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The Hanged Man was not supposed to be here. The Fade was disorienting and Shannon had barely survived, yet somehow she stumbled across the familiar building, tucked away in a corner of the Fade, completely out of place but beckoning with its warm light. It was probably a trap but she did not really care. Once inside the wood of the bar, that familiar scent of spilled ale, and the warm light filled with memories felt too solid to be a mere trick of the light.
Shannon now found herself sat at the corner table, her fingers tracing the familiar gouges in the oak and a tankard of ale in her hand that tasted too real for the Fade. Across from her sat a woman who mirrored her in ways that made the back of Shannon’s neck prickle. She was sketching on a piece of parchment with charcoal-stained hands, her map a chaotic sprawl of lines. Shannon assumed she was a spirit and kept her guard up, yet the comfort and familiarity of a little slice of home made her stay.
“So, you and Anders?” the woman asked, her voice oddly similar to Shannon's own, though with a different cadence.
Shannon sighed. “Briefly. It was short-lived and, on consideration, it was not my finest moment.”
The woman’s hand paused, charcoal hovering over the paper. “And yet Sebastian was?” she asked with a small chuckle.
“Yeah… that one did not quite work out how I planned. But also we are not together anymore,” Shannon replied. She did not ask how this spirit knew the details of her relationships but this had been the best company she had found in a long time.
“What about Isabela?”
Shannon laughed, a sound that felt out of place in the green void. “No, not that she didn’t try.”
“Varric?”
The name stopped her where the others hadn’t. Shannon’s gaze dropped to the scarred wood of the table, tracing her fingers over the lines she remembered too well. She pressed them hard against a scored mark where she remembered one of Isabela’s knife tricks gone wrong, staying silent as the word complicated stuck in her throat.
The woman looked up and caught Shannon’s eyes. The intensity of her gaze was unnerving.
“Ahhh,” the woman murmured, the sound almost suggesting a shared recognition. “I see.”
“It’s… complicated,” Shannon finally managed.
“It always is,” the woman replied softly. She tapped her charcoal against the map. “Right. Anyone else I need to know about?”
Shannon looked at the woman’s hands, then back at her own. She thought of the soft weight of a small head against her shoulder, and that the fierce, terrifying love that anchored her to the waking world.
“I have a son,” Shannon said.
The woman’s expression broke. Surprise gave way to a hollow sadness, which then settled into something more determined.
“Alright,” the woman said. She pushed aside the papers and stood up, reaching for a broom that Shannon had previously seen leaning against the bar. As her fingers closed around the handle, the wood warped, shifting into the familiar shape of a staff. Her clothes, previously simple country clothes, rippled and darkened, stitching themselves into armour that matched Shannon’s own set—piece for piece, dent for dent.
Shannon stood, her hand instinctively drifting to the staff at her back. “You—?”
“Don't worry about it too much,” the woman said, her voice clearer now. “The Fade is weird. It gets jumbled and things echo, then sometimes realities collide. But right now, we need to focus on what is important and get you home. For your son.”
“You know a way out? A rift?” Shannon asked, though she felt the shift in the air, the way the walls of the pub began to bleed into a green light. “I thought they were all closed.”
“I know several,” the woman said. “There are some rifts still left that, with the proper magic, can form a passage. It is just a matter of finding the right one to take you home.”
Home? That word seemed so far away after everything she had been through. Back to the world. To her friends and to her son.
The woman moved towards the door, towards a future that seemed both impossible and real, and she beckoned for Shannon to follow.
Shannon paused, her heart beating loud against her chest. She looked at this woman who walked like her, talked like her, and felt like a ghost of a life she hadn't lived yet. “If you are who I think you are,” she began awkwardly, “then why are you still here?"
The woman turned. Her hand was still on the handle and she twisted, the door creaking open to not reveal the streets of Kirkwall that should lay outside the Hanged Man, but a swirling vista of the Fade. She looked back at Shannon, and for a second, the sorrow in her eyes was so vast it threatened to pull them both into the abyss.
“Because,” the woman said, her voice barely a whisper against the howling wind of the Fade, “a mage needs to hold the way open. And I could not ask that of anyone else.”
She stepped aside and beckoned for Shannon to follow. Hesitating only slightly, Shannon followed. If her guess about the woman was correct then she had nothing to fear.
Hawke would get her home.