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Her breathing has been coming out with a gurgle for the last fortnight, a sign of too much fluid produced where it shouldn’t be, something that she hasn’t been able to clear out with her best selection of healing herbs and potions. There’s a low rattling in her lungs as well, probably from the same cause.
She’s dying, this isn’t news. By now she has been slowly dying for longer than she lived without the taint. She had been nineteen, only nineteen, and she didn’t know how easy it would be to be blamed by someone else’s plans, to be tricked by someone that she considered a friend. She had been only nineteen, and no one gave her a choice. She drank the poison because it was that or the sword, and she was still hoping that she could do some good and help people. At nineteen, death, even right in front of her, seemed too distant to fear.
Twenty years later, death is never very far away. She feels it in every gurgling breath now, in how she can never catch her breath, in how she’ll inhale fresh air and still feel like she’s suffocating. Before there were the blisters and boils, her skin rotting while still around her sore muscles.
Death is coming for her, faster each day now, but she hasn’t given up. If she can’t save herself, she might still save the other Grey Wardens. If she can’t find an answer in her lifetime, she might still find enough that someone else might build on it in the future and find those answers. She won’t give up, no matter how broken her body feels, not when she came so far, when she gave this her whole life.
Her breathing is worse, and that means that her time is closer to running out, but it changes nothing. Her hope will not waver, even as her body falls apart. She knows more now than she did when she stopped the Blight, and she knows more than Duncan ever did, and she suspects that she knows more than any Warden in generations. This can’t all have been for nothing.
She once saved Ferelden with little more than a base of hope, and she lost much, but she hasn’t lost that. She will find a cure, or she’ll do enough so that the next Warden to try will find it.