“I wasn’t meant to be the last of us,” says Varric. But he is 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.
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.
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?”
“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?”
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