Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls.

From these emerald waters doth life begin anew.

Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you.

In my arms lies Eternity

Andraste 14:11

The dilapidated building had seen its better days a long time ago. Out on top of the rolling hills and cliffs surrounding Lake Calenhad, the once-proud three-story structure held a commanding view of not only the lake, but also the sleepy town surrounding Redcliffe castle. The Templar standing just outside the ruined house took no notice of the scenic view. He was not here on tour. He was here to exterminate.

With dual swords drawn, the plate and leather clad Templar kicked in the rotting door and immediately unleashed a powerful smite that shook the rafters. Cries of dismay, anger and fear rose from the den and those inside scrambled to recover themselves after the startle of the sudden intrusion.

The Templar did not hesitate to lay open the neck of a man unfortunate enough to be close at hand. Blood sprayed across the front of his armor and slotted helmet, and the man fell to the ground in a gurgling heap.

Immediately the attack of several mages assaulted the Templar, the den of maleficar awakening to their senses. Muttering a long stream of the Chant of Light to keep his mind free of the clawing fingers of the mind control, the Templar spun around with his swords leading and lay open the chest of another mage who died screaming.

Fire erupted from one of the mages, nearly searing the Templar in his armor and broiling him alive. A wash of anti-magic stopped the flames at their source, and another caster joined the bodies on the floor.

The last mage left standing screamed in denial, digging a short blade into the underside of her arm. The room flooded with the heavy weight of the blood magic and it became hard for the Templar to even move. The mage crowed in triumph, seizing the moment and struggled to control the Templar's very blood and boil the man alive with his own fluids.

"I shall not fear the legion, should they set themselves against me!" The Templar shouted, and power burst from him in a wave of energy. The mage clutched her wounded arm to her chest, screaming and fell to her knees, spitting curses the whole while. The Templar straightened, reciting verses under his breath and without pause thrust his left blade into the woman's chest, using his right to slice cleanly through her neck, her head rolling to the floor.

Turning toward the only other exit out of the room, the Templar continued further into the dilapidated building, holding his sword out in front of him, ready to leap to the attack at a second's notice.

The distinct tang of magic filled the air the further in he went until the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end with the unpleasant feeling. No one jumped out to try and test their luck against him, and eventually he found himself in a long hall with only one door. Beyond it he could hear the cries of a woman bordering on screams of torment and those of ecstasy, breaking the silence that had fallen in the hall.

Unsure what he was about to walk in on, the Templar pushed the door open quietly with caution. Instantly the magic suffusing the air shifted, becoming more intense, flowing from an indistinct unpleasant sensation to one that was heavy with the promises of carnal pleasure and streaked with the eddies of desire. The smell of sweat and sex followed the currents of the magic, tinged with the burn of ozone and the pungent scent of incense.

The origin of the screaming and moaning was in the center of the room on a bed that seemed to be the only furniture in the space. A woman writhed against the sheets, her body glistening with sweat and her arms stained red with a thick layer of recently dried blood. The insides of her thighs were slick with sweat and arousal, her neck and breasts colored with splotches of red from the mouth of an overzealous lover. Suddenly a spell rocketed out of seemingly nowhere, splashing against the Templar's armor and sent him staggering backwards. A man, obviously the woman's partner if his lack of clothes was any indicator, had come from behind the door and was applying a steady mental assault against the Templar.

He rallied his strength, the potent combination of the room's heady atmosphere and this new opponent's obvious skill going a long way toward collapsing the Templar's considerable mental resistance. He tried to take a step forward, only managing an uncoordinated jerk toward the mage and cursed, the word muffled by his helmet.

"I don't know how you got up here, dog." The mage hissed, striding forward toward the Templar and lifted his hands. "But this ends here."

"Maker, though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the light. I shall weather the storm. I shall endure. What you have created, no one can tear asunder." The hold on his body relaxed, the effects of the spell withering. A flash of pain rent through him the instant he forced the spell's release, and the Templar coughed out a mouthful of blood as he swung his sword up, splitting the mage's side from hip to opposite shoulder.

The mage's eyes went wide with pain; the sudden spurt of blood erupting from the wound coloring the front of the Templar's already splattered armor. He staggered backward a step but not near fast enough to avoid the second sword impaling him through the chest.

Gasping for air, the Templar ripped off his helmet as soon as the mage collapsed on the floor dead, revealing close-cropped sandy brown hair and a pair of warm brown eyes narrowed in pain. Blood flecked his lips and teeth, coating the inside of his face guard. Wrinkling his nose in disgust, the Templar bent over and coughed violently, a mouthful of blood joining the puddle on the floor and he spit once the fit was over, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. "Damn blood mages."

The immediate threat dealt with, he turned his gaze to the woman on the bed, who had seemingly watched the whole event with little interest. Her body was flushed, and she showed no embarrassment at being laid completely bare before him. Her gaze settled on his face, red lips full and curling into a seductive smile. The atmosphere in the room shifted subtly, and the Templar dropped his helmet from loose fingers, drawn in by the overwhelming pull of primal need.

"What is it you desire most, Templar?" She asked, her voice breathy, seductive, a tingle of sound against his ears laced with the potent temptation of desire and magic. The woman sat back on the bed, her eyelids heavy, a look on her face that he recognized as a mage who had taken too much lyrium and was riding the magical high. Her hands traced the curves of her body, over the swell of her rounded hips, the dip of her waist, the peak of her breasts, her lips curving into a lusty smile. Mentally, he staggered under the pressure of the intense mind magic she wielded, and the lapse was enough for her to glimpse into his thoughts. The tangible fog of magic in the air intensified, and like a haze clearing with the rise of the morning sun, the templar suddenly found himself faced with an illusion of a blonde and brown haired woman with piercing blue eyes that he knew more intimately than his own. Seeing her lying there, sprawled out before him, naked and inviting was almost more than his willpower could fight against.

With an unsteady breath and a shaking hand, he took a step toward the bed, raising his blade. The mage only smiled. When the cold tip of the sword touched the center of her chest, she shivered with delight and sat up into the point of the blade, holding the flat sides of the blade between her palms. "Are you sure this is the sword you want to pierce me with, Templar?" She asked, her hand sliding up the length of weapon, her fingers brushing over the hilt until she could lay her palm over the hand that guided the blade. The Templar felt the shiver of magic course through his arm and down his spine, pooling into a dull ache in his groin. The tip of his blade pressed against her flesh, drawing a drop of blood that ran from the vale of her breasts down to her navel.

"Yes!" She hissed, sitting up on her knees, a low moan sounding from the back of her throat and a second drop of blood joined the first. Her eyes shut in ecstasy, her hand gripping his gauntleted fist harder. "Do it, Templar." The mage whispered, arching her back so that her chest pressed more firmly against the point of the sword, her hands guiding the weapon toward her heart. "End me. Before the demon takes me."

The plea for help snapped what little sense there was back into his head, and suddenly the wash of magic beating at him became a secondary thing. Awareness returned, and the illusion of the woman that he had loved disappeared right before his eyes, replaced with the weary face of an entirely different woman in pain.

The Smite reverberated so strongly in the small confines of the room that the dust from the ceiling shook down on both of them. The woman cried out, falling back on the bed, her chest heaving as she struggled for breath and shivered violently. Sheathing his sword, the Templar closed his eyes and concentrated, his senses sharpening back to their razor's edge and the last of the haze of desire was washed away in a cleansing wave, the echoes of chanting and hauntingly beautiful music clinging to the aura of anti-magic.

Upon opening his eyes again, the room appeared as the rest of the building had: slightly dilapidated, ill kept, and dingy. For the first time, he noted that the headboard of the bed was outfitted with metal cuffs on chains, obviously well used if the state of the dried blood on their surface was any indication. With a rising sense of disgust, he saw correlating marks on the woman's wrists, evidence that she had been a prisoner not that long ago here. By the lack of any sort of permanent looking fixtures however, he concluded that this safe house was obviously not a permanent place of residence.

The woman on the bed writhed again, clutching at her hair and had broken out in a cold sweat, moaning out broken bits of words as she struggled against some inner torture. He wrapped the mage in the tattered blanket, the piece of cloth discolored with dried bodily fluids of every sort, but it would have to do for now. He had a feeling that most of it was probably hers anyway. There was precious little time to go hunting for something cleaner. The hardest part was about to begin.

With her arms tucked securely into the cocoon wrapped around her by her unlikely savior, the mage whimpered, turning her head from side to side and dampening the pillow instantly with her sweat. The Templar hovered nearby, waiting breathlessly. If her captors had given her too much lyrium, she would shortly die of the overdose in a bout of madness that could culminate in an intense magical flare, or turn her into an abomination. Either way, he was prepared for that outcome. If she were to survive the strong dose however, then the real trial would begin, and he would quickly have to decipher if the Desire she wielded held its power with demons, or other arcane knowledge. Only time would tell.

It was near an hour before the woman stopped tossing and turning, overcoming the initial rush of a near overdose of lyrium. The Templar did not relax any, however. He unwrapped the mage, convinced that at least now she would not be in danger of flinging herself off the bed in her pained state and wiped the sweat, blood and grime from her body. At first he thought that the undersides of her arms were a lost cause, but as he continued to clean the unconscious mage, he noticed that the long lines of blood was actually a single scar, one on the underside of each arm. Taking a long moment, the Templar looked over the singular deep wound that ran the length of the inside of her arm, from the bottom of her wrist to the crook of her arm. Printed over the center of the long gash were runic symbols that he vaguely recognized as being part of some kind of magical ritual, though what they meant, he did not know. At first he thought that they had just been dried on blood, but he quickly realized that the marks were not on her skin, but rather in it. Tattooed in her own blood most likely, in the same manner that the Dalish used on their faces.

After he'd had his fill of looking at the marks on the undersides of her arms, the stained blanket was discarded in a corner and forgotten, and a new one that was slightly cleaner was draped over the mage. Once that had been done, the Templar dragged the body of the most recently dead mage out into the hallway, pulled up a chair inside the door and waited quietly, resting his chin on the pommel of his sword and watched.

Near the whole night had elapsed when the mage finally woke from her stupor. At first she was unaware of her surroundings, simply staring at the ceiling without really seeing it in a daze. Eventually awareness came to her, and when she sat up to inspect the room only to find a fully armed Templar staring vigilantly at her, the mage squeaked and did her best to cover her nakedness.

"Who are you?" She asked in a sharp voice, clutching the sheet to her chest with her gaze riveted on the lone armor-clad man in the room. All traces of the earlier pull of desire were completely gone, replaced with fright and an impressive attempt bravado. "What do you want?"

He sat back in his chair and yawned, tilting his head slightly to the side. "You can call me Derik. What is your name?" He didn't bother pointing out that he'd already seen everything she had to hide. If the thin blanket made her feel more secure, then who was he to tell her to drop it?

She considered him for a long moment, tightening her grip on the blanket. "Neve." The mage finally confided after a while, shifting uncomfortably on the bed.

"Neve. Well, nice to actually meet you in your right state of mind." Derik said in an off-handed sort of way that only served to confuse the mage. She was small for a human, almost elf-like in build and statue. The mage wore her hair long in tangled waves of blonde, and huge doe-like hazel eyes stared at him from a heart-shaped face. If she weren't so frightened, dirty, and dangerous, she would have been quite beautiful. But her time in captivity had wreaked havoc on her body, evident in the hollowness of her cheeks and her overall thinness. The skin around her eyes were sunk in too, a result of too little sleep and too much lyrium. "What can you tell me about the Midnight Tang?"

Neve stiffened, her eyes going wide as if just realizing some vitally important detail. "T-this is… You're in… How?!"

Derik remained quiet and let Neve settle down from her outburst before continuing. "It is my duty to seek out maleficar and end them." He supplied in a low voice. "From what information my sources gathered about the Midnight Tang, they have confirmed that the Tang uses mages with demonic powers in order to fulfill assassination contracts."

Neve's eyes dropped to the bed. "That is correct." She whispered in a rough voice, letting her hands drop slightly, revealing the curve of her breasts. "My sister… I came looking for her."

"Your sister was part of the Tang?" Derik asked, folding his hands over the cross guard of his blade casually.

Neve nodded, her eyes venturing up to meet Derik's again. "Leona was her name. She… died during the war… on assignment. I came looking before I'd heard… they captured me first and then this…" She lifted one of her hands, showing the red marks around her wrist, evidence of her forced capture.

The name Leona rang a bell in his mind, but at the moment he couldn't place the reference. "You are a hedge mage then?"

Again she nodded. "My mother was Chasind, my father was Fereldan. We lived north west of Gwaren… until the Horde…" She didn't have to finish the sentence. Many had suddenly found themselves without a place to return to in the wake of the Blight's destruction. Even three years after the slaying of the Archdemon, the country had not fully pulled itself back together. Too much had happened in too little a space of time for Ferelden to have recovered. Taking a small breath, Neve continued. "I was captured not long ago. They knew I was a mage, and so they…" With her wrist turned up to reveal the long scar overlaid with blood tattoos, she needed to say no more.

"Why?" Derik asked with an almost impulsiveness to his tone. "Why would they capture you and turn you into a blood mage?"

She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. "Not just a blood mage. An abomination." Her whole body shuddered in revulsion, a pair of tears escaping her eyes and she hastily brushed them away with her fingers. "They didn't tell me much. All I remember is being held down while they cut the inside of my arms…" A flash of remembered pain crossed her face briefly. "But after that… The man who was with me, where is he now?"

"Dead." The Templar replied and watched Neve's reaction carefully.

If it weren't such a grim declaration, she would have smiled with relief. As it was, she spat on the ground angrily instead. "Good riddance. I don't know how he was doing it, but he was in my head and I could just… See things. I don't really know how to explain it. It was like I just knew and now…" Her eyes trailed toward the door, her tone dropping off distantly. "I know how to call upon desire. I don't know how I know, but I just do. Does that make any sense?"

Derik sat back in his chair slightly, eyeing Neve and contemplating her situation. "Not to me, it doesn't, but perhaps to another mage it would. I'll need to do something about you."

"Something?" Neve gulped, her eyes watering again, going wide with fear. "What is to become of me now?"

Derik leaned forward slightly in his chair. "You have two choices." He said in a calm voice. "I can bring you to the Circle of Magi." He noted immediately that she recoiled even from the mention of the place, not unexpected given that she had grown up free of the Chantry. "They will want to know what happened to you, and when they find out that you have been in a demonic ritual, they will probably enact the Rite of Tranquility upon you."

Her eyes went wide, panicked tears welling up and she hugged herself tightly. "I don't want that! Please…"

"The second option…" He continued in that same calm voice, "Is to put you in the hands of mages outside the Circle. I can't leave you to your own devices, especially since you are a blood mage now, willingly or otherwise. They'll keep an eye on you and make sure that you aren't a danger. To yourself, or anyone else."

The tears spilled over and she clutched her hands to her mouth, a loud sob leaving her. "B-but I can have my freedom back eventually, right? I didn't want any of this… I just wanted to find my sister-" A choked sob cut off whatever else she was going to say and Neve doubled over herself with trying to hold back the overflow of emotion.

Derik stood and moved to the side of the bed. Neve looked up at him with her huge eyes reddened by her tears and leaned away from him. With an infinite amount of compassion he put his hands on her shoulder and knelt so that they were at eye level. "Be strong, and you will get through this trial." He said gently, and the mage seemed to cling to his words like a life rope. "What has been done to you cannot be undone, it can only be dealt with. You have your two options."

She nodded, closing her eyes tightly and touched one of his hands. "I'll go with the mages. I can't… stand the thought of being Tranquil." Her whole body shivered and she seemed to withdraw into herself even more.

Derik drew his hands away and stood. "Then get some rest. I'll find something for you to wear, and in the morning we'll head to town and I'll get you set up with the Mages' Collective."

"The Mages' Collective?" Neve repeated in a timid voice.

"The free mages I will be leaving you with." Derik replied calmly. "It is a society of mages outside of the Circle's influence. Most members don't know each other. They can't afford to in the event that one is caught and interrogated for information. I know someone that will take you in and keep you safe for a while."

She nodded, simply processing the information and unable to say anything contrary to Derik's statement. "Thank you." For the first time she smiled, a small timid expression, but one of such sincerity that Derik couldn't help but to have some real hope for this girl's future.

Aaah, well, here we are, back in the Heirs of Honor universe. For those of you who haven't read the story, it is not strictly necessary, but is recommended to read before this story. Derik is a minor character from Heirs of Honor, and now a main character of Duty and Desire. His character and personality provided me an opportunity to explore the duality of not only mages, but also the Collective, so I'll be doing that a bit with some adventure along the way. This is a more adult story, hence the M rating. Violence, strong language, sexual situations, etc. will be happening throughout, so be prepared! I hope that my returning readers enjoy this little continuation (it's not exactly a sequel) and that you new guys will like what I have to write.

Updating schedule will be sort of just happen when it happens. I write this on a shuttle ride to and from college on my iPod, so I do work on it for most of the week, but only in half hour stretches. The pacing of this story is going to be snappy, especially in the beginning. I don't plan for this to be an epic novel like Heirs of Honor was, but the story might surprise me. Anyway, thanks for reading this far! See you next update!