Chapter Text
The portal winked out behind him like a snuffed candle.
He didn’t stop to watch it go. He was already moving—staff raised, boots slamming against the Fade’s soft, yielding floor as he closed the distance between himself and the nightmare demon at a dead sprint. It was enormous, the way all things were enormous in the Fade, as if this realm didn’t know or care about making things to human scale. Massive legs crashed down around him in a ring, sharp hairs slicing at his arms and neck as they brushed past, and the stench hit him all at once; burning flesh and rot together, corpse-sweet and acrid, the smell of something that had never been alive and something that had been dead far too long somehow occupying the same body. His stomach lurched, but he did not allow himself the luxury of stopping to gag.
He swung his staff low and then up, blade raking across the nearest leg, and acidic blood sprayed across the ground with a sound like water on hot stones. The demon shrieked—more vibration than sound, something that rattled the bones in his chest—and a pair of fangs descended, close enough that he could feel the displaced air on his cheek. He shoved his staff upward, straight into the maw. Fire erupted from the tip, raw and furious, and the screaming pitched higher.
Hawke.
He swung again. Kept moving. The rhythm of it was almost comfortable after the years of fighting things that wanted him dead.
You know you will not win here.
“Funny,” he muttered, wrenching his staff free with a grunt. “You’ve only just met me.”
You cannot.
The voice was in the air and also in his skull, intimate in the way a nightmare was intimate, reaching past his ears and directly into the part of the brain that b relieved things in the dark. It wasn’t like being spoken to. It was more like remembering something he’d always known.
He ignored it. He was better at ignoring that sort of thing than he used to be.
He continued to swing in swift but calculated intervals—up into the snapping fangs, down and across to deflect the legs trying to tangle his own. Burst after burst of ice and fire and crackling lightning erupted from the head of his staff, summoned from sheer force of will, and the demon recoiled with each one. He was bleeding somewhere on his left arm, could feel the warm crawl of it down toward his wrist, but he couldn’t tell when it had happened and it didn’t matter. What mattered was the pattern. The rhythm. Strike, deflect, strike, move.
You have so much fear in you.
The voice found a lower register now, softer and worse for it. He tightened his grip on the staff.
Fear of failure. Fear of the truth you have always known.
One of the demon’s legs thrust forward—faster than the others, anticipating—and caught him square in the chest. He went backward and hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him, skidding through the Fade’s damp filth before he managed to slam the blade of his staff into the ground and haul himself upright. His vision swam. He blinked it clear.
Was it truly wise, the demon continued, its voice curling around his mind like smoke, to remain here? Knowing what you leave behind?
He raised his staff. Exhaled. Summoned a wave of ice across the ground ahead of him and listened to the smaller spiders shriek as the shards tore through them.
Knowing who.
He did not slow down. He would not.
Something heavy dropped from somewhere above—a sound like a fist hitting wet earth—and then the weight of it landed on his back and drove him face-first into the ground. The impact knocked the staff from his hands. Before he could move, a half dozen spiders swarmed over him, their barbed legs piercing through the softer parts of his armor with efficiency, and he understood in a distant, clinical sort of way that he was in serious trouble.
His fingers dug into the filth. He couldn’t find any leverage. Every time he began to push himself up, something pinned him back down, and the world started to take on that particular gray quality that meant his body was running low on things he needed to stay alive.
Perhaps, the demon said, this is why you chose to remain.
He pressed his forehead to the ground and focused on breathing.
Better to die here, before you must live with the consequences of your own failure. The Chantry. Your family. Every choice that led you here, to this. Wouldn’t that be easier?
Easier. He nearly laughed. Yes, sure. Very. Incredibly easy. Much better than any of the alternatives. He let his forehead rest on the ground for precisely one more second, and in that second, the thought crossed his mind—the genuinely treacherous kind, the sort that only visited when the rest of his defenses were exhausted—that he didn’t have a particular answer to any of that. The Chantry, his family, his choices… ten years of choices, one stacked on top of the last until they’d become a wall, and he’d been scaling it ever since without looking down.
What a fitting end, his own mind joined it, for the great Champion of Kirkwall. Facedown in Fade-filth, stabbed to death by spiders, where no one will ever find the body. At least Varric would have the decency to invent something better. He was good at that. He would make it something with dragons. Or at least a proper villain. If there was one regret—
Anders.
The demon’s voice dropped, almost gentle.
How long do you think he’ll last without you? How long before the man is nothing but a vessel—skin and bones for Justice to wear like an old coat?
Something ignited in the base of his spine.
You know it is already happening. You have seen it. You have watched it, all those years, and done nothing that mattered. What is left of him now, do you think, while you rot here?
The fire spread from his spine to his shoulders, his arms, his hands, his jaw—all of it burning at once, and Garrett Hawke heaved himself upward with everything he had. The spiders went flying. Fire tore out of his palms without finesse, without strategy, purely on instinct, and the burning remnants of small spider corpses fell around him as he scrambled to his feet. He crossed the distance to his staff in four strides. When the demon brought its leg down to stop him, the blade caught it cleaning and the demon shrieked in something that might have been surprise.
He pointed up at it, breathing hard, his left arm still bleeding sluggishly and his bones making their objections known.
“Anders,” he said, with great deliberateness, “is none of your business.”
The demon lunged, but already he was moving. He fought differently now—not frantically, but precisely. Each strike had a destination. He was looking for something, and he found it just as the demon reared back for another lunge; a seam in the armor of its head, a thin place in the chitin where the plates didn’t quite meet. He watched it, waited for it, counted his own heartbeats until the moment aligned. And then the fangs descended, and he didn't retreat.
He stepped into it.
He spun away from the fangs as they grazed his cheek, flipped his staff so the blade pointed up, and reached for every thread of magic he could find in this Maker-forsaken place. The Fade answered, and the force of it punched upward into the air, seized the demon, and dragged it back down with a violence that left no room for argument. Demonic ichor sprayed in a wide arc. The body convulsed once, twice, three times.
Then nothing.
He heard his staff crack beneath the weight. He stood over the remains for a moment, breathing, listening to the silence settle.
Then he looked up. No portal. No Inquisitor, no Varric, no familiar face waiting to haul him through to safety. There was only the Fade’s perpetual sick green twilight, the distant warping of reality that passed for an atmosphere here, and the very specific stillness of a place that had just watched something eternal die and wasn’t sure what to make of the mortal still standing.
Right, he thought. So. That’s that.
Garrett Hawke was alive. He had yet to decide if that was fortunate.
So he walked. He retraced their route first, working backward through the Fade’s geography—which did not cooperate—but followed something resembling logic. He made it back to the place where the Inquisitor had torn the air open and dropped them here, which told him nothing useful but at least confirmed he hadn’t become entirely turned around.
From there, he wandered.
Up a staircase that flipped the world upside down, so that he was walking on the ceiling of somewhere and the ceiling was beneath his feet. Through an archway that narrowed as he passed through it, pressing his shoulders tight until it released him on the other side like the Fade itself was disgusted by his presence in its mouth. The Fade was not, as far as he could tell, hostile at the very least. It was indifferent in the way that deep water was indifferent—not trying to kill him exactly, but not caring one way or the other whether he kept breathing.
He flexed his fingers instinctively. Without his staff, his hands felt wrong. He’d carried one since he was twelve years old, when his father pressed the first one into his hands and told him, This is who you are, Garrett, whether the world likes it or not. He kept reaching for it, the phantom weight of it, and he kept finding nothing. He’d have to manage.
Echoes came and went. They were worse than the demons, in their way; a child’s terrified crying from somewhere with no direction to it, a man’s voice repeating a name over and over in the distance, growing neither closer nor further away. None of it was real. Or rather, all of it was real in the way the Fade made everything real—residue of dreams and nightmares from every person who had ever slept and been afraid. He kept walking and tried not to think about which of those sleeping people might be dreaming about him.
Naturally, he thought about Anders, because the alternative was thinking about nothing and the Fade was already full of nothing.
He thought about the morning before all of this, about Skyhold’s stone halls and high cold windows and the persistent smell of smoke from the great hearth. He’d woken before dawn and laid there listening to the sounds of a fortress still asleep and thought, I should have written something. A letter. A note. Something. He hadn’t. He’d told himself there would be time later, which had turned out to be exactly the sort of thing you told yourself when you didn’t want to consider the consequences of not doing so.
It took many hours before he found something worth slowing down for. A flight of stairs, narrow and spiraling downward, cut from what looked like actual stone rather than the Fade’s tendency toward suggestion and implication. And emanating from somewhere below: a warm amber light, quietly persistent in the surrounding murk of greens and sickly yellows. He stood at the top and looked down and thought, with complete sincerity, that it was absolutely a trap. Anything in the Fade that looked even remotely inviting was a trap. The Fade was not the business of doing people favors.
And yet.
He’d been wandering for hours. He had no staff, a bleeding arm, and all the situational advantages of a man in a place he didn’t belong. The warm light was the first thing he’d seen in all that time that looked like it might come from somewhere tangible, rather than the Fade simply performing the concept of light.
The walls closed in as he descended, close enough that his shoulders brushed the stone on both sides. Down and down and further down, and just when the urge to turn back started making reasonable arguments, the walls simply stopped. Fell away. The staircase continued its spiral into open space, nothing on either side but the dark, and below—a door.
Solid wood. Iron fittings. The warm light seeping from the seams of the frame, gentle and insistently real. His pace quickened despite himself, which was unwise on a staircase with no railing and an endless void on both sides, and he had to forcibly slow himself to keep his footing. But it was so close—it was right there—and when his hand finally touched the wood he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The door was solid. It was real.
Turn back.
He paused. The voice had no direction, no body. It simply was, the way a thought that wasn’t his sometimes was. He looked at his hand on the door’s iron handle and considered the instruction.
Turn back.
The door could lead nowhere. It could lead somewhere worse. It could be every trap the Fade had been building toward since the portal closed, the long con, the final joke.
It could also be the first door he’d seen in hours, in a place that was not inclined toward mercy, leading somewhere that cast warm light.
No, he decided, and said it out loud for good measure as well. The Fade could take note. He was done wandering.
He pushed the door open.