Amell does not get heartbroken.

She's seen it in other people, of course. Her fellow mages were always involved with each other in some way or another, and she's seen them cry into their pillows and write in poorly hidden journals about their 'burning feeling of loss'. She's comforted some of them peripherally, not stopping to invest too much time in them, of course. They had years, their whole lives, to get invested in each other.

After all, there was no escaping the Circle.

The Tower.

Your own mage blood.

You could slice the back of your hand up a lot, like she did. You could let blood as often as you wanted, and maybe the old blood would do some good (it does some good, you use the power for healing spells on occasion), and maybe the new blood that grew in its place would make you better. She had theories.

But she'd never been heartbroken.

To some degree, Amell thinks it might be akin to the feeling she gets when she steps back into the Tower. There's the smell of burning flesh, and cold metal. It's a smell she's become all too familiar with since leaving.

The smell of war.

The sight of so many templars in once place after being so free from them makes her queasy.

Greagoir is broken. He is a man broken. The stress of the attack shows in every blood smeared stain of his face. He was a man designed to kill mages and end abominations, but not so many. Not all at once. Not children.

She offers help, and he takes it. Because he is broken and down to his last few men and doesn't know what else to do.

When the templars close the doors behind with them a screeching thump, she nearly gets sick to her stomach. Not being trapped in here. Not again.

Sten shrugs in his armor, getting used to the new red steel plates. "In accordance with the Qun, mages in Serrahon have their tongues cut out. If this Tower had followed such practices, this could have been prevented."

"Could you be ANY more insensitive?" Alistair asks disbelievingly.

Duncan barks and runs around with a discarded piece of cloth hanging from his maw.

"I wouldn't mind." Amell tempers her gags at the smell of the bodies splayed in the corridors. "I don't find talking very useful, anyway."

There are some bodies still clinging to bedposts. Alistair looks like he wants to say something, but doesn't. She's fought abominations in the wild, but not many. The come in hordes.

Wynne is the same white haired picture of serenity, though her face is wrinkled with concern. She tells Duncan to wait with the other mages and the children, thinking a mabari war dog that could rip throats out from abominations and cuddle with the frightened children ideal for the situation.

There are memories.

They float through the stench and soot and debris like twisted, malignant things. She saw them through a lens made of blood and sadness.

The fellow blood mage, she lets escape. Blood magic has wrought this mess, and a thirst for power.

Blood magic will fix it.

She slices and slices and slices, her hand pouring, and after a particularly hard battle she collapses to her knees and doesn't cover her hand quickly enough with her sleeve. Alistair helps her up and sees it, sees the red and the way the cut is now nigh permanent, sees the layers of scar tissue broken into over and over and over.

He starts asking questions, hoarsely. A sting of unending questions. Who could she stand it? How did she hide it this long from him? Why did she choose to be one?

"You were a blind rat if you did not see it." Sten grunts and wipes the blood from his sword on a nearby statue of Andraste (rather ironically, Amell notes despite her fatigued haze). Alistair bristles, ready to yell, but the look in Wynne's eyes quiets him and he looks around at all the bodies as if sensing that all his opposition is out of place.

"We should move." Amell croaks, downing a health poultice Wynne hands her. "I can sense a heavy fade presence beyond this door."

As they walk there are a line of women burnt into the wall. The same age as Amell. She knows their faces, even in death.

This nearly breaks her. She collapses to her knees and drops her staff (a mage never drops her staff. You are to hold your staff until you die, but in a way she has). She grew up with them. She knew the shape of their smiles. She was never good friends without anyone, but who really was good friends with their family?

She realizes, a little too late, that she left more behind in the Circle than her hate for it.

Sloth is slow, and convincing, like heavy honey and cream.

The blackness of sleep, of rest, is nice.

It is like dying.

Duncan, the real Duncan, greets her with open arms, and it is then she knows something is wrong. Duncan is guarded, smart. Duncan never gave hugs.

And she finds Niall, who she always looked up to as a good mage and a good man, and she transforms into many people, many beasts, And she saves Wynne from her guilt, and Sten from his guilt, and she saves Alistair from his family.

The happy smile - the great, buttery, beautiful smile on his face - almost convinces her to leave him. She would miss him, of course, but he looks happier than any trip to the Wonders of Thedas could ever make. Happier than if Duncan himself came back from the dead.

And she breaks his heart and saves him from himself all in three seconds.

In a way, she thinks, it's poetic. She's never liked poetry, or books at all, really. She'd rather do things instead of read about them, because she is curious and annoying in that regard, but this trip to the Fade is poetic.

Sloth is trying to help them. Ease their suffering.

She only kills him because she has a Blight to stop.

And then she meets Cullen.

Sweet, coppery-haired Cullen is now deformed by fear, loathing, fatigue, and hate. He screams at her, admits that the demons can torture him very effectively with images of her, images of her with her mage robe half off, half down –

She tries to talk to him softly, tries to make her voice as convincing as possible. She kneels down and presses her hands to the barrier and cries with him, for them, for their lost innocence, for the world facing the Blight, facing death, facing loss.

Yes, she thinks. This is heartbreak.

Uldred gets the brunt of her fury. Niall's litany saves them, saves many mages. Saves them all in a way she never thought possible – Irving and Greagoir smile at each other even though the First Enchanter is wheezing and even though the Knight Commander is shaking on legs far too tired to stand anymore.

They are smiling for a split second at each other.

Templars bury mages. Mages bury templars. Templars pray for mages and their safe passage into the afterlife. Mages bring the weary templars food.

Alistair stops her in camp, before she can head to the small lake to bathe.

"I...I'm sorry."

For yelling, he thinks. For just standing by as you cried in the Tower. For knowing nothing about you. For being jealous of a broken templar with coppery hair in middle of a crisis.

He doesn't say the last bit, of course.

She smiles, smeared with dirt and sweat and blood over her collarbone.

"It's okay. There's still lots to do, you know?"

He nods, and lets out a breath that is relieved, and bows out and excuses himself and thumbs the rose he picked from Lothering.

It's red, bright red, and he asks Wynne to enchant it so it never dies.

He wonders about a lot of things. The treaties, their plans and tactics, the great overgrown lizard flying about and making a mess of things...but never about her. He doesn't wonder about her.

He just feels happy.