The ringing in her ears was the first sensation that came to her as she struggled back to consciousness—like swimming to shore in a river of molasses—then a sharp pain shooting down her arm from her shoulder. Dazed, Adara opened her eyes slowly and blinked up at the sky. It was a clear day before the blackpowder ignited, but now the sky was streaked with black smoke.

One ear was still ringing too loudly for her to hear anything else out of it, and after a moment Adara wished it was both of them. Screaming. There was so much screaming all around her. Screams of pain, screams of grief, and screams of sheer terror and confusion.

The thick groggy feeling in her head had her moving slowly. Her head was throbbing, likely from where she had smacked it against the ground. Adara hissed in pain as she sat up. Something in her shoulder was broken or dislocated from landing hard on it, sending sharp pains stabbing down her arm. When she touched her hand to the still-ringing ear, her fingers came away bloody.

The street was unrecognizable: igniting one barrel must have set off a chain reaction that ignited the rest of them. Rubble and fire were everywhere she looked… and people. Oh Maker, the people. How did this happen? The moments right before the explosion were foggy. They were going to search for the blackpowder before the man in templar armor had set it off. They ran but not fast enough to stop him, then Carver grabbed her…

Adrenaline born of panic flooded through her, and she moved without heeding the pain in her shoulder. "Carver?" she called. They had been thrown apart in the explosion, but he couldn't possibly be far. Her voice was too weak and wavering, so she tried again: "CARVER!" It was just one more scream in a sea of them. She received no response, but she didn't need it: she found him.

She crawled to where he lay crumpled and still in a dark pool of blood. She said his name again, but he didn't move. "Oh no, no, no," she said when she saw the warped metal piece of a barrel hoop that had struck him with enough force to penetrate through his backplate and then rip its way out of his chest. "Carver?" she asked again. "You need to wake up now." Or Adara did, because this couldn't be happening. Not when she had just gotten him back.

Her hands trembled as she brushed his hair out of his face and hunted for a pulse in his neck. She couldn't find one, and a sob ripped out of her chest. Her hands began to glow with healing magic, as much as she could possibly pull from the Fade, but she wasn't a true healer. Not like Wynne, or even Anders. She couldn't bring someone back from teetering on the line between life and death, and no healer could bring back someone who had already gone beyond it. Still, she tried, pouring everything she had into forcing her magic to reshape this horrible new reality: that Carver was dead.

Her sobs turned into wails that turned into anguished screams. This isn't happening. I won't let this happen. This won't happen. The rubble around her quaked, sending bits of debris clattering across the ground in small eddies. Conjured flames licked up her arms, her magic beyond her control in her grief. Her lips iced over and her wailing screams were accompanied by eerily frosted breath.

A thousand voices began to echo in her mind. The denizens of the Fade were relentless in their hunt for weakness in any mage's mental fortitude. Adara had spent most of her life learning how to shut them out, but she couldn't do it now. It was hard to even remember why it was mattered.

The voices grew louder, making promises that Adara knew they wouldn't keep but that she was just desperate and lost enough to be swayed by. She would say anything, do anything, if it would bring Carver back to her, on this side of death.

She closed her eyes. It felt like dozens of hands were pulling at her consciousness, demons eager to claim her and devour her, and she wasn't sure if she even cared to stop them. What was the point? This life would never let her know peace anyway, only suffering and loss. Demons could have it.

After everything, you aren't really going to give up this easily. Are you?

The voice echoed throughout her head, louder in her thoughts than the demons' murmuring. She'd heard this voice before in her dreams: feminine and always mildly amused, belonging to the entity shrouded in yellow light that so often chased away the demons vexing her. A stronger demon, Adara had always assumed.

We should talk.

.

.

When Adara opened her eyes again, she was no longer kneeling beside Carver in a destroyed street in Amaranthine. Instead, she was crouched in a field of tillering spring wheat. The young plants moved as if being blown by a gentle breeze, but the air was still. She could see a rippling movement at the edge of her vision like a heat haze in summer, but it was gone every time she turned her head to get a proper look.

The Fade. She was in the Fade, or at least her mind was. There could be no other explanation.

At the edge of the wheat field was a familiar pond dotted with lily pads. In Adara's childhood memories, the pond was farther away from the field than this, but she supposed that this wasn't a terrible approximation. Was she creating this, or was something else?

When she stood up, she could see a woman sitting at the edge of the pond with her back turned to Adara. Long pale blonde hair fell loose down her back, the ends also moving in a phantom breeze. The woman turned to look at her as Adara drew closer, and Adara froze in place.

It was her. Or rather, it could be her, if she could expect to live another forty years. She looked peaceful in a way Adara didn't think she had ever actually felt, and the lines around her eyes and mouth indicated a life filled with much more laughter than Adara's reality. If Adara looked very closely, she could see that same rippling movement at the edges of the woman's hair and clothing. Another vision conjured by the Fade. "Hello," Not-Adara greeted her with serene cheer.

"What are you?" Adara asked warily.

"I'm curious."

"That isn't what I mean," Adara said. "Are you a spirit, or a demon?"

Not-Adara shook her head with a gently teasing cluck of her tongue. "It isn't quite so simple as that, you know. We can be as varied as your kind. I suppose you would call me a spirit. Probably." The spirit patted the ground beside her. "Why don't you sit and tell me about this place?"

"You didn't create it?" Adara ignored the spirit's invitation.

"I did, but from your memories. This was a calm place. The only place not touched by sorrow. I thought it would make you feel more at ease."

"At ease for what? I don't have time for conversation, or for games," Adara said.

"Oh, we have time," the spirit said. "Only a moment will pass in your world. The man you ache for will not drift any further from you before that. Now, tell me of this place."

Adara gritted her teeth and sat down. She needed to be cooperative to a point, but she also needed to remain wary. "This is where I lived before my magic manifested," she said. "My parents worked in a human's wheat fields. My brother and sister and I played at this pond whenever we could." Did the spirit want her to get lost in her own memories? Memories of her life before the Circle were distant and few.

She remembered sitting by the pond with her little sister, weaving grass and dandelions into crowns for the fat toads that lived there. She remembered the way her little sister would squeal with glee every time she managed to catch one in her chubby hands. She remembered splashing in the shallows on hot summer days, and she remembered sailing boats made of leaves across its surface.

Of course, this was the Fade, where memories were as real as anything else. Now there were three elven children on the other side of the pond, ignoring Adara and the spirit while they played. Her brother was skipping stones across the pond's surface, while a very young Adara held her baby sister in her lap. Her brother celebrated the number of skips he achieved while Adara giggled and their sister clapped.

All three looked up as if they heard someone call for them, and they ran away, fading into nothing as they did. Adara touched her cheek, surprised to find it wet with fresh tears.

"Simplicity and peace before both were taken from you," the spirit said musingly. "I think I understand."

"What do you want from me?" Adara asked. Maker, she was so tired.

"You called," the spirit said. "In your pain and fear, you called out across the Veil. Many tried to answer; all would hurt you. You have been calling in your dreams for a long time now."

"You've been watching me," Adara said. "You're the one who keeps showing up and chasing off the others."

The spirit nodded. "I have been watching your walls crumble, wondering if you would truly allow them to fall. It would be a shame for one of my fumbling brethren to ruin someone so interesting."

"Interesting how? Why are you watching me?"

"Your actions ripple across the Veil. You use the Fade's power with ease, but you have also wielded magic beyond it. Ancient and new, carried by spirits and by blood. You have passed into the Fade and out again many times, shaping it with each incursion just as you have shaped your own world. You have both broken the Veil and healed it. You have slain gods and monsters and men. How could I not watch such a person?"

"What do you want from me?" Adara repeated.

"You once wanted to make a deal with a spirit such as myself," the spirit said. "You thought that healing could buy your freedom, if only you could barter with one of my kind for the strength. Compassion, perhaps, or Hope. Yet you have also sought power in blood, an act that takes you further from us and one that many of my fairer kind mistrust."

"And what kind of spirit are you, exactly?"

The spirit paused as if it hadn't really considered the question. Not-Adara tilted her head and pursed her lips in a show of thought. "Tenacity," she said finally.

"Tenacity?" Adara echoed with a frown.

"It's prettier than Obstinance. Or Pigheadedness," the spirit grinned enough to show Adara her own teeth.

"I thought spirits embodied a virtue." And demons embodied the more negative traits of mortals, which Adara left unsaid. "Is tenacity a virtue?" Determination was, perhaps, and Adara supposed they meant the same thing… but the spirit surely chose its words carefully.

Tenacity shrugged. "We are not all so simple. Perhaps I am more like you, yes? You are drawn to heal but also to kill, with magic and with blood. You are both selfish and selfless by turns, which has altered the course of things." Not-Adara laughed. "Like the way you cling to this boy's life, howling loudly enough into the Fade to demand my attention. I only wish to be part of it all."

"Part of what, exactly?"

"Change," Tenacity said simply.

"That's not an answer. What sort of change?"

Tenacity's eyes gleamed. "I don't know, and that's terribly exciting, isn't it? I want to find out. I want to see it through your eyes." She tilted her head again. "I will make you stronger when you need it, stronger in ways that blood cannot accomplish. We will drag your man out of death's reach. Deal?"

"Even spirit healers can't bring back the dead," Adara said.

"You won't exactly be a spirit healer, though, will you? This is a different kind of deal. Besides, he hasn't gone far. Mostly dead is still slightly alive, after all. Why your kind insist on such stark definitions of things, I'm not sure I'll ever understand. Maybe I'll get to find out."

Adara fell silent. In all likelihood, this was a demon's trickery. She had suspected that this entity was a powerful one biding its time, after all. Now it was seizing its opportunity.

"I'm not a demon," Tenacity said, as if hearing her thoughts. Maker, it probably could hear them. "I don't feast on suffering. In fact, it's usually much more interesting to facilitate the opposite. Your mind and your body will remain your own. I will just be… a passenger. Mostly."

If Adara agreed now and it was a trick, she would become an abomination. But if she said no… Carver would stay dead, and that wasn't a choice at all. "If you can bring him back to me, then yes, fine. I accept. Just… help me. Please."

Tenacity smiled at her. It was both familiar and not. Adara had seen her own smiles in her reflection before, but in this older face that was both hers and not, the expression was strange. There was an unnatural brightness behind her eyes as she reached out to touch Adara's cheek. The moment her fingers brushed Adara's skin, everything disappeared in a flash of light.

.

.

Adara knew she was back in Amaranthine before she opened her eyes. She could feel the rubble digging into her knees, and she could smell fire and spent blackpowder. The ringing in her ears was gone, and her shoulder didn't hurt anymore. There were no more voices in her head, but her mind felt full in a way she couldn't describe.

Had the world always felt this still? Odd.

Carver was still gone but not out of her reach, and she could see that now. She was strong enough to pull him back, and this reality was hers to shape. Her skin glowed so brightly with magic that it hurt to look at her hands, but she didn't need to see anything with her eyes anyway. His body was broken, but she restored it. His soul tried to leave, but she held onto it. Simple. It was as easy as being swept away by a current: all Adara had to do was yield to it. She was Tenacity, after all, and the rules that bound everything in this world to immutability were not hers to follow. She would change what she liked. We are Adara, and we are Tenacity, and he is ours.

Carver remained still, but he drew in a breath with a ragged gasp. Adara let out another sob, this one of shock and relief.

With her success, though, came a reminder that Adara's body was an imperfect conduit for so much energy from the Fade. It was too small, too cramped, and for a moment she was bewildered by the sensation. She hadn't expected that. Or rather, Tenacity hadn't expected it. Adara looked at her hands and frowned, unused to the feeling of having more power than she could use without destroying herself. Part of her was surprised by the power. The part of her that was Tenacity now was more surprised by the limitations.

Her vision began to swim. Defying death was a powerful act and not one that mortals were meant to do. Even with Tenacity's aid, Adara would need to pay for it: in exhaustion, if nothing else. She tried to reach out for Carver just to make absolutely sure that she had really succeeded and that he wasn't going to slip away from her again. Instead she collapsed next to him. She caught another glimpse of the sky: vivid blue streaked with black smoke. Oh, that's beautiful, that new part of her thought before she closed her eyes and couldn't open them again.