The sight was incongruous to the eye: as though someone's nightmare had bled into daylight. Slate-roofed dwellings lined the hillside in crooked avenues; the lake stretched out vast and serene in the background. The sun, with the sadistic timing of a nooseman, had thrown off its veil of cloud to illustrate the scene below. This was no typical Fereldan funeral: no priestess paced with censor swinging, no Chanter droned in monotone exaltation to the Maker. The pyre had not been constructed with loving reverence, nor interwoven with straw from the bed of the deceased, nor lined with their garments. It resembled more a large bonfire, hastily and sloppily constructed; with a pile of naked corpses flung haphazard on top. The soldiers responsible were already retreating; the villagers watched their dead burn with cavernous eyes.

Leliana, appalled at such abandonment of ritual and tradition, uttered something unintelligible in Orlesian. The cart now halted, she clambered down from the driver's seat and strode towards the makeshift pyre. Alistair sheathed his sword and followed her, an astonished Flora at his side.

"What is the meaning of this - this disrespectful display?" the lay sister demanded of the startled group, her voice fletched with outrage. "How are the souls of the dead meant to seek out the Maker without proper dispatch? Where is the priestess? Your Chantry Mother?"

"Dead," came the succinct response from a man at the edge of the crowd; his body hunched as if a great hand was pressing on him from above. His eyes were sunk into deep grooves and the hair on his head sprouted in patches, as though clumps had fallen out.

Leliana blinked, but ploughed on regardless.

"What about your lay-brothers? They are able to carry out the cremation rites in certain circumstances."

He made a half-hearted gesture towards the bonfire. The flames were consuming the bodies now; gnawing their way through flesh and muscle. The column of smoke that they had sighted on the approach was oily and dark: it left fingerprints of ash on the faces of those watching.

"One's up there. The other will be by morning, judging by the state of 'im."

Flora stepped forward, her mender's mind fixing on the most obvious explanation. She could feel her magic rising in her throat; lustrous particles melting on the back of her tongue. Such a response was instinctual: she could sense that there was work to be done nearby.

"Is it plague?"

This would account for the swiftness of the dead's disposal; in cases of infectious disease, bodies were burnt as quickly as possible to prevent further spread.

"No," replied the man, reluctantly admiring her even while bent beneath the heavy cloak of exhaustion. "No plague. We're under attack."

There was a ripple of interest through the small crowd as Morrigan and Sten came forward. In normal times, the sight of a staff-wielding sorceress and a vast, glowering Qunari would prompt consternation. Now, the villagers turned eyes of tentative hope towards the new arrivals; a collective inhale passing through them.

"Have you come to help us?" called out a woman bearing a grubby child on her hip. "Maker be praised! We had given up on rescue. The arl's knights have abandoned us to our fate."

Alistair shot a swift side-eye to Flora. She was thinking the same as he: recalling the group of Redcliffe knights in the tavern at Lothering. They had claimed to be searching for a cure for Arl Eamon's ailing condition; as must the rest of the arl's retainers. Based on the scowl embedded on Morrigan's face, she had no intention of getting embroiled in Redcliffe's problems. Still she said nothing, folding her lips until they formed a thin and disapproving line

But Flora was not looking at the witch: she was staring around at a town that did not resemble the tranquil settlement that they had viewed from the bridge. Now that they stood on the fringe of Redcliffe, she could see the cracks in the peaceful facade: the ground that looked as though it had been raked with a plough; the violent marks gouged into the walls; the window frames holding only a few ragged shards of glass.

Signs of recent battle.

I see them.

Not merely recent, but recurrent battle.

I thought it was odd that the boats weren't out.

"Under attack by what?" asked Alistair, trying unsuccessfully to mask his bewilderment.

There was a silence in response. The crowd exhaled a brittle stillness. The pyre hissed and spat as it ate through fatty tissue; grease igniting with muffled pops.

"Dead men," said the woman with the child, eventually. "And monsters."

Flora wondered if they were referring to Darkspawn, although she had never heard them named as dead men before. 'Monster' seemed to suit them well enough, but then she recalled that Darkspawn hauled away their victims for purposes that she would rather not contemplate. There were at least a dozen bodies stacked on the giant pyre and they looked mostly intact. The flesh not yet consumed by flame was marked by injuries of battle, not the feral mauling of Darkspawn.

Still, she thrust down this wondering for the moment since there was a more urgent matter to attend to. Her grief at seeing such wanton destruction of life had already been parcelled up and stowed in a side compartment of her mind. Later, she would open up the ship's locker and mourn over the contents; but not when there were those who could still be helped.

"I'm a mender," she said, offering herself up like a platter of fruit. "Are there any wounded?"

The man eyed her with naked doubt. Mages generally did not arrive looking dishevelled and clad in what appeared to be wool and sackcloth. Mages were erudite creatures draped in silken robes, fastidiously clean and with an air of general sophistication. He had not yet realised that Morrigan too was a mage: she had wisely stowed her staff in the cart for the time being. Flora, who frequently forgot that she even owned a staff, had mistaken it for a tentpole that morning and packed it away with the canvas.

"They're in the Chantry," he said at last, heavily. "But it's a slaughterhouse in there. Not a sight for pretty girls."

Flora ignored his last comment, having heard it in various disparaging iterations for much of her life. She had already spotted the metallic sun suspended on its twin spires above the rooftops; hung like a sacrifice cast in bronze

Alistair watched his sister-warden head between the buildings with a sense of mild misgiving: he wondered how any surviving priestess would react to the use of magic inside the church. He caught Leliana's eye and canted his head in Flora's wake.

"Not all Chantry folk are as tolerant as you," he murmured, letting his voice fall beneath the animal noise of the fire. "Can you keep an eye on - well, not her, but those around her? I'll deal with the cart."

Leliana dipped her head in acknowledgement. With a final, sorrowful look at the burning bodies, she too headed towards the Chantry's suspended sun.

Once Flora was in the midst of Redcliffe's battle-scarred streets, she lost her bearings. Much of the town was built on stone terraces hewn into the red cliff; the roads ran at counter-angles to each other and there seemed to be no sense to the location of buildings. Humble, single-room dwellings sprouted like mushrooms between workshops and taverns; a blacksmith's forge stood precariously close to a grainstore. She paused beside a half-tumbled wall and peered around, hoping that the Chantry's suspended sun might reflect a ray of light from its authentic counterpart. Redcliffe, after all, was many times larger than Herring.

"This way."

The lay sister had a better sense of direction. Leliana strode past the smithy as though she had spent her childhood scampering along Redcliffe's tangled roads. Flora followed her, swallowing gilded tendrils of magic as they bloomed within her throat. Her heart was knocking against her ribs like an unjustly caged prisoner: this would be the first time that she had faced a mass of critical casualties in half a decade.

Slaughterhouse. A 'slaughterhouse', he said. That's what it's going to look like in there.

There was a pause, and then an irritated response from her general.

You're a mender. Your trade is flesh and blood and bone.

I know. It's - it's been a while since I've seen so many bad injuries at once. I hope it's not too… too overwhelming.

There was a pause, and then an opaque and formless whisper slid from a deeper part of the Fade. As always, Flora's general rendered Compassion's instruction in a language that the mortal girl could comprehend.

Remember the Ellyn Dynge.

The Redcliffe Chantry was larger than its counterpart in Lothering. Constructed from the ruddy stone that gave the arling its name, the wood-framed structure rose in three distinctive tiers; stained glass windows gleamed like the coral-hued eyes of a Par Vollen tiger. The bronze sunburst, elevated on twin struts, rose several dozen feet above the ground. As they drew nearer, they saw that the building bore its own battle-scars. One of the orange windows was blind and broken and the wooden doors were splintering in three places. Fortunately, the Chantry walls were built as thick as a fortress and little structural damage could be seen.

"The audacity of the Maker's enemies," breathed Leliana, smoothing down her hair to make herself neat. "Assaulting His sanctuary."

"I think they're everyone's enemies," replied Flora gloomily, eyeing a suspicious stain on the nearby wall. "What do you think they could be? What's a monster?"

Leliana made a sound that was Orlesian for, I know not.

The smaller door set into the vast wooden entrance swung open at Flora's tentative nudge. A draft of cool, stagnant air escaped the hollow hall beyond and she wondered if all Chantries had the same vaguely mouldering smell. Diffused sunlight streamed at acute angles through the stained glass, illuminating scattered stretches of flagstone. The remnants of tallow candles dribbled from iron holsters: though between the patches of natural and artificial light, the hall was drowned in shadow.

Despite the smoking flame at the altar and the half-sun cast in bronze hanging overhead, Redcliffe's Chantry bore little resemblance to counterparts in other villages. Each wooden pew and bench had been reappropriated as an improvised barricade; the dawn door in the transept was obscured with furniture, as was the rear exit used by the priestesses. A broad wooden beam was lying near the main doors, ready to be slid into staples sunk into the oak.

Instead of reverent stillness, a terrible groaning filled the air. In the space where pews had once rested, pallet mattresses were spaced at intervals on the flagstones. Ten men and two women, each maimed with varying degrees of brutality, lay curled on the lumpen bedding. In some cases, crude bandages or poultices had been applied; in most, their wounds were left exposed and raw. A few uttered cries or curses, one murmured a feverish and unending prayer. Several lay as crooked and lifeless as a child's thrown doll; their skin a waxy bluish grey. A naked corpse was folded in one corner, destined for tomorrow's pyre. The air tasted stale and metallic; blood leaked across the flagstones and clotted in the cracks. In the midst of the wounded and dying knelt a harried priestess with skeins of greying hair escaping her hat; offering up her own ragged plea to the Maker.

Flora inhaled a deep and steadying breath; filling her lungs and anchoring her feet to the ground. The first lesson that she could remember her spirits teaching her was to calm herself before healing; to pass a palm over any agitation in her mind and flatten it out. Her knee was a reminder of what could happen when she set about mending in the midst of distress.

Twelve wounded.

The light of the Chantry dimmed, as though the candles had been snuffed out and the sun sunk below the horizon. Faint in the distance came the roar of wind and water: the enraged howl of an approaching storm. Waves flung themselves against the walls with a cascade of muted crashes. Against the far wall rose the silhouette of a vast and splintering ship; caught in the ferocious clutch of the Hag's Teeth. There was a wound in its hull large enough for a carriage to pass through; the wind had clawed the sails to shreds and little remained of the mast save for a splintered shard. The Ellyn Dynge tilted on the reef like a dying animal; disgorging man and cargo into the eager maw of the Waking Sea.

The sand was wet and formless beneath her feet; the wind blew her hair into her eyes and she brushed it back with trembling fingers. She could see her father and the other men of Herring rowing back through the foaming chop of the waves; the muscles in their arms straining as they fought for every foot of water gained. In the bottom of their boats lay human cargo: the men they had managed to pluck from between the Hag's Teeth, and those they had pulled gasping from the water. A lucky few sailors had managed to claw their way through the maze of currents to the shore; they crawled onto the beach wild-eyed and gibbering with shock. Others were washed up on the sand like flotsam; drowned or nearly so.

The younger Flora stood knee deep in frothing shallows and watched the Waking Sea spit out its victims. It was not the first shipwreck she had witnessed from the shore, but it was the first that had presented her with such vast and varied carnage. Her mender's eye swept over the survivors washed up before her: men whose lungs bloated with seawater; men with splintered ends of bone sticking through the skin: men impaled with shards of their former ship, as though the Ellyn Dynge was enacting posthumous vengeance for her mishandling.

What do I DO, the younger Flora begged in a frenzy of panic; her thoughts scattering like a shoal of startled fish. There's so many. So many!

You divide them, came the calm instruction. Those who are a few breaths from death. Those who are candle-lengths. Those who will see the next dawn. Then attend accordingly.

Breaths, candle-lengths, the next dawn.

Moments, hours, a day more of life granted.

With her patients thus divided, she took a deep, steadying breath; anchored her feet to the sand and set to work.

Her mender's eye wandered the length of the Chantry, passing over each bedroll in a swift cataloging of injuries. The tile sunk beneath Flora's feet like sand as she wandered towards the silent, grey-faced man on the furthest pallet; the distant, muffled roar of the waves rang in her ear like the echo of a seashell. She was not diverted by the groans and cries of those she passed, for she had learnt that the louder the cries, the greater time they had left to them. The man at the far end of the Chantry had lost so much blood that his flesh had the spongy paleness of wax. His heart flickered like a candle in a draught; Flora could feel its failing beat like an irregular scratch in her mind.

Leliana realised that Flora was not going to introduce herself to the priestess; nor provide any explanation for what she was or what she was about to do. The bard could see realisation and then subsequent alarm dawn in the robed woman's eyes; a smooth, scholarly hand rising as if in protest. The bard interjected swiftly, her pale blue stare fixing the priestess to the spot like a pin impaling a white-winged moth.

"I am Leliana, a lay sister of Lothering's Chantry," she said, with the assurance of one occupying a far higher position in the church hierarchy. "I am the companion of this mage, who means you and these poor creatures no harm. The Maker has blessed her with the gift of healing. Let her tend to your wounded without interference."

The priestess cast a swift, fearful glance over her shoulder to where Flora was kneeling over the man; her head bowed low. Still, she was pinned to the tiles and could not move.

"It is not permitted - magic in the Chantry." Her mouth twisted in dismay. "It is unheard of. The Templars would not stand for it. Mother Alleria would not - she would not… "

There was a tremor in her words like a plucked lute string. Leliana narrowed her eyes, casting an arm out to encompass the barricaded doors, the broken windows, the score of wounded sprawled before them, the gore leaking across the tiles. Redcliffe's Chantry appeared more a recent battlefield than a place of worshipful contemplation.

"As I understand, your Revered Mother is dead," Leliana's voice softened slightly, "for which I am very sorry. But these are not usual times. Your arl is absent. You are under attack, by monsters…?"

If Leliana had been hoping for some clarification on the nature of the strange assailants, she would be disappointed. The priestess flinched as though struck, her fingers clenching into her palms.

"The mage must be supervised by a Templar," she said vaguely, then wandered off in the direction of an empty bookshelf. The contents lay strewn and trampled over the flagstones; stray pages lying like fallen leaves. The priestess gazed hard at the shelves as though searching for something, her brow furrowed.

Leliana looked around her: there were no Templars to be seen; only the tattered remnants of their banner used as a makeshift shroud for the body in the corner. She glanced at Flora to see if any assistance was required - the like of hot water, or bandages - and was startled to see the mage straddling her patient, her bloodied face bent low and fingers clenched hard around the motionless man's shoulders. From a certain angle, it looked oddly intimate. From another, it looked as though she was eating him alive.

It was not the sort of mending that Leliana had witnessed before. There was something primal about Flora's magic that had certainly not been taught by the perfumed scholars at the Circle. She was grateful that the priestess had now retreated into an antechamber. The bard decided that it was best to also leave Flora undisturbed. Spotting a box of tallow stumps and an iron stand beside a nearby pillar, she went to assist in her own way: lighting candles for the souls of the dead.

Flora, in the meantime, was in her element. She could still hear the waves crashing faintly against the fortress-thick walls of the Chantry; her tongue prickled with the distinctive tang of saltwater. Her memory of the Ellyn Dynge had bled into her reality; the past imposed in faint and ghostly outline over the present. When she drew a shard of edged iron from a belly, it became part of a sheared-off anchor; a broken limb crushed by a falling mast instead of a crushing blow from a weapon. The features of her patients melted like a pencil drawing placed in water, replaced by the white, frozen faces of the half-drowned sailors. In less than a half-candle she had mended eleven of the twelve; their wounds repaired so impeccably that they would lack even a scar as a souvenir. Flora knew well that the potency of her abilities fluctuated depending on circumstance; her magic in a constant ebb and flow. She saw herself as a valve - much like the flap of skin parting the chambers of the heart - through which Compassion issued their healing as required.

"Get your heathen hands away from me, witch."

The shadowy beach melted away; the wind died down and the waves fell back. Flora blinked, thrust abruptly from her reminiscing. The last patient to be mended was glaring at her through a residual grimace of pain. He was a man in his sixth decade; his body made up of hard angles and his face set in a scowl. A Chantry sigil, along with a half-dozen other charms, hung against the papery skin of his throat.

"Eh," she replied, utterly confused. "Wha-?"

Her other patients had risen from their bedrolls restored and revived; some accepted a drink of water from Leliana, others went straight to the altar to offer tremulous thanks to the Maker. Not all had acknowledged her healing - it was borne of magic, after all - but no one had been openly hostile.

"I said," the man repeated, flushed red from the exertion of speaking. "Get away from me."

Flora was confused: had he misunderstood her intention?

"I'm a healer."

"A heathen."

"The wound on your belly is leaking foulness into your blood," she said, astonished. "It's poisoning your guts."

The wounded man stared at her with a baleful eye, as though she had peeled back his shirt and jabbed at the wound with a finger.

"Don't touch me," he said, taking care to enunciate each word through the pain. "I'd rather be poisoned than suffer your demonic sorcery."

"You'll be dead by dawn," Flora pointed out bluntly, discomfited. "Please, I can mend it in no time at all. You can close your eyes. Pretend it's the Maker healing you."

This was the wrong thing to say: the old man's nostrils flared and he muttered something that sounded like, blasphemy! His fingers clawed their way up to the holy symbols draped around his neck, then clutched them hard into his palm.

What do I say to him?

He has made his wishes known.

But he'll die.

You cannot save everyone.

Flora could not think of the words to articulate her protest and so she returned her attention to her unwilling patient. His face was so creased with suspicion that it resembled a piece of crumpled parchment.

"Please," she said, for want of anything else to say. "I can save you."

"I'd rather die," he retorted, each word clawing its way from a throat constricted with pain. "Than be saved by a… a desire demon."

Flora was nonplussed.

"I ain't a desire demon," she replied, the northern vernacular emerging more strongly in her perturbation. "I'm wearing clothes."

Then Leliana was at her side, setting slender fingers on her shoulder.

"Come on. You can come back later and see if he's changed his mind," she added in an undertone. "I know many like him. His zeal is misguided. Faith should enlighten us, not blind us."

Flora stood up, reluctantly. She had left bloody palmprints on the flagstones in her wake; her hands and face stained red as though painted with a crimson brush. The loose strands of her hair were clumped together with dried matter. Leliana steered her towards the doorway, past the row of empty bedrolls. The priestess, who had watched each mended patient leave with a suspicious eye, pointedly ignored them both.

When the bard spoke next, there was a note of wonder in her voice.

"Alistair said that you were a gifted healer, but - but I had no idea."

"I can't do nothing else," Flora mumbled, shooting a resentful stare over her shoulder at the sole remaining patient. "Apart from shield a bit.

"There was a man whose guts were spilling forth from his stomach! Another whose skull had been broken in two! A woman whose arm hung by a sinew!"

Flora had mended each injury before: the wreckage of a ship could mangle a man with the same brutality as any weapon. Between them Ellyn Dynge and the Hag's Teeth had chewed up two dozen sailors before spitting them onto the shore.

"It's my spirits, not me. Why did he call me a desire demon? RUDE."

The bard tutted, nudging Flora towards the door. Her bloody footprints made little difference to the gore-smeared Chantry floor.

"Oh, don't sulk about it. Let's find a bucket and water. You look like a wolf after it's had it's dinner."


AN: I wanted to get a few things across in this chapter! Firstly I wanted to show how Flora's upbringing in Herring has inadvertently helped to prepare her for the trials she's undergoing as a Warden. I also wanted to show a little more of Flora's daydreaming, and how she constantly superimposes memories from her childhood onto the present to help her deal with things. The wreck of the Ellyn Dynge, with its mass casualties, gave her experience in dealing with multiple terrible injuries (and also triage! Deciding who to treat first, which is something paramedics are trained to do today). Secondly, I wanted to show a different side of the inhabitants of Herring. So far, they've been portrayed as a pretty unfortunate collection of people: unfriendly, violent towards each other, humourless, joyless... but they'd also row into a storm to rescue sailors from a run-aground ship. Again, it's important because these are the people who Flora was raised with.

Anyway, yet again I've spent 387392934 words describing pretty much one scene, lol. Oh well! I hope everyone is staying safe. It's such a weird time! Looking out of my window (I live in central London) and seeing no one in the street is so strange to me. Wash your hands everyone! And stay home!