Warnings for this chapter: none beyond the usual.

Chapter 3: Harrowing

"This is all as sweet as Andraste's fuzzy dimpled peach, but I'd rather you stop before I vomit," Eve said.

A rumbling laugh echoed through the alley as everything froze; even the raindrops hung suspended in the air like glittering crystals. "What's the matter, mageling?" Nessa asked in a cavernous and commanding voice much too large for her slim body. "Is this not how it happened?"

Cold mud squelched under her boots as Eve recoiled from Nessa's open arms and scrambled to her feet, shivering. Beneath the horror, she marveled at each freckle dusting Nessa's high cheeks, creamy skin rosy from the flush mantling her lightly lined face. She looked as perfect as Eve remembered her. It had even got Nessa's eyes right - the exact shade of sunlit chestnuts in autumn that sometimes glimmered with what Eve was sure was pride whenever she had completed a particularly difficult surgery or draught.

Eve drank in Nessa's face greedily even as her insides wrenched at the reminder that she hadn't seen the real Nessa in over five years. Ever since this night, when she'd been shipped off to the Circle Tower in Kinloch Hold.

Kinloch Hold. She was in the Tower. She'd been told to lie still and quiet on the cold marble slab as templars cinched the worn leather restraints tight around her wrists and ankles. To make the Harrowing safer, First Enchanter Irving had said. But he'd meant safer for the templars when they have to execute you if you become an abomination. And then she'd left her anxiety and fear behind as her mind and body sung with the heady potency from the largest draught of lyrium she'd ever drunk. The stained glass window of the Harrowing chamber had swirled like a kaleidoscope as euphoria bubbled and then she'd somehow found herself standing in Eldrina's cramped bedroom with a scalpel in hand, which meant-

"This is my memory, isn't it?" Eve said bluntly, squashing down a twinge of fear, "you got most of it right, but you got a little ham-handed with the warm fuzzies. This isn't real."

"Ah, but it is as real as you want it to be in the Fade, da'len," the thing wearing Nessa's face crooned. "And I can make it real. I can make it all nice."

Eve crossed her arms even though she couldn't feel the damp chill in the alley anymore. She needed to stop shaking. She needed to be careful. "Oh, it would've been nice if it had happened like this," she said lightly, "but who gets what they wish for in life? It's bad for moral character. Perfect mental and emotional health is overrated, just ask the Hero of Ferelden."

Nessa's head tilted up to stare into Eve' face, the rest of her body still frozen in an open embrace tauntingly. "But you should be proud, mageling," the demon - for it must be a demon - rumbled with narrowed eyes, "you did fix her. Fixed her better than you fixed yourself. Look at you."

Suddenly the acrid smell was back. Eve gasped at the pain searing from under her left eye to her scalp and down to the tips of her left fingers. She knew without looking that the lightning strike that had killed the farmhand had also singed her shiny black hair off and laced smoldering burns down her neck and body that would never heal perfectly in the next four years.

"I didn't fix anything," Eve bit out through her teeth, "the spirit healed us. Empathy healed us out of kindness when I asked it for help. For Nessa. Not for me."

The demon tsked. "That spirit was foolish and unimaginative," it chided, "I would have healed you whole, healed you so your skin was perfect and your arm didn't ache on cold nights. I would have healed your scalp so your hair grew back as black as the night instead of white. I would have healed the rift between you and Nessa so you'd be talking now, fixing wounds for your true people in the alienage instead of your solitude in the Circle, waiting for replies to your unanswered letters."

That hurt. How did it know?

Eve pushed that aside. The Fade was reflecting her mind; as horrifying as the thought was, perhaps it had poked around her head just like how it had conjured this memory. It had somehow delved into her past and found something she craved - power to fix everything, to heal everything. But she could never blindly grasp for such power, not after learning the bitter truths of alienage life and its people. It was almost like…

"You're a pride demon, aren't you?" Eve said slowly even while sincerely hoping she was wrong.

The demon dipped into a graceful bow from the waist up. "At your service, da'len."

Sweat broke out on her temples and Eve scrambled to remember what she'd read about them in the library during her feverish scramble to prepare for her Harrowing. Pride demons were exceedingly clever, which was not good, and used the victim's talents against them so they unwittingly fooled themselves, which was really, really bad.

Eve might be smart for an seventeen year old, but she wasn't fool enough to think she could outwit a demon whose purpose it was to use a person's best skills against themselves. With a sinking heart, she remembered that pride demons were also extremely powerful and highly resistant to magical attacks. This was the worst demon that could have been summoned for her Harrowing; all the apprentices dreaded it and instead hoped for an exceedingly lazy sloth demon instead. She was really, stinkingly, proverbially screwed and not in the fun way, damnit.

She blinked as Nessa's warm, soft hand cradled her cheek. "What do you say, da'len?" she asked in Nessa's low voice, and it took a second for Eve to remember that a demon wore her family's face, "don't you want to help me? To help the alienage? Don't you want the power to fix everything?"

Clenching her hands made the charred burn split and drip blood down her left fist. Her heart ached for it, hungered for the temptation the demon laid at her feet. But power wouldn't fix everything. Power to heal the most complex and dangerous illnesses wouldn't heal the poverty and injustices in the alienage, despite the rumors that Neria had named Cyrion as the newfound bann of the Denerim alienage after the blight two years ago. Brute power wouldn't heal the rift between mages and non-mages, between elves and humans, between elves and elves. No enticement of power could strip her of knowing that power alone could fix everything. It should have sent a desire demon instead.

But she was trapped in the Fade. Time was ticking in the Harrowing chamber, and there had been frantic rumors that if apprentices took too long, they were killed before they could be possessed. How long was that window of time and had she passed it? She couldn't get a sense of how long she'd been in here. And what had the demon said? Things were only as real as she could make them in the Fade. That included memories, emotions, magic… what about non-magic? And since it was trapping her in her memory…

"I just want the truth," Eve said with as much conviction as she could muster.

It frowned with Nessa's plum lips. "You do want power, you're just not admitting it to yourself, da'len," it said with a small edge of disapproval in its silky rumble. "More power would've saved your messenger friend from that brain bleed. More power would've saved Gertrude, dying alone and ignored under the stairs. More power would've shown Nessa what a gifted surgeon and healer you'd be, the pride of the alienage, her best apprentice-"

Her fist shot out and cracked against Nessa's jaw before she'd realized it. The brief bloom of satisfaction died as the demon turned back to stare at her with Nessa's face empty of all fascimile of emotion, its eyes empty and terrible.

"You want the sordid truth of your small life?" it hissed. "Have it."

A thunderclap later Nessa was lying flat in the mud, her arms askew as the cool rain pelted down into her open, blank eyes. Eve shuddered, the water pooling in her raw burns and stinging her wounds as she peered around through the rain. No light shimmered into being, no ex-templars pelted out of a skeletal shack, no elves peered through the gapped fence. Perhaps the memory wouldn't move forward without her playing along - which was exactly what she needed. Her escape from the Fade counted on believing that this memory was reality.

Looking at Nessa - the demon? No, Nessa - it wasn't hard to take a deep breath and sink back into how she'd felt five years ago. She was alone in a forgotten muddy corner in the ex-templar district, kneeling in a puddle by her only family with tendrils of lightning licking up and down her arm in supreme uselessness. She was caught between the screaming need to do something and the clammy certainty that she had absolutely no idea what to do. She could see that Nessa's heart was frazzled, spasming erratically, the blood settling in arteries and veins instead of being shunted to where it needed to go.

Five years ago, she'd grabbed Nessa in her shock and grief, so Eve seized the front of Nessa's soaked robes. She cried out as Nessa's torso arched as lightning whipped down Eve's arms, through her hands and traveled through Nessa's heart. Overjoyed, she watched it beat with strength and synchrony for a few beats, then slouch into a jitters again. Panic tightened her throat as she tried again and again to shock Nessa's heart back into working order and failed again and again.

Nessa's chalky face blurred as the rain and tears obscured her vision and the air raked her throat as she sobbed, knowing that if Nessa didn't get air to her brain soon that she'd die in the dirt.

"Some - SOMEBODY. HELP. PLEASE," she shouted up at the clouds. She grit her teeth and swallowed back a sob, then two, then three, straining to hear the faint footsteps of the people surely rushing to help the one surgeon who had helped them through childbirth and plagues and fires and held their hand as they died.

But there was only the steady drumming of rain.

Her hands were tight, numb claws in the lining of Nessa's favorite blue robes, slowly staining black from the burns furrowed in her left hand. And despite the bolt of lightning that had killed the farmhand and disfigured her, Eve found that singing thread because she could not leave Nessa and had no other choice but to pluck it again and beg please.

This time, instead of the sky splitting open, something opened inside her.

A gentle presence nudged around curiously in her mind. Her fleeting impression was that it was strange but benign and after a moment of panicking about how to talk to it, Eve just concentrated on her guilt, grief and worry for Nessa and desperately asked please.

The presence jerked still and looked through her eyes. Then it grasped her singing thread and yanked.

The thread glittered pale blue in her vision as it shot down her arm and Eve scrambled to lay her hand on Nessa's bare skin, instinctively knowing that she needed bare contact. The threads wove through her fingertips and channeled down through Nessa's arteries until they coalesced in a glowing web in Nessa's heart and her skull. Eve couldn't keep up with each repair that was happening, she only knew that once the threads pulled back, Nessa's heart was pumping strongly and in unison, pushing blood up to her brain nestled in a whole and unbroken skull and she was finally, finally breathing.

Eve could hardly believe it. She watched Nessa's chest rise and fall, hardly noticing how the presence felt tired and was starting to fade as the threads whipped back up her fingers and up her arms. But she definitely noticed when the thread lashed back into her core and violently flared.

"APOSTATE!"

The bellow echoed off the crumbling buildings as a skeletal figure staggered from out beneath a tent. Maker's furry coin purse - the ex-templar, for it could only be an ex-templar sleeping in these parts, threw and broke a small glass bottle at his feet and wiped his mouth with the back of his mouth as he raced towards her with an enraged cry.

Eve tried to throttle the wildly flaring thread which was now a fountain spouting from an inexplicable wellspring inside her, and simultaneously threw up a beseeching hand. "No, I'm not-" the rest of her shout morphed in a horrified gasp as blood spurted from four long slashes that suddenly raked across the man's ribs out of thin air. Had she done that?

He roared like a wounded boar and charged, brandishing open palms that glowed pearly in the downpour and suddenly she was slammed back, her teeth clacking as she hit the rough fence. The ache in her head was nothing compared to the bone-dragging sense that something was leeching at her, relentlessly strangling the fountain until she was breathless, sleep dragging at her eyelids and nausea roiling up her stomach. Maker, she was drowning in a soundless sea, the fountain nothing but a faint thread glimmering deep inside her. The ex-templar, Nessa, the alleyway - everything was fading to black and distantly she could feel the demon's incandescent fury because she was leaving, she was escaping the Fade because her plan had actually worked-

With a gasp, Eve wrenched her eyes open and blinked. Colorful rays of light lanced down through the circular window above her, dazzling her vision. She blinked, slowly recognizing Andraste's beatific face captured in glass. She wasn't in the ex-templar district. Disoriented, she remembered the stained glass from when the templars had strapped her down to the marble platform for her Harrowing-

"Stand down!" a deep voice shouted.

Rosy light glinted off a naked blade as it flashed overhead. Eve shouted in surprise and futilely wrenched at the bindings tying her down to the marble slab as two templars fought an arm's length from her, bellows mingling to create an echoing, confusing din in the chamber. What was happening? She had to get off this icy executioner's block-

Too late, she glimpsed the sword swing overhead before hot agony bit into her arm. She screamed and yanked her hand out of the mangled leather buckle, surprised at how real it felt, how shockingly crimson the blood was as it gushed down from the deep slash below her wrist and stained her Circle robe.

"-is an abomination and I WILL NOT ALLOW IT!" a harried voice bawled nearby.

There was no time to think. She screamed as a templar in full armor suddenly lurched over her with his sword aimed at her heart and her magic roared to her fingertips in her favorite Force spell that knocked the templar back with an almighty crash.

"I am ordering you to stand down or Maker save your hide!" the other templar shouted, shoving the fallen templar back away from the table Eve was strapped on.

Her spell had knocked his helmet off and one of her Force claws had found its mark to score a deep, bloody cut up through his lip, through his unkempt beard to stop just below his right eye. A fanatic light burned in his bloodshot glare, his visage tightened into hate-filled snarl as he tried to dodge around the defending templar to get back at her like a rabid dog.

Recognition clicked into place as Empathy perked up in her head. He was that templar that all the mages whispered about, the sternly handsome one that even the senior enchanters tiptoed around. She'd heard that he whipped out harsh repercussions for the smallest of transgressions, a fact which terrified all the apprentices and made them scuttle up a different path whenever they glimpsed him in the hallways.

Empathy was urging her to feel his pain, to feel the hurt and fear that the spirit could feel throbbing off of him in waves. Eve steadfastly refused and kept the insistent spirit at bay. Andraste's girdles, he's trying to kill me, she scolded mentally.

"She's run over the alloted time and that means we are risking another Uldred-" the enraged templar was arguing, jabbing a finger at Eve.

A thin man with grey, shoulder-length hair and a stooped back suddenly stepped in front of the platform, and Eve recognized First Enchanter Irving's creaky voice. "Eve was one minute over the allotted time and shows no sign of demonic possession," he said, hard strength in his words. "You may check as you will, templar, but you will see that she is not an abomination."

"What are rules for if you'll arbitrarily ignore them? And you can't tell just by looking at her," the templar spat, seemingly blind to the other templar keeping him at bay with a hand against his chest plate, "it could be hiding inside, waiting for the right time-"

"Rutherford, you will shut your damned mouth," the defending templar shouted in his face. He tore off his own helmet and Eve recognized the weathered profile of Knight-Commander Greagoir. "I am sending you to Kirkwall," he barked, "Maker knows you won't level out here, not with you going to pieces every other week. Pack your things, you're leaving at first light."

For a breath, Eve thought the templar would punch the Knight-Commander. Empathy seized the moment to broach past Eve's mental barrier and channel the templar's feelings - a disorienting turmoil of hate, anger, but at its core, a dense and implacable terror and cold certainty that things will go wrong - and before Eve knew it, words had stumbled past her numb lips.

"I can heal that," she blurted. At everyone's surprised looks, she pointed with her one free hand at the templar's lip and cheek, blood dripping on to his armor from the laceration. It wasn't what Empathy wanted, and she was already regretting this, but it was the only thing Eve could think of that she could actually fix. "See, here," she stammered, quickly baring her sliced forearm and knitting the skin and muscle together in a blink. "I can do this for that cut-"

The templar jerked back, the rancorous denial in his expression making her shrink, her offer struck dead on her tongue. "Keep your magic away from me," he snapped, using the back of his forearm to swipe angrily at his mouth and gripping his sword tightly. "I will not give the likes of you another chance-"

"Harrington, Smith, escort him to his quarters and ensure that he does not leave them until first light," Greagoir commanded. With a start, Eve realized that she'd been so distracted that she hadn't noticed a few other templars standing guard around the chamber and two of them were now striding towards Rutherford obediently.

Irving turned, his face deeply lined with worry and concern. "My child, how is your hand?" he asked.

She'd been trying to peer around him, trying to see if the terrifying, deranged templar had been clapped in irons and taken away. Instead, Eve flexed and flared her fingers. She could move them with her usual strength, and feel her short nails draw lines on her palm. Everything past the slash had been healed, so perfectly that not even a scar remained on her blood-stained skin. Empathy disapproved when she hoped that the templar's would scar. "Everything in working order," she answered, relieved.

"That is good to hear," Irving muttered fervently as he bent to unbuckle the other bindings. Finally, she was free to spring off the marble platform, relieved to see that most of the templars had clanked their way down the stairs to the third floor. "Still, I'd rather the senior enchanters look over you to check," Irving insisted as he gave a passing nod to Greagoir, who was now conferring with another templar. "This isn't the first time that I've wished that we had our own spirit healer in the Tower, but we will make do."

Eve bit her tongue and nodded, deliberately dragging her feet. As much as she wanted to get out of the Harrowing chamber and leave the slab with the bloodied leather bindings behind, she would much rather not bump into the deranged templar's back before he was safely shut in his room.

"Oh, and," Irving said as he held the door open for her, his bushy smile cynical, "congratulations on passing your Harrowing."

Note: I am aware that Cullen does not seem to have his signature scar until DAI, however I hope you don't mind me taking a little creative license. As always, please leave a little review to feed the writer!