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Hawke knows the Amell colors are maroon and silver.
Properly sanguine and argent, in the Orlesian. The sanguine represents victory, military might, strength. It approaches royalty without presuming to usurp it; implies age and wealth without crowning itself the abhorred title of king.
The argent is supposed to represent valor, mercy, and purity, reflecting the shining steel sword of Andraste and the cleansing Blade of Mercy carried by Templars. To Tzipporah it, too, represents wealth, the gilded halls of Orlais and Tevinter where her ancestors came from before Kirkwall. She tries to imagine it’s compassion or generosity instead; the endless silver coins she gives as alms, or the silver vessels used to brew healing draughts.
She knows the Amell colors are maroon and silver, but they are not the colors she wears.
Mother died a scant two months before Aveline comes to the estate ordering Hawke to fix a problem of the guard’s own making. By Merrill’s reckoning - by elvhen custom - she’s just barely out of the second stage of mourning, having recently finished the forty days when she is not permitted to lift weapons. By Fereldan reckoning she is still in mourning, and will be for another ten months.
It’s black she wears when she meets the Arishok for the last time. Andrastian black and grey, the color of ashes, with red — the color of blood, an elf’s mourning — tucked where she can. She tries to get to the estate to get her armor, but the civilians and mages — still civilians, they didn’t choose to be soldiers — are more important, and it’s black and grey and red she’s wearing when she accepts a duel.
It is the colors of ash and blood she is wearing when she steps down the stairs in the Keep, hand pressed to her stomach against a wound she doesn’t think she’s going to survive. When Anders lays down the broken bone he was setting to rush towards her, calling for bandages and elfroot gin, when Merrill, uncaring for the presence of Templars and nobility, whispers for the blood soaking her stomach to clot, barely visible against her black jacket. When Meredith tells her she has done a great service to Kirkwall.
She is still wearing the ashes and blood when she forces herself to the Alienage against Anders’ advice to make sure the problem that started this is solved quietly. There is a portrait painted, in colors of ash and blood, to be hung in the Viscount’s Keep in her honor, and she sits for it with deep resentment and more than one kind of pain.
When the nobility can no longer be put off and she makes her way to Parliament Hall, in the Southeastern wing of the Viscount’s Keep, she does so in black and grey and red. Most Marchers would expect her to wear her house colors as she listens to Seneschal Bran declare her a full citizen of Kirkwall, able to hold titles and bear witness as if she were a pure human born legitimately within the city walls to her lady mother. But Hawke is not a Marcher, which is indeed what makes such a ceremony necessary before the nobility can bestow her the titles Lady Amell and Champion of Kirkwall, Living Guardian of the State.
Lord Durand insists on throwing a banquet in her honor, ostensibly thanking the Champion for her service and celebrating her elevation to the nobility. Hawke knows it is as much a thanks for finding his sister Ninette’s murderer at long last, and the closest a Marcher noble can come to acknowledging her right to mourn her own loss. She wears her ashes and blood and burns with loathing for the Orlesian duke, someone’s third cousin, who tries to invite her to a hunt.
Lady Harimann presents her with a gift: ceremonial armor, as befits the guardian of the state (some small repayment to Sebastian, the flashy part of her apology, alongside the money to repair roads and walls in Starkhaven, to fortify its people against floods; Hawke doesn’t like nobility, but she might like Flora). It is made of ash and blood, because that is what Kirkwall sees her in and that is what Kirkwall is made of; Iron and steel foundries and jet black stone and the blood of ten thousand slaves and elves and refugees. The buckles and trimmings are gold - or, in Orlesian - the color of the golden light of the Maker and the gilding that hides the Chantry’s heartless apathy.
It is said that the Emerald Knights were named for their armor that shone green in the sun. The color of life, of growing things.
Hawke wears her title in the colors of death and she wonders if it’s an omen.
