We know very little about the time Rook is stuck in Fade prison. Only that it is weeks and that the team crafts the fake dagger in the meantime. We never really learn what everyone feels or how they find Rook in the end. I think it is called the Lighthouse for a reason. So. Part two. Emmrich.
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Its shape the absence of you (Part 2 of 3)
The memory has burned itself into his mind, plays on repeat every time he closes his eyes. Kamari, right in front of him, just a couple of steps away. Falling forward, reaching for the dagger in Ghilan’nain’s chest, he’d called to her to pull it out. And then she is gone. Just like that. Swept into the greater Fade with not even a trace for him to find.
Other details are hazy. Davrin bodily dragging him away, down to the beach. The heat of the fire as Elgar'nan’s rage consumed the island. The silence of the Lighthouse.
When Emmrich opens his eyes the morning after there is a heavy weight sitting on his chest. Its shape the absence of her.
She pins him down, like a butterfly in a box or a flower pressed between pages.
This weight, it is seeing her face as it twists in anger and pain. Pain he caused her because he is a coward. It is the shake in her voice as she tries to stop him from breaking something beyond repair. Because he is a coward. It is the knowledge that the last memory he has of her will be this because he let his fear win.
He’d been so afraid of the possibility that she would leave him in some nebulous made-up future, so afraid of causing her pain with his own death should she stay, against all odds. So scared of the what-ifs and the maybes. Of his own feelings.
And nothing of this matters if he’s lost her. Just like this. Before he could repair what he had broken, before he had the chance to say how truly sorry he is. How much he needs her. How much it scares him if she should not feel the same way.
Except- she does. Did. He simply had been too scared and too stubborn to believe it until it was almost too late. Is too late now.
Emmrich is no stranger to loss and grief, to regrets. He has learned to carry them and not break, but he can feel the cracks. The rituals, the habits that he has picked up and created for himself after he joined the Mourn Watch have supported him through the darkest days. They do so now too even if it is a struggle. A clean shave, the proper dress, every piece of jewelry is a piece of stability, of armor against the pain.
He has days where this works, where he can be a functioning member of the team. Go over news from Minrathous, work on theories and ideas how to stop Elgar’nan without the dagger - how to make one.
It’s an idea that first sparks hope - trying to find Kamari in the vastness of the Fade by his usual means had yielded nothing, not even the smallest trace of her. But with the dagger they might be able to do something.
He latches onto that idea, to that work like a lifeline. He spends days working out the details, the composition and crafting methods, and manages to procure the materials. He works on it feverishly, painstakingly. Yet when it is finished it is nothing but a bauble, a mere trinket, and not his salvation.
Emmrich also has bad days. They all do. Kamari was not the only one that did not make it off the island. They lost Harding, Bellara. Both Taash and Neve take it hard, and he tries to be there for them with an open ear - he is a Watcher, it is part of his duty after all.
But it is hard on the bad days, when he wakes up with the memory of her on his mind and that weight on his chest, when nothing he does can ease it.
Then all he can do is sit in her room, one of her journals in his lap. She’d shown them to him once, her thoughts and feelings committed to paper, interspersed with pressed flowers she’d found on her travels with Varric. Emmrich knows there are also her thoughts on him in there - but he is still too much of a coward to read them. The page is marked with a Shroud’s Kiss.
He also has not informed Myrna or Vorgoth. He knows he must, eventually, as is his duty. But it would be so final to put it to paper, like dousing the last flame of hope he keeps alive in his heart.
It had been bad enough trying to explain it to Manfred when he had turned to him and simply asked, “Kamari?”
“She is gone, Manfred. We’ve lost her to the greater Fade and I’m afraid it will not be as easy to bring her back.”
“Alive!”
“Oh I hope so, my boy.”
Then he had sent him out on an errand so Manfred would not see him cry.
It is a bad day when he finally opens the journal to the page with the pressed white flower - her favorite non-color as she had teased him after his little pedantic outburst during their date. White like fresh snow. The moon. Kamari, in an Old Nevarran dialect. The only thing she had ever received from her parents. He’d felt foolish then but she had just waved it away with a laugh, with such grace.
Now his fingers tremble as he lifts the flower so he can read the words below.
I’m glad Manfred is back. It will make many things so much easier for Emmrich. He doesn’t really want to admit it, perhaps not even to himself, but he’s felt lonely without him. Without his family, his son. He waved it off when I suggested as much but it’s so clear to see.
With Manfred back it’s going to be easier to convince Emmrich that he is braver than he gives himself credit for. That his fears are not everything, will not consume him. With time, he’ll see what I see. A wonderful, kind, loving man that has faced so many things thrown at him and not wavered in who he is.
The strength of that conviction, that we must believe in kindness - it’s what gives me hope that we will get through this. It’s what I love about him.
The first tear falls onto the back of his hand and he quickly closes the journal, not wanting to smudge her words and lose this last thing he has of her. The reason he cannot give up hope.
He cries himself to sleep on her couch that night, the journal pressed tightly to his chest.
When Emmrich wakes in the early hours of the morning with a pounding headache and his heart heavy, it is to the sight of the Caretaker hovering in front of him.
“A new path has opened, dweller. The Lighthouse will show the way as it has always done. A beacon to the lost.”
Then they disappear before he can ask any further questions.
Emmrich stumbles to his feet and out of the room, out into the Library where there is a door that has not been there before. It leads to a spiraling corridor ushering him up and up and up, until he arrives at what must be the very top of the Lighthouse. Gemstone windows encircle the entire room, shimmering in every visible color and some that can only be felt. And in the middle of the room a light, warm and bright and a doorway beyond.
His senses reach out to it, through it. It is as if he has become a lighthouse, his searching gaze traversing the Fade farther and faster. Somewhere, she is out there somewhere, he can feel it.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there. Eventually there are Neve, Lucanis, Taash at his back. Asking questions, bickering. Still he searches, unwavering, until-
“There, a light!”
“We’ve got something?!”
Emmrich reaches into, through the doorway. His fingers wrap around a wrist, his other hand finds the upper arm. Then Taash and Lucanis are beside him, reaching and pulling until there is no more resistance. Until she stumbles out of the Fade and into their arms. Whole. Alive.
Then Kamari pulls away, stumbles back with her hands raised, her breathing shallow, her eyes pressed shut. “Please. A moment.”
Neve is faster. “What’s wrong?”
It takes Kamari a moment to answer. He can see her deliberately drawing breath, using a technique every initiate learns to deal with panic and pain to calm herself. His heart twists.
“Too many sensations at once. Too bright, too loud, too much. I can feel… everything.”
Then she opens her eyes and her gaze finds his, and for a moment he forgets how to breathe. What he sees there, a moonrise.