It was so very dark.

This wasn't the dark of an evening in Lowtown or even the dark of a cave. Not the natural darkness of night but the darkness of the abyss, of imprisonment.

Merrill had to fight off panic. Not knowing where she was or what lurked in the shadows was the worst feeling. She had never done well in the dark. Even the caves that Hawke frequently dragged her too gave her a spooky enclosed feeling. She was raised in the wilds, where the sky was her rooftop and she had always had starlight or moonlight to light her way.

It would have been easy to call up her magic to light her surroundings and show the way out. Her fingers itched to summon a light, any light. Just to see where she was.

But it wasn't her dream and she didn't want to alert the dreamer just yet.

With time, her eyes began to adjust and dark shapes began to appear. She shuffled her bare feet awkwardly and inched forwards. The ground beneath her was solid and crafted, not natural. The floor sloped sharply downwards in front of her, and at its bottom a small platform prevented it from meeting its opposite in a sharp point. Merrill bent down and felt the floor - wood, good oak. And damp. This was the hold of a ship. The dark shapes around her were barrels, probably. She could only see a few feet in front of her.

A scrambling sound drew her attention. She inched toward the sound gradually, and this was where she found the dreamer.

He was bolted to the wall by a metal band at the neck. As the ship lurched and tilted he had to fight continuously against the wet sloped floor to stand, to prevent slipping in the dampness and choking against the metal collar. But there was nothing for him to hold onto and frequently he did slide off his feet and strangle, until he could push himself up an inch or two and breathe again. There would be no rest for him during this journey, with the ship constantly leaning to and fro and knocking him off his feet. He could steal perhaps a minute of sleep before being choked awake again. She could see him panting with the effort of it.

His lyrium brands glowed faintly. They seemed to be dampened by the collar he wore, which prevented him from activating them fully.

Merrill could only be baffled by such pointless cruelty, and not appreciate the cleverness of it. Not the way the dreamer could, in a bitter sort of way. This way there was no need to guard him. He could be unbelievably dangerous if he ever had a chance to think very hard, but with measures like this his survival consumed him utterly and left no energy to contemplate or plan.

The dream or memory or whatever it was hovered over this scene, which must have gone on for hours or even days. Merrill crouched in the dark and watched everything.

This was the commission she had set herself: to observe. To enter the Fade with Fenris and see what plagued him, with only a little gentle direction to help her find what needed to be revealed. It was an invasion of the most private sort, and he would be murderously angry with her for violating his mind, she knew.

And he would be right to be angry.

But Merrill had always been willing to do the wrong things, if the reasons were good enough. She had contacted her demon willingly, spilt her own blood to power her magic, and worked endlessly with her mirror — all of these very bad things, many people had told her. By comparison, this would be a small thing, she thought.

Sometimes nobody else would be willing or able to do what must be done, and then no one would act, and things would be lost. If someone had to do it, Merrill was willing to bear the consequences. There would always have to be someone who dealt with the dark places, to bring the important things to light. Merrill could see no other way to help Fenris but to force help on him, since he would not accept it openly. She could only hope there was no way to do him more damage with her presence here.

Her fretting ceased at the sound of footsteps, a group of them, wearing shoes that sounded against the damp wood. She straightened and stood, unable to make out anything more than shapes apart from the dreamer's faintly glowing form.

One of them carried an oil lamp, and for the first time Merrill could see her surroundings. The hold spanned the entire length of the ship, most likely. At the other end, there were cages. Large cages, with people in them.

"Your Master calls you," one of the shapes spoke.

The slave leaned his head back and looked at them. There was no defiance in his face, and without it Merrill could barely recognize him. There wasn't much of the Fenris she knew in this face at all. He looked… empty.

The humans surrounded him, slipping themselves on the slanted floor, and unhooked him from the wall. The collar remained, with a heavy chain attached. By this chain they lead him out of the room. When he slipped against the floor, stiff from being chained for so long, they dragged him by the neck until he scrambled up on all fours like a dog.

It was much more terrible, knowing the man he would be later, to see him like this now. This would have been easier if it were a stranger. Shivering, Merrill forced herself to follow. Whenever she found herself averting her eyes, she made herself look.

There was no turning back now, and this was only going to get worse.

As the men dragged the dreamer away through the depths of the ship, they passed other figures. Other slaves, not chained but crouched together in the hold, some in cages and some outside them, eyes glittering in the dark.

Merrill knew without seeing it that they were elves.

Why was I never told of this? Merrill wondered for the first time. Until I met Fenris I thought of our captivity as something in the past, before the Empire fell back. All of our talk about the great and glorious past of the elves, and what the humans took from us centuries ago. But this… this happened within my lifetime. This is still happening right now. And we never speak of it.

Merrill looked upon the faces of the galley slaves in flashes of torchlight, the ones who fire the canons and row the boats and serve the officers hand and foot, and to a one they were elves. All of them.

Yet we don't consider these poor souls our cousins, or even elves truly. The only real elves are the Dalish who keep the old ways, that is what I was taught. But what if the old ways were taken from you by force?

All of the disdain Fenris had for the Dalish, and their adherence to ancient tradition, suddenly made sense.

The Dalish despise the city elves who live in squalor, and ignore our cousins who still slave for the imperium, and yet we call ourselves The True People. It must have seemed like a cruel joke to him. Our purity comes at the price of ignoring our own kind, our old ways ignore any history we'd rather forget. We speak of old glories and old crimes, when new ones are happening even now.

But Merrill had to believe, insisted on believing, that the Dalish were preserving the old ways for everyone, for all elves, even these lost ones. One day they would regain their place and they would come back for them, and avenge this crime.

Her thoughts were disrupted when the small procession climbed up a ladder and into the light, and she was pulled up with them as though by an invisible chain linking her to the dreamer. For a moment Merrill was blinded. She stumbled against the tumbling walls of the ship, and the dissonant sounds that surrounded her pounded through her head. The rush of the sea and the roaring of the wind combated with the clanks and clangs of men working, shouting amongst themselves in an unintelligible din made up of all the languages in the world. Isabela makes it sound so romantic, she thought dazedly. But I don't like this at all.

They were climbing out onto the deck and there were men gathering there, staring at the tattooed slave. A palpable anxiety rippled through this crowd of hard men. They didn't like to be made to look upon a slave. And certainly not one that was bred to fight and kill.

Merrill could see the men escorting him now, how they sneered at him as they dragged him out into the sunlight. These men were unimpressed. This dirty, skinny elf could barely hold up his own head, much less fight like a warrior. The magister exaggerated his claim, obviously. Perhaps they would throw the wretched thing overboard, if it did not prove useful.

The largest of them knelt beside the white-haired elf, who was blinking against the daylight, and grasped his collar roughly, jerking his head to one side. He barked something loud and viscous in his ear, probably a warning to do as he was told.

Then, with a loud snap, the collar fell from his neck and Fenris was freed.

He straightened and looked around him, rubbing at his neck. Then he pulled himself up to his feet, and the crowd murmured. He was tall for an elf, and his brands began to glow with an eerie humming sound. There was a certain dignity in his stance that was not there before, and an intimidating aura of power that slowly grew to envelop him.

The slave reached out his right hand expectantly to the handlers that surrounded him.

A sword was placed into it, and he examined it with an interest he had not shown in anything else. It was a good sword. Merrill knew it, because he knew it, and it was his dream. Newly forged, ornate but not at the cost of efficacy. It was sharp and heavy and would strike true.

A grim smile crossed his face as he lifted it with both hands, testing its weight.

Then his Master's voice sounded like a thunderbolt, and his head snapped to attention instantly.

"Sailors, officers, noble passengers. This is Fenris, my little wolf."

The Magister stood at the wheel above them all, wearing dark robes in the hot sunlight that made him appear a shadow. He was tall and commanding, and the Captain seemed to shrink beside him.

The slave's eyes were fixed to him and him alone.

Danarius seemed amused by the crowd's response to their entrance. "You are right to fear him. Fenris could kill any one of you without breaking a sweat. But he is entirely tame, and will do anything I ask."

"Little wolf."

Fenris nodded to him at this address, ready for his command.

"There stands a man who means to mutiny against this ship and its captain. Kill him."

The human was only recently freed from the stocks, his skin sunburnt from the exposure. They gave him a sword and he seemed to know how to use it. They had told him that if he won in single combat, they would let him go. It seemed an easy enough task, to kill a slave. He looked his opponent over and grinned, exposing a row of missing teeth. This one had done quite a bit of fighting in his day. He had killed many. One more would not be difficult.

The crowd tittered uneasily. Of course there was no way they could let the mutineer go free, no matter what he had been promised. If he killed the slave, would they have to throw him overboard anyway?

Only Merrill knew that he was about to die a horrible death.

Danarius knew it too, and remained standing when everyone else settled back and sat on the floor. He knew it would not be a lengthy duel and stood proudly over his greatest possession as the fight began.

It was a farce, from beginning to end. The human got off only a single strike, which Fenris easily parried, and whirled around to slap his blade across the man's back, striping it with blood.

From there he struck blow after blow, easily, effortlessly, until he knocked the sword from the other man's hands and the real carnage began.

Merrill had seen Fenris do a great many gruesome deeds. In Kirkwall he had pulled the still-beating heart of his enemies from their chests as they gaped in horror. He tore out the throat of his master, the man watching him now, with his bare hands.

She could never have imagined that he was being merciful.

Now, for their entertainment, he began to take the man apart piece by piece. No single subtraction was enough to kill the poor soul, who was progressively hobbled by the elf's attacks until he could do no more than lie on the ground and scream.

As he grows more and more bloody and the cheers grow ever louder, the slave truly comes alive. There is a fierce pleasure in the fighting, something very like delight. It is the only pleasure he has in this life.

His hands, feet, genitals, nose were sliced off one at a time, with increasingly acrobatic flourishes. From inside the man, he produced organs: a greenish bloody sack the size of his fist, a trail of intestine, a rib. The grim spectacle is greeted with cheering from the audience, who have gotten over their disquiet and now cheer the slave on, hungry for more and more blood.

Merrill finally cannot watch as what's left of the man begs for death, and is methodically massacred by a grinning white-haired devil.

In the end they had to pull him off, leaving no more than a slab of meat staining the decks, and Merrill had to fight the urge to vomit.

They wrestled the slave to the ground and he fought them mindlessly, snarling like an animal, but soon the collar was back around his neck and he submitted to their hold.

They applaud him then - Magister Danarius, who had produced this marvelous spectacle. He accepted their praise with false modesty, and motioned for his slave to be brought inside.

Already as the crowd dispersed the other elven slaves threw the vaguely human remains overboard and began to scrub the decks, to remove the stain, as the Magister called for his dinner to be served inside.

Merrill wondered for the first time if this had been a mistake.