoleum

There were six gravestones in the crypt, each entwined in climbing pink roses. The sorrowful theatricality was not diminished as the sound of the rain began slamming over what he saw to be little stained-glass windows—one on each wall— in the shape of an armoured knight atop a risen horse. Its front hooves were pointed towards a sun with elongated rays, however the knight did not have his or her sword up. There was a bird afloat whose wings seemed to wrap around the knight's shield from behind to cover whom it was loyal to. Finally, the knight seemed to carry a withered, rag-like Ferelden banner on his back. A faded forget-me-knot overlapped with the heraldry.

Such a Fenris thing to stare at details in the background before regarding the elephant in the room. But his eyes did go over the gravestones, which looked so sparkling real one would scarce believe the funeral not to have happened today. He read over the archaic Ferelden font—Bethany, Daniel, Malcolm and Sif, the latter whom he remembered to be the husky. Then his eyes veered further over two names he'd never come across before—Holly and Anna. And there was still space left for at least two stones.

He gulped. He tried, at least. His throat felt hard and dry and utterly blocked with the grim realization. He approached them in this quaint little place, feeling like the grave intruder that he was, and noticed each stone had a little forget-me-knot lost at the top in the whiteness of the roses, except… not all of them had it. The rain slapped the windows even harder.

And so Fenris came over, and glanced through the stained-glass, hoping he'd see something or someone, that the memories would eat him or shake him or throw him surely as all the others had promised it. But nothing moved. Only rainwater falling down in little veins, one of which made it seem that the knight was weeping.

The longer he looked at it, the deeper came his realisation that he was now living in a way that he had never lived in his remembered time. He had so thoroughly turned his back on life that he didn't know a single person as he knew Hawke, and had no devotion to anyone as he now had a devotion to her. And the folly of this, the deliberate despair and resentful emptiness of his own life, struck him with full force.

As if he was back in that old roofless chapel, he thought he wanted to light a candle, though for whom it was, he hadn't a clue. He touched the rays of the sun in the glass and he thought how real and ineradicable his memories were of his friends in Seheron, and that he too must have had a crypt for them, though surely more ugly, more locked and more dilapidated than this place.

But then he thought— this place was beautiful because the people that were dear to her whom she had lost were beautiful. That his own crypt must have been beautiful and surely they deserved as much and more.

What was ugly, and locked, and dilapidated was Fenris himself.

The very fool who put them there.

He took a step to the left, and before he knew it, the azure light of the street lamp refracted through the depiction of the sun in the window, through the rays and through the veins of rainwater flowing down in uneven curls along the knight's armour…

The breath was out of him. He looked up at the portrait as its very essence had changed right before his eyes, as if that spoke to him, clearly but wordlessly, and he begged for forgiveness.

What a miserable instrument he was. What a meaningless life.

He wanted to weep.

But if his ruthlessness and emptiness could be eclipsed, if his cruel tools and talents could be useful here, then he could only marvel at the Maker.

An awareness came over him, all of a sudden, that though he was in dread of failing in what he had to do, and though he was in pain for Hawke, getting here, just getting right here in this moment, had lulled him into a wordless gratitude. He felt so strongly that he had been given a priceless gift, that he could never give thanks to the Maker for what was happening to him, for what had been placed in his hands.

Because if one so full of soul such as Hawke could have experienced utter ruin, yet picked herself up even a little, then the resting stones of his victims that resided within him were but a small and polluted and meaningless thing, lost in a grave of excuses on top of which he slept every day. Then his finger came to the bird and the shield.

He wanted to take his hand away, and looked back to the entrance, and he wanted to go out and tell her he didn't need to know. Not her deepest darkest regrets, nor the roots of her personhood which had so far been the subject of his great fascination.

All that he needed, and all that he wanted, was a future, in fact, his future, horrible and beautiful, as long as she was in it.

And yet he knew this, all of this that she'd shown him, was the most important thing to her. Flashes came before his eyes, just after the Deep Roads, the night she vanished—

"I called you troll mage too. Are you going to turn into a putrid green hideous giant that reeks of sponges and highweeds and ask me to call you Bob?"

"Not until you grow wings and fly away as an actual mad cockatoo."

"Perhaps I don't want to fly away."

"Stay on the ground if you must, but be wary of how long you linger with your wounds open."

"Ah, and thus she never runs out of compresses." Fenris sank back in his armchair. "She is allergic to them."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Something happened to you, Hawke. Not now, a long time ago. Every other tragedy just piled on top of it and is hurting you even more."

She hesitated and looked away. "Well, wouldn't you like to know?"

This was the snap in her otherwise candid tone. This was what made her seem older than her looks. This was the sadness in her eyes. This was the wrath which she tamed in her hands. This was perhaps the irreparable thing for which no amount of effort on her part was enough.

This was the place in which her other foot was whenever they got close.

He would know.

And then surely enough his finger seemed to twitch over the glass shape of the forget-me-knot, now brilliantly azure from the street lamp beyond it, and he pushed at it, snatched it in his hand, and went to the gravestones which missed them.

Malcolm

She watched Andrei's cold breaths drift away behind his sullen walk. For once in her terrible pregnancy, she felt relief; relief that in spite of Andrei's historically juvenile decisions, he had made the right one with them all on his own. She almost felt giddy, if not for the morbidity of the decision.

But this was nothing new, was it? You'd see people happy like they had never been in their entire lives before they killed themselves. You'd think these people leave the world an uglier place through their decision, but people hardly ever think of the ones who stay. Some of us who stay may do so because we face our problems and rise above them, but most of us survive by making others miserable. This is the hideous truth we don't like to discuss. Suicide is easy to protest because the guilty are too dead to provide a defense. Preventing terrible things from happening is a noble deed with a merciless aftermath when the hero has no solution to follow.

Well, she had a solution, but this wasn't suicide by misery, exactly. It was suicide by necessity. Her rationale was this: you plant a tree. You watch it every day, growing and growing. You water it. You tend to it. You fend off whatever tries to pull or snack on it. Caveat: you love this tree. Then one day you're told the earth beneath it is cursed. The curse has a fifty-fifty chance of either destroying the soil or the tree. What do you do? Do you let the tree die and hope the next one would grow, or do you get rid of the soil? It truly depends on which you think is irreplaceable.

For Hawke, this was never a debate in principle, and now…it was no longer a debate in practice either; Andrei would do just fine. Besides, now she knew he truly loved them all, so she was consoled with the fact that though she was somewhat replaceable in flesh, she was hard to replace in spirit. He would not remarry unless she'd be a damned good one, and Hawke would make sure she was a damned good one. He'd have her face tattooed under his left pectoral. The future Mrs Dvorak would never forget who she'd have to live up to. This cracked her up so much it was a shame she wouldn't get to see it.

Her amusement soon withered, however. The sounds that came from the Hawke house were unequivocally clear. It was the sound of supreme resolute anger. Malcolm was screaming at Leandra. Leandra was screaming at Malcolm. The exchange became louder and louder and this came as a shock to anyone who knew them. They wouldn't risk notice of any kind.

This was the absolute agony of deathbeds and other such tragedies. The tragedy is bad enough, you can deal with that to a degree, but to see everyone around you fighting over it is unbearable.

"I'd like a moment with Father," shouted Hawke over them as she opened the door, and quite suddenly a hush bestrode the house. "Alone," she said flatly.

Malcolm, still sat clutching at his walking stick, looked up at her with surprise—rather with big, childlike eyes behind the loose grey strands of hair.

Leandra was breathing heavily, taking it all in with a little too much grace that it deserved. "Very well… but you come to me the second you're done, girl," she said commandingly.

"I will," she said and bowed her head.

As her mother left the room, Hawke circled her father as if she was about to interrogate him.

"You said you would always support my decisions," she said.

Malcolm regarded this with a quick eyebrow of regret. "Did I?"

"You did."

"But was I drunk when I said it?"

She shook her head suggesting his humour had better direct itself towards the chicken bones and used napkins.

"My children will join their father in Ravensburg, or wherever he ends up going."

"Maker, and they said I was losing my mind! Are you racing me to the highest peaks of insanity? You don't have to copy me to my grave, kid."

"Forget the Maker," she said curtly and slashed the air with her hand. "There is no Maker here."

"There is a Maker here, and what she's making is terrible decisions," he said condescendingly.

"—and yet," she cut him, "I need you to promise me that you will see to my terrible decision no matter what you believe."

She went to him, and wrapped her arms around him. But he would not open his eyes, and he dropped his walking stick and balled his fists on his knees, ignoring her as if he did not feel her touch.

She tried to give him back his walking stick as he was never without it, but he had turned away from her, as if coiled into himself.

"Father," said Hawke, "I am fearful. I am fearful, and sad and so full of hate. I hate the Maker. I will never forgive him for this. I want nothing to do with him. I never drew strength from him, never needed to."

He seemed to give this some thought, though he did not turn around.

"Forget the Maker," he said curtly too. "This is but a tangle of spurious philosophies, mashed together forcefully and violently like uneven puzzle pieces to give yourself the arrogant belief that your knowledge is now complete. You think your tragedy is evidence of the meaninglessness of life. You think the injustice of your tragedy gives you licence to act like a wounded zealot seeking vengeance and destruction, as if you had been entitled to something other than what's happened to you. You think that for you the world of experience is insufficient and evil—so to hell with everything? Forget the Maker, my dear. It's you who has made the decision," he said.

He was speaking calmly, politely, but it was coming from a place of wrath. She never saw him holding his anger so expertly for years.

He made a sudden grimace as his eyes fixed on no particular thing, and said: "You… you go with your mad and simple-minded husband, this devil who worked his way into my confidences, listening to my tales and legends and instruction, all the while he had his wicked eye on you. You… you go ahead."

"I'm not going anywhere," she said quietly. She closed her eyes, patiently waiting for Malcolm to understand the full length of her decision, but he did not seem to take it in nor want to.

"I. AM. NOT. GOING. ANYWHERE," she reiterated firmly.

"The hell you are!" came Malcolm's voice supreme and overbearing like never before. "I will throw you in the Kirkwall Gallows before I let you kill yourself!"

Hawke shook her head in disappointment. "You hypocrite."

Malcolm hesitated in his anger.

"You tell me day and night about the hell that was the Gallows, how there was nothing worse, how if it wasn't for mother you'd have ended it. How what gave you strength to escape was me," she said briskly. She shifted her weight and pointed at him. "Now with that in mind, think very hard on what I'm about to say: there is nothing worse than living without them," she said firmly as she touched her belly.

Malcolm looked at her and paused, heartbroken.

"You want me in the Gallows so much, then rest easy; I'm already on the boat," she said snappily.

Malcolm looked like he was in about the same predicament. He looked as if he was in absolute pain, shaking his head slowly. "I can't do this, Hildegard."

"You have to!" she cried desperately. Her eyes flooded. "Please I beg you!"

"I can't give you what you want! No. I can't and I shan't. No. Absolutely not!" he cried.

"So this is how it is?" she shouted, pleaded. "We really are in an endless race with each other? We're competing even over avoiding personal hell?"

"There must be another way!" he cried.

"Well then find it, dear genius, please and quickly!" she shouted. "For the moment however there is no other way!"

Hawke was breathless. Quiet bore disquiet.

"Mine may be a tragic situation. But people are equipped to deal with tragedy. They're not equipped to deal with hell! It destroys them! I will not live like that! I accept the damned guillotine that was thrown in the middle of my destiny. But I also choose who goes on it!" she said firmly.

Moved was not quite the right word. Rather, Malcolm was speechless and bowed his head.

"I am. Not anyone else. I… will do it," she said, closing her eyes and inhaling, "with as much love and courage as I have in my veins. I don't need the Maker because this is my meaning. This is what feels all right to me. I do not fear death..." she said and smiled a bitter smile as she put her hand over his heart, "And who has given me such strength and devotion but the man who gave me life?"

And finally, Malcolm sighed and stared upwards, his hand coming over hers on his chest. She could see his lips moving into something like a prayer and he was weeping. He bowed his head. "My child," he said, his voice breaking.

But then his other hand also came to hers, pushing it against his heart, and he bowed his head.

"Dear Lord, long ago, you placed a treasure in my hands. I now promise you that I will safeguard her and her children—"

"What are you—?" she said, her hand wishing to escape.

But Malcolm ignored her and kept her hand locked there onto his heart. "—and that theirs will be a life of earthly blessings for as long as I can give them—"

"Father—"

"Please… Maker, grant them a life of spiritual blessings," he ended in his calm, cultured voice, and let her hand go.

She didn't say anything this time, merely staring at him.

"Your mother and I… are leaving the house to your sister. We are quite dying, as figuratively as we are literally, to start our retirement travels… and Ravensburg's exotic enough to visit what with those terrible pointy wooden shoes they make everyone wear," he said, comically illustrating. "Oh, you'll hate them, trust me," he said, covering his face. As he brushed his hands away, his big hazel eyes started to water. "I see no better point on which to end our wonderful… wonderful trip," he said with the calmest affection in his far-gazing eyes, and, as if with a newly found strength, got up on his feet without his walking stick.

She prepared to object, but Malcolm came to embrace her.

"I will always support your decisions," he said, holding the back of her head as if she were a child, then he whispered in her ear: "But I choose how I go about to make that happen."

Then he brushed past her, to which she flung her arms out spitefully.

"I'm not even dead yet and you're already disgracing my dying wish?" she shouted as she turned around to follow him.

"Well, dear coward, when you will be dead who's going to argue?" he said as if it were nothing, and went into his bedroom.

The echo of that door closing cut right through her heart.

Daniel

"Please, Daniel, just one bite," said a woman sitting by the young man's bed. Daniel was a handsome fellow, not a carbon copy of Andrei, but could have been mistaken for him had he not looked so depleted and terrible.

"I'm trying," he said, though he looked ready to sleep.

"Please try harder," the woman said. She had his blueish green eyes. Her hair was dark brown and she had wrinkles under her eyes and around her mouth, but she was a very beautiful woman.

"What? You're afraid it's going to waste? Just give it to Hildegard. She's like a food vacuum these days," he said and looked towards Hawke, who was sitting on the other side of the bed next to Bethany. "No offence."

"None taken," she said. "I see edible things. I make them disappear. I can barely cross my arms. I almost succeeded yesterday."

"That's why I always have another witness in the room when you're around. I'm afraid if I die you'll eat my corpse."

Bethany puffed, however his mother did not find it funny. She gave him a look.

"What?" he cried.

"Is there something else he could tolerate eating?" said Hawke.

"He needs to eat this," said Esme in a sharp tone, gripping the bowl of green puree tightly.

"He hasn't eaten in two days, maybe his stomach needs a little appetising before eating something so gross."

Esme gave her a look too. Hawke was not popular for her social finesse. In Lothering, there were four F's of finesse one could be known for—fetching, farming, fighting and mating. In a small town, fighting was a rarer of those four, so it made people happy enough to forget her other handicaps.

"No, it's okay," said Daniel. "It just burns my eyes. But I imagine most foods do nowadays."

"Are you sure it's not just you? My eyes are burning a little too."

"Haha, very funny. I bathed this morning. Who's to say it's not you? Do you even fit in the tub?"

"Nope. They just slap a huge bar of soup in my lap and take turns hosing me. I think they just draw straws now," she said and grinned at her sister.

Daniel laughed. "I'm near glad I can't do it. If I had to choose, I'm not sure which I'd pick."

Esme really had it with the jokes. She put the bowl on the nightstand rather angrily, and sat up.

Daniel tried to sit up on his elbows and said, "Oh come on, Mother we're just playing!" then sat back, too weak, but still determined to speak. "I'm stuck in bed all day bored out of my mind. This is, literally, the highlight of my day."

But she wouldn't hear it. She stormed out.

The two sisters shared a look.

"I'll get some butter," said Hawke cheerfully, and (tried to) sit up. "Butter makes everything—ugh—taste better."

"Okay, but leave some for me too," he mused.

"Har har."

As she went out, she momentarily glanced behind and saw how Daniel took Bethany's hand, and the strange, engaging look they shared. She felt heartbroken.

She wasn't the only one. In the small rays of light coming through the kitchen windows, Esme sat at the table with a crumbling look in her eyes.

"If you think anyone here is intently set on infuriating you, perish the thought," said Hawke, sitting in front of her.

Esme didn't look at her, merely staring at her hands.

"He needs to laugh, Esme. We all need to. We can't afford to cry," she added gently.

"I know," his mother said curtly. She wrapped herself in her own arms. "I just can't find anything to laugh about. I don't know how you do it," she said, her tone slightly accusatory.

She picked up on that and thought carefully. "You're right; I may be wrongly wired."

"I would give anything to see him cured. I would give my life in a second," she said, her face curling up with grief in the sunlight.

"That is indisputable. I would do nothing different for my own."

"I'm not disputing," said Esme, tightening her grip, though she wouldn't look at her. "I'm merely unconvinced."

Hawke had known Esme for a long time. She was used to her passive aggressive mannerisms such as denying a notion followed by a loosely synonymous one. But her refined impressions were always greatly overridden by her more primitive brain which remembered since childhood Esme was the tall lady who made really yummy pineapple cake.

And so Hawke made a grimace, and tried to swallow, and despite her inner objections, said: "You were an alchemist? Before?"

"Before?" said Esme, but then picked up on the subtext. She meant before she escaped the Circle. "Of sorts. My primary divination was healing, but I worked closely with an alchemist."

"So ... any salamanders on your side of the Lake?" said Hawke.

Esme regarded this with an eyebrow that highly doubted the girl's intelligence.

"Alright, so you don't know," said Hawke. She sighed and regathered her breath. "I have information that may provide a cure for Daniel at best, or buy some more time for us to find it, at worst. I will help you with this all the way, I will give it my all; you have my word."

The other eyebrow surely followed, and the tone of her face had changed. Unmistakable hope lit up her eyes, and the breath went out of her. "What do you know, Hildegard?"

Hawke paused, staring at the woman intently.

The eyebrows fell. "What do you want?"

"What my father can't do, and a mother can't afford not to."

Hello, I have risen. Don't worry, I am posting until the very end.