As Donnic left the cave, Aveline came over to where Fenris was sitting and sat down next to him. She gave him a long appraising look, while he steadily refused to look back. He only looked down, down into the darkness where Hawke was.

Aveline knew, now, why she had put off speaking to him.

"Donnic..." she began, hesitantly. "I love him with all of my heart. But I don't like to speak of this in front of him. It doesn't seem fair. You never met my first husband, did you? I forget that sometimes, that not everybody knows."

She took a deep breath.

"His name was Wesley. He died when we were fleeing the blight, before we reached Kirkwall."

"I know that," Fenris mumbled.

"No, you don't." Aveline's mouth settled into a hard, thin line as she contemplated him. "No one does."

"He was my first love," she went on shortly. "I met him when I was still a little girl. He wasn't like the others in my village. They called me ginger and manthing and ugly slug. It's all right, they were idiots. Wesley was different. He was kind and generous and brave. And very handsome, he was always very handsome. I don't know how I got so lucky. He said when we were still children that he would make me his wife someday, and he never wavered for a moment. When we married, it was the happiest day of my life. He was a good man, and I would have done anything for him. Anything."

"But he was tainted, on the road. Flemeth, the witch, when we met her there she said it was too late for him and we all knew it was true. I would have fought the whole of the darkspawn horde to save him, but against the taint there was nothing I could do. He had to be killed, to spare him a worse fate."

"And Hawke... stepped in and did the job. Without even asking me. She was quick and clean and he was gone."

"I was so very angry with Sadie for a long time. It was my job to do it, it should have been me. It should have been me," she repeated, trailing off.

"But now... After all these years, I have to admit: I am so grateful to her that I don't have to remember killing my first love, what it felt like to slide the blade into his chest. She spared me that. I never properly thanked her for it."

Aveline shifted on the floor, her armor rattling awkwardly.

"That wasn't the worst of it, though. The worst thing was, there was no time to bury Wesley. The horde was behind us, and I had to leave him behind. Leave him on the road, unburied, for the darkspawn to do unspeakable things to."

"Just imagine that. Imagine what that was like for me. The only man I had ever loved, and I had to leave him on the road."

"But if I hadn't, if I had stayed by his side and refused to move, I would not be sitting here with you now. I would have died. Maybe all of us would have died, if I had slowed us all down like that. I had to get up and fight again, on the worst day of my life, because we needed every sword. I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and figuring out how to live without him. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do."

"Now, tell me, Fenris. Do you think I loved Wesley one bit less than you love Hawke?"

Aveline knew she had struck true. The air had changed, and the elf looked different when she looked at him. His eyes pressed shut and he shook his head ever so slightly.

"Of course not," he said quietly.

"Fenris, we need you. There is still work for you in Kirkwall, important work. I know better than anyone how much this hurts. But you have to go on. Everything you have fought for will be for nothing if you give up now."

"All right! Stop it!" he snapped at her, harshly, his voice subtly breaking at the last. "Just stop..."

All of the pain and grief he had staved off since the moment Hawke had been dragged away from him was breaking over Fenris like a wave; he was aware of nothing else. All on their own, his knees pulled to his chest and his head fell onto them, and a strange cry tore from his throat.

And all at once, all of the lyrium in his body began to glow.

With a dissonant hum, every tattoo activated, filling the cave with an unearthly light. The strange markings blazed against his skin, and his muscles visibly twitched with the pain of it.

Aveline could do nothing to help, now. She was never a comforting person, she should not have sent Donnic away. "I'm sorry," she said uselessly. "I am so sorry."

Fenris rose, still glowing, his limbs shaking with unreleased power.

"Fenris? What are you doing?"

Aveline rose to her feet. She was suddenly very nervous. Had she pushed him too far? She had broken through his denial, but she had no idea what he would do now. Could it be that he would jump to his death?

"Stay back," he said shakily, and Aveline was afraid.

She had to take several steps back, to avoid the crackle of energy she could feel coming off him in waves.

The lyrium brands had always been deeply connected to his emotions, activating in his defense more or less unconsciously whenever he was threatened or angry. Now it seemed as though it would consume him completely, burn him alive. Fenris stared in horror at his own hands burning him with pale blue fire.

"Stop it!" Aveline shouted at him. "Calm down!"

Easier said than done. His heart and breath were racing out of control. Everything was agony, everything. His skin was burning. He stood over the pit and blue light flooded it, and suddenly it was alive with movement.

The things that lived there looked up into the light and answered its summons. And they all came crawling out.

A scurry of wings and claws was scrambling up to meet him.

He stood over the pit and then smiled and said: "Yes."

With sudden calmness, Fenris walked over to the wall where he had sat for days and picked up his greatsword, his body still throbbing with the lyrium's light.

"You should probably leave," he told Aveline firmly. "They're coming."

Aveline's stomach dropped, and she scrambled to grab her sword and shield. She didn't realize fully what he meant until a few seconds later, when things started to crawl out of the pit.

Drakes. Lots of them.

She screamed for Donnic, not sure whether to warn him away or call him to help.

With a scream of rage that shook Aveline to her core, Fenris was upon the drakes with his sword, still bathed in the eerie lyrium glow. His Sword Of Mercy shone with magical light, feeding from the lyrium in his body. He took them apart, one by one.

It was the one thing he truly knew how to do, the thing he was made to do. To fight, to kill, to destroy. Not one claw or tooth touched him; he had gone entirely intangible, but for his sword. He carved through the beasts, not neatly as he normally would, but brutally and with great relish. He cut them to pieces as they shrieked and swiped uselessly at his glowing form, which hovered in that in-between place where his lyrium brands held him.

With belated help from Aveline, and Donnic at last racing down into the chamber to help, the cave was soon littered with corpses.

Fenris stood panting in the center of them all, looking for something else to kill.

"Venit pugnare me! Volo magis!" he shouted at them, shaking still with rage. He stormed over to the cliff and looked down - there were no more dragons to face. He had killed them all.

"Hostibus pugnare non est amplius? quae ratio mihi vivere?"

Donnic grabbed his wife's hand, and they stood there watching.

"Hawke!" He wobbled on his feet, and screamed her name down into the darkness one last time. "HAWKE!"

The light died out as suddenly as it had come. Fenris fell to his knees, and they rushed to grab him before he could fall any further. Aveline laid him backwards onto the ground. He was unconscious, but she felt a pulse still in his neck.

"We'll have to carry him back," she told her husband. "And straight to the clinic if we can. Maker only knows what he's done to himself now."

Donnic grabbed her arm suddenly. "Do you hear that?"

"Don't you start..."

"Listen!"

And then she heard it.

Very faint. Very far away.

But very much real.

A voice that said,

"hello up there!"

Aveline froze in place. "HAWKE?" She called back down into the pit.

"aveline?"

The couple's eyes met in disbelief. It was real.

It was Hawke.

And she sounded pissed.

Author's fun facts: all my Arcanum is courtesy of Google Translate Latin.

Translations are roughly as follows:

Venit pugnare me! Volo magis! = come and fight me, I want more!

Hostibus pugnare non est amplius? = are there no more enemies to fight?

quae ratio mihi vivere? = why do I still live?