Most Circle mages had a few personal items. Usually nothing of any real monetary value – such items "disappeared" from the tower with predictable regularity – but sentimental items, either from their lives before the tower, or from their time in the Circle. Little things – an old toy, a favorite piece of clothing, an unsigned love note.
Wynne was no exception. In her quarters in the tower she kept a sketch that one of her students had made of her in the days when there were only lines on her face when she frowned, a handful of glittering quartz she had picked up on one of her rare trips beyond the tower walls, and a small collection of books on brewing and winemaking.
They are treasures, but she leaves them behind when she leaves the tower to fight at Ostagar, and later when she follows the Warden out into the world.
She carries only one treasure, unique in all the world, keeping it buried at the bottom of her pack. She never takes it out, never pulls the rolled parchment scroll out of its protective tube. She does not need to unroll it to see it any more perfectly than it is fixed in her memory – a name, a date, and a tiny footprint, stamped there with her blood as the ink.
She does not need to see to remember, and remembering is all she needs to rise and fight again and again, even after her body tells her that her time has come. She rises and she presses on, because the next stranger's life she saves might be her son's.