PROLOGUE

WHY WAS I STILL HERE?

I lost count of how many times I'd asked myself that question that faithful day at Ostagar. I shouldn't be alive, I deserved to be dead for what I'd done to Jowan, how I'd betrayed him and in my heartbroken fury, I'd vowed to show him of love's blackened nature. I probably cost him his life. And I deserved to share his fate.

Blood magic, the mere thought of it made me cringe in ways that I thought only imminent death could. Using your, or another's, life force to create monstrous things that should have only existed in terrible legend was a foreign concept to my mind. I'd hoped that it was just a legend that the Chantry had cooked up to keep us in line… I was wrong.

Now I was, not only an escapee to the Circle of Magii – an apostate – I was a known accomplice to a blood mage that had killed four Templars, destroyed his phylactery and fled the Circle all in a few hours' time. The Chantry hated me.

In actuality, my mere existence was despised by all; everything that was loathed the most rolled into one convenient package.

I was an elf, a knife-ear, a should be slave. I had no idea where I'd even hailed from, the Circle having taken me away from my family so young, I had no recollection of a life outside of the Tower. My pointed ears and slightly longer face was all that stood between me and a somewhat normal existence outside the walls of my school. I'd never really known that my kind were so despised by some until I'd traveled here and tried to buy some food at the market and the farmer tried to flag down a guard to report me as a run-away slave. Sometimes, if I wore my hair a certain way, and stood a bit taller, people would mistake me for a young human, as I did now.

Then, there was the lyrium that ran through my veins.

It wasn't lyrium, exactly, that gave me my powers, but that my connection to the Fade – the land of spirits and dreams – that allowed me to cast spells. However, my connection seemed to be just a bit stronger than the Templars liked, and I was constantly watched at the Circle. Mages were feared, to put it lightly. Entire volumes were written on the dangers of a mage, an order of specially designed soldiers created to keep us under the Chantry's thumb and, finally, a castle – built by the late King Calenhad – was dedicated to the mages to keep them and general society away from each other.

A malifecarum accomplice. An apostate. An elf.

Perhaps, if fate was kinder, I would be dead already.

But that was not her plan.