Chapter Text
Later, as she sat by the veilfire eating a giant spider, Hawke reflected on the unusual events that had brought her here. It all started with a letter from Varric, summoning her to a forgotten fort in the mountains to fight an enemy she had killed long before. She still had that letter, stashed in her pack with the other ones he’d written her. He’d likely found them by now and, hopefully, the last one she’d written to him in case the inevitable would finally come to pass. Though she wouldn’t have guessed it would be her current predicament, somehow, it also didn’t seem surprising. The crazy had been ramping up over the years. In a way, it was only fitting.
She’d lingered around the location of the rift for some time after it closed — around three days, she estimated, based on the total number of giant spiders she’d ingested since then — but had decided she would move on come nightfall. There had been a chance she could get out, however slim, but she had given it enough time. The Inquisitor opened the rift they entered through on a whim, as she nearly fell to her death. The other had been the result of a blood magic ritual involving most of the surviving Grey Wardens. Neither condition was ideal to occur again, and she assumed neither party would be stupid enough to consider doing so in an ill-advised rescue attempt. Hawke certainly hoped not.
“Think I’ll head in that direction,” she said, nodding towards a large black spike in the distance.
It was the largest out of several. Though it did not stand out in any meaningful way, its shape did faintly remind her of Fenris’s blade. Follow your gut, she imagined Bela would say, Just avoid pointy rocks. Boats do not do well with pointy rocks. With Hawke not being on a boat and pointy rocks being the only thing around her, however, aiming for the sword-shaped peak seemed as good a decision as any.
“You coming with?”
Leandra looked up from her roasted spider-leg and at her eldest daughter. The stitches across her neck stretched with her ashen skin. She was wearing one of her favourite dresses, the one they’d cremated her in. The colour looked good on her, even giving her lifeless face the faintest hint of a blush.
“I’m not sure I can keep up with you,” she said, smiling gently, “Always, you were running around ahead of everybody else. Now, here you go again. Don’t we have it good here?”
Hawke glanced around at the black spires mired with lyrium veins, the emerald streams that were neither liquid nor fog, and the rotting corpse of the fear demon just visible beyond the ridge behind them.
“I suppose it’s a small step up from Kirkwall.”
“Oh, we haven’t been there in years,” Leandra sighed airily. “It did change since I was a girl… Say, I never asked. Did you ever grow to like it there?”
Hawke considered the question for a long moment, noticing how it was becoming harder to think. Her mind was growing hazier with each passing day, in part, she suspected, because of how difficult it was to tell them apart from the nights. Spider meals were one measure. For the other she couldn’t be quite sure, but there seemed to be more activity in the Fade once Thedas went to sleep. The shamrock sky grew brighter with anticipation as thousands of mages laid their heads to rest and crossed over to the other side. Not to where she was, not exactly, but some place that the spirits could sense them nonetheless. The excitement would die down after an indeterminable length of time and, eventually, start up again. It was the closest to a rhythm she had found since getting stranded, so it was what she held on to. Without it, the endless blurring of time and space would undoubtedly do a number on what remained of her sanity much faster.
“I liked the people,” she answered eventually. “Not all of them, obviously, but… I found some good ones.”
“Yes, I did like your friends,” Leandra nodded.
“Please don’t do that,” Hawke grimaced as her mother’s head wobbled dangerously on its jagged perch. “This is weird enough without having to pick your parts up off the floor later.”
Leandra laughed. Though the spirit’s impression was accurate enough, to Hawke it still sounded odd. Not because it was wrong, but rather because of how long it had been since she’d last heard it. Leandra never quite let go of the noble manners she’d been taught, not even while living in the dregs of Ferelden or Kirkwall’s slums. She had not seemed unhappy in the last years of her life, despite the losses she’d suffered, but she would rarely express herself by tossing back her head in open and unfiltered joy. The last time Hawke had heard her do it was when she was still together with her father, the man who she had decided was worth sacrificing everything else those manners came with for.
“It is an odd look,” Leandra giggled, assessing her patchwork form, “Why do I look like this?”
“Beats me,” Hawke scoffed, though a voice in the back of her head thought differently. It spoke with an accent, bright and innocent, with a charming roll to her r’s.
Spirits respond to people, Hawke, to our wishes and desires, our fears, our thoughts and our dreams. They are like this mirror, reflecting yourself back at you. Well, maybe not this mirror… But any other mirror will do!
Hawke shook her head. “Are you saying I want to remember my mother like this?” she asked no one in particular. She’d been doing that a lot, alongside giant spider hunting. Somehow, an answer always came.
“You do like to beat yourself up,” Leandra said lightly.
“Don’t leave to others what you can do better yourself.”
“That sums you up well,” her mother sighed resignedly.
They didn’t speak for a long while, with the only sound around them coming from the veilfire crackling solemnly in the silence. Instead of speaking, Hawke thought. It was a pastime she had only started entertaining in the later years of her life. It still felt uncomfortable, not in the least because one of her thoughts had manifested into the dissected form of her mother sitting beside her. Thinking in the Fade, it seemed, was not without consequences.
She directed her mind back to the choices leading her up to this moment and corrected herself. Though she had denied it for a long time, what was the point now? It had not started there, with that letter in which Varric gushed about the silver-haired Herald. It had started long before, before Varric had ever entered the picture. If anyone had made her want to believe otherwise, make her think she was not living on borrowed time, it was him. Yet not even he had managed that. Such was the power of ancient witches who could turn into dragons.
“Sometimes you bite off a bit more than you can chew though,” Leandra said conversationally, “Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Hawke agreed. There was little else to do with the evidence of that statement quite clearly, undeniably visible around her. “Sometimes I do.”
“… More spider-leg, dear?”