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It starts with a painless cut.
You brush the glass away, the broken plate already an afterthought in your racing mind. Countless three-in-the-morning nights have left their circles beneath your eyes and clumsiness in your movements; that’s the fourth late dinner on the floor this week. Bathed in the dim candlelight from the desk in your study in Denerim, you use the careless mistake as an excuse for a break from your research. You watch the trail of blood, barely more than a prick at worst, travel down your finger and remember.
You remember the words scrawled on a page, eerily human despite their origin. The blood is the key. The blood is always the key. Dark tunnels, an abandoned mine; an elf with hollow eyes, the darkspawn with none. Pain. Confusion. Escape. No.
You shake your head and the memories fade. They’d scoured the place after the threat was gone, on your orders. But nothing. Nothing besides the handful of papers you’d grabbed when you fled. Whatever else there may have been, the darkspawn had taken his research with him. Only fleeting observations, disjointed notes were all that was left.
It is the one time you regret letting your emotions override your judgment.
The trail of blood has wound its way down your finger, but you are immobile, crouched on the cold, stone floor. You can’t believe what you are even considering. And yet, you can.
She stood tall yet vulnerable, fire at her back and the weight of the world in her eyes, as she spoke.
“Some might call it blood magic, but that is but a name. There is far more to fear in this world than names.”
You listened. You trusted her judgment, just as you always had, and he had trusted yours. An uncomfortable proposition and awkward glances were more than a fair price for life. What was one inevitable demise, when you had already escaped another? There had to be a way out, a contingency in the rules. You just had to find it.
You look at the book resting on the desk, a last gift from a woman you still call friend. The drop of blood reaches your palm, sliding down your skin to your wrist. You have read it cover to cover, baptizing it in your own sweat and tears, but its arcane theory is lost on you. This is a task that will demand something more. Something beyond your carefully crafted expertise. It isn’t as if you hadn’t considered it before. You’ve condoned it, even encouraged it damn it. Its different if it isn’t your own hands, isn’t it? The book, you suspect, may have the missing link, but it was the ageless mage who uncovered the foundation.
But you’re hesitant. The scars of a childhood friend still wound your heart while your own Tainted curse, a Calling on the horizon, sings dully in your ears. But some treasons can’t be written off without a thought. Even on the days where it doesn’t weigh down on your shoulders, a thousand pounds of pure one-hundred-percent Chantry-approved mage guilt, you wonder what may have been. Blood magic was the source of all of your problems, how ironic that it could be the end of them.
You aren’t doing it for yourself anymore. A gasping breath, an enraptured sigh. Hands intertwined, and not even the Maker himself could make you want to let go. Isn’t it funny? How you had to face an inevitable death, in order to want to live?
A drop of blood falls to the floor. You pull a knife from the drawer and open the book again.