flutiebear:

They say you can never go home again, but that means something different when you’ve no home to return to; or when home itself is an obsolescence, a luxury reserved for the living. The Warden has died so many times and on so many battlefields that each death bleeds into the next, until the ends become a blur of color, and duty, and faith everlasting.

Each death, however, precedes a rebirth, and the Warden is a phoenix rising from snow, or rock, or mud—which to a Fereldan is just as good, if not better, than ash. 

Ostagar, though, is different. Ostagar was the site of the first death—and the first rebirth, if you’re a sentimentalist—and to the Warden, that makes it as close a place as any to home. Fitting then, that on the eve of this, the final death, the underground journey from which there is no return, the Warden turns homeward bound one last time, to the beginning of it all.

A sentimentalist might call it coming full circle, or tying up loose ends. But the Warden is not a sentimentalist.

“Come on, boy,” says the Warden, clapping cold and gnarled hands to the faithful hound trailing behind. 

The mabari comes when called, for although he is old, he still has memory; and he knows that this is his home too, though for different reasons. For humans aren’t the only ones who can be saved, or be reborn, or devote their lives to another, and nor are dogs aren’t the only ones who howl wordlessly at the moon, or comfort each other in the long, wintry dark. 

And when the old man bounds toward his master, his pawprints make messy sunbursts in the snow.

Goddammit, flutie, that LAST LINE.