A Battered Old Journal, Chapter Three

Title: A Battered Old Journal, Chapter Three

Series: Dragon Age

Characters: OC: Mathis Hawke, OC: William

Words: 1,107

Summary: The third entry in the journal, written on the ninth of August in 9:56 Dragon.

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Bit of a time skip on this next one. Like I said in the last entry, there’s not much I clearly remember before I turned nine years old. After that…I remember almost everything.

This next event occurred when I was ten in Harvestmere, just a few days before Satinalia. I was left on my own a lot more in those days as Mother was two months away from giving birth to my baby sister, Cullen half didn’t know what to do with himself at that prospect, and Uncle was more often with Aunt Merrill as they’d just found out she was with child. So I spent what time I wasn’t tied up in classes or tutoring with Siegfried was joining in with the templar initiates my age to spar.

Being a templar never called to me, mind you. I may have grown up in the Gallows but I was raised by a mage who spent most of her life running from them. No matter how much she trusted them nor how much love she held for Uncle and Cullen, Mother taught me early that not all templars are the same. The helping of horror stories I heard from some of the younger mages who’d been my age or younger during the fighting helped cement my wariness of the profession.

I love my uncle and Cullen is the only father I’ve ever known but…I couldn’t do what they do.

Swords, though, now there’s something that calls to me. Uncle blames Mother for my fascination with sharp objects but it was his stories of fighting in Starkhaven that actually sparked it. The stories of Mother’s fights were always distant, back away from that roiling mess that’s at the center of a battle. Uncle’s, on the other hand, were always right there in the middle of that madness where survival danced on the edge of the sword in hand.

So for future reference note that it is not a good idea to tell an impressionable five year old war stories, even if they are censored. And I know I’m rambling again but I promise this has a point.

One of the younger initiates was a boy named William: son of a Ferelden refugee like me but forced into the templars by his father. He was never fond of me, not from the moment he arrived in the Gallows when I was six, and always took the opportunity to remind me of what my father had done. His mother had been in the Chantry when…well, you probably know what happened. Short story, she died and he blamed me since my father was dead.

He was a bully too and I spent a lot of time working to avoid him since he was two years older than me. Didn’t really help much as William liked to pick on my friend Tara and, as Uncle says, “Hawkes don’t abandon family, Mathis, or friends, not if we can help it.”

Amongst the templars I couldn’t avoid William and that day we didn’t have an instructor who knew to keep us apart. So when we got paired together and he got this mad look in his eye, I had to struggle to not go against Cullen’s number one rule when he let me into training: never strike in anger.  Following that is how I ended up on the courtyard stones with a bloodied lip, a handful of bruises, and the tip of William’s waster jabbed into my throat.

I remember those hateful words he spoke then: Your father was a monster and you’re going to be just like him. And I’ll be there, monster, to kill you. They weren’t words idly spoken – William meant them with every fiber of his being. I imagine now that most of that was his father’s influence, taking out the anger at the loss of his wife on a young son who, in turn, took it out on the son of his mother’s killer. If I’d been in his shoes, I probably would have hated me too.

Ten year-old me didn’t think like that though. He hated William for the things he’d said and for every little thing he’d put Tara and every other child he bullied through. So I snapped back without thinking that the Chantry deserved to be destroyed because it had been as bad as everything else in the city back then.

It is a terrifying thing to see another human being go mad.

That’s what happened to William. I watched it and I still can’t tell you exactly how the shift between hate and madness looked. It was just…indescribable and terrifying.

He abandoned the waster and leapt on me, fists flying as he sat all of his heavier bulk on my rib cage. I remember lifting my arms to protect my face, still trying to follow Cullen’s rule against attacking in anger but it started to get to where I couldn’t breathe or feel my legs. William was yelling, the instructor was yelling, and I was getting scared and angry.

I don’t know exactly how long that went on but I do remember when it ended. Magic roiled wildly within me, building and building until it exploded outward. Then I could breathe again.

And William was dead.

I heard later what happened as the instructor tried to pull the older boy off of me. He said William was there one minute, raining down blows, and the next he was in the air. Apparently he flew twenty feet before he came down on the back of his neck and snapped it clean through. He was dead instantly.

I tried to heal him though, I remember that. Through the tears of horror and the pain, I remember trying everything Siegfried had taught me. I may have hated him then but I never wanted him dead.

Cullen refused to let any charges be filed against me like William’s father wanted after he heard what happened. I got a scolding from him and Mother for what I said and punished by being told I couldn’t take a step out of the Gallows for a month. Some thought it was too soft a punishment. Uncle said though that anyone that looked me in the eyes after that knew I’d never see that scene repeat.

I’ve never forgotten that day, that moment when I spoke without thinking and killed a boy. Sometimes the look on William’s face as he was thrown upwards into the foreign air still haunts me in that place halfway between waking and the Fade. I never remember it in waking but it’s always there, lurking in the dark.