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The undercroft is a place of shadow, of heavy stone and jumbled storage, but Anders knows exactly where he is: ten yards down from the eastern balcony, near the wall. Ten yards down from the place, seven years ago, that Karl bled out his life. Ten yards and seven years from the place it all started will be the place it all ends.
Except for him the basement is deserted; there is no one to see him making his preparations, mixing and fixing and disguising the explosives as just another set of innocent boxes and barrels that fill the forgotten storage room. No one sees him, no one knows he is here, and no one will stop him, not even himself. Especially not himself.
As he works he can’t stop the tears from falling – tears not of grief (only,) but of frustration, of thwarted rage, and of bitter regrets. Not for what he will do, but for what he has not already done. One tear for every death. For every mage who had died while he waffled and waited and delayed. One tear for every person who will die when he does this? No, he decides. He will never have enough tears for that. He couldn’t even begin.
It has been a long time coming to this, ten yards and seven years of fighting, arguing, debating, writing, healing, and struggling – with himself as well as with others. Even when the end began to close on him, inevitable and profane, for a long time he had still hesitated. He knew what must be done, but he did not know where.
He had debated setting his charges in the Gallows: bring down the prison, melt the slave statues, break the chains. But there is no possible way to evacuate the mages first, not with the Mage Underground shattered, not by himself alone – and although the Gallows may be doomed, may be slated for death already, it will not be him who brings down the axe.
He had thought of bringing the destruction to the Templar Hall, and even begun to lay his plans to that effect; but in the last hour something turned his feet away, and he knew it was not fear of the Templars that did it. It was Justice, but more than that, it was understanding.
He hates the Templars, but he also knows them. He’s lived among them all his life – he knows how the system works. The indoctrination, the addiction. Coercion and control. He knows that there aren’t enough sick sadistic bastards in Thedas to volunteer to fill out their ranks, so they fill them instead with recruits from Chantry orphanages. Chantry orphans, half of them snatched as babes from a mage mother’s arms – the magic in their blood lends them to it, makes it easier for them to abide the lyrium, easier for them to channel the power… set child to jail parent, tear every family apart.
He doesn’t pity them; he still hates the Templars, he always will, but Justice helped him to look past his own pain and see the ways that this was much bigger than him, much bigger than any Templar Hall.
He has come to understand at last that it doesn’t matter how many Templars he kills; the Chantry will merely make more. It doesn’t matter how many corrupt Knight-Commanders they depose; there will always be another waiting in the wings, ready to step into their place. Nothing will change so long as the power of the Chantry sits unopposed, ruling all with an iron leash. It is not a person he must kill, but an idea – the idea of the Chantry’s inviolability, their untouchableness, their divine right to order the lives of others, all in the name of keeping people safe. People. Not mages. Because that’s what it’s all about, in the end, we are people we are people Void take you we are alive and we are real, we are not animals we are not monsters we are not things.
No, for all he hates them, he knows it isn’t the Templars that are the problem. They are only a symptom of the corruption. The Chantry is the source. Templars are only the military arm of the power that is the Chantry; they can only carry out the edicts the Chantry sets. It is the Chantry that feeds self-loathing to every mage, weakening their hearts against the demons that would prey on them; it is the Chantry that pours poison into every ear in Thedas against them. It is the Chantry that rides the mages like a bridled horse, spurred and bound, that whips them on like beasts even as it drags back the bit between their teeth. Magic is a gift, it could do so much good in this world if only the Chantry would let them; instead they keep them locked away, never to live or work or breathe save when it profits the Chantry. The Chantry keeps all good in the world for their own doing while all ills are laid so squarely on the shoulders of the mages.
Reforms will never come. Too much of their power is bound up inextricably with the subjugation of mages; not only for the money it brings them, wrung out from the soulless bodies of the Tranquil, but for the legitimization of their power. To justify the war against the devil, after all, there must be a devil that the common man can see. Tevinter is far away, but mages can be born anywhere, anytime; it gives them all the reason they need to post their soldiers in every town, in every city, in every principality. A show of ubiquitous force, a visible reminder of who controls these lands – a subtle threat unspoken, never forgotten. We can come into your home at any time, we can take your children from you, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.
Children torn from their families, bodies stripped of their personhood and made the property of the Chantry, voices smothered screaming into silence. He can’t, he won’t believe that this was what Andraste would have wanted. And the Maker? The Maker is gone. The Chantry doesn’t get to speak with his voice, no more than Anders does.
It should come as no surprise to the Chantry what harvest their history of fear and force has sown. There is nothing in the Chant of Light, after all, that advocates peace.
There’d been a time when he’d believed it did; a time when he himself had believed in peace. There’d been a time when he believed that the world could be changed by peace, and he’d taught Justice as well, or tried to; the spirit is a warrior by nature, a creature of force and battle. Anders tried to teach him that fighting could be more than blows, that it could be words, that it could be actions. Now he doubts himself, hates himself for the time wasted. Because there comes a time when actions mean nothing, when words mean less, when all that is left is force. Justice was right all along.
Seven years and he’s accomplished nothing. All his words have been nothing. He had dreamed of winning minds and hearts with his manifesto; why? He can’t even get his friends to read it, let alone strangers. Let alone the Mothers, the Clerics, the Divines – the ones who could change things, the ones who never will. The Chantry has no reason to listen, no reason to care, and every reason not to. The Chantry is too powerful, they control every crier and every outlet in the land, they can spin the story in whatever way they like. They will slaughter every man, woman and child in the Gallows and then make up some story as to why it was necessary, why it was deserved, and everyone, absolutely everyone will believe them, because there will be nobody left alive to say otherwise.
Even the Seekers, the last supposed defense against corruption in the Templar order, have done nothing. They came to the city, they saw the atrocities, and they did nothing; they swallowed the half-baked excuses and coverups the Knight-Commander fed to them and went away satisfied. They never even thought to investigate the conditions of the mages themselves, any more than a farmer would think to ask the cows in the barn if their accommodations were satisfactory.
For years he’s tried to persuade them, through words, through actions; tried to make himself an example of magekind that could do good, that could help people, that could change things for the better. But he is no longer that man; he is no longer Compassion. He is Justice. Andraste had not stayed her hand for pity of the innocent conscripts, the indentured workers in the fields of Tevinter; and neither will he.
He can’t help but give a bitter, mocking little chuckle at the notion of himself being anything like Andraste. If nothing else perhaps he will have his own burning, like Andraste; perhaps he will even have his very own Hessarian to wield the knife.
He has spoken in words of reasonable argument, of passionate rhetoric, of heartfelt pleas, and he has not been heard. He has spoken in acts of healing, of compassion and mercy, and he has been ignored. So now he will speak. He will speak now in acts that cannot go unheard; he will speak now in the language of destruction and violence, of the Templars, of the Exalted March, of the only language the Chantry understands.
The power of the Chantry must be broken. They are invulnerable only because everyone believes them to be so; because no one dares to strike against them, because no one has ever succeeded. He will show the world that the Chantry is not superhuman, is not divine, that they are only humans wielding human power and they can be brought down by humans as well.
We must break. Break the system. Break the symbol. Break the Circle. Break the Chantry.
He knows with a healer’s sure experience that sometimes the bone must be rebroken before it can be set, that the limb must be amputated before the poison can spread, that the wound must be lanced so that the infection can heal. All of Thedas is infected, a hot swollen fever that boils and pulses just below the surface, and Kirkwall is where the boil comes to a head. It must be purged, the infection cleansed, the corruption burnt away. Only then can true healing begin.
There will be war. But not forever. And after the war, there will be peace; some better peace, pray to the Maker, than what they have now. Not this cannibal peace, a peace that must be fed daily with corpses, with sacrifices, with mages ground up in the machinery that churned endlessly away in the name of endlessly upholding the status quo.
What that new world will look like, Anders can only guess: he himself is too Andrastean, too deeply mired in the Chantry’s indoctrination, to imagine another way. Vague hopeful visions of Rivain, of the Keepers, of the Avvar dance through his mind, but he can’t quite conceive of how it can be brought about. Others must take up where he falls short; when he prays, it is not for his own survival – not even for his own success – but for that.
But Maker help him, he is still only a man, with a man’s dark weaknesses at the bottom of his heart; and as he looks up at the vaulted ceiling of the undercroft he feels the dark bitter satisfaction well in his heart, and Vengeance whispers: All right, you bastards. Now it’s come to this. This is where you broke him. And this is where I’ll break you.
~end.