By Gods Forsaken

by inwardtransience

One day, the shadows will part, and the skies will open wide. When he rises, everyone will see. (How do you do a summary for something this big? Total retelling, Mahariel!Warden, mage!Hawke, Dreamer!Trevelyan!Inquisitor, worldbuilding, too many OCs, serious plot edits, primarily F/F.)

13. None Are Alone — I

9:30 Nubulis 19

Kibannan Circle of Magi, Ostwick, Confederation of Free Cities

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Everything was cold, and dark.

The thing about being a Dreamer was that sleeping was pretty much a continuation of whatever she'd been doing or feeling or whatever when she was awake. Evie...didn't think it was like that for normal people? Mystrel said even mages were less aware here than she was, that there was a break — a psychic discontinuity, Mystrel called it — between their waking self and their dreaming self. That the Fade, and who they were while here, was separate from them, at least a little bit.

Apparently, it was even more for normal people. She'd been told normal people were barely conscious at all when they were here, that it was fuzzy and distant and weird, didn't make any sense at all, like a jumble of any random thought just thrown together into a confusing mess. Not that they noticed how confusing it was, since they were barely here, and once they were gone they didn't remember most of the details.

Which was just weird to think about. Evie was pretty sure she'd had moments of not being fully awake, psychic discontinuities in her moment to moment being, but she'd been very little — she couldn't remember them. She was never not awake, in a way. She was awake in the real world, of course, and when she went to bed she just laid down, got comfortable, and then stepped right into the Fade. There was no break, no discontinuity, one went right into the other. The same thing when her body woke up, she just...went back, and she was there. No break.

Mystrel said how life was for Evie, each moment flowing right into the next to the next to the next with no break at all, was what a normal person (even a normal mage) would think of as just never going to sleep at all. Which was weird. If this psychic discontinuity was what normal people thought sleep was, Evie hadn't slept since she was...she didn't know, two or three? Mystrel said normal people would get very tired trying to do this, which, yes, her body got tired, she had to let it sleep, and her mind did too sometimes, but when that happened she made somewhere soft and warm and pleasant and just relaxed for a bit, she didn't...let things go black, and stop being her, whatever that was like.

Sleep for normal people sounded...kind of scary, honestly? If she had a break like that, when she stopped being aware of herself, and woke up hours later with only a vague idea of what had happened, that would be... She didn't like that thought. She'd probably be really freaked out when she woke up, and run off to find Mystrel and ask what was wrong with her.

But, sometimes, she kind of wished she could just...stop. Even only for a little bit.

The problem with always being awake was, when she went to sleep, she brought all of her with her. Normal people did some of that too, but they did it less, not everything got through that psychic discontinuity, some of themselves left behind. But whatever Evie was thinking, whatever she was feeling, all of it came with her.

So if she felt awful while she was awake, she felt awful while she was asleep too. It seeped out of her into the Fade around her, making everything hard and bland, like the colours had run out of everything, and cold, her breath fogging in a little cloud in front of her. (She hadn't even known her breath could do that here.) Going to sleep, she hadn't thought about where she was going, and she'd ended up in a tiny little room. A box, really, there wasn't enough room for her to stand up, or even lay across the floor in any direction — maybe if she put her head in one corner and stretched out the long way, maybe. Not that it mattered, she wasn't moving, sat still against the wall, her shoulder leaning against the corner, her knees hugged to her chest, just...

The colours were washed out, nothing looking quite right, but that didn't mean there wasn't anything to look at. The walls flickered from one thing to another, like looking through a dirty window — the view of the Waking Sea from the cliffs the Circle stood on, so close but so far, the Templars wouldn't let her go outside; one of the Templars at the door, turning her away all cold and hard, and more Templars flashing by, always there, always watching; the other mages, all so much older than her, most didn't talk to her at all, some days she went hours without talking to anyone, just blank uninterested faces all around; the Tranquil, looking like humans and elves but empty, there was nothing inside them, like someone had taken a bunch of clay and shaped it into the form of a person, did some magic to make it move, but it wasn't real, it was empty, and—

Jeria, explaining to her that, no, there was no time she'd be allowed to go home, she'd be staying here. For the rest of her life. Forever.

Evie could do anything she wanted in her dreams. But she didn't have the...the energy to do anything, the misery that had been following her around for a couple weeks now weighing her down even here. She could go find some dream-books, she guessed — books in the Fade were neat, because while she was reading them what she was reading about was painted into the world around her, real books were so much more boring — or maybe find Cammy, Cammy could always cheer her up. Obviously, Cammy was a spirit of joy, cheering people up was what it did.

But going to find Cammy would take effort. More than usual, since she would need a thread to follow to Cammy, and she didn't know what she had that she could use right now. And she didn't really want to anyway. She wanted to just...not.

For once, she was jealous of other people's ability to not be, even just for a little bit.

There was a tingle crawling across the magic of her little box, a sharp smell that made her think of dry leaves crunching with autumn frost, the air around her feeling even colder than it'd been a second ago. In a low whisper, felt more than heard, like fingers on the back of her neck, "I can help you rest, child."

Evie scowled — great, it was this demon again. It'd found her almost every night the last week or so, she could slip away pretty easy but it was still annoying. She didn't bother responding to the thing, or doing anything else but fly away from her little box, letting it crumble apart behind her.

Not really aiming for anything, just reaching and pulling, Evie stumbled into Amalia's dream — she was the closest person to her right now, back in the real world, it made sense she would end up here. Evie glanced around and—

Oh dear, Amalia was having a sexy dream. That was embarrassing. Well honest, Evie didn't care, and it wasn't like Amalia even knew she was here, but she knew Amalia would be embarrassed if she knew Evie saw this, and it was just polite not to look. So Evie left right away, blindly grasping for one of her own memories.

She was sitting at a desk, in the blue study — her desk, child-sized, put here when she'd been old enough to start writing lessons. There was a quill in her hand, one of the cheap, plain ones she'd learned with, a paper in front of her half-covered in lines of sloppy, jagged cursive. Mother was sitting nearby, in a soft gold home-dress, sipping at a cup of tea, her elbow resting on the edge of Evie's desk. There was giggling coming from behind her, she glanced over her shoulder, playing in the middle of the floor were baby Max and Sedma. Max was so little, and how bad Evie's handwriting was, this must have been a few years ago.

She was home.

A thrum of hot pain shooting through her chest, Evie froze the memory with a thought, everything going too still and silent. She turned back around, staring at the wall over her desk. Tingles calling over her arms, her throat almost painfully tight...maybe coming here had been a bad idea.

Sneaking a quick glance at her mother again, she blinked. Wait a second, she could go into other people's dreams, whenever she wanted. And Grandfather was the Arl, maybe there was something they could...

Evie felt like an idiot. She should have thought of this earlier.

But, she couldn't just go over to someone's dream and expect them to remember it, what with that psychic discontinuity thing, but there had to be a way to make it stick. She'd never tried, though, she didn't know it.

Which meant she had to find herself some knowledge. Evie closed her eyes, concentrated, focused on Mystrel, on all the things the patient, helpful old spirit had taught her — parts of Mystrel that she carried with her always. Pulling on those threads, Evie reached out, and she moved...

Evie stepped out into soft sunlight warming her skin, a gentle breeze tugging at her hair, herbs spicy and flowers sweet tickling at her nose. She glanced around, finding herself in...a garden of some kind, she thought. But not like any kind of garden she'd ever seen, all the plants — almost too colourful, leaves a hundred shades of green, but also a purple-ish red, glimpses of blue and yellow, some of the branches a dark almost silvery black, and flowers and flowers in every colour imaginable, some of them with several colours all in one blossom — let to grow in curving, twisting shapes, pretty but not what they'd do left to themselves, or the nice symmetrical, orderly shapes most real world gardens were forced into. The paths between them were marked with tiles, a silver-blue with an almost glass-like sheen to them, but not pressed right against each other, grass still allowed to grow between them, in a few places trails of violets stitching through.

Evie knew what this was, not where but when. How everything seemed to have too much colour, the giggling giddy thrill of magic against her skin so thick she could almost touch it, the clear blue sky above her streaked with faint smears of green and orange and violet — this was a memory of Elvësan, the land of the ancient elves before the Fall. She hadn't seen very many of these, but the sky was kind of a giveaway.

After a short walk through the super-colourful bushes, she came to a sort of amphitheatre thing. The grassy ground sloped down away from her, zigzagging weird to form benches, faintly shining with enchantments of some kind. Scattered across the benches were about two dozen people — well, she was pretty sure they were all spirits. Some looked like elves, with weirdly-cut clothes glimmering with polished stone here and there, but others had less obvious shapes, blobs of light with only vague features, faces and hands, too young to keep a constant form yet.

From what Mystrel had said, spirits got smarter and more complex as they aged. Making themselves look like a very particular thing, especially something with as many fiddly little details as a body, and keeping it the same all the time, was actually kind of hard, the younger spirits often couldn't do it at all. You could kind of tell how old a spirit was just by how normal they could make themselves look — except demons, who sometimes made themselves scary on purpose — from blobs of light like many of the ones here (very young, and mostly boring), to ones who could hold a shape but couldn't get the colours or the details right (old enough to be a person, but still very single-minded), to ones that could look mostly right but messed up some of the details, like the hair or the eyes, going even more wrong when their attention slipped (the oldest in the audience were these ones), to spirits like Mystrel and Cammy, who could look like normal humans if they wanted to, Evie couldn't tell the difference.

The oldest here was definitely the one at the lectern at the centre — well, there wasn't a lectern, just a flat little round spot at the bottom of the slope, all the benches facing toward it, but that's where a lectern would go if there was one. The spirit looked like an elf woman, maybe in her thirties, face stern but friendly, eyes such a bright green Evie could see it from here, her very blonde hair plaited through with glinting strands of silver and gold. She was wearing a sky-blue dress, knee length and sleeveless, covered in complex swirling stitching in yellow and white and green — Evie knew enough to tell some of the squiggles were written elvish, but she couldn't read any. There were rings around her arms and ankles, silver sketched with the glowing blue of lyrium, her ears run through with glimmering silver and gold and emeralds in multiple places, which was wild, Evie had never seen an elf with pierced ears before. The elf was in the middle of giving a lecture of some kind to the other spirits, the air bending in colourful swirls around her as she illustrated whatever it was she was talking about.

Evie knew the elf woman was Mystrel. She couldn't say how she knew that, she just did — the Fade was weird like that.

"Now, none of that." Mystrel cut off her babble, the swirling colours around it vanishing, and glanced up at Evie. There was an odd clang, felt more than heard, and...something happened to the Fade around her. Like the air she was breathing, her magic, was being bent back, away from the nearest row of benches and over her shoulders to trail away. In a blink, Mystrel was standing next to her. "It appears my mortal friend here needs something of me. Farewell for now." Mystrel's hand came down gently on Evie's shoulder, and the amphitheatre smeared away into nothing.

Evie found herself standing in a place that couldn't exist. They were in a beach, the sands a gently glowing pinkish-white, looking out over a softly lapping sea, the water intensely blue, too blue, the sea didn't actually look that blue. The sky was the bright green of the raw Fade — soft and pleasant, like sunlight through leaves — dotted here and there with islands just floating in the sky, some flat with the ground but some at weird angles, one she spotted completely upside-down, covered in grasslands and forests and cities, tiny in the distance, a river running off of one to tumble down, down, down, down, miles down, before finally splashing into the sea, maybe only a hundred feet from the two of them on the shore.

The Black City was, as ever, upside-down directly over her head, murky in the distance, stained metal and glass sickly glimmering in the directionless light.

It was weird and impossible, but it was pretty. As fun as exploring dreams and memories could be, Evie had always liked the raw Fade.

"I would prefer you call for me when you're in distress, Evelyn." Mystrel had taken a couple steps away, her back to Evie, drawing on the air in swirling curves, a trail of light following her finger before quickly sinking away — warding this spot against other spirits or demons who might come bumbling in, she knew. Evie could see now her dress was backless from the waist up, held in place by the front coming up and tying behind her neck, which, that was scandalous, Evie had never even heard of such a thing before. Maybe it'd been fine back in Elvësan. "It is not wise for spirits so young as some students of mine to be in close proximity to such strong feelings. At least, not until they learn to hold a more coherent sense of themselves and who they are."

"Oh, right." Evie knew that, that just being close to people feeling things could have an effect on spirits, and since Evie was a fancy special Dreamer or whatever the effect she had was even bigger. If she went around feeling too miserable around baby spirits for too long she might turn them into demons on accident. (Humans and elves were as dangerous to spirits as the other way around sometimes, though nobody at the Circle seemed to know, which was weird, weren't they supposed to be experts?) "I wasn't thinking about that, sorry."

"No harm done. Only something to keep in mind in future."

"Right." Evie glanced around for a second, thinking about how to ask what she wanted to ask. But first, she was wondering, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen you look like an elf before."

Mystrel gave her one of those flat, expressionless looks it did all the time — or a similar thing but more elfy, she guessed. "This is what I looked like, once." It glanced down at itself, hands sliding down its sides, came to loosely fold over its hips. "Or as close to it as I recall — it has been a very long time."

Evie blinked. "You used to be an elf? Can people just become spirits?"

"Certainly." In the space of the word, Mystrel shrunk down to about Evie's height. She still looked like an elf — even the same elf, the blonde hair and brilliantly Fade-green eyes — but a girl instead of a woman, the piercings in her ears vanished, the backless dress traded for a loose vest and tiny little shorts that might pass for underclothes. (Evie was starting to think the clothes had been weird back in Elvësan.) "I was born a being of flesh and blood, a very, very long time ago — before the raising of the Veil, before the foundations of the Golden Spires were laid, before humanity as you know it even came to exist. The uncounted eons are as scattered dust in my mind, so ancient even I can scarce recall."

Okay, Evie had sort of already known Mystrel was really old, but still, holy crap. "The Golden Spires? I don't know what that one is." It was hard to appreciate how stupid old her spirit friend was if she didn't even know what one of the measuring sticks was.

"The court of the self-proclaimed gods of the ancient elves — you know it by the name Tevinter recorded: Arlathan." Saying the word, an odd lilt on its voice, Mystrel pointed up...

...toward the Black City.

Evie had no idea how to respond to that, she just gaped back at Mystrel, breathless.

Wait, if the Black City, which used to be the Golden City, really used to be Arlathan...that meant it couldn't be the city of the Maker then, right? Which meant the Chantry was wrong about that. (Not that that was a surprise, the Chantry was wrong about a lot of magic stuff.) Which, that also meant everyone was wrong about where the Blight came from — she'd always thought that was kind of stupid anyway, but the Maker couldn't curse people for breaking into His house if it wasn't His house. So...where did the Blight come from, then?

Also, why was Arlathan stuck in the Fade? Also also, why didn't anybody know this?!

(Because they didn't have absurdly old spirit friends, that was why.)

"Like all creatures of the waking world, elves came to be out of the meeting of earth and sky, spirit given flesh." While Evie had been distracted by the dazzlingly huge history fact dropped casually on her head, Mystrel had moved closer to the shoreline, sitting on a rock that hadn't been there a moment ago, bare toes dipped into the water. "From the beginning, there have been people who decided they wished to return to the sky that birthed them, to leave their body behind and walk among the spirits as one of their kind, forevermore. Never very many, as it was a frightening thing to contemplate, but a few."

Oh. Yes, that was kind of a crazy thing to do, wasn't it — in fact, it sounded a lot like dying, just without the...not existing anymore part. Just letting your body die and hoping nothing went wrong sounded very scary. Plopping down onto the rock next to Mystrel — the water was very warm, warmer than the Waking Sea ever got, and while there was a hint of salt on the air it actually smelled really sweet, almost syrupy, which was weird — Evie asked, "Is that something anyone can do? or are elves just special, all meeting of earth and sky or whatever."

Mystrel turned a faint smile on her. "Humans are spirit given flesh the same as elves, the process by which you came to be differing only in the details — so far as anyone can say such things with certainty, of course, nobody remembers a time before elves. Yes, humans can do it too. It is not a simple process, requiring the use of certain potions and meditations, and the art was lost with the Fall and never rediscovered, so I'm unaware of any human ever accomplishing it. I will not be teaching it to you, at least not yet. I fear you would be tempted to use it to escape your current circumstances, which would be an extreme course of action to take, to say the least."

"Well, okay, yeah, I might, maybe." Especially if she didn't get used to it, if being stuck at the Circle just stayed miserable, and it went on and on and on and on, and Evie couldn't get a break from it at all... Yeah, she might just decide to leave it behind. She thought being here would be a lot better if she knew she didn't have to go back. "But! I had a different idea about that, that's why I came to find you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I think, maybe Grandfather will be able to yell at people and get them to let me out? I mean, I wouldn't be able to stay out, I'll always have to come back, but even being able to go home for a little bit every once in a while will help, I think."

With a slow, solemn sort of nod, Mystrel said, "It might at that. And it is quite probable the Circle will be amenable to such an arrangement — it isn't unusual for the children of the nobility or other influential personages to be given special treatment. They will likely assign your father's sister to keep an eye on you while you're on the outside, however."

Oh, well, that was fine, Auntie Lyn was nice! Auntie Lyn was the Knight-Captain at the Chantry in Kibannan, which was only a few minutes' walk from the big Trevelyan house in the city, so it wouldn't even be that far out of her way, that they'd ask her to do that made a lot of sense. (It was kind of silly that they thought somebody needed to keep an eye on her in the first place, but people were silly about magic.) "Okay, good, I thought that might work. But, to do that I need to talk to someone outside. I can go in other people's dreams, but... Is there a way to make them remember it, so they'll know to actually do something about it when they wake up?"

Mystrel smiled.

What followed was one of the shortest and easiest magic lessons she'd ever had with her (apparently very) old spirit friend, but also one of the more interesting. Before, their about every other day lessons weren't on magic, mostly history and languages and whatever fun interesting thing came to mind, but now that she was in the Circle, surrounded by magic stuff all the time, Mystrel had switched to mostly magic lessons. She said they'd be getting back to other stuff in a few months once she was caught up a bit — since she'd done that Harrowing thing before casting magic even once in her entire life (well, maybe a couple times, but never very much), she was behind all of the full mages...but also not really, because even the youngest were literally twice her age. Most of the apprentices were older than her, even some who'd just gotten here, throwing someone as young as Evie into the Harrowing was something they did never, finding a Dreamer they'd freaked out just that badly. Evie hadn't understood what was going on enough to be as annoyed about that as she should have been, but she did now.

Anyway, magic lessons. Magic was actually really easy most of the time, or at least the simpler stuff was — if you could imagine it, and you could throw enough power at it, it would happen — so Evie was catching up really fast. Enough some of the other mages and the Templars were kind of creeped out, she thought, but it wasn't like this stuff was hard. The more complicated stuff, sure, and it didn't help that the words Mystrel used to teach her and the words Circle people used to describe the same things were different — Mystrel talked very artsy-like, all about enforcing one's will on the world and introducing uncertainty into the unchanging, but Circle magic was all fields and schema and equations, big long words formed by tacking together roots from Classical Tevene...but not always used with their actual meanings — Classical Tevene was one of the languages Mystrel was teaching her, though they'd barely started, focusing more on Orlesian (which she'd already known pretty well), modern Tevene, and Orzammar dwarvish, and obviously Orlesian and modern Tevene had lots of the same old roots in them, so she knew what they were supposed to mean — which only made it more confusing. Back in the real world, she spent a lot of time reading, trying to catch up on how they talked about magic, which was going much slower than the actual doing magic part.

But, yeah, dream stuff. This Mystrel described it as kind of doing magic in the real world but backwards, introducing certainty where there was none. Evie could talk to people in their dreams using this — mages, yes, but normal people too — and there were also other neat things she could do. Normally, she could learn things in the Fade but, like, practice didn't carry over, she couldn't exercise here and have it do anything to her body in the real world. But, if she trained in a skill that used a lot of little fiddly precise things, like playing the lute or swordplay or something, using this same making dreams real trick she could make the muscle-memory carry over. Which was kind of neat, she hadn't known that.

Also, Mystrel warned her, it was very possible to hurt people doing this. If she hurt someone in the Fade, the wounds wouldn't carry over, but that didn't mean bad things couldn't happen. Doing damage to their fake Fade body couldn't damage their real body, but it would hurt, and could mess people up pretty badly, emotionally. If she killed someone — in the way spirits could be killed, the magic and thought and stuff that made them up scattered enough it couldn't pull itself back together — normally someone would just wake up, but if she made it real first... Well, they might wake up really messed up, maybe insane, and might just never wake up at all. It was totally possible for Dreamers to murder someone in their sleep, and most people had no way to stop them at all.

Aaand Evie suddenly understood why everyone was so weirdly scared of her. Okay, then.

Anyway, actually doing it wasn't hard — she just reached out to all the... It was harder to explain than it was to do. The magic in the Fade felt all wispy, like smoke filling a room flowing around and curling, she just had to reach out and make the wisps stop. Same with a person in the Fade, make all the little bits of magic and thought and feeling or whatever stop, and somehow not flickering around back and forth and all over the place made people's minds actually work right, and they would be fully awake here and would remember it and everything. Though, it was a fake awakeness, they couldn't change things as easily or thoroughly as she could, but it was more than enough to have a conversation they wouldn't forget right away.

Mystrel had her practise for a bit, but not on any actual people, just on the magic of the Fade on their little seashore here. It only took her a couple tries to get it to feel right, it wasn't hard — it helped that Mystrel could demonstrate it for her, she just had to make it feel like it did when Mystrel did it, it wasn't hard. (Apparently Mystrel could do Dreamer things, which, she'd kind of known that already, with how much control it had over the Fade, and also it'd probably been a Dreamer back when it'd been an elf? So, that made sense.) And then she practised on Mystrel, which looked like it made it uncomfortable — not painful, really, more like sitting wrong, shifting on its rock and frowning a little — but it just broke her magic with a thought, told her to do it again until she had it right. It only took a few more tries before Evie had that down too.

So that meant she could go find Mum, and beg her to get her out of here. But first, she could feel her body twitching through the thread connecting them, she should see what was going on with that. After politely thanking Mystrel for the help — because Evelyn Trevelyan was a well-mannered young lady, of course, or at least knew how to act like one when she wanted to — Evie reached inside, following the thread down, down, and she pulled—

Oh, she was thirsty. She should take care of that, and maybe get a snack while she was at it. Besides, it felt like it was late enough for first sleep to be over already — Mum might not even be asleep right now. Amalia's bed was empty, so, seemed like a good bet. She had time.

The Circle was quieter during the night, but it never was entirely silent. In the big, sprawling manor house the mages and Templars were set up in — it had been built by the Orlesian governor ages ago, when the Empire had taken over the Marches during the Second Blight (replacing the Tevinter governor in Kibannan, Evie's several-times great-grandfather), and added on to here and there ever since — there were a couple of different wings, each set to a different purpose. The Templars had one wing, on the north side of the manor, opposite the shore and closest to the gates. Evie had only been there passing through when she'd been brought here, since then had only seen the main entrance to it, flanked with Templars in their shiny armor, the air crackling with isolation wards.

The apprentices, which was what they called people who hadn't done the Harrowing yet, had another wing on the east side. All of them were put in four big rooms, two for boys and two for girls, filled with rows of beds and desks. The apprentices were mostly kids, and there were some grown people too, but seeing anyone older than twenty or so would be weird. Their hall also had a few lecture halls and stuff, one big lounge with a view of the cliffs, a dining hall connected to the kitchens at the base of the tower. The people living there weren't all apprentices, there were a few full mages and a couple Enchanters who had some rooms, keeping a closer eye on all the kids and stuff.

In the middle of the manor was the tower — it was called that, but there were a few halls and stuff attached at the base that weren't part of the tower itself, but not part of any of the wings either. Underneath were the storerooms and kitchens and stuff, also where the staff lived. The baths were down there too, everything clean and pretty and enchanted, Evie privately suspected it was Tevinter work. (Nobody denied they'd been very good at building that kind of thing, and still were, really.) Above that were some lecture halls, the big room Evie had had that weird evaluation thing in, a few halls with wards all done in the floors where people could practice bigger, flashier magic without breaking anything. The tower itself wasn't tall, a big wide circle but only five levels high. The staircase wound halfway through it, and on the inside was the library, on the outside rooms holding magic junk — like things for potions and enchanting and all kinds of magical artifacts gathered by the Circle, that sort of thing — and also private apartments for Enchanters, the youngest Enchanters at the bottom all the way up to the Senior Enchanters on the top floor.

Jeria's office and her rooms were up there, it was the only part of the top floor Evie was allowed to go to. The four levels in the library — the bottom floor of the tower was the big dining hall — were all different, had different kinds of books in them. The first floor everybody could go to, just like history and science and the basic magics and stuff — this was the only one apprentices were allowed in, it was directly connected to the second level of their wing. The second floor all the full mages could go to, and apprentices with permission from a teacher; the third floor the apprentices weren't allowed in at all. The top floor normal mages could get in if they had permission, but otherwise it was just for Enchanters.

Not that Evie spent a lot of time up there, but she had taken tea with Jeria up in her office once a week since coming here. Jeria was nice enough, but it was kind of irritating, because Evie had to remind herself to be proper and all, when really she just wanted to complain at Jeria about how terrible it was here, she hated it, she wanted to go home. But Evelyn Trevelyan was a well-mannered young lady, and that wasn't how she'd been taught to speak to people in a forum like taking tea with the First Enchanter of the Kibannan Circle of Magi, so.

(She was pretty sure Jeria knew something was wrong, but she was too polite to say anything.)

The last wing was where the full mages lived. There were a few lounges here and there, but most of it was a sprawling web of apartments, the kinking halls laid out haphazardly, as though more had just been tacked onto the place whenever they decided they needed more. Evie had only been in hers, but she assumed they were pretty much all the same. The thing was split in two parts, one a sort of sitting room thing, with a couple chairs and sofas and bookshelves, and the other a bedroom. The bedroom had sort of been divided in half, but not with a solid wall, instead these flimsy wooden slats that did block light, but not really sound much. Close to the door the slats could be pulled out or pushed in a bit — they had to be pushed back to get through the door, but at night they were usually all the way to the wall, blocking it off as much as possible.

On each side of the thin little wall were a pair of beds and desks — on the other side were Jona and Sadie, on this side Amalia and Evie. Of the four of them, Sadie was the oldest, a squat, smiling-eyed woman of around thirty-five. (So, about Evie's parents' age.) Sadie had kept trying to be nice to her, all talking soft and grabbing at her hand to lead her places, Evie had been here for about a week before telling her off — Evie might be a little kid, but Sadie was not her mother — and she was still pleasant but more distant now. (She got the feeling she might have offended Sadie a little bit.) Jona was twenty-seven (Amalia said), tall and Orlesian blonde, and had hardly talked to Evie at all, so she couldn't really say what she was like.

Amalia was nice enough. She was the closest to Evie's age of the three, at seventeen...which meant she was only not quite twice as old as Evie. She was Antivan — or, her parents were Antivan, she'd been born in Wycome — with dusky bronze skin and glittering black hair, a slight lilting accent on her Alamarri. (Which was familiar, Mum was from Antiva, she had the same accent but much stronger.) She'd done her Harrowing only a few weeks before Evie, and didn't really know many of the full mages either — she did have friends here, but they were mostly still apprentices. Evie wouldn't say she was a friend, exactly, but she was friendly, telling Evie how things worked around here (casually, not all annoying and condescending like Sadie), showing her around the library, what she should be reading to catch up, what was just fun to look at.

They'd even practised magic together a few times. Evie, of course, didn't know the words the Circle mages used to talk about magic stuff, and she hadn't been practising magic as long as Amalia had. What she did have was a spirit teaching her almost every night as she slept. Mystrel didn't use the same special words the Circle did, so it was often hard to describe things in a way Amalia could understand, but apparently it was helpful. (Amalia wasn't just saying that, Evie could feel her casting get smoother sometimes.) Actually seeing someone cast a particular thing correctly was also useful for Evie — magic felt different in dreams, getting it to go right in the real world could be kind of awkward — so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

She was pretty sure that was right. Orlesian was annoying, even when it was Orlesian pretending to be Alamarri.

In her room it was quieter than it would be during the day, especially with Amalia already gone, but not entirely quiet: Evie could hear muffled moaning through the wall — probably Jona touching herself again. The first time that had happened, Amalia had gotten all flustered, maybe worried she'd have to explain it to Evie, but obviously she knew what sex was. The older mage had been surprised for all of three seconds, because duh, Amalia, Fade-walking, she'd known all about it since she she'd been five. She kind of thought it seemed weird and gross, but adults did weird and gross things sometimes, so she'd just shrugged it off every time she stumbled across a memory or dream of it somewhere and moved on.

Like she did here and now. Evie slipped out of bed, plucked her cloak out of her wardrobe and wrapped it around her shoulders — her nightdress was fine as long as she stayed indoors (and she wasn't allowed outside), but it was the middle of Nubulis, it could get cold in the halls. She pushed the slats out of the way so she could get at the door, a surprised squeak coming from the other half of the room, Jona probably heard the clacking, but Evie sidled through the door without a word, closing it behind her.

The hallways through the next door were also quieter than in the daytime, but not silent. There were a few people scattered here and there, their faces shadowy and blank in the darkness, huddled up close in little clumps, the air filled with a hiss of whispering, too quiet for Evie to pick out any of it but a single word now and again. Maybe a footstep, a rustle of cloth, a suppressed giggle.

Standing not far from the door was Amalia and a willowy blond elf, it took Evie a second to realise it was Weyrden, one of Amalia's friends. He was still an apprentice, he would have had to walk across the whole Circle to come find her — Evie thought they might be together, but neither of them had said anything about it, and always acted normal around her. It just meant Weyrden was around a lot when Evie was with Amalia, which was fine, he was nice enough. Amalia noticed her right away, said they were just about to go down to the kitchens to nick some leftovers, if Evie wanted to come with.

The walk down toward the kitchens was quiet, hardly any people around, a couple more going the same way they were or on their way back, but otherwise nothing. There were a couple Templars standing guard by the doors up the stairs to the library, but they were going the opposite direction, taking the stairs down underground. The kitchens were low-ceilinged, but really long and wide, columns splitting it up here and there, cabinets and baskets and ovens and all kinds of things scattered all over the place, smelling like ash and a mix of spices that had Evie sneezing a few steps inside. (Only a couple times, though, just getting used to it.) There were some people about, mages slipping down to get a midnight snack and chat for a bit, along with several people (mostly elves) in rougher wool, who Evie assumed were staff. She'd seen them around, of course, but during the day they had a uniform of sorts, at the moment she could guess which were mages and which were staff because one mostly wore linen and the other wool.

(Evie's silk-blend nightdress stood out in that way, it was one of the things she'd taken with her from home.)

There was a basket of leftover buns sitting on a counter, so Evie grabbed one of those — they were cold and a little dry from sitting out for several hours, but she just need her stomach to shut up so she could go back to sleep, no big deal. After a few minutes bumbling around, Amalia ended up at a stove, sparking it to light with magic. She started mixing up a drink, several people nearby telling her to add them to the list, she asked Evie if she wanted some moretta intersognante, which Evie still wasn't sure what that meant — intersognante might be "between-sleeping", but she didn't know moretta — but she'd had the stuff before, it was good, why not.

Before long, Evie was perched on one of the counters, kicking her feet in the air, another bun and a steaming mug in hand. The drink was mostly milk, but it also had rum or brandy (whichever one Amalia found first), along with a few spices — mostly nutmeg and cinnamon, she thought? Something Amalia remembered from before she'd been brought here, she made it every few days. It was supposed to have coffee in it, if she was making it during the day it did, but, that wasn't really something people wanted in the middle of the night, was it. A lot of people liked it, it'd become a whole thing long before Evie had gotten here.

Even one of the Templars standing guard upstairs came down when he smelled it, setting down his helmet and peeling off his gloves so he could properly hold a mug. Evie was a little nervous when she saw the shiny armor in the shadows, but some of the mages greeted him by name, a few minutes later sat on counters chatting and joking, so apparently this one was nice.

After a few minutes, the mages started playing a game. They would make a glowing ball, some kind of annoying or embarrassing spell held inside, and would then toss it at another person; the person had to catch it, which was hard to do, because they needed to push out magic that held back the ball without breaking it; then they'd change the magic of the ball and the prank spell inside (which was also hard to do without breaking it), then toss it to a new person, who did it again, and again, and again. The prank spells held inside were harmless things, mostly — a burst of frost was the most common, just hitting the person with a sudden freezing wind, probably because that was the easiest thing to do. Evie had seen the mages at it a few times, but she'd never played it herself. She was a little kid, so they didn't think to include her in stuff, and also she didn't usually hang around very long. Soon they had a dozen or so people at it, mostly younger mages (and probably a few apprentices), tossing the magic ball around, teasing each other, laughing when one burst on someone.

Then Weyrden shot her a look, the blue-ish ball of magic bobbing in his hand. Oh, okay. Evie set her mug aside, held up her hands to catch it. The chattering mages went quiet, watching, but she didn't have a moment to think about that, Weyrden gently tossed the ball over at her. As it came within arm's reach, Evie pushed her magic at it, surrounding it — the tingly, tickly magic of the ball wiggled, shivering sparks running through it, so Evie shifted her magic a bit. It was difficult to explain what that was like, kind of like singing at different pitches? but also she could do more than one pitch at once, so that wasn't quite right. But anyway, she just slid the texture of her magic around until she found a way to hold it that didn't make the magic of the ball shiver, and there, she had it.

Evie reached into the spell inside the ball — mm, it was...sharp, and prickly, would probably pinch at a person's skin if it hit — and tweaked it a bit. Instead of poking at someone, the little bits should burst into a bunch of colourful sparks, which might tingle a little bit but wouldn't hurt, just be surprising. Changing the magic of the ball was harder, since she still had to hold it at the same time, so she did something simple, making it all smooth and shiny — the colour of the ball changed while she was at it, turning into a soft yellow-white. Once it was done, she picked someone out of the circle (didn't know their name), waited for a blink to make sure he was paying attention, and tossed it over. He caught it, but Evie had expected him to, her ball spell should be easy to hold on to.

Glancing around, Evie noticed most of their circle was looking at her. What? Why? She hadn't done anything weird, had she?

Or maybe figuring this out the first time she tried, when she was nine, was the weird thing? Okay maybe, but Weyrden must have thought she could play, he wouldn't have tried throwing it to her if he didn't...

After her turn came a couple more times, she decided to try something more complicated. The inside spell, she remembered what Cammy's magic felt like, all giddy and bouncy and eager, pushed the best copy she could make in there, tweaking it to jump out at a person, to sink into their skin. The ball spell, that she made more complicated. Like, really curly hair, going in tiny circles and kinking this way and that, but a couple layers of it, and made into a big ball. Holding it tight while making it, when she let go the threads of magic blew out into a tangled, sizzling mess, Evie had to scramble to hold it together.

Mm, nope, this was too unstable, it wouldn't last long enough to get across the circle. She wrapped a thin layer of magic around it, much weaker than the rest, it would only last a couple seconds once it was out of her hold. There, much better. Evie picked out a woman in the circle, maybe about Jona's age — her balls had broken on people a few times, but she'd never gotten hit yet, so, seemed fair. Carefully, she lobbed the ball over, violet streaked with silver.

The woman reached out to catch it with one hand, confident smirk on her face — she had maybe a half second to jump in surprise at the feel of the ball before it burst with a sizzle of magic. The spell took before she could stop it, and she was taken over with breathless, helpless laughter, going on for seconds, until she'd fallen to the floor with her back against the cabinets, arms wrapped around her stomach, her breaths thin and gasping and tears in her eyes, before the energy of the spell finally ran out and she stopped.

There was some joking around, most of their circle teasing the person who seemed best at this game finally getting hit with something, Evie kicking her feet in the air, giggling to herself. The woman grumbled a little, but she didn't seem too annoyed, still smiling and everything — it probably helped that Evie's spell would have felt really good, so.

Amalia leaned over to ask what that spell was. Evie didn't know how to explain it's what one of my spirit friends feels like, but made to jump out at you, so she put it in another ball, this one far more stable (it should hold together on its own without any help), and handed it over so Amalia could see what it felt like.

Evie was down in the kitchen for maybe a bit over an hour before she decided it was time to go. She'd had a second mug of Amalia's stuff, and there wasn't very much liquor in it but she was starting to feel all warm and tingly, which was when her parents stopped giving her wine, so she should probably stop. Besides, she was getting sleepy again. After tossing a last ball at someone — it burst, giving him a light shock, but softened so it just stung a bit instead of twitchy painfulness — Evie slipped off her counter, put her mug in a wash basin with the others, and made back for the stairs up.

When she got back to their rooms, Jona was on the sofa in the sitting room part with a book. Avoiding Evie's eyes, voice all awkward and her cheeks pinking a bit, she said sorry, she didn't mean to wake Evie up. But she hadn't woken Evie up, and also she could go straight back to sleep whenever she wanted to, so even if Jona had woken her up it wouldn't be a big deal. Jona was still being all weird and shifty, probably because she'd been doing a sexy thing and hadn't known a little kid could hear her, and adults could be weird about that...sometimes, Evie was pretty sure her parents had had sex with her in the room before. She would have been tiny, she didn't really remember, but still.

It took a little bit to get through that talk, like, it was fine, Jona, Evie didn't care, before she finally got back into her bedroom. Putting her cloak away, she slipped back into bed. It only took a quick moment of thought — closing her eyes to focus inside, following her magic down, down, down — and Evie was opening her eyes in the Fade.

Finding her mother shouldn't be hard — getting around in the Fade was actually easy. Her biggest worry was that Mum hadn't gotten back to sleep yet, since it wasn't very late, she didn't think, but she might as well try. Standing in a Fade-copy of the kitchen, sloppily-formed spirits tossing glowing balls of magic back and forth with echoing giggles, Evie closed her eyes, and focused. She'd never gone to a sleeping person before, but she'd done it with spirits, it wasn't hard. She just thought about her mother, memories flicking behind her eyes, found the thick bundle of threads leading away, and she reached out and pulled—

Evie was slapped over the head with sudden heat, thick and stifling, the steady wind cutting it down only a little bit. There was a lot of shouting going on, creaking and splashing, but muffled with distance, Evie couldn't pick out a single word. Nearer by was a laugh in a deep, booming voice, then a much higher voice snapping back, annoyed and almost whiny — this time, she couldn't pick anything out because it was in Antivan. (She could recognise it, because it was her mother's first language and she used it sometimes, but she couldn't really speak any.) Evie opened her eyes, looked around.

She was...standing out in the middle of the water. Once she realised that, she started to fall, dipping down to her knees before she stopped herself, the water much cooler than the air (though warmer than back home), ocean salt stinging at her nose. Okay, then...

She was in a harbor, the shore maybe a half mile away — all that noise was coming from the dockworkers, the piers hidden by dozens of great big ships, ropes running here and there in all directions, the painted sails a dizzying mix of colours. The city, stretching across the mouth of a narrow river, was all made of brick, pale yellow and orange, glinting with glass and criss-crossed with curtains and banners, though she was too far away to make out much detail. She could pick out the Chantry, and what was probably the local lord's keep, but most of the city was a colourful haze, the stone near glowing in the high summer sun.

Treviso? It must be Treviso, but Evie had never been. They were planning to make a trip out for a season, once they were sure baby Lettie was old enough to travel safely...but Evie might never go now, what with the Circle being stupid. Boo.

Not far away — it'd probably been closer before she'd gotten distracted, drifting further along — was a boat, much smaller than the ones over at the docks. This one was a tiny, graceful little thing, long and narrow, hugging low over the waves, only enough room on it to fit a few people. Small enough one person could sail it on their own, if they had to. There were two people on the boat, a grown man and a girl, both with the bronze skin and glittering black hair Evie thought of as Antivan, the man at the rudder and the girl tugging at one of the ropes running up somewhere over their heads, she lost it in the mess up there.

Evie flew over to the boat, landing a couple steps away from the man at the rudder. Looking at him, she could almost see two people at once — one a smiling human man, eyes warm and beard cut precise and dramatic, broad-shouldered and jovial...but also a spirit, under the magic of the dream its form vague and shifting. The spirit (a friendly one, by the feel of it, she wasn't worried) must be pretending to be Nonno Elvio. Evie had met...well, she remembered meeting her Antivan grandfather all of once, when he and Nonna Audria had visited after baby Lettie was born, they'd stayed for a few weeks before leaving for Antiva again. He'd been a lot older then, with grey in his hair and looking thinner and weaker, but he still smiled the same.

The girl also looked much younger than her mother, no older than thirteen or so, and she was also dressed weird. She had on baggy linen trousers, the cloth rippling in the breeze, a wide cloth belt wrapped low over her hips, and the shirt was tiny, hugging close to her skin, her arms from fingertips to shoulder, her clavicles, and the bottoms of her ribs showing.

For a couple seconds, Evie could only stare at her, blinking. Not only was the shirt so tight, the curves of her chest very obvious, but it was so little! Her navel was showing! They were outside! That was, just, scandalous...by Ostwicker standards, must be fine in Antiva, she guessed? Mum was from a respectable family, if it weren't okay Nonno would have made her cover up more before leaving the house...

Shaking off her confusion, Evie took a second to concentrate. So, she just had to reach out toward Mum (it had to be Mum, who else), the flicking wisps of her magic, and she made them stop.

Mum gasped, stumbled, nearly fell over — she might have, if she didn't have a rope right there to hold on to. "Che? Cos'è que... Treviso? Sono a Treviso?"

"Um, Alamarri please, Mum." She knew "che" was what, and Treviso was obvious, but...

Mum jumped again, whirling around to face her. "Evie?! What are you... What's going on?" She looked around, the boat, Nonno (who'd gone still when Mum woke up, no dream to work off of anymore, smile now looking a little blank), the city on the shore. "Is this real?"

"That is all a dream," Evie said, waving her hand around. "Your dream. I'm real, I came to find you."

"You..." Mum slowly turned back to her, her eyes wide. There was an odd tingling on the air, the colours around her smearing a little — feeling things can do that in the Fade sometimes. It didn't feel like a bad thing, but... She meant, it wasn't fear, or surprise either, something deep and big, and... Evie didn't know what that was. "So, you are sognatrice..."

What did she just say about the Antivan? That must mean Dreamer, it sounded vaguely like the Classical Tevene word for it, and really what else could she be talking about? "Yep, that's me, weird scary magic person over here. This is really a dream, and I'm really here, we're in the Fade right now. This is really happening."

"...Oh." Mum stared blankly at her for another couple seconds, wide-eyed and silent.

And then, in a blink, arms were around her, yanking her in to press her face against Mum's chest — which was less cushiony than normal, since Mum was young enough in this dream her breasts were much smaller — fingers digging through her hair. There was some babbling in Antivan, which Evie only knew a couple words of, but it didn't really matter, Mum's soft, warm voice carrying the meaning anyway. After only a couple seconds Evie's chest was starting to feel too full, clawing at her throat, because it was her — it might not look like her or smell like her, but it felt like her, the little tingly bits of her mind (the spirit part of Mystrel's spirit given flesh, she guessed), louder here without her body in the way but still obviously her. Evie wasn't sure how she could tell, she just did.

Mum leaned a little away again, sitting on her heels in front of Evie. (She was also shorter than she was in real life.) One hand cupping her cheek, "Oh, cara mia, how I have missed you. It's too early for you to be taken from me like this." Part of Evie doubted that — it wasn't like Mum had really tried to stop them from dragging her off to the Circle...but she didn't know how much choice Mum had had about that? Once the Templars knew what she was, it'd probably been too late, and that was really Evie's fault, babbling off about her spirit friends to Auntie Lyn...

Still, she could feel it bubbling up, but Evie brushed the feeling away before she could start crying — crying sort of made it hard to talk, it'd just get in the way. She probably wouldn't have been able to just stop it like that if this were the real world, but her fake dream body only did what she wanted it to, so it was easy. "I've missed you too, Mum. It's, um, why I came to find you." Part of it, anyway.

"Oh?" Her eyes narrowed, giving Evie a very canny look — it didn't match the age Mum looked like now at all. "Are you all right? Did something happen? We haven't heard anything, the Revered Mother hasn't gotten back to us with news yet, and your aunt Adelynn said..."

"No, nothing— Nobody's hurt me or anything, just..." Evie took a careful breath, brushing away the urge to cry again. Still, there was something shaky on her voice when she said, "I hate it here! They never let us do anything, and all the other mages are so much older than me so they hardly ever talk to me — most of them, some are nice, but still — and its big and cold and the dreams are mostly terrible here, but I can always get away so I guess that's not a big deal, it's just that it's every night and it's annoying, and the Templars are, ugh, all these big people all in armor carrying swords everywhere, it's kind of scary — none of them have done anything, but that doesn't matter, being everywhere all the time, and watching, they're creepy — and they say I have to stay here forever, and they won't even let me go outside!"

"Evie—"

"I want to go home!"

And then Mum was hugging her again, her fingers running through her hair, softly hissing into the side of her head, tsee tsee tsee tsee (that's what Mum said instead of shh, she assumed it was an Antivan thing). It was harder to brush away the urge to cry this time, clinging at her throat and stinging at her eyes. She wished Mum were wearing a proper dress, there wasn't anything to ball her fists in. "I'm so sorry, dolcezza."

Oh, that meant sweetness — Mum called her that sometimes, Evie never really wondered what it meant but it sounded really similar to the Tevene word. Maybe she should add Antivan to the list of languages to learn, but Orlesian was the big important language in the south, and Tevene the one in the north, so those were bigger priorities right now...and also old elvish for magic reasons, she guessed...and maybe Qunari, if she had the time...

"I shouldn't have left it so long, I thought— Well, it doesn't matter." Mum leaned back a bit again, but her hand didn't leave Evie's hair, still slowly combing over her temple and down, down... "I'll talk to your grandfather tomorrow, I promise. There must be some arrangement that can be made. Back in Antiva, sometimes mages are allowed to go home now and again, and in Rivain, well..."

Evie almost had to smile at that. There were barely Circles at all in Rivain — there was one in Dairsmuid, but it ran like the northern Circles, just places mages could go to learn things and then go back home whenever they liked — and in Antiva they let people get away with things sometimes, worried if they were too harsh Antiva might switch to the Black Chantry. (They were closer to Tevinter than Orlais, and their nobility had a lot of business deals and intermarriages and stuff.) But still, rules were bent and broken all the time, that's how the world worked. "Please do. I just, I really don't want to stay here..."

A worried sort of look crossed over Mum's face, then softened, her eyes warm and...something. There was a flicker of green-gold magic, but Evie didn't know these things well enough to tell what it was. "You know, you won't be... A mage is always part of the Circle. Even if they let you come home sometimes, you'll always have to go back."

"I know that." Evie had read up a bit about that...and then asked Amalia, because the book she'd found was really dense. Legally, her parents weren't her parents anymore, in the sense that they didn't get a say in what happened to her. Mages couldn't own property — even their personal things, like their clothes and stuff, were owned by the Circle (which was owned by the Chantry), and could be taken away whenever they wanted — and if they made things, like enchanted stuff or wrote a book or something or got paid to do a job for someone, they didn't get to keep whatever money they made off it, it belonged to the Chantry. They couldn't marry, at all ever, and if they had children they didn't have any say, the Chantry decided what happened to them. The Chantry had the right to do whatever they wanted to them. What they did when, where they went. They could do the Rite of Tranquility on or even just kill any mage, at any moment, for any reason — there were rules about it, but it was the Chantry who made the rules, the Teyrnir couldn't try a Templar for murder for killing a mage if the Chantry said it was okay.

Basically, mages were slaves owned by the Chantry. They didn't call them that, but that's what they were. If Evie went home, it would only be because the Circle said she could, and no matter where she went or how long she stayed there they would still own her.

Evie hesitated for a second, biting her lip. She wasn't...really sure this was okay to say? She meant, she used to tell Mum about her spirit friends all the time — mostly Cammy and its friends, when it was Mystrel she more talked about the things it had taught or shown her, which Mum must have thought she'd just read somewhere (or made up) — but Mum hadn't thought they were real then. She'd thought they were, like, imaginary, just people she'd made up...for some reason. (She didn't really get it.) But, Mum hadn't freaked out over the dream stuff, so, probably fine. "Ah, one of my friends, Mystrel? It said the Circle will probably let me go home sometimes, they'll just want Auntie Lyn to keep an eye on me. So, maybe talk to her too, so she can talk to the Chantry about it from the inside?"

"That's good thinking, clever girl." Then Mum blinked, frowning to herself a little. "'It'?"

"Mystrel's a spirit — I don't think spirits really can be girls or boys...though it just told me tonight it used to be an elf woman a really long time ago? I don't know. Calling them 'it' does sound kind of rude, but I don't know what other word to use."

"...What kind of spirit is this Mystrel?" Mum sounded kind of wary, like she was trying not to be scared or worried or something.

Which was silly, because she really didn't need to be. "Oh, Mystrel's a spirit of knowledge, I guess it's called. It likes to learn stuff, and then teach it to other people. It's always giving me lessons in things, mostly like history and languages and stuff — it's why I went through stuff faster than Master Clément thought I would, remember? Mystrel was giving me extra lessons in my sleep. I can introduce you sometime, if you want?" She didn't see why not, if she could find Mum and Mystrel in the Fade she should be able to get both of them in the same place at the same time. And, usually a child's parents should know who their tutors were, that just seemed appropriate.

Mum seemed a little taken aback by that, twitching away a little, blinking at her. "Oh, well. Maybe some other time, Evie. As long as you're already here, I think I'd rather catch up with just you tonight. Could we, ah..." Mum glanced around their little boat, but there wasn't much else to see — the dream no longer working right with Mum awake, it'd started to fall apart, the shore in the distance faded away, the boat left bobbing in a little circle of water a hundred yards wide or so, the world beyond shifting greenish fog. The spirit that had been pretending to be Nonno Elvio for Mum had left at some point, Evie hadn't been paying attention.

"Go somewhere else? Sure." Evie focused for a second, then pushed a memory of somewhere else out into the Fade around them. The floor stopped rocking under her feet with the waves, the sea salt gone, the breeze instead a little flowery, a bite of green on the air.

They were standing on one of the balconies at the family's estate on the fringes of the Crossroads, about ten miles north of the city — the Arling was named after the city Kibannan, but the Arl, Evie's grandfather, actually lived out here, near the keep guarding the meeting of the roads leading to Kibannan in the south, Ostwick and then Markham in the east, Kirkwall in the west, and the mountain trails north. All the land trade going between the west — Kirkwall, Wildervale, Nevarra, sometimes all the way to Orlais — and the east — Markham and Ostwick, and sometimes Hercinia and even Ansburg or Wycome — came through here, so it was important. The estate here was on the north end of the town, overlooking the thinner trail heading north, after going over a few rolling, grassy hills vanishing into the trees, a few miles later the trees going up, and up, rocky cliffs showing themselves here and there, the foothills of the Vimmarks blotting out the horizon.

It was kind of pretty, but mostly Evie had picked this place because she didn't live here, she was less likely to get homesick.

There was a spindly, graceful metal table and chairs (Orlesian-made, carved very fine and fancy) nearby, while Mum was looking around wide-eyed with wonder Evie guided her to them. So, they were in the Fade, but Evie was basically hostessing right now, if in a weird dream way, so she should do good hostess things, right? "Do you want some tea, or coffee? I can do that. Snacks too, if you like. They're not real, obviously, but they'll taste real." As close as Evie could imagine it, anyway. "Oh, maybe those little cakes, the ones with the orange in them that Grandmother has here sometimes? I know you like those..."

Suddenly enough Evie jumped, Mum let out a high, delighted laugh.

፠

It was just after lunch on the second day after her dream visit with Mum that Evie saw results. Though, it was kind of scary at first, really.

Evie was sitting at a table in the apprentice library, with one of the basic texts all the mages were supposed to read spread out in front of her — there had been at least a dozen copies of it on the shelf, it was read enough they needed that many. On one side she had a long scroll of paper, already covered with a couple feet of her notes on all the big complicated words and stuff Circle people used to talk about magic. She was trying to take notes, and not just be angry with this stupid book.

By this point, Evie had...mostly caught up on the basic stuff all the apprentices were supposed to know before doing the Harrowing. She hadn't learned all the magic they did, but the different kinds of magic, all the special words they used, she had most of that already. Or, she'd taken notes on all of it, she wouldn't remember it all, but she'd go over her notes and read more advanced stuff, it'd all sink in in time, she was sure. Since she'd done basic magic stuff in this world, she'd decided to catch up on how the Circle talked about the Fade. It hadn't been at the top of the list because, well, she already knew all about the Fade, and spirits and stuff, she didn't think she had much to learn. The basics, anyway, there were always new things to learn in the Fade, but how it worked, that she got already. But, there might be terms she needed to know here too, or some special ideas she didn't know already, might as well go over this stuff too, just in case.

This book was about the Fade, in particular how spirits and demons worked. And it was wrong, about...almost everything, really.

Evie hadn't had very high hopes just reading the introduction. It started out with what was said of the Fade and spirits in the Chant, probably thinking everyone reading the book knew that stuff — she did, so that wasn't a problem, really. Except, the Chant was wrong about some things, and this book didn't question those. Like, most of this was from Threnodies, okay. That said the spirits were the first people created by the Maker, and yeah, spirits were here first, that was fine. The Maker not being happy with them also sort of makes sense. There's this one line, They shone with the golden light / Reflected from the Maker's throne — spirits take in stuff, and they kind of become it? so if the only other person around back then had been the Maker, obviously they'd just reflect Him back at Himself. That was how spirits worked. That line was neat, Evie took it as a sign that whoever had written it at least got spirits a little bit.

But it got worse as it went on. Threnodies then talks about the Maker creating humans — everybody knew elves came first, but take it to mean elves and humans and it was still fine — but how spirits react to that makes...no sense whatsoever. Just none. The Chant said the spirits were really jealous of humans, and the physical world the Maker had made for them. And also just the humans in general, because the Maker liked them better, older children jealous of the new baby, you know. The Chant says the spirits appeared to humans in dreams, and demanded they worship them as gods.

That made no sense at all.

See, spirits were like... How it worked was, the things people did and how they felt about them kind of...leaked through the Veil. Spirits ran into these thoughts and feelings, and thought and felt them like they were their own. That was kind of fun, so then they looked for more things to think and feel — most of the time, they looked for something like the first (or if not the first, the clearest and strongest) thing they'd come across, so they found another thing, and another thing, and another. Over time, as they absorbed more and more thoughts and feelings, they absorbed the magic of the Fade with it, so they got stronger and stronger, and also smarter and smarter. (Wisps, the youngest spirits, couldn't really think at all, like babies but without the bodies other people had to take care of.) They also got more and more complicated.

Because, an experience was never just one thing, people were complicated, a happy memory might have bits of nervousness or sadness or all kinds of things mixed in. So while a spirit might have followed one thread as much as it could, it might understand one thing better than anything else, it still got little shades of other stuff, and the more thoughts and feelings it absorbed the deeper those shades were. This was why younger spirits might seem really flat and simple, but older spirits have real personalities, different than normal people but no doubt still people, can think and feel for themselves.

Spirits as a whole deciding they were going to do something just wouldn't happen — they were even more divided than people in this world were. See, as much as humans didn't like each other sometimes, they at least had a lot of things in common, like the need for food and shelter or families and stuff, that spirits didn't really. Also, spirits didn't have...kingdoms and religions and laws and stuff? They didn't work together in the same way humans did, mostly just because they didn't need to — they didn't need things, so there wasn't really any point to teaming up to get something done.

Also, the I am a god, worship me thing was...weird. Oh, that might happen sometimes, sure! But, spirits were made up of the thoughts and feelings they ate, and there weren't a lot of people going around saying I am a god, worship me, so that...wasn't something they'd come across very often? So there couldn't be very many spirits who got that idea in the first place. There were the Old Gods, but they were great dragons and not spirits, so they didn't count, but they could have put that idea into the Fade, but still not a very big idea, since it didn't keep happening much. If that made sense? She thought that made sense.

And the book took that wrong idea and ran with it. It was right that spirits and demons were really the same thing, but they used this wrong idea from Threnodies to explain how the different things they do made demons demons, but that was wrong. The book said it all fancy, that demons wanted to take over people as a part of the eternal design of corruption, that they were trying to subvert the Maker's favourite children away from Him, which...that...wasn't how that worked?

Not even a little bit?

She meant, all spirits wanted more of whatever kind of thing they'd absorbed to make them what they were — like how people wanted food, it was just what they did. How they got more was the difference. It wasn't even that demons were the ones who'd taken in bad things, as the book said later on, it was that they chose to get more of their stuff by taking it from people. It was a difference not in what, but how.

Like, for example, if a spirit of fear, like a lot of the ones around here, just wandered around absorbing the fear leaking through the Fade, that was a spirit. If that same spirit decided to find a person in the dreaming and make them scared, and absorb that experience, that was a demon. If a spirit of joy, like Cammy, wanted to trick someone into letting it possess them, so it could go around having fun and making people happy in the physical world, that was still a demon, no matter that the thoughts and feelings it was made from were good. If that same spirit asked a human (or elf) friend and the person agreed, sure, that sounded like a great thing to do, and they went off having fun and making people happy in the physical world together, that was still a spirit and not a demon — despite actively possessing someone, which this book said was only a demon thing. It was a fine line, but an important one.

The book ignored that line, didn't really explain it at all. Instead it was all this stuff about how demons were evil, that they were angry with the Maker and were doing bad things to humans to get back at Him somehow, and that was just silly. The other spirits were harmless, but also boring, because obviously they couldn't do anything fun or neat, they just spat back out whatever had come to them, so there really wasn't even any point in talking to them.

If Evie thought about it too hard, this book made her very, very angry.

Really, getting a distraction from this stupid book wasn't bad — it just wasn't great that it came in the form of a Templar. There were always Templars guarding the doors, but they hardly ever went in the libraries, one of the few places Evie could go where there weren't any hanging around. So when she heard the tromp of heavy boots and the clinking of mail coming up behind her, Evie's heart about jumped out of her chest. It didn't help when the Templar said she was to come with him.

She gathered up her scroll, wedging it into the wide cloth belt of the weird robe thing everybody in the Circle wore, leaving the book open on the table, and trailed out of the library after him, trying not to feel too nervous. It couldn't be a bad thing, could it? It wasn't like she'd done anything, and... Maybe Jeria just wanted to have tea again. She usually sent a Tranquil to collect her, but Evie had told her how wrong they felt, so she might have decided not to this time. A Templar wasn't better, really, but...

Oh, no, they weren't going up to Jeria's apartments — they went down the stairs instead of up, and then...took a right down a hall... There wasn't anything but the Templar wing over here. And that was where they were going, the pair guarding the doors pushing them open to let them through. That was just making her more nervous. Evie cringed as she walked through the isolation wards, the anti-magic crawling over her skin, meaningless hissing in her ears quickly giving her a headache. Once they left the wards on the other side the hissing went away, but the headache was left behind, pounding away behind her eyes.

Anti-magic was really uncomfortable. Evie should ask Mystrel if there was something she could do to push it off, if only to keep her head from hurting.

For a few turns around hallways, they walked through the Templar wing. There weren't a lot of people here at the moment, the Templars who were out of their armor, wearing plain trousers and tunics — mostly giving her unpleasant looks as she went past, suspicious. She didn't think this wing was that big, they had to nearly be on the far side already. Eventually, they came into a bigger room, with some sofas and a big hearth and stuff, a few people standing around. (Waiting for her, probably.) The gold-accented armor, that must be Knight-Commander Whatsisname (everyone just called him the Knight-Commander), and there was Jeria, another Enchanter and a couple Templars. Standing chatting with them was—

"Auntie Lyn!" Evie dashed across the room, jumped at Auntie Lyn, her arms coming up to— Her face bounced off the hard metal of a Templar breastplate, Evie stumbled back, rubbing at her aching cheek. "Ow, stupid..." She fixed it quick with the easiest healing spell in the world, but still, that was a dumb thing to do.

Auntie Lyn laughed, low and warm. "Hello to you too, child." Adelynn was Father's sister, older by a couple years, with the same narrow face and curly black hair (though Lyn's was chopped short to better fit in a Templar helmet), lines just starting to show at the corners of her eyes. The story went, when Lyn had been fourteen or so she'd decided she didn't want to do the proper young lady thing and get married to some nice young lord or whatever, and had run off to start Templar training instead — she'd been one of the Templars at the Chantry in town for longer than Evie could remember. When Mum and Dad had to be away at some social or political event, Lyn usually came over to keep an eye on things at home, so Evie had seen a lot of her growing up. She was nice! Teased them a lot, but still...

"Hi!" she chirped, her chest near bubbling, enough she might almost be bouncing on her toes. She couldn't help it, it'd been so long since she'd seen someone she actually knew in this place. Well, Jeria, she guessed, but she didn't count. "What are you doing here? Not that I'm not happy to see you, of course, but your post is back in town."

Giving her a crooked smile, Auntie Lyn said, "Generally speaking, mages aren't allowed to travel alone — you would need some kind of Templar escort to bring you back into town, so I volunteered. I hope you don't mind."

Evie blinked. "I'm going home?"

"Yes, child. Unless you would rather stay?"

"No! No, going home is good." Evie sipped over to her side, slipped her hand into Lyn's, the leather of her glove hard against her skin. "Okay, let's go."

"Do you need to get anything from your room?"

"Nope, let's go."

They didn't actually leave right away, Jeria had to explain the rules first. Her grandfather the Arl had demanded she be let out now and then to spend some time with her family, which the Templars had decided to allow — by how Knight-Commander Whatsisname stood there all stiff, arms crossed over his chest and glaring at Evie through the holes in his helmet, very reluctantly. She could spend one week a month at home, plus holidays and family events like weddings and stuff. If she left the grounds of their home in town, Auntie Lyn had to be with her at all times; she could go as far as the Crossroads, but any further than that would need permission from the Circle and a couple more Templars to keep an eye on her.

And Templars would be keeping an eye on her — or at least Auntie Lyn would be. As long as she stayed at home, Lyn didn't have to be there constantly, but she was supposed to check up on her every six hours. That kind of seemed like a lot, but okay. Speaking of a lot, Jeria said that, since Lyn had to be with her whenever she left home, she should keep in mind that Lyn still had her job at the Chantry to do, so, try not to make it too hard on her. Also, if she broke the rules the Templars could make changes to these rules or take away her visits home altogether, but they promised her grandfather they wouldn't unless she did actually break them, so as long as she did as she was told there shouldn't be any trouble.

Evie listened to the rules parts, but mostly ignored the lecturing parts. It didn't seem that important, all speeches telling her to behave yourself young lady were mostly the same when it came down to it, and she wanted to go.

She was nearly skipping when they finally left, and Evie was out in the sunlight without a window in the way for the first time it what felt like forever. Warm and soft, the wet, salty wind off the sea nearby tickling at her hair and playing with the hem of her robe, it was great, if Lyn weren't leading her along by the hand she'd probably be skipping ahead right now. Waiting in the courtyard was a carriage, all in Chantry colours, the familiar sunburst on the door — Auntie Lyn must have borrowed it from the Revered Mother. Lyn helped her up, then climbed in after her, and the carriage jerked into motion, and they were going.

Leaning against the door, Evie stared out the window — the south side, the grassy land stretching off toward the horizon not far away, the wind constantly tugging at her hair — watching the land crawl by as they went down the hill toward town, her feet kicking, cloth shoes lightly scraping the floor each time they passed. Her chest so tight with it it almost hurt, she was so happy she could hardly stop giggling, each breath just coming out like that, but she also thought she might cry, the shining sunlight blurring a little in her eyes, which was weird, that was a silly thing to be doing right now...

They were going for some minutes, maybe halfway down to town (the Circle wasn't very far away from Kibannan proper), when Auntie Lyn spoke. "I have some advice, Evelyn."

Evie perked up a little — Lyn only used her full name when it was something serious. She peeled herself away from the window, forced herself to sit straight in her seat, hands folded in her lap, held her legs still. "Yes, Auntie Lyn."

Lyn's lips twitched, just a little. "I understand adjusting to life in the Circle can be...difficult. Some mages, I've found, never do. A spirit like yours, I imagine you will always find life there oppressive."

"I have the same feeling," Evie said, trying not to sound like she was grumbling. It was hard though, because the Circle was stupid and terrible.

Lyn smiled, warm but a little crooked, dark eyes dancing. "I'm not surprised. But you needn't surrender to your fate, Evelyn. There is a course you may take within the Circle that I think will ease the burden on you quite a lot. You see, Enchanters, both by their thorough understanding of the dangers of magic and their respect for the institution and traditions of the Circle, have earned some measure of trust. They are allowed certain personal freedoms above and beyond that granted to the rest of the mages of the Circle."

"Oh." She hadn't paid that much attention to the Enchanters, really, she hadn't thought there was much difference besides having their own rooms. "Would I be allowed to leave the Circle?"

"To a degree, yes. With sanction from the Knight-Commander, you could even be permitted to live at home. You would still be required to regularly check in with the local Templars, and Enchanters do have responsibilities to their Circle, but so long as you don't break any of the rules you can do as you want."

That sounded...pretty great, actually. Why did the Enchanters stay at the Circle at all, then? "Um, how do you become an Enchanter?"

"You must contribute an original work to the Circle." Evie frowned at her, she added, "A book, child, you must write a book — or a treatise, it needn't be so long as the word 'book' might imply. It can be about anything you like, so long as it adds something worthwhile to the knowledge the Circle has gathered over the years. Once it is finished, you will be called before a panel of Enchanters to defend the merits of your work. If they agree it's worth other mages reading, it will be added to the archives at the College of Enchanters in Cumberland and the Grand Cathedral in Val Royeaux, and you will be affirmed as an Enchanter of the Circle, with all the rights and responsibilities thereof.

"The youngest Enchanter on record," she continued, her voice a little lower, her lips twisting with a smirk, "was nineteen when he was affirmed." Auntie Lyn leaned forward, her voice lowering even further, an odd drawling curl to it, like sharing a joke. "You're a smart girl, Evelyn. I think you can break that record. What do you think?"

Evie grinned. "Yes! Thank you! I'll do that."

And she knew just what she would write about...

---

[Elvësan] — Changed from canon Elvhenan. The canon word means "place of (our/the) people", but I've changed the location suffix -an to -san, for reasons. I made some basic conlanging notes for elvish recently, just to keep things straight, and I've decided that the sound written "vh" in canon doesn't actually exist in ancient elvish. The sound written "v" is just a [v] (the same as the sound in English), while "vh" is a [β] (no teeth, like a b sound but your lips held looser) — it's rather odd for a natural language to distinguish these two sounds, but I can't think of a better explanation for the digraph "vh" turning up in elvish words. [p] going through the same process but more and eventually merging with [f] is also used to explain why canon Elvish has "b", "f", "v", and "vh", but not "p", which is really weird. Anyway, "vh" didn't exist in ancient elvish, but by the time of the Republic in the Dales it'd become a thing, from "b" and "m" in some ancient elvish (and borrowed Tevene) words.

Since it is weird to distinguish [v] and [β], many modern elvish languages don't. Lýna's rather conservative dialect does, but the elvish spoken in the Dales in the modern day doesn't — Lýna's elvish has different vowels, more consonants, and more complicated grammar than the elvish Leliana learned — and it's marginal in Free Marches Dalish.

Oh, and I've also played with the vowel system a bit. The "ë" is a front rounded vowel ([œ] doesn't exit in English, but the same sound as in French "sœur"). This sound would eventually become the vowel written "y" in Lýna's elvish, though it still exists in Leliana's (if somewhat inconsistently between speakers).

The meaning of this word is also kind of a mess. The ancient elves used it to describe anywhere they lived — mostly in contrast with the dwarves and spirits, it wasn't a proper name. In the elvish of the modern Dales ("Elvœzan"), as a proper noun it refers to the time of the ancient elves (ultimately inherited from Tevinter scholarly use), and as a general term anywhere elves live. (For example, elven quarters in cities, as well as anywhere in the countryside where elves are the majority.) In Lýna's elvish ("Èlvhysã") it can refer to anywhere elves dominate, or remnants of the same — meaning, elves converted to human religions/cultures don't count. Anywhere their clans have claimed (even if temporarily), places like the Tirashan, the Arbour Wilds, and the Forest of Arlathan (where elves do still live, quasi-independent of Tevinter), as well as ruins that haven't been despoiled by humans, such as those in the Brecilian Wilds.

And the word "elf" on its own (Lýna's: èlvhy ; Leliana's: èlva) also means different things. Lýna's refers only to people who are still culturally elvish — this is the word she's thinking that gets translated capital-P People — and other elves are usually referred to by whatever ethnonym is appropriate, i.e. the elves living in the Dales are Orlesians (odlalẽ) and not elves (èlvhylẽ). This is typical for the dialects of the wandering Dalish. In the elvish spoken in the Dales, it just means elf, and also doubles as a third-person pronoun.

And I've babbled about this way too long, I'm done now, promise.

[first sleep] — There's significant historical evidence that people in pre-industrial Europe didn't sleep through the night. Best we can tell, it was normal for people to go to bed not long after sunset, sleep for three or four hours, find something to do for a couple hours — chatting with neighbors and petty crime were common, but mostly lots of sex — and then go back to sleep for three or four hours, waking up again around sunrise. Sleeping straight through the night didn't start becoming common in the West until the Industrial Revolution.

Turns out, many of the things you think are normal are actually historically aberrational. Learning is fun!

[it sounded really close to the Tevene word] — As a reminder, modern Tevene is irl Romanian (with elvish/Qunari borrowings), while Antivan is irl Italian (with elvish/Welsh borrowings). Romanian and Italian share a number of sound changes, so occasionally Tevene and Antivan words will be similar — in this case, yes, dolcezza and dulceaţă sound pretty close. Nevarran (irl Spanish) and Orlesian (irl French) are somewhat more distant, which you can see in this case with dulzura and douceur respectively. This split makes sense, for geographical and cultural reasons. And this isn't really important, is it? Language nerd, sorry...

[College of Enchanters] — This is the College of Magi in canon, using "Enchanter" in the name just makes more sense.

---

What, this fic is over 200k words already? How?!

Broken Circle next. I'm still expecting this to be three chapters. I may or may not finish the first two before posting them, we'll see how I'm feeling about it.

btw, this chapter's title is from the Chant, the Maker's first words to Andraste: "Heart that is broken, beats still unceasing, / An ocean of sorrow does nobody drown. / You have forgotten, spear-maid of Alamarr. / Within My creation none are alone." So, much more positive implications than the quote the fic's title is pulled from xD

Right, bye.