One day she wakes up, and knows. Knows everything there is to know, or at least it feels like it. It's in her blood, in the air she breathes, it's in the slow blink of her eyes and the almost-panic running through her veins.
If she could she would cry.
Viera—no, Etsel, no no no, it was Myrrdan. She grits her teeth at the confusion and reaches past the knowing into the living. Her name is Korvera and she is a Circle mage and things have gone horribly wrong. Everything is horrible. Everything is wrong.
Her bones ache with the wrongness and finally a few stray tears break past her turmoil. She died at twenty, at fifty, at two weeks and four months. She was born years ago, again and again and again.
She's had magic, and been a templar, and been both. She's cut down brothers and sisters, been cut down by the same. She once travelled far enough away that the idea of Andraste was a mere mention in dusty books. She'd never left her village.
But she'd never lived all that and known. Never seen the void of death and touched it. Never woken in her scratchy bed and instinctively, intrinsically, known.
Until now.
Her body doesn't feel like her body, her mind doesn't feel like her mind. And yet all of it is familiar, all of it is true.
Screaming startles her out of the cyclical nature of her thoughts, and she turns her attention to her side where her bunkmates are waking up.
Jaddan, old for an apprentice and all-the-more fragile for it is silently seizing on his bed, mouth open but no real breath leaving his body. At his side Elerasia is kneeling, blank-eyed.
Korvera has no idea who let the first scream escape, but soon the whole room is in chaos. Those trying to restrain the still-bucking Jaddan; those curled up and moaning; those suddenly, furiously yelling their despair out into the world.
She sits up and walks out the door. The rows and rows of sleeping spaces are only half-full, due in part to the rate of corruption (and death) in those who are old enough to understand certain things and still young enough to be ignorant, and the higher rate of mages being killed instead of brought back.
None of them are ignorant now. And none of them are dead, even if they should be.
She can hear the screaming echoing even here, in these half-abandoned halls. A floor up, where the more advanced students are kept, she can hear the sound of small explosions and crying. Ice creeps along the walls as she walks, her magic reaching out in response. If they survive the morning it's not guaranteed there will be much of a building to go back to.
She climbs flights of stairs, stone worn away from hundreds of feet making this same pilgrimage. She knows, from her memories and her studies that something this large, this monumental, has to have been magic. Misfired magic. Probably blood magic.
And there's one spot all aspiring blood mages go to do their work.
There's no door on the observatory, no lock to pick or blast away. A simple stone archway opens into a dim room, only lit by the rising sun casting soft shadows on the walls. Casting soft shadows on the blood splatters. On the face of the apprentice laying on the floor.
Dead, she can already tell. He paid the price for his dealing and did it gladly. Maybe it was even his goal; she's seen her fair share of desperate suicides staged to be more. For some an escape from the tower is only possible by escaping flesh too.
She winces, a little, at the thought. Until this morning she hadn't even known suicide was something that happened. Happens. Is happening.
The markings on the floor indicate a summoning, but she can't tell of what kind. None of her lives have delved too far into blood magic, although a few have done the odd healing or tracking spell. And technically all phylacteries are blood magic. And she's done enough of those as a templar.
She's not sure how long she stays standing there, eyes on the dead body and the pools of blood, but it's long enough for the sun to have chased all the remaining shadows away and for the sounds of footsteps to drift up the stairs.
She turns to the sight of mail and swords and the drawn face of the First Enchanter. She steps aside, silently, and watches as fingers tremble against steel. She only has to look into the expression on the Templars' faces to know they, too, know. They too have felt the embrace of death and life and knowledge.
The First Enchanter kneels by the body and touches a single finger to a corpse-cold hand. He's a wizened man, steel haired and stooped back. Strict, mostly fair, when he can be. As caged as they are, if more comfortably. She has to dig for his name in her overfilled mind.
Luvien Garrent. She thinks she knew his mother, in one life.
"Vequiel D'Marras. A promising boy, strong in spirit magic. I do not recall any worries of possession or rebellion. He was quiet and obedient."
"The most dangerous forest is a quiet one," one of the Templars says, lowly. Korvera thinks that perhaps there's not so much disdain in his words than there would be yesterday. The look in his eyes is haunted.
The First Enchanter nods, slowly, ponderously.
"Such a thing should be impossible for one half-trained boy. The fact that he ended up dead and not an abomination shows a level of skill you don't usually find in first-time blood mages. And the level of the casting—"
"There was a book," Korvera interrupts, words being pulled out of her mouth without her input. Her mind is far away.
"Apprentice?" the First Enchanter asks, turning her way. She looks to the worn stone and smiles a little wryly.
"In the library, there was a book. Not all of us could read it, but those that did tended to...find truth in places that you would have least expected. It was enchanted, probably. Kairn—my, uh, seventh iteration—he read it and found a ritual to heal an old friend of a crippling disease."
"And you think D'Marras found this book?" Luvien asks, not necessarily disbelieving, but not necessarily accepting either.
"I remember that book. I learned invisibility from it, and never learned to turn it off," one of the Templars says quietly. Korvera closes her eyes and lets her memories drag her to the answer.
"It gives you what you want, but not necessarily how you want it."
Worried looks from all in the room, and then finally the First Enchanter seems to realise that it might not be appropriate to have a thirteen-year-old in the same room as that of a magical suicide. Not, of course, that she is a simple thirteen-year-old anymore. Just like he is not a simple First Enchanter, nor the Templars simple Templars.
She leaves before she can be kicked out. She doesn't feel like going through the ignominy of being treated as a child. She feels old, older than dust and magic and malice.
And she feels young, small. Smaller than the blue-lit veins in her hands, than the quiet whispers of still-moaning mages and Templars down below.
The contradictions feel like they could kill her. If the memories don't first.
Instead she goes to the library, abandoned and quiet but no doubt soon to be crowded with anxious mages as they all go back to their favourite coping mechanism: research.
She still doesn't feel real, but she has an advantage most of her peers probably don't: lives five and twelve were as Grey Wardens, and lives two and four were slaves. She's used to not feeling real.
She finds a dusty corner and curls up, resting her head against the cold stone. The memories aren't so much voices as creeping knowledge that overtakes everything. She's not sure how so much can fit into her head in the first place, not sure how she's not seizing like Jaddan in the dorm, how they all survived it.
But for now she can't think clearly enough to worry about it. She sees the body in the observatory tower and chews on her lips, some odd feeling in her gut. She should be horrified, really. Except all her emotions seem to be buried under a fog so thick she thinks she might choke on it. In her eyes the apprentice is replaced by bandits and Templars and mages and desperate thieves and contract kills both taken and witnessed. A cacophony of death she's seen and experienced.
It gets stale.
"Korvera?" a soft voice drifts towards her, and she blinks. In front of her one of the younger initiates fidgets with wide eyes, and she straightens in worry. A few of her lives had families, children. A few of them hated the idea of it.
Nial, nine years old and miserable with it, shuffles a little closer. Korvera used to help him tie his shoes in the morning, used to doing it with her own younger brother. At one point she thought they were fond of each other, a sort of sibling dynamic she had missed dearly. The Templars did not agree. She hasn't seen him in months.
Korvera sighs a little and opens her arms, beckoning. She wants time by herself to think, to remember. But the idea that she is not alone in this is soothing. And she knows, dearly, that as soon as the fog lifts she will need the strength of others to help her through. In that they appear to all be in the same situation.
Nial sniffles into her collarbone and climbs into her lap, great shuddering breaths reverberating in his chest. Korvera closes her eyes and leans back into the stone wall.
"I was big and strong and everything was scary," Nial whimpers into her nightgown, "there was a forest and knights and and—" he trails off.
Korvera sighs, memories rising up like the tides of the ocean she's never seen. She's not sure how to explain, how to sooth his mental anguish when she herself has no answers, no stability. She's not sure even the First Enchanter at this point has any answers for them.
"It's over," she says instead, "it's over and you're safe now."
It's a lie, and one he probably knows now. He no longer has the ignorance that even the circle children keep. They are never safe, not from demons, not from Templars, not from the Circle. The world would like the crush them and it's made no secret of that.
She holds the boy closer and tries to change the truth with simple force of will.
—
Her first life was as a human farmer, living in a simple town with a simple family. In this there is mercy: she starts out peaceful and it is only the corruption of continuous living that kills her. His name was Bryce and he loved his wife dearly.
Her second she is a nameless elf in a dirty city, no family and no future. She killed for survival and died for someone else's greed. As she drew her last breath she only had the comfort that she wasn't leaving anyone behind. The blood mage, her master, would certainly not miss her.
Her third she was a Templar, grief-stricken and cruel with it. Her family had burned in a mage's fire and she burned forever more with fear and anger. Etsel died saving her charges from another Templar's blade and felt no guilt at it.
She feels sick just thinking of that life.
The fourth was named Viera, and she was qunari. Born into the Qun and restrained by it, she was eventually able to run away into the arms of a human lover. She was killed for it.
Myyrdan was an elf, with beautiful features and a cheerful demeanor. He was Dalish and so now she has the phantom pain of his vallaslin pricking along her cheeks. He worshiped June and was an artisan. When the humans came he died with a smile on his face and a whole battalion dead at his feet.
The fifth, the sixth, the seventh. All of them, up to her current life trapped in stone walls and chantry prayers. All of them living and breathing and dying. All of them she remembers, along with the cold of the void.
She turns over each new memory as if it is a curiosity she can unravel and learn from. That she can control, and thus finally feel balanced. More than anything she would like to feel balanced again.
She stares out at the confused masses of children, mages and Templars, and feels for the first time the enormity of what is happening settle over her. In the far shadows she can see the few Tranquil, faces wet with tears.
No one seems to know what to do with them, nor do they seem to know what to do with themselves. It makes her heart ache.
The First Enchanter and the Senior Enchanters stand in front of the crowd, looking drawn and worried and, under all that, just as confused. She wonders what stories they will tell, to try and keep their charges in line. Whether any of them will believe those stories, or if their collective lives have all been difficult enough that they no longer swallow lies coated in honey.
"I am sure you are all looking for answers right now, and I hope I can relieve some worries by answering some of your questions. We do not currently have all the information about the incident that happened last night, but we can conclude with certainty that I was the work of powerful blood magic," the First Enchanter starts, hands clasped in front of himself and lips turned down.
The crowd shifts but doesn't speak. Everyone is in the small hall, even those that just a few hours ago were catatonic or seizing. The shock hasn't receded completely, but it has lessened. Korvera can only thank whatever absent god looking over them that the magic didn't do anything more than alter their memories. She knows now what sort of things blood magic can do: they are, after all, still alive.
"Normally we would call in reinforcements, or at least council from the other Circles in such a time of need. Unfortunately, with the current unrest between the rogue Templars and the rogue mages, it is unsure when we would be able to contact the Order. Until then we will need to carry on, and help each other through these troubling times."
The First Enchanter pauses, fingers twitching.
"It has been suggested that we start by cataloguing the new memories, to see if we can find a common thread among them. We still are not sure what the purpose of the spell was in the first place. Furthermore…" he trails off, eyes roving the gathered mages and Templars.
"Furthermore, as I am sure you have noticed, those among the Tranquil have been...restored. They will remain so, following these new revelations. A certain amount of caution must be realised from all of you, as you will no doubt find magic to be more uncontrollable in face of the new emotions. Enchanter Erane will be in charge of the Tranquil until such a time as a solution can be found. That is all."
The crowd shifts again, movement uneasy. The First Enchanter retires with a few of the others, no doubt to do more research or to try and plan some sort of coping strategy. The instructors gather up the younger children and usher them away, voices kind and sympathetic. Korvera sees Nial in the crowd and waves briefly, before he is swept out of sight.
And then she is alone with a room of unhappy people, all trying to put themselves to rights after being uprooted completely from their own identities and beliefs.
She is alone, except with her thoughts and memories.