There was a tree. Of course there was a tree. It had flowers growing around it. Bluebirds were likely to perch on the branches and sing melancholy songs of mourning.
In the Wilds one was more likely to find bodies strung from the trees than buried under them, but each to their own.
"Is this the place?" Kieran asked, his hand held tightly in hers. Andoral's Reach was far out of their way, but this trip was one Morrigan had put off for far too long now.
"It is. Why do you not you see what herbs can be gathered?" Morrigan let go of her son's hand and dropped her pack by the roots of the tree, followed by her cloak. Kieran's own cloak and pack joined them a second later, their owner starting his hunt for useful herbs.
Morrigan sat with her back against the tree, feeling the bark against her bare arms and shoulders. A sharp twig caught against her arm, drawing blood. Naturally.
With a tut of disapproval Morrigan pressed two fingers against the cut, feeling the energy inside her being drawn out to cleanse and mend.
There, she looked down at her bare arm no sign.
Flemeth – Mythal – whoever she was, had not taught her that.
She snapped the offending twig off the tree and threw it into the air, catching it with a spark and watching in satisfaction as the ashes fluttered to the ground.
She read for a while, enjoying the peace (far more peace than she ever got from her in life) and occasionally looking over the top of her book to check on her son.
Looking for herbs.
Watching the birds.
Gone.
She leapt up, book falling.
"Kieran?" She sounded panicked. She didn't care.
A loud sigh, louder than it needed to be (loud enough that his mother could hear it, and hear his disapproval), and a dark head peeked over a bush a short distance away.
"There you are, little man."
"I was looking for herbs, mother" As always he sounded polite (sometimes she could scarcely believe he was her son), but there was a hint of annoyance in his voice. He was getting older. Soon he would be eleven. It seemed to be happening so quickly. It barely seemed like a decade. How fast would the next one travel, she wondered. How long would it be before her son was ready for his own life, before she was no longer there to protect him?
"Do not stray too far, Kieran." Did she sound too reprimanding? Would he resent that? None of this was what she had meant it to be.
A sigh: "No, mother."
Morrigan settled back against the tree and picked up her book again, flicking through it until she found the point where she had left off. She read, but was unable to focus on the words.
Finally the silence was too much.
"I doubt you were happy with how Kieran came to be. You seemed to think it was the duty of a Grey Warden to die – a heroic sacrifice for the good of the world." She laughed, short and bitter, "A sacrifice gets you nothing but a grave, old woman."
Morrigan closed her book, turning it over and over in her hands, staring at it – at nothing.
"I do love him, despite what you may think. No doubt you are shocked that I did not devour my young after birthing, or his father after our coupling."
A pause, then:
"I doubt Kariel would have forgiven me for that."
Kariel Surana. Her friend – her first friend, perhaps still her only friend – the woman who had trusted Morrigan so completely when she had offered her a way out of a Warden's duty.
It should not hurt to think about friends.
"I suppose you would approve that Kieran favours his father more than I." Kieran had her features – her hair and eyes – but his love of dogs and cheeses and terrible jokes, those came from his father. She saw Alistair in his smile and heard him in his laugh. Those things no longer irritated her the way they had a decade ago.
It surprised Morrigan that most of her happiest memories before Kieran had occurred during the Blight. But before then – before Kieran and the woman she now called 'sister' – her life had been so dark, so quiet; her days filled with the sounds of the wilds and the lessons of her mother.
(And looking back she found herself smiling at the memories of Kariel's friends - not her friends, she had but one of those – even as she remembered how they had infuriated her at the time. She had been almost alarmed at how little Alistair had annoyed her during their shared time at Skyhold. Perhaps it was maturity. Perhaps it was the parts of Kieran she now saw in him.
She had not been entirely upset at his survival from the journey into the Fade.)
"In truth, none of this is what I expected. Kieran certainly is not. I thought him to have this grand destiny, and now I am content for him to be my son."
She remembered suddenly, sharply, the first time she had felt worried for him. They had been on their own, Kieran was only a few weeks old and ill. Flemeth had taught her nothing about childcare, about how to heal with magic. And yet Morrigan had used her magic to fight the fever, and help her son.
No, Flemeth had not taught her to heal with magic. She had learnt the basics of herbalism from her mother, but her magic had been focused towards destruction. With it she had learnt how to reach inside a man's head, find his fears and make them real; how to freeze and burn and hurt. So It had been curiosity, not the desire for company, that had drawn her towards Wynne while the older mage instructed Kariel at camp.
(And yet… and yet the memory of Wynne's instruction was not unpleasant. She had been stern, and the amused smile she'd worn whenever Morrigan had made a mistake had been insufferable. But there was no cruelty, no malice behind her words. The old woman had seen what cruel words could do to a student and sworn she would not make that mistake again.)
Flemeth had been the one to teach her that the world was divided into the weak and the strong. The strong survived where the weak were crushed. Morrigan would've been content to let the Circles fall and see what would rise from the chaos. Not a new Imperium, but a new world entirely.
But she remembered a tower where an old woman, her body the host for a spirit, had been the only thing standing between the children and the demons, or the Templars. Until Kariel had made it clear that they weren't there to begin the annulment Wynne had refused to lower her staff.
Morrigan had seen only Wynne's weakness. She had seen her willingness to live under the rule of the Templars as the mark of a pathetic woman.
But Wynne had never sent children unarmed against Templars and told them it was a game. Wynne had seen the effect of harsh lessons on the boy she thought she had failed and learnt from it. Morrigan often wondered how many daughters Flemeth had raised as she had been raised, and if the old witch had ever learnt from her mistakes.
I am many things, but I will not be the mother you were to me.
Morrigan had not believed that either she or Kariel was what Wynne desired in mage company. Morrigan had little time for the woman's sanctimonious sermons, and Kariel was outspoken in her criticisms of the circle, the Chantry and the Templars.
ooo
"This is a simple enough exercise, Morrigan. I am surprised at your lack of success. Perhaps if you spent less time tutting under your breath at everything I have said and more time listening it would go easier?"
Wynne sounded amused, several summoned wisps already hovering near her. Morrigan scowled,
"I am not one of your child apprentices, old woman. Do not patronise me."
"Then perhaps you should stop acting like one."
Kariel laughed.
"Don't let it get you down. Back at the tower I was rubbish at healing."
"Yes,'"Wynne replied, "I have heard stories of the tendency of Irving's star pupil to sleep through her lessons."
"Boring old men teaching me boring old things. At least this is fun!"
"You'll forgive me, Warden, if I don't take comfort in your own lack of success." Morrigan indicated the wisp floating near the elven mage's shoulder.
"I was bad at healing. But I'm good with spirits.'
"Perhaps you shouldn't think of this as being part of the Creation school, Morrigan." Wynne had suggested. "You have a gift for the Spirit school, after all."
ooo
Morrigan sighed. "None of this is what I expected. Kieran, the eluvians, the vir'abelasan. I believe I knew everything there was to know of the world. A foolish belief of a foolish girl." She closed her eyes, remembering.
"We spoke once, did we not, about those who would mourn us? I believed I would have no need of someone who would mourn me. I believed a great many things, then. I wonder, old woman, did you ever think on what I said on the Circle of Magi?"
Her views had been naïve, she knew that now. At the time she'd known nothing of the Rite of Tranquillity or the fear the mages in the Circle had lived under. She'd seen only the weak and foolish, bowing their heads to the Templars while the strong lived outside their rule. The truth of the matter, as with many things outside the Wilds, was more complicated than that.
"You claimed the Circle was a place of safety, yet it was your actions that led to their independence. Your son that cast the deciding vote. And now, thanks to the Inquisitor, the mages have a chance to see what this world will make of them."
(The Inquisitor. Another elf, another mage. How many would have to save the world before the world stopped hating them?)
"I am proud of what I have achieved. Of Kieran, of the knowledge I have gained, of my friendship with Kariel. I am her friend – no matter what you may have thought. And you – you should be proud of what you achieved. The chance that the mages now have – 'tis not something I could have pictured ten years ago."
She laughed at that,
"I believe that is something we could actually agree on."
Wynne had told Kariel that she could be the change the Circle needed. She'd scoffed, but still… she had tried. The only reward she'd asked for had been for Queen Anora to grant the Ferelden Circle its autonomy. Morrigan considered it ironic that the pro-Circle Wynne had done more for mage freedom than either she or the Grey Warden.
It had always been hard to look at Wynne and not see a different old woman who lived long past her time, one who had also clawed her way back into the world of the living with the aid of a spirit.
(Or a demon. Or a god).
What had it been for Wynne, she wondered.
"The truth is," the words burst out, "you have haunted my thoughts for ten years now. Can I get no peace from you even after death?"
There was no answer. The dead, not even Wynne or Flemeth, do not linger in the world.
"Sometimes I do wonder…"
But she couldn't say it.
I wonder if things would've been different.
ooo
"You don't know anything about the Tower!"
Kariel's intensity had surprised her. The Warden normally hid her anger behind the illusion of calm.
"Mages aren't weak for being taken as children. We get told again and again that we're nothing in the eyes of the Maker," she scowled when she said the name of the Chantry's god.
"They are weak, Morrigan." That was Flemeth's lesson, "In this world only the strong survive."
ooo
Strength. She'd thought she'd known what that was. Foolish, foolish girl.
Strength was a single, frail old woman standing between the helpless and death.
She'd thought of Wynne in that moment in the Fade where Flemeth had tested her, and Morrigan was still uncertain if she had passed. She could only be certain that she would make that choice again, no matter how many times she had to.
Strength was a woman ready to die to protect those she cared for.
And strength was looking at the lessons you had been taught all your life and walking away from them.
Morrigan stood up and put her book away in her pack.
"Come along, Kieran. Bring what you have found and we shall discuss their properties as we travel."
Morrigan placed one hand against the tree and bowed her head.
When the end comes, I will go gladly to my rest, proud of my achievements.
She pictured a girl, her dark hair full of feathers and twigs, her face burning with shame as her mother's words hit her again and again, watching the mirror shatter into pieces, learning harsh lessons until she believed they were true.
And she pictured a girl in the robes of an apprentice, her arms full of books and her head full of theories; and another old woman whose words had never stung and broken.
And she wondered which path she would've taken had she been offered the choice.
Very quietly, she began to whisper: "hahren na melana sahlin. Emma ir abelas. Souver'inan isala hamin. Vhenan him dor'felas, in uthenera na revas. Vir sulahn'nehn, vir dirthera. Vir samahl la numin, vir lath sa'vunin."
It seemed fitting, after what she had learnt of her mother.
"If you expected me to sing that for you like that fool Leliana then you are sorely mistaken."
A pause. She took her hand away from the tree, and picked up her cloak and pack. She could see Kieran making his way over to her. Soon they would leave, Andoral's Reach just another memory of a place they had been.
"Farewell, Senior Enchanter Wynne."
There was nothing more she felt she could say.