The island in the Fade that Justice guided Feynriel to looked like exactly that – an island in a silver ocean. A hundred feet from shore, the silvery water that lapped at the gray shores spilled away endlessly into empty haze. And always in the distance, the Black City, a reminder of perfection lost.
The small territory itself was a maze of mist-draped columns, some standing, some tilted to lean against their neighbors, a few crumbled and fallen. The ground was barren, rocky, but incongruously pale flowers, petals just touched with blue, pushed up around the base of some columns, filling the still air with a subtle fragrance that stirred memories of comfort, of safety.
For Anders, a lullaby and his mother's arms, barely remembered from his time before the Circle. For Merrill, the gentle sway of an aravel as they traveled the Fereldan forests. For Isabela, a sun-drenched day, the ocean swells lifting and dropping her ship like a lover allowing her to ride at her leisure. For Fenris, blue eyes and a promise that if the magisters came, she would stand beside him.
Feynriel fell back against a column and slid to sit braced against it.
"That took too much out of me. I have to rest." He smiled, despite his obvious fatigue. "But I did it."
"Should we stay here?" Merrill asked. "Should we leave him alone? Is it safe?"
Justice was already walking. "Leave him. This is a place no demon will dare violate."
Fenris looked between Feynriel and Justice, torn between two mages, and turned to stalk after the one that might help Hawke.
Isabela rolled her eyes. "And they say pirates don't have manners. Thanks for getting us here. We'll be back as soon as we can. Come on, Merrill."
She caught Merrill and pulled the mage with her, following Justice through the maze of columns.
Merrill twisted to call back to Feynriel, "Thank you! We'll be back soon. Just get some rest. Smell the flowers. Don't wake up!" As he fell out of sight she said, "I wonder what would happen if he fell asleep here. Would he start dreaming? Could he bring a different part of the Beyond to this part of the Beyond? And could he fall asleep and dream in that one too? Oh, I could get lost in my own head thinking of that."
They hurried to catch up with Justice and Fenris, weaving through the columns until they came to a clearing in the center of the island.
Roughly circular, it was marked by a dozen stone benches along its circumference. Anders noted in the moment that Justice swept his gaze through the clearing that the center was set with a mosaic of the Maker's symbol, a sun blazing within a circle. He wondered if this was the remnant of someone's dream that the spirits had taken as their home, or if they had somehow created it together.
"We created this," Justice said aloud. He addressed the empty benches. "I call you to this place, brethren. I seek counsel from the virtues. Come Truth. Come Valor. Come Fortitude, Peace, Compassion, and Faith."
Fenris muttered something under his breath as figures faded into being on the benches, translucent, ethereal, but almost human.
"Justice," breathed one. "What have you done?"
Another – Truth, Justice's thought supplied to Anders – rose from the bench and drifted across to raise an ethereal hand to brush Anders' cheek. Anders felt the brush to the depths of his soul and quailed under the spirit's regard. "You have changed, Justice."
"The world on the other side of the Veil is not as immutable as we think it is from here," Justice said. "Living in it… changes one."
"Do we get an introduction?" Isabela asked. "And when are you going to get to the point?"
Fenris added, "Feynriel cannot keep us here indefinitely. Make your case, spirit, before he wakes."
The spirits turned their attention to the living visitors, all rising from the benches to drift closer.
Merrill caught Fenris' wrist as he reached for his sword. "Don't. We're guests here. I'd be put out with you if you drew a sword in my house and I'm not even a spirit."
Isabela murmured, "That's my girl," when Merrill stood fast under Fenris' glare until he dropped his hand.
The first spirit, though translucent, appeared to be a man wearing heavy armor with a helmet that fully covered his face save for a narrow eye slit. It approached Fenris.
"Would you duel?" it asked.
"Valor. We are not here to duel. We are here seeking help for one who has helped bring justice in the world beyond the Veil. She has had the Fade taken from her."
Fenris tried to see past the slits, to see the spirit's eyes, half expecting the helmet to be empty, but the spirit met his gaze with colorless eyes that blazed with their challenge. "I would duel you if it would help my friend," he said. "Will you help her?"
"No," said Valor. "That is not my role."
Another spirit, female in figure, but robed to shadow any face it might have, drifted to Isabela and brushed its hand down her arm. "No faith in yourself to be the woman you think you should be," the spirit said in a voice like chiming bells. "But you have faith in someone. A name… Hawke. You have faith in her."
"Yes," said Isabela, obviously shaken, perhaps by the observation, perhaps by the intimacy of the spirit's touch past the physical plane. "I do. Sometimes I don't know why, but I do."
Merrill was clearly torn between eagerness and nervousness about talking to a spirit that was not a demon. A spirit wasn't sloshing out of Anders at least. She fidgeted as a new spirit came to examine her. To Merrill the softly glowing figure looked like an elven woman, like someone she faintly remembered and had loved at some time, but somehow forgotten.
The figure reached out to touch her cheek the way Truth had touched Anders, but stopped, fingers hovering above her skin as though they had reached some barrier. "You have known the touch of demons," the spirit observed. "Child, you can never know peace with their touch on your soul."
The spirit withdrew, leaving Merrill bereft. "But wait," she said, reaching out toward the spirit. "Can't you help us?"
The spirit shook its head. "I cannot bring peace where it has already been rejected. The waking world is not for me."
"I thought that's what you did," Isabela protested. "Aren't you supposed to beat people with peace sticks like Justice does with his blazing rage of ragey-ness?"
Anders earnestly wished he could have use of their mouth for a moment. Peace sticks and blazing rage of ragey-ness should not be allowed to pass without comment. And mockery.
"What help would you have of us, Justice?" asked the figure of a man, his face a shifting composite of faces that all bore the unifying stamp of endurance, of perseverance, of Fortitude.
"My power on the other side of the Veil is limited by this body. I cannot be a constant blaze of the Fade in the waking world, but it is that which restores our friend for moments at a time. Without it, she is worse than dead. With it, she is a force of valor, truth, fortitude, and compassion." Anders head turned toward Peace and Faith. "Her faith is quiet, I do not know it, but she is not a woman of peace. She understands that in a world of injustice, there cannot yet be peace, but she struggles for it. She would dream of you again if she were restored."
The last spirit, the one who had been silent and only watched, drifted forward, the other spirits parting for the wispy thing, child-sized and slight. "Is that why you are all here?" it asked. "For Justice's reasons?"
Fenris snorted. "No. I'm here for my own reasons, but we are all here for Hawke."
Isabela shrugged. "What he said."
"I'm here for Hawke. She's a good person, spirits. We don't always agree, but she's…" Merrill bit her lip. "She's one of the best people I've ever known, and she doesn't deserve what they did to her. It was wrong!"
"It was unjust."
"What would you have us do?" asked the child spirit. "We are not healers or mages. We cannot touch her through the Veil and you say she has been cut off from the Fade. We are but spirits, though it pains me to hear of a good woman whose fate causes you all such sorrow."
Anders could feel Justice's hope and realized that this was the spirit he had most wanted to engage. "Return with us. Join with her. Bridge the gap between her spirit and the Fade."
The other spirits rustled, a susurrus of conversation running among them like a wavelet on an otherwise calm pond.
"We cannot do that," said the spirit of Valor. "Our place is here. We must bring our virtues to the sleepers, to the mages, to all who seek us in the Fade."
"And what of those who need us beyond the Veil?" asked the child spirit.
It floated toward Fenris and held its hands out to him in an invitation to take them. He hesitated until Merrill trod on his bare foot. Grudgingly, he let the small spirit take his hands.
He might have flinched, or growled, or at least glared, but the spirit's touch on his soul was delicate, even considerate.
"Such loss," the spirit whispered. "And fear. And I see what memories of comfort the flowers here bring you."
It released his hands. "Thank you."
It turned to Isabela and held out its hands to her. After a moment's hesitation remembering Faith's touch, she took them.
"Trust where you do not feel you deserve it. Friendship without judgment. Treasures a pirate cannot simply plunder."
It let her go. "Thank you."
Merrill already had her hands out when the spirit turned to her. It seemed almost cautious when it took her hands, sighing with whatever it saw or learned. "A mage who has never wavered in what she thinks is right. Never compromised herself. How you long to be that strong."
Merrill felt its touch tighten, like a friend's squeeze before it released her hands, leaving her feeling as deeply examined as ever she had been by a demon, but not judged. "Thank you."
Lastly it drifted over to Justice, stretching its arms up to put its hands on his cheeks much as Truth had. "Justice… oh Justice, how you burn for this crime committed against her. Laws violated, right crushed under an iron heel, and… Justice has learned…." Justice shook his head before the spirit could reveal what he had learned.
It did not press on to tell them. "Anders, Justice-ridden… It is so hard for you, so lonely. Justice's demands, your heart, this woman. Your heart breaks."
"So his heart is breaking," Fenris snapped, sundering the spell the spirit had seemed to have cast over the group. "It doesn't matter. Hasn't anyone else noticed that he wants to make Hawke an abomination?" He shouted the last word. "Someone here has to say no! We've seen how well it has worked for Anders."
"An abomination?" the little spirit asked. It sounded curious, not angry or hurt. "Would you fear an abomination of compassion, warrior?"
Fenris opened his mouth to say of course, but apparently his brain kicked in before the words could drop from his lips. "Compassion?"
"Compassion," Justice said. "This is the one I had hoped would take up our cause."
Isabela shifted from foot to foot before asking, "Won't that make Hawke, oh, I don't know, a little soft?"
"Do you like her better Tranquil?" Merrill asked tartly. "Because I don't. I think it's brilliant."
"Of course the blood mage thinks it's brilliant," Fenris sneered.
"Well, no, I don't like her better Tranquil," Isabela mused, ignoring Fenris. "And I can't see that a spirit of compassion is going to be as much of a killjoy as Justice." She looked down at Compassion. "Would you let Hawke drink? Have a lover?" She looked pointedly at Justice, "Bathe?"
"Of course. She is human. She must have a human life."
"Then she's got my vote," Isabela said, simultaneously bestowing a gender on the spirit.
"Mine too," said Merrill.
Anders was voting yes, albeit silently. All eyes turned to Fenris.
"This isn't right!" he snapped.
"It is just."
"Shut up!" He turned away from them all, pacing, raking his hands through his hair, seeming to come to one decision before turning on his heel, leaving the choice hanging while he argued with himself.
"This is for life," he tried.
"So is being Tranquil," Merrill countered.
"She'll hate us for it."
Isabela shrugged. "She wanted to die when she thought she would be Tranquil forever. This is better than death, and better than being a meat puppet."
Fenris flinched. It was such a harsh way to think of Marian Hawke. She was always so alive. "Festis bei umo canavarum," he spat before saying. "Do it. Stop talking and just do it."
"Oh," Merrill said. "We hadn't thought about that. How can we do it? We can't carry her back to my clan in a jar." She tilted her head quizzically. "Can we?"
"I will carry Compassion," Justice said.
Wait a minute there, protested Anders. I'm already past carrying capacity with you and you're stuck in here. I don't need a full time menage a trois!
"Anders fears that Compassion will become part of him as I have, but I am already here to prevent that. I believe that if we get to Hawke quickly enough, we can make the transfer. I will restore her connection to the Fade long enough for Compassion to join with her. From there, her connection will come through Compassion."
Put that way it sounded almost like a religious experience. Anders was briefly jealous; he had a feeling Compassion would be much easier to get along with as a headmate than Justice.
The other spirits had faded away unnoticed while the companions debated, leaving them alone with Compassion. The spirit had moved to the middle of the mosaic of the Maker's symbol to await their decision. Justice moved to the spirit and folded her into the circle of his arms, drawing the embrace tighter until she melted through the front of Anders' coat and disappeared.
He staggered, reaching out for some support, finding it in Isabela's strong grip on his arm. "Don't you give out on us now," she admonished. "We still have to get you back to Hawke."
"Merrill, Fenris, we're going now. Let's find Feynriel."
For all that she had been willing to follow Hawke, and for this venture even to follow Justice, in this moment, her friends finally had a fleeting chance to see Captain Isabela.
• • •
Of the four of them, when they woke, Anders was the only one who did not feel as though he had gotten a good night's sleep. He felt as though a pair of ogres had decided to use his head as a ball, tossing it back and forth and frequently dropping it.
He also felt… overstuffed, like a sausage casing ready to split with the pressure of everything inside it slowly expanding as it cooked.
"Let's get back to Sundermount before I pop," he muttered, but standing proved to be more of a trial than he had expected.
Aveline and Fenris caught him before he could face plant and held him dangling between them.
Varric patted his arm. "Lucky for you, Blondie, I thought we might need to get back to Sundermount quickly and hired some horses. Maker, but Hawke is going to owe me if—when we get her back to herself. Now I remember why we walk everywhere. It cost almost as much to hire a team of horses as it did to finance a whole expedition into the Deep Roads."
"It may cost us more than sovereigns if we don't hurry," Aveline said as Anders tried to push himself to his feet only to have his knees give out, leaving him sagging between the two warriors.
"One dramatic race to the rescue coming up," Varric said, sweeping the door open to let them drag the mage out of the house toward the city stables.