Pîrê
A court enchanter follows them home.
Celene’s eyes and ears, but better spending time with the Empress’s pet than slotting herself back into Inquisition meetings once again. She finds Morrigan’s company pleasant anyhow, which surprises most everyone. Madame de Fer of course, but Seeker Pentaghast too, who’s sure that the witch is some sort of spy. Adaar knows that. But a spy can still have fascinating insights on magic that a hedge mage like Adaar hasn’t heard the likes of, even from the masses of Circle mages she’s surrounded herself with. It’s an uncomplicated thing to sit in the garden and hear Morrigan’s theories on ancient magicks.
Better a spot of warm sun protected from the worst of the wind, surrounded by herbs and the scent of apples, the only fruit that will grow at this altitude. Better that than trying to sift through her own bizarre reaction to the last hour at the Winter Palace, the persistent thought of which her mind shies from the way she’s shied from the council meetings. Slowly, she is taking a backseat once again. To be seen, yes. To appear about the castle, conversing with Fiona, with Ser Barris, with Cullen if she has to. But it’s so much easier to be a figurehead, to let other people make the important decisions while she leads a life she never thought possible, ever meal a guarantee and every word she says being recorded by some enthusiastic scholar. She holds her crowned head high and ladylike, and doesn’t hide her marked hand. (The glove she still has, though. She keeps it in its own drawer in her room atop the mage’s tower.) Is this something she can see herself doing for the rest of her life? Simply gliding through it, untroubled? She’s never thought about what might be in store for the Inquisition when Corypheus is defeated.
“What do you suppose will happen to me once the Inquisitor no longer has a use for me?”
The page of Morrigan’s tome is abandoned, golden eyes fixing upon Adaar instead. “I suppose what will happen is whatever you desire, Herald. Your Sunburst certainly burns brighter than the Inquisitor at this point. The power you have amassed will at that point be unformed, able to be shaped into whatever channel you wish.”
“Is that the only thing I’ll have the end of all this?” Adaar asks. “Power?”
“It is the only thing worth pursuing.”
Ironically, Morrigan’s certainty makes Adaar realize that wasn’t what she was asking. She means her fate. She means the Inquisitor, specifically. What will she mean—to Isabela, Solas, to the rest of the people who’ve put their faith in her—when this is all over?
She can hide from own confusion, but this second question leads her right back to Hawke, to war councils and stratagems. A few more days are spent hemming and hawing—once nearly talking herself out of it when she considers that one of them might inquire about her embarrassing horseback flight from Halamshiral, and the ensuing inner-crisis starting the cycle all over again—but eventually she musters her courage.
The Inquisitor looks strangely benign with her spectacles on. Odd that that’s the first thing Adaar notices as she slips into the back of the meeting after dodging them for a month. But she’s struck by it, the feared Champion of Kirkwall looking rather quaint in a pair of small, rounded glasses while she pulls on levers that spin the world.
“It’s good to have you again, Herald,” Hawke greets her when the majority of her circle has filed out, save Isabela.
Adaar scuffs her toe against the floor. Of course the Inquisitor noticed her absence, hardly a thing goes by in Skyhold she doesn’t put a thumbprint on. If she noticed, why didn’t she try to get me back? Adaar wonders, but waves the thought away. She’s done assuming the worst of her.
“It’s nice to be back,” she says, skipping over the part where she justifies herself.
Hawke is content with that. She says, “I have something for you, if you want to join us on a rift excursion again.”
Specifically a rift excursion. A chance to re-involve herself in field work, in mercenary-type activities. Adaar has to admit she’s intrigued by the gift they want to outfit her with, whatever it is.
“I get to put it on,” Isabela claims before Hawke’s even fully extracted the box from her desk drawer.
“On? On me?” Adaar asks as she’s guided into Hawke’s high-backed chair.
“As I’ve said, my experience with Vashoth is limited,” Hawke explains. “But not nonexistent. For a question I had, I sent word to a friend in Kirkwall.”
“The one that taught you Qunlat?”
“No, that friend is an elf. Maraas is a Maker-honest Tal-Vashoth, and he actually bothered to give his insight on this one.”
“What was the question?”
“What would make a nice present.”
Isabela is straddling her lap, probably more than necessary, but Adaar can’t bring herself to mind. She’s curious about the present. The box is opened, jars and salves arrayed in a rainbow of muted colors, a distinct odor caressing Adaar’s nostrils as Isabela cracks the first one.
“Is that vitaar?” Adaar asks. The pungency calls forth every old battle she’d worn the stuff.
“Maraas even sent along a few common designs.” Hawke sounds quite pleased. Self-satisfied, even.
“How’d you meet a Tal-Vashoth all the way in Kirkwall?”
“Where the Qun goes, Tal-Vashoth spring up,” Hawke says. “Even if they didn’t, something about that city inspires people to go crazy.” The deep fondness rumbles in her chest.
“Chronically,” Isabela agrees.
“Do you miss it?”
“Terribly,” they say at the same time.
“Are you going back, when all this is over?” Adaar asks. Her question to Morrigan, but better now, closer to the shape of what she truly wants to ask.
“I promised Isabela we’d take a long holiday in Rivain.” Hawke says. “After that, probably, but it’s in no hurry to take me back. The Circle's doing the best it can, the guard can function perfectly well without me—and the dog’s watching Gamlen, so everyone’s sorted for the foreseeable future.”
Ask, ask if you can see it, Adaar urges.
“Mouth closed, Poppet,” Isabela quashes it. “Not good to ingest this, even for you.”
This familiarity isn’t out of the ordinary. Isabela touches her often, is touchy in general with casual brushes against her side right down to the easy intimacy of stabbing bits of silver through her ears. What isn’t ordinary is how Adaar’s stomach clenches to have Hawke watching them like this—at ease, not the slightest bit affronted at having Isabela crawling all over her.
“Something on your mind, Sweet Thing?” Isabela asks without looking over her shoulder.
Adaar doesn’t know what to make of Hawke’s mild expression. The Inquisitor says, “Not what you’re thinking, but close.”
Adaar is barely hearing the conversation. She can’t be letting her mind wander, not in this position, not when she’s recommitted to her stance of not becoming involved in things. Getting her head mixed up at the Winter Palace is what drove her away in the first place.
To distract herself, she searches for a topic of conversation.
“The Grand Consensus thinks Leliana could be the next Divine,” she blurts.
“Mm. Or Seeker Pentaghast,” Hawke says, arms folded sitting on the edge of her desk.
“Well,” Adaar says, “yes, I suppose. But it’s fairly obvious it should be Leliana, isn’t it?”
“And why do you think that, Herald?”
It’s not judgmental, but Adaar knows a test when she hears one.
“Because she’s a Sister, for one.” She knows she has to believe her own confidence. “She’s aware of, and knows how to play the Game. Pentaghast would simply go in swinging and cut through whatever red tape gets in her way.”
“Like a woman shaped battering ram,” Isabela hums.
“And of course Leliana’s just more…” Adaar falters on the last word. “Fair.”
“She’s willing to disband the Circles is what you mean,” Hawke says.
“…Yes, fine, that’s what I mean. But the Circles are already disbanded. I don’t know bringing them back is going to help anything.”
“I think,” Hawke says, careful, meticulous, still watching Adaar pinned and tilted back in her chair, “Cassandra is the more appropriate choice.”
“And is that the position of the Inquisition? As of yet?”
Before Hawke can respond, every pause a considered one, weighing each of her words that so often shape nations, Isabela makes an exaggerated groan.
“You girls. Talking politics while I’m trying to make art.”
Hawke closes her mouth and grins. “Apologies, Captain. Are you finished then?”
“I am!” Isabela rears back on her haunches, and the room feels near icy in comparison to her weight. “Behold.”
“Very funny,” Hawke says dryly to Adaar’s more literally drying face.
“You’re being sarcastic, but it is very funny. Here Poppet.”
Isabela shows her reflection in the edge-shine of her dagger. The paint is red and crusted, swiped across Adaar’s nose to look like a stripe of blood.
“Something’s funny about that?” she asks.
“I wore something like it,” Hawke says. “Back when I was more…notorious. I hadn’t quite figured out a reputation as a bloodthirsty doglord only shrinks you in your enemies’ estimation.”
“Back when you were a mercenary, you mean.”
Hawke’s jaw tightens.
“It’s okay, Hawke,” Adaar says, more sensitively. “You know that’s not something that bothers me.”
“…Of course. Obviously it wouldn’t.” Hawke almost makes it sound like thank you.
Adaar says her goodbyes under apple trees that are turning orange and with Kieran hugging her legs.
“Come now,” Morrigan tells him, all gentleness that is so out of place in her bewitcher’s voice. “The Herald needs to be on her way.”
“…Yes Mother,” he says with a sigh, extracting himself. Adaar doesn’t let him go without a hair ruffle.
To be a mother and an apostate in the middle of a Chantry stronghold cannot be easy. Adaar can’t help but wonder how her own mother managed, who had Morrigan’s poise but none of her ambition. She hasn’t written to her in years.
“You’ll be alright, without me here?” she asks Morrigan when the human boy is safely out of earshot. The witch’s eyebrows shoot to her hairline, and Adaar supposes it is a rather presumptuous question. “Alone that is. For company.”
“It did not sound like you were asking about company, initially.”
“No I…was merely thinking. It can be hard being alone, especially since you keep jumping from one less than ideal circumstance to another.”
“Your sympathy is endearing but unnecessary,” Morrigan smiles. “Both here and the Empress’s court were places I wished to be. The loneliness was not my choice, but the two of us have made do, and you needn’t worry yourself.”
“Oh.” Adaar doesn’t see a way out of this one except by way of more presumptuous questions. “I was under the impression the…loneliness was your choice. Raising him that way. Based on what you’ve said.”
“At first. I simply…could have had them both.”
Adaar now has more questions than before, but her pack is weighing on her, and a breeze comes to shake a few more leaves loose from the garden sentinels. Winter wants the castle, and she should be gone when it comes.
“You’re heading to the Warden Fortress, are you not?” Morrigan asks. “Be careful there. The Wardens will go to any lengths for victory. Whatever victory means to them.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And Herald?” she says as Adaar finally turns to go. “It is always wise to keep close those you care about. Do not lose them to their own foolishness. You’ll regret it later.”
This, even between the secrets of older magic Morrigan has whispered to her while they’ve sat on the bones of failed empires past, sends a chill through her. She does not like the way her voice hangs heavy with portent as Adaar shoulders her bag and makes for the stables.
Reaching for the fade in her palm is not so different from reaching for the fade in desire of magic. It involves an intuition, another sense that isn’t sight or touch or taste. The sense in one’s inner ear she finds instinctually when first learning to walk, and it is so natural by the time she can recall her own mind she doesn’t even question it. That is how Adaar grasps for the fade as they’re all falling toward their deaths: with clawing fingers and chunks leaking through web space.
They land in a great heap. It’s very kind of the fade not to preserve their momentum. It’d be awful to do all that and still end as a wet pile of bones at the bottom of a hole, just a hole at the bottom of the fade instead of the waking world.
“We’re here. Physically.” Hawke asks Adaar, “Was it like this when you were here last?”
As if Adaar’s somehow the expert. On fadewalking, a thing not done since before the Divine Age, something which she’d experienced once and barely remembers. Well, twice now.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she says instead of answering. Her voice is small. Like she’s holding a little mouse in her mouth that’s decided to do all her talking for her.
“Not until we’re dead, anyway.” Isabela dusts herself off.
“Promise not to sell me out for a boat this time?” Hawke asks.
“She’s never going to let me live that down, is she?”
Varric snorts.
Sera’s having the worst time of any of them, pacing where the foul looking water ends on their stretch of beach. If beach is even an accurate term. Isabela steps away to calm her down.
Adaar would like someone to do that for her. She’d like Hawke to fix this. She knows something horrible is waiting for her up there, beneath the mandibles of the dangling beast with the thousand eyes.
“Where’s Chuckles?”
“I think he made it,” Adaar manages to say, someone else still speaking out of her mouth. “He got inside the fort before the rest of the bridge gave way.”
Varric shakes his head. “The one guy who’d actually want to be here…”
“Let’s go,” Hawke says. “We went through all this to track down the Wardens. We need to get back to them.”
“Why do we even care about them at this point?” Adaar asks, jogging to keep pace. “They were nearly all possessed when we left. They were fighting the Inquisition right up until nearly the last minute.”
“Because,” Hawke says, “Wardens fight the Blight. No matter what happens, when this is over someone’s going to need to do that.”
“There’s the dwarves.”
“They fight the darkspawn, they don’t fight the Blight.” Hawke glares up at the monster on the endless horizon, framed by the Black City. “The Blight took my siblings, took most of Fereldan, took entire ecosystems in the hundreds of years before that. It eats without satisfaction. Half possessed or no, the Wardens are all we have.”
Adaar wonders if that means Hawke would’ve supported their attempts to march on the Old Gods. She doesn’t ask, afraid she won’t like the answer.
Unfortunately, answers lie in the fade whether she wants to hear them or not.
As the faux-Justinia—memory or spirit, whatever she is—fades, she leaves accusations to be made. Adaar is a casualty to the guilt in her gut, the inescapable fact that these memories are hers, and not just a trick of demons and dreams. She did kill the Divine, in a sense. Cassandra was right about her the first time.
She waits. For the denunciation, for the jab of blame she knows Hawke is aiming at the back of her neck.
Instead she feels a touch on her elbow, Isabela saying, “Enough of that. Dream bollox. Let’s get you to that rift, alright Poppet?”
She is even more shocked when Hawke nods. Where’s the disappointment? The confirmation of what she’s known all along? But they are taking their journey up into the sky and Isabela and Hawke are at her sides as always.
If only the Nightmare itself were as easy to overcome. The voices start soon after they make it to the lake in the void. Sera figures as long as she keeps screaming, she can block them out; perhaps she has the right idea.
“You haven’t changed, Captain,” it purrs as Isabela whisks her blades through a shade. “Out here, with the Inquisition, playing hero? It’s only Hawke over your shoulder that keeps you from falling into old habits. Without her, you’d be on a ship right now, far away from all this.”
“Oh, you’d like that wouldn’t you?” she says. “That sounds like a demon who’d rather I wasn’t strolling up to his front door.”
Adaar wishes she could be so flippant. The spirits in this place are harder to siphon, more firmly rooted than even a soul in the waking world. It’d be easier to know that she’s striking back if her magic could break this domain with such effortlessness.
The Nightmare tells Hawke, “Your Inquisition will fall apart like everything else. Everything you have tried to save or build has crumbled to dust in your fingers not out of misfortune, but because you dared to touch it in the first place.”
“Pay it no heed,” she says staunchly. “Every foot off balance is to its benefit.”
Her words cut through it, talk past it. But it knows each mortal so intimately, getting even Varric to murmur, “Keep talking, Smiley.”
“I’d rather it stopped talking,” Adaar says quietly to him.
“It’ll be alright, Creampuff. For this one, I think its bite is gonna be worse than its bark.”
She thinks it’s supposed to be downplaying the effectiveness of the bark, but her skin still tenses like a hound’s rippling fur while waiting for her turn, hoping somehow it might just forget to shine its multitudinous gazes upon her. Only Hawke remained unbothered by its accusation, but she wonders at that. If the Nightmare knows their minds, what they fear in utmost truth, is that really how Hawke thinks?
Her judgment is not delivered in front of the others. It ambushes her, quiet, when she is holding the memory of a stuffed nug to the memory of a child, painting of a painting, when is a rose not a rose?
The voice is against her ear. A warm breath tickling the hairs on the back of her neck. She freezes, crouched and holding the nug with an outstretched hand.
“You will always be nothing to them,” it promises. “You told yourself you liked being nothing, to make bearing it easier. But when you no longer are useful, the mark on your hand a cold ember, you’ll return to even less than that.”
When they reach the beast itself, she is shaking.
She should have never made it out of this place the first time. The Divine saved her life, but she’s done nothing with it. If the Inquisition crumbles, it won’t be Hawke’s fault. It will be because of the shard of ugly magic she took into her own body. She has swallowed the reverence she had no right to chew on, and the rift back to Adamant is barely a pinprick above them. It hangs, a star in the black of the City’s underbelly. Fearlings crawl over the wet sides of the impossible mountain, and she throws them back with a wave of flame. Hawke is nearly at the Nightmare’s avatar. It screams, arrows bristling from all its sides. She isn’t compromised by its words or its venom spit. She’s the one thing that will guide them through.
“An opening!” Hawke says. “Go!”
“We’re not staying to deal with this thing?” Varric shouts.
“I have a feeling this is all we’re going to get. I said go.”
There’s a cliff face between the arena and the exit. Adaar remembers this, distantly, struggling up it while demons chased her heels. This is the same domain after all. Don’t just save yourself this time, a bitter part of her chastises.
“Here,” she says, offering Isabela a leg up. Sera and Varric are already climbing, dots on the rough malachite of the ascent.
The demon rears. The whole great monster, not the avatar, has decided to intervene, and Adaar’s stomach sinks when she sees that first monumental leg swing toward them.
“Go,” Hawke says a third time.
This one is the strongest of all, because Adaar hears it behind her and feels the world crumpling with a single syllable. She turns to see that Hawke is not closer enough to the cliff.
“What? No. What do you mean go?”
“No one’s going to make it unless someone stays down here and distracts it.” Hawke points at the exposed bodies moving up the rockface.
“Yes but.”
But what? What can she say? The thousand eyes of the creature are twitching, looking for them, seeking whoever spat in its face. Hawke might as well be a creature from beyond dreams since Adaar has as little chance of understanding her, how she can stand there stoically as she looks up at that tiny spot of hope in the distance while the shimmer of fadelight reflects in her eyes. She had been so sure the creature’s words hadn’t reached her. That Hawke couldn’t be compromised.
“We can provide cover for you-”
“From the other side of a rift?” Hawke asks.
“I- no. No, but something has to work. They need you out there, their Inquisitor. If someone has to guard the escape it should be me,” Adaar finds herself saying, promises tumbling out of her mouth, desperate just to make this worst case scenario go away.
The passive, horrible, infuriating acceptance on Hawke’s face softens for just a moment. “Adaar.” Her name has never sounded that way in someone’s mouth before. Hawke steps toward her. She reaches up to take Adaar’s cheeks between her palms. “There are many Viscounts. There are many good commanders. There is only one Herald of Andraste and she’s you. I believe that fully.” Adaar has not imagined what the Inquisitor’s lips would taste like. She has not let herself. Now she knows and wishes to everything beyond the veil that it didn’t cost this.
The Nightmare roars, having located its prey.
Hawke steps back once more, drawing her blade.
“Hawke,” Adaar calls, anguished.
“Now Herald! Be a shepherd to the Inquisition. Guard it. Take care of her for me.”
And then Hawke is lost to her, dancing between the spindly legs with as much righteous fury as she’s given everything else. Adaar climbs, but can barely see with the pain filling her eyes. She has to make it out of here. She has to make more out of Hawke’s sacrifice than she did the Divine’s.
She makes it as far as the other side of the portal and Varric asking, “Where’s Hawke?” before she breaks down weeping.
They don’t know what to do with her, even back at Skyhold. Someone has put a blanket around her shoulders.
Wandering about the castle is like being a ghost at her own funeral, even though she’s not the one who’s died. The banners are flying low, oil lamps dimmed to a respectable dull orange, and conversations are held only under the cover of crooked hands. There must be some precedent for an Inquisitor’s passing, but without a body to burn the documents Josephine dug up are useless.
Their mourning should come with hatred. Glaring eyes at the woman who came out of the rift when their Inquisitor did not. It would make it easier to bear. These can’t be her people, her followers, not after what she’s taken from them. Be a shepherd to the Inquisition. Guard it. Take care of her for me. Except, never has Hawke called the Inquisition her.
Varric won’t speak with her. He’s not cold about it, which is kinder than she deserves, but he tells her plainly now isn't the time, Herald, when she approaches his fire. So she goes.
The ramparts is where she finds Isabela. She sits next to her, pulling the wool tighter around herself.
“I keep thinking this is revenge,” Isabela says, watching the swirls of snow play chase with each other hundreds of feet below. “Getting herself offed in the most noble bloody way, just to get back at me.”
Adaar is silent for a moment. “…That’s an unimaginably awful thing to think about her.”
The laugh that escapes Isabela must be heard by anyone strolling the walls this time of night. It is a reflex, a barbed thing that’s been startled out of her. It will mix right in with all the weeping floating up from the Herald’s Rest.
“It’s just.” Isabela clamps a hand over her face. “I did something like this to her. Left when it was most important.” More silence. The howl of wind on mountaintop. “That bitch.”
Her shoulders start to heave, jittery, silent. Liquid seeps through the fingers on her iron-gripped hand, catching the moonlight and making silver track down her cheeks.
Adaar wants to reach for her, to provide the same comfort that’s been extended to her so many times. So she wraps her arm around Isabela’s shoulders and waits, waits for her to demand why she came back and her Champion did not.
Instead, there are nails biting into the front of her robes with a suddenness that strikes every combat instinct she has. Being kissed by the woman she’s harmed so thoroughly certainly feels like an attack. If nothing else, it’s a poison.
“Isabela,” she says breathless in between the offense on her lips.
She wishes she had the power to say no, to remind Isabela that she’s nothing, an imitation. But it isn’t possible. Not when she’s wanted this so badly, coveted the hands now snaking around her neck.
Isabela pushes her until her back is flat against the parapet. The fall to the Frostbacks suddenly appears much farther like this, with only a misplaced elbow away from certain death. The adrenaline jogs her enough that she starts thumbing over every force spell she knows, wondering if any of them would save her from a fall off the side of the castle, but then Isabela is clambering on top of her and even that slides away. No guilt, no rationality. Isabela’s face is wet but the rest of her is so warm, and Adaar’s hands reach up to begin undoing the laces on the pirate’s back.