My chat with Hawke was not only informative, but it also set the tone for my immediate future, as there were many discussions to be held. All of my companions wanted to talk about what had happened at Haven, me being named the Inquisitor, Corypheus, and Skyhold. My first order of business, though, was to officially bring Cole into the Inquisition. Shortly after, I witnessed his odd ability to detect the thoughts of people nearby who “needed” him. Oh, and learned he’s not really a young man, but a manifested spirit of some sort. While I thought that was probably worth keeping an eye on, his problem-solving ability was quite useful, and he was very handy with a blade. And his hat was fantastic, which counts for a lot with me.
Behold the magnificence! Keep beholding, keep beholding, beholding, and we're still beholding, and scene!
After learning about Cole, my other companions all had issues to address. Most pressingly, I had to stop Cassandra from killing Varric. Before she had ever interrogated me, the Seeker had been searching low and high for Hawke because she needed someone to lead the Inquisition. After failing to find the Hero of Ferelden, the Grey Warden who had united that country and stopped the Fifth Blight almost before it began, she started looking for Hawke and found Varric. Varric had said he didn’t know where Hawke was, but his swift summoning of the Champion to help me demonstrated otherwise. Hence, attempted violence. I calmed Cassandra down and reassured Varric that he’d done the right thing by keeping his friend’s secret for her. Plus, if he had brought Cassandra to Hawke, I might never have become the Inquisitor, something I quite like being.
I also talked with Solas in a dream-Haven and learned more about the Anchor, the proper name for the glowy part of my glowy hand. Sera was concerned with what a being like Corypheus could mean for her very realistic, non-religious worldview. And the Iron Bull wanted to drink. So I did. Not my favorite activity, but you try saying “no” to an enormous wall of meat with horns longer than your arm. I checked in with everyone else, too, which meant that all this took quite a while. I actually had to take a break partway through. But, I love and respect all my companions in their own way, yes, even Vivienne, meaning the effort was entirely worth it. I made some friends, as well, as Skyhold had a bevy of new recruits performing old tasks. My favorite of these fresh faces was a very odd dwarf named Dagna. I won’t gush as much as I want to about my Arcanist, I will just say that she is completely delightful in every way and having her around instantly made my life much better. Of all the things I discovered about myself during my inquisiting, all the profound realizations I came to, the oddest has to be that apparently I find a vast majority of female dwarves to be unbearably cute.
Utterly adorable.
Oh, and critically, I discovered that my collection of RaMOs had inexplicably made the trip from Haven to Skyhold. How and why they had been included in the minimal amount of supplies that survived the sudden, chaotic flight from our former headquarters, I have no idea, but I was thrilled to see them. Anyways, while talking with my companions, many of them brought up a few odd jobs they could use my help with. Being the obliging fellow I am, I agreed and started dealing with problems that varied wildly in severity. To start with, I helped Dorian deal with some family issues. Apparently the Gull and Lantern tavern in Redcliffe Village appeals to Tevinter magisters, because Dorian’s father chose it as our meeting point to attempt to hash things out with his estranged son, the same as Gerry once had. I helped Sera do whatever it is Sera does, started the process of getting Josephine’s family out of some century-old debt trouble, and stopped the darkspawn who were popping out of the ground at the Storm Coast. Still raining there, if you were wondering. Also, that last one wasn’t a request from one of my friends, it was just something that needed a good inquisiting. Blackwall approved of the whole thing, though, as you might imagine a Grey Warden would. The highlight of these errands, however, was easily one for Cassandra. One day, I happened upon her reading a novel. A romance novel. A terrible romance novel. A terrible romance novel written by Varric. She was adorably caught up in the story, far more than I could have imagined the hard-as-nails Seeker who could stand toe-to-toe with a dragon could be. Sensing an opportunity, I asked Varric about continuing the series, which he had no plans to do. Until he found out that Cassandra was a fan and thought of the amusement that teasing her with the book could give him. So, in a remarkably short amount of time, he wrote the next entry and gave it as a peace offering to Cassandra. Two of my companions stopped wanting to kill each other and I got a good laugh out of the whole thing. A classic win-win if I’ve ever seen one and a damn fine piece of Inquisitorial leadership, if I may say so myself.
Completely different, but somehow just as utterly adorable as the last image.
One of the more urgent of my companion’s problems was presented by Solas. A friend of his, a spirit of wisdom, had been summoned from the Fade against its will in the Exalted Plains, a very large area that was, at the time, a major battlefield in the Orlesian civil war. Because of course the Orlesians were killing each other while demons were continuously popping out of tears in reality. Well, technically, they weren’t fighting when I got there. They’d stopped for peace talks that I was supposed to attend, but I, frankly, had more fun things to do. Back to Solas and his friend, we found the group of idiot mages who had summoned the spirit. They had tried to make it defend them against some bandits, despite the fact that it was a spirit of wisdom with no desire to fight, and the spirit had transformed into a demon as a result. Which is apparently how that works. Rather than just killing the poor thing, we freed it from the binding ritual the morons had used on it so it could at least remember who it actually was before it died. Then Solas killed the mages. I thought about stopping him, but you can’t fix stupid, and they would have done more harm than good in the long run. Solas went back to Skyhold after that, but the rest of us finished clearing out the central area of the Plains. The Orlesians weren’t fighting each other anymore, but they were fighting both a group of rebels who called themselves the Freemen of the Dales and copious amounts of undead who were appearing in their fortifications. Naturally, I had to solve these problems for them and set about the tasks. When I’d secured the area, I headed back to headquarters to check on my fellow elven mage.
My keen senses are telling me this place is... not nice.
Solas was fine, a bit troubled by the whole event, but happy with how I’d handled it. He also let me know how surprisingly competent I was at being the Inquisitor. A talent I had to exercise again soon after, as it was time to sit and pass judgment on some of the enemies of the Inquisition. When we captured an enemy of sufficient stature, it was up to me to decide their fate. I was surprised when the first man they led before me was one of the Avvar. His name was Movran, and he was the father of that moron I’d killed in the Fallow… you know what? It doesn’t deserve a name. Movran was the father of that moron I’d killed in… That Place. He acknowledged his son’s stupidity, apparently the idiot was supposed to attack Tevinter and had gone after me instead, but the traditions of his people required Movran to hit my home with a goat in retaliation. No, seriously. He threw a goat at Skyhold. He said it was just supposed to be “goat’s blood,” but every report I saw claimed that he threw a whole, live, goat at the wall. A man with that kind of spirit has to be given a purpose, so I loaded him and the rest of his clan with weapons and shipped him to Tevinter. That way, he wouldn’t be a problem for me, and he could wreak havoc on the Vints like he wanted to. And it was funny.
I mean, there is goat’s blood in the goat, I guess.
The next person needing adjudication was more familiar to me. Gerry had been sitting in a cell under Skyhold since the whole time-warp thing had blown up in his face. He didn’t care about what happened to him anymore, since he had failed to save his son, but a man who has the skills to affect time is too potentially useful to just behead. So, I set the man who had tried to kill me and, as a result, shown me the most disturbing thing I’d ever witnessed (will witness? Might witness? Gods, I hate time travel) to work as a well-supervised magical researcher for the Inquisition. He wouldn’t be studying more time magic, because I’m not an idiot. But he would get to do something useful with the rest of his life and I would reap the benefits of his labor. And it was funny. I think I did well for my first try at Inquisitorial judgment, personally. My main takeaway from the whole thing, though, was that I needed a better chair. The one they gave me was… fine, but not really me.
Maybe I’ll make a new chair by melting the swords of my enemies… No, that’d be ridiculous. And spiky.
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