

Were it long, for you, she would have let her hair down.



For you, she would have learned the near-lost language left etched in runes by whom you alleged were her predecessors and carved them into her supple heart. But predecessors? Really? If there were any Eri-esque individual who predated her, perhaps a former grand enchanter or even Daisy might bear some shallow resemblance to her outer shell, but her soul? No. There’s only one Eri. There’s only one flame of genuine, gentle Dalish girl in this inquisition, now flickering. You, of all scholars, oughta have known that.



What I oughta know better than anyone is how crushingly often, in the trials and conquests of love, the most unequivocally wrong of actions can feel so desperately necessary. You can hate the recoil reverberating through your hands as you pierce heart after heart, but in the end, more often than coming to your senses, you just reload your bolts—but this isn’t about me. This is about her and how, had she all the time in the world, she would have learned Tevene, Qunlat, or Orlesian if it would mean a single moment of clarity in her communication with you. Despite hardly knowing how to sign her own name in the common trade tongue, she would have written epics over years just to taste that single second. But you don’t have all the time in the world when you’re doing your damnedest to save it. What you do have, at the bare minimum, is a reason to get out of bed in the morning. You deprive Eri of that and you’ve doomed us all. I think you knew that.

You are knowing while she’s oblivious—heroic, of course!—but so blissfully ignorant. Blissful for sure. But for all your pomp and pride and presentation, you couldn’t give her the same honesty she radiated into the world better than anything done by darkspawn or a rift. You probably understand that, but the kid doesn’t. Were his hair not always so let down, so ever-in-his-eyes, I swear I’d see them widen, shift back and forth on the floor like his uncertain feet as he continually tugs on my sleeves and asks for you. He asks about how you “hurt”, how he can help, how you “could catch the mouse, the opposite of a cat?” I don’t know what he means, but I’d bet you do.



For them, I can only spin words into silver. You’ve robbed us of our gold. Her head lolls against my shoulder in silent anguish, my legs stiffen against the tavern stool. They found her a bottle of that dandelion wine she described to you in those vivid dreams of her home that never even moved you. Letters of consolation came to her from a friend she’d never once met, one who knew of that spirit as well as shared her spirit, but drowning her sorrows isn’t helping. They get dragged back up to the forefront of her thoughts every time the woman in the corner sings of warmth, of embrace, and those thoughts float back to the surface, now muddied, now heavier, but not sinking. Never sinking. My own tankard has long since ceased to contain anything but water, still I respond in kind when she raises hers. I sigh in kind, maybe mimic her slur, and softly hush the boy on my other side, frantically whispering in my ear.

“Not now, kid,” I tell him, “sitting here is the best we can do for now, you and I.” But I can’t allow for any silence that might suffocate her, so I chuckle down into the void of conversation and say,



“Now, did I ever tell you about the time--?”



“That you and Hawke met the man with the cat? Yes. I remember. I like cats. But if she’s a mouse, why wasn’t it a cat who hurt her?”



“Not again, kid! I already told you!" I close my eyes and sigh. "And…I didn’t want to...Not Hawke. No. I wanted to tell you all about the time I was approached by a templar to autograph a first edition copy of Hard in Hightown. She was no regular templar! The book—Why, it was for The Divine herself! Now, she wouldn’t come outright and say that, but my damn editor has ordered so many reprints of that Maker-forsaken thing for the smallest of syntax errors that I had to investigate who in their right mind was collecting a first edition copy like it was something other than garbled trash.”

Finally, the feeble voice to my right wavers alive. It whispers,

“You have told us of that time.”

She peers up at me from my own shoulder, her breath hot against my neck with words, although slurred, even more scalding,



“Josie says that story’s a lie, Varric.” Then, quieter, “please…No more lies tonight.”

Oh, that Ruffles. She gives Eri gowns and perfumes, quills and tomes, she sends errand girls to run her hot baths, but for someone so apt to beautify a wound to its healing, she can’t allow me the necessity of polishing over details. She masks the problem, the boy, to Eri, so like a brother, frets, and every now and then, something has to bend under the pressure. Better the truth than one of us. Better the truth than something with a breaking point. Better the truth than something with a heart, something unlike you.

Probably out of restlessness, the leashed, young sense of sympathetic abandon at my back tries taking a second sip of the ale I bought him hours ago. His face contorts and reddens, he coughs and sputters,



“The grain, the grog, all tart, not together, at least they shouldn’t be! It feels angry, frothing!”



Like all people—like you and I--The kid needs time to understand the nuances of personhood. The spectacle of his learning at least causes weight to lift from my collarbone.

She throws her head back and a melodious miracle of a sound causes all time to stop. Confused, the poor kid doesn’t even know he had accomplished the very mission from which the ale was meant to distract him. I pat him on the back, but it only startles him. His hat falls to the floor. Eri laughs harder. I’ll have to tell him later, when she’s safe, sound, and sleeping, that I’ve never been more proud of him. That ringing sound is one of hope. It means you, for no lack of trying, did not succeed in killing her. For that reason alone, by the breath of the Maker you don’t believe in, I, too, can live for another day. This entire operation is built on ashes, a foundation of death, and I can’t take much more.



You probably know, but I’ll never understand what it was that drew her to you, Chuckles. I’d know if it was an elf thing—you made me very perceptive of things involving you and race—so the best guess I can wager is that it was an affair that transpired between two fade-connected souls. Now, I’ve never claimed to understand magic. I’ll never feel its pull, nor am I one to want to be near the energy that exists both inside and outside the circles. Where there’s magic, there’s often trouble and tension. Even though I’ve lived that reality, even though I know that magic is good for destruction and ruin, I’m still not confident that what she saw in you was something wrapped up in it. At least magic can heal as well as it hurts. From what I can see in the now-droopy-lidded eyes of the woman near me, what you had was more malicious than it was magical.

You know, it’s funny. Normally, when I write for Eri, she’s speaking the words and I just take them down. I thought this would feel different but I guess, in a way, I still am. And she still is.