Sometimes, when it is late at night and Merrill is alone with the narrow confines of her new home, she contemplates the mirror.
It is still a secret thing, this mirror, so far as the alienage elves and Kirkwall's human populace are concerned. If her own people cannot understand, she doubts that outsiders will. Even though they have been kind to her so far. Well, mostly kind. Some of the time.
Hawke and Varric are very nice, at least. Oh, and Isabella. Of course. The others… well… some people just aren't very inclined to get along with one another.
There are some times when she stares at the glass, and blinks, and then the sun is up, and the rats have gotten into her closet-pantry again, and Hawke is knocking on the door to see if she wants to go and help with this or that. Those moments unnerve her a little bit. She tries not to think about them.
Instead, she distracts herself, and does things like wondering what exactly Hawke's job is. She's fairly certain that Varric is a storyteller, and Isabella is a pirate, and knows that Anders is a healer, and Fenris has fashioned a profession out of being 'not a slave', insofar as that's possible, and Aveline, of course, is a guard, but Hawke… among the Dalish, Hawke would have been a hunter. Because Dalish hunters do much more than just hunt things.
But the alienage elves and the city humans only have the sorts of hunters who, well, hunt things, and Hawke completely skips over the 'hunting' part of the job anyway. Unless bandits and dragons count as quarry. And then there are the things which Hawke does that Merrill has no idea how to classify. Like the expeditions and what Isabella calls 'babysitting' and what Merrill thinks of as being almost like a Keeper, only much less formal about it, and all of the talking to people. For someone who is really good at killing things, Hawke spends quite a lot of time talking to them as well. Most of the hunters Merrill has known have been quiet people.
Mahariel was always quiet. Quieter than Tamlen, who was, come to think of it, actually rather chatty by hunters' standards.
But Hawke and Varric and Isabella, they talk and laugh and make light (and sometimes say really very lewd things, which Merrill appreciates) and all the while she could swear that there are a million spiders working behind their eyes, weaving these complex plans that Merrill can only half see. Not that there are actual spiders in their brains. She had tried explaining the concept to Varric, once, and he had asked her not to try again. In a very nice way.
The glass in front of her always seems cloudy, and especially dark at nighttime. It doesn't catch the candlelight. Instead it just sits there, empty but also impenetrable, and she wishes with all of the hard frustration that sits in the back of her mind that it would do something. She thinks of how little she even knows about what it is supposed to do, how it would work if it were working properly. All the answers about her people's old magic which it might hide.
That is when she sees the reflection.
It takes her aback for a moment, because she has never seen a reflection in the mirror. Not even her own. She blinks, and stares, and for one second thinks that that is what she's seen – her own reflection. The figure in the mirror is dark-haired and female. But that's where the similarities end, Merrill soon realizes. The shape is indistinct and hard to see. But the woman is standing, not sitting cross-legged on the floor, and her clothes are dark red and black.
Merrill inches closer, her mouth falling open into a soft 'oh' as she tentatively reaches one hand forward. It has never done this before. It has never actually shown her anything.
The tiny figure in the distorted reflection turns, shadows disguising half of her shape. Golden eyes flash.
Merrill blinks, and then it is gone.
She stares at the mirror until the sun is sitting well into the sky, trying everything she can think of to get it to work again. She places a few more shattered pieces into the frame, resuming her careful work to undo the damage that was done to it, but they feel cold and heavy in her hands, and there is no change. The mirror stays just the same. Inscrutable. Uncooperative. Cloudy and blank and in a fit of frustration Merrill stomps out of the tiny room, slumps down at her table, and presses the palms of her hands against her eyes.
She starts when the door swings open. Heavy footsteps cross the threshold, and Merrill thinks to herself Hawke's forgotten to knock again, which is funny, because she was only introduced to the concept of knocking a few months ago and now everyone she knows seems to ignore it anyway.
Hastily, she drops her hands from her face, and tries to adopt a posture which implies that she has not just spent all night staring into a magical mirror and trying not to cut herself on its broken pieces. Hawke's footsteps halt and hesitate.
"Merrill?"
She looks up and smiles, brushing a stray lock of hair into place.
"I swear, you'd never know I just cleaned the floor," she replies immediately, glancing about the grimy floorboards and the veritable forests of dust in the square corners. Hawke obligingly follows her gaze, and shrugs, but takes the bait and mercifully doesn't ask if she's alright.
There are some mercenaries which have been giving the local merchants trouble. Hawke is bored with being newly wealthy now, and wants a distraction. Merrill thinks that a distraction would suit her, too, but she declines to go along. Instead she waits until she's alone again, and then hurries back into the other room. She spends the rest of the day fitting pieces back into the mirror.
And the next.
And the next.
But it doesn't matter what she does – she never sees the strange reflection of the golden-eyed woman in the clouded glass again.