I Was
I was in chains.
It happens to almost everyone eventually. I'm talking about that inevitable yet somehow always surprising moment when you realise you were lied to in childhood, in such a way that had the purveyor of this falsehood amended their misdeed before letting a moment pass; life as it is, right now would be unrecognisable. I had more than a moment to meditate on the dishonest words of my mother, and after her the templars and the Chantry and every other obedient worker bee. I had thirteen years.
The lie I speak of was one of omission; one that's resulted in years of inaction from countless mages. There's an awful lot they don't tell you about the Circle. The only comfort you can find in discovering these things is having something to blame your shoddy emotional development on.
I entered the Circle a child of only seven, with no shackles squeezing my little wrists bloodless and no sword pressed between the shoulder blades, urging me on. From my wide eyes, partway open mouth and fleet feet you would have thought that I had been brought not into a well-disguised prison but the home of an affluent, austere and perhaps even elderly relative – you know the kind of place I mean, yes? One with a measure of comfort and availability underscored by the humbling and restraining notion that you are but a visitor, required to exercise greater caution with the possessions surrounding you and people greeting you.
I was in the higher-paying end of Starkhaven, already far beyond the aspirations of unnumbered generations of men and women before me – well, geographically at least. I was in the one of a cluster of buildings fashioned out of what appeared to be ivory; sleek, stark white against a sky of any shade. The immaculately clean lapis lazuli floors within kindly removed every aesthetic flaw from my reflection. I was in a place of grandiosity, tradition and truest worth.
But I was in chains; of that there can be no more doubt. Not now. These chains were of a far more subtle and sure kind than creations of superficial steel. Though I must admit most ashamedly, that for the duration of my first day in the Starkhaven Circle, when first sweeping eager eyes over all the mages immortalised in stone, all the gold-wrought chandeliers casting their lustrous glow on me like the favourable light of the Maker, all the tapestried walls chronicling our people's heroic journey, the frightening and doubtful confusion brought on by my mother's goodbye (so rushed it was a blur even then) vanished. I saw and felt no chains on my individuality, my freedoms: my most basic rights. I believed the lie, and sealed away my will.
~o~0~o~
I was in love.
Annabel was her name. The gift she gave me was twofold and paradoxical: a love so fulfilling; a love that was such a remarkable vision of what life outside the Circle could be it proved enough to plant within me a desire to break free yet at the same time proved just satisfying enough to keep me in static complacency, whispering my rebellious ambitions to all I trusted in the dark of night and forgetting them when my mind and body could do anything noteworthy. I assume she felt the same; visualising life as a wife and mother, perhaps in the city's more humble outer limits with just the auburn leaves and the smell of cut grass and the steady, unpretentious income of farming or trading with the more rustic Marchers but glad enough she had me, and not willing to risk it.
Everything can stagnate given enough time. The initial thrill of my magical gift and the inquisitive side of me that it fed was soon quelled and remoulded into a uniform, pleasing, grey lump. Rather than a tool I could use to test the boundaries of my very being, magic was, under the Circle's restrictions: dull. Four Schools, only three of them studied. Four Schools defined, confined to the crusty dryness and ever-present limitation of our teachers. Creation, Entropy, Primal, Blood. All present, all correct. All potential weapons to be wielded against us, should any mage dare to dream and be struck down by our ubiquitous watchers. Annabel gave it life again, through prodigious talent and a thankfulness I could never muster. Life made some sense again; I had her. I'll grant you the privilege of imagining the details; crumb-covered smiling mouths hidden from the templars on Feastday, intimate encounters shared in every invisible place, days competitively testing each other's arcane knowledge and nights swaying back-and-forth to the tuneful Chant, her golden head in my unworthy shoulder, both of us giggling at the absurd audacity of our act: the act of daring to enjoy the holy song that by design exists to curse us, according to its most devoted singers.
~o~0~o~
I was in The Fade.
Why do we call it a place of dreams derogatively, as if a dream was some sort of overtly fanciful impossibility? Rather than mystify and confuse my senses, entering the Fade felt more like the removal of all things that could possibly stifle them. Every surface was sharper to the touch and to eye alike. Every smell was more pungent, every sound grated the ear. Even the air is almost discernible. My soul was in its place of conception, prematurely walking through what felt like its ultimate resting place. Oh, it's bizarre and more than a little surreal, I'll grant you that. But why denounce the dream as a vague shadow of reality when we, unlike our magically-lacking fellow man, can enter such a place bodily? In the Fade I experienced all the insanities and improbabilities of the dream, but I was alive. I felt the potential, and the omnipotence of the dream. I considered the dream as but a glimpse of all possible achievements.
That was my Harrowing. I returned to Annabel's hysterical relief. Her body shook as we embraced, and I smiled when asking why – "Didn't you spend the last insisting you 'knew' I could do it?" She responded by muffling my merriment with a kiss, and telling me she was no seer. She was proven right shortly afterwards. If Annabel had been a seer of any kind, we would have fled together before her Harrowing. It was not to be.
~o~0~o~
I was part of something special.
There were other friends at the Circle, I suppose. Again, I won't bore you with the details of my three years of grief or the chills the tranquil gave me, or even our various triumphs over human/elven adversity; it's an inevitability when you're cooped up together long enough, I don't know why mages still flatter themselves and patronise others by counting it as some sort of achievement. What united the less prejudiced of us were not tiresome complaints about the burden of our inborn magic, but the subtle rebellions we mounted against our city state's pretensions. Young and old, most of us managed to be just that little bit more slovenly, informal and outright vulgar (at least when the situation called for it) than the Andrastians desired.
We didn't care for crowns and pearls and velvet doublets and platinum circlets and diamond-studded silk gowns inlaid with gold thread. We had no time for fish and egg pie. Who was going to share them with us? Why would we care for things the Chantry considered us unworthy of partaking in? Nobody blinked at the news of the Vael Massacre. If the rich wouldn't share a thing with us, we wouldn't weep for them. None of us were surprised when rumours of the Harimanns' involvement surfaced either. We only knew the Harimann family as the most generous donors to the continuation of our imprisonment. It sounded like the sort of thing they would do.
As soon as you got past the extravagant decoration you'd never have thought our Circle was a part of Starkhaven, and nothing made us prouder. We were held to the 'High standards expectant of the Starkhaven citizen' by the Knight Commander. We were kept spruced-up and squeaky-clean for our few permitted minutes in the rose gardens, where more fortunate folk could stare at us through the fences or listen to our conversation without recoiling in snobbish disgust. The First Enchanter went along with it. He went along with everything. He had to go.
~o~0~o~
I was the one who started the fire.
Anders, Hawke: I beat you to it. I destroyed a Circle years before you were even considering the idea. Okay, I never quite marshalled the courage or resolve to apply my fiery skills to an actual Chantry, but I'm glad to feel I was still ahead of the curve.
As my thirteenth year in chains ended I learned to put away childish things. I grew up, graduated to murder. Wouldn't mother be proud? My plan had only two goals: escape and make sure the only intentional victim was the First Enchanter. I can practically hear your questions. Why not kill a templar? Why not the Knight Commander or Captain? Sometimes I almost sympathised with them back then. They thought, acted and behaved in ways that were entirely expected, given their profession. Our dear old mage-in-chief on the other hand, was a snivelling coward forever abdicating any power he may have had to improve the safety and quality of our lives.
The night of my escape is a blur almost as vague as my mother's goodbye. I can remember the inexplicably relaxing warmth in my body as flame, blood-red, spat from my fingertips and sprawled over the dozen aligned bookcases like an ever-swelling beast eager to devour anything in its path. I can remember the coldness of the night and the verdant, dew-dampened fields. The only other thing I remember was the last look I took. The smooth 'ivory' was a blackened soot-covered mess, crumbling by the second, vomiting ash into a sky aglow with growing flame. I laughed at how awed I had been. I didn't even care that I had destroyed the place where I had met Annabel. She deserved better.
I stayed in the Marches for a while and kept myself informed enough to discover that the First Enchanter did indeed perish. Well; perished first. Other casualties for the greater good included eleven templars and roughly two dozen mages. In hindsight their deaths don't really matter, I suppose. They'd only have been moved to Kirkwall. All it took were a few more years.
I'm joining the war; Maker knows I'm capable enough. I killed almost three dozen people without being caught. If I'd stayed and been moved to the Gallows, nobody would ever have suspected my involvement. But I wasn't really trying to make a profound statement about our plight. We mages have been so apathetic and accepting of our slavery that I never believed I could have roused them. That's why I acted alone in Starkhaven: the mages there were irked by the city's pretensions, worried by the Knight Commander's tendency to talk about the Right of Annulment every day, saddened by losing friends and lovers to the Harrowing and angered by the First Enchanter's spinelessness, but never enough to act. What I did was not for them, but for me. You could even say I didn't consider anybody else worthy of freedom, for they didn't want it as I did. With their minds changed I will join the war. But my reasons for setting that particular fire were purely selfish. I did it for my own freedom (and the freedom of anybody else with the presence of mind to run, but that was more a bonus than objective).
I've heard of Hawke, just like all the others. I'm as well-versed in the events of Kirkwall's meltdown as any other mage. I've read a few of his supposed speeches and I've read the manifesto of his controversial companion many times over. They've got the freedom aspect down perfectly; I wouldn't change anything there. But there's one thing I can't agree with either of them on.
Magic does not exist to serve man. Magic does not exist to rule over man. Magic does not exist to bring about a new order of mage ruling over non mage. Magic does not exist to test our faith and ease the Chantry's hunt for the heathen. Magic is. Yes, that's right: magic just exists, indifferent to the trials of its wielders or the megalomaniacal subjugation of its detractors. The wind does not care for the ocean, for the waves it brings forth or the caverns these waves cut into the cliffs. Magic is no different: it has no opinion on how we use it, on whether we wield its bloody variant or not. This war isn't about magic; it's about people and the choices they make. We mages are just people, people who choose to live free. The templars choose to deny us that. This is why we hate them. This is why we'll kill them.