"One can hardly call this 'solitary confinement' if you keep coming in here." Anders mused, holding his head very still.

"Are you telling me I should leave?" Candlelight flickered off a straight razor.

"No, dear. I live on your visits," Anders tried not to wince, and failed. "Just concentrate on the shaving, okay? I know what you're thinking: if I cut him I can just heal it. Well, I don't want to be cut. Be careful."

"How you get so unruly after just one week is beyond me," Ellyn folded the razor away, switching to a comb. "It's like you're carrying a bunny around with your chin."

"Thanks, Ellyn," Anders groaned. "I feel unattractive enough in this pit. I don't need you to put me down too."

"Fuzzy bunnies are cute." Ellyn suggested helpfully. "I like fuzzy bunnies."

Anders held back a laugh. He reminded himself that they had been keeping her like a flower in a glass dome all her life, so it was expected that her stupidity and cuteness went hand in hand. No matter how depressed he felt in his situation, Ellyn always managed to say things that made him laugh.

This was the seventh time he escaped from the Circle. If there was a next time they would probably just execute him as a maleficar, whether that was true or not. He had an inkling that the reason why he wasn't dead already was due to Ellyn's influence.

Ellyn would have visited everyday if she only could. Anders was kept in the basement behind two enchanted doors, and one of the enchantments acted as an alarm. The templars came by at a different time everyday with food, and that only matched up with her free time once a week. She snuck in with the templar, leaving in the morning when the enchantment was disarmed for a change of guards. She came with soap, water, and conversation.

In other words, she came to preserve his sanity.

She was also, inch by inch, driving him absolutely insane.

Ellyn was no longer the awkward tween, all elbows and knees. Even the memory of her ever looking awkward might have been something he made up to veil his own attraction for her. Seventeen year old Ellyn was exceptionally beautiful. She was all long golden hair, pale hazel eyes, classically sculpted features and what appeared to be a perfect body under those apprentice robes.

He hadn't had any female company aside from Ellyn - which did not count - for over nine months. He wondered if he could resist her for another three, but knew that was probably asking too much of himself. Every week. She came down here every week. Breathing in his face while she shaved him, touching his hair, chatting all night, falling asleep on him while her robe draped all over her. The girl was clueless. It was time to make a stand.

"Ellyn, I need you to stop coming down here." There. He said it. As expected, she made the most hurt and confused face she had ever learned to make. It was somewhere between a cat whose cream was taken away and a kicked puppy. He regretted it immediately, but he knew he had to put his foot down this one time. "I'll be out of here in less than three months. I'll be alright."

"But why? Are you sick of me?"

Not in the least. That was the problem. "No. But the templars might get suspicious if I leave this place looking like I went to a spa instead of a dungeon. Maybe they'd just decide to throw me back in here. It'll be good for me to grow a little scruff and look more like a dejected good little mage who won't ever run away again."

"I can come without giving you a shave, no?" Ellyn insisted. She was always stubborn when she wanted to be.

"I don't want you to see me all smelly. You can understand that, can't you?" Anders appealed to her inner neat freak. Ellyn was always scrubbed, her hair always clean. He wasn't sure if it was because of the spirit inside of her - which he suspected had something to do with purity - or if she just had an obsession with bathing. Right now, he was hoping for the latter.

"Oh, alright then." Jackpot. "But what if you get hurt? Or if you scrape yourself and it gets infected?"

"I won't." Anders wondered. Well, it was possible. Three months alone in the dark. "I know a basic healing spell like most mages. I'll be fine."

"What if you fall down and break your leg?"

"Now you're just being silly." If he was really injured, he could inform any templar that was standing guard. They were not all heartless. "Come on. Get some rest. They'll get suspicious if you yawn through all your lessons tomorrow."

She was quiet when she left. Anders reached down under his pillow and turned, as was his habit in the mornings. His fingers came upon four full tallow candles and a piece of flint. As an elementalist, he had no need of any of it. He smiled at her thoughtfulness. Useless, but thoughtful nevertheless.

Laughter was heard just at the edge of hearing, like the sound of silver bells. I guess you do have some self control after all. I'm surprised at you.

"Shut up." Anders muttered. Talking to oneself was not a good habit to get into in solitary confinement and he had no intention to start this now.

Good for you. If you try anything, I'll have to kill you. Ellyn won't like that.

2

"I saw that," Anders said under his breath as he walked by the templar.

"I don't know what you're talking about, mage." Ser Cullen whipped his head up so that he stared straight ahead. His face was beet red.

One year in solitary confinement while Ellyn grew and developed without him watching over her. Apparently everyone else noticed how much she had grown as well. He was getting quite sick of men staring at his little Ellyn. He did not know about his own possessive side; Anders felt almost irritated with himself.

Part of him knew that the nature of their relationship dictated that he would one day have to give her up to another man, with his blessing. The childish part of him, the one that used to cling to his mother's skirt, said different. He wanted to keep Ellyn innocent so she would always need him.

Ser Cullen just rubbed him the wrong way. He was young, about the same age as Ellyn, and she liked him. When she passed by Cullen in the hall, she turned a little to hide how she blushed. Anders never felt so unsettled in his life.

A templar! Templars were rapists and murderers. They were mage hunters who abused their superiority every chance they got. What exactly did she see in the boy? Anders could've sworn that he himself was better looking - taller, more muscular, and most definitely more charming. Cullen just stuttered and stared at the ground whenever she tried to talk to him.

"If you want to have a conversation, you'd probably have to slap him on the back a lot," he commented over a glass of wine. At least she was old enough to drink with him now.

"Why? What will that do?" Ellyn swayed in her seat. Her wine glass was half empty. Anders did not allow her to drink with anyone else; even when he was there, she was only allowed one glass.

"To get the words out!" He laughed. Ellyn giggled. "Seriously, girl. I don't know what you see in that templar."

"He … um … he feels the same as me." She was changing colours again. It might have been the wine, or not. Anders felt a flare of jealousy. He did his best to keep it hidden.

"You mean that he likes you? Or that he's shy and inarticulate like you?" He left off 'and stupid.' Even he knew when to stop.

"No...he...smells the same?" Ellyn fumbled for a word that fit. "His aura is the same? He … has this air of purity about him."

Anders almost spat out his wine. "You mean he's a virgin?"

"Shh!" Ellyn grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down towards the table. "There's a bunch of templars at the next table! They'll hear us!"

"They're at least as loud as we are." Anders didn't bother looking. He whispered. An exaggerated, conspiratorial whisper. "Don't worry about it." He laughed. "A virgin, huh. That is rare around here. It's no wonder that you noticed him."

Anders felt a weight lift from his shoulders. Nothing was going to happen between these two, not without a whole lot of help. If Cullen hadn't done that by now, he was probably too shy to approach any women. Well, good.

No, wait. Didn't he want her to be happy? He looked across the table at Ellyn. Beautiful, sweet Ellyn. Bumbling. Shy. Inarticulate. An innocent child. A young woman. The most powerful spirit healer the Circle had ever seen. She was his charge, his salvation, his best friend, the family he gathered for himself.

She was all these things. He wanted to give her up to nothing and no one.

You selfish, selfish man. A voice called to him in the back of his mind, over the wine. This time, he was quite sure that this thought was his own.

3

The little princess, they called her. Thy had been watching her for some time now. They heard that she was powerful, but they knew how to deal with mages. Drain their mana, and they were as infants. Helpless.

She was drinking tonight. They saw her swaying in her seat talking to that mage, Anders. She would be slumbering deeper than usual. It would be easy to carry her off some place out of sight. She would not be the first, nor the last.

They had taken others before. Young ones. Shy, beautiful little girls. Older than children, younger than women. The only preference they differed on was how they would make them squeal. All three lived on the fear, the pain; to mar the perfection that existed in an innocent, to wipe that brightness from her eyes.

Anders thought he heard a scream in the night.

He sat up in bed so fast his head hit the top bunk. No one else seemed to have heard it. No one else was awake, but he knew he heard something. A cry for help for him alone.

Ellyn.

Anders took his robe in his right hand, his staff in his left. He ran down the hall, dressing along the way.

"What are you doing?" Cullen shouted. He was guarding the stairs to the apprentice quarters this night. Despite the fact that it was only a mage in his small clothes he saw running down the hall, he armed himself immediately, putting his shield between himself and Anders.

"Cullen, come with me. Something's happened with Ellyn." Anders said without stopping. At the mention of her name, Cullen followed.

Both men stopped dead at the door to Ellyn's room. Her curtain was ripped, revealing its innards to the hallway beyond. It was not a large room. Ellyn had, over the years, covered the stone wall with her doodles. Since no one else was ever allowed in here, her teachers did not get a chance to scold her for painting on the walls.

Right now, it was all just one colour. Ellyn stood just above her bed. Her hair fluttered as if there was a breeze in the room, her eyes glowed a fiery white. Light poured through cracks in her skin, threatened to tear her asunder.

Three templars surrounded her, hovering just as she was, faces turned outward, spewing blood from every orifice. They were painting the walls anew with blood. Anders tasted bile in the back of his throat and fought the urge to be sick. Behind him, Cullen's knees gave in, sending the armoured knight onto the ground heavily in a clatter of steel plates.

Anders heard the scrape of boots on stone echoing and fading away. He ran away. Fat lot of help that lout was.

"Ellyn. Ellyn. Ellyn." Anders chanted her name over and over, but she did not seem to hear. "It's Anders. I'm here. You're safe now. It's alright. Come down. I'll catch you."

No response. Anders risked a step forward. One false move and he would end up like one of these fools. He stepped onto her bed, holding his arms out in front of him, his staff left behind on the floor.

Anders wrapped his arms around her. "Ellyn? Ellyn, it's Anders. You're safe. You're going to be alright..."

This was his moment of truth. Do you love her? Will you give your life to save hers?

I do. He closed his eyes and kissed her full on her lips. The horrors of this grisly scene around them faded away. His lips tingled and the warmth of the kiss spread to his ears; Anders felt his heart clench in a sweet sigh, skin prickling along his scalp. In a heartbreaking moment he understood that he had never truly kissed before.

So this is what love tastes like.

A blast of energy pushed him full on the chest, smashing him against a stone wall. Anders found himself sprawled on the floor, every bone in his body broken. Blood started gushing from his mouth. I'm going to die, he thought. Like one of those stupid templars. Vision and sound began to fade, even the pain was leaving him.

He heard Ellyn, six years old, crying in the hay loft. Little Ellyn talking and crying at the same time, "I'm so sorry..."

4

"I demand you bring her out here and execute her at once!" Knight Comander Greagoir was livid. There was a maleficar in their midst. He knew. He had pushed for years to have her made tranquil, and the paperwork seemingly fell through the cracks. Now three templars were dead, slain by blood magic. She had to die. Now.

"Your templars were in her private chambers in the dead of night." First Enchanter Irving held out a stack of paper. "These are the five reports I've found against them over the years. All of them from young women under twenty. And who knows how many more there were that didn't have the courage to say anything."

"She is an abomination!" Greagoir was not going to let this one go.

"So you're not denying that you harboured rapists? Child rapists?" Irving wasn't about to back down either. "And when one of our apprentices managed to fight back, you want me to kill her?"

"Abominations are killed on sight. That is the law. What these men did is in the past. They are dead." Greagoir pointed at the door behind Irving. While Ellyn's room was being cleaned, Irving housed her in his own office. He was the only one who had a key; this was his way of ensuring her safety. "She is alive, and she is a maleficar. She needs to die before she infects this entire Circle!"

"She did not use blood magic, Knight Commander." Irving explained, pacing his words. He had learned over the years that speaking slowly calmed Greagoir. "We found her on the floor sobbing over Anders, and she was not an abomination then. The templars' blood did not boil in their veins, as ones killed with blood magic. They were crushed physically from the outside in. It does require an advanced spell to do that much damage, for sure, but I have no doubt that Ellyn is quite capable."

"Ser Cullen claimed he saw her possessed. He said her eyes were glowing and she was using blood magic."

"And he surmised this by seeing the room covered in blood, I presume? The presence of blood does not denote blood magic. Visit the scene of any battle and you'll see people covered in blood. That does not mean that they're using blood magic." Irving went on, "as for the glowing eyes, that's just a part of her spirit magic. When those templars drained her mana, hoping to disarm her, she had no choice but to call on her spirit for help. One who bonded so young is actually immune to demonic possession. She was not possessed. At least no more than usual."

Ser Greagoir had nothing more to say. As much as he wanted to see her gone, the law was on her side. "She should undergo her harrowing as soon as possible." Maybe then he could kill her when she stays too long in the fade. He stormed off.

Irving turned his key in the lock. "Crisis averted." He gave Ellyn a curt nod. "For now."

Ellyn did not reply. She had not said anything for days, not since they found her crying over Anders' body in her chambers. She cried until her tears ran dry. Anders was placed in a bed near the back of the office, and Ellyn had been sleeping in a chair next to him for the past week. His heart was beating, his breathing even and slow. He was just barely alive, but he would not wake.

"Ellyn, listen to me. Anders is in the hands of the Maker now." Like most Fereldens, Irving was Andrastian. According to Anders, that meant doing nothing a lot. "I need you to recover from this. I want you to go through your harrowing as soon as possible. Can we do that?"

Ellyn nodded. Demons were no danger to her. I'm a danger to everyone else. She squeezed Anders' hand. Nothing. She wasn't powerful enough to heal him. He had escaped for the last time and he wasn't coming back. If she ever wanted to hear his laughter again, she needed to be stronger.

Your time has come, Ellyn. You will take the first step towards your destiny.

5

Anders threw back his coverlets and stretched.

It was a sunny day - one of those perfect summer days, where the sky flowed a deep cerulean, the sun always hid behind a wisp of cloud, keeping the day cool enough to run in. He was woken by the birds nesting in the tree just outside his window. Once a year, or so it seemed, every single bird within ten leagues nested in this particular tree. He didn't mind. It meant waking up before anyone else so he could get his chores done and have the rest of the day free.

Anders pushed the door to the living room and saw his mother by the wood stove. So he did not wake up before her after all. "Morning, mother."

"Morning, sweetheart." She turned to smile at him, while keeping her hands busy stirring some porridge on the stove. "Did you sleep well?"

"I think I had a nightmare," Anders recalled. The memory was already fading away, evaporating like dew. "I was...somewhere else."

"You're not thinking of leaving mother, are you?" She frowned, "I need you here. Promise me you'll never leave."

Anders was about to reply when a knock came upon the door. "Let me get that."

"I'm sure it's not anyone important, dear. Just leave it."

Odd. Why did she say that? They lived on a farmstead in the middle of nowhere. Any visitor was important. Anders opened the door.

There was a little blond girl outside. She looked to be about six. There was something very familiar about her that Anders could almost recall. Something about...spirits. "You will leave him alone. He is under my protection."

"How...inconvenient." 'Mother' cradled her head in one hand, miming a headache. "Are you sure you don't want to leave him to me? I can give him whatever it is he wants..."

"No. And you've got it wrong. This isn't what he wants. Not anymore. You will leave now," the girl grew suddenly to his height, then more, "before I change my mind."

The demon rustled away in a swish of silks and golden bells.

"Wow," Anders reached up and touched his earring. "I can't believe I almost fell for that."

"You did fall for that, you fool. Ellyn was right to worry," The blond girl fixed him with her blinding, fiery gaze. "You were just about ready to sign your soul away, and for what? A memory?"

"It was a good memory." Anders shrugged. "So, we're in the fade together. This is new. How do we get out of here?"

"We don't."

"What do you mean, 'we don't.'" He imitated her serious tone. "I have to wake up sometime, no?"

"Do you remember how you got here?"

"Uh...well," with the desire demon gone, Anders' memories came flooding back. The last bits were especially painful. "Yes. Am I dead?"

"No. If you are dead, you will not be haunted by demons." She shook her head, slowly, her hair a halo in the eternal summer twilight. "So consider that a good sign. The bad news is that neither I nor Ellyn have enough power to wake you. For now, you're stuck here."

"So...you're saying that I'm in a coma."

"Yes."

"A coma which the most powerful healer the circle has ever seen cannot wake me from."

"Yes."

"Andraste's knickerweasels." Anders walked out of the little cottage of his childhood and onto the grass. Pulling his boots off, he laid down and stared up into the blue. "It is a nice memory, though."

The girl near him giggled. Anders turned to look. There was something different about her. He had seen echos of her over the years, but this was unexpected. Ancients spirits did not giggle. "You've changed."

"Ellyn is extraordinary," she mused. "You can dig and dig for years and not find a shred of malice in her. She is pure, innocent love embodied. It's hard to live in that soul and not find joy in some things. She makes it easy to forget your purpose."

"Just what is your purpose, anyway? Who are you?"

"I'm the mother. I'm the protector. The Elven had a name for me, though that is no longer important." She pulled at the grass sadly. "I was once a goddess, but when my People died and ceased to believe, I became just another idea in the fade. As for my purpose...I have misplaced it."

"Great, not cryptic at all," Anders rolled his eyes. "Ancient spirits just love to talk in riddles, don't they?"

"That was as clear as I can make it for you." She said with just a hint of annoyance.

"How exactly do you misplace a purpose?"

"I died and left it with my body. Then I lost that too."

"You're right. Ellyn has been rubbing off on you. That made zero sense."

"Shut up," she scowled. "Ellyn will find it soon enough."

"I'm confused," Anders sang out.

"Live with it."

"Well, excuse me for being mostly dead."

"Don't fret. We'll save you. There will be a heavy price to pay, and one day you just might wish that we never saved you at all." Mythal, the great protector, dropped her voice to a whisper. "Ellyn is not the only one who needs you."