Varric Tethras can't stand holding back the truth about Marian Hawke after the Inquisitor leaves her in the Fade to die. What he can't stand more is no one is trying to get her back. With the assistance of friends in surprising places, he fights in...
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All Marian had to eat the day of her mother's funeral was whatever Bodahn left in the pot from last night. After the years under her service, he must have learned that all he had to do to make her day was cook Mother's beet soup. Well, he tried last night when they got back from the funeral, but when he lit the flames, she didn't smell beets boiling.
It's a smell no one forgets. A sickly sweet aroma with that hint of char. Only the smoke wafting in her face from the breeze coming off the water made it bearable. Embers of cloth ascended the sky—wisps carrying Mother's soul back to the Maker. It was beautiful; quiet apart from the crackling. It was nothing like the fires she would see from the Chantry. Or the screams she'd hear.
"You really are your mother's daughter," Gamlen had said about her shacking up with Anders.
Ah but that kind of dreary nostalgia is going to kill her faster because it's exactly what Varric warned her about. Gotta look on the brighter side of things. The green grass and that nonsense. Once she might have had something snarky to say. Every problem she faced she solved it with a joke. It worked for a while. But you can't bring people back from the dead with a punchline. You can't bring anybody back from anything, not even their choices.
And from the look of where she's at, coming back from the dead is a curse worse than the Blight. She can't feel her body, if she still has one. Every angle she looks appears underwater, but she hasn't drowned. Something dark approaches in the distance. The shadow wavers in the green waves but gains size. Just as it stops, it looks up, but she can't make out a face.
"Thank Andraste," Hawke says. "Death pities me."
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Ripples of white surround Varric, puppeting sunlight underwater that dance in streams through an infinite space of colorlessness. It could be a dream, with his body suspended as it is, but when he touches his coat, he feels the pressure of the fabric, and he knows he's real. Varric reaches for a ripple; it wraps itself around his glove like a squirrel racing along a tree trunk, then leaps off. Another ripple slithers up and down his arm, then falls off his shoulder. He recalls looking out from the coast during the highest sun, shielding his eyes from the brightest reflections dancing across the water. It's like he stepped into the sparkles and floated through their prismatic charm. But nothing here smells like salt and sand, only the chill of glass, if glass had a smell, or a chill.
