Isabela
"Ah, my dear Isabela, the job is done."
Isabela brushes her hair out of her eyes and favors him with a burning smile. If there is one thing her husband – late husband – has taught her, it is that her womanly charms have worth in men's eyes. Admittedly, he had done it through raging jealousy and his fists, but the lessons have stuck.
She stalks toward Zevran, already stripping off her belt and her thin shift, dropping most of her knives as she goes, ready to offer him the first part of his payment for a job well done.
She doesn't care what the enlightened says, vengeance is sweet, and freedom still sweeter.
Aveline
When she was a little girl, her father taught her the things he thought a little chevalier should know – pride, duty, endurance.
He tried to teach her never to let a slight pass unanswered, but she heard another voice in her heart that she always hoped was her mother's. Her mother's voice counseled that not all strength came from the fist.
In Kirkwall she tries to hear her mother's voice as often as her father's and her guards – her family – prosper for it.
There are Orlesians who say that living well is the best revenge. Aveline believes that living good is better.
Carver
Some nights he dreams that he died instead of his sister. That in some other world, some other life, the balance of existence dictates that Bethany lives and Carver dies.
Most nights he dreams of darkspawn and wakes with a scream caught in his throat. It's the price of being a Gray Warden, and he pays it willingly.
He pays it because every time he ventures into the Deep Roads with his fellow wardens, every time his sword cleaves through twisted flesh and bone, he is paying them back for everything he lost, everyone he lost. He does it for Bethany.
Varric
For long years he has engaged his imagination in fantasies of revenge for his brother's betrayal. The fantasies grow more elaborate time, lovingly embellished with screams and pleas for mercy, gilded with admissions of guilt and heartfelt apologies.
Late at night when the Hanged Man is silent save for the surprised shout of a drunkard waking from his stupor with his face in a puddle of… something, he tells Bianca bedtime tales of heroic fratricide.
Seeing Bartrand weeping, lost to the curse of the very idol he had tried to kill his brother for, Varric loses his taste for vengeance.
Fenris
With Hadriana dead at his feet, he had thought that all he would need to be a free man was Danarius' death, that it would stop the burning that is his first memory.
With Danarius crushed and broken, his rage turns on his sister, the flames licking higher in desperation to keep from being extinguished. What would he be without the fire?
With her heart in his hands, he begins to understand how men open themselves to demons, and why those of rage are things of molten hatred.
Vengeance has not cooled the blaze, only brought him to the brink of self-immolation.
Merrill
She thinks, sometimes, that other clans will hear of her and what has happened. When she sees a face marked by vallaslin in the alienage her heart always stutters a little and she wonders if she will be brave enough to take the justice that by rights, other Dalish could mete out.
In her wretched little home, she stands in front of the eluvian, seeing exactly the reflection of her soul she would expect – nothing – and one night her broken heart hardens.
She returns to her studies and her goal of repairing the cursed thing, no longer to retrieve lost knowledge, but to find the evil through the looking glass, and have vengeance.
Then she will face the other clans and allow them their justice.
Justice
Justice does his best to find justice for Kristoff's wife, Aura. He finds the memories of the man's love compelling, even envies them. He does his best, and in the nights while his companions sleep, he turns the man's memories over and over like treasures to rival the lyrium ring his friend had given him.
Love, he finds, is a treasure beyond compare, and one he knows he could never experience for himself.
When does he know that he has lost himself? When does he find himself twisted out of true?
When he whispers jealously, No, Hawke is a distraction.
What need has Vengeance of love when they have retribution?
Sebastian
His cry cuts through Hawke's misguided attempt at granting mercy to a murderer.
The man brought him justice for the murders of his family, he is certain he can make him see reason, even with his lover.
Elthina is his family. Washis family.
He makes his case, makes his threat, and hates himself for it, and sees Hawke hate him for it as well, but the choice is made.
When the knife finds its home, for just a moment he feels a pang, and hears the distant echo of a demon's laugh.
Has he seen justice? Or just vengeance?
Hawke and Anders
Vengeance.
She turns the word over and over in her mind until it loses all meaning, becoming only ugly syllables, not a name, not a concept, not an act perpetrated when justice forgot compassion.
She smiles and nods when spoken to, takes food and drink when her friends press them upon her, even sleeps when she grows tired, but always her thoughts turn inward.
She knows the lure of vengeance, ugly though it is. She knows the rage and the anger and the… the helplessness against horror that push for action despite consequences.
But when she looks over at Anders, slumped against the center mast of the ship, forced to live to make some reparation despite his wish to die, she thinks that justice could be far crueler in the long run.