The Tower is a tomb.

Greagoir's doom-laced portent rang in Flora's ears like a funeral bell, the words hollow and hopeless. If she had not known better - he was a Templar - she would have believed him to be melancholy. When he spoke of the Annulment, there had been a weariness in his face that could not be entirely attributed to exhaustion.

As she followed Alistair towards the foot of the stairs, her heart beat a quick and nervous rhythm. Kinloch Hold had been no home to Flora during her four-year stay, but it had not been entirely torturous, either. After all, it had offered her three guaranteed meals a day, fireplaces in winter and a roof that did not leak. Some of its occupants had been cruel to her but most had been preoccupied with their studies: they were scholars, who loved to learn and hone their craft as far as was permitted. She did not want to consider the possibility that all within its curving walls were either dead or maleficar.

Why didn't you warn me?

It would have made no difference.

I could have prepared myself for it. If I'd known beforehand.

Nothing could prepare you for this

The knot in Flora's belly twisted until it became a tangle of fear and dread. Alistair glanced over his shoulder, his face taut and humourless.

"It won't be as bad as Ishal," he said, not wholly convinced. "I can't see how it could be."

Morrigan's lip curled: her eyes gleamed as though they had been polished.

"What makes a worse mess of a man: demons or Darkspawn? We shall see, I suppose."

There were six Templars guarding the stairwell with blades drawn and helms closed. They moved aside in ragged succession; their military precision shredded along with their composure. Even the senior officers had been shaken by the Circle's collapse: Kinloch Hold had always been a quiet and uneventful posting.

Alistair reached up to close the visor of his own helm. It fell into place with an echoing clang: his vision of the world now slatted with steel. The borrowed armour was not a perfect fit, but it would suffice - he doubted that many attacks would take on a physical form. He was grateful for his own sword, and for Flora's shield.

"Ready?"

"No. Let's go."

Flora saw no point in lying, nor did she see the point of delaying any further. She felt vaguely nauseated. Her brother-warden gave a nod, then unsheathed his broadsword: drawing a weapon that would require a dual-handed grip from most men.

The stair followed the curve of the tower; windowless and flanked by torches. The sharp bend of the wall meant that only the next few steps were visible to the climber. Alistair proceeded with caution, blade first. There came no sound from above, save for a constant drip-drip-drip from some flaw in the masonry. Their footsteps were echoed and amplified by the close confines: it sounded as though they were more than three.

Flora had tried to count the number of steps: had counted to twelve six times, and then gave up. Greagoir's words hung above her like a suspended blade.

"I'm sure they ain't all dead in there," she whispered to Alistair's back, unnerved by the eerie quiet. "Some will have fought back. They're not like me: they're skilled."

"Skilled in theory, perhaps," retorted Morrigan, who was sauntering at the rear with deliberate ease. "Adept in the classroom . Mother told me all about these Circles. Kept like trained mice in a cage: little tricks performed on cue."

Alistair opened his mouth to offer a retort, and then fell silent. As much as he did not want to admit it, the witch had a point. He was spared from conceding this out loud by their arrival at a pair of wooden doors. They were shut fast, severing the stair from the next floor.

The three gathered together on the landing; perhaps a little closer than they would have done in normal circumstances. Flora found herself between Alistair and Morrigan: inhaling a strange mixture of sword oil, sweat and the musk of animal fur. She edged herself behind the witch, feeling the stone wall press against her shoulder.

"Want to go last, do we?" Morrigan asked snidely, though in hushed tones.

"Mm."

Flora had learnt a lesson in the gaol beneath Redcliffe Castle: that the enemy could attack from behind, swiftly and without warning. There came a flicker of rare approval from her general: whose standards were so lofty and obscure that Flora mostly failed to meet them.

Well remembered. You can defend all positions from the rearguard.

Shifting his shield onto his shoulder, Alistair nudged the door and let it open a fraction. An expanding wedge of torchlight filtered in, painting a yellow stripe across the stairwell. It fell across Morrigan's wary, feline face: her eyes narrowed.

The corridor beyond was wide and curved, like the slow meander of a river. It also appeared deserted. Threadbare tapestries, unravelled by generations of idle young mages, hung from the walls in an attempt to preserve heat. Doors led to the apprentice dormitories at spaced intervals; these were open, save for one where the passageway curved out of sight. Usually the corridor would have been a marketplace of activity: apprentices rushing to classes with books falling from beneath their arms, senior mages so deep in conversation that they walked past their destinations, Templar soldiers overseeing the chaos with careful disapproval.

Now, the corridor was so still that it could have been a stage set in an Orlesian play: the actors not yet arrived. The stone passage stretched out before them; torchlit and silent. The woven faces of nameless Chantry peers stared blindly down from their portraits.

"Flora, where are we?"

Flora could not see beyond her brother-warden: whose frame blocked much of the doorway. Still, she knew well enough - the stretch of corridor had been her home for four years.

"These are the bunkrooms for the apprentices," she whispered; never certain of her pronunciation of dormitories. "The classrooms are on the next floor."

Alistair advanced into the corridor, sword drawn. It was impossible for him to proceed quietly: the rustle of ill-fitting mail and percussive boot accompanied each step. Morrigan followed at a cautious distance; if she had been a cat, her ears would be pricked.

"I'm used to listening for Darkspawn," Alistair observed as they passed a dour-faced priestess preserved in oils and canvas. "Useless, here. I don't suppose either of you can sense demons? Or blood magic?"

"I'm a mage, not a Mabari," retorted the witch as Flora shook her head. "Would you have me on my hands and knees, scenting out the enemy?"

He grimaced, shooting her a wary look.

"Ugh. Forget I asked."

It's so quiet, thought Flora unhappily as they approached the door that led into the first dormitory. Where is everyone?

There came no response but a sigh from Compassion.

Alistair paused at the door, then gave it a tentative nudge. The door sagged as it opened, swinging on a single surviving hinge.

Beyond lay chaos: shards of furniture so fragmented that it was impossible to tell what they had been whole; wall hangings torn from their fixings; bedding hurled into corners. The vast candelabra hung from the ceiling at a lopsided angle; two chains trailing. The ground was white as if covered with snow: strewn with pages from hundreds of eviscerated books.

Amongst the wreckage lay bodies, some still clothed in navy robes and others exposed to the air. Flora's first thought was that they had drowned. Her second was that this was impossible, they were elevated a hundred feet above the water. Yet the corpses looked so similar to those that washed up on Herring's shore with regularity: white and bloodless, flesh spongy to the touch. There were a half-dozen in total: one was little more than a laundry pile of skin.

Alistair inhaled a sharp and dismayed breath, lowering the blade.

"Shit," he said, hollow-voiced. "Poor sods. The maleficar used them up."

This explained the strange condition of the bodies: they had not been drowned, but drained of their last drop of blood. Flora wondered why the chamber seemed to be dissolving around her, and then realised that her eyes had flooded. It did not matter that none of her fellow apprentices had liked her: she had never wished them ill, and was horrified at the fate that had befallen them.

This is not an appropriate time for tears. Save them for later, if you must.

But - but -

There are those who need help and they will suffer for any delay. If the boy sees you weeping, it will prolong matters.

Flora conceded that her general had a point. She had never cried in front of Alistair, and doubted that he would take it well. By the time that her brother-warden turned back, she had dutifully blinked away her grief: bundling it to the back of her mind. For the hundredth time since Ostagar, Flora was grateful for the veneer of stoicism that she had inherited from her father: he donned aloofness like a cloak.

"Let's try the other dormitories," Alistair said quietly, and without much hope. "There… there might be some survivors."

They progressed down the corridor, less cautious and more urgent now. The next few dormitories housed similar scenes of destruction. The carnage seemed to grow worse with each chamber: at the sixth, Alistair opened the door only a fraction before swiftly closing it again with his face taut.

"No one's alive in there," he said, avoiding the question in his sister-warden's eyes. "For the love of Andraste. Perhaps the Templar was right."

The Tower is a tomb.

"He can't be," Flora breathed, thinking of the hundreds who dwelt within Kinloch Hold. "There are people still alive."

"How do you know?"

This came from Morrigan, who had nonchalantly collected several of the scattered pages from the tiles. "It certainly resembles a charnel house here."

Flora did not know what a charnel house was.

"I felt them," she insisted, following Alistair as he approached the final dormitory. "Their hearts. They beat against my skin."

The witch's face twisted, sceptical.

Alistair stopped abruptly before the door, his head tilting and hand half-raising. Both of his companions fell silent. He glanced over his shoulder, mouthing something several times before they grasped his meaning.

There's something in there.

Flora met his gaze: mage or maleficar?

He gave a shrug, readying his blade at a precautionary angle before nudging the door open.

The wedge of light expanded and a shout tore through the bedchamber: raw and ragged.

"Stop!"

The air before Alistair billowed into a cloud of autumnal colour: crimson and amber, shot through with indigo. The light spread outwards and then dissipated; as though a bucket of watered-down dye had been thrown against glass. He felt nothing save for a slight breeze at his ear and the acrid residue of the arcane on his tongue.

Then Flora was at his elbow and he did not recognise her: her face was terrifying, and beautiful, and wrathful as some avenging warrior goddess. He had never seen her furious before but when she opened her mouth the stream of invective that emerged was more northern fishwife than celestial deity.

"EHHH!" she yowled, enraged. "You stupid stock-fish, eel-skin, bent-hook, rotted prawn - tryin' to ROAST my - my- my- "

Gradually, Alistair came to understand what had happened. A slender figure hovered in the space before him, his face made skull-like by fear. He wore the dark crimson robe of a Harrowed mage; although he looked too young to hold seniority. His staff was extended towards Alistair and the doorway, the head moulting still-smouldering ashes. Flora's shield melted like dawn mist beneath the sun, stray filaments of light drifting to the tiles. It had materialised in half a heartbeat before him: intercepting the ball of flame so thoroughly that Alistair had not even felt its heat.

"Crab-legged, flotsam-brain, bilge water bottom-feeding- "

"Did you try and set me on fire?" Alistair asked, raising his voice above Flora's indignant screeching. "We've come to help."

"I - I… " The mage mentally flailed, eyes darting from side to side. He was exhausted: the hollows of his face made into chasms.

"Sit down Gerwyn, and stop being such a damned fool. I promise you, when the Templars come to Annul us, they'll send more than three.'

The voice was weary but authoritative; it came from somewhere beyond Alistair's hesitant assailant. The dormitory was crowded with mages of all ages: though many were young and clad in their night-garb. They were clustered in small and frightened groups between the bunk beds, clutching any random possession that they had managed to save from the chaos. Most were human, but there were a few elves in their midst.

At their heart stood a woman, straight-backed and tall; her hair trapped in a faded bun of such severity that it pulled back on the skin of her forehead. Despite the devastation that surrounded her, her face bore an unruffled calm: she was perhaps entering her sixtieth year. She wore an instructor's layered robes, and a subtle crest of seniority was stitched at her breast.

The woman angled her pale blue stare - oddly reminiscent of Leliana - at Flora, and said, with soft authority:

"Calm down - Flora. Your fellow Warden is unharmed. Our friend Gerwyn is merely on edge, as are we all. Understandable, really, given the circumstances."

Four years of residence at a Circle had instilled deference to the stitched crest. The breathless Flora, astonished that a senior instructor had remembered her name, shut her mouth abruptly. She felt disorientated: it had been some time since she had embarked on a full-fledged Herring rant and it had thrown her off balance.

The misunderstanding had come from Alistair's borrowed breastplate, which bore inverted sword and Chantry sunburst. He looked down at himself, then at his red-faced sister-warden, who was deflating like a punctured puffer-fish. He was oddly touched by her fury: he had never seen the placid Flora so angry before, and it was on his behalf.

"You're not entirely unexpected," the senior mage continued briskly, crossing the chamber in several decisive strides. "Ralena, how much drinking water have we left? We'll need to replenish our supplies. How should I address you-? Wardens? Warden-recruits?"

As the mage spoke, she handed bandages and poultices to those with surface wounds. Despite the fact that she was simultaneously conversing with the new arrivals, issuing instructions to her subordinate and distributing supplies; she performed all three tasks with admirable competency.

"Wardens is fine. We came to enlist the mages," said Alistair, hastily sheathing his blade as he noticed the frightened eyes of children. "And found- "

"Carnage."

The senior mage finished his sentence without prevarication: the word emerging as a blunt statement of fact. She then let out a sigh, the creases deepening across her forehead.

"I would take these young ones down, but Maker knows how the Templars would react. As far as Greagoir is concerned; the whole of Kinloch Hold has fallen to blood magic. I will not risk them."

Flora vaguely recognised the woman as one of the instructors that had been present during Jowan's escape. She knew very little about the upper echelons of Kinloch Hold; she had dwelt on the apprentice floor and attended the most rudimentary of classes, accompanied mostly by children and elves. The children and elves invariably graduated to intermediary instruction, leaving the illiterate and apparently incapable Flora behind.

"There are more survivors," she said, relatively certainly. "And First Enchanter Irwin is alive."

"Irving," corrected the senior instructor; the creases scoring her brow deepened. "How do you know?"

Flora fell silent, her gaze wandering: drifting above the woman's shoulder like the tail of a cloud. The mage looked at her, brows drawn together and lips pursed. Nobody spoke, and even the whimpers of the younger students ebbed away.

The pause was broken by a leisurely, even tap; the toe of Flora's boot marking an organic rhythm against the tile. The senior mage looked at it.

"His heartbeat," Flora said in explanation, blinking the corporeal world back into focus. "He ain't dead."

The woman inhaled a long and thoughtful breath. She did not ask how Flora knew this, but merely seemed to accept it. Her eyes made swift appraisal of the three new arrivals: a healer, a warrior and - based on impression - a Chasind apostate. Two out of the three looked to be formidable opponents.

"I intend to go to Irving's aid. Will you accompany me?"

"You can accompany us," said a dubious Alistair; reminded of a particularly bossy Chantry Mother from the monastery. He was not sure if it was even a good idea for an elder in her grey hairs to join them: what if she had a heart attack, or - worse - a hernia?

The woman guessed the cause of his reluctance: her pale blue eye turning on him like a piece of glass.

"I may not be in the first flush of youth," she replied, steely. "But, believe me, I am more than capable. Incidentally, you may call me Wynne."

"Alistair," replied Alistair, and was about to introduce his sister-warden when he remembered that the elder mage had already addressed her by name.

"And I am Morrigan," the witch added; having hastily stashed her stolen pages. "'Tis my first visit to a Circle and I am not entirely convinced of their value."

For a brief moment, Wynne looked as though she was about to agree. Then, she shook her head swiftly - gathering herself - and glanced over her shoulder.

"Allow me a few moments to prepare."

The children gathered in anxious clumps looked even more distressed at the prospect of their guardian leaving them. They did not want to be left in the company of the trembling Gerwyn, or the equally ineffectual gaggle of older apprentices. Wynne placated them with terse assurances as she retrieved a length of beech.

While the mage prepared her staff, slotting new stones into the recess at its base and checking for damage; Alistair glanced down at his sister-warden. As usual, she was within two paces; close enough to touch with an extended finger. Her face was as still as an Orlesian mask: stoic and serene in equal part. Alistair ducked his head, angling his words through the space between them. She was three inches over five feet; he stood a foot higher.

"Flora," he said quietly, wanting to snare her attention and nobody else's. "Flo."

Flora looked up at him expectantly.

"I don't think I've ever seen you so angry before."

"Oh." A faint line scored itself across her brow. "I was frightened. You were almost roasted. Like a halibut."

Alistair swept a swift eye around the walls to check that no one was paying them too much attention. Unfortunately, most of the bedchamber's occupants were either staring at the Warden-recruits, or at the fascinating figure of Morrigan; leaning against the doorframe with arms crossed.

Undeterred, Alistair returned his gaze to the pale heart of Flora's face. He wanted to touch her: to trace the line of her jaw from her ear to the apex of her chin. He wanted to commit the construction of bone and flesh to memory; to imprint a delicate pattern of her skull on his consciousness. He could not explain why, except that it was borne from a need more complex and visceral than desire. Her irises were so pale that they stole colour from the torchlit air around her; leeching veins of shifting gold.

"Flora," he breathed again, astounded that he had ever found the name to be dull and prosaic: the label of a thousand ordinary peasant girls.

In spite of the chaos that surrounded them, she smiled at him; eyes curious.

"Oh, desist," cut in the acerbic Morrigan, her voice like a thief's blade prying them apart. "The situation is dire enough as it is without you two making it worse."

"I'm ready. Shall we go?"

The senior instructor - Wynne - had readied her staff and exchanged a casual dressing robe for one with a heavier weave: still, it would bear little protection against an ill-intentioned spell.

Flora eyeballed the older woman, and realised with trepidation that this was another person she would need to shield. She knew that her barrier could resist the assault of one maleficar, but was unsure if it could withstand the assault of simultaneous attack. She did not know if it would last against demonic magic.

What if everyone runs in three different directions? I only have two eyes.

Can I make my eyes go in different directions to help keep track?

….

! No.

The responsibility for keeping her companions intact felt like a length of six-inch thick rope tangled around her: of the tarred and braided sort that kept galleons anchored in port.

What if I make a mistake?

What if you don't?

Flora blew out her cheeks in a long and gloomy exhalation, aware that she would gain little sympathy from her general. She thought of her father, who had borne responsibility for those who worked on his boat; taking the helm as they steered into the wild heart of the Waking Sea. He had never protested at the burden that he bore: then again, he had never complained of much except bent hooks and broken lines.

He just got on with it.

He did.

Worrying… it doesn't really help anything, does it?

No.

In her mind Flora adjusted the heavy rope of responsibility until it draped across her shoulders: still there, but less distracting and a little easier to bear.

"It ain't getting any calmer out there" she said out loud, grateful for the natural nonchalance of her face. "Let's go. "


AN: If I could animate two seconds worth of footage, it would be Flora looking like a avenging goddess of antiquity and screeching like a deranged harpy, lol. And all it took was the prospect of Alistair getting a fireball to the face to unlock the wrath of a Herring fishwife!

Anyway, here we go into the Circle! We've met Wynne, who (sorry Wynne!) I'm downgrading to a regular mage in this story since Flora has the role of the spirit healer. I did her slightly dirty in the original by making her a bit of a batty old shrew, definitely going to amend that this time.

lol I love how Morrigan just has NO time for Alistair and Flora making eyes at each other.

Thank you for reading!