No price too high

The Faline paper, pressed and clean, shook in Lasair's hand that summer morning, before it crumpled in potent fury and despair.

She wanted to break something. Just a vase to hear it shatter, just one little sherry glass, something. All of her effort to turn the tides against Miriam, wasted for her fellow mages making spectacles of themselves and worsening public opinion faster than Miriam could hope for. She threw the crumpled ball out the window instead and ran a hand over her face with a ragged sigh. She promised Basileios that she would at least try not to break their new furniture, and as satisfying as it might've been, he was still sleeping in their bed behind her. Pushing her chair away from her morning coffee, she stood and made her way over to him, pressing a featherlight kiss to his cheek before taking a slim leather-bound journal from the bedside table and slipping away with it.

She wasn't going to get caught. She had too much to lose.

With her morning robe tied at the waist and her slippered feet silent on the stone floor of the Andraste House, she made her way to the greenhouse where her fox pup, Sarka, was sleeping. Her fingers trailed over his golden fur from his slowly rising tummy as she spent the morning reading and re-reading Bas’ harried notetaking from his time in the Order.

It was charming to see a glimpse of him from his youth. She’d only heard of the sunny young man he used to be before magic became his downfall, and she could read an earnest, voracious love for the subject in his notes. She adored the scribbled notes in the margins, the dedication to a branch of magic he took down in his journal simply to learn. This journal in particular didn’t end up helping Basileios, being about a fellow mage’s mimicry techniques, but it’d ended up becoming Lasair’s doctrine, her one guiding scripture in a time when revealing her need for knowledge would land her in prison.

The journal described the mage Adalyn’s ability to mimic another through physical contact, along with the exercises Adalyn learned to shorten how much time she needed. There were hints of lessening it to not need touch, and that was what Lasair needed.

She couldn’t keep carrying her source of weakness on her shoulders, out in the open for the next cretin to steal from her. Or worse, to fall under the hands of the new Order, to be made of use to Miriam’s tyranny whether she wanted to or not.

So she practiced under Adalyn’s secondhand tutelage. A brush from her cloak to see how long she could hold its enchantment was brutal at first, a strain beyond her means to hold onto. Sarka went diving into the greenhouse brush when she towered over him as a bear, but when she didn’t go after him, fear turned over for curiosity, then calm. After enough returns to the greenhouse, enough attempts, he stopped seeing the difference.

She eventually got a handle on a touch of her cloaks sparking the transformation, but she needed more. Bas watched from the greenhouse doorway, leaning against the frame silently as she practiced and practiced and drove herself past the point of exhaustion, to bloody noses and blackouts, and the result was a transformation borne from a few stray hairs in her hand.

But it wasn't enough.

Even if she carried the smallest piece of her cloaks along with her, there was always the risk of discovery by magehounds, always the possibility of it being stolen from her. She wanted a future that only belonged to her, and if it meant another price had to be paid, then so be it.