Guilt, A.K.A: The Jowan Chapter.
Guilt
Morgana
She can't sleep.
Will she ever be able to sleep?
She is used to the confusing nightmares; they frighten her, and leave her screaming, praying she will wake up so she can escape from that terrible and wonderfully gentle song, but they are not as bad as the guilt. The heavy, miserable, heartbreaking guilt.
Every time she closes her eyes, the image of Jowan, her best friend, looking to her through the bars flashes onto the inside of her eyelids. That and the image of the normally almost reasonable Alistair recoiling with an exclamation of "Blood magic!", his inner templar rearing in him just as her inner mage wanted to spit at him to back down. Back down, and be gone.
What frightened her most was that, while she was thinking all this, in the middle of the righteous mage hate she remembered who he was, what had happened to him, and her anger... well, it all sort of... deflated. What is happening to her?
It's hard to hate a templar who seems so... un-templarish. Maybe he is, as he puts it, "just Alistair". Not templar, not prince, not even Grey Warden - just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She tries to shake these thoughts out of her head - they're dangerous. In the words of Anders, "Let a bucket-head get too close, and he'll be smiting you to Orlais and back before you can say 'lyrium'."
Sleep finally settles like a fog over her mind, and she expects to see the usual horrible visions, visions which only she seems to see. There is no giant, tainted dragon, however; instead, there is a dream, made of half-memories and endless guilt.
The Tower library. A shaggy-haired little boy and a girl in apprentice's robes that will never fit her. She asks him if she hears the song drifting through the library: it is soft and haunting, a thousand different voices singing in unison, whispers echoing beneath its surface that are too faint for her to make out the words. She wonders if she is imagining it; she finds she isn't. She needs to find its source, she decides. It calls her, pushes her onwards - she takes the boy's hand and they walk through the library towards its source, him smiling trustingly at her, encouraging her.
Before she knows what is happening, her voice has joined the others, twisting through the song, the song that's now in her blood, and the boy - Jowan, she suddenly remembers - looks frightened.
The darkspawn are all around them now, ripping, shredding, tearing, screeching, and she knows that this is how they will die.
There is suddenly a cry of pain behind her and in a haze of red, the darkspawn around her are ripped apart, screaming in horror instead of triumph.
She looks behind her to see the man, still shaggy-haired, giving her a half-smile of reassurance that doesn't work while trying to stand and stem the flow of the blood from the self-made gash on the inside of his elbow. She smiles back to him, herself now a woman, and walks to stand by him; together, protecting each other, as always.
She sees the smite as a flash, sees her friend buckle and drop to the floor, and then instead of darkspawn it is templars swarming around them. She waits for a smite of her own, but they ignore her, and as she screams while they drag him away, she swears she hears the dragon laughing.
She wakes to a faceful of canvas, the tent having collapsed on her again, and is sure she hears running footsteps. By the time she has got the tent off her and gone to get the bread she knows will be outside it, they are gone.
Chewing it, determinedly ignoring the tears running down her face and salting the food, she hears the crackling of turning pages, a candle illuminating Alistair's tent and the silhouette of his still-sitting form. The templar reads?
She shrugs. She guesses he can't sleep either, and she wonders why.
She looks into the campfire's dying flames, telling herself she sees nothing in them.