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Merrill can't sleep.
The ground of Sundermount is cold and hard, laced with sharp rocks that test even the thick calluses of Merrill’s feet, digging into her skin through her bedroll. Merrill misses Ferelden these nights, full of mud and dirt but also rolling green forests and thick, lush grass in the valleys where they were sometimes able to camp. She remembers lying in it sometimes, as a child, lost in her own world as magic danced along her fingers quick-learned from her lessons and insects chirped in the world around, bright pinpoints of life like in the vines and roots she'd learned to command.
It had been a solitary life, there in Ferelden, but never an unwelcome one. Merrill had never fit in well amongst her adoptive clan, not even during the breaks in her duties and training as the Keeper's First, but when she'd lain there watching the clouds, surrounded by nature and the hum of her own thoughts, well. She'd never felt lonely.
Particularly when Mahariel and Tamlen had been there, too. Merrill hadn't realized, at the time, how much she'd felt the warmth of their company, enjoyed the quiet chatter of their laughter and the way they talked, always leaving her the space to interject but never demanding words that didn't come, and.
Well, Merrill's hardly alone, here amidst her Clan. But she doesn't know she's ever felt this lonely.
… all right, maybe it's not just the hardness of the ground that's keeping her awake.
It doesn't help that she can still feel it, too. The voice of Audacity, whispers too faint to make out at this distance but the terrible, taunting weight of its loneliness still tearing at her heart. The Keeper had been all too happy to call the matter settled once they'd discovered the sealed-away spirit at the source of the voices and memories, but their knowledge did little to muffle its voice.
Of course, there’s much the Keeper has been all too happy to call settled, isn't there? Almost unconsciously, Merrill rolls over to brush a hand over her bag, feeling the coarse cloth against staff-calloused fingers and hearing the faint scrape of glass shards clinking against each other despite her careful wrapping.
She'd approached the Keeper about it earlier. She'd spent weeks before gathering the courage, rehearsing her arguments as fingertaps against knuckles, counting the points until she could rattle them off in her sleep, like the tales and traditions set bonedeep for her to preserve. It could save Tamlen and Mahariel. It could restore a relic from the time of Arlathan. It could teach them more about Elvhen history than they could have ever hoped for.
It could restore what they've lost.
... she'd had it all planned out, but none of it had mattered in the slightest. Marethari had shot her down the moment she'd even seen what Merrill had brought, refusing to hear a word against it and ignoring Merrill's frustrated, tongue-tied arguments.
“You will rid us of it in the morning. I will not have it in this camp.”
Merrill doesn't know what to do. This is what she was meant to do, wasn't it? It always has been. She was never any good with people, not fit for leadership, no talent for healing. But lessons, magic, stories - those, she could still do. She could still help her people. She could still use the gift she'd been given.
It's a Keeper's place, isn't it? To remember, to preserve, to restore, above all else?
They've lost too much. Doesn't she see?
Merrill doesn't understand. Merrill doesn't understand, and she doesn't know what else to do. She knows the spell well enough, or at least she knows she should be able to adapt the ritual to stave off the Blight sickness that's been passed down through their clan over the years, but she doesn't have enough power to do this alone, and she has no other options. The Sabrae clan has had no luck with mages, not even a Second born or spared to them, and she would hardly approach any of the human mages for help. And with the Keeper forbidding even the shards from the camp, Merrill has no hope of holding on to them long enough to reach the Arlathvenn.
Merrill has no hope of success at all. She rolls over again on the too-hard ground and curses the tears stinging at her eyes, curses the Keeper her stubbornness, curses her friends for leaving her and the humans for what they have done and herself most of all for failing yet again, and she curses that damned demon whispering temptation to…
To…
… Merrill's eyes suddenly go very, very dry.
Because there is magic, she knows, well beyond that taught by the Keeper. Old magic, forbidden magic that thrums too-fast in her ears right now, magic strong enough to power anything and only one way to learn it.
Merrill sits up. Merrill slides, slowly, from her covers, shivering as the cold night air raises bumps on her skin and welcoming the sobering bite of its chill. Gently, quietly, she slings her bag over her back. Slowly, she walks, not up the mountain but down, away from the thoughts of any mind but her own. Merrill watches the stars, breath misting in the air in front of her, and remembers the names given each by her Keeper, so many lost over the years. Remembers staring at them in Ferelden, in the midst of friends now gone, thinking those days would never end.
And in the morning, to the grey of the predawn light and the clink of glass on glass with every step, she makes the climb to the mountain’s peak, and never looks back.