Chapter Text
"Ay," said the Captain, reverentially; "it's a almighty element. There's wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling. Think on it when the stormy nights is so pitch dark," said the Captain, solemnly holding up his hook, "as you can't see your hand afore you, excepting when the wiwid lightning reweals the same; and when you drive, drive, drive through the storm and dark, as if you was a driving, head on, to the world without end . . ."
—Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
—Aristotle
—
The corpse—is Hawke.
He’d thought it one of the many shades left stranded in this horror-world, another mimicry of steel and bone and shadow of some ancient war long forgotten; and then the strange green light of the Fade had gleamed off its armor with the shift of a breath—of a living, impossible breath—and his own had stopped completely.
A living creature. Hawke.
Hawke.
Four months—
Four months, and she is dead—
He drops to his knees, sword-point catching on stone-cracks and twisting awkwardly, his nerveless fingers barely able to keep the clutch. “Hawke,” he says, as if the word means anything here. No echo on these dead rocks, no sound but the hard thudding in his ears—
The black head lifts, lank, oily hair displaced over one cut and swollen ear, the low tail’s tie long severed so that the strands hang tangled in her broken gorget. She tilts just enough for one eye to pierce him through, a stark crown-blue gone colder than he remembers, and then it drops again into the dark and his heart will not beat.
“I should have known,” Hawke whispers, and her voice, her voice, her voice who was dead and is now alive! An afterthought in a tumble of Fade-boulders, wrong for the shape, covered all in spider-silk and old dried blood in the gloom beneath Nightmare’s corpse. Both legs stretched forward, broken; head bowed as if in sorrow; both arms pulled back behind, pinioned by the fine white threads that slather every open space in this Fade-clearing around the bloated carcass. “After all this time, I should have known…”
“Hawke,” he says again, helpless litany, and she begins to laugh.
So bitter. So empty, from Hawke who has always brimmed overfull with mirth, who has stood death in hand and smiled at its taking, who cradled Fenris’s own heart away from the long thorns that caged it and stayed until they unwound themselves again. She laughs like her skin is hollow, and when she is done she rolls her head back on her shoulders until she stares straight up into the Fade-green skies. “Don’t tell me,” she says, and even through her tone’s acidity there is something in his soul that sings at the sounding of it— “you’ve come to take me home.”
He can see her face. Her hair has fallen away, and after months of grief rotting out his heart here is her face at last, turned away from the Void after all. Her eyes are the same, even if the whites are reddened with tears and blood. Her cheekbones still hold the same high curve, even with her cheeks skull-thin with famine; here is her long nose, her precious mouth almost too wide for her face. New grooves at its corners, at the corners of her eyes. New slashed scars down the plane of her jaw.
Fenris closes his eyes. He forces his heart to steady as he sheathes his sword and drags one gauntlet free so his bare hand might close this last little distance. Four inches—four months, and all at once his fingers curl around the back of her neck, sliding into her filthy hair like a prayer, his thumb feathering down the pulse in her throat that beats alive, alive, alive, alive.
“Yes,” he says, and Merrill’s palm drops onto his own shoulder, brace and warning in one. “We have come for you.”
“Well, thank the Maker. He knows I’ve been waiting long enough.”
The words are light, but the tone’s cold enough to burn, and Fenris must pull on the earliest memories of his training to keep the agony from his face. “This is no Fade illusion, Hawke. I swear to you, this is real.”
“You’ve been searching for months,” Hawke says, a recitation empty as a sea-washed shell, her lips curled sharp. “You’ve gone to the ends of the earth. You’ve sought out—oh, who is it this time? Merrill, Lady Trevelyan and…is that Dorian? What an unusual group! Tell me all about the ways you’ve spent your sleepless nights hunting me down in the vast nothingness of the Fade. Tell me all about them, Fenris.”
“Inquisitor,” Dorian urges, and Trevelyan sucks in a sharp breath before stepping a few dozen paces away. The unmistakable shinck of her knives sliding free tells him he is not the only one who does not trust the laws of this place. The green-gold fog of the Fade swirls oddly in her wake, a living thing as much as the whispers at the edge of his hearing, and Fenris swallows down the fear.
Hawke sees it; Hawke laughs again, off-key and mad. “Oh, agony! How your heart must be breaking all over again. But who am I to argue after all this time—please, Fenris, carry us away through the last rift left in the world, or to the miracle somniari that walks near this place in the Fade, or whatever deus ex machina you’ve contrived for this particular rescue. I can hardly wait to see what new and exciting ways this dream will shred me to pieces at the last minute.”
Dorian kneels, then, his embroidered black-and-copper cloak spilling over his thighs like an upended wineskin, his half-gloved fingers dancing gold flames over Hawke’s broken legs. Both crooked—both badly so, one knee bent at entirely the wrong angle so that Fenris’s stomach lurches when he sees it, the other shin bone-pierced and swollen twice its proper size, purple and shiny and half-healed in every wrong way. The colossal shadow of Nightmare drapes over them all, grotesque and obscene, too many withered spider-legs curled in upon themselves and spearing skyward. The hole Hawke blew through its body lingers still, charred flame-edges marking the remnants of her rage, but every time Fenris blinks the corpse-thing shivers at the edges of his vision, and more than once he must convince himself it has not moved.
The Nightmare has not moved. It has not—
Hawke is staring at him.
Smiling, too, as Dorian’s hands flicker from gold to blue-white flame over her broken legs; as the Inquisitor circles the edges of the clearing in watchward warning, bending to clear random rubble and kick aside collapsed detritus; as Merrill makes a tight loop to Hawke’s other side and kneels to touch her face. “Look at you,” Hawke says, and begins to drag her arm between them before her strength yields to the stronger silk and her hand falls limp in air again. “You’re not the best I’ve seen, but you’re close. The ears are too long.”
Merrill laughs, sorrowing and sweet, and smooths Hawke’s hair from her eyes. “Hardly much we can do about that, can we?” she says, light as she’s ever been; her wrist flicks, and the spider silk wrapped thousandfold around Hawke’s right wrist falls away with a whisper. Her arm drops, stone-hard and heavy, and Merrill barely turns the knifeblade back to safety before catching her by elbow and shoulder to slow the fall. “There, lethallan! Isn’t that better? Lean forward, and I’ll cut away the rest.”
Hawke does, though it’s less a lean than a controlled collapse. Her eyes glitter like ice as Merrill cuts away the spider silk entangling her wrists, her waist, her thighs, even the ends of her hair; it clings to her like grasping fingers, even when Merrill pulls it wholly free, and for one horrific moment when Merrill slices through the band cuffing Hawke’s neck the raw ends lift and reach once more, a thousand wriggling white worms clutching at her throat, needling, driving deeper into her skin, ignoring every frantic pull both Fenris and Dorian make at their threads—
Fenris cannot see what Merrill does. Her magic is thick to him, oily and tinged with bloodrust; he can only feel it pulse through the lyrium like a bloom of black ink through water, her fingertips at the root of the white snake where it meets the boulder Hawke leans against. The spider silk gives one great shudder, then falls limp, every thread as dead as the Nightmare-corpse that shadows them.
Dorian recoils, the blue-white light cupped in his hands pluming into nothing. “What was that?”
“A curse,” Merrill offers. Her voice is distant. “A memory…”
“A promise,” Hawke murmurs, grinning, even as the Inquisitor stirs at her watch behind them.
Fenris knows what Trevelyan will say even as she straightens, even as she shades her eyes against a sunless light. One dagger gives a dull glint in the raised, clenched fist at her forehead; the second spins between the fingers of her other hand fretfully, thoughtlessly, at her hip. “I’m sorry,” she says. “They’re coming.”
Dorian’s level gaze shifts to meet Fenris’s own. They’d known this risk, known the moment they worked magic in the Fade that the spirits and demons who lived there would seek them out to kill them—and yet, somehow, he’d thought they’d have more time. If only they'd been able to wait for Varric— “This is beyond my skill,” Dorian admits at last, straightforward, sea-calm. “She must have a surgeon. I can do nothing else here.”
Each hidden catch to his gauntlet snaps shut again, little clicks all in a row like fingers breaking. “Can she be carried?”
“Certainly,” Dorian says, though his mouth twists. “She’ll be in agony for the entirety of the walk, of course, but do we have much choice at this point, really?”
No choice at all. Fenris lurches to his feet, unsteady still with the rocking sway of a heart given back its beating, and bends again to where Hawke lies in the shadow of corpse and stone. “I’m sorry,” he breathes, as if it will matter, as if it has ever mattered, and lifts her by waist and thigh from the place where she has lain undying for four months.
Hawke screams. Screams again, one broken leg unbending and grotesque in profile, the other bent too far over the places where Fenris holds her, and she shoves mindlessly at his chest, his shoulder, his jaw, scrabbling without purchase for relief from the pain. There’s no strength to her; there’s no weight, and even as the lyrium floods from both proximity and emotion he’s enough himself to realize her leathers hang like empty drapes on her bones, that her upper arms have gone thin as her wrists. No weight. No strength. The wildest mage he has ever known, now nothing but a guttered candle—
“Oh, Fenris,” Hawke says, gasping, laughing, and the tears streak down her temples into her hair. “Do it. Run. Who gives a shit—the last time you came you tore me open with Carver’s sword, and that was novel enough, but what’s that to a little old-fashioned torture? Run. Run.”
He cannot do this. The Inquisitor has come to meet them, her own eyes too bright at this shell of the Champion he holds, and they must go, they must—every instant wasted here is another demon drawn. By now even he, no mage, can smell the reek of sulfur and pitted charcoal, and still he can’t, can’t—
“Look,” Trevelyan says sharply, and Fenris stares, aghast, as a vile creature slithers out from the stained, matted fur of Hawke’s collar to nestle along the hollow of her throat. Black, moist, undulating—leech-like, if leeches were as long as his forearm and twice as thick—and when he shifts Hawke’s weight to tear the thing away it curls around the base of her neck and sinks a round row of sharp teeth into the skin beneath her left ear.
Hawke does not flinch. Barely even blinks, even as Fenris snarls and Dorian takes two abrupt steps forward before snatching at the creature’s girth in one revolting squeeze. The round wet teeth hold their snag on her throat a moment longer, then rip free with a spray of Hawke’s blood into open air. Dorian closes his eyes, clenches his fist; on the exhale lightning blows out both ends of the leech like a firecracker, and he flings the desiccated corpse as far into the mists as he can. The Fade-green fog parts, swirls, sighs, and comes together again in its wake, solid as if it had never been rent.
“What was that?” Fenris snaps. Hawke still hardly seems to care; now her head has turned away from his, her eyes half-lidded, more than enough to bare the new-bleeding circle the size of a fist beneath her ear. More, too, now that he knows what to look for: circles both new and old, tens, dozens, hundreds, fresh-scabbed and old-scarred, white rings dancing down both sides of her throat and across her shoulders where her armor has torn, across her bare upper arms, the backs of her hands, her palms, her legs where they are broken. Four months—
Four months—
“That was Despair,” says Dorian. The creases at the corners of his eyes are tighter than Fenris has ever seen them, but he will not look Fenris in the face. “I’m afraid time marches on, Inquisitor.”
“Fenris, I’m sorry. There were at least twenty I saw, and more coming.”
He shakes his head, his throat too tight to speak. It’s all too much—Hawke returned to him against all odds, against all rights, the dead brought back to life—and this life no life at all, a horrored half-life feeding the demons of this Fade against her will—but alive, and—
He takes one hard step. The jolt is enough Hawke shrieks, and venhedis, he wants to weep—but the sulfur stench is overpowering now, and even from this little promontory he can see the red glow and oily black smoke of growing rage in the valley below. Only minutes, then, only minutes, and if this is the price of her survival…
Another step. Another, and another, and they run at last, Hawke’s head tucked tight beneath his chin, his gauntlets curled so hard into her leathers the wide straps strip and split beneath the pressure and she is screaming, screaming, laughing, and he will break apart from this, he knows, nothing more than fired white clay dashed upon the rocks.
“Creators,” Merrill gasps, and swings before him so suddenly he nearly falls. “Lethallan, lethallan—”
“Merrill,” Fenris says, startled.
Her eyes are sharp as bird-bones, defiant. “I can help her. Let me do this. I can take away the pain, at least for now—help her sleep until we’ve gone back again.”
He recoils instinctively, and even that motion is enough that Hawke gives a sharp, agonized groan. “You—no. You will not use blood magic on Hawke, not here of all places—”
“This is hurting her!”
“Don’t worry,” Hawke says, mouth bowed into an enormous smile, reaching for Merrill with a hand gone nearly skeletal. “Flames, don’t you know he does this every time?”
His throat burns, the lump high and hot and hard enough to choke. Trevelyan says nothing, her face open with grief and little understanding, lit green from below where her anchored hand clenches over her chest; Dorian knows more of what this will cost, and the slow, near-imperceptible nod he gives Fenris has all the weight of Tevinter’s heavy history behind it.
Fenris cannot speak the word aloud. Still, Merrill sees it, and when she reaches up he does not draw away; she swipes one thumb through the blood tracing down Hawke’s throat and presses that thumb to her own tongue. He watches Hawke’s blood vanish, sickened, and then Merrill places one slender hand on Hawke’s forehead and the other on her heart and between one heartbeat and the next the world—stops.
He will not move. No softness left to Merrill now; she stares into Hawke’s eyes in a wordless shout. Hawke’s lips part, the tendons of her throat gone taut as wires; and she sighs, easier than she has yet breathed since they found her, and her brow relaxes all at once. Her eyes do not fall wholly shut, but the madness is not so violent, and when Fenris takes a tentative step forward she does nothing more than lean her head against his armored chest complacently.
He would thank her, because even with the price this painlessness is a gift, but as he opens his mouth Merrill covers her eyes with the heels of her hands and begins to weep.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasps, her voice hitching, and Trevelyan lopes back a pace or two to place a comforting hand on her back. “I’m so sorry—she fought me—I saw—”
Saw—
But flame roars over the ridge behind them like an opening storm, and there is no more time. Trevelyan shouts; Dorian twists to throw an open palm at their backs and a wall of ice sprays outward in a terrible arc. Even that is a delay of only moments as they turn and run; the Fade has sensed the magic here, Dorian’s and Merrill’s and Hawke’s, and when Fenris chances a glance over his shoulder there is nothing at the ridge’s edge but death. Rage, mostly, seething towers of fire and smoke and spitting brimstone; between them spill the roiling ripples of hunger and fear and one-eyed sloth, and more than one stretched shadow tells him Pride has come for its pound of flesh as well. More than twenty. More than fifty now, if he must guess, and the fume of more power yet over the horizon.
He will not allow it. Four months and ritual upon ritual and his feet pounding on the bleak stark rock of the living Fade itself—he bares his teeth, Hawke clenched tight enough to him his arms ache. His pulse echoes back through her skin; his eyes lock forward, focused on nothing but Dorian’s billowing black cloak and the Inquisitor’s armored back, tall and narrow, the empty leather sheaths for her daggers half-hidden by the carelessly slung staff.
Not a thousand yards to spare in the chase. Merrill’s staff spins a great circle in the air above her, then slams blade-first into the earth as she runs. Stones crack like shattered glass even as Fenris sprints across them; a chasm drops open in his wake, yawning a hundred feet wide and twice as deep. The demons slow, snarling, a wild sound like mountains tearing apart at the roots, but the Fade has always been the province of spirits and not mortals, and by the time Fenris can look once more the chasm has closed, black shale pulled from nothing to close over the pits, edges seamed together like a surgeon’s stitches. The demons wait no longer to resume their surge, a rolling wave as relentless as a tide.
For one terrible, still moment, he’s pierced clean through by the eyes of a distant demon of pride half-crossed over the pit. Too many eyes, yellow and lidless, too much seen all at once: a startling, vivid memory of a dilapidated alienage shack and another demon hidden there, another offer, and a time when trust meant nothing behind the fear.
He knows his fears so well, now. Hawke has made his heart too strong to break that way again.
“There!” the Inquisitor shouts, and Fenris wrenches his head away from the yellow stare at last. An iron band around his chest gives way, then shatters as he drags down breath after breath; Trevelyan lifts her fisted, glowing hand, stumbling to a halt, and when she thrusts her fist to the almost-sky the endless murk of the Fade blasts away from her in every direction. Fenris’s eyes sting, grit and grief-salt blurring all the world to smears, and he can’t—where is it—
And then he sees at last the tall silver spearing of the eluvian that brought them here, unchanged since last they left it in this small stone-circled clearing, its mirrored surface reflecting a world they cannot see.
Merrill does not stop, a grass-toned dart as she races to the mirror’s frame and slams her palms against its sides. Her mouth moves with words he cannot hear, gold tendrils of magic lifting vine-like from her knuckles, her forearms, draping themselves over the mirror’s framing until the metal gleams with raw light.
A touch on his arm as they wait, embroidered half-gloves—Dorian, chest heaving, his fingers dropping to Hawke’s forehead, his black-lined eyes falling shut. A purple seam of light across her forehead, a quick nod from Dorian, and Fenris tightens his grip on Hawke’s waist, her knees. Precious minutes. Such precious seconds, every one, as Merrill sweats and fights the mirror and the demons race to meet them—
He gulps for air. He can’t focus. Hawke’s face is too pale, her eyelashes black and stuck to her broken cheeks; the Inquisitor stands at Merrill’s back, one hand on her spine and the anchor reached over her shoulder towards the silvered glass; Merrill herself splays her palms against the eluvian’s frame, her head hung low, one foot braced hard behind her as if the mirror weighs the world.
Sparks bloom into fire. At the places where Merrill touches metal, yes—and behind, too, where the thousand yards has collapsed into less than half that so that the ever-present fog around his ankles grows choked with greasy smoke. The rage demons throw orange light through the Fade’s fog in sharp streaks, unnatural reflections flung through stone and mist and the curves of Desire’s shoulders. More white-gold flashes come from where Merrill and the Inquisitor work, cleaner and briefer; Fenris blinks, again and again, until the afterimages disappear and he can see in the nearing throng the curved twinned horns of Pride piercing skyward through the smoke. How many pairs tower there above the rest? Four? Five? And all with yellow eyes…
His throat is raw. “They are too many. Too close.”
“A few minutes more.” Dorian’s words are a soft echo, almost whipped away by the sudden bellow of a dozen hunger demons at once. The curls of his mustache turn up in a sudden smile too glad for this false world; he strides away from them all, facing back the way they’ve come, and pulls his staff from his shoulders in one smooth flourish. “And quickly, if you please!”
Abruptly Fenris cannot speak, caught driftspar in the tide of rage and grief and the agony of joy at Hawke’s living once more, the madness of a magister’s back between Hawke and the death that follows, the wild impossibility of his own slave’s feet profaning the Maker’s holiest ground. Hawke breathes in his arms, her head turning once against his chest as he swallows down ash-thick air—Hawke breathes—
Hawke breathes.
“No,” Fenris says at last, hoarse as ash, and shifts Hawke’s effortless weight to one arm. Two long paces—three, the Fade-stone growing hot beneath his feet—and his free hand clenches hard into the embroidered copper of Dorian’s cloak. “Enough!” he shouts, this time to be heard over the soughing rush of magic at the mirror, the rising cry of demon and fire. Dorian staggers, wild-eyed and staring back over his shoulder, and now Fenris can see the fear hidden behind the set of his jaw. “Dorian Pavus! We must go now!”
“Someone must make sure you get away! They’re too close—I’ll give you the time!”
“You will not!” Fenris snarls, and when Merrill’s voice rises to a chest-breaking scream behind him he shifts his grip to the cloak’s collar, and he pulls.
Only flashes, then, the mirror’s magic as wild as lightning and brighter still, the vine-gold tendrils Merrill has woven to its frame rippling with power. Trevelyan’s hand pulses in time, green light growing steadily as she grips her own wrist and forces it towards the mirror’s surface over Merrill’s shoulder. “Dorian!” she cries through gritted teeth, and shoves closer—closer—so close the air shrieks at the sawing edges of two forces never meant to close their distance. The Fade seethes at their backs in an instant’s pause, only an instant, but enough, enough— “Fenris, Merrill! Go! Now!”
And she slams her hand against the eluvian’s face.
White light explodes outwards from her fingers. Hotter than the first opening, though there’s no time left for fear; Fenris pelts forward, Hawke in one arm and Dorian’s cloak tangled around the other, Dorian cursing madly, and somewhere in the last steps Merrill stumbles forward too, and Trevelyan shouts behind them all, wordless and thundering too long—
—
There is nothing.
Nothing in the path between, just as before. No earth beneath his feet, no sound, no sight but the grey emptiness of the endless void. Nothing in his arms, though he can feel his elbows still bent, his fingers still crooked around the shape of Dorian’s embroidered cloak. No weight. No Hawke. Nothing at all.
Nothing.
Every nerve scrapes raw to bleeding—every muscle in his jaw clenches whipcord against the bitterest grief he has ever felt.
He should have known.
How many times? How many times in the last four months has he dreamed this very thing, Hawke found at last, Hawke living, Hawke safe in his arms—only to wake and find the dream slipped away with the misty dawn? How many times—sensing his own unwilling rise from sleep, clinging desperately to the last few minutes where he might still measure the warm weight of her arm over his waist, where he might still feel the texture of her skin against his fingertips.
One more dream. Only one more dream…
His feet slam into stone. Hard stone, the faces worked and polished smooth, and then the rain-grey sky comes so brilliant and blinding he must throw up his hand against it. Only he cannot, because in his arms—
Fenris knows he breathes too fast. The lyrium down his throat flares with every gasp, too fast, too bright, rippling when he tries and fails to speak. Somewhere the mirror flashes again, and again, and again, and at last goes dim and silent. Somewhere voices rouse across the gardens and at his side, his back, hands dropping lightly on his shoulders only to dance away again; somewhere a staff rattles to the ground and rolls away, forgotten. It doesn’t matter, inconsequential as the dawn rain that drums past the open archways where the eluvian stands in its stone tower. How light she has become. How light, even here in this world where Fenris stands wide awake at last, where there is no dreaming left.
Hawke’s fingers lift, slowly, then curl against her own throat. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, and when Fenris gives one great staggering step her head tilts back against his shoulder where his armor is not so thick.
Hawke is alive.
