Neria brings him to one of the classrooms. A few apprentices mingle in the corner, but a sharkish grin from Neria sends them running. “Right then,” she says, turning to Cadeyrn. “Basics first, right? I like Primal magic. That means Elemental spells - you know, fire, cold, earth, lightning.” She waves a hand, and a blast of ice freezes the side of the wall. “That there was a spell called Cone of Cold. Literally its range is shaped like a cone, and it’s cold. Magic’s difficult stuff.”

Cadeyrn stares wide-eyed at the crisp sheet of frost that covered the entire other side of the room, including the desks and chairs.

“We’ll blame someone else if anyone asks,” Neria says cheerfully. “Anyway, Primal magic’s all mostly for doing big damage. When you get real good, you can even meddle with the weather. Cause storms or earthquakes and the like. Needs a ton of power though, so don’t try it ‘til you’re older. Even something like the Cone can take someone a few years to master.”

Neria was not all that older than Cadeyrn - as a teenager in the upper range of years, she was only about 6 or 7 years older. Cadeyrn furrows his brows. “What makes you better at magic than everyone else?” he asks, thinking of the weary, wrinkled, balding apprentices who could barely start a spark.

Neria raises a brow. “Stronger connection to the Fade, I suppose? Or maybe the Maker’s got something in mind for me. Who knows.” Neria shrugs flippantly. “Anyway, Primal’s just one school of magic. There are three others. None of them are as interesting as Primal, of course, but they’re useful in their own ways. There’s Creation, basically a lot of do-good and healing; Spirit, which focuses on intangible energy - mind trumping body, I suppose you could say; and Entropy, which is all about death and curses.”

Cadeyrn listens carefully while Neria begins explaining the details of each school. It’s so much easier to listen to someone else explain rather than read it from a book with blocky and hard-to-read pointy letters, and despite how carefree Neria acts, he can tell that she probably knows more than any other apprentice here.

“So, the Primal school’s the most common one people know, because, you know, hard to miss someone shooting lightning out of their arse. If you get real good at it, you can expect to be using it for whatever war the Crown wages, so don’t stand out too much if you hate the idea of hurting people.” Cadeyrn shoots Neria a look, and she grins and wiggles her fingers. “Oh, obviously, that’s no problem for me. Irving likes to say that I’m sociopathic,” she says fondly. “Anyway, moving on…

“Mages who specialize in Creation are the most ‘useful’. Specifically, they can not only heal injuries and ailments, but can make you temporarily stronger as well. They get to leave more often because people expect them to be nice and heal people rather than blow everything up. So if you’re particularly longing for fresh air, you’d best play nice and they’ll eventually let you out of here every now and then.

“Spirit’s a strange school. Not too many go far in it, but from what I can tell you’re manipulating energies directly from the Fade. The only one you have to learn is the Barrier spell, just so you can stay alive, but the rest is fairly niche. About half of the Spirit spells that I know of are to be used against other mages, which really makes you wonder… but anyway, there’s not really a lot of uses for it unless you really like Spirits and have got a vendetta against people. Which, hey, maybe you might.

“The same goes for Entropy, really - the spells in that school target other people’s life force, though actually not many of them directly do damage. Most of it is about making people weaker, cursing them. It’s some nasty, subtle stuff, but though it’s creepy as Blight none of it’s actually forbidden. The only school of magic you’re absolutely never to use is blood magic. Got it?”

Cadeyrn nods. He’s read enough about the evil of the Tevinters’ blood magic from the history books.

Neria smiles. “Alright. So. If you’ve got any questions, start cracking.”

After a brief pause, Cadeyrn asks, “Can you just pick what kind of magic you want?”

“Well, I mean, you do have to study it. Like with anything, you might understand one School quicker than you understand another. But the choice of what you want to learn is completely yours.” Her expression changes, growing thoughtful as she regards Cadeyrn.

Discomfited, the boy crosses his arms defensively. “What?

“Most people who come here can do at least a bit of magic. Show me what you can do.”

Stony silence meets her demand.

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine?”

Cadeyrn looks at her, looks to the still-frozen side of the room, and looks back.

Neria sighs. “Andraste, even silent you’re still sassy. Fine, your loss then. I can’t teach you how to use magic unless I know where you’re at, after all.” Starting to walk away, she dramatically cries out, “Lesson’s over! Everyone go home. Goodbye, farewell, toodle-doo…”

Pursing his lips, Cadeyrn glares and turns to the untouched side of the room. He closes his eyes and breathes.

The crackling sound of ice from behind Neria gives her pause. She looks back to see Cadeyrn with a hand stretched out, a frozen wave of ice spearing out from the floor in front of him.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Neria grins sharkishly. “Now that I can work with!” she crows, skipping back to the scowling boy to ruffle his hair.

There’s not much time left until curfew, so Neria shows him how to make a small wall out of ice (”The spell is literally called Wall of Ice, by the way”) and parts with a jaunty wave and a promise to pick up the lessons later. Cadeyrn falls into his bed, exhausted from the expenditure of his magic. When he wakes, the half-moon faintly illuminates the room. He crawls from his bed and brings his history book to Dell’s post, where the young templar greets him with a nod.

They rest in comfortable silence in the circular room, Dell standing responsibly on guard while Cadeyrn quietly sifts through the pages of the textbook. His head is full of glowing trails of magic, the sound of ice and the chill of frost, and he can barely string together the meanings of the letters before him. He takes a moment to rest his head in his hands.

“Are you alright?” Cadeyrn lifts his head to peer up at Dell, whose helmeted face regards him. Cadeyrn shrugs and leans back.

“Tired,” he says. His eyes drift shut again. Neria, grinning as she pulls upon the Fade, her skin twisting and warping into the shape of a demon. Green smoke rising from the stone floors of the dormitories. The beds sink, and everyone pours from their beds, half-liquid shadows with scarred, broken mouths.

“Hey.” A hand jostles Cadeyrn’s shoulder, and the boy snaps awake with a burst of frost. Dell pulls in a breath, his outstretched fingers hovering, their tips whorled in white ice.

A contrite expression flutters over Cadeyrn’s face. He unsticks himself from the frozen wall. “Sorry,” he mumbles, casting his gaze down to the ground.

Dell draws his hand back and looks at the boy before him, whatever expression he’s making unknowable through the heavy metal of the knight helmet. Cadeyrn tenses; he’d used magic against a templar. Would that be taken as an attack?

But Dell doesn’t have much of a reaction. Other than pulling away his hand, he didn’t seem to mind the cold frost that nearly took off his fingers. After a moment, he says, “When I was younger, I stabbed my own brother.”

At Cadeyrn’s confused expression, Dell turns his head to look back toward the entrance of the room he guards.“I didn’t mean to, of course. It was an accident. Our father had arranged for us to be taught swordplay, and we were just starting to learn to push the limits of our strength. My brother never liked the sword; he was a scholarly boy, always preferred books and libraries to the outdoors. But every man should learn to defend himself if he has the opportunity, so my father pushed him to attend lessons. I, meanwhile, craved every lesson. I had dreams of becoming a hero, a lord knight who would ride against armies and rescue beautiful damsels. I threw myself into the training and brashly swung my sword around at any moment I could.

“There was a day where I had been practicing alone in the grounds. I had been holding the sword in front of me, simply posing and feeling out the stances. But I had been building up, readying myself to launch into my swings. My brother had come up to me then from behind. Quiet as he was, I hadn’t even noticed. All he did was simply call out my name, softly— and in my mind, warped by my imagination of bloody battles and feverish with instinct, it became an attack. So I spun around and stabbed, just like I had practiced so many times before.

“By the time I realized what I had done, my brother was already on the ground and bleeding out. I called out for help from my father, the servants, anyone. Someone fetched a healer, who stabilized him for a moment, but the damage was… severe. It was not certain that he would last for much longer.”

Dell’s quiet voice pauses. His helmet points stoically at the entrance, and Cadeyrn looks at that metal shining with moonlight as though a blade rested on its edge.

“It was then,” Dell said, “that the templars from the Chantry came. They escorted a mage, a tall and willowy woman with grey hair and kind eyes. My mother hadn’t wanted her there— the last thing we needed was magic, she said. But in the face of my mother’s anguished rage, the mage only looked at her with a great calm. And when my mother had finished shouting, the mage said that she was here to save my brother’s life.

“What she did was a miracle. The fatal wound that I had inflicted on my brother faded in an instant. The mage looked winded by the end, but she did not ask for recompense of any sort. She merely said that our thanks was enough, and she looked at me and said that I should perhaps try to be more careful in the future. And that was it. She left, the templars following her out, and returned on her journey.

“When my brother recovered enough to regain his senses, I slunk to his side like a beat-up dog, ready to face whatever blame and hatred I thought he must have for me. I had nearly killed him, after all, and such a thing could not be so easily passed off. Yet pass it off he did. My brother took one look at my guilty face and laughed, though it pained his ribs. He told me that I should not feel as if the entire weight of the blame rested on me, for he should have known better than to startle someone with a sharp sword in his hands. He said that people approaching those who wield great power should be wary, lest that power be turned on them; and he also said that people with great power should be cautious and practice proper restraint, for if they wield their power too loosely, they will drive away everyone around them until no one dares to stand by their sides.”

The helmet turns to the side, then, and an echoing laugh escapes from it when the man inside catches sight of Cadeyrn’s consternated face. “Yes, he’s quite a wordy person, my brother. Likes to think he’s a poet. But what he said was right. If you approach someone with a sword, you should be careful to not get stabbed. Likewise, if you wield the sword, you should try your best not to stab anyone you didn’t mean to. But accidents will happen eventually, so at that time, we should be forgiving and do our best to be more cautious for the next time. Do you agree?”

Hearing that question, Cadeyrn blinks, and the vague pieces of the story finally slot together in his head. The templar is trying to teach him something. He wonders if this is what a storybook is like, this kind of long and fantastical tale about brothers and swords, magic and forgiveness. He bites his lip and nods, understanding, somewhat, that Dell was trying to tell him that he was forgiven for using his magic, but should try not to do so again.

Cadeyrn thinks of the strict watch the templars had against magic use, now, after the demon-mage, and wonders if someone else would have cut him down rather than try to teach him a lesson.

Satisfied by the boy’s acquiescence, Dell hums and turns back to stand properly at his post.

“I feel I should tell you the rest of the story, now,” he says, after a short and thoughtful silence. “It was because of this that I gave up on my ambitions of becoming some heroic knight, and instead opted to join the Templar Order. I felt that I should follow a path of restraint and protection rather than one of bloodlust and boasting, and I also could not forget the kindness of the mage who had saved my brother. I had not known much about mages back then. She completely overturned everything I thought I knew about them—about you. I decided that it would be an honor to dedicate my life to the protection and guidance of the people who wielded such a miraculous power, for I realized, then, that mages are all people like anyone else, capable of great generosity and altruism in unexpected places. When the Maker said that magic must serve man, not rule over him, I believed this to mean that the mages must become the masters of their own magic, never letting the fear of their own powers rule over them; for when a mage accepts their abilities and masters their potential, they are capable of greater feats than anyone.”

Dell looks at Cadeyrn sitting on the stone floor, the heavy book open in front of him. A trace of frost lingers like dust scattered over the stone.

“I believe in your potential. You’re young, but already I see that you have a drive unlike many of your peers. That’s why I encourage you to keep trying your best, and don’t take any failures to heart. And whatever worries you may have, you’re welcome to share them with me.”

A long time had passed while Dell told his story. Now, the sun began to peek from the horizon, a soft glow emanating from the windows. Cadeyrn regards the figure of the knight as the morning light of dawn casts a halo over the armored silhouette. A strange warmth curls up inside of him.

“Alright,” he says quietly, turning his face down to hide the shine in his eyes.