#absolutionem 02

[accipio]

Hawke's father taught him early on that the Fade is not always a churning maelstrom of demons and hostile magic like in the tales. It's more dangerous than that. It often appears exactly as the dreamer expects it to be, a mirror held up to the waking world and warped by the mind that beholds it. An incautious mage may mistake this reflection for reality; lulled into complacence by the familiar, they never wake. Or rather, they do not wake as themselves.

Hawke has played this game many times, and he knows better than most the tricks that a mind can play on itself. When he awakens in his assigned quarters, the plain room exactly as it was when he fell asleep there hours before, he just knows. His surroundings look and feel as solidly real as ever, but there's a subtle skin-crawling offness to everything that washes over him like vertigo.

Never one to wait around and let the demons find him, he grabs his wooden staff from where he'd left it by the door and heads outside, not even bothering to change out of the threadbare trousers that serve as his nightclothes. Physical armor is useless here.

He doesn't have to wonder what awaits him on the other side of the threshold. He knows exactly what he's going to find. He steps forward onto weathered cobblestone, the same stone that was carved from sea-battered cliffs by Tevinter slaves over fifteen hundred years ago. Before him rise the twin white towers of the Gallows, impossibly tall, no less stark and pitiless than the empty black sky behind them.

The city of chains welcomes him back. He has been many things, here—fortune-seeker, troublemaker, protector, liberator, destroyer—but in his dreams he is a prisoner. He has never left, and he never will.

He walks on, not because he wants to, but because he knows that the only way out is forward. He expects to be accosted by the usual suspects: despair demons, his failures made manifest.

(Bethany, her body a mangled ruin, her lifeless stare a silent accusation. Mother, reaching for him with another woman's hands, lurching forward like a puppet on a string. Why didn't you protect me, son? Why didn't you protect me, brother?)

But they don't appear. The Gallows steps are deserted, the gates open and unguarded. There are no fires burning in the braziers, just as there are no stars above. Instead, everything is lit by a diffuse purple glow that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It renders the scenery curiously flat, shadowless. A fragment of some poem or other worms its way into his mind: No light, but rather darkness visible.

The back of his neck prickles with instinctive, animal dread as he steps through the gate and into the courtyard. It, too, is empty, save for a solitary figure standing in its center, rigid and unmoving like a soldier at attention. Waiting for him.

Hello, Knight-Captain.

The templar's silverite armor is more brilliant than it ever was in the waking world, its gleam undiminished by the lack of any natural light source. He is beautiful, perfect, a storybook knight made real, but no poet could ever dream up the frigid contempt with which he regards Hawke.

“You forget your place, mage,” the Knight-Captain says. Hawke stares at him, torn three ways between confusion, fear, and perverse fascination. “But I shall remind you of it.”

Hawke's gaze drifts to the oddly-shaped weapon in the templar's hand. He realizes with dawning horror that it is no weapon at all. It's the sunburst brand.

He scoffs, feigning nonchalance. “You lot really need to come up with some better material. That doesn't sound tempting at all. Your plan is to do what, exactly? Hold me down and brand me tranquil?”

The Knight-Captain (demon, he mentally corrects) appears unimpressed. “No,” it answers, the familiar voice stripped of all warmth, all humanity. “Only to give you what you want.”

Hawke's stomach lurches. No more talking. He calls upon his magic with ease, its flow unobstructed by whatever had dammed it back in the waking world. The demon, however, remains one step ahead of him. It raises its empty left hand, and a Silence slams down upon Hawke with the force of a physical blow. He staggers back, reeling from the nauseating sensation of emptiness, a limb suddenly severed.

Demons can't do that. Can they?

“Shit.” Maker, he's really in it now.

@absolutionem