Kinloch Hold, Ferelden | Three Weeks After the Last Post | (Late Friday Evening Fandom Time)

[not_every_mage]

Once Anders was back at the Circle, he barely had time to change his socks before he was whisked off to stand before Chief Enchanter Irving. Irving wanted an apology and a promise to stop trying to escape; Anders considered it a matter of honor to give neither.

"You leave me no choice," the bearded man said, sorrow in his kind eyes. "An apprentice who won't cooperate with the goals of the Circle endangers all of us. Off to the cells until you've had some time to reconsider," he said, then paused. "The Maker blessed you with a knack for healing, Anders. You could do a lot of good if you didn't waste your energy on running away."

"The Maker didn't bless me just so I could be shut up in a tower all my life," Anders said impetuously, and then he was in chains again.

He passed the long days in the cell cursing his luck, cursing the Circle, and trying to plot a way out. Running hadn't worked, but if there was some other way --

And then, very early one morning, his friend Karl visited and brought along a miracle that Anders couldn't have imagined when he awoke to sound of raps on his cell door. "Are they sticking you in here with me?" he asked in dismay.

"What? No, nothing like that," Karl said, sounding rushed. "I gave the guard on duty all my silvers to look the other way for five minutes. I had to bring this to you." With that, he thrust a tiny leather pouch through the door in the cell.

"What is it?" Anders asked, pulling the bag open to poke inside, revealing a tiny vial and a note on a slip of paper rolled into a slender straw. "Looks like a bit of perfume and a mash note."

"It's your way out," Karl explained. "Some mages in Tevinter have learned how to go through the Fade and travel in the physical world. That's the ritual and potion they do it with."

Anders frowned. "Why haven't we heard of it before?" he wanted to know. "And, more important, shouldn't you keep this for yourself?"

"It's not controlled travel," Karl admitted. "Some of the mages who try it only go a few yards, others wake up in Orlais. Some have never been heard from again. I couldn't get enough for two, and I'm not sure I'm brave enough to use it to begin with. But given your situation -- better Orlais than a cell, wouldn't you say?"

"Absolutely I would," Anders agreed, and reached his fingers through the slit in the door to brush them against Karl's. The risks of the potion worried him, but even death had to be better than a life as a slave to the Templars. "I'll write you."

Karl quirked a smile. "You'd better." He squeezed Anders' hand as best he could and hurried away before the guard could come to see what they were up to.

Anders spent the rest of the day waiting for night to come to he could perform the ritual, as recommended, under cover of darkness. Once he was almost certain everyone else in the Circle was asleep, he sat cross-legged on the cold cell floor, poured a bit of the potion around himself in a circle, and swallowed the rest.

He hadn't quite finished the ritual before he felt the need to retch. As he did, he was dimly aware of lights swirling around him, the shape of demons at the corner of his eyes, voices talking in strange accents. When he looked up again, he was back in his cell and a doorway made of white light was directly before him.

What was there to do but go through it?

[OOC: establishy, NFI, NFB, OOC is love.]