Private Character Introduction: Varric

[varricmod]

The long slog was finally over. The sky had been healed. Corypheus had been defeated. The Venatori had been chased back into the dark corners of the world to stroke their mustaches and plot for another day.

Hell. Even most of the rifts had been closed.

Skyhold was quiet.

Too quiet.



The thing about heroic quests is, Varric wrote, quill scratching noisily over parchment, no one really knows what to do once the hero saves the day.

Solas had been the first to abandon ship—mysteriously, of course—but the others had started to follow suit. Cassandra to her new position as Divine. Vivienne back to help the colleges of magi. Dorian to his homeworld. Blackwall to take the grey.

Even Bull was making noise about leaving. “Following Boss around is good pay, no mistake,” he said just a few nights ago, slamming back his third ale. “But hell, it’s gotten easy. Me and the boys get restless when things get too easy.”

It was all slowly unraveling, the way every story eventually did. There was a part of Varric that wished he could grasp onto the pieces and hold on tight—to keep the whole thing from just slipping away from him again. Damn it, he was getting too good at standing on the shore watching loved ones sail away.

“The dwarf thought angstily,” he muttered beneath his breath, scratching out the last line—a letter to Bethany, his only tie to Hawke now; and what was that about angst?—and starting over. The whole grand hall was huge and echoingly silent around him, seeming to press in on all sides. Cavernous.

Which is why the sound of shattering glass was so Maker-taken loud.

“Maker’s nutsack!” Varric barked, jumping to his feet. He reached instinctively for Bianca, slinging her over his shoulder as he went sprinting for the door leading up to Vivienne’s old promenade. Shards of glass crunched beneath his feet, tinkling musically as they scattered down stone steps, and even as he rushed in to see what the void had happened, he couldn’t help but feel something was…off.

The air felt heavy. Thick. Grasping.

He could hear the pound of feet as others came running, but all that seemed very far away. The air was vibrating around him, trembling in a way that made the whole world seem to ripple. When he glanced around, alarmed, he saw a score—more—of blinking eyes watching him from the scattered shards of glass. Elven and human and qunari and…something he had never seen before, something not of this world…all fixed on him as he skidded to a stop.

And before him, dark and forboding, the cloth that Vivienne had thrown over its face fluttered to the floor, was an eluvian. Shivery light seemed to pour from its jagged, cracked face, and he felt as if he were falling, he felt as if he were flying, he felt—

He felt nothing at all—

—until he hit the stone with a loud crack, body shuddering with the impact.

“Well shit,” Varric muttered beneath his breath, struggling up to his knees. He felt woozy and disoriented. Outside the huge central window, he saw a mass of blue-black clouds and a dark flicker of light streaking across its face like the pulsing veins of a heart. The sky roiled around Skyhold. Beyond the castle’s thick walls, the land fell away into nothing.

The Fade. Whatever had happened, it had pulled all of Skyhold into the Fade.

“Well shit,” he said again, climbing to his feet. Bianca was a familiar weight in his hands. “So much for things being quiet.”