"Our shem" they called him. Ser Otto had been in the Alienage long enough to know how much of a compliment that actually was. The term "shem" often was at least partly derogatory even if the word had not originally been so, but the expression of possessiveness that accompanied it was close to affectionate. Our shem, the blind Templar who won't go back to the Chantry every night and lives in a little shack not far from the great tree in the centre of the houses. Our shem, who doesn't preach about the glories of the Maker to people living only one meal from starvation, but who many times has sat on his doorstep in the evening and shared his own scanty meal with a starved beggar on the streets. Our shem. Even stranger than most shems - but ours.
He had lived now in the Alienage for nearly fifteen years. After that battle where all the light of the world had ended for him in one burst of fire, he had sensed the bustle of his superiors trying to swiftly find him an assignment where he wouldn't demoralise the young Templars in training just by how he looked. A quick reassignment to Denerim, then the placement in the Alienage, officially to oversee the orphanage there and distribute the alms grudgingly given by the richer quarters of the city. It was his opinion that there had always been an element of cynicism in those gifts. Keep the elves both dependent on the gifts, and far enough from despair to minimise the chance of a riot, and there was less chance that a riot might spill over to somewhere in the city where it would cause...problems. Two days in the Alienage had taught him how great the despair indeed was in this tiny corner of the city that most preferred to pretend did not exist. He had asked the hahren for somewhere to live, and with surprise at the request, the elf had offered him the shack near the tree, where an old elven woman had died a few days earlier. They probably had not expected him to stay there so much as a single night. Fifteen years later, he was still there.
The children had been the first to accept him, when their elders were still eyeing him with distrust. He returned to the Chantry once a week to collect his tiny stipend, and always took a side trip through Denerim's market late in the day to beg the broken pastries and sweets from stall holders packing up for the day. The children would flock around him when he returned, and he would take them to sit under the tree, share out the treasures and tell them stories. Not the stories the Chantry would prefer, of the sins of the mortal races, but tall tales full of heroes and dragonsfire. And for a short while the children were also blind to the squalor surrounding them, their eyes full of old tales and their mouths full of honey cakes. Escape can be within, as well as without.
When the plague came, and the Tevinter mages came to heal the sick, Ser Otto had been everywhere, in and out of houses where even families had abandoned their own for fear of contagion. Blindness confers fearlessness, there is no horror in the face of someone who cannot see the horror before him. He had wondered many times why the contagion had not passed to him, whether this was some illness that affects only elves. He had asked the mages about it and had got no clear answer. But mages were rarely straight talkers.
And then...she had come. The Grey Warden, an elven mage, sweeping through the fear and the lies like the wrath of Andraste herself. She had exposed the Tevinter mages, she had freed the slaves, she had proved the involvement of the Regent. He had spoken to her only once, after it was all over, about his own fears for the place. She had listened to him and acknowledged his fear, and promised him her help.
And now she was in his house, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed. He had no chairs in the one room house - indeed if he had had a chair in here, the door probably would not open any more. He had offered her a share of his bread and hard cheese, the only food he had in the house, she had accepted with courtesy as though at a noble's banquet, and they had talked, for hours it seemed, about the problems facing the Alienage and the threat of the oncoming Blight. And then she had made a light comment about the cakes he gave the children and memory burst like floodwaters in his mind.
"I wondered if you would remember me," She dusted breadcrumbs from her fingers. Now he listened carefully, he could hear in this woman's soft contralto tones the higher, lighter voice of the elven child she had been. One of the more nervous ones, it had taken a lot of coaxing before she would join the story circle and even then she had always sat on the edge of the group, poised for flight.
"I remember. You used to be the last to join us on those evenings, and the first to leave. And then that night you stayed when the others went, and you offered to teach me a game. And I told you that my lack of sight would prevent me from playing, and you told me that I needed no sight for it. And you took out a length of string..."
She placed something in his palm - his fingers traced it as a rough loop of twine. Her voice was amused. "I still carry string with me. Even play sometimes. It clears my mind when I have too much else to think about."
Almost without thought, he looped the strings around his fingers as she had taught him so long ago and offered them to her. Her fingers lifted the string onto her own hands. "First figure - the Cat's Cradle." She presented her hands to him.
"I am not sure how well I remember this." There was a strange intimacy in this contact. He traced first her fingers and then the strings with his own fingertips. Then memory took over again and he slipped the string back to his own hands. "You called this second figure the Templar's Bed, claiming it looked uncomfortable enough to satisfy the Chantry. And I should have told you off for that, and I never did."
She laughed at that, and the laugh was indeed that of the young girl he had known, light and spontaneous and all too infrequent, elven orphans had little enough to laugh about. She lifted the string away from his fingers. "Templar's Bed becomes Chantry Candles. Clearly the templar is relieved to be out of the bed and in the chapel." The strings fell into the long lines of the third figure. "We played this game for the last time the day the other templars came to take me to the Tower. I was afraid, and you sat by the gate with me to wait for them. And then..."
That memory came back too. The templars had been brusque - one more unwanted mage, one less unwanted elven child - Ser Mikkel had roughly grabbed her by the wrist and she had cried out. And he had come to his feet blazing with a fury he had not known he was capable of feeling. "Have a care, Ser Mikkel - she is a child of the Maker as are we all, and we will all answer to Him in the end for our actions. You will treat her with the reverence due to every one of his creations, you will lay no rough hand on her nor speak to her with rough words, and I shall myself speak to the Knight Commander to be sure of this!" The templars had fallen back, and he had spoken gently to the girl clinging to him. "Child, you are going where your Maker given talents will be used, and trained and valued. We are all taught that magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him, do not let anyone tell you that your gift is a curse. Great power has been given to you, and with that comes the responsibility to use it well, for the betterment of the world that He has given to all of us. Andraste's blessings, and may the light shine on you." And he had gently kissed her forehead, and given her hand to the younger templar, whose voice was kinder than his colleague, as though he had not been trained long enough to be hardened to his work. She had gone obediently, and that was the last time he had spoken to her. Knight Commander Gregoir had confirmed when he visited Denerim that she had arrived safely and settled well. And Ser Otto had not expected to meet her again.
And now, over ten years on, she was sitting beside him, as if the strings of the interrupted game had lain between them for all of those years, ready to be taken up again. The starveling waif had become an assured woman, alight with the power he had sensed in her first when she was eight years old, a tingling in all the senses. He took the catscradle from her again. "Chantry Candles becomes The Manger. Did I remember the name right?"
"You did. The Manger is the first figure, upside down." She picked the string figure off his hands. "Manger becomes Diamonds. I did try to find a templar at the tower who would play this game with me, but none of them would. They probably thought I had enchanted the strings to strangle them, or something."
He chuckled at that. "The Templars who guard the tower have seen too much - and too many apprentice pranks. I was the target of enough of them in the time I spent there. I often thought that was why I was reassigned so fast to hunt apostates, that I was becoming an embarassment to the Knight Commander by constantly being found with my armour transfigured to an attractive shade of pink, and having to explain yet again that no, I had no idea which apprentice had done it this time." He reached for the strings again. "I remember how this figure goes, but I don't remember the name you gave it."
"That one is Cat's Eye, and it becomes The Dining Table." She demonstrated. "And I used to say that it had to be an elven dining table because there was nothing on the plate."
He nodded. "And there was one last figure." He felt for the strings and took them, and the figure fell into long, straight parallel rows, tight knotted around his fingers. "And you taught me that there was no further figure that could be made from this, because this last one knotted the fingers up so hard."
She touched his fingers. "Quite right. That is the last, and it was called The Lovers - horizontal together and bound too tight to free." Her voice was soft. "And it enables me to return a gift you gave me a long time ago, while your hands are tied and you cannot protest."
And she leaned forward and kissed him.
But this was not the chaste kiss he had given to the frightened child so many years ago, her lips found his and she kissed him with passion, and love, and a little fear. Fear that he would reject her? Fear that he would now just be one more templar with a distrusted mage? Fear that he still saw her only as that mistreated child?
But somehow his hands were free of the string, and his arms were round her, and he was kissing her back with a total lack of practice, and an immense willingness to learn. And for a night the little house was not lonely, and the small bed was even smaller, and she taught him a new language of lips, and tongues, and fingertips that required no sight to translate it. And with the morning, she kissed him again, and made him a promise to meet that day and investigate the hauntings at the old orphanage that had troubled him, and he heard her soft footsteps go out the door. And all he could think of was that there was no way that he could confess this because he would never be sorry. And that without ever seeing her face, he knew her to be gold as the sunrise, or as the Golden City before the magisters blackened it with their presence. Living flame, enough to set a whole world ablaze - or to give that whole world light.