Rion dashed up the stairs to the Haven Chantry, eager to get his report delivered to the Ambassador. He was not, mind, looking forward to the actual report. While he felt the mission had been an overall success, he was not sure how Lady Josephine would take the news that her messenger was "singed, but alive." But Rion was a strong believer in getting unpleasant things out of the way as quickly as possible, and after the report was over he could relax in the tavern.

As he entered the Chantry, he glanced around. His eyes were caught by a woman standing to his left, wearing a magnificent white Orlesian hennin. It took Rion a moment to place where he'd seen it before, and then he remembered…

Whooping as he hurls bursts of fire one after another at the loyalist mages. Madden on his left, Tara on his right, each attacking with their own conjurations. The loyalists lowering their staffs as one, sending out a blast of ice that quenches Rion's fires. Desperately conjuring fire to ward the ice away, seeing it stop inches from his face. Beside him, Madden and Tara down, faces encrusted with rime. Then running, trying to outrun the sight of his dead friends and the woman in the tall white hat, the woman who'd slain them…

He came back to his senses. He was no longer on a sun-drenched battlefield in Orlais; he was in the dim light of the Chantry. But somehow, the Lady Vivienne was here too. His hands gestured of their own volition, calling a magic barrier to glimmering life around him.

Vivienne shot him a disdainful look. "If I meant you harm, young man," she said, "you would have been dead long before you managed that spell."

Rion took a moment to work that out. "Right," he said, dismissing the barrier with a wave of his hand. "Uh, Lady Vivienne. What are you doing here?"

"I am lending my aid to the Inquisition, which is in sore need of it," Vivienne said. "And who might you be?"

"Oh. Yes," Rion stammered. "I'm, ah, Rion. From Ostwick."

"Ah. I once lived in the Ostwick Circle, as well, though you must have been very young when I left. If you had even been born." Rion felt young indeed under her assessing gaze. "Were you at all acquainted with Senior Enchanter Lydia?"

"Only from a distance," Rion said. Once he had started espousing the cause of mage freedom, Lydia and the like-minded senior mages had tended to shun him.

"She was a dear friend of mine," Vivienne said. Her look struck Rion as distrustful, even accusatory, and he abruptly remembered that Lydia had been killed, allegedly by rebel mages.

"I'm sorry - about what happened to her," he blurted. "I can't imagine that anyone from Ostwick would have been involved. We never would have raised our hand against a fellow mage without being forced to it."

Vivienne raised an eyebrow. "Who did you raise a hand against? Do I surmise correctly that you were part of the mage rebellion?"

"I was. Mages deserve to be free," Rion said defiantly. "But… I came to realize that the war was doing more harm than good."

"As wars so often do," Vivienne said. "As you were no doubt counselled by those older and wiser than yourself. I do wish, darling, that you had listened to them."

Ron didn't think "darling" was a term of affection, not the way that it formed on her lips. "They would have had the mages do nothing! In the face of abuses by the Templars, Meredith Stannard's reign of terror, the annulment of Dairsmuid. Were we to just sit in our Circles and wait for the axe to fall on us?" He realized he was getting louder as other people in the Chantry startied to stare. Well, let them.

Vivienne's voice was quiet in comparison, but cutting. "So instead you blundered out and made the situation worse, building on Anders's unconscionable destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry to make mages more feared across Thedas than we'd been in decades. Well done, indeed."

"Anders is a hero," Rion protested. He was momentarily sidetracked by wondering if "is" was the right word. Was Anders alive or dead? He had no idea. "Ah, his act drew the world's attention to how mages were suffering in Kirkwall."

"Is there a specific number of innocents that one must to kill to become a hero?" Vivienne asked. Her gaze was almost piercing in its intensity, and a vertical line had appeared between her eyes. "Or is heroism more dependent on killing them in a sufficiently symbolic way?"

Rion flinched. The accounts he'd heard had, indeed, focused on the building. "I haven't ever heard that many people were killed."

Vivienne sighed. "No, dear. You wouldn't have."

Rion felt he was an unsteady ground. "At least we're on the same side now, right?"

"Are we?" Vivienne asked. "Now that it seems likely that the Inquisition will intervene in the war between mages and Templars, what do you hope comes of that intervention?"

Rion didn't hesitate. "I would hope that we mages are given our freedom."

Vivienne smiled a little smile that didn't reach her eyes. "There, you see. I would see the Circles re-established, and you would see mages loosed upon the land, to struggle on their own against demons or be made pawns of the unscrupulous. Your goals are not mine."

"You would restore the Circles?" Rion asked in genuine horror. "Return everyone to their cages? Put mages back under the control of the Templars, after everything that they've done?" There was a shimmer in the air in front of him. He made an effort to reign in his magic before he set something ablaze.

A brief hand motion from Vivienne sent a cooling breeze to break up the haze. "The Templar Order requires reform and new guidance, certainly, but there is no reason to discard it. The Templars can be our friends, not our enemies. When an abomination erupts, mages have always been glad enough to have Templars to deal with it."

"And how many abominations would never have been without the Templars bearing down on mages?" Rion countered.

"A hypothetical, dear. Weigh it against the certain harm that one unchecked abomination can and will do."

"Why do you insist we need Templars? Why don't you think we mages can keep watch on ourselves?"

Vivienne sighed once more. "Because I've known too many mages."

It struck Rion as a weak rejoinder, and he seized his opportunity to exit the conversation with the upper hand. "I should deliver my report to Lady Montilyet before the hour grows late."

"Go on then, darling," Vivienne said with a wave of her hand. This "darling" fairly dripped with venom, making her previous use of the world sound affectionate in retrospect.

Rion strode off toward the far end of the Chantry, trying to settle his nerves. Perhaps some of the onlookers had been convinced by his arguments to support more freedom for mages. At least, he thought, they must feel that he had held his own.