The first time Gail ever took something he did not rightfully own, he was only ten years old. It was a cold night in Lothering, his mother having just succumbed to the fever, and he had eaten nothing for days. Try as he may, the boy was not able to resist. The merchant was not looking and that apple's red sheen still haunted his thoughts to this day. The merchant might have been distracted, but the town's guards were not. They caught the young thief and he publicly received ten lashes for his crime.

Though he could read and write, not to mention that he possessed a quite uncommon aptitude for mathematics and drawing, the boy spent the next three years begging and looking for work, unable to find any for his public punishment remained quite vivid in the memories of the town residents. Ironically, most recalled the event with bitterness, as he was quite possibly the youngest thief to ever be publically punished in such a way.

This event did not teach him honesty, however; it taught him never to get caught.

True, he never stole anything that would raise alarm; a misplaced pendant, a pouch slightly lighter than it had been earlier. He would only steal from traveling merchant as well, only to sell the trinkets to the next caravan that would come through and, sometimes, snip them back again.

Before he turned twenty, the thief had enough gold to purchase a small but cozy house on the outskirt of town. If anyone questioned how he had earned enough money to acquire it, he simply answered with half-truths, explaining that he had become a skilled haggler, selling forgotten items found in the mud or on the Imperial highway, which eventually turned him into an actual merchant. To people who doubted his claims, he would pretend to admit a dirty secret; that bandits sometimes used him as an intermediary to sell their plunder. An outright lie, possibly uglier than the truth, but it kept people from poking around too much.

He was happy. For years, the young man lived a solitary life amidst strangers who looked down upon him, he never once cared for what these folks might think of him, but he never blamed them for his misfortune either. He loved being a thief; those fat merchants never missed what he took, but they would have him flogged should they ever catch him red handed, which added excitement to his job. Like a predator, he would size up his mark, pick the best angle of approach, wait for a moment of weakness, of isolation, and be in and out before anyone was the wiser.

Today, however, is different.

Templars, six of them, had walked in from the north gate during the night, followed by a sturdy cart that pulled a coffin-sized safe. Greed is an ugly thing, but Gail Cervantes was, after all, a thief, and so, leaning against the tavern's rotten walls, happily chewing on a ruby-red apple, he observed the cart for all morning.

The Templars paid no attention to him, for he, unlike more capable thieves, did not dress in leather and dark clothes. On the contrary, he wore a light grey tunic, the likes of which were sold by dozens at the market, and brown linen trousers held by a leather belt with a polished iron buckle which, alone, was worth more than all of the thief's clothes put together.

So he stood there, smiling at pretty lasses, nodding at grim fellows and taking bites out of his apple. From against the wall, at this weak spot, he could hear travelers talking by the fire. Usually, he spied on merchants this way, learning what they carried and which of their possessions they kept close tabs on, but this time, he listened to Templars, men of war, speak of how they could better increase the safety of their cargo.

"Carrying Lyrium by cart is dangerous enough," said the elder, "but this is utter madness! If anyone finds out what we're carrying…"

A younger, yet far more commanding man cut him off, "Nobody will find out anything unless you run your mouth!" This one, whom Gail instantly nicknamed Lord, obviously ruled the others.

The youngest of them could have been a woman, judging from the voice, but may also have been a boy just past puberty, so Gail named him Cub. "Are you sure it's safe to leave the… Cargo outside?"

Lord scoffed, "Why, you'd rather bring it in your room?" Cub's answer was inaudible through the wood, but it made the leader laugh a long and honest belly-laugh, "Oh, the wonders of youth and idealism, how I miss those days… Hang onto that innocence while it last, lad, but do not let it get in the way of your duties."

"Yes, milord…"

"Now, then," went Elder, "Vilmar and Gregor are taking the first watch, Kenan and I will replace them at midnight, do you wish us to open the safe then? The air must be getting foul in there…"

Lord grumbled something, a sentence that took less than a minute, but might have contained crucial informations for the thief. Outside, Gail threw the apple's core aside and, from the large pouch at his side, pulled a roll of parchment and a stick of charcoal.

Elder laughed, but it was a dry, almost bitter laugh, "I dislike it as much as you do, but you told the lad yourself; we can't let our feelings get in the way of our duty."

In the top right corner of the parchment, Gail drew a box with wheels, with two stick figures standing in front of it, guarding the hastily drawn cart as surely as those two Templars guarded theirs.

After a moment of consideration , Lord spoke again, "Then do it, but before you send Vilmar and Gregor away, all four of you will keep watch, let no one near and take no longer than absolutely necessary."

Cervantes therefore added two more stick figures to his drawing. In the bottom right corner of the parchment, he drew a quick map of all the buildings he could see around the cart, judging their heights and the distances between each by comparing the length of their shadows to that of the tallest Templar. Though the charcoal lines were far from straight and the drawings crude at best, Gail quickly had in hand a very accurate map of Lothering's main street, with every fence and billboard included.

On either side of the cart were the tavern and the chapel, both guarded by Templars, so he marked each with an X. Thirty meters separated both buildings, with an arm of Drakon river running between the two. He then slowly drew a line between the two crossed out buildings, over and smiled to himself.

Yes… That would do.

Now with a way to reach the safe unseen, he set his mind on how to open it. Lockpicking is an art, one Gail had little practice with. Picking pockets and crawling around in the shadows were no challenge to him, but the technicalities of high-quality safes eluded him. He could steal a key from one of the Templars, but that would rouse suspicions, not to mention he could not see a keyhole from so far away. He would instead wait for them to open the safe, see how it all worked, and only then would he take one of their keys…

But after thinking about it some more, he decided against that plan. The Templars would surely leave in the morning and if he waited until after midnight to pick their pockets, there would be no crowd to hide him, only the darkness.

The trick would be to let them open the safe and then, somehow, keep it from locking itself again, and doing so in a way that would not alert anyone.

Only then did it dawn upon him that this venture might just be outside his expertise. The wealth contained within this safe were certainly worth the effort, but also were they far beyond anything he had ever taken. This theft would be noticed, this went beyond pickpocketing, beyond burglary… And that fact, more than any monetary gain, restored Gail's resolve. There comes a time in every man's life when he gets a choice; he can either become better, more than he used to be, or wallow in his petty existence, stagnating until time moves on without him.

Pushing himself off the wall, Cervantes picked up a sack of groceries from the floor, fruits, dried meat and ale, and walked straight ahead, crossing a few familiar faces whom he remembered only for their cruel words and accusations. He ignored the locals and they ignored him right back, not even bothering to move out of his way as he crossed the stone bridge. Now, thievery does not call for physical might and Gail would likely have lost an arm wrestling match with the weakest peasant out there, but he was nimble enough to slip through the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream.

He lacked the muscles of a farm worker, but also the belly of a merchant. Granted, too much ale and not enough exercise had made him as flat as a board, but he hardly cared about that, his appearance being the last thing on his mind, as evidenced by the patches of stubbles on his face and his dishevelled haircut. When he approached the cart, neither of the Templars perceived him as a threat, but they still asked him his business, as he just stood there, a few feet from them, smiling like an idiot.

"Ah, yes!" He spoke, clearing his throat, "I… Uh… I used to be… The Chantry helped me when I was in a bad spot…" He stopped there, looked at his bag, and when he looked up saw the Templars exchanging puzzled glances. "You men are stuck here, guarding a box…" He took a step forward and held up the provisions, "I figured you could use some food."

It was expensive stuff, stolen from a recently departed merchant from Redcliff. The ale in particular caught the warrior's attention and, gasping, he showed it to his companion. Neither saw the thief's hand dive into a thick leather sack hanging to the Templar's waist. Sure enough, he found the key in a tiny pouch sewn inside the bag. Even the Chantry's guardians were naïve enough to believe secret pockets to actually be an efficient way of warding off thieves.

"Is this what I think it is?" Spoke the now slightly lighter man, sceptical.

The other turned to Gail with a frown on his face. "Where in Andraste's name did you find Dwarven Ale in these parts?"

To which the thief shrugged, "Got a good deal… By that I mean the fool thinks I gave him a fair price for it."

They laughed at that, though the men decided not to drink as long as they were on watch. They took the food, however, and spent a few minutes trading jokes with Cervantes before he took his leave.

It might have cost him today's catch, but he got the key. Home is where he went next. There, he went straight for his poorly supplied cellar and picked an aged and battered clay pot, filled with nothing but spiders.

The pot, about knee high, broke into four fragments, like a blooming flower, when Gail threw it on the kitchen's floor. He took the smallest fragment, about as tall and wide as his head, and dropped it in a wooden bowl, where, using another bowl, he began grinding the clay, breaking it into finger-sized chunks at first, then into pebbles, until the bowl was chockfull of fine brown powder, packed so tight he could hold the bowl sideways and not a grain would fall.

He repeated the operation with another shard of clay and, once he had two bowls filled with rust-colored powder, the thief threw the best wood he had into the oven, feeding the fire far more than was necessary and using up a week's worth of firewood. Eventually, the heat grew almost unbearable, as though the air itself was sweating, and Cervantes decided it would do.

Throwing some copper cutlery in an iron cup, which he held by bracing a fire poker into its handle, he sat by the fire and, holding the cup in the heart of the furnace, watched copper grow white and bend like wax in the sun. Some of it fell out of the cup, but not much and he eventually propped the cup between two flat logs.

Back at the table, Gail pulled the Templar's steel key from his pocket and set it down in one of the bowls. The thing glistened in his home's dim light, pure white in the darkness. Even their keys are arrogant! Thought the thief, pushing hard until it no longer protruded from the clay. Using a kitchen knife, Cervantes carved a notch into the bowl's rim and, with a wooden spatula's handle, dug a trench into the clay, one which led from the key's round end to the indentation in the bowl. In that groove, he pressed the spatula's handle and covered it all with the second bowl, pushing the almost circular confection as hard as he could. The heat and intense focus made his hands slippery, his limbs heavy, but Cervanted focused on his task without complaining, for he had no one to complain to anyway.

After a moment, he took the bowls apart and removed the key. Both surfaces now had mirror images of the key at their centers, as well as that of the spatula, which he also removed. Carefully, the thief put the bowls back together. He looked around for some string, but found nothing of the sort and fell back on using his belt to hold the device together.

In the furnace, copper and iron now glowed white and yellow as fire embraced the cup and its content. When Gail pulled it out, the copper was actually boiling.

It sputtered and bubbled and he carefully bend the cup over the wooden bowls. Liquid metal leapt from its recipient and dripped along the wood searing, steaming and hissing on its way down until Gail corrected it's position and began pouring it straight down that notch into the bowl's side. The spill unfortunately had enough life left in it to bite into Gail's leather belt, which filled the room with a chemical stench that banded with the heat to make Cervantes' home an unbearable environment.

Most of the day had passed by then, leaving the thief with six hours until midnight. The copper key he pulled from his makeshift smelter still needed a lot of work, seams and irregularities plaguing its shaft. Armed with a file and the patience of a man used to careful planning, Cervantes worked for hours. Every time he thought the result satisfying, he would look back to the original key and spot over a dozen new imperfections in the copper one. So paranoid to get a perfect reproduction that, when he finally deemed his work finished, there was barely an hour left for him to put his plan in motion.

He rubbed his tunic in charcoal, smeared his face with the substance as well, grabbed his hunting bow and three arrows, and, finally, threw his whole bucket of charcoal in the fire, only to hastily shut the furnace's lid. This would create a lot of smoke. His house was on the south-east edge of town and the Chapel in the north-east part, close to the center. The summer wind would bring this thick fog above most of Lothering, masking moon and stars like storm clouds.

Gail moved silently, staying in the shadows and away from the road. There were plenty of back alleys in Lothering and he knew them all. The one he followed took him just across the street from the tavern. To his right, past the bridge, shone an unusual amount of torches. He would be spotted instantly if he tried to cross there, and swimming would make far too much noise. Instead, Cervantes crossed the street, bent over so low he might as well have been walking on all four, and running so fast he did need to use his hand on one occasion, lest he trip on his own feet.

He did not enter the building, no one must know he was even out of his home that night, but instead dragged himself up the wall, holding onto any protruding beam and window frames he could find.

His fingers kept slipping on the crude wood and his thin arms struggled to carry him up, but the thief's determination never faltered. All things considered, this whole adventure should have terrified him; a reasonable man, as he often thought himself to be, would have been far too scared of possible repercussions to try any such heist, but Gail, at that time, thought himself to be quite the master thief… Of course, the merchants that made up his usual preys were hardly on the level of Templars, but one who has never known defeat cannot sense its approach and Gail felt only confidence as he tugged hard on old Vernon's clothesline, hung over the street, between the man's house and the tavern.

Rolling it at his feet, Gail attached the rope to an arrow's shaft and nocked it into the tired string. The bow was old, made of second-rate wood and a stolen bow string that had probably seen more winters than its current owner. Across the river, the chapel's roof was no more than a dark silhouette against the horizon, but Gail knew a wooden beam ran along the building's spine, and so aimed five meters above the dark shape, pulled on the string until it caressed his cheek, and released the arrow.

It sailed rather lazily over the river, pulling the rope in its wake, and dug itself straight into the chapel's bell tower, more than twelve feet from where Cervantes had been aiming. Still, he yanked the cable twice, to test its reliability, and both times it became tense as a bowstring.

Instead of shooting an arrow at his feet, as was his first thought, Gail tied his end of the rope to the shaft of another arrow, then wrapped the cord around the tavern's chimney once and slid the arrow under the tense rope, propping it's head against the roof so that as long as the cord remained tense, the arrow would be upright.

With less than twenty minutes to midnight, Gail wrapped his legs around the rope, gripped it with both hands and, using only his arms, slid himself all the way across the river and over the cart. The smoke coming from his house did more than smother the stars, it tried to suffocate him as well whenever the wind died down. It burned his lungs, stung his eyes and tickled his nostrils, but Gail could not afford to cough, sneeze or even close his eyes, keeping them on the two Templars, still on watch before their safe.

It felt as though every muscle in the thief's body ached from holding back what would no doubt be a thundering fit of coughing and sneezing. His eyes swollen and drenched in tears, he blindly reached into his pocket and pulled out the Templar's shiny metal key. He would have thought up a better way of returning it discreetly, but at that exact moment, a shift in the wind threatened to shift his weight sideways, which would have been rather inconsequential, seeing as his legs were wrapped tight around the rope, but instinct took over and Gail dropped the key to hold himself with both hands. When he looked down, the thief saw that the key had bounced off the provision sack he'd brought the Templars and fallen in the mud, just behind the tall one's boot.

Neither noticed a thing and Cervantes crawled the rest of the way, to the Chapel, when he propped himself between the roof and bell tower, where he could clearly see his goal and anyone coming from the tavern.

The smoke no longer stung his eyes, but he still struggled to keep them open. It felt as though fire ants were crawling into his skull, devouring his ocular globes from within.

There were tears running down his face now, ruining his camouflage. He did not wipe them, as it would only make things worse.

Far off, past the fog that had furtively chewed the edge of his vision, Gail spotted movement, likely coming from the tavern, though he only obtained confirmation when two Templars crossed the stone bridge, chatting amongst themselves softly. One was tall and thin while the other was small and broad; Cub and Elder. Elder greeted the two men currently on guard by pounding his chest, gesture they returned. He told them about Lord's order to open the safe for a few minutes and both men went from utterly bored to fully ready for a fight. One even put a hand on his sword, though he stepped away to let Elder climb onto the cart and unlock the safe. The other would have done the same, had he not been busy searching for his own key, which he found, with immense relief, in the mud at his feet.

It took all of the thief's resolve to keep both eyes open and watch as Elder spinned the key two full rotations to the right, pushed, turned it left at a ninety degrees angle, pulled and turned it left once more until it reached its original position. Only then did the door glide outward on perfectly oiled hinges. Gail, an hairs breadth from clawing his own eyes out, did not see anything for the next minute, too busy blinking and scowling at the sky.

At last, the pain subsided and he could look down once more; the Templars were all glaring at the safe, as though they expected its content to try and kill them, though Gail could not see it with his swollen eyes. Elder told them to watch the perimeter as well and two of them, the short one and Cub, gladly turned away.

Nothing relevant happened, though Cervantes could feel the Templars' dark mood from his perch, even after they closed the safe and the previous guard had left, they remained insecure. This gave pause to the young thief.

What could they be carrying in there? He'd heard much about the horrors inherent to the Fade, and how a Templar's duty is to fight such monstrosities. Could the thing in that box be using him? Luring thieves into trying to free it? That would explain the Templars' paranoia… No, they would have warned people… Maker, they would surely not have brought such a thing in Lothering, or any population center, if it could manipulate the minds of others…

Now more than ever, Cervantes felt compelled to open that safe. Not just out of greed, however, but also out of curiosity.

This time, the smoke did not assail him as he crept like a rat along the wire.

Cub and Elder were discussing the Chant of Light, opposing Cub's literal view to Elder's more metaphorical approach to it. Neither heard a thing when a black figure detached itself from the night and landed softly atop the safe, where it crouched like a frog for a moment, observing the bickering men who backs were turned.

Gail's already strained muscles jerked like rusted hinges as he slowly lowered himself onto the wagon. He had a pair of arrows left, but never thought of using them to kill the Templars. Thievery is one thing, murder is another altogether and Cervantes had never harmed another individual in his life, the very thought of someone being hurt by his fault would certainly have appalled him…

In complete silence, he slid the copper key in the lock and repeated the same combination as he had seen Elder perform. The lock made the faintest sound as it freed the heavy iron door. Using his foot to hold some of the door's weight, Gail opened it with the utmost care. His heart pounded so hard in his ears he feared the Templars might hear it, but dared not look back.

Inside the coffin-shaped safe, he found the statue of an elf woman, a Dalish, judging from the tattoos. She a pale grey in the darkness, eyes closed, features twisted in a grimace of annoyance and hatred…

How was he to move this statue out without the Templars noticing? A dozen solutions floated in the thief's mind, but were all blown away as the woman opened her eyes with a sigh.

Not a statue. In the dark, Gail had mistaken the elf's pale complexion with actual stone… The Templars were carrying a live Dalish elf in an iron box. She gave him a suspicion glance, mouth opening to ask a question, but spotted the bickering Templars and understood the situation faster than Cervantes could.

The elf smiled and seemed to hold back a delighted squeal, but Gail only looked, stepping out of the way when the elf decided to brush past him. Her graceful steps were quiet as a butterfly's wings as she stepped onto the cart, giving Gail a quick kiss on his dirtied cheek before running off in the darkness, away from the guards and towards the river.

Still unable to comprehend what had just transpired, Gail climbed back onto the safe, where he jumped on the rope and crawled back towards the tavern.