Archive of Our Own

if it’s true what they say
I’ll be on my way
we can all be on our way
if it’s true what they say

 - Anais Mitchell, “If It’s True”

It started with a book that wasn’t a book.

“Really? That’s how you want to start it?”

He glares. “It’s how the story starts.”

“The words trip around his mind like a brook, babbling, bending, breaching the surface. I’m not usually the one who does this, but for him, I’ll do anything.”

A soft, focusing touch. “It’s a great opening.” A gentle smile. “Keep going.”

I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t expecting anything, really. For two years, four months, and ten days, I’d stopped expecting anything at all.

Hawke was dead. There was nothing left to expect.

Varric hadn’t said “dead” in his letter, of course. “Left behind.” We had to leave Hawke behind to cover the Inquisitor’s escape. Almost like there might still be hope, like they could just go back to get him tomorrow. Except that Varric had addressed the letter to “Fenris” instead of “Broody” or just “Elf.” Dear Fenris.

It took me an entire day to be able to read what followed those first two words.

The grief surprised me with its ferocity. It felt like anger, like my anger at Danarius, at my enslavement and my disfiguring and what he made me do in his name, except somehow worse. It had never occurred to me that anything could be worse. It didn’t just fester, it burned, like acid in my stomach and heart and veins until I couldn’t handle it anymore and ran. Left the hidden house we had called home and ran. Away from the Free Marches. Away from everyone and everything we had known together. Just…away.

“You’re a hard man to find, Elf.”

And still, I somehow wasn’t surprised when, two years, four months, and ten days later, I heard that gravelly voice behind me.

“I really didn’t think I was going to, to be honest,” he continued, the squelching of his muddy footsteps stopping five paces behind me.

I wiped the gore and rain off my face and growled without turning around. “You weren’t meant to, dwarf.” I stepped over the body in front of me, intending to run. Again.

“I really think you ought to hear me out. Might make your day a little better.”

I spun around before I knew I was doing it, successfully goaded, and there he stood. Varric Tethras. Author of half a dozen books. Author of my living nightmare. The greatsword in my hands shook, not with fear or fatigue but rather grief transmuted to rage, as I leveled it at him. “You dare to show your face after what you did?”

Varric, as ever, seemed wholly unconcerned with the knife’s edge on which he was perched. Bianca strapped to his back, no allies in sight, just his perpetually bemused expression as a defense. “I can see that you’re mad, but—“

With a roar, I lunged at him, dropping the greatsword and grabbing his neck in one hand, tattoos flaring blue as I lifted him high in the air. I screamed again, “You fucking dare show your face to me?”

His hands scrabbled at my wrist. “What—“ he gasped, “what did— I—“

“You FUCKING MURDERED HIM!” I bellowed in his face, shaking his small body like a rag. The blue light wreathing my arm intensified as I prepared to phase through his neck and collapse his windpipe.

But he was just barely able to squeak out, “He’s— not— dead—“

My hand went slack in shock.

Varric rolled around in the mud for a full minute hacking and coughing, but I barely registered it. I couldn’t. I stared at the space where his head had been, at the splay of my bone white fingers, not quite understanding why my heart was beating so fast, why my arm didn’t seem to want to move.

“That’s not funny,” I whispered, knowing it wasn’t a joke.

“It’s not a joke,” Varric replied with another cough, standing back up. “Fuck, Broody, remind me never to—“

“It’s not funny!” I yelled, a different sort of yell now, and this time, he didn’t back off.

“It’s not a joke. Look at me.” He grabbed my arm. “Look at me!“

I did.

And I saw a grief like mine. Not as big. Not as sour. But still the same. The whole time I’d been running, it had never once occurred to me that this was a feeling I could share. And it wasn’t all that I saw.

I also saw the faintest glimmer of hope.

“How?” I breathed. “Where?”

Varric shook his head, rubbing at his tender neck. “Not here. Can we get out of the rain at least?”

I nodded, feeling…I don’t know how to describe it.

“Try.”

He levels a look at the spirit, but he doesn’t object.

It was a…numbness. But not the sort of numbness like after I read Varric’s letter. That numbness made me feel like my body and mind were disconnected, separate. This numbness was almost the opposite: I could feel my heart racing, my mind whirling, my body…it was so overwhelming, I just sort of…shut down. It was too hard to think. So I just nodded, starting to walk down the road back towards the village.

“Don’t you, uh—“ Varric coughed, cleared his throat, tried again. “Don’t you want to grab your sword?”

I shook my head. “Not mine. Grabbed it off the first guard.”

“Ah.” He took a look around at the bodies strewn across the path with their floppy-yet-spiky hoods, the half-dozen or so staves lying where they fell. “You do this a lot?”

“Yes.” I kept walking.

“Seems harsh.” A sympathetic, unjudgmental look.

“Not unreasonable, considering, you know.” He gestures in the universal sign of everything was shit. But then he pauses and shakes his head. “No, I suppose you don’t. Call it retribution, and leave it at that.”

“I always thought their hoods held secrets, but they were just heads.”

A beat. “Yes. Quite.”

He chuckles, reaching out instinctively to grab his hand, but stops at the last moment. “You’ll get used to him.”

“I look forward to it.” A gentle smile. “Keep going.”

The fire in the tavern was probably warm, but I don’t remember. I don’t really remember getting back to town, to be honest. The slam of a book on top of the table was what focused me again.

“Varric, I’m not interested in—“

“No, no,” he interrupted me. “This is how I know.” He jabbed a stubby finger at it. “Take a look.”

I did. Hard in Hightown: Chapter something, the cover read, the chapter number too smudged to read. I sighed, pushing it back towards him. “I’m not interested in reading another one of your serials,” I started again, exasperation creeping into my voice, “I just want to know how—“

“Fenris.” My name on his lips sent a chill down my spine. Dear Fenris. “Really look at it.”

The force of his sincerity is what convinced me. I’d never found Varric terribly earnest, to be honest, no matter much Hawke told me he was. He was a charlatan—a happy charlatan, maybe even a heroic one, but a charlatan to his core. But the look on his face, the haunted-yet-hopeful expression…I found my eyes drifting downward again to the book.

Which was…odd.

The first thing I noticed was that the smudge over the chapter number wasn’t really a smudge. It wasn’t dirty or grimy. It was more like the text itself was smudged. The longer I looked at the book, the more wrong it seemed, like how the lines of the cover didn’t quite match the angle of the pages, or the way the words of the title—clearly written in Trade—would suddenly look Qunlat or Orlesian or Tevene or something unrecognizable if they caught the firelight differently. I looked back up at Varric. “What magical nonsense is this?”

“Something I found in the Fade,” Varric answered grimly.

I recoiled instinctively, backing away from the table. “What the fuck, Varric, that’s—“ And then my reason caught up to me. “Wait, you were in the Fade? Again?”

“Kind of? I think?” Varric shrugged. “I’m still not sure if that library was in the Fade-Fade or some weird pocket-Fade that—“

“Did you see him?” I demanded impatiently, that spark of hope rising in my chest. “Was he there?”

Varric shook his head, and just as quickly that spark died back down. “No. But it’s where I found this.” He pushed the very wrong-looking book closer to me. “Read it.”

I tentatively opened the book. The memory of Hawke teaching me to read, first in Kirkwall and later at our home, hit me hard suddenly, unexpectedly. His hands on mine, letting me turn each page when I was ready. His lips, forming the vowels and consonants as we went. His patience, when I was so quickly frustrated. I missed him extraordinarily in that moment.

A quizzical smile. "I think I taught a Fenris to read once."

He smiles back. "I know."

"That's not part of this story," the spirit says, a layer of agitation in its voice, a layer of agitation in its voice. "You have to deal with this story before you can deal with that one, or any other one."

He nods carefully. "You are right. Call it an...illustration, of how so many of my stories intersect with this one. How it's all caught up together. The joy. And the pain."

The spirit shifts uncomfortably, but says nothing.

"This not-really-a-book sounds interesting." A happy, unbothered expression once again. "Keep going."

A normal enough story, even if the words at the periphery seemed to slide off the page. I recognized the name of the guardsman from Varric’s previous editions of this serial; Hawke kept them around the house, and I’d taken to reading them when he wasn’t looking.

This chapter described the guardsman at a bar on the seaside. It really was lovely prose; I’d never tell him, but Varric’s writing was uncommonly good. I kept reading, to a part when the guardsman then encountered a dark-haired nobleman on the patio idly strumming a lute so out of tune, it sounded like some other instrument, perhaps a tuba or a kettle drum, trying to invent music from scratch. I couldn’t help but smile to myself.

“Which part?” Varric’s voice broke in tentatively.

I’d almost forgotten he was there. “The part with the lute. Just reminds me of Hawke. He got a lute off a passing caravan one time and brought it back to the house. That’s almost exactly how I described it, like he was trying to invent music from scratch.” I glanced up to see Varric with a strangled look on his face. “What?”

“Just…um, just keep reading,” Varric said, voice hoarse.

Something in his voice made my heart beat a little faster again. I looked back down and kept going. The guardsman and the dark-haired noble reminisced together in the next passage, the noble saying, Kirkwall. It finds its way into your soul, and once it gets there, you carry it always. I furrowed my brow, my lips mouthing the words as I reread them. “…’you carry it always.’ That sounds like something Hawke used to tell people.” My mind whirled, something on the edge of my perception screaming at me. I didn’t look up, but I could feel Varric’s eyes on me.

“Keep going.”

The last passage. The guardsman proposed a toast, saying The world can always use a Champion or a guardsman wherever they happen to go. I traced the words with my finger, barely noticing the way they seemed to slowly spin on the page, the thoughts in my head spinning with them. “Champion…” I trailed off, throat suddenly dry. “Varric, is this supposed to be a tribute to Hawke? It’s kind, but I—“

“I didn’t write this.”

I couldn’t make myself look at him. My tracing fingers started clawing at the page, as if I could tear the truth out of this thing that was like a book but wasn’t. “I don’t…I don’t understand. This is your serial. This is your writing. This…this is your—“

“Elf, I didn’t write this. I found this.” He gripped my arm roughly. “In the Fade. Don’t you get what this means?”

I looked up finally then, into Varric’s tear-streaked face. I’d never seen him cry, not when Bartrand died, not when Leandra died. But he was openly weeping right then, with a look of such intensity that I almost flinched.

“I think Hawke’s still alive.”

The spirit furrows its brow. “Hope, but he’s crying. Not a very good story.”

“He’s crying because of his hope,” he argues back, willing patience into his tone and gestures. “It’s the pain that made him seek me out, but it’s the hope that gave us a direction afterward. We needed both.”

“Hmm.” The spirit’s dark eyes narrow almost to slits, clearly troubled, but it motions for him to continue.

Varric said he had a plan. He said I wasn’t going to like it.

He was right.

It took us weeks of traveling to get from where Varric had found me outside Hunter Fell to Brynnlaw, right on the edge of the Arlathan Forest. That was the last place he’d gotten a letter from Merrill, he said, so that’s where we had to go.

He talked the entire way there. At first, he tried to bring up old stories of our days in Kirkwall, but I shut that down pretty quick. So instead, he talked a lot about the Inquisition—a lot. About how impressive the Inquistor was, about the different companions he traveled with—including a demon and a magister, what fun—and about one woman he’d met. “You know I met a witch while I was with the Inquisition? A real live witch, not just a mage. Said she helped the Hero of Fereldan take down the Archdemon back in ‘31. Weirdest accent I’ve ever heard, too.”

Three weeks of that. Of the uncountable reasons I had missed Hawke in the two years and now nearly five months since he had died, I hadn’t gotten to being the banter-buffer between me and everyone else yet, but there we were.

And then, almost without my realizing it, there we were. Brynnlaw. The dense thicket of the Arlathan Forest just on the edge of the horizon. I recalled the stories Danarius would tell me about the forest. How it was a place where magic was wild and unpredictable. How it stood as a monument to the hubris of elves and the order of the Imperium. How it was where rabbits went to die.

Curious that in all my years enslaved to him, he never once found the courage to go inside.

It was utterly in character, then, that Merrill’s cottage was in the hills right on the edge of the forest. Uncontrolled magic near a quaint thatch roof? Of course.

Varric knocked on the door, and before he could even get out a “Daisy,” she had squealed and twirled him around three times, already chittering away about a new tea she’d developed from a tree she’d never seen before. She stopped mid-sentence when she saw me, though. Froze, like a deer in a hunter’s eye.

No. Like a Chantry mother on the edge of a graveyard.

“Fenris,” she whispered, tentatively, one hand half-outstretched like she was worried I’d fade away.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was so small, so broken. So very different from her greeting to Varric just moments before. I hated it, and appreciated it, and understood it, all at once. After all, what do you say to someone who’s lost what I had? “I— I tried to write, but I didn’t know where to find you. I just— He was so dear, and you both were so happy, and I—“

I held my hand up, and she stopped immediately. Didn’t flinch, just stopped. Uncharacteristic. I appreciated the intentionality.

“Actually, that’s why we’re here, Daisy,” Varric said, putting a gentle hand on her arm. “We need your help with something.”

She took us inside, and Varric told her the same story he told me, and then he asked, “You still got that eluvian?”

She was still wiping the tears from her face—tears of joy this time, that Hawke might still be alive—but she laughed and said, “Of course I do, it’s right over there. It was terrible smuggling it out of Kirkwall after we escaped, but I wasn’t going to leave it behind. Not after everything we went through to fix it.” With pursed lips, she added, “So hard to tell if it was worth it, though. It makes a better clothing rack than a mystical artifact from my ancestors these days. Why do you ask?”

She pulled the layers of knitwear and leggings off, haphazardly revealing the mirror responsible for the deaths of at least two of her former clan. The thing was evil and dangerous and I still felt the same revulsion looking at it as the first time she showed it to us, nevermind the fact that she had it in a corner like some knickknack she picked up at the market. I hated that thing on sight, hated more that we needed it.

Varric explained, “Because I’ve been through one of these now, and I think I know how to open it.”

Which is how, four days later, I found myself carrying the damn thing like a pack mule through a forest that kept trying to kill us.

“You’re sure this is the place?” I said as the sun was disappearing that fourth day, carefully removing the eluvian from where it was strapped to my back. As much as I just wanted to chuck the benighted thing off the nearest cliff, Varric was convinced this was going to work. But as I looked around the clearing, dotted with the fragments of old ruins, it didn’t look any different than anything we’d seen since leaving Merrill’s cottage.

“Oh yes,” Merrill responded cheerily, practically skipping around the clearing as she started to do something with her staff. “The Veil is quite thin here. I’ve been able to have many lovely conversations with spirits every time I’ve been to visit. I’m sure it will work.”

I rolled my aching shoulders, casting a sideways eye at the nearest half-buried statue. “Lovely,” I echoed. “So you’re telling me that—“

“Hush.” I jumped as she put a finger to my lips. I hadn’t realized she was so close. “I know you hate every part of this. And I know that you and I are only friends because of Hawke, and without him, you must think…” She trailed off. But when she looked back up at me, the determination in her eyes looked exactly like his. “I can do this. I can help you get him back.”

So I silently let her go about her work. Setting wards around the clearing. Activating other devices she’d found around the forest. And, when it came time, instructing me to remove my tunic.

A smirk. “Sexy.”

The familiarity of the look, of the expression, makes his heart beat faster with hope. He ducks his head, hiding his grin. “Shut up.”

Varric had talked nonstop about the Inquisition as we’d traveled east toward Brynnlaw. Nonstop. It was hard not to be jealous, if I’m being honest, given that I’d been alone for so long and that I held Varric responsible for it. Unfair, maybe, but I think he held himself responsible, too. I think that was why he’d come to find me so quickly after leaving Val Royeaux instead of going straight back to Kirkwall.

“A possibility. A story thread to follow. A way to make up for the second-worst mistake in his own story.”

He nods. “I think you’re right.”

“I am. It’s what he told me.”

What he kept coming back to was his conversations with Morrigan. She had told the Inquisition that to open an eluvian, you needed a key. And a key could be anything: an object. Knowledge. Power.

Like the power etched into my skin.

“This is going to work, right?” I said, shifting uncomfortably in the middle of the clearing. “This will get us into the Fade?”

“Crossroads,” Varric answered, idly fiddling with something on Bianca.

“Right, Crossroads.” I still didn’t understand how the Crossroads wasn’t also the Fade, but it seemed like Varric didn’t either, so asking him wasn’t going to help. “And then we can get into the Fade from there?”

“Of course!” Merrill called across the clearing with all the unearned confidence of someone who had once asked a demon to repair a broken mirror.

“Of course,” I repeated under my breath. I hugged my bare torso a little tighter.

I hated magic. Hate magic. I could point to any number of things magic had taken away from me, starting with the love of my life. But for that man—and that man only—I was willing to storm the gates of my actual hell.

So just as the sun dipped below the horizon on that fourth day, in a clearing surrounded by humming artifacts attuned to the wild magic around us, Merrill pointed her staff right at me and set me on fire.

I don’t remember a lot of what happened next, but I think something went wrong. Merrill’s spell hurt, but it didn’t hurt like being burned. Rather, my tattoos seemed to absorb the fire, turning from blue to purple in an instant, glowing brighter than the sun.

“Now, Fenris!” she yelled. “Direct the energy at the mirror!”

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, tried to find that place inside me I go when my body does what it does on the battlefield. But the clearing suddenly got very noisy, very fast.

“Shit!” Varric shouted, and I snapped open my eyes just in time to see a blast of energy fling him into the side of the eluvian.

Out of nowhere, a horde of enemies was upon us—wisps, demons, walking constructs—and whatever wards Merrill had set up only seemed to be attracting more. Varric rolled to his feet, Bianca already loaded and firing, but as I dove to grab my broadsword, Merrill yelled, “Fenris! The eluvian!” I could barely see her for the flurry of magic surrounding her as she fought to stay on her feet, but I could see the steel in her eyes. “Go!”

“I don’t know what to do!” I yelled back.

“Yes, you do! Go!” And then I lost sight of her.

I turned back to the eluvian, closed myself against the chaos swirling around me, and thought of one thing.

Hawke.

I felt the magic burning through my tattoos burst out of me and strike the eluvian, pulling me along with it. The last thing I saw was Varric’s grim grin. “Go get him, Broody.”

Then darkness.

A gasp. “Did they…”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I barely got a chance to see what they were facing before the eluvian opened.”

The young man closes his eyes briefly. “A fight against impossible odds, shared mistakes, to save a friend they both love.” He opens his eyes. “This is not where their story ends.”

A long slow exhale. “Good.”

He looks at him with hope but says nothing. It might be working, if hearing that made him feel anxious.

The spirit harrumphs. “But you don’t know they survived. Just more pain and suffering.”

“No.” He fixes the spirit with a look. “Sacrifice. Are you telling me you would dishonor sacrifice for the sake of happy memories?”

The spirit flickers ever-so-briefly before shaking its head. “No. That would be…wrong.”

He nods and continues.

I fell. It could have been a minute or a year. I had no point of reference other than the sensation of downward movement, a lurch in my stomach like when a cart goes over a particularly steep hill.

No. More like how it felt when Justice would possess Anders.

And then suddenly, I was standing on a castle’s wall. No impact, no transition, just suddenly I was…there. Staring over the crenellated stone at a mountain range in the distance, jagged snowcaps towering over a lush valley. It took me a moment of looking at its beauty to realize that I was looking at its beauty and then to wonder why I was looking at its beauty.

“Hello.”

And then to remember where I was supposed to be.

I whirled around to face the voice behind me, finding only a little wisp of a demon dancing on the far edge of the wall. I reached to draw my broadsword before realizing I had left it behind in the clearing.

“You can make it real, you know.”

I furrowed my brow. The voice came from the wisp, though I do not know how I knew. “I can make what real, demon?”

“Your sword,” it replied in a gentle, distinctly male voice. “Burnished steel, blazing beneath the sun, cuts a path through those who would harm me, only when my hands are full do I feel safe.” It bobbed at me. “If it will help you feel safe, you can make it real.”

I flexed my hands, and for the briefest of moments, I felt the edges of a hilt in my grip. I shuddered, dropping my hands to my sides. “You will not trick me, demon. I will summon nothing while I am here that may bind me to your service.”

The wisp bobbed. “You called me ‘demon’ again. He said that you would say that, but I am not that. Why do you—“ It stopped, and as it curled around in a circle, I had the distinct impression that it was looking at itself. “Oh. Right.”

In the space between moments, there was suddenly a young man sitting where the wisp had been. A rough, homespun tunic, buck teeth, straw-colored hair, and the most ridiculous wide-brimmed hat I’d ever seen. He almost looked real, even though I knew he wasn’t.

“I forgot that I was that when I could be this,” he said, his lilting voice exactly the same as the wisp’s. “I like being this. Do you like this me better than that me?”

“It does not matter what form you take, demon,” I replied coldly as I started to walk away, “you will neither trick me nor delay me from my goal. I will leave the Crossroads and find—“

“This isn’t the Crossroads.”

I did my best to ignore the spike of ice that shot down my spine. “I— I do not believe you, demon.”

“This is not the Crossroads,” he said calmly, “and I am not a demon.”

I looked around wildly, the icy fear spreading through my veins. The eluvian I came in through wasn’t visible. No eluvians were visible, for that matter. All I could see were castle walls decorated with an eye-and-sword banner and mountains in every direction. “No,” I said, mouth dry, “no, Varric said it went to the Crossroads, and then— I have to find him, I have to get through this and—“

“You are here for Hawke.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, turning slowly to look back at him.

His expression hadn’t changed, yet he seemed somehow sadder. “I am not what you say, and I am not here to stop you. I am here to help you. He is here.”

My heart beat faster. I looked around wildly, at the not-castle in the not-mountains, and started to panic. “Here? He can’t be here, Varric said he was in the Fade. Merrill said the eluvian would work but Varric said it would only take me to something called the Crossroads and we’d find a way in from there but Merrill was supposed to be here to help get me in and now they’re gone and I can’t do this on my own I can’t DO THIS BY MYS—“

The young man put his hand out, and I immediately calmed down.

Not calm, exactly. It’s like I just…forgot to be anxious for a moment. I didn’t forget why I had been anxious, just forgot to be anxious.

The young man smiled. “Oh good. I’ve been practicing that one. Forgetting everything is not always helping, and I want to help.”

I blinked. Without the fear compressing my body, the young man looked more real and less terrifying. “What are you?”

“I am C—“ The young man stopped, and then started again. “I am Compassion. And I am a friend of Hawke’s.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“Weird kid, but he’s starting to grow on me,” he said in a low, quiet voice with unfocused eyes. “I can only imagine what Fenris would say if they met. He’d probably just scream demon! and run at him with a sword.”

The young man spoke with a familiar cadence, a familiar inflection. It wasn’t his voice, but the words were unmistakably Hawke’s.

“You, um…” I swallowed roughly, trying to collect my words. I glanced at the castle keep behind him, gleaming in the sun. And I thought back to Varric’s many, many stories on the road to Brynnlaw, which I was only finally starting to realize were meant to fill the gulf of grief between two former companions. I tried again. “You’re Cole, aren’t you.”

The young man nodded. “Hello.”

“But how am I here?” I whispered. “I thought the eluvian was supposed to take me someplace else.”

He pointed at my bare torso. “The dream in your skin called out to what it lost. It drew you here.”

My heart started beating faster again. I didn’t dare speak.

But I didn’t have to. The young man’s eyes unfocused again, his voice once again colored with a foreign inflection—mine this time. “Brown hair, soft in the morning sun, scars from our shared journey together, only when my arms are full do I feel safe.”

My breath hitched.

“He is here,” the young man repeated. “And I want to help.”

For Hawke’s sake, I had once been companions—no, friends—with an apostate, an abomination, and fucking Sebastian. For Hawke’s sake, I could be friends with Compassion, too.

“Okay. Help me find him.”

An awed look. “That must have been hard for you.”

He tries not to sounds too hopeful as he replies, “Why?”

“Just…” A furrowed brow. “I’m not sure. You seem to not like magic, or the Fade, or spirits. So trusting this one—” a gesture at the young man “—must have been hard. Why did you do it?”

He can’t help himself. He reaches out and covers his hand with his own. “For you.”

“Are you ready? I don’t think you will like this part.”

“I am.”

“The Fade flickers, fades into shapes like real-world places but also like the strongest feelings of the strongest spirits.” The young man looks around at the castle’s keep. “I was very happy here, so this part looks like this. But it won’t when we leave.” Compassion looked at me and asked again, “Are you ready?”

I swallowed and started to nod. Then, in a flash of inspiration, I held my hand in front of me, felt for the curve of a hilt, and was suddenly holding a silvered greatsword. “Now I’m ready.”

He gave me a smile. “I like you.”

“I hate everything about this,” I grumbled in response.

If anything, that made him smile more.

We walked down the wall into the bailey, then out across the bridge over the valley below. The further we walked, though, the more our surroundings seemed to change. Where once I saw a mountain, I now only saw the peak, unattached to anything below. A valley in the distance began to look more like a running river filled with black ichor. And at some point after I’d stopped noticing, the sky was no longer blue, but a sickly green. I shuddered without meaning to.

“I did say you wouldn’t like it,” Compassion said, leading me on with purpose.

I do not know how long we walked. But soon enough, the—

“No, no, no!” The spirit slams the table with his palm. Bits of the table fly off in random directions, fading away or becoming other things. “You can’t skip over any part of the story or you ruin it.”

He stares the spirit down. “Ruin it?”

“You can’t—” The spirit shimmers briefly with indecision before starting again. “You can’t truly deal with it if you don’t face the whole thing.”

“You wanted a story, not a personal logbook. I haven’t told you what I ate at Merrill’s house or how many steps I took on the road to Brynnlaw because those details don’t matter. Neither does what happened between when I got here and when I got here.”

“But—“

Everything in him wants to summon the greatsword and chop the spirit’s head off, but he finds an inner calm from somewhere and levels another look at it instead. “You said you’d fix him if I could show you how the pain in a story makes it worth telling. That’s what I’m doing.”

The spirit shimmers with indecision again, alternating between an angry glower and an intrigued frown, but sits back down.

A reassuring squeeze of the hand. “Keep going. I think I’m going to like this part.”

Soon enough, the smell of sea-salt on the air started to drift across the misshapen plain. It had a familiar scent. Hauntingly familiar. I looked to Compassion, wiping more green ichor from my silver blade. “What is that?”

“It is where we are going,” he responded simply, and kept walking.

As I followed him, the landscape continued to shift, as it had countless times on our long walk. I knew enough by now to know we were entering the territory of a powerful demon. “Spirit,” Compassion always insisted.

But I knew.

The landscape slowly became a seaside vista, the cliffs overlooking the ocean dotted with the verdant green of growth instead of the putrid ubiquitous green of the Fade. Something like a small tavern waited at the edge of one of the cliffs.

“He’s there,” Compassion said.

My heart lurched. My body tensed, poised to break into a run, but Compassion held a small hand up.

“He is also…not there.”

I growled. “Spirit, I do not wish to play games, I just—“

“It is not a game. It is very much not a game.” The young man seemed to shrink in on himself, his cadence for once taking on an unfamiliar lilt, neither mine nor Hawke’s. “Stories are the fruit of life, and they must be shared.”

The tone sent a shiver down my spine, even if the words themselves were innocuous enough. “Stories?”

Compassion turned to look at me, face impassive. “Do you know why I keep saying you should say ‘spirit’ instead of ‘demon?” he said, as if this were an answer to my question.

I pushed down my rising irritation for the hundredth time and shook my head.

“What you call a demon is a spirit whose purpose has been turned, twisted, taken away. It is not made different from itself. The water that quenches is the water that drowns. You still call it water.” He shifted, gesturing back towards the tavern. “This one carries stories, helps people remember what is good about where they have been, purifies the parts of the story that are not. But it has been a very, very long time since there has been a real person to help in this place. And it has forgotten how to help in the right way. Stories are not stories if you only remember the good parts.” His voice shifts into a lower register, with a cadence I’d come to recognize as Varric’s. “The thing about stories, kid, is that you have to have both good parts and bad parts. Otherwise it’s not a story, it’s just bragging.”

I considered this for a moment. For two years, six months, and…I had no idea how long at this point, time ceasing to mean anything in this misbegotten place. Ever since Hawke died, the stories I’d had of him had curdled in my mind, separating into either saccharine sweet—the bits of the stories that surfaced when I hated the world—or woefully tragic—the bits of the stories that surfaced when I hated myself. The spirit in that tavern over there sounded a lot like the demon I’d been wrestling with for the better part of three years. A demon with which I was all too familiar.

And if that demon or spirit or whatever was acting on an instinct that had been twisted from its purpose, then I might just know what to do. Because I had once been twisted from my purpose, and Hawke had saved me. For him, I could do better, be better, than just going in sword swinging.

I walked past Compassion toward the tavern beyond.

A furrowed brow. “But why would you want to remember the bad bits of a story?”

He looks at his beloved with a gentle smile, ignoring the increasing agitation of the spirit sitting opposite. “We’re getting to that. But I promise you: it’s worth it.”

I pushed open the door and immediately recognized the surroundings from the book-that-wasn’t-a-book, as well as the man wiping down the bar. He did look quite a bit like Aveline’s husband, if I ignored the way the light through the window cast shadows on the wrong side of his face.

“Friend!” he said, grin splitting his face. “Welcome! Come, sit a spell. You must be weary from…” He trailed off, the grin fading. “Wait. I know you. You are…” He squinted, as if trying to remember a half-forgotten dream. Suddenly, his dark eyes opened wide, confusion and consternation warring across his brow. “Fenris. You’re Fenris.”

I nodded slowly. “And if you know that, then you know why I’m here. Who I’m here for.”

“You can’t.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not finished with him yet.”

“And I won’t let you keep him here one moment longer.”

“You—“

“Hello.”

The blitheness of Compassion’s soft greeting over my shoulder broke the tension. The man wearing Donnen’s face smiled again—a genuine one this time. “Compassion! It’s been ages since I’ve seen one of you. Come, let me get a look at you.”

Compassion walked past me to the bar, giving a subtle nod toward the patio. As the two of them started chatting, I slipped away, through the open door to the area overlooking the ocean.

And my heart stopped.

“Well, hello there! Welcome to…well, wherever this is. I can’t quite remember. Too much—“

I couldn’t hear any more, wind briefly rushing past my ears before I buried my head in the crook of his neck, clinging to him like the last safe place in the whole world.

“Hawke.”

And then I didn’t say anything for a long moment. I couldn’t.

Finally, I pulled back, his face in my hands, just so I could look in his eyes. Those beautiful eyes.

Eyes that held no spark of recognition.

“Hawke?”

He gave a lopsided grin, buoying me with its familiarity even as his words shredded my soul. “Sorry, friend. I’m not sure who that is. But, you know, I’ll take another one of those hugs. Strong arms you’ve got there.”

I shrank back. He is also…not there. But it was him. It had to be him. It looked like him, smelled like him, he’s right where Varric said he would be. “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

He furrowed his brow, though with a smile still on his face. Another familiar look. One he would give to particularly thick vendors in the market. “Your arms. They’re quite strong. Are you a tradesman of some sort? Blacksmith, perhaps?”

“It’s me. Fenris.” I tried to keep the rising panic out of my voice. “Hawke, please. Tell me you remember.”

The smile faded from his face. “I’m sorry, friend, I…” He trailed off, looking around the patio. “I think I knew a Fenris once. Tall elf fellow. Loved him like…well, not like anything else, I suppose.” He smiles again. “What a funny coincidence. Doesn’t feel like a very common name, does it?”

“No, no, no…” I backed away, scrubbing my face with the heels of my palms. “No, I can’t, this can’t—“

A soft touch on my forearm grounded me, and I looked to see Compassion staring back. “He’s there,” he said again.

“Is he?” I said fiercely. “He doesn’t remember me, he doesn’t even remember his name. He’s just like—“

I stopped the words before they came out of my mouth, but they came out of Compassion’s instead, almost like he couldn’t help himself. “Stone sarcophagus sliding open, fresh air, new. My body hurts, my skin burns, but the man who opens the lid looks happy. Who are those two women over there? I can’t remember.” He looked back up at me and shook his head. “He is not like you. He was not erased. He was looted.”

Looted. The rawness of that word on Compassion’s lips turned my renewed grief to rage in the space of an instant. “Nostalgia!” I roared, spinning toward the door. “Give them back!”

Donnen walked calmly out onto the patio, polishing a glass with a towel, unnatural grin on his face. “What ever do you mean, weary traveler?

“Hawke’s memories,” I growled, feeling the hard weight of my sword in my hands, “give them back.”

The spirit chuckled. “Oh, his memories are intact, friend. Too intact, I should say.” He stepped further onto the patio, calmly walking past me to the railing, looking out over the unreal water. “All he could do when I first found him was talk about what he remembered. About what he wanted. About what he lost. He was so focused on the past, and so…sad. So very, awfully sad. Absolutely couldn’t find the good at all. So rather than leave him for Despair to find, I brought him here. And…helped him.”

Compassion shook his head. “Sometimes the pain is helpful. Sometimes forgetting is what hurts. Helping is not always helping. It took someone else helping me for me to learn that.”

The spirit snorted. “Unpleasant memories make for terrible stories. And what I care about are the stories worth telling. So I helped him take those memories out of his stories. And he’s much happier for it.”

A confused smile, turned down at the ends. “I am…wait, I don’t understand.”

“You will,” he responds resolutely. “I promise.”

He looks at the spirit, whose face has gone unreadable. The spirit murmurs, “You called me by the wrong name, traveler,” in a tone that is not at all sure it’s right.

He nods. “I know. But I knew a spirit of Justice once who became twisted into Vengeance and did terrible, horrible things. And Nostalgia is what I would call taking unpleasant memories out of someone’s stories.”

The spirit recoils, as if struck. “No, that’s not what I—”

He interrupts gently. “Let me finish mine.”

“Take away the connections, the pathways, the drips and drabs and drafts that link disparate memories together into a coherent story, and what do you get?” Compassion asked softly.

“Someone who can’t feel loss.” My heart sank. “Someone who can only live in the present. His memories are there, but he can’t reach them. He doesn’t have a way to get to them.” I looked across the patio at Hawke, my beautiful, ridiculous man, as he watched the ocean waves with wonder. “He remembers ‘a’ Fenris exists, but he can’t connect that memory to me, because it would mean feeling the sadness of having been separated for so long. But it means he also won’t remember…” I rememberd a night before the mage rebellion, sitting on top of one of the dockside warehouse buildings, pleasantly drunk and pleasantly tangled together as we watched the sun rise over the harbor.

And then I looked at Compassion—no, at Cole. I remembered the stories Varric had shared about the Inquisition on the long walk to Brynnlaw. I remember how it—no, he—had learned, had grown, had changed.

And then I looked at the spirit, the earnestness on his face. The sincerity of his desire to help.

And then I suddenly knew what to do.

I took a deep breath, letting the sword in my hands slip back into nothingness. “Spirit,” I said, “I have a proposal.”

The spirit raised a single eyebrow. “Do you?”

“If I can prove to you that stories with pain are worth telling, will you fix him? Let him leave with me?”

The spirit’s eyes narrowed. For the briefest moment, its form shimmered, from Donnen to something else, something that made my eyes hurt. But I didn’t look away. I needed it to see, to see me. The water that drowns is the water that quenches. So I stood my ground. And waited.

The spirit suddenly snapped back into form, face impassive. “Alright,” it said cautiously, voice a shade deeper than before. “Terms accepted. Tell me a story, weary traveler.”

I let out my breath and slowly nodded toward the table on the edge of the patio. “Have a seat.”

As the spirit and Cole sat, I walked over to Hawke. He gave me a lopsided grin. “Hello again. Here for another hug?”

I chuckled, shaking my head. “No. I was actually wondering if you’d like to hear a story.”

“A story?” His eyes lit up. “Of course! I feel like I could listen to your voice all day.”

“You,” I laughed, “are a terrible flirt.”

“Really? Because I think my flirting’s pretty top-notch.” And it occurred to me, if I have to fall in love with him all over again, I guess it wouldn’t be that bad.

A startled glance. A sharp intake of breath. “Fenris.”

So I took him by the hand, led him over to the table, sat down, and took a deep breath. Please let this work.

“It started with a book that wasn’t a book.”

---

There is silence on the patio. Hawke stares at Fenris, frozen, no longer smiling. Fenris, in turn, stares back at him, searching for something, anything, in those deep, dark eyes.

“Fenris,” Hawke says again, voice small, the name almost swallowed by the sound of the surf below. “You’re…” He squeezes his eyes shut, one hand rubbing his temple, the other like a steel cage around Fenris’s.

Fenris turns to face the ashen-faced spirit. “I would not be here without the pain. I would have no reason to be here without the pain. Varric, Merrill, Cole, none of them would care at all about his story, about this story without the pain.”

The spirit’s form flickers, unstable. “A memory that causes pain…it drowns out the memories that cause joy. It makes the past hard to relive.” Its voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, the tavern flickering along with the spirit, the Fade’s natural state trying to reassert itself.

“That’s what I used to think, too.” Fenris speaks to the spirit, but focuses on Hawke. “That the past was only pain. That anything good had been sullied by magic and demons and the evil works of mages and men. But it’s not.”

Cole murmurs in my cadence, “He saved me from Danarius. He saved Varania from me. He saved Kirkwall from itself. He makes the story sweeter because he saves me from the pain, every time.”

“That book that Varric found,” Fenris nods, “was your attempt to give Hawke a happy ending, wasn’t it? Familiarity, comfort, closure, with none of the pain he’d gone through?”

The spirit says nothing,

“But a story with only the good parts is Nostalgia, spirit.” The spirit flinches again. “And that’s what I thought you were, but you’re not, are you? You want the happy ending to the story, but you’ve been isolated from your purpose. You aren’t supposed to suppress the pain. You aren’t supposed to hide the pain. You’re supposed to release the pain. Aren’t you?”

The spirit still says nothing.

Fenris gathers all his courage, all the pain of the last three years, all the love of the man with a death-grip on his hand, and says, “I know what you are.”

The spirit’s lips don’t move, but its voice reverberates through the landscape. “What am I?”

“Catharsis.”

Everything explodes in a burst of bright light, millions of colors shifting and shimmering and sweeping around. The tavern, the ocean, the table, the spirit—everything fades away. Except Hawke. He cries out in pain, curling in on himself, right into Fenris’s open arms.

Please let me be right. Fenris hugs Hawke to his chest, arms like steel bands against the raging storm of light around them. Please.

Slowly, achingly slowly, the cacophony of color starts to fade around them, coalescing back into the seaside tavern. Fenris’s heart drops. No. It didn’t work.

He releases Hawke, gently pulls his head out of his chest so he can see his face.

His tear-streaked face.

“That,” Hawke says with a thick voice, “was a very good story.”

Fenris laughs. And then they cry in each other’s arms for a very, very long time.

---

There’s silence at the table for a moment before Varric says, “I don’t know, feels like it could use a little editing.”

Hawke swats him on the shoulder while Merrill collapses into giggles. “You’re terrible, you know that?” he says, trying—and failing—to glare at his friend.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Fenris says calmly, raising his pint glass at the dwarf. “I’m much better with my hands than my mouth.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Hawke growls, nudging him with his shoulder.

“Gross,” Varric says.

Merrill straightens her tunic, tipsy with drink and emotion, then looks at Fenris. “There’s still one thing I don’t get.”

“One thing?” Varric murmurs from behind his drink.

She swats him on his other shoulder but continues, “How did you get back?”

Fenris hunches his shoulders a bit and lets his eyes go glassy. “The dream in your skin that called you here can call you home too. Dancing, dreaming, dramatic retellings—they’re all the same thing, aren’t they?”

There’s a beat of silence at the table before Varric says, “Damn, Broody, you’ve got Cole’s patter down. I’m impressed, and very creeped out.”

The group of friends continue chattering deep into the night, swapping stories, sharing memories, and working out the grief and tension of the last several years. And every time Fenris looks over at Hawke, he’s still there. Safe. Beautiful. Whole.

Together, they watch the last of the light disappear in peace.