There’s irony in this, Jowan thinks. Or symbolism. Or both.
He’s spent a decade hiding his left hand, hiding the man he was. Hiding the scars he made as a stupid, stupid boy crammed in a corner of the Circle with a knife gripped between shaking fingers. He remembers it with painful clarity - sitting huddled against the wall, knees drawn up in front of him and a forbidden book lying open against his legs, the cold burning sensation as he drew the blade across his skin. More than anything else, perhaps, he recalls the terror. Terror of the Templars, of the Harrowing, of his own magic, the terror that drove him to listen to Uldred’s whispers.
And the terror that followed as he tried to hide it. Wearing overlong robes on purpose, so that the ends of the sleeves dangled over the healing cuts. Always placing his palm down flat on tabletops. Using his left hand as little as possible, so no one would notice the way he winced whenever it touched something.
It didn’t work, of course. They found out. They found out just as he stopped using the damn magic. Typical of him, really - not only could he not be a real, secretive blood mage, he couldn’t even stop being a blood mage properly.
The cuts have faded over the years, dwindling to thin, pale scars, but he still hides them. After he fled Redcliffe - after his old friend unlocked his cell and begged him to run and save himself - he took to wearing gloves, whenever there were others around. He has an easy excuse - have you any idea how hard waving a wooden staff around all the time is on your hands? You get more blisters than you get scandals at an Orlesian party - and no one’s ever questioned it. Not the refugees he took to protecting from the darkspawn, not the other apostates in the underground network he fell in with, not his fellow rebels once the Circles broke their chains. Only in the evenings, when he was alone, would he ever slip off the gloves, trace the scars, bow his head and bite his lip to hold back the sobs.
Ten years, and they stayed there, cold white lines. Accusing him. Reminding him of how he failed Lily, how he betrayed his best and oldest friend, how he so nearly killed poor Connor, how he caused the deaths of dozens in Redcliffe.
(‘I want to forget it all,’ he remembers whispering to himself one night, and a voice rose up in his mind and hissed back at him - you don’t deserve to forget. Remember what you did, the people you made suffer. Remember, so you never become that again.)
And then he goes to the Conclave, because maybe they have a chance to end this, to make sure no other mage ever becomes a monster by accident because they were scared of the Harrowing. And somehow he manages to screw everything up again, and there’s a hole in the sky and the Divine’s dead and his friends are dead and there are demons all over the place and a Seeker’s raging at him and an elf’s telling him he’s their only chance -
And there’s this, here on his hand.
They call him Herald of Andraste, and he knows they’re wrong, because Andraste would have to be utterly mad to choose someone who could cause a disaster just by blinking. But all the same, there’s this mark on his hand, a mark that can help people, close the rifts, save the world, and it lies right over the scars of his idiocy, neatly concealing all traces of blood magic.
He has spent a decade hiding his left hand. But now the Inquisitor is emerging from the maleficar, and the mark covers the scars.
And so he holds it up to the world, and uses it to banish the demons.
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