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.)

16. Broken Circle — III

9:30 Nubulis 21

Kinloch Hold, Danesmouth, Highever, Kingdom of Ferelden

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Esmond's eyes, cool and calm, moved over their group, from one to the next to the next — confirming they were all ready to go with a look. Once he'd gotten a nod from every single one of them, he threw open the door. The swordsmen charged through first, the door narrow enough they had to go two at a time, Kenrick disappeared in a flicker of blue, Alim elbowed himself in front of Wynne, bounced in next to Lýna and stepped through the door into—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

—into the atrium.

Alim hitched to a halt. Blinking, he gazed around at the room. It was an atrium — a ƫestozătu, to be more specific. Alim had read such things described before. Certain ancient Tevinter cities — only the most populous and wealthiest, such as Minrathous, Quarinus, Treviso, and Cumberland — had had blocks with these large stone buildings, several stories high, housing multiple families on each floor. Insulae, they were called. In the early centuries, especially in poorer areas, these places really weren't very nice, cramped and dirty, sometimes shoddily built, basically vertical slums. (And rather dangerous, too, there were incidents in the literature where insulae collapsed, usually killing dozens.) They did improve over time, somewhat, especially as enchanting grew more commonplace and the standard of living of the urban populace improved.

During the Qunari invasions, every Tevinter city except Minrathous had been conquered, by the end of the war much structural damage had been done, even Minrathous itself half-ruined — Tevinter had practically had to rebuild from scratch. So they'd decided to do it properly. The new apartment blocks were built with modern materials and enchanting techniques, the old standard entirely redesigned, incorporating elements from the traditional, more upper-class single-family home. Some were nicer than others, of course, but they were definitely an improvement. Even the homes of literal slaves in the major cities were probably nicer than those of peasants in places like Denerim or Highever — a little cramped, maybe, but sturdy and private and clean, at least.

Alim had never seen such a place, of course, not in person. But he had seen drawings. So he could tell, at a glance, that he was standing in the atrium of a modern Tevinter apartment.

The surfaces were, he knew, mostly porcelain, though he would never guess that just looking around. The floor tiles looked like they could be granite, though very smooth and polished to a shine, black and red and white. The walls looked to be stone — and they should be, mostly, the porcelain was only a thin upper layer, panels two feet by four. The dominant color was a creamy off-white, but there were designs dyed into it, swirling lines in a rainbow of color, dancing around each other, in places condensing into flowers — rather tropical, bright colors and complex blossoms — in others birds in flight, or prancing deer— No, halla, those were halla, the long curling corkscrewing horns gave it away. The artwork struck him as very elvish, actually, though that wasn't a surprise — Tevinter had a significant elven population, they'd had a large influence on their art going all the way back to the classical era. And, there were the elves of the Arlathan Forest, of course, the Tevinters had had and still had close cultural contact with them, so.

The dominant feature of the atrium was the skylight. In the original design, in stand-alone single-family homes, it would just be a hole in the roof letting in light, rainwater collected in a pool beneath to be used for whatever purpose. Of course, modern Tevinter had running water pretty much everywhere now, so they didn't need to do that sort of thing anymore, and obviously they couldn't just put a bunch of holes down through a multi-level apartment building. Instead, a square section of the ceiling and the floor right under it, maybe two feet to a side, was made out of clear glass, an array of mirrors on the roof collecting sunlight and directing it downward, more mirrors and lenses and amplification enchantments built into each floor level keeping it going. It was surprisingly intense, a shaft of pale gold slashed through the center of the room, mirrors fixed on spindly little frames redirecting some of it up at the ceiling, the pale porcelain there almost seeming to faintly glow, filling the room with light — not bright enough to be unpleasant on the eyes (though he wouldn't want to stare at the center of it too long), but definitely more than enough to read by.

It was quite pretty, actually. The drawings he'd seen really hadn't done the thing justice.

But, well, pretty as it was, it really shouldn't be here — the Tevinters hadn't invented this sort of thing until long after Kinloch Hold had been built. Also, he thought he would have noticed at some point? Also, it should still be dark out...

Feeling a little dazed, numb, Alim drifted through the room — weaving between chairs and sofas and little tables, stepping over children's toys strewn across the floor — passing the doors to both sides without a glance, making for the back right corner. It looked like there was a little alcove over here, light spilling out that didn't seem to be coming from the skylight...

Yep, there was a window over here, sunlight illuminating a little reading nook, two poofy armchairs and a couple bookshelves along the walls. Alim leaned close to look out the window, practically pressing his nose against the glass. Straight across was another tall building, white stone practically glowing in the sunlight, shadowed here and there with ornamentation in, well, probably more porcelain. (Tevinter used porcelain for fucking everything these days.) They were on a curving little street, dense with people wandering around, carts pulled by dracolisks — he was pretty damn high up, more than he'd thought, he had to be on the sixth or seventh floor, maybe higher — he looked to the right, more buildings, the sea a mile or so away, to the left—

Oh.

Those were the Glass Spires, home to the Convocation of Grand Clerics of the Black Chantry, and the Imperial University of Minrathous. Yep, he was definitely in Minrathous.

He was pretty sure there wasn't some kind of gateway to Minrathous in the Enchanters' apartments. As far as he knew, magical transportation at this range was...well, not impossible, theoretically, but certainly impractical. He couldn't actually be here.

He must be in the Fade. They'd been about to fight an abomination, a powerful abomination, and...

Sloth. It must have put them to sleep and trapped them in a comfortable dream, somewhere they wouldn't want to resist, would want to stay, until their bodies back in the real world withered away.

Why Tevinter, though?

Where else can a mage live free?

Orzammar? That was where he'd been planning on going, when he'd attempted to escape. Also, the Anderfels, Rivain. Shit, the Dalish would probably take him, if he asked nicely — and agreed to forsake the Chant, obviously, but still.

"Alim? Is that you?" He twitched, looked over his shoulder. Even as the doorway at the back room came into sight, somebody leaned out of it. Somebody, like he hadn't known it was Lacie just from the sound of her voice. She looked older, but not by a whole lot — late twenties, maybe — her hair longer, tied back loosely, deep black curls spilling down her back. She was in a sky-blue northern-style dress, scandalous by southern standards — her knees, arms, and most of her shoulders were uncovered, the material flimsy enough the way it draped over her figure was, um, kind of distracting. Of course, it was fucking hot in Tevinter, clothes up there tended to be briefer and thinner than anything worn in the south.

By everyone except whores, of course. Like he'd said, scandalous by southern standards.

Blinking in confusion, the only response Alim managed was, "Uh..."

"I was wondering whether you'd make it back for lunch — Crina didn't hold you up too long this time?"

...The fuck was Crina?

"Come on, we were just sitting down." Lacie disappeared back through the door. The kitchen would be through there, Alim knew. He didn't really decide to move, before he knew it he was walking through the door — still in a daze, confused — had barely got a chance to look around before—

The breath was knocked out of him as something hard slammed into him, low on his stomach, little arms wrapping around his thighs. "Tătic!" What...? Oh, right, Tevene, Daddy... And the girl was babbling away, still in Tevene — despite not speaking Tevene (at least not the modern language), Alim understood every word, in that instinctive way things just made sense in dreams sometimes. His hand having found its own way to the girl's head — her hair was red, though darker than his, yet fire but colder — Alim just stared down at her for a few seconds, blinking dumbly. She had Lacie's eyes. There was a second kid sitting at the kitchen table, younger, Lacie was already over there fussing over him.

Alim snorted. "That the best you got? Tevinter Enchanter, complete with wife and kids?" He...wasn't sure how he knew he was supposed to be an Enchanter, teaching at the University, he just did.

Lacie looked up at him, smiling, but her voice wasn't quite her own, too flat and deep — the demon speaking through her, he knew. It was unsettling, to say the least. "And why not? This is a good life, calm, peaceful."

"Peaceful? Tevinter is at war with the Qun, you know."

"There is no war here. Just your studies at the University, your students, your family. Mock it all you like, but you would be happy here."

"Uh-huh," sarcastically, rolling his eyes. "If you think this is what I want, I don't think you know me very well."

Abruptly, blink and he'd miss it, Lacie was replaced with Cera.

"...That kind of wasn't the problem."

And now she was Solana.

Alim glanced down at the girl half-hugging him — still elven — and back up at the demon. "How is that supposed to work, exactly?" Solana was human, so...

And now Lýna.

He coughed — yeah, he was giving that idea a hard pass. "Right, well, I'm just going to go now." Shoving the little girl away, Alim turned right around, moving back for the atrium. He half expected hissing and shouting from the demon, but its wheedling was softer than he'd think, going for a suggestive, seductive tone.

Which, if it'd really wanted to make him stay, maybe it should have tried not being Lýna. That was just fucking creepy.

Alim wasn't a Dreamer, obviously, but the Fade was a funny place. Space in dreams didn't work the same way they did in real life — everything in the Fade was connected to everything else, travel done more through following a thought from one end to the other. So, when he came up to the shaft of light slicing through the room... Wynne, he was the most familiar with her, and as a mage she'd have the clearest presence in the Fade. He thought of Wynne, focused on his memory of her as intensely as he could, he stepped into the light—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

—stepped out of it. Into a sitting room, one of the mages' apartments in the tower. It was nice enough, the floor covered with rugs, padded armchairs arrayed here and there. The place was obviously lived in, books and little trinkets scattered around. People-wise, the room was empty, save for a woman in one of the chairs.

...That had to be Wynne, but she was hardly recognizable. She was much younger than Alim had ever seen her — maybe about his age? Her face rounder and softer, completely absent the familiar wrinkles, her long hair the pale straw blonde common among people of Avvar blood, left loose to tumble in thick curls over her shoulders. Also, she was wearing what was clearly a nightdress of some kind, and Alim would rather not see the closest thing he had to a grandmother underdressed, thanks. Even if she was a lot younger and kind of—

No, brain, stop, damn it!

She had something cradled in her arms that— Oh, an infant. Tiny, maybe a year old at the most, sleeping bundled up in blankets. Seeing Wynne with a kid in her arms wasn't actually unusual — this young, he guessed, but still — but the look on her face, gentle but intense all at once, was sort of...

Did... Did Wynne have a child?

"Yes, I did."

Oh! Shit, he hadn't meant to say that aloud. "Um, sorry. I, uh, didn't know that."

Wynne glanced up at him — she might be weirdly young, but her soft blue-green eyes were still the same — a gentle smile pulling at her lips. "It's not something that's spoken of often, and few of us who were there are still around. It was so very long ago..." Her gaze was drawn back to the baby, one finger playing at a wisp of hair.

Right. Well. This was awkward.

Births at the Circle were very uncommon. Which it didn't really seem like they should be, considering the mages (at least the younger ones) were screwing around pretty much all the time. He meant, they were locked up in a tower together, there wasn't really much else to do — except read or practice magic, and a person could only tolerate doing that so many hours a day. But, because they did have magic and alchemy of all kinds available to them, there were all kinds of methods they could use to avoid it. No technique to prevent conception worked one hundred percent of the time — except sticking to the same sex or the opposite race, he guessed — but ending a pregnancy was trivial, and perfectly safe in the early stages.

Alim had actually helped Lacie get the potion together once — he wasn't exactly a genius with alchemy, but she hadn't been confident in her ability to do it properly. Though, that had been kind of awkward. He meant, it didn't bother him in principle, and he was perfectly willing to help a friend who needed it, especially when it wasn't very difficult. But, he...kind of thought it'd been his? He wasn't the only person Lacie screwed around with, but he'd counted back weeks, and it'd seemed pretty likely. Not that he minded, exactly, it'd just been...weird. Standing around brewing the thing, he'd kept thinking he should, he didn't know, apologize. Except, not that, exactly? Say something, at least, but he had no fucking clue what, so instead they'd just stood there in awkward silence, and it'd been seriously damn uncomfortable.

And, there were reasons births were so uncommon aside from mages just not wanting to deal with it. Sometimes the Templars themselves ensured pregnancies never came to term — after all, the Templars in general would rather mages didn't exist at all, so letting them breed was counterproductive. They would even force an abortion on mages who wanted to keep it, though that almost never happened, because there were very good reasons to not. For one, a child of two mages was very likely to be a mage themselves, so, any child mages of the Circle had would probably be doomed to a life lived in captivity, fanatics with swords watching them day and night.

The Templars didn't even let the children play outside. Given the environment they lived in, having children seemed horribly irresponsible.

Also? If a mage does have a child, they aren't allowed to keep it. The infant would stay with the mother for a time — several months at least, two years at most — but only until the Circle decided it was safe to relocate them. The child would be moved to a different Circle, probably in an entirely different country. They would never see each other again. Often, the Templars would even change the kid's name, never tell them who their parents were, destroying any chance of them ever finding each other down the line.

The women of the Circle, quite reasonably, didn't want to go through that. Even those who had moral qualms with killing a child in the womb often thought it a lesser evil.

And Wynne had gone through that, apparently.

Alim had had no idea...

He was about to come closer to... Shit, he didn't know, do something. But he noticed there was... They weren't alone. At first, it was just the faintest presence on the air, a warm, tingling weight. Then, little wisps of gold-white light brushing over Wynne's shoulders. Its form gradually resolved, the wisps becoming hands, extending up into arms, and finally a recognizable human form, draped over the back of the chair — the gold-white light took on the color of hair and cloth and flesh, but transparently, inconsistently, the spirit beneath the illusion still leaking through.

Alim swallowed — Wynne's partner spirit, it had to be.

Resting its chin on the top of Wynne's head, looking down over her at the infant, it said, "He is a sweet child." Its voice sounded vaguely elven, but with a peculiar echo to it, reverberating through the magic of the Fade.

"Yes, he was." The sadness on Wynne's voice was painfully obvious.

"He is well, you know."

"I know." Wynne looked up at Alim again, giving him a distracted sort of smile. "Greagoir has been keeping me informed. He's an Enchanter at the White Spire now. Rhys of Lydes."

Alim gaped at her. "Rhys of Lydes? You don't mean the same Rhys of Lydes who was apprenticed to the Circle's ambassador to Tevinter, and was sent back for injuring three apprentices in a drunken brawl?" That had been, what, nearly fifteen years ago now? It'd been a bit of a diplomatic shit-storm back in the day...though the northern Circle hadn't made too big of a deal about it, the ambassador had even been allowed to remain in the country — the impression Alim had gotten, reading about it a decade after the fact, was that the authorities had decided Rhys had been in the right...and had maybe been a little impressed he'd been the only one conscious at the end of the fight, despite being outnumbered three to one.

Wynne smiled up at him, a little crooked, her eyes dancing. "Alim, silly boy, why are you so surprised? He's half-Avvar, after all."

He bit his lip to keep himself from giggling. Not that it did any good, echoes carried through the magic around him anyway, stupid Fade...

Its voice low, soft, the spirit muttered into Wynne's hair, "We have to go, Elska."

"I know." For another brief moment, Wynne stared down at her son. Before Alim could decide if he should be doing or saying anything, she moved, rising to her feet more smoothly and easily than she would be capable of in real life. The dream-infant was, abruptly, gone, dissolved back into the Fade. "We are dreaming. I assume the demon is holding us here."

"Yes." The spirit burst into wisps of light, flittered over to Wynne in a blink, reformed itself next to her, joined at the elbow. "However, its attention is divided. It should be easy to break yourselves out of its grasp if you gather yourselves together, give your presence more weight than it can compensate for."

That didn't really make sense to Alim, but apparently it did to Wynne, she just nodded. "You can carry the both of us along my intention?"

"Ah, I'm afraid using you as a focus would be...complicated."

...Because she was an abomination, right? Alim assumed that might do weird things with how everything in the Fade was all mixed up — drawing a line between Wynne and someone else might end up getting the spirit drawn in somehow. Or something, he didn't know.

The spirit turned a smile on him. It looked a bit wrong on its fake, stiff human features, but the soft, gentle glow of its magic — warm and soothing on his skin, a pleasant twitter in his ears — prevented it from seeming too creepy. "Now, sweet boy, that's a horrible thing to call someone."

"But you are, right? I mean," Alim grimaced, said to Wynne, "I'm not going to— None of us are going to say anything, we don't want... You know. But, you are an abomination now. Right?"

Wynne's lips tilted into a sardonic smile. "I believe the term is spirit-healer."

"I'm pretty sure spirit-healers are just friendly abominations."

An edge of dry humor on her voice, "Be a good boy, and maybe I'll stay friendly."

Alim giggled. It was a little embarrassing, actually, but he couldn't help himself.

The spirit started explaining what they were about to do and what it needed from him, but stopped immediately — it was clearly reading his mind somehow, must have realized he already knew. Alim stepped up to Wynne, taking her free arm. He wasn't certain whether all of them touching was actually necessary, it wasn't like any of this was real to begin with, but just in case. He closed his eyes, focused on...

Oh. "Um, the people who came with us, a lot of them I don't even know their names. I doubt I can find them in here."

"That's all right," the spirit said, smooth and reassuring. "We simply need to gather enough weight to pull yourselves free. Your Seeker can easily return the others to their bodies once the demon is dealt with."

Right, so they were just trying to wake up so they could help Esmond kill the thing. Got it. So, starting with the other Wardens... Lýna, he'd find Lýna first. He concentrated, pulling forth memories of his time with the Wardens, Lýna being so very Lýna, holding them in his head as solidly as he could—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

"Hey, Alim! Sit down, sit down — Goldanna's just finishing up with dinner, I think." Well, apparently something had gone wrong, because that was definitely Alistair's voice.

They were standing in a combined kitchen and dining room, rather modest. Probably a peasant home in a city somewhere — in the homes of people with any significant wealth this space would be two separate rooms, and they'd have servants to work them. Too, the furnishings were pretty basic. The table, chairs arrayed around it, was rough wood, simple and undecorated, surfaces smoothed by years of constant use, chipped here and there from impacts. There were cabinets on the floor here and there, counters along the top side, holding baskets filled with a variety of things — bread, vegetables, dried herbs, a little one had several eggs. Various cooking implements and pans and such were hung on hooks on the wall, mostly inexpensive earthenware and iron.

There was an old wood stove made of roughly-hewn granite bricks, scorched black in places from repeated exposure to fire, shuttered vents at the top forming a simple hob. Inside, Alim could see, suspended over the smoldering coals was a pan of some kind, probably a cheap imitation porcelain — sturdy enough to survive the heat of the fire, but it'd likely shatter if dropped. (The secret to making Tevinter ceramics was fiercely protected by its producers, southern manufacturers hadn't yet managed to reverse-engineer it.) There was some kind of pie cooking in it — a savory pie, most like, vegetables and gravy and meat — a greening copper teapot on the hob, a few buns held a little above the heating surface on a sort of rack — must be a lot of gravy in that pie, if they would be having more bread with it. Either that, or the cook was accustomed to feeding Wardens, he guessed.

Tending the fire and watching the teapot was an auburn-haired woman, maybe thirty at the oldest, wearing a plain but well-cared-for woolen dress, peasant wear. Alistair was seated at the table — he looked the same as always, though his armor had been removed, leaving him in the linen trousers and shirt Alim knew he wore under it. He was cheerfully grinning up at them...bouncing a little boy, maybe around two years old, on his knee.

There were a few other children running around too — the oldest was a boy of maybe ten, though there were two younger girls and...Alim wasn't certain whether that one was a boy or girl, children tended to be dressed the same regardless. While the woman at the stove (Goldanna, was it?) said something about yes, welcome, Alim, go ahead and have a seat, almost done, one of the kids ran up to him, chattering away, bouncing excitedly on her toes, begging her "Uncle Allie" to show her magic tricks.

Refusing to allow himself to be drawn into the scene with a quick focusing exercise — dead easy after years and years practicing magic — Alim turned to Wynne. "Why does this demon keep trying to ply me with small children? I don't even like kids."

"Maybe it knows something about you you don't," Wynne said, slyly, smiling mockingly at him.

"I was recently informed I can't have children. Warden stuff."

"Family is more than biology, sweet boy. And I do believe this precious girl," Wynne said, reaching out to ruffle her hair (the girl giggled), "isn't claiming you as a father in any case."

She was definitely teasing him. "Whatever. Right, Alistair, we don't have time for this."

"Oh, don't be like that, Alim," Alistair whined. "The Commander isn't going to begrudge us taking it easy for a single evening. Besides, it's not like there's anything urgent going on, Wardens aren't really needed when there isn't a Blight on, are we? Go on, sit down! Goldanna's mince pie is excellent..."

"I'm sure it is." They were in the Fade, after all, it would be an idealized expression of the concept of mince pie — food here was always excellent, if a little...weird. "The problem is that Blight thing, you know, we are kind of needed."

"There will always be time for another excursion into the Deep Roads, we don't—"

"Alistair." The man cut off at his interruption, blinking up at him. "Do you remember the fight against the archdemon?"

Alistair winced, opened his mouth as though to answer...and then froze. "No. No, I don't. That's funny, that seems like the kind of thing you would remember, doesn't it?"

"Now, now," the woman chided, "let's not fill the children's ears with such dreadful talk. I'll have the tea ready in just a second, and—"

"Do you remember coming here?"

Alistair just blankly stared at him, his mouth hanging open, his face beginning to pale.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Nope!" He practically threw the child out of his lap, sending the small boy sprawling to the floor, sprung up to his feet. "Oh, that damn demon, it— Now this is just, just, mean!"

Alim's lips twitched. "Wow, Alistair, I'm surprised at you using that kind of language — there's a lady present!"

"I'm sure Wynne doesn't give a—" Alistair cut off, stared at Wynne for a second. "Uh, Enchanter, did you know you have a spirit hanging off you?"

Wynne ticked up an eyebrow. "I did, in fact."

"Right," he said, drawing the word out, "just checking. Anyway, yes, that demon. This is just not on. When I get out of here, I'm giving that stupid-head the sternest talking to, just you wait."

Alim rolled his eyes. "You're ridiculous, Alistair."

"I do my best."

"That's kind of sad, actually."

"Shut up, poopy-head."

"Right, well. Come on," he said, waving Alistair closer. "I was aiming for Lýna, actually, not sure why we ended up here. Let's try that again, shall we?"

"Fine, fine." Alistair waltzed over — ignoring Goldanna asking him to please stay, he'd disappoint the children, the girl tugging at the hem of his shirt — took Alim's free arm. "Looking for Lýna and had to settle for me, huh? I feel so insulted."

"No offense, but she's the boss of us."

"Yes, she is bossy. I hope Leliana's into that, or that's going to get awkward."

Oh, so Alistair saw it too. "I wouldn't joke about that in front of Lýna. Dalish are pretty serious about keeping it inside their race." Like, they literally killed Dalish who didn't, it was a whole thing.

"Does that matter? She's not with her clan anymore."

"You can take the hunter out of her clan. Now shush, I have to concentrate."

"I'll be good, but only if I get a sweet later."

Alim just ignored that. Right, let's give this another shot. Closing his eyes, Alim again concentrated on thoughts of Lýna — this time, outside of the context of their group interactions, just Lýna on her own. Running through the trees like a crazy person, hanging out on the tops of roofs for some inexplicable reason, had she fallen asleep up one of the masts last night? He wasn't really certain how that worked. Anyway, yes, Lýna, Lýna, Lýna—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

...He was gonna go out on a limb and assume this wasn't it either.

Not that he could really tell where they were for certain — the details were...oddly muddled. They were clearly in a big hall of some kind, and a fancy one, everything smooth and fine and glittering, polished stone and silver and gold. And while the colors sort of came through, the cleanness and the shininess, the shapes were blurred, indistinct, the air filled with the slightest greenish haze, streaked with blues and reds. The raw magic of the Fade. And the people — for there were people around, dozens of them — weren't any more distinct, clearly in fancy expensive dress, fine cloth accented with precious metals, by the glinting colors even jewels in some cases, but no particular detail stood out, not enough to really get a clear impression of any of them in his head. Like the dream had attempted to form, but couldn't quite resolve properly. It was bloody weird.

The only identifiable detail he did manage to pull out of it was that everyone appeared to be wearing masks, in a wide variety of shapes and colors — they must be in Orlais. The combination of the glitzy hall, the Orlesian style of dress, they must have gone to—

"There you are. I was wondering if you might turn up."

Yep, that was Leliana's voice. Dammit, he'd missed the person he was going for twice in a row now, what the fuck...

Unlike everyone else in the hall, Leliana actually came through in detail. Instead of the pale linen trousers and plain gambeson she'd been wearing when they'd been forced to sleep, she was in expensive-looking Orlesian dress...though not really a conventional style, Alim didn't think. The dress was made of a fine, shining material, almost certainly real silk, a deep green that seemed to shimmer in the light, stitched with dancing patterns in glittering silver and gold. It clung to her relatively loose — tailored pretty tight, but cinched only with a white and gold sash at her waist, no corset or anything of the like holding it in shape. It was also rather brief for this sort of thing, the neck line not too low but three-quarters of her arms and her legs below the knee uncovered. Uncovered by the dress, anyway — she was wearing leggings of some kind, gloves fingertips to elbow, both in black. To top it off, heeled boots of white leather, smooth and unlined, fixed to it here and there bits of...serpentstone? That greenish-black gleaming rock was serpentstone, he thought. Right, boots and a cloak draped over her shoulders, dragging down nearly to the floor, the hood pulled up over her head — not far enough to hide her face, the hem resting at about her hairline — black stitched with green, the inside surface, in the shadows around her face, a deep blue-violet.

That was...weird. Didn't really seem like the appropriate style for an Orlesian ball. Or, maybe it wasn't that weird for a minstrel? He imagined the stiff hoopy skirts would be hard to sit in, and they kind of needed to be able to breathe to sing properly, so corsets were out. Also kind of exotic and dramatic, but that probably wasn't so unusual for minstrels either. So, yeah, maybe this was actually appropriate, he wasn't certain.

He didn't see a lute on her, but, he was just going to assume this was supposed to be minstrel costume.

"Fancy duds, Sister. We in Orlais?"

Leliana smiled at Alistair, small but sweet. Alim belatedly noticed she was wearing makeup, something darkening her lips, light eyeshadow with twinkly silvery bits in it. "Yes, this is the Winter Palace, in Halamshiral. Though, it's hard to tell, it doesn't look quite right." Again, he picked up something late, this time that she was speaking in Orlesian — but, in that weird way of dreams, he understood every word anyway. (He did speak Orlesian, just not well enough to not notice it happening.) "We're escaping the demon, yes? You're here to collect me?"

Huh, he'd sort of assumed the dream would have seemed real to her, even if it looked off to them. Maybe Leliana's defenses against mental influence were solid enough the demon couldn't draw enough information to form the illusion properly. That was...sort of creepy, honestly. Wynne was a spirit-healer or whatever, and the demon had been able to work with her just fine — she'd realized it was a dream, yes, but the dream had still formed correctly. Alim didn't know what to think about this.

Best not to comment at all. "Yep," Alim chirped. "Come on, next is Lýna. Would that be enough?" he asked Wynne's spirit friend. "I might be familiar enough with Kenrick to find him, but I think that's it." Or Esmond, he guessed, but the spirit had kind of implied the Seeker was awake?

The spirit leaned around Wynne to give him another blank, translucent smile. It was leaning on Wynne, really, kind of draped over her, clinging on, which was kind of weird. The spirit's behavior with Wynne in general, from the beginning in the room Alim had found her in, was giving him a very clear these two be fucking impression, which...he was pretty sure spirits couldn't even do that? Whatever. If it was still reading his mind, it ignored that tangent, said, "All of you together with this Lýna should be heavy enough, especially with Esmond distracting the demon on the outside."

Oh, he was awake then. Alim wasn't sure how that worked, but neat.

"I wonder if you might help me with something first?" Leliana didn't wait for a response, turned smartly on her heel, her fancy cloak whipping around. Okay, fine, Alim guessed they did have time — time worked weird in the Fade, chances were wasting a couple minutes here would work out to a negligible delay on the outside. Leliana led them through wide open double doors, like everything else the details blurred and indistinct, into another hall. Alim could only make out the very basics about its structure — down the stairs ahead a sort of recessed dance floor taking up most of the space, tables lined along the sides (probably stocked with food and drink), along the perimeter a much narrower overlooking balcony, dotted with little tables but no chairs, just for resting glasses on — the only clear impression that everything was very clean and shiny, with a lot of gold glinting everywhere, colorful stained glass stretching up the walls.

Leliana continued down the stairs toward the floor, the fuzzy dancers halting and stepping to the sides with eerie synchronicity. Alim jumped when a deep voice boomed around his head, it took him a couple seconds to realize they were being announced...which, this was the court of the Empress of Orlais, so he guessed that made sense. Leliana first, identified as a ward of a Lady Cecille of Lydes (herself described as a cousin of some Marquis or another); Alim went next, as Warden-Constable of Ferelden (his last name dropped), and then Alistair, as Warden-Captain, which was funny, apparently Alim outranked Alistair in Leliana's dream-future — he heard Alistair grumble to himself in good-natured irritation; last was Wynne, an Enchanter of the Circle of Magi in Ferelden.

Or not last, actually: her partner spirit was named too. Not a name, really, it didn't make a whole lot of sense — genius of will, that who magnifies purpose, instrument of protection. Okay, then.

Leliana led them all the way across the hall, up a handful of stairs to a little platform. Directly ahead, looking down on them from the balcony above, was a...well, a woman, definitely. Like everyone else, too many details were absent, Alim couldn't make out very much at all. He didn't think it was Empress Celene, though? She wasn't wearing Imperial blue and gold — there was a very particular shade of blue only the royal family was allowed to wear at court, it was this whole thing — instead mostly green and purple and silver. No idea who that was supposed to be.

Though, he did notice the mystery woman and Leliana were wearing the same colors.

Coming to a halt, Leliana dipped in a graceful curtsy, a formal greeting falling from her lips. The lady on the balcony replied...though Alim didn't understand a word, the voice muddled into incomprehensibility. Leliana turned to them with a wry sort of smile. "Do you recognize her?"

All of them gave various denials. Even the spirit answered, though its was weird: "I'm afraid that's knowledge you must uncover for yourself, little raven."

Leliana blinked at the spirit for a couple seconds, surprised, before her face split into a smile — brighter than before, warmer, more genuine. "Yes, I suspect you're right about that. Oh well. Shall we go?"

Once Leliana had her arm looped through Alistair's, it was time to give it another try. Alim asked them all to help this time, concentrating on thoughts and memories of Lýna as intensely as they could, giving Wynne's spirit friend more to work with. Perhaps she'd been dragged in deeper than the rest of them...which would make sense, she was particularly vulnerable right now, that should have occurred to him before, but with all of them pulling at her together they should be able to—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

—make it.

"It is time."

They were standing in an enormous hall. Gray stone, some of the blocks in the walls two feet square, enormous, the ceiling arching high overhead, light let in through stained glass far above, hearths set into the walls flickering with flame, here and there and there, eight of them in total. Filling the wide floor were a dozen long tables, lined on both sides with benches, all of them absolutely packed with people — men and women, humans and elves and dwarves, hundreds of them. They wore leather, durable but undecorated, armor and weapons bearing the tell-tale sheen of silverite.

Wardens. These were Grey Wardens, so many of them, probably more than had ever been gathered in one place since the Third Blight. Hundreds of them, enough Alim honestly wasn't certain there were this many Wardens in all the world.

Not far away, elevated slightly from the rest of the floor, was a last table, perpendicular to the rest with chairs lining only one side, allowing those seated there to look over the hall. At the middle of the table, the only figure standing, was a Dalish elf, short and white-haired— Oh! It was Lýna! Alim hadn't recognized her at first — she wore professionally-made silverite scale armor instead of the asymmetrical mess she'd cobbled together herself, her hair was longer, held in a thick braid folded over one shoulder, and she looked older, her face a little longer and narrower, her figure slightly more noticeably feminine (though not by much), faint hints of folds sketched at the corners of her eyes, across her brow. Mid-thirties, maybe? Hard to tell sometimes, especially with the white hair, the tattoos covering her face.

So, they were definitely in the right place, then. Good, if they'd managed to miss Lýna again somehow that would just be irritating.

"The war of ages has ended." It didn't sound like Lýna was raising her voice, calm and smooth, yet the words seemed to fill the hall anyway, echoing with a visceral force no mundane sound could have, heavy with the magic of the dream. "The archdemons have been slaughtered in their secret warrens. The darkspawn have been tracked to their nests, broodmothers scoured and torn out of the earth. The stain of the Blight has been burned away — not all of it, a few lingering shreds remain. But the greater part of it is gone. What is left cannot spread anew, will never threaten the peoples of this world. Our work is done. We are no longer needed.

"It is time for the Grey Wardens to end."

...That sounded ominous.

Slowly but gracefully, Lýna plucked a chalice up off the table, held it up to the crowd of Wardens. "Join me, brothers and sisters."

The hall was filled with noise, shuffling and scraping and clanking, as hundreds of armored men and women pushed themselves up to their feet. Every single person in the hall was standing now. Also, every single one had their own chalice in hand. For a moment they paused, hardly seeming to breathe, the air feeling all too thick.

"In War, Victory." Alim didn't see who said it — not Lýna, it was clearly a human man. Then, a couple seconds later, many voices all at once, at least half the hall, strong and firm and proud, "In Peace, Vigilance." Another pause, a few seconds, the magic of the Fade weighing down on them, heavy with meaning, everyone in the hall seemed to take a breath, before they all spoke with one voice.

"In Death, Sacrifice."

They all, as one, raised their chalices to their lips.

But Lýna's was slapped out of her hand, falling to clatter against the table, the contents splashing across the wood. Alim had been too distracted watching what was going on, he hadn't seen Leliana move — she was standing behind the high table now, inches away from Lýna, gripping her arms at both elbows. She hissed, the words carrying across the distance between them easier than it should, "What are you doing?!"

"The Wardens exist to oppose the Blight." Lýna's voice came low, flat, empty. Clearer than ever, her difficulty with the language completely gone, yet seeming to be absent something vital. "If there is no Blight, we have no reason to exist."

At first one by one, but then faster and faster, the Wardens started falling. Slumped back to their seats, leaned over the tables, limp, hardly making a sound, no pain or protest — as though going to sleep, quickly and easily, all of them at once.

Alim felt a chill steal over him — poison. This wasn't real, but if Lýna had drunk that, if she'd meant to die, with a powerful demon reinforcing the magic of the dream, who knows what might have happened?

"This isn't real, Lýna, what you're feeling right now. A demon is doing this to you."

"No."

Instantly, in the space of a blink, their surroundings were completely changed. They were outdoors, in the dead of winter, the earth covered in a layer of snow glowing an eye-aching white from reflected sunlight, on and on and on, broken here and there by dark blotches of trees, some barren twigs and others thick with needles or leaves. (Alim had read there were trees in the far south that kept their leaves through winter, that was sort of neat.) The air was a hard, sharp, painfully dry cold, his skin tingling after only a couple seconds, icy wind tugging at his hair.

Lýna was still standing with Leliana — though her proper age now, in her familiar slapdash armored Dalish leathers — the taller Sister still holding onto her with both hands, Lýna staring flatly up at her. But there was another figure, also in Dalish leathers though without the added bits of metal stuck on, only a single quiver and a dagger at the small of her back, an unfamiliar fur-lined cloak covering her head. Alim couldn't make the person out at all, but he was pretty sure it was Lýna — a thin haze of snow kicked up by the wind blurred the finer details a bit, but he was almost positive that was her bow the figure was carrying. She was a little bit younger, he thought, but not by much, not more than a couple years.

The younger Lýna was walking away from them, trudging through the snow. The stuff went thigh-high on her, forcing her pace slow and awkward — pulling the back foot up, yanking her knee toward her chest, her lower leg dragging through the top half foot or so, leaning her weight forward to force her foot back down to the ground, sometimes teetering as she hit the obscured ground awkwardly, then starting over with her back leg again. It looked like a lot of work just taking each step, Alim would be wiped out pretty quickly, but dream-Lýna was going at a pretty good clip, fwoosh fwoosh fwoosh, holding her bow loose but arrow nocked and ready, just in case.

(She was old enough the Blight in the far south would already have been on, after all.)

Then, dream-Lýna paused. For a moment, could only have been a few seconds, her shoulders hunched, unmoving, she might not even have been breathing. Then she let out a shaky sigh, and started moving again.

It was the dead of night, and there were elves sitting around a crackling fire, red-orange light casting nearby landships into flickering color and shadow. Small children mostly, too young to have their faces tattooed yet, though there were a few adults — his eyes were drawn by white hair burning in the firelight, a small child, maybe only four or five, huddled up against a woman with striking violet eyes. Lýna and her mother, probably. An older man, silver threaded into his hair, was standing, giving what looked like a dramatic recitation of some story or other, but Alim couldn't make out the words, Lýna probably couldn't remember them, the night still and warm and safe—

Lýna — older, but still younger than present-day Lýna, a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen — barely ducked out of the way of blades slashing for her throat, she stumbled, her knees skidding against the thin coating of fallen leaves. They were in the woods somewhere, the ground rolling and rocky, hill country, there were people moving around, the air filled with the clanging of weapons and shouting and screaming, and an unholy, ear-piercing, nauseating screeching...

Shrieks. One was bearing down on the dream-Lýna — a mockery of the elven form, limbs too long and kinked at odd angles, arms ending in vicious foot-long claws, jaws filled with fangs dripping black blood. Lýna scrambled back on her hands, her foot catching awkwardly on the string of her bow she'd managed to hold on to, tripping her, the shriek curled and tensed, ready to pounce.

A big damn axe took it in the back of the shoulder, the thing screamed as it fell, the axe was wrenched out to swirl around again, taking it deep in the neck this time. And there was an Avvar standing where it had been, a huge, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man, a wild smirk on his face. "Get up, little elf. The Lady isn't taking us to—"

Lýna jumped, drew and fired almost faster than Alim could follow, and a shriek rushing for the Avvar's back twitched and fell, an arrow sprouting from an eye socket. Pushing herself to her feet — rubbing at her face, her hand shaking — she snapped, "Banter later, fight now."

The Avvar laughed, hefted his axe to—

—the human children (more Avvar?) were giggling, red-faced and breathless, sweating. A little, tattoo-less Lýna, a child, stood over them, as worn-out-looking as them but not sharing in the joke, stiff and unsmiling, she looked out over the valley — far below, they were right at the top of a high cliff face, the children must have just climbed it — for a moment before turning around, putting the human children to her back and—

—suddenly Alim was in the middle of a gathering of some kind, dozens of Dalish elves all around, watching a group of people in the middle. One was an older woman, hair mostly turned to silver, a girl who was clearly Lýna, appearing about the same age as in the battle a moment ago, the third a boy right around her age, maybe only slightly older. Absurdly, there was flowering elfroot in Lýna's hair, the little white blossoms attached to the vine almost invisible from lack of contrast. Lýna and the boy had clasped hands, right in left, the older woman saying something, Alim wasn't listening — Lýna hadn't listened — tying a delicately stitched, colorful ribbon around their hands, weaving them together, again again again.

A Dalish wedding, apparently. Alim looked around for a second, and while the others he'd collected were nearby there was only one Lýna. Looking at her across the narrow open ring between the three involved in the ceremony and the rest of the crowd, he said, "Could we slow down for a minute, Lýna? You're making me dizzy."

Lýna turned to look at him—

—mud slapped against her face, Lýna — a child again, three or four — tipped and fell into the water, a river, pushed herself back up on hands and knees, sopping wet and shaking — from tears, not cold. Then a man was there, scooping her up, wiping off her face. The man's features were indistinct, Alim couldn't make out much. His hair was darker than Lýna's, but not dark, maybe blond, and his voice was clear and smooth, but he didn't pick up much more than that.

He guessed Lýna couldn't remember her father very much at all.

And again, they'd moved on before Alim could hardly process what was happening...though there wasn't much to process this time. Everything was black, sprayed with the countless twinkling lights of a starry sky, but in all directions, seeming to sway gently, back and forth and back and forth, the only sound the gentle lapping of waves.

"It's not the demon." Alim couldn't tell what direction Lýna's voice was coming from, seemingly from everywhere at once, flat and empty. "This is real."

The black was abruptly gone, and they were in hill country again, a shallow hole dug into the ground — a white-haired woman was lain in the hole, her arms hugging a roughly-carved wooden staff, still with death. An older woman, the same one from the wedding before, placed an acorn over the dead woman's heart, then stepped out of the hole. Dirt was being shoveled in, some by hand and some by magic, a white-haired child darted toward the hole, "Ymaj!" but was snagged before she could get too close, a blonde woman holding the crying girl to her chest, stroking her hair.

The real Lýna was standing among them again, but Leliana's grip had been broken at some point. She watched the scene — which seemed to be sliding along faster than it would have in real life, the hole filling up unnaturally quickly — her face blank, eyes unmoving, just watching. The older woman, presumably their Keeper, was casting some kind of spell, hands flickering with green-gold light, a sprout poking up out of the dirt, and Lýna said, "This is real."

Then they were in the shadowed interior of a landship — which was weird, because there should not be enough room in here for all of them to stand — Lýna's voice hissing in the darkness, "The demon didn't give me this."

Outside again, running along the shore of a river out from a valley — it was hard to tell, but Alim thought it was the same valley they'd seen from the top of a cliff before. Dalish elves and Avvar humans ran, belongings slung over shoulders or the backs of halla, behind them the roars and screaming of darkspawn, the valley burning.

They were in the blackness again, stars in all directions, gently swaying. Alim was too disoriented by all the shit being thrown at him to figure out what the fuck he was supposed to do, Alistair nearby lowly cursing to himself. So it was Leliana who got to it first, gently whispering out into the impenetrable night. "You don't truly wish to die, Lýna. If you did, there were so many times you could have let it happen before now."

"...No." They were standing in a forest again, but a different forest — trees stretching high and thick overhead, many of them covered in a thin layer of moss, the air thick with fog. They were in the middle of a Dalish camp again, but— Just a quick eyeballing here, but they seemed to be short a few landships, judging by how many elves there were around. Presumably, some had been lost or damaged over the years.

Lýna was sitting on a bundle of furs nearby, staring up at them. She seemed unwell, too pale, shivering, deep shadows around her eyes, too weak to sit on her own, held up by a raven-haired girl — woman, really, around Alim's age — the faint lines of veins showing through her skin too dark...almost black. She had Blight sickness. Crouching over her, muttering, was the same older woman from before, and also the fucking Warden-Commander.

Alistair gasped as soon as he caught sight of the dead man, but the rest of them ignored it. Well, Alim paid attention only enough as he needed to figure out what this memory was: Lýna's recruitment into the Wardens. She'd mentioned, back before their Joining, that it worked as a sort of temporary cure for people already sickened from the Blight, that she'd been near death before hers and survived — which had been a hell of a relief to Perry, since he'd been showing early signs of infection at the time. Of course, Alistair had known Duncan much better than the rest of them, it made sense that he'd be the most affected by seeing the dead man again.

"No," Lýna said. "I don't wish to die. I only..." She leaned further into the black-haired elf at her side, let out a long, heavy sigh; the dream around them shivered, like ripples across a pond. (It was a little nauseating, actually.) "I'm so tired, Lélja. Everything out there is... I just want to sleep."

Leliana, standing over her, just stared. By the open-mouthed look on her face, she had no damn clue what to say to that. None of them did — Alim himself certainly didn't. It wasn't like he could try to tell her the world wasn't kind of shit right now. They were facing down a Blight, a Blight she'd been dealing with for years before anybody in civilized lands even realized anything was wrong. If Lýna was just done with it all, well, Alim couldn't honestly say he blamed her that much.

Which was a problem, because he suspected they did kind of need her around. She was vulnerable to spiritual attacks, yes, but...

He felt something touch him, magic warm and gold and softly tingling, a thought not his own dancing through his mind. She has written on her arm, she who protects her people — it's who she is. Her heart is of mine.

Alim blinked. He glanced toward Wynne, the spirit still clinging to her.

Genius of will, that who magnifies purpose, instrument of protection.

...Ah, shit. This was gonna suck, but he didn't have any better ideas. Lýna would just have to forgive him the cruelty later.

"I don't care." The others twitched with surprise at his sudden outburst, disapproving glares turning his way — though not from Wynne, he noticed, the spirit must be communicating with her too. Alim walked closer to where Lýna sat, as he approached Duncan and the old woman backing away, giving him space, though the woman propping up Lýna glared up at him. Narrow-eyed and angry, it was actually a little intimidating, hostility wafting off her so thick Alim could even feel it in the magic of the Fade. Because more scary Dalish girls were just what he needed, uh-huh. "So you're tired. Boo-hoo. Take a nap when we get back."

"Alim, what are—"

He shot a glance at Leliana over his shoulder — she got the message, her mouth closing so quick he heard her teeth click from here. She didn't look happy about it, her face twisting in a grimace, but at least she shut up. "I'm so sorry," he drawled mockingly, standing over Lýna, "but you don't have the luxury of laying down and giving up. Not until we're done with you."

The woman's hateful glare was practically a snarl now. "Who do you think you are, śẽvh?"

...Did this Dalish girl getting all cuddly with Lýna just call him a shem? Well, that was probably supposed to be one hell of an insult — Lýna even flinched, just a little, which was kind of funny. "I'm not talking to you, demon."

"Don't call Mẽrhiᶅ that."

Ha ha, wow, that was a Dalish name, wasn't it. Anyway, this little diversion was completely pointless, moving on. "Is this what Maharjaj—" He thought he had that name right... "—teach their hunters to do? abandon their duties when they're needed most?"

Lýna frowned, shallow, absent, as though distracted. "But I'm finished."

"No, Lýna, you're not. You took an oath to oppose the Blight, and the Fifth is still rising in the south, right now. That idea in your head, that the Blight is over, that is a lie the demon put there. We're still in Kinloch Hold. Remember?"

"No, I don't..." Rubbing at her face with one hand, Lýna shivered, the dream around them echoing with it. "That can't be so."

"It is." Alim crouched down, inches away. "But even if there's a chance it isn't true, is that a chance you want to take? When we met, you didn't strike me as an oathbreaker."

Lýna flinched, her eyes closing, seeming to duck under the weight of the word — Morrigan had said that was a big fucking deal for Chasind, and he knew it was for Avvar too, so it'd seemed a good bet Lýna would take that personally. She was quiet a moment, her breath thin, shaking. "I'm so tired," soft and weak, barely audible, half-broken.

Okay, ow. It took some effort to keep an edge of steel on his voice. "Yes, well, unfortunately your feelings on the matter are completely fucking irrelevent. You're still needed out there, Lýna, we still need you. Quite frankly, you're simply not allowed to give up here. You're going to get up, we're going to get out of here, and we're going to go back to doing our fucking job. Or are you an oathbreaker after all?"

Lýna drew in another breath, long and harsh and pained. And, slowly, she held out a hand.

Pulling her up to her feet was surprisingly difficult — especially since, as frustratingly tiny as he was, Lýna was even tinier. Like something were clinging to her, dragging her down. Not Meh– uh, whatever that elf next to her was called (no way in hell was Alim remembering that name), like the magic of that desire abomination but much more unpleasant, slimy and cold and heavy, crawling up his arm from their joined hands, trying to pull him down with her, with the extra weight of the demon's magic tying her down she was too heavy—

Alim grit his teeth, leaned forward to loop his free arm around her. Which just put him into contact with more of the demon's freezing, dragging magic, but he pushed back against it with magic of his own, burning hot and furious in his chest, dancing over his skin in little rainbow sparks — which, that was neat, nothing like that happened when he flared his magic in the real world — he planted his feet, and he pulled.

The magic holding Lýna broke with a tactile snap, suddenly unbalanced Alim staggered back a couple steps, Lýna's feet tangled up in his not helping, they nearly fell right back to the ground. Lýna was still clinging to him, her forehead pressed against his collar, shivering. There were fragments of the demon's magic on her, but they were slowly dribbling away as he watched, stubbornly clinging to her even as they gradually sublimated into the Fade around them.

Okay, that had been worse than he'd expected — he hadn't thought Lýna had been so thoroughly ensnared in the demon's magic. In retrospect, he was impressed she'd gathered the will to so much as hold out a hand, to attempt to break the spell at all. Like he'd thought to himself earlier tonight, tough as nails, this girl.

Not that she really seemed like it right now. Her voice thick, like she were desperately holding back tears, she muttered, "I'm sorry."

"Hey, it's all right." Doing his best to ignore the voice at the back of his head all like, what the hell, Alim, you just made a girl cry, you asshole — not like a real voice, he meant, a spirit or demon or something, just him talking to himself — he let out a short sigh, his hand coming up to the back of her head, hugging her against him. Oh hey, his glove had disappeared at some point, that probably made having his hand in her hair way less uncomfortable. "You know, Lýna, you have shit luck with demons."

Lýna choked out a laugh, wet and shaky.

Right, time to get going then. He waved the others over, but he hardly needed to, they were already pretty close. After a brief discussion with Wynne's spirit friend, Alistair's arm was thrown over Alim's shoulders, Leliana's around Lýna's, their free arms linked with Wynne's. The spirit smiled at them for a brief moment, the Fade echoing with a warm, giddy kind of...excitement wasn't quite the right word, but none better was occurring to Alim at the moment. Anticipation? No...

The spirit flickered out, but didn't go away, its presence on the magic around them still obvious. It intensified, even, seeming to harden into a razor edge, magic protective and prideful and determined, it lanced out into the dream around them—

—a wave of nausea, his head spun, magic hissing and crackling around him—

—Alim sucked in a gasp of air, cool and wet with spring. Clumsily flailing a little, banging his elbow on the stone, he shoved himself up to a seat, glanced around himself one way then the other, then the ceiling just to make sure.

Oh, good, it'd worked — he was awake. Either that, or the demon had moved them into a reproduction of one of the Enchanters' sitting rooms, marred with spell damage and bodies slumped motionless on the floor here and there, which would really be a quite silly thing to do. Letting out a relieved sigh, Alim ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair.

And then flinched when some of it caught in his glove, a few hairs yanked right out of his scalp, damn it...

Once he'd stopped cursing to himself over that, glaring at the stray hairs stuck in his glove, Alim pushed himself to his feet — a little shakily, his limbs weak and unsteady, like one of those miserable days on the road. Which was a little ridiculous, because it wasn't like he'd been doing anything, he'd literally been asleep, but okay. His hands planted on his knees, he glanced around the room, Esmond should be fighting the abomination somewhere, right?

Turned out, no: the Seeker hadn't needed their help to kill the thing. In the middle of the sitting room was a twisted, discolored human form — he thought it was human anyway, probably male, but it was difficult to tell for sure — intensely scorched like the desire abomination before had been, blood leaking in thick trails out of eyes, mouth, ears. Okay, then...

Esmond was nearby, crouching over Wynne. As their group (but not the Templars) started getting up, Wynne propped up on an elbow and rubbing at her forehead, Esmond just nodded. "Good, you woke on your own. I was concerned what might happen if I attempted to call you back into your body myself." He was speaking, Alim realized, a cold stone falling into his stomach, to Wynne.

Wynne noticed that too, the hand on her head pausing, before slowly falling down to her lap, the old woman staring warily up at Esmond. "You know."

The Seeker sniffed. "Of course I do. I've known you've entered into a communion with a spirit since the moment I saw you down on the apprentices' levels. Faith?"

"Protection."

"Ah, that would suit as well," Esmond said, nodding. "You are a fadewalker, not an abomination — despite the connection between you, Protection remains in the Fade and your soul remains your own. For a mage of the Circle to form this sort of relationship with a spirit is frowned upon, but permissible."

"I see." Wynne sounded about as skeptical as Alim was. Fadewalkers and abominations were different things, obviously, but fadewalkers weren't tied to particular spirits the way Wynne was. That was abomination stuff. But if Esmond was going to give Wynne an out, she might as well take it. "We both thank you for your understanding, Seeker."

"Of course, Enchanter. However..." Esmond leaned a little closer, his voice dropping into a husky mutter. "...why don't we keep this one to ourselves, hmm? I'm afraid many of our Templars here are unlikely to act rationally on this matter."

Well, they were all in agreement about that one. The bastards had wanted to kill Alim for just being next to someone committing forbidden magic — he doubted they'd be willing to agree the distinction Esmond was making even existed.

It took them rather longer to recover from this fight than it had the others. Esmond had to pull all the Templars back out of the Fade, one by one. Alim wasn't sure how he was doing that, but it looked painful — each of the Templars would cringe as they woke up, teeth grinding, before relaxing as Esmond let up on whatever weird Seeker magic (or anti-magic) he was doing to them. Many of them seemed as worn out as Alim felt, or deeply affected by whatever they'd seen in the Fade, a couple removing their helms to wipe at tears. The most dramatic reaction was probably from Kenrick: on waking he gave a full-body twitch, with a kick rolled back over his shoulder, his blade snapping into existence, before finally realizing the abomination was gone and they were fine. He didn't calm down immediately though — simmering with fury, the Knight-Enchanter stiffly paced in a little circle off by himself, curses hissed through his teeth.

Alim didn't pay most of that much mind, though. They had their own problem. They all got up right away, if only to plop herself down in a nearby armchair in Wynne's case, so Alim didn't even realize anything was wrong at first. But then he noticed he didn't see Lýna. After a couple seconds looking around, he spotted her still lying on the floor. For a moment he was worried she hadn't made it through the Veil, but no, she was awake, but she wasn't moving. Just, laying there, blankly staring up at the ceiling, unmoving save for breath, the occasional blink.

Swallowing down a guilty wince — he might have been an ass in there, but this wasn't his fault — he crouched down next to her. "You alive down there, Lýna?"

The next time Lýna blinked, it seemed her eyes stayed closed for slightly longer. "Yes."

"Just checking. Can you move? I think the abomination's magic made us physically tired as well, so, it might be difficult."

She let out a thin sigh, her eyes flicking to the side for a second. "Yes." She ended up needing a little help sitting up, pulling at Alim's arm, her grip weak and arms shaking, took a moment just to breathe, unreasonably wiped out from so small an effort. It took two tries to get the cap of her wineskin off, a little bit of the mead inside — Lýna didn't like beer, but when she'd found out the sailors who'd brought them here had mead on board she'd been almost excited — dribbled down her neck, but she ignored it. "I'm here."

"Right." Alim glanced around, but none of the Templars were nearby, recovering on their own. Alistair and Leliana had approached, though, both still a couple steps away, neither seeming quite sure what to do with themselves. "You're the Lieutenant, but I'm exercising my the one who knows shit about magic authority. You're done for the night. You're going to go back downstairs to recover from being fucked in the head by one too many demons, or — I swear, Lýna, hand to the Maker — I will force you back to sleep with magic and have Alistair carry you down. You need to rest. We'll take care of it from here."

Lýna took in a breath, as though to speak, and for a second Alim thought she was about to argue. But then she let it out in a sigh, her eyes falling closed, and nodded. "Yes, that is...best, most like. I'm sorry."

Well, shit. "It's okay, Lýna. What I said in there, I didn't... It's your duty, yes, but it's ours too. You don't have to do it on your own." That was a shit apology, but...well, he wasn't certain what exactly to say, and there were too many people around, it was awkward. He'd think about it and get in a proper one later.

She nodded. "I did... I made deal, with Esmond. Uldred and leaders, they are to die, but the rest, I plan to take as many as I can. Esmond says, he likes us to only Conscript those who surrender, but."

...But she intended to save as many of the rebel mages as she could. Maker, this girl, she... "Thank you, Lýna. I mean it, you— Nobody from around here would have thought to even consider preserving the lives of blood mages and apostates, even if it's just to use them against the Blight."

Lýna's face twitched, though the expression was mild enough (too exhausted) Alim had trouble reading it. Annoyed? Whatever, not extremely important. "I was... You know people, here. Those you...think will do, save any you can."

"Yes, I understand. Don't worry, I'll take care of it." He didn't actually have the authority to Conscript anyone — technically had to be an officer for that, at least a lieutenant — but presumably Esmond would honor the deal. "I suspect some of the rebels will be friends of mine, so."

The ghost of a smile pulled at her lips, she nodded. "Okay. We're ready?"

Stepping closer, Leliana said, "I'll take her down."

Alistair cleared his throat. "I realize you're just trying to be helpful, Sister, but you can't get through Enchanter Leorah's wards. I'll take her."

Um, Alim seriously doubted Alistair would have any better luck getting through those— "Oh! That's what Leorah meant by knocking, hitting them with a disruption?"

"Yep, you'd need a Templar on hand and, lucky us, here one is." Well, no, mages could cast disruptions too, but they didn't have one to spare. Alistair sank down on Lýna's opposite side, giving her a smile — an actual normal smile, not one of those lopsided I think I'm so very clever smirks he usually defaulted to. "I'm not much help here anyway. This group is a little low on ranged fighters for the swordsmen we have, and I'm not taking lyrium, so my disruption is weaker than the others'. They'll do just fine without me here."

...Alistair wasn't taking lyrium? Okay, he was seriously bloody impressive, then. Supposedly, he'd fought a revenant single-handedly, and then suppressed the casting of an abomination all by himself — and that was without the power-boost Templars got from lyrium? That was just nuts. Alim wasn't certain Alistair would really be so little help, he meant, Alim didn't know much about it but even he could tell Alistair was really good with a sword...but it wasn't like the rebel mages were likely to challenge him to a duel, so...

Lýna did seem a shade skeptical herself, but she didn't argue, just gave him a slow nod. "Good luck. What is it you say? Walk in...something..."

Alim snorted. "Walk in the Light of the Maker. And All-Mother keep you, you silly girl."

So thoroughly exhausted by the magic of the abomination, Alim doubted Lýna would even have the strength to sit up on her own without leaning on his arm, so standing was out of the question. Of course, elves were tiny, Lýna especially so — it took seemingly no effort at all for Alistair to scoop her off the floor, one arm around her shoulders and the other under her knees, and pop back up to his feet. He stood up quickly and easily enough Lýna let out a little gasp of surprise, babbled in elven for a second before catching herself again. "I hate being little. Not child."

Laughing under his breath a little, Alim said, "Yeah, no kidding. Bloody humans have to be so damn big, very annoying."

"You're bigger than Lýna here, at least." Alistair's reassuring smile had tilted a bit into a smirk now. "Having carried both of you now I can say that for sure — I put you in your bedroll after the Joining," he added. Which, okay, that was kind of embarrassing... "Lýna, though, you weigh about as much as a human ten-year-old, so..."

Lýna weakly smacked Alistair over the head, hissed... It sounded almost exactly like set, but Alim assumed it was the Dalish equivalent of shush. "Be quiet. We go now."

"Ser, yes, ser."

By the time Alistair and Lýna were gone, all the Templars were up and moving around again. Alim quickly updated Esmond, that four abominations in as many days were too many for the Lieutenant, so he'd be representing the Wardens' interests here now. It was hard to tell with their helmets back on, but Alim got the impression the Templars were sympathetic toward Lýna's difficulty — the vast majority of people never had to deal with an abomination once in their life, facing four in the space of a week was just absurd, especially for someone who hadn't been trained properly to handle it — and unhappy at the implication that they were actually supposed to listen to him. Tee hee. Esmond quick confirmed that Lýna wasn't permanently harmed, and that she'd read him in on their arrangement. And then they were moving on again.

It would be over soon. Alim had lost count, but there couldn't be that many floors left.

The next was the Enchanters' workspace — that is, a library everyone else wasn't allowed in, enchanting and alchemy labs, and also the high-security vaults in the middle, containing the more dangerous artifacts and also the Circle's phylacteries. (Though not the Enchanters', those were at the White Spire in Val Royeaux.) There was a little bit of a mess here, but not much in the way of damage, as thought Enchanters had been at work with various projects when the fighting started and left them behind, in a couple cases potion vials dropped to shatter against the floor or papers left randomly scattered. There'd been at least one small skirmish here, just outside the entrance to the vault, the walls in one spot abraded down a bit, streaks of dried blood splashed across the tile, but that was really it.

Esmond checked the inside of the vault too, as long as they were at it. It looked mostly the same as when Alim and Jowan had snuck in to destroy their phylacteries, cases and shelves and shit packed full of all kinds of magical paraphernalia, left here for who knew how long gathering dust. One room had clearly seen some fighting, but the damage was minimal — probably wary hitting an enchanted device with the wrong spell could cause an unpredictable interaction — the worst of it a bookcase toppled over, the wood cracked and splintered, a few restricted books spread across the floor. One particular room looked different, but only in that much of the enchanted weaponry was gone.

And, of course, the pair of Templars guarding the tiny room the phylacteries were kept in were both dead. One had a gaping furrow carved across his chest, probably with an enchanted sword or axe or something, the other looked like he'd been stabbed in the back, probably distracted by the attack on his fellow. The dead men had been propped up sitting against the wall, clearing as much of the narrow hallway as possible, and just left there — they would have been killed near the beginning of the rebellion, so they must have been here for going on a full day now.

Esmond and a couple Templars stepped into the phylactery closet quick, though Alim stayed well back — there were isolation wards over the door, he'd rather not get too close. When they came out, the Seeker announced that every single one of the phylacteries had been destroyed, the room filled with magical fire until metal was melted and stone scorched black. They would have to make new ones for all the survivors once this was over.

Alim winced — poor kids, the process really wasn't pleasant...

This floor was a little weird, in that with the vault in the way the quickest path from the stairs down to the stairs up was through a room on the outside ring, instead of the middle room like pretty much everywhere else. There was a little sitting room there, armchairs and sofas and little bookshelves, from what he could tell a place some Enchanters could meet between their apartment floors just to sit and talk for a little. There were other places they could do that, of course, this one just didn't seem to have any other purpose he could think of.

They were just outside the door into that room when Alim felt a tingle of magic echoing across the air — a sharp snap of spirit magic, but the tone very tight and controlled, probably a trap ward of some kind — followed by a harsh boom, the stone shivering under his feet. A couple seconds later, a crackling of lightning, a distant shout. The Templars tensed, preparing for an incoming fight, started slipping into the room, Alim picked out the thumping of footsteps, the roar of fire interrupted with the fwoomp of a barrier coming down, a few high snaps, clattering as debris scattered against the stone floor.

Alim had just walked through the door when a figure toppled into the room from the opposite side, a black-haired woman in Circle robes. She fell to roll across the rug covering the stone floor of the little sitting room, narrowly missing a harsh white slash of spirit magic slicing through the doorway after her, coming to a sudden halt flat on her back. The woman lay there for a second, seemingly too breathless to do much of anything, a hand pressed against her side — she was wounded, he saw, a patch of her robes over her hip wet with blood.

A second later, two more mages followed through the door after her, magic sparking at their fingertips. Grimacing, the woman raised the hand pressed against her side, a hand covered in her own blood. There was a flash of red-purple light, a pulse of magic — shivering and twisting, the feel of it slightly nauseating, the sound of it eerie and disjointed — Alim winced as the pair of mages screamed in agony, high and screeching. But the screaming only lasted for an instant. When the light cleared, their bodies were slumping limp to the ground, their faces reddened as though from an awful sunburn, eyes and ears and fingers darkened from burst vessels, both of them already very dead.

The Templars tensed, a heavy hiss replacing the lingering echo of magic as they filled the room with a disruption. The woman winced, from pain or her magic being suppressed or both, her bloody hand returning to her side pushed herself up onto her knees with a grunt of effort. When she made out the Templars streaming into the room her eyes widened, her mouth dropping open for a second. "Shite." Holding her free hand down at her side, "Seeker Esmond, I surrender."

Alim gaped at her. "Solana? What the fuck?"

Her eyes flicked to him and then back to the Seeker, then gave him a double-take. She clearly hadn't expected to see him here. He wished he could say he hadn't expected her to join a rebellion against the Templars or play around with blood magic, but he honestly wasn't that surprised.

Solana Amell had been brought to the Circle relatively late, for coming from such a populated place. Normally, it was typical for mages living in significant settlements, where the Templars had a presence and there were plenty of people around to notice anything unusual going on, to be discovered while still children — between eight and eleven was most common. Being discovered earlier was very unusual — magic only rarely presented before the age of seven, Alim being found by the Templars at four was exceptional — but later wasn't very common either, mostly because the emotional volatility of pubescence made magic very hard to hide. Solana had been fourteen when she'd been brought to the Circle, nearly ten years ago now, which was rather late, especially for being from a place with such a heavy Templar presence as Kirkwall.

The circumstances were even weirder. The Amells were (or had been) one of the ruling families of Kirkwall, across the Waking Sea from Highever — Kirkwall did have a (selected) monarch, but it was largely an administrative title, the actual authority was held by a council of noble families, the Amells one among them. The family had been in Kirkwall practically forever, since it'd been a Tevinter city — in fact, the name had originally been Amelius — though they'd fared very poorly during the Qunari occupations over the last couple centuries. They'd been on the edge of sputtering out of existence for the hundred fifty years since the last war, until they'd finally vanished from Kirkwall right around the time of Solana's arrival at the Circle.

In fact, Alim suspected the two events were related, though he didn't know much in the way of details. At the beginning of the Age, there had been two adult Amells left, brothers, a Lord Aristide and a Lord Fausten — the latter was Solana's grandfather. News of a big scandal had reached Kinloch Hold some decades ago — Alim was too young to remember, but he'd read about it — involving a Damion Amell, Solana's uncle, getting involved in smuggling somehow, Damion's imprisonment and eventual death muddying the family name. Fausten had died not long afterward. By that time, Aristide's daughter had already run away from the Free Marches in some scandal Alim didn't have details on, just that it'd been another big controversy at the time, leaving only two Amells in the city, a son of Aristide and a daughter of Fausten, Solana's mother. She had married a commoner, so had kept her name, by the end had managed to have five children, which might well have rescued the family from the brink of death.

Until all five were discovered to be mages. Now, that was fucking absurd — it wasn't unusual for magic to crop up in the same family now and again, but five children out of five? That almost never happened, at least not in the south. Solana had refused to speak much of her family at first — not unusual, it took most new arrivals some time to be comfortable talking about that kind of thing, too hurt and sad — but she eventually admitted that her parents hadn't wanted to give them up, they'd been planning on running away to Antiva (and from there to Rivain or Tevinter), but the Templars had shown up at their home before they could manage it. Her father had refused to hand the children over, the conversation ending with him ordering the household guard to kick the Templars out. It hadn't gone well, to put it mildly.

To put it less mildly, a Templar had murdered Solana's father right in front of her.

In the end, the children had been taken and split up, sent to different Circles — Solana, the eldest, was the only one sent to Kinloch Hold, and she had no idea where her younger brothers and sisters were. She'd only gotten a few messages from home since. One had come seven years ago now, right around the time she and Alim had started becoming friends, from her uncle Gamlen (Aristide's son), informing her her mother had died. (Suicide, Alim assumed.) Another had come from the office of the Viscount a couple years later, informing her the Amells were no longer Kirkwaller nobility — they'd been expelled due to some scandal involving the last living member of the family, Alim wasn't certain exactly what.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Solana didn't like the Templars or the Circle very much. He couldn't even pretend to be shocked for a single second that she'd ended up with the rebellion.

Before anyone could say or do anything stupid, Alim skipped through the crowd of Templars — he couldn't fadestep with the disruption filling the room — slipping between Esmond and Solana. Between a bunch of tense Templars and a maleficar probably wasn't a wise place to be, there was an unpleasant cold tingling at the back of his neck, but it would be fine. Hopefully. "We're going to want this one, Seeker."

One corner of Esmond's lips curled with a very faint grimace. He glanced at the two dead mages, killed by blood magic of some kind, before turning back to Alim. "Are you certain, Alim? I of course respect the Wardens' rights in this matter, but given the circumstances I wonder whether your Lieutenant might have second thoughts."

Alim snorted — if Esmond really thought that, he was drastically overestimating how much Lýna gave a damn about Chantry laws concerning magic. "I doubt it. At the very least, I'd suggest you hold off on executing anyone until Lýna gets the chance to Conscript them."

"Wait, what are you talking about?"

Sighing to himself, Alim half-turned to Solana. She hadn't risen to her feet, still kneeling on the floor a few feet behind him, a hand pressed to the wound in her side, sweating and pale from pain and exertion, her wavy black hair unusually frazzled, in places glued to her neck. "Oh, nothing, I'm just saving your life is all."

Her long, narrow face twisted into a scowl. "And just how are you managing that, exactly?" she asked in her familiar upper-class northern accent, despite the pain an impressively dry drawl to her voice.

"You just used blood magic right in front of a bunch of Templars, you fucking idiot."

Solana blinked. Her eyes flicked to the Templars behind him, then to the dead bodies to her right, and then back up to Alim. "...Oh. Shite."

"'Shite' indeed. You wanna let my boss Conscript you into the Wardens, or would you rather I get out of the way so one of these fine gentlemen can go ahead and cut your stupid head off?"

She glared up at him. "You're an arse, Alim, you know that?" He did know that, in fact. Tipping back to fall on her ass, Solana let out a heavy sigh. "Right, then. I'll accept a Conscription into the Grey Wardens at your Lieutenant's convenience. In the meantime, Seeker, would you permit me to heal myself? I suspect I'll bleed out in short order if my wounds remain unattended to."

His voice still smooth and flat, but dropped by nearly an octave, displeased, Esmond said, "I will consider any sign of magic from you to be a hostile act, maleficar. However, I will permit the Enchanter to heal you, should she wish to do so. Wynne?"

Wynne had already moved forward, waiting a couple steps to Esmond's right. "Of course, Esmond." Looking past Alim, a faint but honest smile on her face, Wynne said, "It's alright, child, I have no intention of harming you."

Alim wasn't looking, but he could practically feel Solana's skeptically raised eyebrow. "Forgive me my hesitation to believe you, Enchanter. We are on opposite sides of the battle here."

"If you consider the events of the past day carefully, Solana, you'll realize I didn't choose a side. I don't want to see men and women I've known since they were small children fight and suffer and die — and so there was no place for me in Uldred's rebels nor Irving's loyalists. Let me heal you, child."

Solana let out another sigh. "Fine. Agreed, Seeker, you have my word I won't cast any magic until I am told otherwise."

For a long moment, Esmond glared down at Solana, his face cold and impassive. Then he lifted a hand, waving the Templars off. There was a brief hesitation, the men clearly unwilling to let off a mage who'd just killed two people with blood magic (even if they were rebels), but eventually the disruption did, slowly, lift.

While the Templars milled around, darkly muttering to each other and scowling in Solana's direction, the Seeker interrogated her about what was going on upstairs. The remaining rebels had been holed up in the upper Enchanters' apartments, dug in with traps and wards — a lot of those were down now though, sabotaged or tripped in Solana's escape. Uldred was one floor above that, in the Harrowing chamber with two of the more experienced rebels and their prisoners, and there had been another ten in the apartments.

The past tense was an important distinction. Solana had decided to defect, bringing them down to nine, but she'd been discovered picking her way through the wards. In the fight, one of the rebels had stumbled into a trap — she hadn't stuck around to make sure, but it was most likely fatal — down to eight, and the two she'd killed here made six. She doubted any of the rest would surrender, the Templars would probably just have to kill them all.

("Lay back, child.")

("Dammit, Wynne, I'm a grown woman.")

("Of course, dear. Now lay back.")

The Templars' hostility toward Solana softened a bit as they realized she'd, whether intentionally or not, reduced the rebel mages they'd have to deal with by a third — not to mention, severely weakened their fortifications while she was at it. They might not like how she'd done it, but it was undeniable that the chances of them losing people were considerably lower now. Nobody had been looking forward to the prospect of attacking a dozen mages in a location they'd had the opportunity to dig in at, wards and enchantments and traps, no, they definitely would have lost people, most likely several.

If the Wardens weren't around, Solana would almost certainly have still ended up being executed as a maleficar, but Alim suspected the Templars would at least have been less cruel about it. Which didn't count for much, but still.

Esmond nodded at her description of the layout of the levels above their heads, muttered to the Templars to be ready to go as soon as they were done here. Any wasted time would give the rebels opportunity to lay new wards and traps, after all. "You said the Enchanter is in the Harrowing chamber, with the prisoners. Why?"

Solana grimaced, but not in pain this time — the wound in her side was actually very serious, Wynne had needed to stick her hand inside Solana nearly up to the wrist to get at something important, very gross — instead with a very clear sense of distaste, anger. "The Veil is thinnest there."

"Yes, but I'm of the understanding that the difference it makes for spellcasting is negli—"

"Oh, fuck," Alim groaned. "Seeker, Uldred is a spellbinder."

His face twisted into a disgusted glare — and not a subtle one either, probably the strongest expression Alim had ever seen from the Seeker. "Ah. I understand. Both the First Enchanter and Ser Cullen?"

Grim, Solana just nodded.

Spellbinding was a...controversial practice, in the southern Circles. Even in the north, a number of people very strongly disapproved of it. In simple terms, the magic worked by summoning a spirit or demon through the Veil and binding it into some kind of enchanted object; this would help both to power a spell — most standard enchantments used lyrium, which slowly decayed through use, but a spirit would last as long as the binding held — as well as to focus it more precisely than could otherwise be achieved, even allow a degree of self-adjustment, the spirit tweaking the magic as needed to suit the specific use the enchanted object was being put to.

A good example was the spirit blade Knight-Enchanters wore. It was called a spirit blade because there really was a spirit bound in the hilt — Faith, usually. Since the spirit inside provided the magic necessary to operate it, the blade would last pretty much forever — supposedly there were spirit blades made centuries ago that still worked — and were completely unaffected by disruption fields. They could even be used inside isolation wards for a short period of time. The blade could cut through pretty much any physical substance, but was perfectly safe to use: it would cut only what the Knight-Enchanter wielding it wanted it to cut, the spirit inside adjusting the magic to suit its user's will. If Kenrick wanted to, he could cut someone's hair by slashing right through their neck, leaving them entirely unharmed — a mage would feel the magic as it passed, but an ordinary person might not even notice a thing. That particular effect could only be achieved with the help of a spirit, even Tevinter enchanters couldn't pull that shit off.

The Chantry didn't forbid spellbinding, since a lot of important enchantment work going all the way back to old pre-Blight Tevinter required it, but it was strongly discouraged for Circle mages to study it without close supervision, and sometimes even explicit permission. There were practical concerns that a mage would make a mistake and let something they summoned loose into the world, or that they might end up possessed. There were also religious concerns, given how the Chant speaks of spirits and demons — the hard-line position was that people should avoid contact with the denizens of the Fade whenever possible; an even more extreme position held that summoning things across the Veil was, in some small way, undoing the Maker's work in separating their worlds in the first place, that spellbinding was inherently heretical. Alim personally thought that was a creative interpretation of the text, but creative interpretations of the text weren't uncommon, when it came down to it.

A more interesting perspective was rare in the south, but was actually the primary objection in the north: some considered spirits to be another race of people — wildly different from elves and humans and dwarves, yes, but still people — which made spellbinding a form of slavery. It might seem odd that this was a common reservation with spellbinding in the north, given slavery was actually legal there...but there was a popular strain of abolitionism up there too, especially in institutions closely connected to the Black Chantry, as the Circles were — Andraste had led a slave revolt, after all, it'd be weird if they didn't have anti-slavery sentiments. People who had this objection to spellbinding also tended to be abolitionists, so it actually wasn't contradictory at all.

If Alim was being honest, he wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that perspective. He'd never really considered the question of whether spirits were people or not until he'd read someone making the argument, and he...didn't think they were wrong? A very different kind of people, sure, but. It was an uncomfortable thought, though, raised a long list of difficult questions, so Alim did understand why people avoided it.

Anyway, getting to the point. Spirits and demons had an effect on the minds of people dreaming in the Fade — or in the real world, through abominations. It was possible to harness those effects through spellbinding. It wasn't even unheard of, defensive wards containing demons that inspired fear in intruders, jewelry enchanted to induce happiness or awe or lust, manacles that sapped the will to resist or compelled the wearer to speak the truth. Not unheard of, no, but extremely rare in the south, where the Chantry explicitly forbid the practice; such enchantments were legal in the north, though not particularly common there either.

Theoretically, a person could quite easily bind a demon with the explicit intention of using its influence to psychologically torture someone.

"What are the demons bound to?"

Solana flinched as Wynne cast another spell into her wound, took a moment to gather herself, her eyes falling closed, her throat bobbing with a heavy swallow. "The binding is integrated into the summoning circle. Cullen and Irving are inside the circles. You'll have to be careful breaking them out — the bindings are also the only thing preventing the demons from attempting to possess them."

That...was going to be a problem, yes. If they broke the circles, taking down the entire binding, the demons could just hitch a ride on Irving and Cullen, using their bodies to insulate themselves from being dispersed. A demon needed permission to properly possess someone's mind, but the body didn't have the same protection — the things a demon could do from there were limited, but Irving and Cullen would still be stuck with their influence until they could get an exorcism going. They needed to break the binding holding the demons in this world while leaving the binding keeping them away from the prisoners in place.

Alim was clever, but he seriously doubted his glyph magic was good enough to pull that off. Templars usually didn't study this sort of thing at all, so that left "Wynne? Do you think you'll be able to handle the binding?"

Esmond shook his head. "I can handle the binding."

"Seeker, it—"

"The others will hold the strongest Suppression over the circles they can summon, and then I will Sever them both. The binding will falter, and the Suppression will disperse the demons in an instant, before they have any opportunity to invade the prisoners. It will be quicker and safer than picking at the glyphs."

...Okay? Alim had no idea what "Sever" was supposed to mean, but he wasn't about to challenge Esmond about it to his face either — if he thought he could do it, Alim guessed he was just going to go along with that. Besides, if it went wrong they could just exorcise the demons anyway. It would take longer, and the process was unpleasant, but they wouldn't be risking Irving and Cullen's lives if the Seeker's trick didn't work out.

Not that Alim really gave a damn about Irving and Cullen's lives, honestly, but he wasn't the one calling the shots here.

That conversation petered out, nothing important left to go over. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Wynne spoke. She didn't look up, still focused on Solana's side — the work was mostly done now, the nauseating-to-look-at hole punched into her mostly patched up, though what little remained was still half-hidden with blood — but it was clear she was talking to the Seeker. "I don't know what you were intending to do with Solana, but she won't be coming with us. She's lost far too much blood. I don't want her walking at all, but she'll have to be moved somewhere she can rest, at least."

"Come now, Wynne, I'm—"

Wynne's eyes flicked away from the wound and up to Solana's face, an edge of steel slipping into her voice. "The peritoneum was lacerated in multiple places, and while there was only minor damage to the liver, nearly half of the right kidney was altered with a disorienting translation along twenty-one planes, including damage to major arteries and veins and a total severing of the ureter. If someone hadn't been here to patch you up, you would have bled out in fifteen minutes; if it were someone without the necessary knowledge of anatomy to repair the affected tissues, you would almost certainly lose the kidney, and likely die a couple weeks down the road from necrosis. So if I tell you you are going to lay down and rest, young lady, you are going to lay down and rest. Am I understood?"

For a couple seconds, Solana just blinked up at the old Enchanter, her mouth hanging loosely open. "Ah... Yes, I understand." Her voice came thin, slightly shaky. Which did make perfect sense — Alim wasn't the best healer, but he'd followed more than well enough to understand that Solana was very lucky to be alive.

"Good. Seeker, I would ask you don't put her in one of the cells. Even in those without magic, our connection to the Fade assists in the recovery process — the wards on the cells will slow her recovery at the very least, and may even cause serious complications."

The Seeker nodded. "Would suppressing restraints have the same effect?"

Wynne's eyebrows dipped with a faint frown, but she said, "No, it's an internal process. Fixed restraints would stress the affected tissues."

"Ser Edith, your cuffs."

One of the Templars walked up, produced manacles from somewhere in her armor, polished steel with a faint blue-silver glow of magic to Alim's sight — enchanted to produce a disruption field around the wearer, preventing a mage from casting, basic Templar equipment. There were a couple chain links at the base of the cuffs, allowing some freedom of movement, but there was a solid bar connecting them, preventing the wearer from reaching the keyholes, making them almost impossible to pick by hand. After a bit of fiddling around with a tiny little knife pulled from his belt, Esmond had partially disassembled them, detaching the bar in the middle, leaving two cuffs with a few links dangling from the ends.

One of these went around each of Solana's wrists. There was a faint tingling in the air as each cuff closed, the disruption fields coming into effect — Solana grimacing with discomfort, her feet shifting against the floor, shoulders rolling a little. Once they were both locked in place, Esmond stared coldly down at her. "Until the Warden-Lieutenant officially Conscripts you, you will be in our custody. You will be put in one of the supervisor's apartments in the upper apprentices' level, where you will be guarded at all times. Stay where I put you, and you will be left alone until the Wardens take you away; attempt to run, and you will be killed where you stand. Understood?"

Solana gave him a flat, almost irritated look, one eyebrow ticking up a little. "I believe I was informed by a healer a minute ago I will not be running at all."

"Amell, I have no—"

"I understand, Seeker. I won't make trouble."

Esmond sniffed. "It's far too late for that, don't you think? Excuse me." With a gentle creaking of leather, the Seeker stood and walked off, before long huddled up with a few Templars halfway across the room. Probably giving orders for a couple of them to take Solana downstairs and guard the door — by the almost painfully rigid posture of the Templars, also warning them there would be consequences if she was killed before the Wardens had an opportunity to Conscript her. He clearly wasn't very happy with Solana — she had rebelled against the Circle, and was a maleficar and all — but Esmond was the kind of guy who'd keep his word anyway.

So, that was working out. The Seeker had agreed to get the Circle involved when the time came, they had Wynne to pull the Arl out of stasis, and they had a new recruit for the Wardens who was highly educated in the history, politics, and economics of the Waking Sea and dwarven kingdoms — knowledge that wasn't of much immediate use, but definitely would be in the months and years to come — and on top of her potential as an advisor for the next Commander of the Grey also happened to be a damn fine mage. Not bad at all.

But in the meantime, Alim had a quick jab to get in. "Cullen and Irving."

Solana blinked, glanced up at him. "What?"

"You said Cullen and Irving. Not Irving and Cullen."

She let out a sigh, her head falling back to thunk against the rug. "Don't you start."

"Oh, I never stop, you know that."

"Yes, I suppose I do."

"That's your line, huh? Rebel against the Circle, choose to embrace apostasy, kill everyone between you and the door — definitely get some of our friends killed before it's all over, no doubt about that. No, you don't have any problem with any of that, raring to go. But as soon as Uldred starts being mean to Ser Cullen Rutherford..."

"Being mean?" Solana drawled. "He's torturing him right now."

"Yes, well, these things happen when a Circle falls apart. With how many people have been killed or injured, did you really think tu amante would come out in one piece?" He was pretty sure that was right, he didn't actually speak Nevarran. Solana did, though — in addition to Orlesian, Antivan, dwarvish, and Qunlat, because apparently the education the nobility gave their kids was ridiculous.

Solana's face grew somewhat less pale, which he guessed was the closest she could manage to a blush at the moment, what with the blood loss. "Andraste have mercy, Cullen is not mi amante, Alim," the Nevarran phrase said with maximum sarcasm.

"No, he just wishes he was."

"Alim..."

"Oh come on, Solana, that boy all but jumps to open doors for you. He blushes whenever you so much as look in his general direction! And you love it. Don't even try to deny it, this is me."

"My my, is that jealousy I hear?"

"What do I have to be jealous of? I've just been informed he is, in fact, not your lover." She had several, Alim himself among them, because people got around in the tower. He'd teased her before about sneaking off with her Templar admirer, but he didn't actually think they'd ever done anything. Cullen was too damn shy around her, for one thing. "I'm just saying, everyone knows that poor boy wants to court you — and he's taken vows, how sad for him."

Solana snorted out a laugh. "He grew up on a farm, he has no idea at all how to court a lady."

"No, but he'd try, Maker bless his heart."

"Alim..."

"I'm just saying, you're ridiculous sometimes, Sola. All the shit that's gone down today, and Uldred messing with Cullen is the thing that pushes you out?"

Her eyes tipping away, Solana's shoulders twitched in a weak shrug. She winced a little, probably pulling something in her side — Wynne was still finishing up, moving while having skin regrown could be very uncomfortable. "It isn't that I... Cullen's a sweet— It's not a problem with anything..." Her mouth worked in silence for a second, before relaxing with another sigh. Her voice low and awkward, eyes still not meeting his, she muttered, "If Uldred just killed him I doubt it would so concern me, but to... Cullen doesn't deserve this."

...Well. He didn't actually know what to say to that. Except, "And Irving does?"

"Irving's an arse."

Alim laughed.

"I need to speak with you for a moment, Alim."

His eyes widening a tic, he glanced up at Esmond, who'd returned at some point. He'd noticed the Seeker had been very unhappy with this development, going all stiff and cold, but apparently he was back to normal again. "Of course, Seeker." Glancing back down at Solana, "Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."

She gave him a flat sort of look. "I believe that's my line."

"I'm not the maleficar in the room." Alim ignored the sighing — from both Solana and Wynne, actually, which was unexpected, he didn't know what he'd done to annoy Wynne (this time) — and followed Esmond off. There wasn't a whole lot of space in this room, not enough to really talk privately, but Esmond sought out as much as he could, leading Alim over into a far corner. Once the Seeker came to a stop, Alim asked, "Okay, what is this about?"

The obvious signs of displeasure had gone out of Esmond's face, returned to the vaguely creepy placidity he usually wore. There was an oddly soft note on his voice, actually — sympathetic, maybe? It was hard to tell, and it didn't help that he was whispering so lowly a human in Alim's place might not even pick it up at all. "The fight to come is going to be difficult, and I would prefer my people have as few distractions as possible."

Alim waited for Esmond to continue, but after a couple seconds it became clear he wasn't going to. "Right, that makes sense. And?"

"They are uncomfortable with you fighting the rebels alongside them."

"Ah." He might have seen this coming — honestly, he was a little surprised it had taken this long to come up. Perhaps now that they knew precisely what they were about to face, their numbers and their defenses already weakened for them by Solana's botched defection, Esmond felt secure enough in their success he didn't think they needed Alim's help anymore. Crossing his arms low over his chest, Alim gave the Seeker his best unimpressed, I can't believe you're saying this stupid shit to me look. "I suppose I shouldn't be insulted. After all, why would a Templar want to work with the evil maleficar?"

Esmond's eyebrows dipped, just a little. "It's not about that."

"It's not? I wasn't counting, since I got back how many Templars have demanded I be put to death for practicing blood magic which, reminder, I have never cast in my life?" Excluding the Joining, but he wasn't certain whether that should count anyway. "Maybe I should be grateful I wasn't stabbed in the back down—"

"Alim, I understand this is difficult for you, but could you maybe not speak for five seconds?"

He had to bite his lip to keep himself from smirking. "Was that a joke, Seeker? I don't think I've ever heard you make jokes before."

"You're not one of my charges anymore," Esmond said, as though that actually explained anything. "You needn't belabor that particular issue with me. If you recall, I took your side in that matter."

"Oh, um..." He'd forgotten, honestly — he hadn't known before, and when Esmond had mentioned it downstairs he'd been too blindsided to figure out what to say, so he'd just changed the subject back to Annulment. So. "Right. Did I, uh, ever thank you for that?"

Shaking his head, Esmond muttered, "You didn't, and you needn't. I didn't do it as a personal favor, or even truly for your sake. I was simply doing my job."

Somehow, Alim had the feeling the Templars didn't see it that way.

"Their reticence to fight the rebels with you at our side has nothing to do with the, yes, false accusations of blood magic. The question is one of your loyalties. Do not lie to me, child: if you hadn't left the Circle when you did, you most likely would have found yourself among the rebels."

"...Ah. Um." The words were caught in Alim's throat, the pressure of the unspoken words almost painful in his chest, instincts telling him admitting this to the Seeker's face was a bad, bad idea. But, it wasn't really — it would have been before, but Esmond had acknowledged earlier that the Chantry had no authority over Wardens, so. "Yes, I, uh... I probably would have. If I didn't get myself killed earlier in the fighting, of course."

"Of course. I know you think little of the Templars here, but I hope you can admit they are not blind, nor are they entirely foolish." A smile twitched at Alim's lips at the Seeker's use of entirely. "You may be a Warden now, but you were one of ours until very recently. Some of us have known you since you were a small child. We know of your attitude toward the Circle in general and our calling particularly, and we know of your relationship with the Enchanter at the heart of this all. So you can understand why my men may have doubts about your loyalties."

"Yes, that makes...perfect sense, really. And you can't just tell them to deal with it and move on, like you did downstairs?"

"If I tell them you will be joining us, they will accept it. However, I can not order their reservations on the matter away. I fear your presence will be a distraction. And we have a difficult fight ahead of us — a distraction at the wrong moment may mean the death of one or even a few of my men. I prefer to minimize the chances of the people under my command being killed whenever possible."

"Yes, I understand." His eyes flicking over to the wall nearby, Alim let out a thin sigh. "I'm the only Warden up here. If I leave, there will be nobody left to represent our interests."

Esmond shook his head. "The Wardens have no interest here. All that are left are Uldred, his closest comrades, and the most fanatical of the rebels. None of them will be suitable for Conscription by the terms of the agreement I made with your Lieutenant."

...He probably wasn't wrong about that. "If there won't be any rebels we can Conscript, why did you include that in the agreement in the first place?"

"I thought there would be more than a dozen left," he said with a light shrug. Which honestly meant Esmond was a little insane, if he'd thought there were more he shouldn't have come with so few Templars. "Besides, you got one Conscript out of it. If the Wardens are still wanting for mages when we meet again to face the horde, I may talk with your Lieutenant then about asking for volunteers. But I have honored the terms of the agreement. Unless you disagree?"

"No," Alim said, sighing again, "not as I understand it. And if we only get one new member out of this, I'm happy it's Solana — I was thinking she would make a good advisor for the next Warden-Commander on matters of politics and trade."

One of Esmond's eyes twitched, but he kept whatever words of disapproval he was thinking to himself. "I'm pleased I could assist the Wardens in this way."

Yeah, Alim just bet he was. "All right, I'll stay behind, but if Lýna has a problem with it you get to explain it to her."

His lip curling in the faintest of smirks, Esmond said, "Frightened of your commanding officer, are you?"

"I wouldn't say frightened. But if she's going to be angry with somebody, I'd rather it be somebody who's not me, you know."

"Yes, I know. Thank you, Alim."

"No need to thank me, Seeker. You have to do what you think is best by your people, I understand." Alim hesitated for a second, then lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Between you and me, I wasn't looking forward to this anyway. Darkspawn and abominations, sure, but I don't like killing people, and I probably have friends up there..."

"Between you and me, I understand perfectly, but we must act as our duty calls us. My duty calls me to end this rebellion by any means I deem necessary; your duty is outside of these walls."

"True." If Alim read Lýna correctly, she'd only decided to participate in this mess in the first place to build good will with the Circle ahead of the arrival of the horde. Even without any Wardens seeing it through to the end, they'd already done what they needed to do.

"I would like you to escort Solana downstairs on your own. I'd rather keep all the Templars I have with us, and I imagine you can talk your way past Enchanter Leorah without too much difficulty."

"I always do." It helped that Leorah liked him, and that she would often forget what the conversation had originally been about after going down a couple tangents — he'd been nine years old and trying to get out of a calligraphy lesson when he'd learned that trick. "Trust me to walk her down, do you?"

One of Esmond's eyebrows twitched. "You won't be able to get through the main door. And despite your impulse toward contrariness, I doubt you'd do anything to risk the Wardens' mission here."

"I'm glad you have that much confidence in me, Seeker, because I bet nobody else does. You want to hold on to the Sister?"

"I won't turn away her assistance if she's offering it."

"Nope, just mine." Alim let out a final sigh — rather relieved, honestly. He hadn't wanted in this fight in the first place, he should really be glad Esmond had handed him a perfectly reasonable excuse. "All right, I'll just do that. I'll see you later, I guess."

"You will." Esmond's hand came up, clasping his arm just under the shoulder, gently enough Alim knew he was consciously trying not to hurt him. "Thank you, Alim."

"Yep." Not really sure how to tie this off, Alim just turned on his heel and made back for Solana. Wynne was finished now, standing a short distance away chatting with Leliana and a couple Templars, leaving Solana lying on the floor alone, none of the Templars willing to stand too close to the scary evil maleficar. A large patch of Solana's robes were dark with blood, still sopping wet in a few places, her skin through the hole and her right hand stained pink, streaked with red here and there. She'd gone still and silent, her eyes closed, almost seemed asleep. "All right, it's bedtime, young lady. Come on and I'll go tuck you in — if you're a good girl maybe I'll even read you a story."

Solana's eyes blinked open, and then blinked a few more times before finally managing to focus on him — she must be seriously wiped out, after the fighting and the blood loss and the healing, understandable. "You're an arse, Li, you know that?"

"It's come up. Seriously, let's get you out of here."

With a very put-upon eye roll, Solana raised a hand, somewhat unsteadily, asking without asking for help standing. (Her bloody hand, Alim noticed, but he didn't really care.) He clasped her arm above the wrist, his other hand supporting her elbow, pulled a little to give her— Hissing through her teeth, Solana gasped, "Stop, stop." Sitting upright now, her legs splayed out in front of her, she hugged her middle, her breathing hard and thin. After a few seconds to collect herself, she held up her left hand instead. "Let's try that again."

"Wynne told you to go easy on your right side, didn't she."

"Shut up."

This time, they managed to get Solana up to her feet — it was easier than dragging Lýna up back in the Fade, but still not easy. Alim was annoyingly tiny, and Solana was rather tall for a woman. (A human woman he meant, obviously, she'd be very tall for an elf.) She wasn't particularly big, thankfully, but even so, she was taller than he was, and also significantly heavier, so while getting her to her feet wasn't easy — his arm and shoulder straining with the effort, Solana groaning in pain — supporting her weight wasn't much better. After only a few seconds with Solana's arm over his shoulders, leaning heavily on him, his back was already protesting a little, and he doubted it was going to get better as they made their way down the stairs. They'd probably be fine, but if he weren't a Warden, with the boost to strength and endurance the Joining gave them, he seriously doubted they'd get even close to making it all the way.

Their first few steps were somewhat awkward, limbs tangled up with each other's, but steady enough. They weren't at risk of falling on their faces any time soon, at least. Alim felt Solana's eyes on him, but it didn't take long to get to the stairs, he had to keep his eyes on his feet, no attention to spare for figuring out what Solana was thinking. They were about halfway down the first flight when she gave voice to it anyway. "Is it my imagination, or are you stronger than I remember?"

"Do I feature in your imagination often?" He wasn't looking, but he didn't need to to know she was rolling her eyes at him. "No, it's not your imagination. It's a Warden thing. I'm probably stronger than you now, actually." One of those annoying things about being an elf, even human women could sometimes physically overpower elven men — not always, but sometimes. Honestly, that could be interesting in a lover — there was a reason he knew for a fact Solana had been stronger than him before the Joining — but outside of that very specific context it was just kind of embarrassing. Even in that context, really, it wasn't something he'd ever admit out loud...

"...So I suppose I have that to look forward to." There was a note of suspicion on her voice — probably wondering how this could be a Warden thing, which was legitimate.

"Yeah, give it a few weeks and you'll be able to kick my ass again."

"I could kick your arse right now, Surana."

"That's adorable, sweetie, but you can't kick anything at the moment, much less my 'arse'."

Solana grumbled, but didn't argue. "How did you get wrapped up in all this, anyway? I don't imagine the Templars sent for the Wardens to help them deal with an internal rebellion."

"Well, no, obviously, it just kind of happened." Alim considered a second but, well, it'd take some minutes to get all the way back down at this pace, might as well find something to talk about. "Right, how I got here, let's go all the way back to the beginning—"

"Because you like to hear yourself talk."

"I wasn't going to say that, but yes, of course. Anyway, it all started a few months ago now, with Jowan being terrified of the Harrowing, and you know how Jowan can get when he starts obsessing over something..."

---

ƫestozătu — Modern Tevene, gotten by approximating Romanian sound changes from testudinatum, a Latin architectural term. Not 100% correct, I don't think, but I'm fine with it being a little off.

[the elves of the Arlathan Forest] — Ancient Tevinter successfully conquered the elven capital, of course, but in the following centuries they had serious difficulty holding it. The land wasn't really suitable for conversion into plantations — there are reasons the ancient elves didn't put their farmland there — and elven rebels continued to stalk the woods, even local spirits and the remains of ancient wards resisting human rule. Eventually, Tevinter gave up trying to rule the region, and just let the elves have it — in the modern day, Arlathan is technically part of the Imperium, but is administered as a semi-autonomous province. Since the region was never fully integrated, there is some continuity with the pre-conquest elves, though obviously there have been major disruptions and they've gone through millennia of cultural development. Like the Dalish, their memory of what came before has nuggets of truth, but is imperfect.

genius — Meant in the Latin sense, referring to minor local deities and guardian spirits. In Classical Tevinter, would have been used for a type of spirit, specifically those that are born from mortal wishes/hopes/prayers/whatevs. (Which differ from spirits formed by mortal experiences in their behavior, but how and why isn't important just now.)

ymaj — "Mommy"; "mother" would be mamaj

Solana Amell — The default name for a human mage is "Solona", but I changed one letter. Those who haven't played Dragon Age might only find the names "Amell" and "Gamlen" vaguely familiar. Amell has been mentioned as Marian's mother's maiden name, and Gamlen as Marian's uncle — Marian and Solana are second cousins. (Which is canon, by the way.) Also, the Amell family timeline has been significantly tweaked. None of the details are particularly important to explain just now.

---

Have a chapter for my birthday, I guess? It's absurd to think that I'm thirty, I'm pretty sure I should have become an adult at some point over the last decade...

Yes, I did just cheat you all out of the final confrontation with Uldred. In my defense, it actually makes a lot of sense for Esmond to not want Alim up there, especially now that he knows how few rebels are left, and this chapter is long enough already. It feels like it fell really flat to me, but I had a big insomnia spike the last couple weeks, so it's possible I'm imagining it, and almost certain there's nothing I can do at the moment to fix it. I'd rather just tie it off and move on. Also, that fight would be super anti-climactic anyway — there are enough Templars there to suppress their casting, and nobody is inclined to stand around and chat, so. Not really missing anything.

So! New Warden! Lýna got magically traumatized again! Alim continues to be a little shit! Moving on! Woo!

Anyway, aftermath chapter next, then back to Denerim, then back to Redcliffe, and then checking back in with the Hawkes. Good times.

(Oh my god I'm so tired.)

I have a cheesecake to make. Bye.