not all who wander

The box smelled so strongly of smoke that it almost made her want to check if it was burning. It wasn’t, it had sat cold and un-moving on the bottom shelf of her Lighthouse office for months. For one hundred and forty-three days and counting. Did the counting stop just because she’d opened the box?

Inside was a collection of papers, charred around the edges, and what few trinkets she’d been able to save from her apartment after the fact.

She emptied the entire thing onto her new desk, in her new office above the lamplighter, with a clatter that felt bone-shaking. The wisps scattered and then drifted back over to…look? She didn’t mind them looking as long as they didn’t- one of the wisps moved through the stack of papers, knocking them sideways.

She caught an errant page as it fell and noted the name on the bottom- Emilio. Her favourite uncle. She scanned the letter. Congratulations, it said, on your acceptance into the Circle. It was the only one she’d kept.

Acceptance into the Circle really meant acceptance into the upper rings, into higher society. A move made possible by her newfound access to magic.

ONE

It hadn’t happened on any kind of special day, it always happened on a special day in the stories- a name day or Wintersend or some other holiday. Some moment of importance. Stories never conveyed the reality.

The reality of a one room apartment for a family of four, with a mattress on pallets her father had taken from the docks where he worked. With mismatched chairs and a wonky table. A tub used for washing themselves and the clothes her mother was mending for their neighbours. Cramped, dirty, drafty in the winter, stifling in the summer.

It had been after summer had finished, but a surprise Parvulis heatwave had left the entire building melting, with doors thrown open despite the potential for thieves and criminals to just walk in. Not even the criminal element had been working. No breeze. The air had been thick with hot, wet air. Like walking through soup.

She’d been given her usual job of ironing the finished garments that her mother and sister were fixing up and cleaning. It seemed obvious now that something had been different. She’d been standing by the roaring fire, waiting for the iron to heat up- even stripped down to the lightest linen layers she’d owned, she should have been sweltering. Instead, she’d barely noticed the heat. A cool breeze had passed up her back.

She’d taken the iron and pressed it to the dress she’d been working on. The creases had remained. Tentatively, she’d placed her hand next to the iron’s surface. No heat had emanated from it. She touched the metal. It was ice cold.

She should have known better, she had known better, but at only-just-turned-12 she’d still come out with an outrageous thing to say. “I think there’s something wrong with the fire.”

Livia had laughed at her. Their mother had taken it more seriously, if a little bemused.

“What do you mean, Neve?” Even then her reputation had been solid. She wasn’t the kind of girl who told fanciful stories. She enjoyed hearing them, but she didn’t tell them. Especially not to get out of work. Which meant it had stung all the more when Liv accused her of it.

“She just doesn’t want to iron anymore.” At fourteen, Livia was an authority on wanting to shirk responsibility.

“No! The iron is cold. I took it out of the fire and it’s cold.” She carried it over to her mother to show her.

Drusilla Gallus was as sensible as her younger daughter. She tested the iron carefully and hummed, brow furrowing. “That’s strange, but maybe you should try leaving it for longer.”

Neve had loathed the way it felt like she was being blamed for something, for getting something wrong even when she’d done it hundreds of times before. But she took the iron back to the fireplace and placed it in.

Staring at it, ruminating on how unfair it was that she was being treated like she was incapable of heating an iron, tapping her fingers on the ironing board while she waited, the cold snap had started.

The fire didn’t go out, but the room’s temperature dropped sharply. Livia had started shivering.

It started to snow. Soft white flakes drifting onto the board in front of her. Neve had looked up, expecting it to be plaster from the ceiling. Instead, snow was materialising two feet above her head and descending slowly.

“Neve!” Drusilla had sounded shocked, but not angry.

“Neve!” She said it like Neh-vuh. Which Livi only did when she was upset with her.

Neve had stared up in wonder, hand outstretched to touch the snow. It didn’t often snow in Minrathous. She could count the times she’d seen snow before on one hand.

Drusilla had abandoned her sewing to come and touch Neve’s face with a warm hand. The snow stopped. The heat flooded back into the room. Neve had been pulled into a hug. She still hadn’t quite understood what was happening.

Liv had spoken first. “You’re a mage?!”

And then everything had slid into place, the final puzzle piece in a truly strange day. Because she had magic. She was a mage- and that was a good thing.

They’d thrown a small celebration that evening, using meat they couldn’t afford to make the bierocks she loved. Her father had been ecstatic when he’d gotten back from the docks. Her mother had spent the rest of the day trying to talk her through how to call on her magic, even though she wasn’t a mage. By the time dinner was ready, Neve had frozen several cups of water and, accidentally, the butter.

They’d filled out paperwork, she’d had to show her magic to several different magistrates. It had taken months. Then her father received a letter from some mysterious patron, offering her a scholarship to attend the Minrathous Circle. In the top ring. Such an opportunity.

Her father had received a lot of letters after she’d gotten magic. And so had she. Offers to visit from aunts, uncles and cousins she didn’t even know she had. People who hadn’t cared about them before, people who’d wanted to be able to boast about having a mage in the family.

Emilio hadn’t been like that. He was a healer. Stern but with a knack for telling stories. He’d taken care of her and Livia many times before the magic and his congratulations letter was the only one she’d gotten that didn’t come with hidden strings. It was why she’d kept it.

Neve set aside the letter for filing. “Don’t touch that,” she warned the wisps sternly.

Underneath it was a letter bearing her own signature. Slightly yellowed with age, and with a brown stain at the bottom.

How many times had she pored over this letter? The guilt of it.

TWO

I won’t be able to make it home this weekend. Thesis project.

A letter sent from the Circle to her home in the same damn city.

How could she have known it would be the last letter home she’d ever send? And it was all complaints.

I hate the Circle. I think my classmates are doing blood magic. They think I’m beneath them for coming from a Laetans family.

Secrets shared with her sister.  

Don’t tell mum and dad.  

She hadn’t wanted them to feel like she was doing this out of obligation. That sticking with it when she hated it was something she was doing for them, instead of for herself.

She’d never know if Liv told.

The memory was one of the clearest she had from that time. She’d been over it so many times.

She’d forgone the weekend visit to work on her project, already behind in classes because she didn’t know the fundamentals of magic like the Alti kids who’d been studying their whole lives.

Monday had come and she’d made the journey across the city, back to Dock Town. They probably could have moved out of Dock Town now, but instead they’d just made the move to a bigger apartment in a nicer building. Where Livi and Neve still had to share a bedroom, but they got their own beds. At least, when Neve was home from school.

She’d approached the new building with undue confidence. Being home always made her feel better.

The first sign that something was wrong had been the door hanging slightly ajar. The inside of the apartment was dark, as if someone had drawn the curtains. It was still early evening and the sun was still up. They had acquired a magical glowstone now, but they still preferred to use natural light.

The door frame was damaged, she’d noticed as she approached. Sense of dread growing. She’d pushed open the door to find a horror scene. The apartment, ransacked.

Blood on the ground.

Her parents bodies in the kitchen, Livia’s in the bedroom, their bedroom. Anything of value, taken.  

She’d called for the city guard. They showed up, surprisingly.

Because she was a mage.

They’d looked around. Because she was a mage.

Even at fourteen, she commanded more respect than they ever would in this city. Because she was a mage.

It hadn’t helped. They’d looked around and given her their assessment.

“We’re sorry, Miss, there’s been a lot of break-ins in this area. Could be a new gang. Could be an opportunist. We’ll keep looking, but without more evidence there’s not much we can do.”

More evidence.

Like the eyewitness accounts they didn’t bother to gather.

Like the bloody footprints they didn’t bother to sketch.

Like the stolen items turning up in a pawn shop weeks later.

All things she couldn’t do a damn thing about at fourteen.

All things that were no longer useful to her once she wasn’t.

No amount of magic could force them to care about a simple home invasion in Dock Town.

No-one cared about Dock Town.

It wasn’t fair, but it was the way of the world. She placed the last letter she’d written to Livia on top of the letter from her Uncle.

There were too many memories tied up in this box.

Too many letters to read through. She gathered them all up into a neat stack again and placed them back in the box, where hopefully the wisps couldn’t find them.

She picked up a plain metal ring from the table and considered it.

This wasn’t the first time she’d lost everything. It wasn’t even the second.

THREE

After the death of her family she’d been passed to her mother’s sister, the person Neve suspected had been able to pay the most to bribe an official to sign the paperwork. She was confident that was the only reason she hadn’t ended up with her Uncle Emilio. He’d have been happy to take her.

Her aunt and her husband had been…fine. They didn’t expressly say the only reason they wanted to take her in was the mage thing, but they didn’t not say it, either. They certainly brought it up at every opportunity socially.

“Oh yes, this is our niece Neve, more like a daughter to me really. She’s attending schooling at the Circle!”

Social mobility in Minrathous was a fickle beast. Being a mage was the only surefire way to traverse social circles. Having one in the family counted.

She’d felt more like a show dog than a child. Trotted out to do tricks.

Her aunt had been notoriously pushy about boys too.

“How are you getting on with your classmates? I ran into Lucia Vitellius on Thursday and she said her third son is in the class below yours. They invited us over for dinner.”

Neve didn’t want to go to dinner with one of her classmates. Nor did she want to get set up with the third son of a low-ranking Altus family. She didn’t want to leave behind Dock Town. She wanted to be more than just her magic.

Meanwhile school was getting worse, with Neve being unable to turn a blind eye to blood magic, or rule breaking and teachers hating her constant stream of questions about why Tevinter society operated like it did- well, she wasn’t likely to find a boy at school.

She quit in her final year. The same day she’d packed up a single bag of her things and walked out of her aunt and uncle’s house for good. This ring had been among the things she’d taken, her parents’ wedding band. The pragmatist in her had said if all else failed she could at least get some money for it.

The optimist in her wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons.

As it often did, the optimist in her had won.

She found herself a job as a paper seller, using her meager salary to pay for a hole-in-the-wall apartment with damp patches.

It had been the first place that had been truly hers. The first steps towards freedom.

And she’d gotten to keep the ring.

She placed the ring in her desk drawer for safe keeping.

She picked up a monogrammed coin purse. A keepsake from the first real case she’d ever taken.

FOUR

As a paper seller she’d found that people often asked her if she’d seen things. People or pets most often, sometimes small trinkets that had been dropped on the street.

She’d had a knack for remembering faces and outfits. Finding people that had walked past her recently was a snap.

But everything changed when Camille Morar came by.

The poor girl had been beside herself when she approached Neve, one rainy evening.

“Please, have you seen my brother? His name is Cato, he’s been missing since Tuesday. It’s not like him. I know he hangs out around here and you’re here all the time so I just thought you might know something…”

Neve was incapable of saying no to someone that desperate.

She’d started by asking around the other paper sellers. Then the dock workers. Enough of them had seen him that she could put together a vague timeline of his movements.

She’d followed those movements to their logical conclusion, a seedy bar with a grumpy bartender.

“I’m looking for a man.”

“Girls like you usually are.” She’d rolled her eyes at the slight, but ignored it.

“He went missing around here on Tuesday. Cato Morar. Human. Birthmark on his face. Red hair.”

“Hm. I might have seen a guy like that. Are you gonna buy anything?”

Transactions, always transactions. Coin bought information. She didn’t have much of it, but what she did have, she could spare on finding someone. She bought a drink.

The bartender cleaned a glass. “Sure, I saw a fella matching that description. He got wasted over at that back table and some guys dressed like mages escorted him out.”

“Dressed like mages?”

“Robed guys. The kind that don’t usually come down here. They’d been hollering like it was a party and your boyfriend sort of stumbled into them and they took him out with them. Headed down towards the tower by the water.”

Easy to follow the clues to the tower. She found a gold chain and a red gem that looked like they went together. Unfortunately, they led to the catacombs entrance. She’d heard plenty of bad things about the catacombs. But in she went regardless.

And stumbled straight into her first confrontation with the Venatori. A cult ritual to the old gods, a gaggle of missing people all about to become fodder for blood magic and her, a barely eighteen year old mage who’d not prepared at all for a fight.

They hadn’t expected her to have magic. That was their folly. They turned on her with shouts and blades and the kind of magic that turned her stomach and she’d focused on breaking the lock on the cage and letting out the prisoners. The burst out of their cage and leapt on the venatori. A brutal, but short lived fight.

She’d found the man with the red hair and the birthmark.

“You must be Cato. Your sister sent me to find you.”

Cato and Camille were reunited and the name Neve Gallus spread around Dock Town. They’d paid her well, or at least, more than her paper selling paid.

Soon she had enough jobs hunting down lost people and items that she didn’t need the paper selling job anymore.

Detective Neve Gallus was born. Finding a niche and filling it. For the lost and hopeless of Dock Town. So that no-one would ever have to feel as helpless as she had in the face of a justice system that didn’t care.

Neve slid the coin purse into her pocket. She might as well get some use out of it, even if she was only keeping it for sentimental reasons.

She poked through the items on the desk again, coming up with a pendant that hadn’t been in the box, but had been on her desk. Brom’s andrastian pendant. The one Bellara had asked about. The one that reminded her that there were good templars out there. And the thing that reminded her that letting people help her got them hurt.

Brom had been a good man.

She’d worked with the templars on and off, when she needed the money or when they desperately needed her help.

Aelia had been one of those cases. But they’d succeeded. Her and Rana and Brom and Jahvis. Stopping her from destroying the city and capturing her. Getting her off the streets.

So when she’d escaped… well Neve had been furious.

FIVE

Jahvis said their hands were tied. But he’d also said that about hunting down Aelia to begin with.

Which is why she’d gone to them again. When she’d found out where Aelia was, again, she went to them, again, to ask for backup, again. Aelia had almost killed her last time she’d gone in alone, she didn’t want that to happen again.

When she’d arrived at the Templar’s office, Brom had been there alone. No Rana, No Jahvis.

“I’ve found her,” she’d said. “I don’t know how long she’ll be there, you need to get this information to Rana.” She trusted Rana, wanted her there in a fight.

“I’ll leave a note,” he’d said. She should have suspected something was off, but at the time it hadn’t set off any alarm bells. She’d been toon focused on Aelia.

“I’ll meet you there,” she’d said. You, meaning all three of them preferably.

Wrong. He’d rushed in alone while Neve was still gathering information.

By the time she’d got there, Aelia was gone and Brom… he’d been gone too. Just differently.

Another thing for her to feel guilty about. Another loss of someone close to her.

Rana told her it wasn’t her fault, but it still felt like it was. Like she should have been able to do more.

Story of her life.

Aelia was gone now. They’d seen to that. Taken off the board permanently by the Threads. It should have felt more like a win than it did.

Even thinking about the Threads seemed to summon them, because the door swung open and Elek walked in, all oozing confidence.

“Boss, they need you.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Why, what’s happening?”

She’d already stood up and straightened her cravat. Elek didn’t call on her for nothing.  

“Someone stole one of the medicine shipments we had coming in on the latest ship. We suspect the Venatori were involved.”

Neve shot a glance at the remainder of the keepsakes on her desk. Reminiscing could wait, right now she had to focus on Dock Town.

+ ONE

After the Blight, after the Dragon, after everything, Minrathous needed someone who cared. Dock Town needed someone who cared. Someone who cared enough to get the job done no matter the cost.

Someone who cared enough to stop the Threads from exploiting their neighbours. To turn their assets against the Altus, against the corrupt Magisters, against the slavers.

The kind of people who kept trouble off the streets, who smuggled in supplies to help the lower classes, who made their money selling lies to the corrupt.

Brick by brick. Step by step. Paving the way to a better Minrathous.

(What had it cost? Everything.)