When Merrill arrived to lend her promised aid to Anders' clinic, the line of sick and injured had spread even as far as the area leading up to the clinic proper, and the antechamber inside away from where the actual Healing took place was crammed full of chaos. Harried-looking aides were trying to sort people by urgency. It was hard to tell which could be diagnosed and treated by conventional medicine and which were true emergencies requiring the aid of a full Healer in all the ruckus. One of the clinic's aides recognized Merrill (or at least her staff) and allowed her to go through to the clinic proper where Anders worked. When she poked her head inside, she saw Anders glowing blue-white with his hands molding spirit-magic to Heal a patient lying on the table in the room. A long line of other patients waited for him when he was done.
"Anders?" Merrill called softly, not wanting to break his concentration and possibly harm the patient.
"Hm? he murmured absently, his attention clearly focused on his patient.
"Ive come to help... what do you need me to do?" she asked.
"Help with the patients," he replied, his tone indicating he was busy and did not wish to be disturbed.
Her brow furrowed in puzzlement. Help how? That wasn't very specific.
:Well, he did say I could learn Healing from him,: Merrill thought.
She very much doubted, however, that he meant for her to just start flinging magic about. Marethari had always made her watch and observe carefully a new form of magic for several days if not weeks so she came to a full and natural understanding of the method and environment of a spell before her Keeper would truly teaching it to her. He probably meant for Merrill to observe first. Well, she could do that.
:In fact, I can even help with the patients a little bit. I might not be a Healer, but I still know how to diagnose a large number of sicknesses just fine. Marethari taught me how when I lived in the Clan. I can at least start sorting all of this lot here, so Anders has an easier time with his duty!:
Merrill had next to no experience with spirit-healing, but she was a blood mage. It as true that blood magic had a large amount of negative applications, but there were some positives. Many, many, many sicknesses that existed were carried in the blood and that was how it attacked the body. She needn't even use active blood magic to diagnose a condition, diagnosis of the blood was a passive effect and so it shouldn't raise any alarm bells.
Merrill nodded firmly to herself. In some cases it was simply easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, as the Shem saying went. The people who were here came because they needed help and healing but medicine was as esoteric to them as magic, all they knew was that something was wrong and they needed some way to fix it. Merrill would be doing a tremendous service to the Healer if she could weed out those cases which were true emergencies from those who would be fine with a simple drought and a check up the following morning. Plus, she could use her diagnostic ability to give Anders a headstart by not having him waste time figuring out what was wrong before he went after it.
:Keeper Marethari always said that if one is going to assume authority, then is is best to act as though one simply has an unquestioned right to it.:
She had cautioned her young apprentice about the dangers of appearing too weak as a leader, leading to the possibility that those she would lead would not respect her command. Her advice about posture and expression came back to Merrill, and so she took a deep breath, straightened her spine, fixed her face in an approximation of Marethari at her sternest and most commanding, then turned on her heel and marched right back out to the waiting room like a woman on a mission. Merrill picked the first sick-looking patient she saw, marched right up to him, and held out her hand in a peremptory gesture.
"Your hand please," she said with what she hoped was firm politeness, with an aura hat said she was making it a request but it was one she expected to be obeyed.
The man, slumped down and riddled with what looked like pox scars, unthinkingly proffered his hand. Merrill grasped it firmly, and before he could question her (or she could question herself) she poked him with a long needle on the tip of his finger. She squeezed firmly, and a single drop of blood welled up on the tip of his finger. Merrill ignored the soft, pulsing call of its power, concentrating instead on decoding the living mysteries contained within it.
She sensed the almost crystalline structure at its core, the esoteric template within that made up all that the man before her was; tall, fair, human, dark-eyed, light-haired, born with a slight breathing problem. She ignored the codex and concentrated instead of the foreign matter darting and squirming within his blood. She could sense an old, latent strain of illness, one that had been contracted and fought off long ago, dormant in his blood, but dismissed it quickly as being on no relevancy to his current condition. The cause for concern, she noted a bare moment later, was what she read as poison at first. Then her instinctive blood-sense increased, granting her greater sensitivity, and she came to understand that the poison was one that he was regularly exposed to but it was not one that was entirely harmful... she read the symptoms that the "poison" had on his body, the hallucinogenic properties, the general feeling of well-being, the addictive qualities.
:Oh!: she realized a moment later with a feeling of consternation. :This man is taking drugs!:
A momentary closer "look" into the structure of the latest poison compared to earlier poisonings revealed that the structure of its make up was slightly different. A bad batch most likely.
She was not trained as a Healer, and it was not her place to usurp Anders authority within his own clinic. It would be the same as Merrill walking into the camp of another Clan without announcing herself and pretending to be Keeper. She could however, make his task a little easier, she was there to help after all. Merrill summoned up a simple spell she knew of that would leave a "smear" of light from her fingertip and wrote on his forehead. She detailed the nature of the drug the Shem was using and why he was sick. She thought about reccommending that he be weaned away from his addiction but didn't want to usurp even the smallest measure of Anders authority within his own clinic; he was the Keeper and she was the First, it was her place to support him, not to take over his command. She left the diagnosis as it was and moved on to the next patient.
She found herself examining a young female surface dwarf, which was odd for they were normally a hardy people. The patient was sun-struck, Merrill could tell that without needing to draw any blood. Still, out of fairness, she checked her eyes and looked in her ears and searched out other obvious places that symptoms of smething else might hide and only then did she wrote her diagnosis on the forehead of the girl before she moved on.
The next person she came across was a small female human child; pale, shaking and sweating. Merrill poked her with the needle right away and discovered a virulent sickness in her blood, one that was hard to see and decode easily from the drop of blood. It was a lot like trying to read very, very fine print; the information was there but it was so compact that it was difficult to understand. Fortunately, Merrill had a bit of a solution. The time she had spent studying the Eluvian and trying to restore it had not been without merit; she might not have unlocked all of its secrets but she had gleaned some useful information from it. If she couldn't see the blood-code easily with her own senses, she needed a way to magnify things for a better look.
:I need a mirror, and a source of light,: she thought.
Merrill had a small compact mirror that Isabella had given her, insisting that a beautiful woman should never be without a way to tell herself that she was beautiful. Merrill kept it as a sun-signal and a sign of friendship. There was Anders' lantern nearby.
"Clear a path!" she commanded the patients loitering in the waiting area.
She pulled the child along behind her and stopped directly before the lantern. She pulled the mirror from an inner pocket and closed her eyes, summoning the complex spell in her mind. It used the air and light-reflection to create a magically enlarged copy of whatever was on the surface of the mirror written in light in the air before the caster. The surface of Merrill's mirror glowed softly in her hand, a misty nimbus hanging in the air over its surface when she brought it into the circle of light created by the lantern. She pushed the drop of blood from the child's finger on the surface of the mirror and concentrated hard, manipulating the spell. The image in the air expanded showing all of te complex little "bits" that was what blood was made of, then Merrill manipulated the spell, tightening its field of vision, honing in on the problem area so she coud come to a faster understanding of what was going on inside of her. Her blood looked like a battlefield; large, blobby foreign bits were attacking disc-shaped red bits with sickle shaped white bits defending the red bits and fighting off the blobby foreign bits.
:Ah! I recognize this one,: Merrill thought with a feeling of relief.
It was, thankfully, treatable, but conventional ingredients for it were expensive because many of them were imported. Merrill knew of a recipe that used elfroot and a few other herbs that could be grown with relative ease, but she wasn't certain how it would work on a human, much less a child. Still, she wrote out on the childs forehead what her sickness was, how far along it was, how much time she likely had before the next phase, and what the known cures were (though privately she trusted that Anders was a more than good enough Healer to know that). She patted the child's hand and wiped her mirror clean, readying it for the next diagnosis. It was easier to use the mirror to magnify the blood for a closer look rather than "squint" at it (magically speaking). Additionally, there was far less chance she'd miss something important.
The two harried-looking assistants, seeing that she was doing some sort of arcane magical skill with the patients, naturally thought that Anders had brought her in to help. While technically this was true, he had invited her to assist him, he hadn't actually assigned her any duties yet, being too busy saving a person's life at the time. Still, Merrill didn't have to actually use healing magic to help out, accurate diagnosis, her Keeper had once told her, was often even more important than trying to cure the patient. If it was something obvious and non-life threatening, she could shuffle them to the side to be treated by conventional medicine instead of taxing a Healer's valuable magical reserves on something not very important. The more serious cases she could pull to one side for Anders to look at once he was finished with the true emergencies. She had performed the same function for Marethari on more than one occasion as part of her duties as First for the Clan so she was confident in her ability to do this much at least.
As Merrill worked her way through the waiting room she saw that matters at the clinic were not as bad as she had originally thought they were based on her walking into the waiting room and seeing a mass of people smelling of sickness and injury. There were a number of people (not, unfortunately, a majority, but a number of people) that were easy to tell what was wrong with them just by looking at them; broken leg, crushed hand, gash to the side and other obvious reasons for them to be seeking a Healer. There were cases where Merrill could plainly see that something was wrong when she looked at a magnified drop of their blood, but she lacked the experience to recognize what it was, so she simply wrote out the symptoms and her observations of the behavior of their blood and left it to the trained Healer to sort out.
It was hours later, when even Anders had to be approaching the limits of what he could endure to spend magically, when the two women working a the clinic who seemed to perform a combination of patient-sorter and door-guardian called a halt to incoming cases except for true, life-threatening emergencies. Merrill realized then that she'd been there all day and hadn't eaten anything. The eldest of the women manning the clinic offered Merrill meal of plain bread gone slightly stale and cheese. Merrill was too hungry to be choosy by this point and tore into it. She hadn't really been using much magic, but the patients had run her off her feet nonetheless.
"Merrill," Anders called from back in his clinic.
His tone was surprisingly brusque and Merrill hoped it was because he was tired and not that he was upset with her for some reason. Had she overstepped herself somehow? She hoped not.
"Coming!" Merrill called back around her mouthful of food. She hastily got back on her feet and walked through the doors into the clinic proper, trying not to feel like a da'len called before the Hahren for some infraction or other.
"I thought I said no blood magic," he said tiredly upon seeing her. "I only made one request and you couldn't even keep that one up. If word gets out that I'm harboring a blood mage in this clinic, everything I've worked for will be ruined!"
His tone, while weary was sharp with anger and he glowed a bit blue at the end. Merrill quailed a bit inside, upset that she had failed her teacher already on her very first day! Still, she had to say something in her defense because he didn't understand what she'd done, not really.
"It's not blood magic!" Merrill protested, distressed. "I never touched the power in any of the samples, I just read the code in the blood and looked at what the... uh... I don't know the words for them, the littlet living "bits" were doing to help me diagnose the illness so I could see if there wasn't anything I was missing. I was just trying to be thorough. Keeper Marethari and i used a similar skill when we treated Mahariel for the blight. The mirror I just used to magnify things so I could see them more clearly. If anything, mostly it was eluvian inan erathi."
Anders brow furrowed in puzzlement at the unfamiliar elven vocabulary, but he seemed willing to listen, which was good. He took a deep breath, clearly to calm himself and said severely.
"Okay. You say it's not blood magic, I suppose I will accept that because I know you don't lie, Merrill." He sighed. "But people see you pricking fingers and taking blood, and then clearly performing magic, what else would they think?"
"Oh,"Merrill said, feeling a bit put out. "Well, I suppose... I hadn't thought of that."
She was never going to get used to these Shem-nan and these peoples ridiculous terror of anything and everything magical! Granted, the Keepers didn't generally practice the art openly, but the Clan didn't fear them if they saw one or two minor spells being worked.
"I just wanted to be useful," she finished, apologetically.
"I know," Anders said tiredly. "Just... try and remember, that, even though they come here for magical Healing, they only do so out of necessity and not because they like magic."
Then Anders gave her a small tired smile.
"Reading the code of the blood? I've never heard of such a thing, and I've studied a lot of Healing magic. Why didn't you just use magic to diagnose them?"
"It's wasteful," Merrill replied. "And... Well... I don't know how to do it safely."
Anders raised his eyebrows at her, silently prompting an elaboration on her statement.
"From what I've read about Healin, a Healer must lower your own inner shields to commune with the spiritual energy of the patient's body. That can set up an uncontrolled empathic magical link between you and the person you're Healing if you have no training to prevent it. Marethari always warned me against trying it. She said that I was so innately sensitive and my nature already too given to self-sacrifice, that I was at too great a risk of loosing myself in the Healing and never coming out of it, and that I shouldn't attempt it without learning the proper precautions first."
"Your teacher wasn't wrong about that," Anders said with a certain dryness. "Still... what is it that you're doing? The reading the blood bits, is it blood magic?"
Merrill thought about it for a long moment, trying to think of a way to phrase it that wouldn't set off Anders' automatic wariness of anything that had the slightest tint of blood magery about it.
"I suppose an honest answer," she said reluctantly at last. "Is that in a strict definition, it has aspects of it. Yes, it requires a person's blood, and it can only be read by a mage but really that's it. Blood magic of the inimical sort, the sort most mages here in Kirkwall seem to be interested in, is all about using the life energy within the blood. Blood-reading ignores the magical life energy completely. In fact, that energy is superfluous, and not of any import at all. Blood-reading is a simple passive ability to read the tiny little bits that make up the blood, usually searching for some sort of foreign..." Merrill searched for a term and didn't have one. "Thing that's causing trouble."
There was a long moment of silence and Merrill looked anxiously at Anders, suddenly hoping that she hadn't offended his magey sensibilities, for his good opinion of her new teacher mattered to her.
"Huh." he said after a long silence. "That's... interesting."
"Interesting-good?" Merrill asked hopefully.
He hummed a bit, clearly thinking the matter over carefully before weighing judgement. That could have been the interference of Justice, who probably would have insisted on hearing a fair Trial.
"I can honestly say" he finally said after a long moment. "That I'd never thought of specializing in looking in the blood itself for the source of an illness. As a Healing mage I do know for a fact that many of the worst and most difficult diseases are carried, incubated in, and transmitted through blood, and poisons are almost always carried throughout the body via the veins. Actually, a number of modern medical practices in the Grand Imperial Hospice in Orlais concentrate on finding a way to neutralize these blood-borne pathogens without resorting to magic. Ordinary healers called chirurgens hope to make medicines and a set of medical practices that don't rely on magic available to the common sort who don't have access to Healers. They use the blood to try to diagnose the "humors"of the body. In some cases have met with success, though they've had to rely on magical implements that make it possible to see what they're trying to look at... well anyway, I can't entirely say that you're wrong on this count."
Merrill brightened.
"However," he added a moment later before she could celebrate. "I just can't have everyone see my clinic with a known mage running around collecting samples of blood from every person who walks through the door. It doesn't mater what you're actually doing or what you intentions are... people are going to assume the worst, and they won't believe you if you try to explain yourself once they've made up their minds."
"Oh..." Merrill deflated.
"I know living in the city where everyone's so afraid of what we are is an adjustment for you," he said gently. "Just try to be more aware of how magic is perceived here. Only the really dark scary things about magic are commonly known because the Chantry and the Templars go out of their way to sensationalize it, partly to serve as a waring but partly, in my opinion, to keep people in fear of it. For an average person with no background, magic means demons coming to eat your soul. It's very hard for them not to be afraid even when they know it's being used to help people. The blood-reading just hits too close to all the horror stories."
"I just don't see why they spend so much time trying to lock it away and seal it up," Merrill said, frustrated at the strange proudly ignorant attitude of the outsiders. "Our ancestors, the elvhen I mean, all had magic. For them it was as natural a part of life as breathing. Among the Dalish the mageborn are reared to be protectors and guides, we see ourselves as servants of the people. Why don't they just do that here? Why don't they just spend all that energy they put into trying to contain it into just trying to live with it?"
"If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be running a smuggling ring to free mages from the Circle," Anders joked tiredly. "All I can say is that people only know what they know, and magic, by its nature is sometimes unknowable. That scares them. The faith of the Chantry seems to claim that all things are knowable through the Maker-"
"But-" she protested.
"But I'm not going to argue who gods are real and whose are not," he forestalled her protest that his argument rested on the premise that the Shemlen Maker was a real deity and not something they'd made up to explain the world.
"I'm just telling you that people don't like things that are outside of their power and control," he finished. "And for the large majority of people magic is a force that is very much outside of their ability to understand or control. It exists in contradiction to Chantry doctrine of a being that is all-knowing and all powerful, by investing extraordinary power into the hands of ordinary mortals."
"Och," Merrill said, with what amounted to unusual skepticism from her. "The Dalish who have tried to understand the strange, contradictory doctrines of the Maker Cult. We've all come to the general consensus that the Chantry came up with this story for how the world and every single thing in it, from the Fade and the Spirits to the least little rock, came to be. Then they just fit everything else in around it any way they could, even if it doesn't make sense, instead of simply questioning the validity of their story."
"Well what about the Dalish and their gods?" Anders countered. "Just because that religion came first-"
"By thousands and thousands of years before human's existed," Merrill felt obliged to point out. Anders glared for the interruption.
"How do you know that your ancestors didn't just make your creation myth up as a way to explain what they couldn't explain?"
"Well..." Merrill said fairly, giving her honest consideration. "We don't, I suppose. That's probably why they call it faith. All I know is that I've never seen a Dalish use Mythal or Fallon'din or Dirthamen as an excuse to lock people up, or take away their property, or their liberties, or their lives."
"That could also be because the Dalish are among the oppressed minority," Anders said. "Believe me, things change when power gets involved."
"Now you sound like Fenris," Merrill said with a small smile.
"Then I think wed better cut the discussion short since we're neither of us theologians."
"Not true," Merrill replied honestly. "As the Keeper's heir, I am expected to preserve the knowledge and practice of ancient elven religious traditions too."
"So you're not only a mage, but a Chantry Sister as well? Or... you would have been, if you'd stayed with your Clan."
"These valla'sliin are not just for decoration" she said with a melancholy sigh. "And they aren't merely a social function either. I've heard my people described as being "beligerently devoted" to the original faith of the Elven people, and I cannot say that its not an accurate description. We take our faith so seriously in part because it's a core piece of culture that is being eroded away, and in many cases, forcibly stripped from our cultural identity. But that's neither here nor there I suppose. Anders?"
"Yes Merrill?"
"I know I came in the middle of things and you didn't have time to give me directions, but... did I help?"
Anders smiled his small smile that was both careworn and kind and said
"You did. I was surprised by just how much. There was a brief time in the Circle in Ferelden that the First Enchanter had me teaching a class of novices about the basics of my art, and when I thought about essentially getting a new apprentice to help out around here my mind automatically filled in with my time as a teacher then and I thought this was all going to be a lot more work."
He paused for a minute looking her over carefully.
"I have to admit, with all of your strange questions and the way you see the world in such an honest light, that I often forget that you've studied and been taught about magic for nearly all of your life."
"Well, yes," Merrill said. "And I do know a great deal of it, I suppose. However, I think in this case it would be a good idea for you to start your teaching by assuming that I know nothing of Healing and going from there. Shem magic is... very different from what I know. Our views and our ways of understanding even the nature of magic is almost nothing alike."
"A good point," he said. "Most nights after the clinic closes, I just toddle to my room, eat what I can find and collapse for a few hours of sleep if Justice doesn't start in on that Manifesto. Tonight though, since it doesn't require me actually using magic and I'm fagged out, we'll start with a lecture on the basics as taught in the Circles..."
He started with the four broadest categories of magic, and the four schools they were divided into and what those delineations generally meant with regards to the practice of magic. Merrill almost had to bite her togue to keep from iterrupting every other second, as his explanations did not sound at all like what she was accustomed to. She asked him instead about Healing magic in particular, hoping that zeroing in on a single subject would make more sense to her than all of the jarring differences.
Anders went on to explain to her what Spirit Healing was, and why it was so relatively rare even though it was sought after. Merrill didn't see what was so extraordinary about asking a good spirit for its help to aid other people, or why that might put her in danger. Anders reluctantly had to acknowledge that, in her case, perhaps it was not as great a worry as it would be otherwise. He cataloged and discussed the various types of Healing spells and how they worked and what they were generally used to treat. Her new teacher finished his lecture by giving her an arm full of magical tomes on magic basics and Spirit Healing. He commanded her to read them when she was done assisting him in the clinic, She was to write essays on themes and subjects that he would assign at a later date, and he explicitly forbade her from doing any Spirit summoning without him there to supervise.
Merrill left the clinic feeling tired but satisfied. Her life wasn't what she envisioned for herself but she felt in her heart that the Goddess had led her to this path. It didn't necessarily mean that she would not be able to aid her people at some time in the future, and learning all she could to help people now was surely what Mythal would wish for her to do.
