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There’s a very good reason I hate going into the Fade after joining with Justice. A reason I won’t ever tell the others. No matter what kind of torture the elf may threaten me with, or jibe Hawke, Varric or Isabela may throw my way.
They don’t know what I see when I am in that realm. They don’t know the horror I see my friend becoming in front of me when I dream. I never want to see that come to pass. I never want to see him as he is in my mind’s eye.
The hulking form reminds me of Rage Demons summoned from the ground as I fight. Instead of crackling fire, molten hate made manifest, he is the etheral blue that splits my skin in fine, jagged lines when I can’t control him anymore. His claws are white, not dark and poisonous as a Rage Demon’s.
He is eternal, unforgiving… but most of all he is Vengeance, no friend of mine, not the way I knew him before. I cannot fathom how my hate, my rage, my misguided passion for the Cause turned him into that … thing.
The others all think when I wake screaming it’s from nightmares of Darkspawn, High Dragons, Old Gods and Tranquility. No, I would prefer those things to the visage that haunts me. The guilt I can feel on my face, tangible in the dream world as it can never be in my waking hours.
He is terrible, cruel, hard, righteous… he is Vengeance and he never was my friend. I wake screaming because I realize that I have killed Justice, whatever he was when I took him into myself that night in the Keep and for the time afterward.
I took a good spirit and corrupted him, twisted him into the demon I now know only as Vengeance. I hope that when the time comes one of this rag tag crew that Hawke holds together … somehow will do what is right, what is needed because I cannot do the right thing either from cowardice or his control over me.
I cannot enter the Fade because I fear that which I have become, that which I am until I die.