Until that day, the Blight had been a thing of history. It was something to talk about and compare bad things to in moment of frustration. His family hadn't believed that it was a true Blight, but an uprising of darkspwan that could be put down with an aptly applied amount of force. Worry had been present of course. They hadn't seen this sort of darkspwan behavior in generations, and that was certainly cause for concern, but that served as little to prepare Aedan for what he saw as they came closer to Lothering.

It was as if the sun decided not to shine on this section of the world, clouds blanketing the sky and turning everything an ashy color. Dead animals and people littered the sides of the roads, the stink of corpses rising and fouling the air. People with dead looks in their eyes walked these roads, stragglers that had waited too long to flee from Lothering, or perhaps had thought that there was nowhere else to go. Funny how a rampaging horde of mindless killing beasts changed people's minds.

They heard stories as they walked from those that would speak of the horrors that they saw in Lothering. More than once they bore witness as someone died as the Taint or other illnesses took them. Solona had gone very pale in the face of such death, her blue eyes seeming to take up the majority of her face as she looked around at all of the suffering present on this road. Aedan simply looked ahead, his eyes glossing over the death that surrounded them. He felt numb to the effects that Solona was suffering from, having seen mass death with his own eyes already, had participated in adding more bodies to the pile wrought of treachery.

He wanted to get far away from this stretch of road as he could before night fell. It wouldn't do at all to be caught directly in the path of the growing Horde, and Solona seemed to be of the same mind, walking a little faster than she normally did. They had just barely passed the turnoff to head toward Lothering when they finally came across the darkspwan.

Their appearance started off as a scream and the startled cry of frightened mules. Panic broke out in those that they had been traveling with as part of the shuffling mass of refugees, more screams erupting all around as people simply picked up and started running. They were harried from every side, pushed by bodies too terrified for manners and were swept along with the tide.

"Aedan!" Solona called, getting separated from his side by the mass of shoving people fleeing for their lives. Keran barked a warning, sticking close to his master's side in the press of bodies, nipping at ankles as they passed by his face.

Then the darkspwan caught up.

Legend had it that the darkspwan were human once, magisters from the glory days of the Tevinter Imperium who had tried to touch the face of the Maker and failed. They resembled no humans now. They were warped and twisted beings, their skin an ugly combination of grey and green. Their flesh seemed to be decaying around them even as they breathed and fought, black blood dripping from open festering wounds, lips pulled back to reveal a skeletal smile, lidless eyes that revealed only a need to destroy and maim. Half were the size of humans, the Hurlocks, the other half looking more closely resembled to dwarves, the Genlocks. With weapons lifted and blood stained armor clattering, they seemed to rush from everywhere in their mad need to kill.

A handful of the creatures tore through any who weren't fast enough to escape their grip, bringing with them the stench of death and decay. A few men stopped running and turned to face the threat in an effort to save their families, but were cut down quickly.

"Maker preserve us." Aedan breathed, turning toward the threat. Solona was closer to the band of darkspwan than he was, left behind by the fleeing citizens. Already she was casting a spell, light gathering around her as she weaved the magic until a fireball sprung to life from seemingly thin air. She flung it at the charging line of darkspwan and those that didn't scatter were thrown from their feet, their bodies alight with fire. They screamed in rage and pain, and those that weren't on the ground charged at the lone mage.

Keran barked and ran ahead of his master, Aedan unsheathing his sword and pulling his shield over his arm as he ran to Solona's side. An arc of ice flew out in front of her, freezing the closest darkspwan solid. Close on the heels of the spell, Aedan lashed out with his shield, ramming it into the chest of the nearest darkspwan who simply shattered to pieces and scattered across the road. He stabbed one of the shorter ones clean through the chest and another lost its head to his blade, crunching wetly when it hit the ground.

Those that hadn't been felled in the initial wave ran around the ice, and Solona cried out when one got a little too close for comfort, spitting and hissing in battle rage. Fire left her fingertips in a searing wave and the Darkspwan recoiled from the heat, a couple of them having been lit on fire. One managed to avoid the flames however and came at the mage swinging, scoring a hit on her arm with its notched blade, and wrenching a scream of pain from Solona. She jumped into action, swinging her staff and it collided with the darkspwan's head, felling the creature. A burst of magic left her staff, and the creature's head simply seemed to explode from the power.

Aedan was splattered with dark blood, his sword absolutely covered with the stuff and his shield bearing a few new dents and scratches from blocking swords and bashing in heads. Keran had felled a few darkspawn at his side, attacking from the ankles and dragging a few to the ground where they were easily dispatched by Aedan's sword. The darkspawn quit coming eventually, the forward moving party taken care of between the two and the others that had rose up to defend their families.

He didn't dare sheathe his sword, worried that there might be more lurking nearby. Turning, he saw Solona heaving heavy breaths, clutching her arm tightly and looking drained. It occurred to him then that aside from running from Templars, she had probably never seen real battle before. "How hurt are you?"

"I- I don't know." Solona replied honestly, and turned so that Aedan could get a look at the wound on her right arm. Blood was gushing out from around her fingers as she tried to keep the wound closed, a long tear in the sleeve of her mage robes revealing the long wound that had been carved into her skin.

"We need to get that patched up right away." Looking around quickly, Aedan made sure that there was no more darkspawn coming down on them immediately then shrugged off his pack, laying down his shield. He found what he was looking for quick enough, holding the bandages gingerly to try and not get darkspawn blood all over them. "Hold out your arm." Solona complied, wincing as she did so, and gave a little cry when Aedan tore what was remaining of her sleeve clean off. He went to work quickly, binding the wound tightly with the bandage. The white fabric was quickly turning crimson, but at least it would help to stop the flow of blood. "There, that should hold you together for now."

Bending down, he grabbed his shield and pack quickly and pointed in the direction they had been heading with the tip of his sword. "Get moving. I'd rather not stick around to find out if there are more hanging around." Solona only nodded, and with a firm grip on her staff in her uninjured hand she followed Aedan, nearly having to jog to keep up with his much longer stride.

-0-0-0-

They kept going until the darkness made them stop, and by then they had left behind the stench of darkspawn, far away from Lothering and once again among refugees that didn't look quite so downtrodden. Aedan set up camp by himself, Solona being absorbed in the task of trying to concoct something to put on her wound. She'd developed a fever, and though it didn't look like she was Tainted, the wound was certainly infected with something else of a devious nature.

While looking for firewood, Solona had instructed him to look for Elfroot, describing the broad leafy plant before he ventured out into the forest. By the time he got back she had stripped off her outermost layer of clothes and was examining her arm with a frown. "Did you find any?"

"I think." Aedan let the pile of wood drop on the ground and walked to Solona's side, crouching next to her and producing a fist full of plant matter. The mage took it, picking through the gathered bits and keeping a few stalks that had leaves nearly as big as her hand on it, setting them aside.

"This should do. Thank you." She tried unwrapping the bandage single handedly, and after a couple of clumsy attempts Aedan pulled off his armored gloves and helped out, unwinding the brown and red stained fabric from her arm. The gash had stopped bleeding, but it was an angry red color tinged with blue and yellow around the edges where the flesh had bruised. He heard Solona hiss at the look of it, a groan issuing from her throat as well as a few curses.

"That's a prize winner right there." Aedan said, walking to where he'd dropped his pack earlier and rummaged around inside, looking for a second set of bandages. "If you were in the barracks, you could make up some fantastic tale about how you got that one and gloat to everyone else in earshot."

Solona stared hard at him, trying to figure out if he was serious or not apparently. She seemed to be doing that a lot, like she expected him to be constantly pulling the wool over her eyes. "Men are strange beasts." A small chuckle escaped her, and she started pulling leaves off the plants that she had set aside, gathering them in her lap. "How anybody could be impressed by bodily harm is beyond me. It seems like a waste of blood."

"Well, I suppose it was too much to ask a woman to understand." Aedan replied quickly, receiving a spite filled glare from the mage. "But you did well today, all things considered. No missing fingers, and you've still got your head." Again he knelt at her side, unraveling the bundle of bandages, ready to help her put it back on since she wouldn't be able to do it herself. "Some more training with that staff and maybe you'll come away from the next battle unscathed."

Solona silently placed a few of the leaves over her wound, pressing the plants against her skin with a pained expression on her face. "How you can joke about this I'll never understand." She murmured, looking up at him once then holding out her arm to be wrapped when she was done pressing the Elfroot leaves into the wound.

Aedan began patching her up again, keeping the bandage tight as he wound the fabric down her arm. "I've never quite seen it done like this before. Isn't it normally in liquid version before you try and apply it?"

"It would be." She gritted out through clenched teeth, watching with a sort of morbid interest as her wound disappeared under the bandage. "But I don't exactly have the resources to be making a potion. No distiller, no flasks, nor mortar or a pestle. So, you sometimes have to make due with what you've got." She flexed her fingers when he was done, lifting her arm slightly to test his handy work, and was apparently satisfied. "Even in its raw form, Elfroot is very useful. I should be feeling better by morning. Sorry I couldn't help with camp tonight."

Aedan waved off her apology, sitting fully next to her and started the long process of removing his armor, stacking the metal next to him as it came off. "What else do you know how to do? Other than setting darkspawn on fire, I mean."

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that." Solona replied with a small smile, taking two leaves that she had left sitting in her lap and chewed on them, swallowing after a little while. "I know a bit of herbalism which seems that it'll come in most handy if I keep being the target of every rogue killer that slips past you in battle. And I'm fairly good at sewing. You do your own repairs as an apprentice in the Circle, and let me tell you there was certainly a lot to repair! Especially when they were trying to teach us how to light fires." She giggled at the memory, drawing her knees up to her chest and staring at the fire with an absent look, locking her hands around her shins.

"It seems like you had fun learning there." Solona gave him a sideways glance, waiting for the next question that would inevitably follow. Aedan didn't disappoint. "Why would you want to leave so badly? At risk of death upon capture?"

A long sigh escaped the mage, and Solona spent a silent moment watching the fire. "I don't think you'd understand."

"Of course I won't understand if you don't explain." Side-stepping the question made Aedan more curious, and he decided to see if he could get her to open up a bit. "They tell stories about the Circle, you know. They say that there's a great tentacle beast lurking in the depths of Lake Calenhad. A result of potions being dumped into the lake from failed experiments, and that the rocks nearest the tower glow at night."

Solona laughed at the ridiculous tale, unable to help but smile at the rumor. "Well, I don't know about a tentacle beast, but I wouldn't want to go swimming in there. It's covered in terrible green floating stuff in the summers. It stinks the whole lake up, you know, especially on a hot day." Aedan still had that curious look on his face, like a boy that wanted a story, and so with a sigh she conceded, letting go of her legs and sitting cross-legged.

"I can't say that I was mistreated in the Circle, but I was one of the lucky ones. New Templars fresh from the Chantry are hard on mages, and doing anything to raise suspicion would result in a warning from them… usually physical. But it was better than being made Tranquil or executed, so we kept silent about the abuse, scared of what would happen if we reported the Templars to the Knight-Commander. Some of the older knights knew what they could get away with too, and would prey on the younger apprentices. Many girls who came to the circle around the same time as me were… well, I'm sure you can imagine." Her hands balled in her lap, anger flashing over her face at the recalled memory of listening on those lonely nights in the Apprentice quarters as others were taken out of the common room and dragged who-knew-where for 'punishment'. How the Templars claimed to be hands of the Maker when they committed such atrocities…

"There's no written rule about having relationships with Templars or other mages, but you'd think there was from the way that they acted. Of course that didn't stop us. It was a form of rebellion sort of, a couple of apprentice mages sneaking away to kiss in broom closets under our guardian's noses. But if you came to be with child… that was a whole different matter." Solona took a deep breath letting her eyes close as she recalled the memory of the one time she'd known a mage who'd gotten pregnant. "There was a girl a few years older than I was who slept a couple of bunks from me. She and another apprentice were very serious about each other, madly in love and they went to all sorts of lengths to hide it from the Templars. But there was no hiding it when her belly started showing in earnest. She was taken away the day that she gave birth and returned a week later without her child. Her lover had also gone missing around that time, and nobody knew where he'd gone. She wept every night for nearly a month, and then finally one morning she was found dead in her bed, the floor crimson with her blood. She'd slit her wrists in the night, unable to take the pain of separation from her love and child any longer. That stopped all the romantic dalliances for near a half year afterwards."

"That's… that's truly awful…" Aedan murmured. He'd gotten all of his armor off and was listening to her story intently, hunched over with his forearms resting on his raised knees, grey eyes wandering over her face to take in every detail as she told her tale. "Where did they take the child?"

"Nobody knows." Solona replied quietly. "I think that children born of mages are raised in the Chantry. If they start showing mage sign, I suppose that they're put in a Circle, and if not… Well, they probably become Templars or a servant of the Maker. That's what I assume. They don't let you have family when you're taken into the Circle. They have a file on your relatives that you can inquire about. My family name is Amell, and apparently I've a mother and a father, and they came from the Free Marches. I was very young when I was taken to the Ferelden Circle, so I barely remember what they look like. If they cared that I was imprisoned in the Circle, then they never showed it, or else the Chantry forbade trying to contact me. I never got letters and they never visited me. I made family from within the Circle. The fellow apprentices were my brothers and sisters, the Enchanters mothers and fathers, and the First Enchanter was like a grandfather to us all. He did his best to keep the Templars decent."

"It sounds very… lonely."

"Indeed, it was a very lonely existence, but we made it work." She shrugged, meeting Aedan's concerned gaze with a nonchalant one of her own. But suddenly she grinned, recalling an important detail that was sure to keep things from getting too depressing. "I did have a lover for a short while. A Templar."

The look on Aedan's face was priceless. "What?"

She couldn't keep the grin off her face, straightening up a little bit for this portion of her tale. "Yes. There was one new Templar in the Circle who wasn't precisely like the rest. He was shy, almost nervous with his duties, and stammered around girls. Not at all like his fellows who were all Chant and Divinity and hogwash. There was some innocence about him, and I suppose that I felt like I should corrupt it. I wanted revenge for all of the wrongs that my fellow apprentices had suffered, what better way than to enter into a forbidden romance with a Templar?

"It was slow at first. He didn't trust me of course seeing as I was a mage and female, which meant that he got tongue tied every time I walked past or so much as looked in his general direction. But slowly I started winning him over. He became more caring in my presence, looked after me a bit when the other Templars started getting rowdy after being cooped up in the tower for too long. He was sweet and kind, idealistic even, and truly believed that he was helping to do the right thing. Before I knew it, I had started to loose my own game, and I was falling in love with him too by the end of it. We had to meet in secret of course, and he wasn't always stationed in the Circle. But when he came back from whatever duty called him to the outside he was more than eager to be in my arms again. Poor boy. I probably broke his heart when he heard that I'd escaped."

For a while Aedan simply stared at her, his mouth hanging ajar slightly until she reached over and pushed it shut. "You'll catch flies that way, you know."

He frowned at the reprimand and recoiled from her touch, though made no move to get up and flee from her. "Did you use that eye magic on him too?"

Solona cocked her head to the side. "Eye magic?"

"Yes, you used it on me in Redcliffe." The mage still looked confused, so Aedan elaborated, feeling extremely foolish for having to do so. "You looked up at me and I felt paralyzed, like I couldn't move."

A devious smile came to Solona's face, one that Aedan decided that he didn't like at all. "Women do not have to be mages to have the ability to awe a man into stillness."

He could feel his cheeks redden slightly, though stubbornly didn't turn from her, feeling like he'd been wronged somehow. "Uh huh, I'm going to believe that never. Keep your mage secrets if it's so important to you."

"Oh! Have I made you angry?" Though feigning concern, there was a large grin on Solona's face that rather ruined the façade quite thoroughly. "Or perhaps you're embarrassed because I've caught you lusting after the forbidden fruit as well…?"

Aggravated, Aedan threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "This is what I get for recruiting a female apostate to my cause. Thank you for the warning Maker, I'll be more careful next time."

Solona giggled to herself, content that she put the normally stoic Aedan off his game. "But what about you? You must have a past from before you started seeking revenge?"

Immediately the air of friendly camaraderie between the two fell, and Aedan pointedly looked anywhere but at her face. "Perhaps another night." Without another word he walked over to his place on the opposite side of the fire and lay down for the night, leaving Solona to stare after him with worry in her gaze and twisting her signet ring.

A/N:Okay, seriously, did anybody else get tired of being told "You wouldn't understand" in their play through? Srsly.

Dalish: You wouldn't understand why we can't go fight werewolves and expose our midriffs.
Mages: You wouldn't understand why we hate Templars.
Templars: You wouldn't understand why we hate Mages.
Dwarves: You wouldn't understand why we build such impressively large doors.
Kolgrim: You wouldn't understand why we worship a dragon.

Eff that. The fools just know that anything they tell you will sound stupid, and they're scared to have their opinions shattered by a more reasonable mind.

Anyway, description of the life inside the Circle was inspired by Anders' constantly whining and moaning. And highschool. Because when you lock a bunch of kids up together and tell them to play nice, things inevitably get ugly. Toss in some sexually frustrated men in armor, and you have yourself a mess. Mystery Templar Lover will remain unnamed, because I'm that devious D

PS: I want to thank everyone that's jumped on board so far for this story! I appreciate those of you who have decided to add this to your alert lists; it makes my heart warm to see the messages pop up in my e-mail. Hopefully, this story will prove to be worth your time, and I look forward to attempting to entertain you all.