I've been suffering from a bout of writer's block while writing Rise of the Wardens, so I decided to take out my frustrations on a pre-Origins story for Tylis Amell. Right now I'm not sure how long it will take me to finish this, or how quickly I'll update. But we shall see won't we?
Jace stood at the door keeping a close watch for any returning templars, while Tylis tried unsuccessfully to work his way around the templar armor's enchantments. The two apprentices, as well as a number of tranquil and other apprentices had been tasked with cleaning the fourth floor of Kinloch Hold, when they discovered one of the templars had gone on vacation, and left his armor on the armor stand in his room, and had carelessly left the door open. The temptation had been too great, and the fledgling mages had felt obligated to enter and think up a prank of some sort to play on the templar for whenever he returned.
"Come-on!" Jace hissed from where he stood by the door. "I thought primal magic was your thing!"
"It is…" Tylis said, "But this armor is made to resist magic! I doubt even one of the senior enchanters could find a way around it very easily."
"Well if you don't hurry up and find a way, we're either going to have leave it as it is, or get caught by one of the tranquil or a templar!"
Tylis rolled his eyes and said as loudly as he dared, "Then I suggest you leave me alone, and let me concentrate!" Jace obliged, although Tylis could still hear the elf grumbling under his breath. A minute later, Tylis said in excitement, "I think I'm almost there! I can feel the spell starting to take hold!" Another few seconds and the suit of armor completely frosted over, and Tylis jumped backwards, grinning from ear to ear. "Yep! That's it!" He said enthusiastically.
Jace looked back into the room just as the frost disappeared and the armor returned to its normal appearance. "Good! Now let's get out of here!... Hey, how long is that spell going to last?"
"Three days." Tylis answered as he stepped back into the hallway and the two friends picked up their buckets of soapy water and coarse brushes again. "Right now it's lying dormant, but as soon as the templar returns and puts the armor back on, it will activate, and he'll have ice cold armor for a whole three days!"
Jace grinned. "That's why I like you shem… with the proper encouragement you can be rather devious! I like that… reminds me of me!"
"Again with the shem thing?" Tylis sighed.
"Sorry." Jace shrugged, "Old habits die hard."
"Really? Because I think you do it on purpose."
Jace grinned again, "Maybe I do."
Tylis Amell and Jace Surana. Two mages as different from each other as fire and water. On one hand, Tylis was a human, and the son of a mage as well. His mother had been a Circle Mage, or so he'd been told, and he'd been taken away from her almost as soon as he'd been born and raised in the chantry by tranquil and chantry sisters. Tylis had a reputation around the tower as something of an altar-boy. He fully committed himself to his studies, rose on time, went to bed on time, completed every research project and paper to the best of his abilities, and never back-talked his superiors, be they enchanter or templar. His primary mentor, an elven woman named Leorah, had quickly noted that while his skills in creation and spirit were lacking to put it mildly, he was quite skilled in the primal school and was a near prodigy at entropy.
Enter Jace Surana… Jace was an elf, taken, or kidnapped as he put it, from the Denerim Alienage. As far as anyone knew, he'd been the first person in his family to have been born with magic, although it didn't manifest itself until he was fourteen years old. From how Jace told the story, he and his three friends and 'partners in crime', Shianni, Soris, and their cousin Kylae had been out to earn some easy coin, and one of the city guards had taken an interest in them and had grabbed Shianni. For the first time ever, Jace had felt arcane energy surging through himself, and released it in a telekinetic blast that left Shianni on her feet, and blasted the guard back a good ten paces. After that, it hadn't taken long for the templars to show up and drag him off to Kinloch Hold, they'd kept saying it was for his own good, and Jace had never believed them.
Jace was a trouble maker right from his first day at the tower. He'd been there for all of three hours before trying to escape through the basement and swim across the lake. In the year since then however, his escape attempts had grown more and more infrequent until he stopped trying altogether, and resorted to playing harmless but annoying pranks on both mages and templars. Unlike Tylis, Jace had miniscule skill in primal, and his talent at entropy was completely non-existent, however he showed himself a natural at both creation and spirit magic. Jace's mentor, one Senior Enchanter Wynne, believed that if the brash young mage ever applied himself, then he could grow to become one of the more gifted mages in the entire Circle of Magi.
How the two young apprentices had ever become such good friends was something no one, not even they themselves, could ever figure out, and their friendship was widely disapproved of, by both the older more experienced mages, and the templars, however there was nothing either of them could do about it. Tylis usually proved to be at worst, a reluctant mischief maker, and on occasion he managed to talk Jace out of one devious plot or another. While Jace would leap at the chance to break any rule, and would constantly try to pull Tylis away from his studies to assist, sometimes he even succeeded.
The rattle of armor, and clicking of boots against the stone floor of the tower caught both of their attention, and the apprentices looked up to see Knight-Commander Greagoir himself, leading a human girl, several other templars, and First Enchanter Irving through the hallway and towards Greagoir's office. At first Tylis and Jace thought the girl was a mage who had committed some 'atrocity', and was about to be punished, but then they both realized that they had never seen this particular girl before, and she was wearing common clothing rather than robes, meaning that she was almost certainly a newly discovered mage. Strangely, she looked a bit old to be a new mage, Tylis guessed her to be seventeen years old, two years older than both he and Jace.
Greagoir stopped walking as he saw the two apprentices standing in the middle of the hallway, looking on with a little too much surprise. "What are the two of you doing up here?" Greagoir demanded, "Apprentices aren't allowed up here!"
Jace looked down at the bucket and brush he held in his hands, then looked back at Greagoir and said, "Well… we're both holding a mop bucket and a brush, so either we're—"
Tylis saw where Jace was going with this and sharply jabbed an elbow into his friend. "Cleaning duty Ser." Tylis said quickly, hoping that the senior templar would ignore Jace's comment. "Ser Hadley allowed some of us to go on cleaning duty along with the tranquil."
Greagoir groaned. "I'll have to have a talk with my second in command…" He said under his breath as he rolled his eyes, then looked back at the two mages. "You may go back to your studies now. The tranquil will finish here."
"Yes Ser, thank you Ser." Tylis said as he set his bucket and brush against a wall, then looked back to find to his horror that Jace was still standing exactly as he'd been and was staring defiantly at Greagoir. Tylis grabbed his friend by the arm and forcible pulled him along. When they were out of earshot, Tylis fumed, "What in the Fade is wrong with you? We just enchanted one of Greagoir's knights armor, and the way you were carrying on back there you were gonna get us both into a full-on interrogation!"
"Get off me!" Jace said and slapped Tylis' hand, he was silent after that until they got back to the first floor of the tower, then Jace looked to be sure there weren't any templars lurking around and said, "I just hate the way they always have to lord their authority over us! I mean… I never hurt any of them with my magic, and neither have you! I've never heard of a mage using their magic to hurt anyone!" Jace growled, before saying, "To borrow an expression from Shianni… 'Andraste's ass', I want to go home!"
"Jace… You're not thinking of trying to run away again are you?"
"Damn right I am!"
Tylis looked around for templars again, or any other prying ears, and then pushed Jace into the dormitory that they shared with some twenty other apprentices. None of which were present at the time. "Okay, seriously!" Tylis said, a little bit louder now. "What in the Fade is wrong with you?! If you would just learn to play by the rules and stick to your studies, then you'd probably see that it's really not half-bad here!"
"For you maybe!" Jace came back instantly. "You never knew what home or family was! I do, and I miss it! I hate this place, Tylis! I hate it so much! We have no freedoms here, even in the alienage I could at least go where I wanted and didn't have to put up with the amount of completely meaningless rules they have here… I mean we even have assigned times for lights out, and wake-up call, and that's just utterly ridiculous! And ever since Anders last little escape effort trying to swim across the sodding lake, we can't even go outside." Jace threw up his hands in anger. "I've put up with this place as long as I can, Tylis!"
"And what are you going to do?" Tylis demanded, "How do you plan to escape? Because it's not going to work! And lest you forget, even if you do make it outside the tower and across the lake, they still have your phylactery! They'll hunt you down and bring you back like they always do, and if you put up a fight, or if the templars are in a bad mood, they'll just kill you! You know how some of them are… Ser Doric, Ser Brethor… Ser 'Righteous Fury' Galvan. They enjoy tormenting and hurting us. Righteous Fury even killed an apprentice before you got here because he claimed that he was casting blood magic. So how do you plan to get around them?"
Jace scowled. "I'll think of a way." He hissed and stormed away.
"Hey, where are you going?" Tylis called after him.
"To go clean out the repository!" Jace yelled back, meaning that he was going to the repository to take a nap.
Tylis sighed and threw up his hands in defeat, then he made his way back to his own bunk and opened his foot locker. He took out a book he'd managed to acquire from a merchant who'd stopped at the tower some time ago. The book explored the theory that Andraste was not a prophet, and was in fact a very powerful mage. Tylis didn't believe the theory, but it did make for a good read, and really made him stop and think. Tylis knew that he should have sought out Leorah and resumed his lessons, but he'd been given leave from his studies for the day to clean the tower, and Greagoir had already told him to stop cleaning, so Tylis felt that that entitled him to take the day off.
