“I wasn’t meant to be the last of us,”
says Varric. But heis the
last, and only silence answers. He laughs in the face of it, soft and
wrenched. “You assholes. I spent my life writing your goddamn stories -
you’d think at least one of you would’ve stuck around long enough to give
me an epilogue. Instead, I’m writing yours. Again. One for the road, huh?”
Reaching into his
pocket, he pulls out the flask, removes the cork, and pours a generous measure of
spirits on both fresh graves. “To the many roads we took,” he murmurs, “and to
all the roads not taken.”
He drinks the
rest, slowly. Lets the sun warm him. Possibly he weeps a bit, but what does it
matter? There’s no one left to chaff him for it. All those times we saved the world, I never understood that it was
still going to end one day. Not the whole thing, maybe. Just the parts that
mattered most.
But that’s what
they fought for, wasn’t it? The right to die slowly, in time, in peace, with
all their battles left behind, until only one old dwarf remained who’d stood
with Hawke and the Inquisition, Cassandra and Tiny and Aveline and everyone
else he’d somehow outlived, all buried now in graves like these, all great
loves loved, all sins compressed to anecdote. All their stories have reached
their ends, save his.
“Ah, well. But
that’s the writer’s curse, isn’t it? Telling the story puts you outside the
story, and I just don’t have the hubris to tell my own.”
Hawke and Fenris
are gone beyond answer, inseparable in death as they were in life. Even so, he
fancies he hears their laughter, and waves it away.
“Yeah, yeah. I know.
I’m being maudlin. Humour me. It’s your fault, anyway; you’re the ones who had
to go and die in your sleep together like something out of an Orlesian romance.
I write that down and nobody’s going to believe it really happened. You’re
nixing my credibility.”
As if you ever had any, says the ghost of Garrett Hawke, while beside him,
the silhouette of Fenris smiles fondly into his ale. For an instant, Varric is
overwhelmed with a scent memory of Kirkwall, shouting and sour wine and sticky
shoes in the Hanged Man, and then he’s back on the hillside, watching the sun
sink lower over the graves of his last two friends.
“Master Tethras?”
The voice is
unfamiliar, female and slightly breathless, and when Varric turns, he finds
himself arrested by the sight of a young dwarf woman clutching a satchel,
cheeks pinked from her hasty climb up the hill.
“That’s me,” he
says. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” she
says, then blushes furiously. “That is, I was told - it was suggested - I mean,
they said you might talk to me.”
“Talk to you?” he
asks - still easily, because he’s met his share of flustered fans over the
years, and it never does to spook them. “About anything in particular, or
just in general?”
“About - about
everything,”
she says, and before he can think of a properly witty response, she reaches
into the satchel and pulls out a letter, shyly handing it over. “Here. They
said I should give this to you first, whatever it is. It didn’t seem right to
read it.”
Varric unseals the letter, heart stilling
as he scans the contents. Maker, he knows that handwriting. The man to whom it belongs is
buried barely three feet away, within arm’s reach of the man who taught him to
write. Eyes wet, he begins to read.
Dear dwarf,
I came late to the pleasure of reading, but there is nothing
quite like losing one’s identity at a formative age to instil in one a
bone-deep faith in the power of stories. You were there through my worst as few
others were, and when Hawke ran to atone for sins that were never his, it was
you who sent him back to me; who told me that he lived at a time when I had begun
to fear otherwise. If not for that letter –
Well. We do not live in that world, nor any other monstrous one,
and for that we have you to thank, both wholly and in part. As I write this
now, I feel an end coming for my love and I, and for once in my life, I feel
disinclined to fight it. We are grown happily old together, and the world is at
peace. I am
at peace. How strange that is to say! I suppose I have always feared that some
new terror would rear up and beg a last bloody service of us both, but it has
not, and for that, I am more grateful than I can say.
Like you, Hawke has always been a storyteller. Even as I write
this, he is telling a wildly exaggerated tale of battling dragons at the Bone
Pit to a pair of local children, both so enraptured that I haven’t the heart to
interject, as I otherwise might, with a few less flattering details. And yet it
has taken me many years to realise that, for all that you share gregariousness with
Hawke, you are also, in your own way, just as private as me. There are stories
you don’t tell, not because they don’t matter, but because they do: because the
truth of them is too big and too difficult to be spoken more than once.
But that doesn’t mean they should go untold forever.
The girl to whom I’m entrusting this letter is called Helva. I
won’t tell you here the story of how I made her acquaintance, as she’d
doubtless love to tell you herself; sufficed to say that it involves both
Isabela and Dagna, and is therefore as beautifully ridiculous as anything from your
more fanciful range of paperbacks. The salient point is that Helva, formerly of
the Shaperate, has since become a promising biographer; she comes to you on my highest
recommendation.
I know you, Varric. Even with only the three of us left, you
still won’t commit to writing your own story. But telling it to someone else,
and letting them write it? That, you just might do. Call it a parting request from an
old friend; or friends, rather. The idea was as much Hawke’s as mine, though for
some absurd reason, he asked that I be the one to propose it. (But then, he has
always been partly your creation, and so baulks at telling you to become
someone else’s, whereas I am my own invention first, and therefore have no such
compunctions.)
Hawke’s story ends; I am called to the fire to adjudicate on a
matter of dragons. Please, speak to Helva. You have remembered all of us,
Varric, and oftentimes better than we deserve. It would not do to deny you the
same memoriam.
Yours in friendship,
Fenris
Varric reads the letter twice, and
somehow does not weep. The dwarf girl – Helva – is silent throughout, respectful
of the contents despite not having read them. When Varric finally speaks, his
voice is mercifully clear.
“So. You’re a biographer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you want to write about, ah. Me?”
Her eyes gleam with hope. “Oh, very much
so. Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he
says, gravely, “but this won’t do at all.” Her face falls, and Varric allows
himself a beat of perverse enjoyment before nodding his head towards the
village. “We can’t start talking here. It’s far too dark, and I’m all out of
spirits. The tavern’s a much better prospect. You can start by buying me a
drink.”
Helva lights up like a lyrium vein, and
something in Varric warms. He is old and tired and the last of his friends, but
thanks to Hawke and Fenris, he has one last chance to live with them again.
“So,” he says, and smiles as he loops his
arm through Helva’s, letting her guide him down the hillside. “Tell me. How did
you meet Isabela?”