Title shamelessly inspired by "Illuminated" by Hurts,
I was originally going to do a reunion fanfic where Daylen reunites with his siblings (set in Inquisition), and particularly with his identical twin, but. This happened instead (and I'm still not even sure what "this" is). Maybe I'll write the reunion later.
The blade—a spectral blade, not one made of steel but his own will—has become a part of him.
It is his weapon, what makes him a Knight-Enchanter and not just a battle mage. Unlike his peers—many of them may be older and more experienced than him, he recognizes this, but they have no official rank over him; they aren't even an "official" order—he wields his blade in his right hand, keeps his staff gripped tight in his left.
And on nights like this, when he can't sleep from loneliness or the night terrors, or both, with the moon engulfing the night sky peppered with aloof stars, he stares at his hands. Thinking, remembering.
A voice he can almost hear, but never distinguish, praising him as he scrawls the letters on parchment—the quill never wanted to rest easily in his left hand, and he had to hold his arm at an awkward angle so as not to smear the ink across the page. He thinks the voice is his father's, a large hand resting on his shoulder and his other resting on Damion's. Damion who wrote normally, but he gets the feeling they never talked about that. Any of them.
"What are you doing?" he can remember, in vague distinctness, his father asking.
He was writing backwards, ؟ƨbɿɒwʞɔɒd ,ɘɘƨ. He didn't have to worry about ruining the words or the paper that way, and even if the letters came out wrong too, he could read it just fine. Everyone else needed to use a mirror, except for Damion—he got it. But Daylen supposes that's why it is called "mirror writing" at all. And it drove all of his teachers nuts at the Circle, when he'd slip into it rather than keep struggling with their way. The Templars went through his journals and grimoires a lot though, because they thought he was trying to hide something from them. Blood magic, detailed deals with demons, plans for a coup. Something.
Daylen sits on the window sill, far above ground but he isn't afraid of heights and maybe that's a good thing, contemplating. He can see Servani—"The Chained Man," so often considered a representation of the Old God Andoral, god of slavery—from where he's perched, and thinks it's fitting in a sick and twisted way.
Mages aren't slaves, the Chantry will say. They aren't property.
But they don't have any personal freedoms. Not the right to family—being caught in his father's arms with Damion, being hugged tightly as they're scooped up and rested against either of his hips. Grinning, smiling, laughing. His mother, Rev-something, stroking his hair and his brother's, humming a lullaby even after their heavy eyelids slide closed and their chests rise and fall slowly, heavily—or privacy or even life itself.
No one cares if an apprentice is stolen from their bed and never comes back, or if they show up with a brand on their forehead and glassy eyes and a monotone voice.
No one cares if the Templars abuse them, if the Templars pose more of a threat to them than demons ever will. Because that's the "will of the Maker." That mages suffer and break and die alone where no one can see them, where no one can hear them. In Circles that are thinly veiled prisons—"gilded cages" to some, but cages nonetheless—and their "guardians" are jailers.
Daylen twists his lips bitterly.
And then his shoulders sag with remorse, a feeling of solitude, of utter isolation creeping in with the guilt. He left Alim there, in Kinloch, on his own. How long has it been, that he's been training? A year? A year and a half?
He turns his gaze to the interior of his room. His bed is undisturbed, all of his limited possessions are placed with purpose and poise, and his desk is tidy, with letters tucked neatly into a drawer and the awaiting blank vellum sequestered on one side of the smooth wooden surface. Almost too orderly, when he puts any time into recalling how the rooms in the Circle had looked—a chaotic mix of sundry pillows, thick and unruly blankets to ward of the Ferelden chill that the lake perpetuated in the winter, desks cluttered with books and tomes and scrolls and an inkwell there and a quill there, and scribbled on parchment here with blank parchment in that drawer. The "order" doesn't stand for such disorganization. They have to be in absolute control of their surroundings, just like they demand command of the battlefields they step foot onto.
Into the darkness, he frowns, and casts his gaze back to Servani.
They're like attack dogs for the Chantry, wading into their battles, using their magic for people that condemn them for being mages. But they're oh-so-willing to turn around and use them like implements of destruction in their wars.
Mages are tolerated when they're "useful," but never if they try to be people.
Daylen hates it, hates it hates it hates it. He lets them do it to him because he loves the rush of power when he can utilize his magic to its full potential, or something near it. Because he loves the privilege it brings him, how he has more access to any and everything he wants to research with less Templar scrutiny. The sense of hope it brings, that he holds tightly and hides away, that maybe, maybe he can find "them."
Foolish, he knows. Hopeless, eve, but still...
He wonders if one of his siblings is at the Gallows of Kirkwall, or at Ostwick. Maybe Starkhaven?
He swears he knows someone from the Starkhaven Circle, but he can't place who. His brows furrow when the only mental image he can conjure is sitting on his father's lap with his younger-by-a-day twin, of blue eyes Daylen thinks are like his own. He wants to believe he'd remember something like that, but his memories from before Kinloch are just fragments that he can piece together, incomplete and almost-lost.
Maybe his father is—was?—an apostate.
Bonus points to the Chantry for tearing his family apart, then. Even mages supposedly "outside" of their domain suffer from the ripples they cause.
He snorted. It reminded him of the butterfly effect.
"A tiny butterfly flapping its wings today may lead to a devastating hurricane weeks from now."
"Accidentally using any magic in front of someone will likely result in the Templars tearing you away from your home and family."
Daylen leans his head back against the window frame with a soft thud, and exhales. His eyes slip closed, and if he thinks of Alim's smile in the mornings at Kinloch, or of sleeping back-to-back with a person only mostly identical to him and a mother's loving touch lingering on the edges of his memories, he can't be blamed.
If he wants to see all of them again, if he's already making plans to make a long overdue detour to Kinloch Hold for Alim and no one else, then it's understandable.
I borrowed the Butterfly Effect quote from Until Dawn (which is such a seriously great game). It struck me deeply, you could say.
I have a tumblr under the user Mooncloudpanther