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In a field outside the small Fereldan town of Crestwood, Malcolm Hawke is training his eldest daughter, Helena.
Three weeks from now, the family will flee Crestwood in the dead of night with whatever they can carry while the cabin they’d been living in burns to the ground behind them. In two months they’ll settle down near a smaller town by the name of Lothering in a house on the other side of the Imperial Highway, close enough to hear the laughter of children their age but far away enough that Malcolm’s training won’t draw the attention of any Templars. In twelve months Malcolm will be dead and burned on a pyre under a willow tree in the yard where a yellow flower will grow until it’s destroyed by the Blight three years after that.
But in this field, right now, with the stars of Kios twinkling above them, Malcolm Hawke and Helena Hawke continue to train, not knowing their time here - as well as their time together - is running out.
At 16, Helena is lanky. (Not unlike her father was at her age.) Her elbows stick out at awkward angles; Bethany spends many evenings poking the knobs of her older sister’s knees until either Malcolm or Helena tells her to stop. Helena hates the attention. She knows that it’s her duty, as the eldest sibling, to take whatever the twins throw at her, to put up with their games and their pranks, but she wishes they could be as respectful and mature as she is. It’s not hard to say please and thank you, Carver, and it’s not hard to apologize without crying, Bethany - this is what she wants to say, but she never does because she is so respectful and mature, as her father always reminds her. Instead she keeps her mouth shut.
Keeping her mouth shut often does very little to help.
Take right now, for example: the two of them have been training for hours now, and Helena is on the verge of collapse. She is tired, her feet hurt, and her arm is just about numb from how long she’s spent holding up her arcane shield while her father shoots round after round of fireballs at her. In the distance she can see the cliff that blocks their house from view, and she imagines the smell of tomorrow morning’s bread cooking, the flickering of candlelight as her mother reads the twins to sleep. Helena wants nothing more than to sleep. She’d lie down in this field right now if her father would let her, even though the grass around her feet has been turned to ash.
“Helena.” Her father’s voice is low in warning. “You’re distracted.”
Her father is a good teacher. Some nights it feels as though that's more important to him than being a good father.
“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head. “I just… I nodded off.”
He shakes his head and leans on his staff, which is stuck in the ground like the stake of a fence. “Pay attention. This is important. When I raise my staff…”
Helena and her father have been training like this almost every night since she was twelve. She was late to come into her magic, Malcolm told her, which was both a blessing and a curse. She was old enough that her magic didn’t first present itself in a fit of anger or bout of sobbing - there were no farmhouses set on fire, no livestock frozen solid - but she was behind on training and had less control over it than other children her age would’ve at that point in their lives. This is why she trains every night, even when she’s tired, even when Bethany wakes her up before dawn and makes her spend the rest of the day running on very little sleep; it’s why she never asks her father for a night off. She needs to learn, she needs to train, she needs to be better - or, at the very least, be good.
“Helena!” Her father’s voice startles her again. “What good do you think it’ll do your mother if you fall asleep in the middle of a battle?”
Helena adjusts her grip on her staff. “I’m not falling asleep,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re lucky I noticed. Not paying attention is dangerous, Helena -”
“I know,” she insists. “I know.”
Her father nods. “Good.”
She takes a half-step forward and lowers herself into a crouch, planting herself in the dirt. One hand holds tight onto her staff, wedged into the charred, churned-up earth beside her, while the other is raised in front of her face, ready to throw up the shield when her father starts flinging his fireballs at her. It’s important for a mage to ground themselves against oncoming attacks - you can do some damage even when you’ve been knocked flat onto your back, but a Templar’s spear can pierce you through the heart or the stomach before you even raise your head. When Helena is certain she’s grounded, she takes in a deep breath through her nose, lets her eyelids flutter shut, and searches for where the mana hums through her veins. A fireball is streaking through the air towards her just as she opens her eyes, but a blue arcane shield goes up in front of her to block the attack just before it strikes.
That first fireball skitters through the grass and up the side of a rock. The second and third ricochet back towards her father, who redirects them towards a grove of trees on the other side of the field with a wave of his arm. The next round of fireballs are sent flying in several directions, with one even shooting up towards the winking lights of Kios in the sky above their heads. Helena can feel her hand shaking and the muscles in her arm trembling, but her father isn’t finished. When the last round of fireballs shoot off into the darkness, she drops her arm and shakes her head to keep herself awake. He can’t make her go on much longer - she just has to stay awake and stay strong until then.
“Your form is good,” he says. “Much better than it’s been before. Do you feel how grounded you are like that? How much easier it is to stave off my attacks?”
Helena nods. He’s made this point a million times before, but she’s not going to say that. “Yes, I feel it.”
“Magic isn’t something you can do halfway. It’s not something you can fake. At the same time, you only need to use the amount of energy you need for whatever spell you’re using. If you draw on too much -”
“Father.”
They rarely talk about it anymore - the idea of turning into an abomination. Helena spent too many sleepless nights in her childhood terrified of looking in the mirror, of falling asleep, of using her magic at all. The idea that she could turn into something that could cause so much devastation made her sick to her stomach and repulsed with herself as well as her magic - the idea of merely existing as she had been felt like too big of a risk. It took weeks for Malcolm to coax her into training again after that, and even then he didn’t understand what about it had stricken her with so much fear. He likely still doesn't.
But he nods anyway. “Alright,” he says, the softest his voice has sounded all night. “You can do one more round?”
She nearly sighs in relief but holds her tongue. “One more,” she agrees. And then bed. And then breakfast. And then a morning in town with Bethany and mother, and no more training until tomorrow night.
Her father adjusts his grip on his staff, holding it aloft before he raises his other hand. Helena plants her feet harder in the ground, grips her own staff tighter, tilts her chin up higher - she will not fail, cannot fail, not when she’s so close to the finish. He gives her a near-imperceptible nod before pulling back his hand and slamming it forward through the empty air almost as quickly, sending a fireball towards her. It hits the side of the arcane shield she summoned and disappears in a puff of smoke.
Almost done , she tells herself. Almost done . Her father throws another fireball at her, and then two at once, and then three at once after that, and she deflects them all, sending them flying into the sky or into the darkness on every side of them. He sends a fireball towards her and freezes it in midair so it turns into an icy projectile, and it hits the arcane shield with a thud before falling to the ground at her feet. Almost done, she thinks. Almost done. And then sleep. And breakfast. And a morning spent frolicking through the meadows with Bethany under the light of the yellow sun . But as the next round of fireballs come streaking towards her, her vision starts spinning, and she doesn’t have time to say a word before she blacks out.
For a moment. Only a moment, and she wakes back up just in time to feel the fireball licking a violent stripe across her cheeks and nose.
“Helena!” Her father runs through the blackened grass as she stumbles back onto the ground and lifts her hand up to her face. The burned skin there is tender and hurts when she touches it, and she exhales hard through her teeth. She’s been wounded by her father’s attacks before, but - not like this. And never anywhere near her face.
Her father falls to his knees by her side, panting. “Are you alright, little dove?” he asks. “Let me see.” He pulls her hand away to examine the wound, eyebrows knitted together in worry, and he’s looked at her for maybe three seconds before he gathers her up in his arms to carry her back to the house. “I’m so sorry,” he breathes as the two of them make their way down the small rocky path they've walked every night for the past year, “I didn’t mean -”
“It’s okay.” Helena buries her face in her father’s neck and wraps her arms around his shoulder, spots drifting in and out of the edges of her vision. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t hear his reply before she blacks out again.
Two hours later, she sits up in bed with a start. Her father is asleep in a chair beside her, and there is no fire in the fireplace on the other side of the room. She reaches up to touch her face and finds a strip of cloth stretched over her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, wincing as it scrapes uncomfortably against the tender surface of the burn. She’s surprised her father didn’t heal it. He heals most of the family’s wounds - neither of the twins have so much as a single scar, and almost all of her mother's are from before her parents met. Maybe he didn’t want to risk doing something wrong and marking up her face even worse than he already has.
She falls back down onto her bed and sighs, staring up at the ceiling. She can imagine it now - the fuss her father made when he came back from training with an injured Helena, the scolding that her mother gave him after they’d patched their daughter up. The thought makes her smile just a little. She loves her father and will take complete responsibility for what happened - it was her fault for falling asleep in the middle of training, after all - but she can’t help but feel like he should’ve sent her to bed when he noticed she was falling asleep and not continued to push her.
Then again - he only pushes her to make her better, stronger. How can she be mad at him for that?
“Helena?” She glances over to see her father sitting up in his seat and reaching for her. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she answers. “I’m awake.”
“Good.” His voice is barely a whisper, and he slides out of the chair to kneel beside her bed. “I’m so sorry, little dove. We should’ve stopped sooner.”
“It’s okay, father,” she replies.
“It’s not okay.” He reaches up to cup her cheek and runs his thumb lightly over the strip of fabric on her face. “I’m your father. I’m supposed to help you, not hurt you; I'm supposed to make your life easier, not harder. I…” He sighs. “I’m sorry. Will you ever forgive me?”
“Of course.” Helena places her hand on top of his and gives him a weak smile. “That's the thing about family, father - you're forgiven before you even have to ask."
The rest of their time in Crestwood is peaceful. For three weeks, Helena doesn’t use her magic even once. She makes bread with her mother in the kitchen while her father plays Wicked Grace with Bethany and Carver; they carve little wooden toys and read books and draw pictures, the twins lying in front of a fire while Helena sits in the back of the room in a wooden armchair, and their parents sing old Marcher songs and dance beside the open window, a gentle spring breeze blowing into the house. Until they’re forced to flee to Lothering, Helena forgets about her magic, forgets about training, forgets about all of it and imagines what life would be like if the five of them had no burdens and didn’t have to spend their lives looking over their shoulders.
Well - most of the time, she forgets. When she looks in the mirror and sees the long, ugly scar stretching from one side of her face to the other, she remembers then.