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Me acquiring the ability to close rifts with a sweet green hand has pissed some people off. I don't even care about the ‘Herald of Andraste' spiel. I don't like that bitch. No, but jealousy must raise its ugly head, especially when you collect all the best, brightest (and nicest looking) people in Thedas and coop them up in a castle together. As even Corypheus knows, I like templars and templars like me, but these days templars don't much like templars. One day my pleasant stroll around Skyhold with my brother (avoiding every woman but Vivienne) is interrupted by male bickering. I wouldn't give a damn, but it's my pet templars barking at each other in the lower courtyard. I have to break it up, just in case.
“Oh Maker, not again. I can't with these people. Sister, you deal with them. I'm going to, uh-” Carver, himself a templar, spots a dwarf girl he has his eye on entering the tavern, and vanishes. An amazing feat for one so large and heavily armoured. I'm sure he learnt stealth off Cole or some other unscrupulous creature.
Downstairs, men whine.
“You do not take lyrium, Commander. Can you even still call yourself a templar? I think not.” A voice cutting enough to slice flesh into pretty Orlesian shapes emerges from a brute grown yet more brutish thanks to the application of red lyrium. No, it's not Samson. He's dead as all the Elven Kingdoms combined, and then some.
“Lyrium does not a templar make, General. Also, I don't call myself a templar.” Meanwhile pretty boy Cullen is as harried sounding as ever. I preferred him in Kirkwall, when he was halfway through his trauma arc. Now he's attempting to better himself and I don't approve. When he sees me approaching down the stairs he places a hand on the pommel of his sword and straightens his stance. His swanky fur ruff still does not make him equal in size to his coppertop ogre of a colleague.
“Inquisitor.” says Cullen, ever so proper.
“Hawke.” drawls Mettin, proper, but also a douche.
Red and blue templars eye me and each other. I should mention that I've been sexually involved with both of these men, and their pointless bickering is probably a proxy for something. To the left of our gaggle of jealousy a group of soldiers spar with a Behemoth. Mmm, epic.
“You should probably call yourself a templar, Cullen. At least when I'm around.” I say, making the Commander blush, adorably. I broke his brain a decade ago and he's never recovered. However, it's not my fault I resemble almost identically a mage cousin of mine.
He begins glitching. “Uhh…”
Yup, there he goes again. Anyway, my mere presence puts an end to the argument about who and who is not a drug addict, and Cullen departs to blush alone in his office. I'll torture him there later.
My pet red templar remains, naturally, staring at me out of mismatched eyes. Allegedly he's married. I find that more impossible to believe than anything else I've ever heard, although his so-called wife lives in the castle with like a billion offspring. As I'm staring back at him he pulls his sword out of its scabbard. Not the sword he swiped off Samson who got it off Corypheus who swiped it off Meredith, but the one I gifted him after Kirkwall blew up.
“Fight me.” he says, psychopathically, prudently raising his shield.
“You're doing it wrong, dumbass. You're supposed to fight Cullen.”
“I am stronger and better than he is. If I fight him, he will die.”
“True. The same applies here.”
“Excuse me?!”
I decide to explain. “Everyone I've ever fought has died. Everyone. Everything. I slew the Archdemon. I slew the Architect. I've slain like fifty high dragons. Corypheus had to come back to life after I killed him, and he's only still alive because he's in hiding and no one can tell me where he is. I don't want to begin slaughtering my allies for no reason, Mettin. Don't tempt me, I'm warning you. Think of the children.” The desire to kill something is rising in me. I’ll have to go out and liberate something for the Inquisition forthwith.
My part-time lover and full time baby daddy cocks his head, his red eye quizzing me. “Can you not spar?”
Time to emasculate Mettin like he emasculated his predecessor in office. “I have never sparred in my life. I am simply this good, and you will never best me, in any way.”
My pet blinks asymmetrically at me. I like to think of templars as cats. Lions. Blue lions and now red lions.
“Maker…I hate you, Hawke.” he says lovingly, replacing his ugly sword in its sheathe.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll torture you in your office later, hun. I’ve got serious business to attend to.”
I think I’ll take Carver, Vivienne, and the demon boy, and go slay my 51st high dragon.