The hearth behind Lyna shed powerful, comfortable warmth over her back, and she let the simple pleasure of it occupy part of her mind as she waited for Fenris to assemble his response. Her eyes flicked down to the movement of his hands, his cracked knuckles and callused fingertips, bronze skin pierced with lyrium as bright as a full moon. The fire threw red-gold light over everything in the room except for those rivers of silver, which gleamed as bright presently as they did in the dark of night. 

From those markings, somehow, came his peculiar ability, not quite magic–to reach through solid objects, to call forth supernatural strength and speed. It was, perhaps, one of the only things about him that still made her wary. And Danarius had intended to give this power to her, as well? She could only wonder–at what cost?

“If that is his plan, we have little to fear,” she replied, though in spite of the confidence in her words, she frowned. There must be something that she was failing to understand, if Fenris remained so anxious at the prospect of the magister’s inevitable assault. To attack without a force that could lay siege, to expect to be allowed to walk through her gates–surely Danarius wasn’t so foolish. “I’ve read of Tevinter forces thousands strong, building towers on wheels, or digging under walls. Instead, you believe he’ll ask me politely?”

The memories were as clear as if they were days old, not months–the cell that Danarius had locked her in, and the look in Fenris’s eyes as she had planted the seed of rebellion with her words. Neither of them could have known at the time what it would lead to, and she certainly hadn’t thought it through beyond getting the two of them out, let alone that he would fight alongside her as a Grey Warden. 

Lyna had no doubt, based on what the messenger had said, that Danarius was in Amaranthine. The options, in her mind, were two: let Danarius come to them, or find him first. “We could locate him and attack where he’s hiding, but that risks innocent lives. If we let him come to us, it gives him time to prepare, but it gives us fortifications, supplies, possibly reinforcements from outside.”

She envisioned the keep itself, how the mountains protected its northern side and limited the directions from which an attack might come. But even if they knew it was coming, it did them little good without knowing what it might entail.

“Has he laid siege to castles before?” she asked. “What kinds of forces does he command?”

“We could go back,” she mused, her posture relaxing little by little, eyes no longer on Fenris but following a pair of Wardens as they exited the hall’s double doors. Here, she was in her element, at ease among kind if not exactly kin, but the suggestion of returning to Orlais dredged up cold thoughts–so many days in a dark cell, the snake-oil of Danarius’s voice, the gashes on Fenris’s back from whatever torment had finally caused him to flee.

But Danarius would be dead soon, and Creators knew that the elves there deserved recompense for the trouble she’d caused. 

“Once this matter is done, anyway.” Finally, she turned her eyes back to him. “The alienages are complicated, in Orlais as here. They’re free under the law, but not protected by it. They need allies who can protect them, or help them protect themselves.”

“I fought,” she said in a quiet, weary voice, “so fucking hard to come back to you. Because I know that. I know that, and I love you, too.”

She had fought and bled and stumbled through that timeless place, aching to return to him. The moment it had occurred to her, in the Fade, that he thought she was dead… that was the moment she had almost broken. None of the place’s other horrors had been able to, but that one realization had come nearer than anything else in her life ever had.

“I had to know you were alive,” she said then, thinking back to the look of pure wounded betrayal he’d worn when she had shoved him backward into the arms of the Inquisitor and Varric. They’d dragged him back out of the Fade with them, and hadn’t let him stay to die with her. Because she’d asked them to. Because she’d betrayed his trust in her. “I had to, can’t you understand? I couldn’t have done what I did if you were there. I had to… I had to be fighting for you.” She shook her head wearily against his hard chest, just a weak little hint of a gesture. “I couldn’t watch you die. Not you. No you, too.”

Her eyes slid shut, lashes still wet and clinging together. “I’d have died with a laugh in my throat if it meant you had a chance to live. I would always die for you, Fenris, my Fenris. You deserve that chance.”

Her fingers tightened their grip on his tunic and she sighed. “I’m all out of witty jokes. I’m all out of strength, too. All I have to offer you now is what’s always been underneath them. If that’s… if that’s not enough for you now….” She trailed off, shaking her head again.

“Yes,” Hawke said quickly. “Yes, I can. I’m not hurt.” Abruptly, she became aware of just how much blood was on her and hastened to add, “None of this blood is mine.”

She had only the vaguest memories of the last few minutes, really; the dance of death had blurred together into a smear of imagery, flashes of distinct woodcut portraits standing out here and there from the fuzzed and hazy wash of the rest of it. Looking down at herself, at the sticky stains and gouts and great gobs of gore which covered her, Hawke decided abruptly that she had precisely no actual desire to remember the last few minutes with any more exactness. It was enough to know that she had… dealt with the matter, and they’d both survived it.

Releasing Fenris, she scouted about the area and found their things – armor, pouches, weapons – stacked nearby. As quickly as she could, Hawke strapped herself back into her armor and slung her belt, with all its clever little pouches full of clever little things, back around her waist. The borrowed daggers, she discarded with distaste. Yes, she could have sold them, but she had no desire to touch them again after the use to which she’d just put them. With her own blades a familiar weight on her back, she felt… steadier.

Hawke returned to his side quickly, reaching down to support Fenris as she attempted to – carefully – haul the injured elf to his feet as well. It was almost certainly going to hurt, but she couldn’t afford to be too gentle.

“We do have to hurry,” she told him. One very clear memory from the last few minutes had returned to her as she’d dressed quickly. “The mage. Cassander Argentus, or whatever the fuck he called himself. He wasn’t here.” Frustration ground her teeth together almost audibly. “I didn’t get him. We have to go, before he returns.”

An impatient sort of anxiety gripped her.

“Can you walk? Can you… your armor, your sword, can you carry the weight? I will, if you cannot. But we have to go, now.”

Hawke let the dead man – dead weight – slide off her blades and fall to the ground with a sodden sort of sound. Beneath his corpse, a seeping, slow puddle began to form, too much blood to soak readily into the packed dirt of the floor. 

She all but leapt across the intervening few feet to fall to her knees beside the wounded elf, wrapping an arm around his waist with care to hold him up. “Fenris!” she gasped, heedless of the blood that covered them both as she looked at him, seeing how slow his pupils were to respond, how ashen pale his deep olive skin had become. He looked not only injured but sickened, dark indentations below his eyes like thumbprint bruises. 

But he was alive.

Breath shuddering in her throat, she tossed her other arm around him and hugged him tight, pressing her face into his chest and closing her eyes. Her lashes would be gummed with sticky blood when she pulled away, but she was far beyond any ability to care. This was her fault. This was all her fault. She had brought him here, she had missed the damned clever little trap they’d laid for her. She had gotten Fenris injured, captured by Tevinter slavers, nearly dragged back into the tormented existence he’d fought so hard to escape.

“I’m so sorry, Fenris, I’m so sorry,” she said, the words muffled and half intelligible. 

Nathaniel couldn’t quite hide his grimace as he reached to take a sip from his goblet. “I was not ordered to, no, but it was my intention. I spent many years away from it at my father’s bidding. Now that my time is more my own, I try not to be absent for quite so long. My sister lives nearby.” Delilah was always pleased when he stopped by, as was his nephew. Though he did not regret his decision to join the Order he was becoming more and more aware of how short his time was among the living, and had promised himself not to waste any of it while he still drew breath.

He had hoped, too, to speak with Wystan, assuming the man had returned to Amaranthine. Conversing with the Warden Commander in letters was to the point but it lacked…. well, to put it bluntly, it lacked the chance for rebuttal. (Not that Wystan could always be moved, but sometimes Nathaniel wished they could have discussions in person instead of after the man had had long enough to become attached to his opinions.)

“I am not sure what the Wardens here intend to do,” he admitted darkly, lowering his voice just enough to keep their conversation a little more private. Nathaniel hadn’t made it a secret that he didn’t much enjoy the state Weisshaupt was in, but given his rank it was better to fight the battles he chose for himself than wind up in hot water because he couldn’t hold his tongue. “If you find yourself with idle hands there are always soldiers looking for sparring partners. From what I’ve heard you’re quite the skilled warrior.”

Dorian laughed blithely and gestured with the hand not holding his cards. “Oh, the Inquisition,” he said, jovial and dismissive. It was shockingly easy to fall into this persona, to remember again what it had been like to be a man who cared for little but himself and his own pleasures and his own goals. Selfish, self-absorbed, pampered. He was, and had been, all of those things. Perhaps it had only been a sort of fever dream that let him believe he could have ever been anything else. 

“The Inquisition is a lot of running about the countryside killing people. Terribly messy business, overall. Do you know, they actually expected me to camp in the wilderness? Me?” He laughed again, eyeing the spread of cards on the table and discarding one from his hand, plucking up a card from the dealer’s pile to replace it.

“Honestly, the overall bloodthirstiness was nearly Tevinter of them; diverting, for a time,” he added as play passed to the woman sitting at his left shoulder. Dorian sipped his wine, quite genuinely enjoying that, if nothing else. He’d rather missed decent Tevinter vintages in the south; the occasional bottle turned up by the Inquisitor or procured through Josephine’s contacts had only whetted his appetite rather than satisfying it.

Leaning forward, Dorian snagged a ripe fig from the platter on the table and slit its purple flesh with a thumbnail, splitting the fruit to reveal the succulent deep pink-red flesh within. He bit with relish and chewed thoughtfully a moment. “It’s only to be expected, of course; the Inquisitor lived in Tevinter for a time, as I’m certain you know. She was married to Magister Navicularius; wasted on the lout, of course.”

The sound of battle brought her head up. It had been so quiet, so hideously, deathly quiet, that the shouts and the scuffle were loud as a clarion – loud as the bells which tolled to call the faithful to Chantry services, or the horns which rang out the retreat upon a field of war. Hawke had heard those horns before, and she had let them call her away, to the retreat. She had run away that day, somehow finding her brother in the chaos, somehow managing to convince him to flee yet further – to their mother, and their sister, who needed them.

She did not retreat now, though visions danced blackly at the edges of her eyes, gibbering like contorted phantasms of the Fade… or like darkspawn, twisted and poisonous. She did run, yes, but toward the calls and shouts, not from them. It was Fenris’s voice she heard, Fenris crying out in pain and rage and fear; and all at once she could not bear to hear it. She barely knew the elf, and yet he was her friend and she would not let him suffer and die, not if she could prevent it!

She would not let him suffer and die, not when she had already waded hip deep in a roomful of blood to prevent it. She could not let that be for naught.

Her blades came up. Her blades came down. A man, who had not even seen her (as the others had not seen her), died (as the others had died).  A man, who was a monster. A slaver, as cruel and twisted in his soul as any Blighted thing. But still a man, she reminded herself as she twisted her borrowed blades and felt them scrape bone. Still a man, and the taking of his life should never become easy, nor enjoyable. She was a blade, she was a killing thing, but she would kill from close quarters and smell the blood as it coated her hands. 

Arrows made things too clean, too distant. She had hung up her bow when she had become a hunter of men, not bucks.

“You shall not touch him,” Hawke hissed into the dying man’s ear. “You shall not have him!” Her blades shoved deeper and one of them found his heart. With a last shocked gurgle, blood spilling over his lips, the slaver went limp as something fled his eyes.

It was easier even than she’d hoped.

The slavers were overconfident, probably too accustomed to handling beaten and broken captives with all the spirit and the will stripped out of them. Or perhaps it was only that they knew their current two captives were caged, and it never occurred to them that one of those captives always carried a makeshift lockpick with her. Or perhaps they merely believed their cavernous lair to be well hidden and impregnable.

Whatever it was, they’d only set two sentries, one at each tunnel exit to the main cavern complex. The rest of the slavers were rolled up in their blankets, snoring and grunting in their sleep like the animals they were. And the sentries, equally foolishly, both faced outward. Clearly they expected no threats from within, having underestimated the ingenuity of a determined Fereldan rogue. The two men died quickly and silently, her makeshift garrote first cutting off their breath and then cutting into their throats. The wire was slick with blood when she coiled it around itself and tucked it away into her sleeve.

One of the sentries carried a sword, which wasn’t of much use to her; but the other had daggers, and these she liberated from his corpse almost cheerfully. And from there it became even easier to move among the sleeping men and women with silence and with stealth, dipping the blades almost delicately into the soft places in their throats. They died without ever waking, and her hands grew as slick with blood as the wire had been.

It was so easy. Horribly, terribly, appallingly easy. She moved among them like death wearing flesh, and none of them ever knew it. None of them even had time to make a sound. None of them even saw her face. They just died. Quietly, and without ceremony.

She didn’t know how long she cried. It could have been minutes or hours. Void, it could have been days she spent there, curled against the warmth of his chest and shuddering, her face pressed to the increasingly damp fabric of his tunic. She cried until her throat ached, until her stomach hurt, until her temples throbbed. She cried until there were no tears left, and even then she gasped and choked as tears dried to salt upon her cheeks and in her lashes.

She cried each and every tear she hadn’t cried for years, all of them coming out in a pained torrent. She cried for Lothering, for Carver, for her mother. She cried for Kirkwall, for every single man and woman and child she hadn’t been able to save. She cried for Saemus, and for his father, and for the Arishok lying dead at her feet. She cried for Anders, for every soul lost in the conflagration he had made of the Chantry, and for Sebastian who had lost his family a second time. She cried for Varric, and for Fenris, who had thought she was dead.

At some point, Huan forced himself up onto the bed with them, nosing his heavy head up against her face and licking at her tears, a worried whine in his throat. Hawke threw an arm around her dog’s neck and held him there too.

Eventually, all her strength was spent, and all her tears were shed and dried. She could not bring herself to move, even then. It felt so good, curled against her Fenris with Huan beside them. It felt like every dream of joy she’d ever had. Except for her own weakness, which had never been a part of any of the demons’ temptations, she could almost fear herself still trapped in that place, never having truly escaped at all.

Finally, she shifted fretfully against him, wanting to see his face. Needing to. She still didn’t like that he had seen her like this – or that she had given in to this, that she was so damnably weak at all – but it was done, and she felt hollowed out, a bird’s egg blown clean with only the fragile outer shell remaining intact. 

“Fenris,” she said quietly. “Why?”

“I come and go as I please,” she replied with mild surprise of her own, though when she considered his observation for more than a moment, it made a kind of sense. No doubt he was used to going where he was told and there only, whether it was Danarius or Hawke who gave the orders.

As for Lyna, unless there was some unusually pressing need, her presence wasn’t strictly required at Vigil’s Keep most of the time. From what she’d known of Duncan, or seen of Wardens in other places, it was natural for them to travel—and fortunately, for the need to wander ran strong in her Dalish blood. She liked to be present among the friends and family that her Wardens had become, but her senior officers could handle most situations that might arise, and who above her in rank would keep a close eye on her whereabouts? The First Warden in Weisshaupt? Not likely.

“Though I’m in no hurry to return to Orlais,” she added, with what might have been a rueful curl of her lip, barely visible. “When I left for Val Royeaux, I meant only to observe.” How different–and, likely, how much easier–the last few months would have been, had she kept to her original plan. “I’d heard some news of the elves there and wanted to see for myself. But once I had seen it, how could I stand by and do nothing?”

Boystown. Not the sort of place Shadow usually hung out, but not a bad one, either. The bars were a little on the glitzy side for him, pumping out music which seemed to be mostly bassline and nothing else; and the drinks were all colors not generally found in nature and overly sugared. But the people were pretty, and mostly in a good mood and having fun – the locals, anyway. Once in a while, some drunken little shit in a Cubs cap wandered in from neighboring Wrigleyville to gawk at the queers and make things get a little ugly, but usually they stayed on their side of the line and Boystown stayed on its.

He wondered if the glitz and the pretty people were why the elf had gravitated here. Fenris seemed to fit in pretty well with his big eyes, shock of silvery hair, and unusual tattoos. Something Shadow had noticed more than once, even before finding out just how weird the real world really was, was that city dwellers had a pretty high tolerance for weird. They saw enough otherwordly shit on the El on their way to work to fill a storybook and barely even looked up from the smartphones. An elf in Chicago’s gay neighborhood? Sounded like perfect cover to Shadow. If Fenris got noticed here, it would be for being stunning, not for being an elf.

“Thanks,” Shadow answered, making himself comfortable at the bar. Or as comfortable as he could be with the strobing, multicolored lights flaring over the dance floor and that throbbing music rattling his bones. The elf’s silver hair picked up the colorful light and turned pink and then green and then bright blue by turns. The glowing tattoos stayed silver-blue though; and Shadow wondered what other people thought they were. Black light tattoos, or glow in the dark bodypaint, maybe. 

“I’m in no hurry,” he added. It was true. He wasn’t.

She didn’t sleep. She was happy to see that it at least looked as though Fenris was resting, as close to comfortably as he could, in any case. But she didn’t sleep at all, choosing to spend her time in planning. By the time another guard came by and shoved food through the bars – dry bread, a wooden cup with stale-tasting water in it – and sneered something about how they better rest up because there was a long journey in the morning, she knew just what she needed to do.

She ate the bread, sopping it in the water first to soften it. No reason to lose out on anything which could bolster her strength, even as weakly as this could. And then she waited, sitting cross-legged in the cage until she was all but certain all the slavers would be asleep except for whatever guard they left on shift overnight. 

They’d taken her enchantments. She’d have to do this completely the old fashioned way, until she could get her rings and things back. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. 

Moving quickly and without a word to Fenris – who might still be asleep anyway, she wasn’t sure – Hawke ripped at the seam of her shirt just enough to open a little hole. Fishing around with nimble fingertips, she found the end of something and started pulling; a long, thin bit of wire came slithering right out. The fools had missed it when they’d disarmed her; well, it had been designed to be missed, after all!

She looked dubiously at the wooden cup they’d left, then managed to snap off the handle without making too much sound. She broke it into two more pieces. “Good,” she murmured. “Not perfect, but good.” 

One end of the wire, she twisted up just so; craning her arms through the bars and cursing her own short reach, Hawke worked at the lock blindly. It took longer than it should have under more ideal conditions, but after a few frustrating minutes, the lock gave with a satisfying snick as the tumblers turned. “Oh yeah, who’s the best? That’s right, it’s me,” she sing-songed to herself triumphantly.

The cage’s door squeaked as she opened it. Moving more quickly now that she could see what she was doing, she opened Fenris’s, too. “Stay here. I’ll be back….” she whispered to him.

Then she picked up the bits of broken mug handle and twisted the ends of the wire around them. From lock-pick to a handy little make-shift garrote, all in only moments. And then she slipped out of the cavern and into the tunnels. A-hunting she will go….

“No,” she managed between wrenching, painful sobs. “No, it’s not all right, nothing is all right! You have no idea what I went through to get back to you, and you won’t even talk to me, you won’t even look at me, and Varric said he punched you and nothing is all right, Fenris, how can it be all right when I can’t even stand up to yell at you properly?” 

The motherly mage nurse had gently told Hawke that the damage she’d done to herself in the Fade, the damage caused by dehydration and near-starvation and over-reliance on strength and stamina enchantments – that it could be permanent. She might never recover the full strength she’d had before. She had pushed herself too hard this time, just trying to survive, and might be broken now forever. 

How could Fenris ever love her now that she was this weak, pitiable, pathetic thing? How could he love her when she wasn’t the bold and reckless Champion who’d always been at his side, protecting his back, being strong for him? It was no wonder he’d turned away from her when he’d seen her trapped in this bed like the fucking invalid she’d become. It was no damn wonder.

“Put me… put me down,” she said, struggling weakly against his chest. And fuck, she was even crying now, like he’d never seen before. He must think she was pathetic. She certainly thought she was. Maybe he was right all along. Maybe he shouldn’t have come back. “I don’t like you seeing me like this.”