Emma was escorted up in the dark, half-asleep, arriving somewhere familiar through the wrong door. The telescope stood with its barrel angled toward the slit windows. Disused for months. A shadow.
The Harrowing Chamber hummed with lyrium, lined with templars. They observed her from within steel helms, eyes sharpened by years of watching.
In the center stood Irving in formal robes and the Knight-Commander she recognized by voice. He spoke first, a liturgical lecture. She was good at listening to things she already knew while her mind went elsewhere: Andraste, the Imperium, the dream realm. He told Emma she was being tested. She would die if she failed.
Emma stared at the floor, etched with astronomical spirals. She was not at peace with dying now. But she was with dying here.
Irving’s part was shorter, which was kind: “The ritual sends you into the Fade. There you will face a demon.”
“I’m ready,” Emma lied.
She looked at the telescope’s silhouette before dipping her hands into the bowl.
Lyrium settled into her skin. It hit her bloodstream, cold and sickening. Its glow caught in the worn curves of the spirals as her limbs went numb. She hit the floor. For a moment, she smelled warm vellum and chamomile on the damp stone.
Then she was in the Fade.
The dream realm’s air was perpetually humid and blurry, smearing everything visible in colors of old varnish and algae. She entered through an arch set deep into a wall of pale stone blocks. Above her, a swollen chunk of oxidized metal suggested the ruin of a curved ceiling.
She’d been here before, or somewhere indistinguishable. It felt like visiting a museum that had been underwater.
“Someone else thrown to the wolves.”
Emma looked toward the voice, into reeds at the periphery that bent without wind. Marsh plants parted as she moved toward them. A rat scurried to meet her in the clearing of her presence.
“As fresh and unprepared as ever,” said the rat, now at her feet. “It isn’t right that they do this, the templars.”
She crouched. Beneath her something squelched, not fully committing to the concept of ground.
“Hello, talking rat.”
It laughed at her. A talking, laughing rat.
“You think you’re really here? In that body?” It lifted its nose toward her. “You look like that because you think you do.”
“I used to be like you. Before. You can call me Mouse. Rat is what you called me. Mouse is who I am.”
It was definitely a rat, a large one, with quick dark eyes and a naked tail. Emma had worked with mice. She knew mice, in a detailed and clinical way. The way the Circle taught most things, handling the subject until it was no longer surprising.
“Mouse,” she repeated. Mouse was not a mouse. “What happened to you?”
“I ran,” he said. Not answering the question exactly, but near it. “I hid. It took a long time. And then — there was nothing to go back to.”
“And the templars killed you.”
“That is what happens to apprentices who fail,” he said, remembering the rule instead the event. He really did seem like a former apprentice.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She meant it, her sympathy at a distance, taking mental notes.
“Don’t waste time on that,” Mouse said, very eager. “There’s a demon here. Contained and called just for you. Face it, resist it — that’s your way out.”
“How long do I have?” she asked.
“I — I don’t remember,” He shifted to become a blond man in Circle robes, hands animated with conversation. “Not long. The templars will assume failure, if it takes too long.”
“And what you face is powerful. Cunning. There are other spirits here. They may help, if you can believe anything you see.”
“Are you helping me?”
“I’ll follow you. If that’s alright. My chance is past. Yours isn’t.”
The Fade didn’t do landmarks. It did repetition that resisted mapping. Dry rot building instead of breaking down. Wet ground fermented into pale lattice that curved around them both.
Mouse did not like it. He was small again, near her ankle, keeping pace easily for something with four-inch legs.
“It’s dangerous to be out in the open,” he said.
“But you can change your shape,” Emma observed.
“I stayed small. Unnoticeable.” He seemed proud of this. “Learned from smaller things. Hid where shadows go on forever. If you stay long enough, the shadows start coming inside.”
She looked upward at a black root that had punctured through the ceiling and away. “What do you know about the Fade?”
He brightened. This was the question he’d been waiting for.
“All dreamers come here. Templars, farmers, children. They just don’t know they’re dreaming.” He paused. “That’s the difference.”
“When they don’t know where they are, they drift and fade. But lucid minds are like a fire. You can see their magic rising from a long way off.”
“Demons feed on the dark parts,” he continued. “Fear. Shame. Anger. Desire can smell what you want most and what you’re most afraid of — same thing, half the time. The templars in the tower would give them a meal for certain.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. She wanted to stay on the Fade. “Can I change shape? Like you?”
“Maybe. If you’re able to forget that you’re you. That takes a long time. You’d better focus on something simpler. Your demon. Kill or be killed.”
Kill or be killed slid off her like water. She kept walking.
“So then, where are these other spirits?”
“Directions are difficult here. I’ll tell you when we’re getting close.”
It didn’t announce itself. It appeared as a peripheral light. She’d taken it for Fade ambiance, some inexplicably luminous point within the general jaundiced nightmare. Bright the way a fever makes the eyes bright. Then it moved. It didn’t close the distance. But what she’d taken for mere light was a light that hated her.
Arcane bolt was her baseline of violence, a tight projectile of force that caught the wisp-wraith mid-approach and scattered it.
“There are more,” Mouse said, from somewhere very low.
“Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”
Two more emerged from the murk, what had felt like atmosphere resolving into intent.
They moved with jittery repetition of motion on a loop, not cunning, not tactical, just kinetic resentment stripped of context. No pattern recognition, no flanking instinct, no coordination between them. What they had instead was electricity.
The first bolt hit before she’d completed that thought.
It was small, as these things went. She’d taken worse in theoretical exercises, worse in hypotheticals, worse in the dry academic taxonomy of this is what damage feels like at various thresholds. Knowing that didn’t stop the involuntary lock of her muscles, the white-out half-second where her nervous system made an urgent complaint she dismissed.
Rock armor settled into her joints and her posture. I am as stone, the Fade accepted this as fact because she did.
The second wraith angled toward her left. She turned with it, tracking, and reached not for impact, but for something older and more uncomfortable, the drain. Her nerves were still frazzled with electricity. She drained it to sustain herself.
The wraith’s light guttered. The Fade conducted the transaction in her favor.
But it reoriented. Lightning again, and this time she didn’t let it arrive — arcane bolt, preemptive, forcing it to scatter before it could complete the cast. The wraith shrieked. She hit it again, because the tactical response to something mid-shriek is to not give it the opportunity to stop.
It came apart. The light dispersed, thinned, became nothing distinguishable from the ambient glow of a plane that had no natural darkness.
The third wraith was slower. She watched it. It watched her. She felt that specific ache behind the eyes that meant she was drawing on something that needed time to fill. She drained it.
The rock armor was still present, humming its dull mineral hymn through her musculature. She hadn’t needed it significantly. She had it anyway.
“You’re still alive,” Mouse said, as if he had been waiting to see.
“I noticed,” she said. “That couldn’t be the test.”
“No,” Mouse confirmed.
Emma looked at where the last wisp had dispersed. The glow had left something behind, a faint residue she could feel. Stripped of purpose, detached, if not peaceful. Something short of a will, with nowhere to go. Waiting to be given a direction. Waiting for her.