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"Will you come visit me? Not now, of course. But maybe later?"
Merrill wasn't expecting much when she asked. This man - Hawke, he had said - had been distant from the moment he had made his way up to the pathway where she had been lingering just out of sight of the judgemental glares of her beloved clanmates, light buzzing in her hands, working its way where it needed to be. He grew only more cold the more ground they covered. He had been only distant, at first. That seemed rather normal, to Merrill, from a human to a Dalish elf. If anything, he might have even been considered friendly by those standards. Unfortunately, friendliness faded quickly to a wary politeness as she wound magic through her staff for the first time in front of him, and as the barrier in their way dissolved and blood dripped from her hand, so too did his remaining politeness bleed away. Neither he nor two of his friends would hear her explanations, or even consider that maybe she knew what she was doing just as much as they knew what they were doing. The fellow elf and the fellow mage had no more sympathy in their eyes than Hawke did.
The only one who had nothing to say was the nice woman with the scarf and the boots and the knives. Merrill had just been glad that someone didn't seem to hate her instantly for something that was her own personal choice. If she kept track of herself, her choices would never affect them. The lady even smiled at her a few times, when Merrill stumbled over her words particularly badly.
When she asked if she could expect company or companionship from this man, his glare sharper than the sword at his back, she was already eyeing the city elves who warily watched their group right back. She wondered who looked like they might be the most tolerant towards what would probably end up being very stupid questions about very basic alienage things. She wondered if any of them would speak to her.
"You should probably stick with elves. And demon-summoning blood mages," Hawke said firmly, and that was the end of that.
It wasn't the last time she saw Hawke, of course. Kirkwall might have been big and full of as many bodies as could be crammed into it, but they still lived in the same city-state. The Lowtown markets had things to offer that the alienage did not, when she could manage to find the markets, and every now and then Merrill would peek through her curtains and see Hawke talking to the lady with the half human son, or fighting off those very rude shem bandits who lurked about at night stealing from the unwary. It was, however, very much the last significant encounter. The last encounter where a conversation was had.
A choice had been made when Hawke turned around and left, a road chosen. There was a significance to the whole thing, a heaviness in the air that bothered Merrill for days after. Eventually the feeling went away, and Merrill went on with her life as best she could. Lonely as she was, Merrill couldn't bring herself to regret how things had ended with him.
I chose this, she told herself every morning she woke up to her drafty wooden walls and new and exciting leaks in her ceiling that kept life interesting. This was my choice, and it will either be worth it, or I will die. Or perhaps both.
Merrill was not always alone. A month after she had been told that her blood was not welcome, the nice shem friend of Hawke's who had smiled so sweetly at her was waiting for her when she returned from a long day of gathering herbs and useful materials just outside the city to sell to the locals. She reclined on Merrill's only chair, feet up on her table as if she'd been there a hundred times, no doubt in her mind that she was welcome. She had brought a big brown bottle and a bigger smile. Isabela, she said she was called.
Every Dalish clan has its own alcoholic specialty. No two clans make quite the same product.
Merrill had never had whiskey before.
Months bled into years. Despite her many years with the Sabrae clan, Merrill had never quite figured out how to immerse herself properly in their social dynamics. If the vast but self-contained interpersonal relationships of her clan had been a challenge, the interworkings of the crowded Alienage felt insurmountable. Despite the high walls, they were not truly isolated. Relationships and connections ran easily into Lowtown and Darktown as needed for trade and employment, and a few even knew their way around Hightown. It was a confusing tangle that she could not unwind.
Trying to connect to these vast amounts of new people so suddenly was intimidating, but Merrill could not affort to be entirely withdrawn from those around her. She only had so many skills that would not get her send to the Gallows, and the skills she did have necessitated contact. She knew materials that could be gathered and sold to those who could make them into useful things, and she could slip in small bits of minor, unnoticable magics for things like food preservation and household repairs in exchange for a few coppers to keep herself fed. There were three other Dalish who lived in Kirkwall. When they saw her vallaslin and the way she dressed, they whispered to her in passing little hints on where to hide and who to hide from when needed.
The Alienage had felt lonely at first, but the longer Merrill lived there, strangers growing less strange, the more she came to know. The elves took part in the Chantry-related holidays, same as everyone, but Merrill often discovered as she went about her own little Dalish rituals for her own celebrations that others in the Alienage had quietly done something similar, because that’s what their parents and grandparents before them had done. When she went outside in the spring with a small batch of triangle cookies filled with ground seed pastes to see if Arianni wanted some, there were many elves already giving baked goods to those who tended to go hungry more often than others. Those who had also made triangle cookies filled theirs with bits of canned fruits. Driven by a buzzing feeling in the back of her mind, Merrill hastily traded one of her seed cookies for a fruit-filled one, sunk her teeth into it, and started to cry. Eighteen years ago, Alerion clan had wandered the hills of Nevarra. They harvested the local fruits, making them into ciders and preserving them. Merrill’s first clan had put fruit in their cookies. She had forgotten.
This and many other things she shared with Isabela, when she dropped in for a visit. Her visits followed no schedule. She might come every day for a week and then disappear for a month if that's how her interests and obligations lined up. Isabela always brought with her a new drink, or two bowls of food that Merrill could warm for them, or a story to share. The stories might be about a drunken encounter she'd had the previous night, or a funny anecdote from seven years ago, or a description of her time with Hawke and his associates. Sometimes Isabela's scarf was loosened and her hair was tangled like she'd been running her fingers through it, bags heavier under her eyes than usual and smelling of the decay of Darktown or the salt of the docks. On those days she'd bring a deck of cards. She taught Merrill the different games she'd learned in her many years of travelling and asked Merrill about her life instead of talking about her own.
Sometimes, Isabela would bring Merrill heavy, rare books to look over until they were to be passed on to their next owners. They were often as fascinating as they were useless to Merrill's life. She never turned the opportunity down. She so very much appreciated that Isabela kept the books around just a little bit longer for Merrill's sake, and she never knew if they might contain something that could help her with the mirror.
In the lulls, in the periods between Isabela's visits, between weather that allowed for gathering, when she was passing long nights with blankets wrapped around her shoulders and cheap and easy teas in her cups alone in her tiny house, she would pull the sheet off the mirror and work. Sometimes the work was active. She sat and wove light and wood and glass and minerals together as precisely as she could, building off of old, blurry drawings and the glance she had gotten of the original mirror before the polite, bearded shem had smashed it and taken Edria Mahariel away forever. Sometimes the work was hardly work at all. Merrill would stare at the mirror for hours, not sure how to continue but knowing she could not stop. This was the reason she had left. Stopping was not an option.
They found Arianni dead at the beginning of Haring in 9:33 Dragon. She sat stiffly in her most comfortable chair, a child's toy at her feet. The cup on the table next to her smelled of death.
On a brisk autumn morning three and a half years after Merrill had walked into the City of Chains for the first time, Isabela visited for the last time.
Merrill was startled out of sleep an hour before the sun was supposed to rise to the loud noise of something heavy being dropped on her creaky table. She sat up and waved her hand, and a candle flickered to life next to a brown, calloused hand that Merrill would know anywhere.
"Things have escalated," Isabela told her, one of her hands hovering protectively over a heavy-looking item wrapped up in a nondescript cloth bag. "I have what I came for. I know where it needs to go. Then, they'll leave me alone forever, and nobody else who wants a piece of me knows enough to ever find me."
Merrill did not ask for details, because she knew Isabela would not answer. They probably didn't matter anyway.
"You can't visit?" Merrill asked instead. "Not even once? Not even on one of those holidays where everyone wears masks and gets drunk and falls over a lot?"
Isabela reached a hand towards Merrill's face, hesitated, then cupped her cheek, stroking it with her thumb. Her scarred hands were chilly from a long night. "The only way I can make sure I won't be found is if I don't give them the chance to find me."
Merrill closed her eyes and held Isabela's hand between her palm and her cheek, pressing into the touch. Isabela had said she didn't like to see people cry. Merrill didn't want to make her sad.
"Oh, Kitten," Merrill heard her sigh, and she knew a tear had escaped.
"Nothing will be the same without you," Merrill whispered, keeping her voice as steady as possible. She felt the shift of air as Isabela stepped closer, smelled the tang of the foundries that still clung to her.
Isabela clicked her tongue and was still for a moment. She said, "Is there a way for me to convince you to run away with me?"
Merrill thought. Every person who had ever doubted her was still less than a day's walk away. Every rejection that had come with the dreary stone and metal walls and statues of this cursed city still lingered. The miles of land under her and around her still remembered being soaked in elvhen blood. She thought of the things Isabela had given her, the food and drink and company that helped Merrill through nights when nothing seemed to be going right. She thought about the day she had told Isabela about how there was no way she could face the Keeper long enough to ask for a tool, and how it had appeared in her hand two days later with hurried assurances that the moment she was done with it, it would reappear tucked away at the bottom of some forgotten storage container up in the Dalish camp, misplaced for a while as even some of the most important things sometimes were. She thought of the fun she had stumbling across little trinkets and bits of jewelry during her gathering outside the city, and putting them in her bag to give to Isabela later. Merrill had taught her how to braid bread the way elves liked to on special days, even if Isabela rarely had the chance to bake. They stood together in a tiny, hidden home where no one would think to look and where the neighbors had no desire to sell information to unknown shemlen when things got rough and Isabela needed to disappear for a day or two.
She thought of her neighbors, and how a child had asked her to teach him that pretty song she had been humming under her breath the other day. The little things that took her magic seconds but took her customers and acquaintances hours. She thought of the mirror, and how it could not fit into a discreet bag the way Isabela's very important mystery item that sat neatly on Merrill's swaying table could.
"I got seasick the last time I was on a boat," Merrill told her. "I want to, but-" she swallowed around the thickness in her throat, "-but you'd end up very cross with me when I never stopped throwing up on your boots."
Isabela's laugh was hollow. "I could never be angry at you, Kitten. But, you're right, you'd be miserable, and then I'd have to live with myself for putting such a precious, sweet thing through that. Shit."
Merrill nodded and opened her eyes, blinking away the blurriness as best she could. Isabela's expression in the dim light was softer than she could remember anyone ever looking at her.
"When do you have to leave?" Merrill asked.
Isabela sucked in a breath, held it for a moment, and exhaled. "Late tonight, after the sun goes down."
"You'll stay for the day?"
Isabela nodded. She leaned closer, said, "I, could I-" let out a breath, and brought her lips to Merrill's. They were cracked from the cold air outside, and warm, and they felt perfect. Merrill put her hands on Isabela's shoulders, and Isabela pulled her close, pressed tight against her soft body. Merrill squeezed her arms around Isabela as tight as she could and wished she never had to let go.
"Lay down with me," Isabela whispered against her lips, the tickle of her breath so close making Merrill huff a laugh. "I want to hold you until I can't."
Merrill started crying again, but this time she was smiling.
The day after Isabela disappeared into the night, the city was on fire.
Merrill didn't understand the specifics of what was happening. What she did know was that there were explosions shaking the ground beneath her feet. What she knew was that two of her neighbors were wailing as elven dockworkers brought back corpses of loved ones who hadn't been able to run from the Qunari fast enough. She knew that every few minutes a Qunari would make their way through the entrance, and while elves made sure they were never truly helpless, the Alienage held mostly amateur fighters and only one other mage who felt comfortable being open about it, whose specializations mostly had to do with entropy and ice. Good for a fight, perhaps, but not so much the longer they had to fight. The bulk of the attackers mostly seemed to be headed elsewhere, but it wouldn't take much to smash the Alienage if whim brought them there. This was no time to rely on luck and hope, if there were other options to be had.
"Is there anyone unaccounted for?" Merrill yelled into the crowd.
"Where's Zehva?" a pale woman in a brown dress asked.
"She told me she was going to see the healer in Darktown for her elbow," a tall man with dark skin and and braided hair told her. "The Qunari are going up, not down."
"Is Dinah okay?" said a woman with a sea of hair and skin like Isabela's.
"Lady Elegant was ushering her away when I passed," a man with a deep tan and a smooth head told her. "She sends her love, Lisbeth."
"Nate's dead, isn't he?" an older woman with skin and hair like snow got out between sobs.
"I'm sorry, Ev," the only man with a full sword said, lowering his eyes. "Nyssa saw him on the ground on her way back. She stopped long enough to take his ring for you."
"I'm so sorry, Ev," Merrill said. "Is that everyone? Is anyone else missing who wouldn't go somewhere else first?"
A few more inquiries were traded, reassurances and condolences handed out, and then there were no more names.
When Merrill was sick, shut up in a ship with no way out during her clan's trip across the sea, Pol had told them all stories. He had told them of the Denerim alienage, of the walls that surrounded it and the gate that kept them closed in. It was mostly a curse, he had said, a way to keep elves locked in. It was not there for their benefit. But sometimes, he had told them all, it's nice, knowing there's a barrier that helps keep random shems out. People only go in if they have a reason to be there. It isn't always a nice reason, he had grimaced, but drunk shems looking for trouble can't just stumble in thoughtlessly.
Merrill stepped around the newest Qunari corpse at the steps leading to the Alienage. It is a Keeper's job make decisions for the protection of their people. Merrill might not be a Keeper, or even truly a First anymore, but some lessons are not so easily forgotten.
Merrill sliced her thigh with the blade on her staff, asked the stone under her feet for help, and raised it as high and strong and thick as she could. The other mage caught on to what she was doing and passed her magic to Merrill too.
Nothing would come through until she said it could.
For hours everyone sat in a circle around the vhenadahl, lighting candles and telling stories about everyone who wasn't with them, voices kept quiet to hear any change in the noise outside. Everyone who had a weapon they knew how to use stood next to the walled-off entrance, just in case. Those who could account for their whole family began to discuss who would need food brought to them while they mourned, whose mirrors would need to be covered if they had any. Nobody Merrill was close to had died, but she knew that she wouldn't be uncovering her own mirror for the next week. It would feel wrong.
Merrill was not good at reading people on the best of days, but the tensions that had been building in Kirkwall in the years since that man Hawke had defeated the Arishok were apparent even to her. It helped that the people in the Alienage had warmed up to her further ever since, and were perfectly happy to have her around while they talked about the problems they ran into around the city.
She had not noticed the Templars being particularly vigilant, but when Dinah whispered to her while they both lit candles under the vhenadahl that she would be safer if she left her staff at home, Merrill nodded and thanked her. When the other mage had introduced herself as Rivka and asked to trade magic knowledge with her, there were always two other people sitting at the entrance of wherever they were practicing, ready to alert them if someone in armor was getting to close.
Much of her time was still spent in front of the mirror when she knew no one would come looking for her. The arulin'holm had long since been snuck back to the Dalish, and vague descriptions of two-way mirrors hadn't meant anything to anyone she could think to ask.
She had already given six years of her life to this mirror. What was a little more, really?
Sometimes Merrill wrote letters to Isabela. She kissed every single one and put them away in a box when she was done. She would give them to her someday.
One day, having wandered farther up Sundermount than usual, Merrill realized that she couldn't see any evidence that there was a Dalish clan nearby. The trails that even the best hunters inevitably left were far older than they should have been, and there wasn't a single Dalish-made trap to be found. She walked further, noting the intact plants that would have been harvested. The echoes their presence should have made in the earth were no longer present. When she reached their campsite, there was no one keeping watch to spit insults at her. Nobody ran out to demand what she was doing there. The aravels were gone. The grass was growing back from where it had been worn down from the years of bare feet stomping over it.
Further away there was a somewhat fresh patch of tree saplings over obvious lumps where bodies had been buried, but the count was nowhere near the number of the entire clan. It was unlikely shem would bother to bury them or clean up their possessions anyway, if they had all perished.
Knowing she already wouldn't make it back to Kirkwall until night had already fallen, Merrill wandered further up the mountain, through the path she had taken with Isabela and Hawke and that elf and that shem mage all those years ago. There were no strange or out of place bodies to indicate that anything happened. The old grave site had been undisturbed, and Mythal's shrine was untouched.
When Merrill reached the cave where the end had begun, she realized that the barrier was gone. She could no longer hear the spirit.
By the time someone came to Merrill's door to tell her frantically about Nyssa and Huon, they were both already lying dead on the ground, and Merrill thought she could see Hawke's back as he made his way up the stairs. She helped a young man named Aharon carry the bodies back to Nyssa's home to be taken care of. They walked out to the vhenadahl together afterward, dried blood still flaking off their hands. When they walked away later, heading to bed to get what little sleep they could, two new candles burned strong at the base of the tree.
Merrill was sitting in front of her mirror when a column of fire lit the sky. A mage has done this! they learned from the screaming, from the people who had been too close who could no longer go to the Darktown healer for their injuries. Debris was everywhere. Worried eyes turned to Merrill when she came out of her home to investivage the shaking ground.
"A mage has done this, Dalish," Abram told her. "You and Rivka need to hide."
"What has happened?" Merrill asked. "Your house is missing an awful lot of its front walls. We need to fix that."
"Later," Lisbeth said, chewing on her lips in thought. "Under my bed, there's a hole in my floor and space to hide. It's not much, and it won't be fun, but you and Rivka are both small. You can fit."
"Let me at least heal the injured first!" Rivka said, walking up to Lisbeth.
"We can wait for a while," Hershel said, dabbing at his bleeding arm. "We don't know how long you can wait. Follow Liz. We'll let you know if we really need you two, or when it seems safe to come out. I don't trust those buckethead shem as far as I can throw them, and my arm isn't doing any throwing until this is all over."
"Why would you try to throw them?" Merrill asked. "That metal must make them terribly heavy."
"Go," Hershel said, and Lisbeth took their hands and led them away.
Merrill never wanted to be trapped anywhere so small ever again.
Rebuilding was slow. No one wanted to ask Merrill, Rivka, or the elven mage lovers who had managed to escape to the Alienage in the chaos to use too much magic at once, in case the speediness of the repairs grew too obvious and drew too much attention. The shem might have mostly ignored the Alienage, but since the Champion had shown his support for the Templars, a carpet rolled out for him up to the Viscount's seat, they liked to make regular patrols "just in case." The new mages didn't feel safe going outside unless it was night. The chance that the remaining Templars could be ones who knew their faces was too great. Rivka had tugged nervously at her large black curls as she told Merrill that while she enjoyed the time they spent practicing magic together, they should probably end their sessions for a while.
Despite these setbacks, it was only a month or so before everything was at least temporarily livable again, and by the time 9:37 Dragon was coming to a close, everything at least looked like it had before the Darktown healer had blown up part of the city and been immediately executed by the Viscount.
If pressed, Merrill could say she knew that things outside of Kirkwall weren't very stable, but she could not have said why or how.
Towards the end of Cloudreach 9:38, a messanger dropped off a letter addressed to "Kitten." Merrill tipped the man a silver, went inside, kissed the letter, and began to read it.
In the early days of 9:39, there were rumors of a Dalish clan passing nearby. A different one from before.
The knowledge came in the form of elves gossiping enthusiastically, as most information did for Merrill these days with Isabela long gone. Apparently Ev's half-human nephew had found himself a human husband in Lowtown, and the husband was a sword-for-hire who had been guarding some traders last week who told him about an unusually friendly Dalish clan who had traded with them. They said the elves seemed to be headed in a vaguely Kirkwall direction. The chain of knowledge was difficult for Merrill to keep track of, but the end result was some of the younger elves asking her about what life might be like for them if they went to the Dalish. Were the rumors about human sacrifices true? How much did vallaslin hurt? Did they really make wine out of non-Dalish blood? Did they really learn to hunt by being hunted and only those who survived became hunters?
Merrill did her best to disabuse them of such bizarre tales, and tell them that life with the Dalish was at least no easier than life in the city, if not more difficult.
"Do you think you might go live with this new clan?" Dinah asked her one day. "They are different people from your Sundermount clan, and maybe they will be more open to your priorities."
"Don't be silly," Merrill said. "I live here now. It isn't so easy, switching between clans like that. I almost wish it were."
"Of course it is not," Dinah said, and Merrill remembered how she had whispered in the night about having fled from the Denerim alienage a couple years after the Blight, after how much of it and its residents had been destroyed. That she and Evie and Abram had run together, despite Dinah and Abram not having actually spoken to each other since an argument in 9:28 Dragon. "It is never easy. But sometimes it is what you need to do. You did it when you moved here, and if it is the right thing for you, you can do it again now. Sometimes it takes a long time to find somewhere you belong. Sometimes you never find it."
"You don't think I belong here?" Merrill asked.
"Merrill," Dinah said, "you know you don't. It has been a good place for you to stay, and you have done much for us. You have kept us safe, you have passed on what you know that we did not."
"You did the same for me," Merrill said. "You hid me when I did not know I needed to hide. You can protect yourselves without me. I've asked so many questions over the years that you all must have found so dreadfully silly, but you still answered them, after a while. You have given me so much."
"That is true," Dinah nodded. "Your time here has been good for us all, I think. But Merrill, can you truly picture yourself living here for the rest of your life? Dying here? It is enough for many of us, even what some of us want, but it is not always right for everyone. Is it right for you?"
Merrill had no answer for her.
"It's up to you," Dinah said. "I won't force you to choose anything. None of us will. Very few of us mind you, Merrill. Many of us like you. You are very sweet, and you like helping people. We will not run you out of town, and we will not dance if you leave."
"If I do leave," Merrill told her finally, "it will not be for a little while longer. There are still things that need doing, specifically by me, and if this new clan is truly on its way here, it will linger for a few weeks for trade. More, if they are as friendly towards shemlen as they're said to be. They might even stick around a while to look for Sabrae, if Sabrae has not contacted anyone since they missed the last Arlathvhen."
"Of course," Dinah agreed.
In the middle of Drakonis 9:39, early in the evening when everyone was preparing for dinner, Merrill's mirror rippled for the first time, and she saw pathways lined with mirrors laid out before her. She pressed a bloodied hand to the surface, and it parted around her, shining. Merrill cried until the sun had long gone down. Then she got up and went to go find Rivka to heal her hand.
Two days later, she packed up the mirror, her clothes, her letters, and everything Isabela had ever given her, and left. Everyone gathered outside to see her off, and the children insisted she paint something on the vhenadahl before she left. She had them describe the most beautiful flowers they'd ever seen, and she did her best.
Clan Lavellan did not particularly need anymore mages. Merrill was not unwelcome, Keeper Deshanna told her, she could obviously look after herself and keep herself out of trouble. They stayed near shem dwellings far too much to have too many mages with them at once. She could stay with them until the next Arlathvhen in three years, where she could share the Eluvian with everyone. No doubt many would be delighted to have a new piece of history to argue about. Then, if a different clan needed or wanted her, she could go on her way with them.
Merrill wondered if her life would consist of nothing but being passed between clans.
At least this clan had whiskey.
No longer spending weeks lingering in a place with walls as tall as trees and far less forgiving, Merrill was amazed to discover how much had changed in the world around her. The explosion in Kirkwall, the one where Merrill had been hidden away for hours, had spread chaos to the world around them in ways Merrill could never have imagined. As the months wore on and Merrill settled into clan Lavellan as best she could, the trading shemlen and occasional city elves told them about how the world seemed to be falling apart. The Circles of Magi were growing restless, which made the Templars more nasty, which made the Circles even more restless. Not all Circles and Templars were at each other's throats, they said, some had managed to keep their wits about them. But those exceptions were just as threatened by the ones who were not exceptions, and everything was a mess.
A year after Merrill joined the clan, they learned that a permanent split had been made, and a war was on. Shems could find a way to blame an elf for sunburn, Paivel used to say, and the clan had to fight off more shem than usual and move on more quickly than they would have liked. Mages and Templars stumbled across them one after the other, and they were rarely willing to turn around and leave peacefully the way they came.
Another year further of this, as 9:41 Dragon began, the clan learned of peace talks that the Divine planned to hold in the Frostbacks in the spring. The Keeper declared that it was in their best interest to send someone to observe, rather than wait for potentially-vital information that could threaten them all to make its way to them third-hand. The Keeper's First, Mahanon Lavellan, volunteered to go.
Merrill was not truly part of this clan. She was a spare mage, and she would not be with them much longer anyway. Mahanon had a place here, would be missed if he left, and if the worst should happen to him, his loss would be felt far more. Better for them to lose someone they had not planned on keeping, than someone who would hopefully stay with them for a very long time.
"My old clan only left Fereldan ten years ago," she told them. "I remember it well. It might be nice to see it again. Besides, Mahanon has far more serious and important First-y things to be doing here than I."
No objections were raised, and as the last weeks of winter receded their claim on the land, Merrill gathered supplies and left.
The Conclave was loud and so very full, and everyone seemed on edge. Merrill had done well at keeping out of sight, dressed in the most basic of clothes, wielding a Circle staff that she had traded for. So long as no one glanced too closely at her, she looked like any elven Circle mage, here to talk peacefully. Important shem never look too closely at elves.
Still, her two years back with the Dalish had gotten her too used to open spaces again. There was a bit of unused space in some parts of the Temple, and she could spare a few minutes to track down an empty room somewhere to breathe in for a bit.
As she searched for a nice, empty spot, she heard a cry. The talks were supposed to be peaceful. That did not sound like a peaceful noise. Merrill's ears twitched, and she eyed the door she thought the noise might have come from.
Everything was cold, and then it was hot, so hot. The world was dark, and then it seemed to be made of nothing but light. Her ears were ringing, her skin was crawling, and she could not feel her hand. The searing light receded. Cool, forgiving darkness cradled her. She knew no more.
Something cold and solid was making Merrill's wrists ache. Her head pounded, and her mouth tasted of metal and decay. Her left hand felt like there were bees crawling under her skin, like she had knocked her elbow against an aravel fifty times in a row, and her knees were numb against the hard stone she knelt on. She opened her eyes, glad it was dim, wherever she was, and saw unfamiliar shems standing around her. A woman with a hood, pale skin, and red hair walked in, followed by a woman with a squiggly oval eye on her chest, warm skin, and black smudged around her eyes. The woman with the squiggly eye shirt walked around behind her, armor clanking with every step. An accent that Merrill had not heard since she left Nevarra thirty years ago made its way to her ear.
"Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now."