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The Templars always presume that Anders will be the more dangerous one. They may have trained all their lives to fight mages - but a warden, an abomination, the man who set Kirkwall aflame and murdered the grand cleric, is so much more than a mage. He is more than anything they are equipped to handle. Do not engage alone - do not attempt to take alive - do not - do not -
This is the only time that anyone has ever overlooked the Champion of Kirkwall.
Tale of the Champion lays to rest some rumors and creates more. Hawke, it used to be said, is a blood mage, maleficar - she is, in fact, no mage at all. Her father was one, her sister is one, her lover is one, but she is not. That reassures the Templar Order, as does the picture that Varric Tethras paints of the Champion: a woman of strength and principle who would rather keep the peace and protect her city, a woman still swept up in events bigger than her, blinded by love for a dangerous revolutionary, convinced out of desperation to burn her bridges and flee Kirkwall and the company of her friends -
Gretchen Hawke uses the book her best friend wrote about her as kindling. He props her up in some places, sells her short in others, crafts with his words a woman who the Templar Order looks at and says is not as dangerous as the abomination with whom she keeps company.
Varric writes what he knows, or what he thinks he knows. Varric does not know of the guilty quiet relief that Gretchen felt when Aveline pushed a knife through her first husband’s heart. That is one less Templar who can hurt Bethany. Varric does not know of all the years she sat in the shadow of Lothering’s chantry and begged swordplay lessons off of the Templars, learning their names and the weak points in their armor and where they lived if she had to slit their throats in the dead of night to make time for her father and sister to flee. They have wives and children but so does my father and I will choose my own family over theirs. Varric does not know how many Templars she has killed.
She doesn’t, either.
No one kept counting.
Varric writes what he thinks is important. He makes the story of Hawke’s fateful duel with the Arishok up almost entirely wholecloth; there was a duel, and she won and was named Champion, but as he writes it she was on her feet at the end, she was not covered entirely in her own blood, she was not holding her intestines in with one hand, and so no one who was not there in the throne room asks how she could have possibly survived. Those who were there, did ask, and the keep in Kirkwall was where the rumors of blood magic began; that from her own spilled blood the Champion drew the strength to survive, the power to kill the Arishok. But Varric wrote his friend a clean victory where she did not crumple to the ground at her lover’s feet and he did not expend nearly all of his energy to keep her from bleeding out there on the floor next to the body of her enemy; and so the Templar Order does not know to wonder.
(Those rumors would be right if they said reaver instead of maleficar.)
The Templars know Anders only as an abomination and a murderer; they do not remember that he is a spirit healer. They do not know how often it was only he who stood between Hawke and death. And the Templars know Hawke as the woman who ran away at his side and murdered Templars to defend Kirkwall’s Circle, but they do not know how many she killed before then. They do not remember how she spent her life on the run before Kirkwall, so that to run again is no issue; they do not know how much she hates them.
When the Templars catch up to the abomination who set Kirkwall aflame, he steps back - and the Champion steps in, her teeth bared, her sword already bloody. They cannot touch him; she is always in the way, and when their blows land on her she grins, reddening her teeth with her own blood, cleaving apart their armor with blows that only grow stronger. They cannot seem to hurt her no matter how they cut her. She steps over their bodies and they step back. They run. Some days she follows. Some days the Maker smiles upon His Templars, and she does not follow.
The Templars always presume Anders is the dangerous one, but whatever the years in Kirkwall twisted them into, however the years running continue to shape them, he was first a spirit healer, and Gretchen was first a protector. She kills, and he keeps her alive.
Rumors are born from dead men, circles of dead Templars on the ground felled by a blade and not by magic. Rumors spread from the lucky who were spared, or the smart who ran. (Not cowards, they insist to doubtful commanders. Someone had to bring back word of what happened. You didn’t see what she can do. I couldn’t have stood against her either.)
They learn not to overlook the Champion of Kirkwall. It doesn’t save them.