Destan
Adaar still feels the kink in the chain, the dark stain on the floor everyone steps around. The brooding is a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn’t endear her to anyone, though, so she sits in on the conference anyway, trying not to be the sort of thing you throw a blanket over and pretend isn’t there. That’s how she decides to survive it. A silent watcher while the inner circle debates what to do with the Inquisition.
“Starkhaven didn’t wait long,” Cullen notes with a snarl at the map. Bit unfair. It’s not the map’s fault. Though you wouldn’t guess it by how many knives people stab into it on the regular. “My guess is the Prince will be kicking out our forces within the month.”
“Are you planning to return and sort that out, Knight-Captain?”
Adaar thinks the Nightingale’s tone is mocking. It would explain the use of that specific title, but why that crack between the Commander and Spymaster would have formed Adaar has no idea; clearly she’s been away too long, missed the intricacies of interposal politics Hawke would have known like the back of her hand. Isabela always said Hawke was an expert at interlinking people who’d oh so very much like to hunt each other for sport.
Isabela has not been invited to this meeting.
“And leave you here without a Commander?” Cullen says.
His tone promises a joke that the restrained dislike in his eyes doesn’t deliver on.
“Kirkwall can be dealt with once we are back from the Arbor Wilds,” Cassandra says.
Isabela hasn’t been invited, but the Seeker has. It makes staunch, bare-bones sense, after all—she was one of its founders, Justinia’s Right Hand. Hawke’s right hand too perhaps, if the former Inquisitor weren’t so concerned with delegation. Adaar can see the shape of the new status quo forming.
“We can hardly march without our allies,” Josephine frowns over her little golden keys, baubles scattered on the playing board. “And we can hardly ask that of them when we are so disjointed ourselves.”
The unasked question hangs, a dripping coat on the nearest hook.
Cassandra breaks the silence with, “I do not believe in dodging the subject. We are mourning Hawke, but if we wait any longer our enemies will use our time of grieving as an opening.”
“They have done so before,” Leliana mutters.
“When we first sought Hawke, it was because we needed guidance,” Cassandra says. “I do not see how that has changed. In absence of time to search for another, I will step in as Inquisitor, if that is what is needed.”
“When we first sought Hawke,” Leliana says, “you were adamant you did not want the position.”
A scowl crosses Cassandra’s face. When she and Hawke returned from Caer Oswin, they refused to speak on what transpired there, though Adaar was able to wheedle from Hawke the promise of a full report in due time. She had been different since then, though Adaar had failed to understand how different, that she thinks she’s the best suited for the job.
“Our options are even fewer than they were then,” Cassandra says instead of being honest. Instead of saying how much she wants it to fall to her. “Who else is there?”
“Me, of course,” Adaar says.
She rises, coming to her full height to stand at the war table instead of her little pity chair in the corner.
Silence and apprehension greet her words.
“I will be frank, Herald,” Cassandra says. “The Inquisitor did not trust you.”
Adaar waits. Cassandra will explain whether Adaar prompts her or not.
On cue the Seeker says, “Ever since your stunt with the mage rebellion.”
“Is that your only grievance with your puppet stepping into the position you made for her? That I’m too lenient on the mages and their position?”
Another woman might have winced. It’s probably not fair to Cassandra; the ‘Herald of Andraste’ was more Hawke and Leliana’s project than hers. Still, she’d used it to their advantage, as did the rest of the Inquisition.
“Yes.”
“You’re honest in that at least.” Adaar blinks. “Cassandra, we may not have gotten along, but I am more than the figurehead you’ve made me. Hawke asked me to look after her Inquisition, and either I do that, or I give in to my gut, which is telling me to banish myself to the Anderfels and hope all this blows over. I owe it to myself, and to her, to stay.”
Take care of her.
She dismisses the ringing in her ears.
“Your dedication is noble, Herald,” Cassandra says slowly. “But dedication does make you the better woman for the job.”
Adaar can see how this is going. They might clash, will against will, until it’s put to a vote, and no matter the outcome neither wins that way—an Inquisitor can’t have advisors who preferred someone else for the job. One of them will have to back down.
“I could say the same thing to you,” Adaar says. “Not in the long term, when you might one day sit the Sunburst Throne. Would you be able to manage both sets of duties? Not to mention the politics of it—already Fereldan and Orlais are sweating at the power we’ve amassed, and for it to suddenly become the Divine’s personal army?”
There. That was her offering. You can have my support as long as I get this, what Hawke asked of me. Adaar pauses. No. More importantly what the people who believed in me before Hawke asked. The mages out there won’t be safe with Cassandra. This is holding the reins.
She can see Cassandra’s understanding; more than the Inquisition she wants the Chantry. Her true home. Whatever she found in Caer Oswin has strengthened her resolve, and honed a Herald’s vote into a perfect bargaining chip.
“…I see your point.”
“Do you still object then?” Adaar asks.
“No. If Hawke revised her opinion, then I can as well.”
“Anyone else?”
The table reels for a second longer. Then, Josephine offers, “I suppose we will have to arrange another coronation before leaving for the wilds.”
Adaar tilts her hands. “I name Cassandra my successor, by the way. Just in case anything happens out there.”
“Maker!” Josephine says. “I hope not! If this was how we’re hamstrung by the loss of one Inquisitor, imagine if it’s our Herald and Inquisitor both…”
The coronation is a quick affair. Despite the name there’s no crown, though Isabela jokes she’d half like to see them put another circlet atop the one Adaar’s already wearing. It’s nice to hear Isabela joke again—they don’t talk much, not the way they used to with the horrid unsaid thing hanging over them, keeping conversations only to the practical. It’s sex mostly, which is an open secret in Skyhold by now.
“I see you’re slotting in to the position of Inquisitor just perfectly, my dear,” Vivienne says on it one day.
Before, it was the sort of thing she was forced the let slide. Vivienne was always Hawke’s creature, and she may prove trouble now that the Inquisitor is no longer here to give her what she’s angling for. It might be good to force her out of Skyhold before things turn even more ugly.
Shit, Adaar thinks, sickened. I’m already starting to think like Hawke.
So she has a terrible grief in her heart and a crown on her head. She sits on the throne in the great hall and passes judgment, and wishes at the very least she could have reached out before things became broken. To Isabela, Hawke, either of them. Now she just wants to do what’s right, and that’s failing her at every turn. In the Arbor Wilds, creatures out of time fire on her, an arrow nearly taking her in the throat even when she begs them that she means no harm.
“Morrigan!” she snarls as a raven goes chasing after the Temple’s leader.
“She’s really not helping here,” Isabela says. “Still think the Empress sent her out of the goodness of her heart?”
They’ve wound up back to back. One of the elves swings a hammer down upon them, and they have to jump apart, not meeting again until minutes later, covered in fresh layers of blood. It’s an incongruity to her: the blood of people from the Ancient Age should be different somehow. Glowing with magic. Redder, perhaps.
But instead they die too easily, and Adaar sinks in profound loss when the hall of beautiful mosaics is silent and littered with corpses.
“Solas?” she asks cautiously.
He’s standing apart from them. Yes, he fought instead of joining these ancient elves—who probably wouldn’t have had him, no more than the Qun would have Adaar—but with breath caught who knows what that means now.
“So much we glimpse of, only for it to end here,” he says, not truly to her. “So much lost.”
Morrigan had said something similar. The both of them had told her not to follow Samson through the caverns, but there were more than just old rituals riding on her now. She couldn’t afford to be the idealist, not with Inquisition soldiers clawing for every minute they were handing to her.
Their blood must not look so different from that dripping off her shoes.
Adaar breathes deep. Opens her eyes. “Let’s find the witch.”
Keeping the Well safe is the least she can do. Isn’t it? She thinks so, when she climbs that final staircase, exhausted, and finds Morrigan already making trouble.
“You heard him, Herald,” she says. The new title hasn’t made it to everyone’s lexicon yet. “He’d rather it be destroyed than let it fall into even our hands.”
“Your hands, Morrigan.” Adaar finds her patience brittle, lost on her tongue. “Say what you mean.”
Morrigan stops, watchful for a moment. “My hands, which are yours by extension, Inquisitor.”
“You’re making it very difficult to believe that, Morrigan,” Adaar says.
“Questions of loyalty are immaterial,” Abelas says. “None of you are deserving. The Well’s line ends here.”
She sees Morrigan move. It might be easier to meet her with a spell; Adaar isn’t the half-taught hedge mage she was a year ago, after all. But by instinct or by passion it’s her body that moves, stepping in between the witch and the elf with her hand tight around Morrigan’s wrist. Lowered gaze, a silent warning. A posture that says, I will handle this.
Morrigan purses her lips into temporary acquiescence.
Without turning from the witch, Adaar speaks over her shoulder, “We are not Tevinter, Abelas. That should be enough. Better those unknown to you than the enemy known.”
“Pretty sure that's the wrong way around,” Isabela mumbles.
“Don’t make this,” Adaar points with her chin to the outer sanctum, “be for nothing.”
“She does not know what she asks,” Abelas says.
“If it is a comfort, she won’t be the one drinking.”
“What?,” Morrigan seethes, trying and failing to wrench her arm away. “Are you petty enough that even that amount of sense has left you?”
“There’s a price, Morrigan. A big one. You have a son to miss you. Better someone who has much less to lose.”
“Hold on now,” Isabela speaks up. “What’s this about a price?”
Adaar affords herself a quick glance across the Well. Isabela’s brow is furrowed, but Solas is silent, watching her. She hadn’t shared Morrigan’s earlier predictions with them, but a chill runs up her spine anyway, like Solas somehow knows anyhow.
“I’d hardly call the Inquisition much less to lose,” Morrigan bares her teeth.
Adaar disagrees. But privately. “Stand down, Morrigan.”
The witch’s eyes flick to the party behind her. It must be killing her, to let even a dollop of the only thing worth pursuing slide from her fingers, but she takes a step back.
And not a moment too soon, as Adaar can hear the magister rumbling, the darkspawn and the dragon one and the same as they try to claw through the magic seals. The Temple has been powerful enough to keep out everything for centuries, but it’s buckling under forms of magic nearly as old as it is.
She strides past. The water consumes her.
Abelas isn’t going to stop her. She’s waist high before Isabela yells, “Adaar, stop that,” and light and sound cover her ears so even that’s quickly drowned out. Drowned. What a thing to think before she’s submerged in a thousand voices, all claiming different things, all at a whisper so she has to strain to hear. That’s an old technique—make your listener work for it. Force them to admit how much they need your words, your guidance, until they’re hanging on every thing you say whether it’s helpful or not. She wakes up with a gasp, even though there’s no water in her lungs.
No water at all anymore. Even her clothes are dry. Isabela has fistfuls of her robes and is demanding, “If you don’t come back to me I swear I’ll-”
“I’m here.” Even Adaar’s mouth feels dry. Compulsion tastes like cinnamon and honeysuckle. “I know how to-”
The sanctum’s gates split.
“Hurry!”
The Eluvian bends to her, and Isabela forces her through the mirror first.
“Maker’s balls Adaar,” the argument erupts later. “Stupidest thing in the world is drinking the water in Darktown, but one step above that is drinking from a well they’ve been pissing in since the dawn of time.”
“Let’s not be belittling, alright?” Adaar’s head aches with all the voices. She doesn’t know if she can stand Isabela’s added to that list.
“Oh sorry,” Isabela says. “Not piss, the collective geas of a hundred bloody generations. So much better. Adaar what were you thinking? You’re…you’re trapped now.”
“I don’t feel trapped.”
Except maybe by the Inquisitor’s quarters. They are so much smaller than when Hawke occupied them. Now the arches contain their shouting match in a neat little box, high up with no way to get down. Adaar still hasn’t redecorated. There’s so many Nevarran ink paintings. The writing desk still has Hawke’s handwriting stained upon it, in notes-to-self, in drafts of unsent letters that mean nothing but are all that’s left of her, fragments of thoughts that prove there’d been a whole picture. Not just a song the bard in the tavern sings. Not just another name on the list of hundreds of historical Inquisitors.
“Not yet,” Isabela says. “But you know you’re bound to something out there, whether it’s dead or not. I don’t get you. How could you know you’re bargaining away your freedom and still go through with it?”
“Hawke would have,” Adaar says quietly.
“I don’t want another bloody Hawke.”
Isabela’s chest heaves. Her pain stings, and Adaar does not feel so confident anymore, questions why she was trying so hard to steer this organization if it’s just going to drive Isabela to the edge.
“I’m…Isabela I’m sorry, I didn’t-”
“I can’t lose you too,” Isabela says, and it’s such a sharp knife in the silent understanding of keeping things unspoken that Adaar is shocked to silence. “And I can’t- I can’t do this.”
“Isabela wait-”
She follows her down the stairwell but the human is so much faster than her, taking them two at a time and disappearing by the time Adaar finds herself in the grand hall. She means she can’t do this right now, Adaar tries to comfort herself with. That’s what she meant. I’ll give her time, and when I find her I’ll apologize proper, because we’re all we have left-
“Herald.”
A different woman, equally distressed, demanding her attention from the opposite direction. Adaar tries to shake her apprehension, her fears that before she can even admit how important this is she’s already broken it, and faces Morrigan’s pale face.
“Herald. Kieran’s gone. He activated the Eluvian somehow, and it shouldn’t be possible-”
A chill claims her. “Show me.”
Barely steady, Adaar is flung back into the crossroads, chasing another person that should not be lost under her command. Yet the crossroads don’t greet her. The horrible, crystalline rocks of the fade do—the place Justinia pulled her out of, the world where Hawke went and never returned.
“He…he should not have been able to bring us here.” Morrigan stares up, rotating in a circle, in awe. “It shouldn’t be possible.”
“It shouldn’t have been possible for me to rip a hole at Adamant,” Adaar says.
She smells something on the air. Honeysuckle and cinnamon.
“There the fade there was already weakened,” Morrigan explains, distracted, as though lore and magic is simply what fills her mouth when she’s not paying attention. “After a thousand or so summonings, it was to be expected. We can work wondrous things when the line between fade and waking world is blurred.”
“Solas has said much the same.”
A wrinkle appears in Morrigan’s brow, the comparison distasteful enough to snap her back to focus. “Hurry. It was only a moment ago, he can’t have gotten far.”
One of the first lessons Tama demonstrated when showing her how to not lose her way in dreams was that the fade is deceptive; Adaar doubts things like relative speed and distance can be counted on to save Kieran. But she looks. She wanders, committing the path home to memory, hoping that the physical fade has enough of its dream logic that skills of emotion based navigation remain applicable. A lingering thread. A breadcrumb trail of lost children.
She is more right than she knows. Morrigan elucidates the scene they come across with startling efficiency: “Mother.”
Kieran is at ease beneath the attention of the white-haired human, the one who bundles her mane into horns in a camp imitation of a Qunari’s. Adaar had always found it rather gauche on Madame de Fer. On this creature—and Adaar knows this is not a human, can note the otherness on the air—it is a threat.
Morrigan’s eye must follow the same path as Adaar’s, the elder woman commanding their attention first, and then sliding to who else is with her in the clearing.
“Kieran!” Morrigan calls, at the same time Adaar whispers, “Hawke.”
Hawke is dead, and her corpse is looming behind the family as a revenant.
But the corpse is alive, her eyes flickering between both parties without any particular recognition, observing out of extinguished lanterns for eyes. Hawke went here and never returned, and she looks it. The fat sucked from her cheeks would signify she has not slept since then. Or eaten. Neither of those are possible, though when she meets Adaar’s gaze with horrible and haggard disposition, Adaar wraps right around to her initial assumption that the Champion of Kirkwall is a ghost walking.
Morrigan’s mother notices her staring. She smiles. “It seems you both have made a deal. Symmetry like that is so pleasing, wouldn’t you agree dear?”
“Enough!” Morrigan says. “You’ll not get a chance to talk your way out of this one.”
The air fizzles. She has a hard time identifying Morrigan’s magic, the ones that weave elemental and entropic schools in ways Adaar never can’t categorize—she cannot tell if this is a kill spell she’s winding up or not. But it makes little difference.
“Ah, Morrigan,” the unhuman sighs. “Be a dear and restrain her, would you?”
The statement being directed at Adaar is inconsequential when she already feels her body obeying.
“What are you doing? Unhand me!”
It is surprisingly easy to subdue her. Adaar should never have underestimated herself.
Hawke watches all this with a mind that has always been inscrutable, but the inscrutability of which has never been terrifying. Not until now. Until Adaar is looking at her, the person she’s been longing for every day since Adamant, and can’t tell if she’s being seen back.
“Hawke,” Morrigan’s mother says, “why don’t you and your dear Herald go for a walk? There’s family business to discuss.”
Hawke inclines her head. What moves her? Puppet’s strings, like the ones controlling Adaar’s arms?
So they go for a walk. In silence. A stroll through a place where mortals shouldn’t be, with two people who are now distinctly not mortal.
At least, that’s only what Adaar can assume. Mythal—Isabela had been trying to warn about this very thing, to not count out the dead gods as dead so soon. Now Mythal has come back, called forth the one who’s apparently her daughter, and claimed a piece of Adaar’s soul.
And saved Hawke.
“We’re…heading back?” Adaar notices suddenly.
Hawke nods.
“But…Morrigan…”
“She’ll come,” Hawke says. “She’s the one who needs to close the door.”
Her voice is ground up lyrium, imperfect and a far cry from the dust it’s trying to be. Adaar feels heat pricking the corners of her eyes.
“I thought you were gone,” she says.
“I’m back.”
“Hawke.” She tries to cram something into that word; a question, a confession, anything.
Hawke rubs her face, wearing the same gloves she had when she died. The heel of it presses into her forehead. “How long?”
“That you were gone?” Adaar’s mouth works for a moment. The most practical unit of measure is time, but that is such a vastly, pathetically poor way to describe her absence she could almost laugh. “A month.”
Hawke exhales shakily. “Can we hurry,” she says. “To the exit. Please.”
Something even more than the obvious is wrong, and Adaar hurries to oblige. She thinks several times during their journey that she will need to right Hawke as she sways, and it becomes a horrible reality when Hawke collapses the moment they step through the Eluvian. Adaar holds her up only mostly, the Champion’s knees cracking on the stone of Skyhold.
“Shit,” Adaar says. “Shit, shit, she was keeping you alive wasn’t she?”
There’s no one around to call for help. The garden is emptier than Adaar’s ever seen it, the guards Leliana promised for the eluvian nowhere in sight. Adaar has half a mind to call out for Gisele, for Elan, for anyone who’s become a piece of this place she’d found so much comfort in, but the only thing that can answer is a wind that’s starting to rise.
“No,” Hawke mumbles, head lolling, dark hair unkempt and freeing itself after weeks of barest survival. “Something’s trying to come out.”
“What does that mean Hawke?” Adaar sputters. “What did she do to you? What happened?”
“Where’s ‘bela?” Hawke says to the crook of Adaar’s arm.
“I…don’t know. I was looking for her, but I think she’s run off.”
Adaar doesn’t add maybe for good.
But Hawke just accepts it. “That’s fine. She’ll be fine. I don’t want her to see me like this.”
“But I can?”
“You’ve always seen the uglier side of me. Usually intentionally.” Hawke lifts eyes to the sky. “And we’re about to run out of time.”
The anchor starts to crackle.
She’s been at sea only once and hated it. But it gave her a sliver of an experience she’d only glimpsed from living the shore her whole life: the way a storm can arrive with near instantaneousness. A sky blue one moment can blacken within minutes, a speed the logical mind must determines is brought on by magic. The waters roil. The pressure falls.
The clap of a rift opening echoes with a grandeur that means it’s happening miles away. Like the storm, it paints the sky black within moments, only the green radiating over the courtyard walls to tell this is not a natural thing.
“The Breach…” Adaar says. “He’s…opening it?”
“I can fight his dragon for you,” Hawke says. Nonsensical. So nonsensical that Adaar only nods. “Can you get me to the war room?”
“You need to lie down Hawke, you’ve been stuck in the fade for a month-”
“Adaar.” Her nails dig into Adaar’s forearm, and her eyes are no longer dead but intensely, intensely ferocious. “We need to kill him. Once and for all. For everyone he’s taken.”
The only person Corypheus has taken from Adaar is now back in her arms. But Adaar nods again. For what he’s taken from the Champion, she will.
“A mistake,” Corypheus calls her.
Well. He’s not wrong. Adaar wishes she could tell him it hardly matters, that fate and happenstance are all as valid of ingredients in the stew of the universe as everythingone else. Unfortunately, Hawke was always the one with a way with words, and she’d disappeared soon after arriving in the valley. One after one, Adaar misplaces the people she desperately needs.
“Better a mistake than the bastard who couldn’t manage to steal back a single anchor!” she shouts over the wind.
The ground is quaking, being sucked into the Breech as it consumes all. It’s funny, a bit. The first time she’d closed it, she’d settled for sealing a rift a half-mile below; now she’s getting up close and personal.
“You rail against your betters,” the magister says, “yet you’re nothing without them. You have lost the one who first split my prison, yet you have none of her skill. Prepare to die, as she did.”
Any protest, any ache that those words bring is cut short as the ground jolts more violently. She has to leap for Varric’s arm, only barely keeping him from sliding off the cliff and into the waiting remnants of the long-passed avalanche on the valley floor below. Haven is still rising. Without footing, the dissipate scatterings of the Inquisition lie there, watching as Corypheus holds out the orb before him, watching as his dragon leers over the emaciated remains of Haven’s chantry.
Watching as another dragon comes screaming out of the emerald spewing sky.
Adaar’s jaw hangs. The beasts go crashing off the edge, two apex predators so socially adverse they don’t even risk fighting one another for territory. A dragon battle does not happen in nature; neither party survives. But the audience is now in an unnatural theater themselves, witnessing as the dragon cracked with blight and red lyrium is chased across the stratus by one blacker, sleeker. Its scales are midnight and its mouth is a beautiful, jeweled red and when it breathes the flames melt the rock the mortals stand on.
“You dare,” the magister hisses.
“Now!” A bellow rises from Adaar's heels. “We end him now!”
The war cry picks up. Those left standing charge.
They pursue him up the skeleton of Haven, dodging skin-bubbling blasts of magic and fighting off the demons he throws to slow them, and all the while the dragons twist above. A dance. A love letter. There is conviction enough in Adaar’s soul to make her chest hurt.
On the highest peak on the highest island, the black dragon pins the false Archdemon on its back. She closes her jaws around its neck and bites and bites, just where the skull meets the spin, sinking further as the monster screams.
“Yes!” Adaar screams, as if the midnight dragon needs encouragement.
But the rending fuels her own fight as she catches a shade alight. Varric shouts something but she can’t hear, blood rushing too loud in her ears. She can assume the gist though, that he feels it too, every one of Hawke’s original faithfuls taking up the banner.
The dragon bites until ligaments tear. Until a shower of blood rains down, the cacophonous sound of meat almost too large to be real tearing, and she holds the severed head of the Archdemon between her teeth.
The roar of victory is echoed among those soldiers still here to see it. But that triumph is up there; Adaar’s still down here.
“Shit,” Varric growls—the ascent has been gruesome, it’s just the two of them still fighting, and now Varric’s gone and twisted his ankle. “Shit,” he says, trying to yank it out of the crack it’s wedged in. “I complain about vertical inclines one to many times for you? Decided to bring me to the most moutainy-mountain you could think of as punishment?”
She hauls him under the armpits, straining even through his hiss of pain. But their separation from their soldiers is exposure, terrifyingly so, a rage demon rounding the staircase above them and spotting them with a screech.
“Faster, Adaar!”
“I’m pulling as hard as I-”
A white flash leaps out of their periphery. Rage moans in pain and sinks back into the fade, swallowed by the earth. Isabela flicks her daggers, tucking them back over her shoulder.
“Isabela! Where-?”
“I’ve been scaling your stupid floating islands for twenty minutes!” she snaps, stepping to help pull Varric free. “They took off right as I almost caught up with you. Some bloody nerve you have! Can’t have an argument without you taking off into the sky in a huff.”
“I didn’t- You ran. I thought you were-”
“I know Poppet.” To Varric, Isabela says, “The Seeker wasn’t too far behind, she’ll make sure you don’t get eaten while we go on ahead.”
“You can’t be serious,” Varric says. “Without back up? You two will get friend.”
Isabela glances to Adaar.
As she does, the victorious dragon above them stumbles on its perch. Adaar’s chest tightens, the only spectator as it slips, whatever strength it had draining away as it falls out of sight. They’re running out of time. Varric can hardly walk. The Breach composes more of the sky by the second, and they cannot wait to face the magister.
It ends now.
“Andraste’s ass, wait for the Seeker at least!” But Varric’s warning follows them as they finally reach the plateau.
The magister greets them, but Adaar keeps the midnight dragon in her mind's eye and chooses not to hear him anymore. The sight of it is what’s going to keep her going, and the need to find her again is what’s going to make her win.
Adaar burns Corypheus with the mark’s power. This little bit of divinity she’s stolen, but she stole it from a thief so it’s now hers twice over. It’s not even divine, if Solas is to be believed, but Solas isn’t here—no one is. Just her, and Isabela, and the magister as he screams profanities at her. She brings down the light until it eats him from the inside.
As for the Breech. She matches magic for magic, breaks the seal and slams it shut again.
When it is over, and the islands start to sink, she and Isabela stand around a smoking crater. Her marked hand feels numb. Her nose is broken, and can taste it running into lips parted by heavy breathing. Corypheus dropped the orb while he was being ripped apart, leaving it a smoking husk. A pang of mourning strikes her. Had Solas even made it? Varric and Cassandra? So many fell just from the displaced mountain alone.
“…These things sure are taking their sweet time to go down again,” Isabela remarks conversationally.
The reality of it hurts to be thrown back into. Adaar’s head jerks up with a snap. “Hawke!”
“What?” Isabela’s demeanor flips immediately, becoming brittle, set upon.
But Adaar has the pressure again of no time, no time to explain merely, “This way, she landed here, this way,” before she’s stumbling drunkenly down hazardous rocks.
There is no dragon at the bottom. Just a flightless bird. She’s lying on her side but she is alive, their journey through the fade not a long and horrible trick. She did not turn to dust at the end of her duty. She’s here.
Adaar rushes the last few feet even as she senses Isabela freeze beside her. “Hawke.”
“In the—rather bruised—flesh,” Hawke says.
The head start is short lived, Isabela suddenly darting past Adaar, running over to give Hawke a swift kick in the side and a, “Bitch!!”
Unfortunately, kicking a fully armored woman is never a good idea, and it was not a pulled, slapstick motion in the slightest. Isabela yelps, hopping on one foot for a moment. Hawke starts to laugh.
It is aching, and guttural, and Isabela loses her balance and collapses onto her. She continues to laugh, even as Isabela delivers another, “Bitch,” and kisses her, kisses her all over—her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids. Hawke keeps laughing, relieved, Isabela climbing her like a tree.
Adaar is now the one frozen. This is the part where she slips away again, where she lets them have the reunion that she’d usurped preemptively. She should let them have their moment.
But.
“Thank you,” she manages to squeeze out, “for your timely rescue, Inquisitor.”
“Oh Adaar,” Isabela says, popping her head up, her attention is diverted as easily as that. “Come here! You’re bleeding.”
Sheepishly, uncertainly, she walks over as she’s commanded, kneeling only after Isabela’s motion.
She is bleeding. Isabela whisks off her bandana and begins to wipe roughly at Adaar’s face, dabbing it on her tongue every now and again to get at the stubborn nose blood. She’s landed in between Hawke’s legs, but that hardly stops her, too enraptured by tilting Adaar’s face and tsking.
“Here,” Hawke says, offering her shawl when Isabela runs out of clean on her bandana.
The Champion is supporting herself on one elbow, holding nothing but amusement at the visible warmth peppering Adaar’s face.
“Don’t be helpful, I’m cross with you,” Isabela says. To Adaar, “And you! I still haven’t forgiven you for taking off without me. Frightened me half to death.”
Then, to Adaar’s mortification, she grabs her by the horns and pulls her into a kiss.
When she lets go, Adaar can only make a scrambling of vowels that come out as, “…Um.”
She looks to Hawke, who’s looking at her, sweaty and blood covered with the remains of dragon that are searing the ground. Hawke who she’s kissed. Whose mouth she knows the shape of, but whose presence in her life she knows the shape of even more.
“I see you two are busy while I’ve been away,” Hawke remarks.
“Stop it, Hawke,” Isabela says, slapping her arm. “You’re scaring her.”
The world truly is beautiful like this. The farthest they can possibly be from it, even compared to the fade which is far but so full of noise. This is the inverse of Hawke’s paintings: a black sky with the jagged white of mountains tearing like teeth. The last of the emerald is fading.
“I...” Adaar tries one more time. So many questions, about her, about Isabela, about them all. But one she wants to know above all. “Are you. I mean are… Hawke are you back?”
“I’m back,” Hawke replies serenely.
“For real.”
“As real as you. We both have a debt to her now, but it may be a while before she comes calling. I’m back, and we’ll be alright until then.”
“What’s this about debts?” Isabela says tersely. “Who’s she?”
“Adaar can explain,” Hawke says, rolling on her back and closing her eyes to the sealed-scar of the Breech. “In the meantime, it seems we’ll be up here for a while. Ash seerkata tost. Enjoy the view.”