Room 317, Thursday Evening

[not_every_mage]

Anders hadn't seen Merrill often lately except in passing, but she was the first person he thought of when all his efforts to determine a way to find Kathy using his own powers or the island’s resources hit a dead end. He didn't know the right magic to find someone who might well be dead. But the Dalish had to have some kind of old-timey Elvish way to do it that Circle mages never learned, didn't they?

It was a slender hope, but slender hopes were all Anders had. He tapped on Merrill's door and held his breath.

Merrill	Merrill, to tell the truth, had gotten a little too caught up in trying to research more about eluvians lately, and probably couldn't tell you what day it was. But she did hear the tap on the door and got up to answer it. "Hello?" she asked, just before she cracked the door open wide enough to peer through, blinking as if she had to try and remember how to focus on faces instead of words (which was true). "Anders? What are you -- you're not looking for me, are you?"
Anders	"I was, actually," Anders said, blinking right back at her. Merrill always seemed a little surprised, and it threw him off-balance. "I wanted to ask you about something, and it might sound mad once I explain it. Do you have a minute?"
Merrill	She got so focused on what she was doing sometimes that anything outside of that focus came as a surprise, really. "Yes, of course, I've got time," Merrill agreed, stepping back from the door and gesturing for him to come in. "That is, if you don't mind the . . . it's a bit of a mess right now, ir abelas, there's books everywhere. I'll have to remember to do better about cleaning up before people visit." Spoiler: that would never happen.
Anders	"Mine's about the same," Anders confided as he stepped through the door. "And it's not as though you were expecting me." He looked to the desks, trying to judge which chair he was supposed to sit in. "Anyhow, what I wanted to ask was -- do the Dalish have any way to find someone who's gone missing?"
Merrill	Merrill waved a hand vaguely in the direction of a chair that only had a small stack of what looked like pamphlets on it, then scurried over to clear them off. "Gone missing?" she echoed. "Our scouts will usually go out to find them . . . "oh, that isn't what you meant, is it?" She tilted her head slightly as her expression turned just a touch distracted; she'd defend the Dalish way of life at the slightest provocation, but she'd spent enough time around books here that she'd very reluctantly admit that it was a little inconvenient, having to sort through everything she'd ever had to memorize. People who had an accessible written language were lucky. "I'm not sure," she said after a moment, frowning. "Do you have any idea where to start looking?"
Anders	"It's Kathy," Anders explained. "She went home to Los Angeles and -- er, do you know what zombies are? Sort of like walking corpses with the blight. She tried to fight them. Last anyone heard from her she was very sick. Probably dying." Behind his back, he was digging his nails into his palms so he would keep his focus. So he wouldn't start crying. "I had a Fade dream the other night, and in it she told me to come find her. She said to start in Los Angeles. If there's any way -- well, I have to, don't I?"
Merrill	Merrill nodded when he asked about zombies, and the slight frown on her face deepened as she listened to Anders's explanation. "Of course you do," she said with a firm little nod and a more assertive tone than usual, but then again they were talking about magic she was familiar with, and that she knew about. What to say to reassure him, or even if she should -- that was a murkier subject. She began to pace a few steps in either direction, sketching vague patterns in the air with her hands. "There's nothing I can recall in the Elvhen histories that might work, but . . . you said you saw her in a Fade dream?" Her understanding of the eluvians was incomplete at best, but that seemed to give her an idea. "That could be it. It's said my people once used enchanted mirrors to send messages over long distances, or even travel. That form of magic is lost to us, but there are stories about people traveling physically through the Beyond." She paused, then clarified, "What you call the Fade." Which would be an extremely dangerous prospect at best, and terminal at worst.
Anders	Anders visibly brightened, as though the magic they were discussing wasn't an insanely risky and possibly fatal proposal for a pair of half-trained mages. He stopped clenching his fists and nodded enthusiastically. "That's like the portal spell that got me here," he said. "The person I got it from didn't know how it worked, but the 'Fade travel' bit was the same. If I could do it again and control where I'm going this time, that'd be perfect. Do you know how?"
Merrill	Merrill frowned and shook her head. "Even if I did, it would be hard to explain, when the Fade manifests differently for you than it would for me. But the spirits who live there -- they know their way around, don't they? And how to cross the Veil. " Oh, there were reasons that Dalish mages didn't deal with Fade spirits as a general rule, but they didn't have friends in other worlds to rescue, now, did they? "If you could convince one to show you the way . . ."
Anders	"You aren't meant to trust them, are you?" Anders asked, squinting a bit. He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. "I've heard there's no way to tell a spirit from a demon." Still. It was the only half-decent idea he'd had, and that alone made it tempting. Besides, there had to be some good spirits in the Fade, didn't there? It wasn't too hard to believe some spirit of love or friendship would guide him to Kathy.
Merrill	"Well, demons are spirits, aren't they?" Merrill asked, feeling this was a perfectly reasonable question. "They aren't meant to be trusted, any of them, that's what the Keeper says. I don't think there's a way to avoid that risk, not unless you can find one, and bind it to your will."
Anders	If Anders had taken the time to listen to Merrill's point about demons and spirits, things might have gone much better for him in the future. But he barreled right past that with typical selective hearing. "Binding it to my will," he mused. "I've heard they do that in Tevinter. But I thought it took blood magic." Though somehow, with his Circle training two years behind him and Kathy on the line, blood magic wasn't as terrifying as it would have been a few months before.
Merrill	"Unless you can get a hold of a mountain of lyrium somehow, that might be the only way," agreed Merrill, who in her eagerness to talk about the one thing she didn't feel entirely clueless about had half forgotten they weren't discussing a hypothetical situation. "And it isn't all as bad as your Chantry says it is, anyway." All right, that statement was mostly a matter of Dalish pride. "If it was, they wouldn't use it to let the templars track mages down."
Anders	"I never thought of it like that," Anders said slowly. "But that'd be just like them, wouldn't it? Make us fear something they do themselves, so we don't think to use it against them." It was of course highly convenient for Anders to come to this conclusion when blood magic offered a way to save someone he loved. But he wasn't in a frame of mind to be objective.
Merrill	Was Keeper Marethari somewhere in the Brecilian Forest, suddenly possessed of the urge to bang her head into a tree trunk? "If people are really that afraid of things they don't understand," Merrill said, her voice betraying a touch more bitterness than she meant it to, "then maybe the only thing they can think of to do is make everyone else afraid, too." That was perhaps not specifically pertaining to blood magic any more, no.
Anders	If Marethari had that urge, it was no doubt joined by First Enchanter Irving's impulse to pound his forehead against the walls of Kinloch Hold. "They have to find some way to control us, don't they?" Anders said, equally bitter. "Just in case building most of a religion around it isn't enough." That wasn't strictly about blood magic either. "Do I need to do anything special, or just will it and...?", he asked, miming slashing his palm with an invisible knife.
Merrill	"Anything special? Only if you were to ask a Tevinter magister, I think." It was an awkward attempt at a joke, and Merrill's shaky little laugh acknowledged as much. "Because of how they -- I'm babbling, never mind." She shook her head and continued in a more serious tone, "It's dangerous, you know. You'd have to be careful."
Anders	"I know," Anders said sincerely. "And believe me, I'm going to take every other road to its end before I start messing with blood magic. But it's a relief to know there's something that could work."
Merrill	"If it's worth that much to find her, then I hope you do," offered Merrill, who seemed pleased to have been of some help.
Anders	"She told me she loved me," Anders said, half-bashful. "Nobody's ever said that to me before. Not like that." And if he lost Kathy, the way he kept losing people, how could he be sure anyone would ever say it again?
Merrill	Merrill wasn't really sure what 'like that' entailed, to be honest, but it sounded significant. Enviable, even. "Oh, that sounds nice," she said, sincere if somewhat vague. "Good luck . . . that's not an inappropriate thing to say, is it? I'm never really . . . " She flailed her hands awkwardly for a moment. "Never mind, just don't get lost in the Fade, all right?"
Anders	'Like that' because Anders had heard it from his parents, and from lovers in odd moments of passion or tenderness, and hadn't quite realized yet that he was lucky to have even that much. "I promise I'll be back as soon as I can," he said, and reached to pat her arm in a way meant to offer reassurance. "It wouldn't do for me to go chasing Kathy and end up lost myself."
Merrill	Whereas Merrill had only the vaguest memories of her parents, generally chalked such sentiments from Marethari up to the Keeper's responsibility to the clan at large, and could never really be sure if it meant something different to humans, anyway. "It isn't so bad, when you get used to it, getting lost," she said with a faint laugh, "but I don't think getting all turned around in the Fade would be quite the same as ending up in half the supply closets in the school. I don't think I would recommend that."
Anders	"I wouldn't recommend either one," Anders said, a rusty laugh in his voice. "Have you found any interesting supply closets?"
Merrill	"No. But the locker was much bigger on the inside than I expected!" From her voice, it sounded as if Merrill had found that a pleasant surprise. "I shouldn't keep you too long, though, should I? You've got important business to take care of."
Anders	"I should go," Anders cribbed from Shepard agreed. "But thanks, Merrill. I won't forget this." There was a renewed spring in his step as he left her room. He hadn't been lying about viewing blood magic as a last resort, but he was closing in on the point where last resorts would be all he had.

[OOC: Preplayed with cracksmostly. Discussion of blood magic NFB. NFI, OOC is love. Content warning for extreme wrongheadedness.]