It was like the past ten years had never happened, except in the lines on Anders' face and the memories he and the Warden Commander shared. A weight had been lifted, a darkness made light.

Nearly.

Mahariel watched Anders sleep soundly at night while she lie awake to keep out the Calling as best as she could. The voices, the song, all of it was louder now, but - and she hated to ascribe any such thing to the corruption in her veins - she remembered it being more beautiful than this. Something was warped and off-key in her mind and she couldn't explain it.

When Anders was otherwise occupied, she would dig through the library for anything she could find about the Wardens' history; Vigil's Keep was not Weisshaupt, to be sure, but the Keep was old and its history was well-documented.

And she found nothing. Nothing that she could find gave her any more insight to what she was starting to accept was her own demise. There was no more sense denying it. Her hair was not coming out in clumps, but it came out every time she brushed it. She didn't have black patches on her skin, but the veins in her neck, her chest, her arms, her face were darkening into a thick, purple map.

If Anders noticed, he didn't mention it; she could imagine he didn't want to upset her. He was now free of the corruption that was overtaking her. She could see that he would just want to live out the rest of his life in peace with her as long as they could, after all they had been through.

But she couldn't.

Not with him, and not with Fenris, not after all she had seen and done. There was a detachment between Mahariel and her fellow elf, a rift, a breach, and neither of them sought out the other to repair it. And while Anders strove in his own noninvasive way to craft the life he wanted to have had with her the first time two of them had cohabitated at Vigil's Keep, Mahariel found a small voice in the back of her head insisting that it simply was too late.

Mahariel knew what the Warden tradition asked of her: to go out in a blaze of glory, fighting darkspawn in the Deep Roads to the last. Frankly, she had had enough of that to last a lifetime, and she wasn't sure how much lifetime she even had left to last. But she couldn't stay here and rot.

There was a place reaching out to her in her mind. Somewhere west. Mahariel had covered the length and breadth of Ferelden; she knew it like she knew an old friend. But The Calling was sending her into the arms of a stranger. Something in her wanted to resist, and she was almost certain it was her reason, but too much of her, the corrupted parts, and the parts that were tired of fighting, wanted to answer it. She wanted to see what was out there.

Late one night when Anders was sleeping soundly and she was not sleeping - she was not sleeping anymore - she found a map, and she decided. She would go to Orlais, past Val Royeaux, and she would keep going. She would not go down to the Deep Roads; and anyway, her mind was not calling her there. No, she would go west, and she would seek the thing that summoned her. She would do what she had done more than ten years ago, when faced for the first time with her own mortality: she would stare it down, and as the corruption in her veins sang her a song, she would rush to meet it.

THE END

Author's note: Well, kids, that's it. The new story, Inquisition, Indiana, will be going up on a regular basis from now on, but that's all for Vigilant. And II is finished. The ending is already written, so now it's just a matter of editing. And figuring out what to write after that.

Anyway, thanks for all your support through this whole thing; the views and the favorites and the reviews (I'm looking at you, starryskyondragon'sback) really helped keep me going, and convinced me that this was something worth writing. Up until this month, it was the longest thing I had ever written and I wasn't sure that I could keep the thread. So thanks again. See you on the flip side.