The Maker was demanding a high price for the salvation of Thedas, the life of a Dalish child in exchange for the life of the world. If the child attempted to strengthen the Anchor as swiftly as possible the child would die, if the child attempted to close the Breach before reaching maturity the child would die, if anyone attempted to transfer the Anchor from the child the child would die, if the child ran afoul of demons and zealots the child would be even less prepared to face them than anyone else.
Naturally the Herald of Andraste would be not only a Dalish child in possession of an incredibly power piece of magic tied into her own but a Dalish child who might very well be one of the most powerful mages born in recent history. And naturally the Herald would require the proper training to achieve great heights as a mage and survive the trial that was to come. Only no one save Solas was quiet prepared for what an elvhen child was capable of when properly instructed.
Chapter 1: Accelerated Education for Extenuating Circumstances: Ward Fundamentals, Uses, and Variations
Even a Templar could tell the uneducated that there was inherent danger in young mages that went far beyond the immaturities of the body and the mind. While immaturity of the body could be relied upon within reason to temper the abilities of a young mage the potential for them lashing out and dealing death was significantly older than their older counterparts. For young mages magic was intuitive, instinctive, and therefore far more dangerous as it had yet to be molded into a shape and tempered by training and the Harrowing. This could be reasonably deduced by an intuitive man but there was more involving the immaturities of the body and mind that ran deep beneath the surface.
Incidents such as the one that instigated the war between the Templars and Mages in Kirkwall were not uncommon among young mages threatened with physical violence and given reason to fear for their own lives. In a moment of pure animalistic fear a mage could draw to much magic into themselves from the ambient, from the Fade, and from their own font resulting in a rather spectacular explosion that more often then not reduced the mage in question to ashes or left them in such a state that death would be a mercy. Given the mental immaturity of children with a natural affinity for magic these events were more common amongst them.
It was more for fear of these events than the fear of abominations that the Templars tried to take gifted children into circles as soon as they started showing signs of a natural affinity for attunement to the Fade. However history had proven that letting this become common knowledge resulted in more instances of small folk beating these children to death or otherwise maiming them which in turn could result in volatile explosions as the arcane torture restrained within a mage's body reached that critical, invisible limit and broke free.
The Circles had special rules for children that only the most careless or those with the greatest death wishes blinded by their hatred of magic would violate without great need. The first was that young mages were never subjected to unnecessary stresses before passing a battery of several tests. They were never subjected to sleep deprivation, starvation, dehydration or pain. The second was that all of the practical instruction in magic was done in the pre-dawn or twilight hours, especially if the day's instruction concerned elemental magics, before passing a battery of tests. The sun's energies made the connection to the Fade in some way unstable, though whether this was because of the sun's strong association with fire and fire's strong association with life and magic or some other metaphysical association was a matter of speculation and heated debates.
The third and by far the most important rule was that young mages in the Circle were taught control above and beyond all other things. Control of magic if not self-control. Magic was a dangerous and oft times unpredictable force. It was why Circles were important, it was why mages were dangerous.
All of this was why she was torn between objecting how quickly the girl's training had been accelerated and the stresses she was put under near constantly and restraining herself at the necessity of it. It both shamed and humbled her to say that if the girl had been human, wholly human, she would have put an end to it immediately. But the girl was not.
In her youth she had often been jealous of the elves in the Circle, how quickly they seemed to grasp concepts and master them, how imaginative their spells could become. Looking on now with the well trained eye of an accomplished Enchantress she was beginning to understand why the Dalish so hated humans for destroying their once great empire and just how far the elves had fallen.
Magic was in actuality a series of mysteries: lower, lesser, minor, major, greater, and higher that wound together in an spiral of surges that allowed the world to function as it did. Life itself was a product of one of the higher mysteries that alluded even the grasp of the most powerful of abomination's minds by virtue of being a product of that particular mystery. The intrinsic understanding of each mystery allowed a mage to manipulate them and the intrinsic understanding of any given mystery was determined by the attunement of their affinity.
The lower, lesser, and minor mysteries were the most basic of spells a mage call upon and formed the foundation of all magic. For simplicity they could be placed into eight categories: illusion being the creation of images or sounds that did not exist, alteration being the minor alteration of the body and mind, destruction being the elemental magic, conjuration being the summoning of familiars, restoration being the healing arts, enchanting being the addition of spells to objects or living beings up to and including people, mysticism, and thaumaturgy. The last two were harder to define and added as the categories into which everything that was not the previous six were placed into.
Understandings were hard won by human mages, the product of exhaustive study and hours of practice made easier only if the mage had studied as a child. Watching the girl during her studies had given unique perspective into how elvish children differed greatly from human children in regards to the mysteries. The time between being introduced to a concept and truly understanding the basis of the concept was dramatically reduced. In the scant few hours between true dawn and sunrise the girl had comprehended the formation of wards and found a way to alter them such that they slowed down oncoming projectiles in a twenty-foot radius of her enough to grant her time to dodge out of their path.
Wards were usually used as either shields against oncoming projectiles, magic and non-magical in origin, or redirect projectiles, magic and non-magic in origin, to their point of origin with equal or greater force. What she had witnessed the girl perform strayed from the most obscure branch of restoration into mysticism, of a caliber many experienced human Enchanters of Circles all across Thedas would be hard pressed to display even the most basic example of: metamagic.
Metamagic seemed to be the province of elves more than their pointed ears or eyes that changed like a cat's in light. It bespoke of the complete understanding of a mystery and the ability to bend it to their will at a moment's notice for any purpose within the limit of reason. The limit of reason with wards, it seemed, was in some way slowing oncoming objects to a degree that they could be avoided with ease without draining the mage's stamina too greatly overcoming one of the greatest weaknesses of wards. No matter how strong the ward was if it was hammered away at for long enough and hard enough or hit in the wrong place it either dissolved or dispelled violently.
The only way to overcome that weakness that she had known of prior to this morning's supervision of the girl's training had been to root the spell to a suitable anchor on the mage's body, like a shoe, and use some spell of alteration to reinforce the body to make taking whatever residual force that made it through the ward as it bent around the force applied to it easier. But this required a higher level of skill and required far more energy than setting a ward away from the body which was not the purpose of that particular kind of defensive ward. The only other alternative was to enchant an object, usually a belt or necklace or bracelet, with the ward and avoid taking too many direct hits so that the enchantment wouldn't break under sustained assault.
That such a high level of magical prowess had quickly become the plaything of a child as two men took turns throwing pine cones and small rocks as hard as they could at the spaces around the child went a long way into invalidating just what a ward could be used for. That said high level of magical prowess had previously slowed the men down as they charged full pelt at her in an impromptu game of tag was equally troubling for the traditional teachings of the Circles. That one man was a qunari mercenary captain with a stride twice the length of a normal man's and not even he had been able to so much as get close spoke of the spell's viability in a life or death situation.
Insofar they had all come to an agreement that any magic that the girl was being taught in the immediate future would be focused solely on keeping the girl alive: wards, vine traps, the creation of bogs or quicksand from solid earth, and minor illusions. Vine traps had the addition of water from the ambient air or conjured water to the ground in large quantities had come as easily as breathing and seemed to be an expansion on the first lessons the Dalish taught children capable of magic. Minor illusions such as images and sounds individually had become major illusions within three weeks, multiple little red haired elves scattering in every direction all of which capable of exhibiting some degree of fatigue and leaving faint sign of a trail.
But even with the successes of the day wards would take far longer. Slowing a charging man or two and small objects was not the same as slowing a spell. No one was too keen on using anything more dangerous and even magic for instruction aimed in a manner which would not come within feet of the student could have unfortunate consequences. One simply did not throw fireballs as an eight year old even if said eight year old was particularly gifted with the weave. Especially not during the day when the firmament was loud and the tapping of a font for even the most basic of spells could result in a splitting headache.
There were reasons that even the most experienced of mages still relied heavily upon enchantments, particularly those that mitigated the effects of using magic when the sun was full in the sky.
Author's Note: Thank you to the guest who informed me that the first attempt at posting this didn't actually work, I would be furious if that had been my only copy of this but it wasn't. That doesn't mean that fixing this wasn't a pain in the ass because apparently docx. Files can't be added to a story because for some reason they don't count but they are an option. I don't know if this is a bug or just how rolls but if it's the latter I'll be abandoning this place again without the provocation of a mass purging of stories again. The first bit is the full summary, this was posted originally on AO3 and the character allowance for summaries is a lot longer there than it is here.
I have returned after a long break of being on AO3 exclusively but have been guilted into posting again on , I'm not too happy about that for several reasons the least of which being I have to remember how to find things here. On that note I do have invite codes available for AO3 that I have not used and if someone wants one I have five I can give away.