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The thing about Wynne—she’s all pins and needles, all want and wanderlust and fleet-footed jitters, and no Circle, no Templar, no First Enchanter’s stern word or lightning-laced, staff-clutching lecture could ever hope to contain her.
It’s a quiet thing, and she hides it well; she must, because she is a mage and mages live in the Circle and she cannot want for things like the grand spires of the Antiva City Chantry, or the perfumes and jeweled windows of Val Royeaux, the wine and pies of Starkhaven, the wisdom of the Rivaini seers. She cannot, but she does, and when she is a small child, she takes the First Enchanter’s hand like a vow and tells him, “I will see all of Thedas before I die, and I’ll have a whole Starkhaven pie, too.”
And he laughs and says, “You’d better start now, then, because you’re dying every day.”
She supposes he is right. And she supposes she should. And, so, she does.
By the time she’s fifteen, Wynne is the finest healer in the Ferelden Circle, and she harnesses the power of revival and creation the same way a Templar takes up a sword and a shield. They tell her, sometimes, that you cannot save them all, but Wynne doesn’t believe them because they’ve never seen a healer like her, and she can save them all. When she’s sixteen, she sees her first real battle. She casts spells like praying, hands clasped in ritual, neck bent, mouth murmuring, draws the breath into their lungs and makes them live again. She loses no one, and she comes back to the Circle with her sleeves rolled up and her hair hanging down past her shoulderblades, proud and vicious as a lion with its first kill, and this time, she tells the First Enchanter, “I can do even better, if you’ll let me.”
One of the Templars, an old, misplaced Orlesian, brings her books when he comes back from the occasional visits to his village, and the words swim through her, make her feet tap against the floor, give her dreams of cliffside castles and silk dresses and crowded morning markets, and, oh, she wants. Wynne wants the whole world, and she cannot have the world while she’s caged at Lake Calenhad, the biggest continent she's ever been allowed to know. It feels like trying to swim upstream, like she can never do enough, be enough, because her small slice of space and time is a concrete, finite thing, and she knows she must hurry if she is to taste it all, and she needs room, air, space to grow and branch and blossom. She feels like she is suffocating. At night, she reads until late, romances and poetry and old Tevinter epics, bounces on her heels while she paces the hallways. Her thoughts sprint though her head; her mind burns.
Then, one morning in midsummer, the First Enchanter says, “Go on, then. Have yourself a Starkhaven pie.”
She does.
Wynne flies from the Circle like a white dove and traverses half of Ferelden in the span of a year with Templars and other mages, fills herself to bursting with the thrill of it. She walks barefoot on the sands of Amaranthine, sits in a tavern on the cobblestone streets of Denerim, learns to dance the Remigold, weaves a crown of flowers in the Brecilian Forest, has dinner with Chantry scholars and learns to speak Orlesian. She kills abominations and highwaymen. She buys herself a gold-and-garnet necklace, and an obscenely expensive bottle of wine. She cuts her hair, grows it out, cuts it shorter, then grows it long again. She stands outside and gets drenched in the warm spring rain. She fears nothing but weakness, wrinkles, gnarled hands, death in bed, those telltale badges of age. She lives.
Eventually, she makes her way to Antiva, and Orlais, and even Rivain in the far north. She sees a clan of Dalish crossing the Minanter with their landships, visits Tantervale over and over and has a whole fish and egg pie in Starkhaven; she climbs the Anderfels, walks the plains and the salt flats of Nevarra and has tea with a dwarven merchant so afraid of falling into the sky she goes down on her knees and holds him like a child. Once, at sunset on a pale, chilly autumn evening in Gwaren, she feels her heart twinge like a violin, and she lets herself fall in love.
(That bit, they tell her, was a mistake, and were she stronger at the time, she would have leapt from her bed and strangled them all in the cords of their cowls.)
She squeezes two or maybe three lifetimes into one, flitting between the Circle and every crevice and corner of Thedas she can reach, restless as a river current. Nothing is ever like it looks in the maps; the Anderfels are so beautiful they drop her jaw and steal her breath, the shores of Amaranthine smell like salt and cinnamon and juniper, Orlais tastes like marmalade and crusty bread and apricots. Starkhaven is green green green, the city spread out like a woman's tiered skirt, and Gwaren is—Gwaren is love. Gwaren is fishermen at the docks, and a tiny table with two chairs, the sun over the sea. A red wine. A brush of lips. A constellation of dreams she didn’t know she had.
She thinks she would re-map the world, if she could, and sometimes she tries to write it down in between places, but she can never quite capture the right feeling, the itch of longing, the sound of her blood pounding in her ears. You can’t put a name to those things, not really, and none of the words ever fall into place. She tries, and tries again, but she never quite gets it right.
And, as they always do, the months fold into years. Her lips get a little thinner. The first flecks of grey thread through her hair. Her bones ache in the mornings. She learns, finally, that you cannot save everyone. But always, always, she finds her back to the Circle, because the Circle is home. It is a beautiful, gilded cage, with all its ghosts and its hidden horrors, but it is home, and it is hers, and she loves it all the same.
When she meets the Warden again, she has no right to be alive. And she is old now—truly, finally old—and she knows it, that threadbare point where she cannot will the firmness back into her face or the weariness from her feet, and yet—and yet.
The Warden speaks, and her heart leaps. She bounces on her heels and paces a bit while she talks to Greagoir and Irving. Her thoughts sprint through her head; her mind burns.
And she goes with them across Ferelden, again.
Alistair, the not-quite-Templar-turned-Warden, asks about her travels, the Circle, and, once, what you (where you meant me, please help me I’m smitten as a schoolboy) should do about the problem of falling in love. He has eyes warmer than the sun and a cheeriness that never seems to dampen, and he reminds her of—of a lot of things.
“What’s your favorite place in the world?” He asks her, sun at his back, looking to set up camp. He is so transparent, so easy to read, and sometimes she can’t decide if it’s immaturity or simply a sweetness that is missing in so many people and the world at large, but either way, he makes her smile.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, which is a lie; she knows very well what her favorite place in the world is. “I sailed across the Waking Sea once, in a big ship with two hundred other people. I loved the openness, you could see everything all around you.”
Alistair shifts the pack on his back and gives her a funny look. He’s always giving funny looks; she cannot believe he was almost a Templar. “The sea’s not really a place, though.”
“All right. Val Royeaux, then.”
He makes a funnier face. “Ugh, you like Orlesians? I’m so disappointed.”
“And why might that be?”
“Because, they’re all so, so prim, and pretentious, and obnoxious.”
It makes her laugh. Maybe it’s a dash of immaturity and sweetness. “Alistair, you’ve never even been to Orlais.”
“No. I don’t need to.” They’re nearing a small lake on the Imperial Highway, one she’s been to more times than she can remember. They’ll make camp there for the night, probably. It is a good place. “You’ve been everywhere, though. You ever think of selling your memoirs? You could do that. You could definitely do that.”
“Not selling them, but writing them down,” she says. “Or maybe drawing up a more accurate map. But I can’t draw, and I’m not much for writing, I’m afraid.” The world isn’t like it seems. It’s colors and shapes and smells and starlight, the clasp of hands, the warmth of magic in your bones. It is something you can taste, hold in your hands, grow in your garden, climb, swim, dream. It’s the laughter of a friend, the caress of a lover, the softness of words. She can’t explain something like that, and there is no map to find any of those things; but, she thinks, that is all there really is.
She fell in love with this lake the first time she laid eyes on it, clearer and cooler than any she’s found in all the rest of Thedas. She’s fished in this lake, dangled her feet off the dock and watched the stars come out. It’s seen her as a teenager, as a soldier returning from battle, as a woman in love, as a mother who will never see her son again. Now, it sees her as an old woman, tired and grey and fearless as she’s ever been.
“I would.” Alistair sets down his things beside her. “I’d write it down for you. Or just listen, if you like.”
“You would listen to a fussy old woman reminisce over her life?” It makes her smile. “I wouldn’t put you right to sleep?”
“I’ll have you know I can stay up very late,” he says, nudging his things with his foot. His eyes are so brown and so utterly familiar she forgets to laugh at him and instead sets down her things so she doesn’t have to think too hard about how, in another place, in another life, in another world tilted just slightly sharper on its axis, things might have worked out differently.
“All right, then. I’ll tell you about the world, young man.” She sits. She can see a cliff swallow diving across the surface of the water, the way she’s always loved.
“Is here good?”
“Yes,” Wynne says. “Here is good.”