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The Settrellas had always been respectful of the Old Ways. When Anna was a child, and her mother was able, she taught her about magicka.
Originally, she had explained, it was all Dark. “All magicka was about blood and dirt. Sacrifice. The unending cycle of life and death. All spells were green then, bright green. Simply because the colours are opposite to the purpose - green for Sun's Dawn.”
Heart magicka, she called it.
She didn’t mean anything sentimental about the term. Salona Settrella knew that the heart was the bloodiest organ.
“All those spells they teach at that college in Winterhold only work because someone, somewhere, made a sacrifice long ago,” Salona had added. She looked stern, even though she was wearing a stained apron and thick gloves with holes in them to pick blackberries; and a strand of her auburn hair had flown into her eyes. “The incantations are passed down in families, eventually written in books, but so few of our kind forget how they came to have that power in the first place. But I have never forgotten, nor will I.”
Our kind, she had said. Because Salona Settrella was a Mage before she ran off to marry a farmer, and she continued to think of herself that way. Anna, on the other hand, was hesitant to think so for herself because she had yet to meet any Mage other than her mother. Life was made up of borrowing books from the kind shopkeep who looked the other way when she slipped food into her pockets, keeping quiet when Papa was home, and doing more around the homestead so her mother didn’t look so exhausted all the time. Where in that was there room for the College of Winterhold? Whenever Salona cast spells with the tip of her finger, it was a secret that she and Anna kept between them - like now, when she silently made the blackberry bush a lot livelier looking.
They went home and made a blackberry crumble, and it was delicious - even Papa had said so. And they didn’t speak of heart magicka again, until Anna had come to her a few years later to ask questions about inventing new spells.
Anna was very good at heart magicka, she soon found out, because she didn’t flinch back from the sacrifices she needed. Her greatest flaw, in her opinion, was that she was too eager, so unrestrained in her thirst for creation that she lost sight of important matters, like how she had drained too much blood from the gash in her leg she had to go to the infirmary and answer uncomfortable questions from the Archmage and the Matron.
And yet, it was worth it. Despite the healing spells she’d needed, and the sharp looks from the Archmage for weeks afterwards, her cutting spell worked extremely well. It was for enemies, after all.
And she had many enemies.
.
No, she had one true enemy: Mehrunes Dagon.
After the death of Jolide Halfhand, her once best friend, in the rage of incompetence and how she had indirectly condemned Jolide to a painful death washed over her as her so-called friends had laughed and spread joy that the filthy woman had burned, burned protecting her orphanage and the children inside. She was distraught. She realised she was wrong to join these people. She looked at them and didn’t see a family like she once did. She looked and saw killers and madness and blood. So much blood. She thought of her mother then, bruised and forlorn, shaking her head when Anna had begged her to leave Pa. Anna cursed herself for not reaching out to protect Jolide with heart magicka. She should have chopped off all her fingers, one by one, or cut out her eyes. She should have carved out so much flesh that no restoration spells could have fixed it. At least then Jolide would live. At least then Anna could go on, knowing that even though they might never speak again because of her wretched choices, Jolide was out there somewhere, happy. Smiling.
That was when Anna lost her thirst for inventing spells, for heart magicka. She had no heart anymore, she was determined to believe - or, if she did, it had been replaced by a steel trap.
But the years passed, and Dagon had returned, and a woman with a steel trap for a heart couldn’t do what Anna needed to do.
.
She began to see her heart as a spinning mirror. One showed Jolide; the other Dagon, whose plot she sought to destroy tirelessly. (No, that was a lie. Anna was tired, so tired, all the time, more tired than her mother had been when she was a child, with her bruises and flinching dignity, the way she’d stare past Anna sometimes, as if it didn’t matter if she tried to make her feel like she loved her.)
She trusted Jauffre - not because the man gave her reasons, especially after giving him the Amulet of Kings only for it to be stolen, but because Jauffre’s plans were her best hope. There was no one else, and the mirror in Anna’s chest spun and spun and spun.
And then, came a moment when a blade stuck at the worst moment, and a follower of Dagon’s had expressed regret for the first time since she did. But it did not matter, because Anna was looking into blue eyes, eyes as blue as the sky on a hot day. And she realised there was no mirror anymore. There was only the man, the quiet, humble, foolish, wonderful man.
She remembered what Jauffre had said about the Amulet, what it could do, what the man might yet go through.
Let him live, she begged, as her bright-red blood spilled across the floor of the Temple.
There was a great deal of power behind a person’s last request before dying. Anna knew what sacrifice she was making; she knew what she was giving up for the man.
Let Martin Septim live.
.
“Did you ever think it would be like this?” Martin had asked, sitting on the creaky wooden floor. “When it ended.”
They were in Anna’s bed in her small cottage outside Imperial City. Anna’s skin still stung with the memory of trailing kisses, and Martin was resting his head on Anna’s bare shoulder with a possessive arm slung around her waist.
Unable to bear the intensity in Martin’s eyes, Anna turned her face away.
“No,” she had answered, eventually. “I had hoped… perhaps.” She cleared her throat. “But had I expected to survive, we would not be here.”
Martin sat up slightly, his gaze turning questioning. “What do you mean?”
Anna let a long sigh slide from her chest unwittingly. Watching the dust dance in the beams of sunlight from her bedroom window, she found herself telling Martin about heart magicka for the first time. Explaining her mother, explaining the price she demanded of her spilled blood while dying in the Temple.
Martin was quiet for a long time, so long that she was tempted to move away. “Amazing,” he whispered to himself. It was like he was pushing all the air from his lungs with one word: amazing.
“Care to share?” Anna snapped. Her vulnerability was shortening the lifespan of her patience. So far in their strange courtship, Anna had avoided directly informing Martin of the measure of her regard. The truth that just spilled from her lips would leave little doubt.
Martin sat up, but left their hands entwined - his own tanned, with callouses and bitten-down nails, Anna’s long and pale and stained.
The smile he offered was like the brightness of the sun in the sky.
“The Gods must be looking down on us,”
His smile grew impossibly wider.
“...because I was thinking of you as I died, as well.”