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Five years old and he sits on a warm countertop in a corner of the kitchen, wiping his eyes with a dirty sleeve. The cook offers him a warm bun and he sniffles behind the treat, small face breaking into a wet smile. Vaya is there soon enough; as always quick enough to suggest she has ears in every wall of the Trevelyan estate, yet still eternity to a crying child in want of his mother.
"Mamae..." He sobs openly.
She holds him, all softness and warmth, and guides him up to bed in the eastern wing: the smallest, furtherest flung room of the family quarters.
She weaves him tales of the traveling elves of the Dales, of animals he's never seen, of gods risen and trapped... All littered with lyrical elvhen where the words are there to grasp, candlelight highlighting the arch of the tattooed design on her high brow. She kisses his forehead: “Tel'enfenim. Melava somniar, da'len."*
He wakes in the night, eyes stinging for the fear of nightmares. He creeps down to the servant's quarters and finds Vaya's cot. She wraps her arms around his little body when he curls silently against her.
Bann Gregory Trevelyan frowns when he spies him scurrying up the back staircase the next morning: "I give you your own bed in your proper place. See it stays that way."
Seven years old and they attend the Chantry sermon as they do every week at their father's behest. Mamae does not and they feel alone and out of place. The skirts they are forced to wear are uncomfortable in ways they don’t yet begin to understand. When the Sisters call them ‘sweet girl’ and try to soften their frowning face it burns away at their gut. When they stand and sing Morgan’s tongue stumbles on the words of the Chant.
His father scolds him later, cuffs his flat ears. Mamae sings him elvish songs but still it stings.
Ten and the Chant is ingrained in his mind. It runs absently through his head by rote, singing in a faceless voice that sounds always harsh and cracking: a background he cannot escape.
He knows the words. But it is the elvish prayers he reaches for when in need of comfort. When he is scared and his hands shake and throat stings with the warning of tears the words come with practise. But these are not by rote. Unlike the strings of phrases he does not understand of the Chant, he knows what his prayers mean. He may not understand anyone's gods, but the words are enough.
'Mythal, hear your child. Guide me though darkness, my path true as an arrow in the night, safe as at a mother's side. Protect and hold my spirit so I may find safe dreams...'
In the deepest dark of the night, before they have the words to say it, sometimes they lie awake and beg: “Mythal… let me stop being a girl…”
Ten still when the first magic cracks through the skin of their palm: a blaze of flame that forces it's way up when their father goes to strike their cheek. They double over, pain glowing white-hot in their left hand.
Bann Trevelyan locks them in the nearest available space: a cupboard. They sit there alone, in the dark, waiting… they don’t know how long for. His young mind is alight with the worst and darkest possibilities. The lessons half-absorbed at the Chantry come flashing into his mind in steel and crimson and hazes of mindlessness. He tries to push at the door, even to burn it, but the strength is not there and the flames will not come. They are convinced, by the time the door is unlocked, that the Templars are coming to kill them.
The ultimatum his father delivers, silence and stealth for safety, seems the greatest mercy he has ever known.
With the family’s ties to the Chantry, even Morgan himself knows that this fragile pact cannot last. Until the age of thirteen he treads in all ways as softly as he can and lives in fear of the fire in his veins and the strange realms of his dreams. He does as his father says in the hopes of keeping his right to the only home he’s ever known.
In the end, it is not the weak bond of Bann Trevelyan’s word that damns Morgan, but the piety of his children. As Morgan ages, and the tension of their fears grow, so too do the swells of uncontrollable magic. Untrained and scared, when their body responds to panic it comes at times with sparks of fire or lightning or white lights. When the Bann’s second child, Gavin, visits home briefly from his Chantry training the presence of an acolyte Templar already has Morgan on edge. Gavin had always been brutish at best; harsh and oddly resentful towards Morgan’s presence in the household. Now, himself fifteen, he is bolstered by several years of Chantry rhetoric and the spreading anxiety working across the holy orders of the Free Marches from the turbulent Kirkwall Circle. He is being trained to be constantly vigilant for magical corruption and vigilant he is. Morgan is terrified of everything his return the the Trevelyan estate brings and that terror is his ruin.
When Gavin raises his voice to Morgan for taking a seat next to their father at dinner, feeling as the oldest son it was his rightful place, it is hardly with any intention to do him much harm. Morgan’s panicked mind, however, registers only a threat and responses: he brings his arms up to cover his head and a small burst of flames flicks up from his palm and licks towards his elbow, scorching a hole into his sleeve. Gavin recoils in shock.
The first work out of his mouth in the stunned silence that engulfs the table then is: “apostate.”
Morgan spends a night locked in their own room. It is larger than the cupboard of years before, but just as terrifying are their thoughts. This time they knows the Templars are coming. Their mother tries to get in to see them but Gavin stands guard and has more than a mind to run her out of the household altogether. It would not take much to have an Elven woman marked as a harborer of illegal mages, even claim the magic stems from her blood. She has every reason to be afraid too.
Morgan hears her voice outside the door as they argue and weeps. The next morning two Templars arrive in full plate armour to take them away. Vaya tries again to push towards him as they march them through the hall, various family and servants alike emerging to watch with curiosity or horror. One of the Templars push her back viciously.
“Ir abelas… Morgan- ma vhenan.” She falls back, sobbing. Her words choke out. “Please no…”
Morgan will not be permitted so much as a letter from her for six months. The Templars do not trust they are secure so close to home as the Ostwick Circle, so is in Kirkwall that they experience the Circle first. Kirkwall is kind to no mage, and those perceived weak suffer most of all. Morgan is stronger than they appear, but that doesn’t stop the sort of Templars who watch for vulnerability for catching their anxious steps and hunched shoulders. They are not treated kindly.
It is under the eye of Knight Commander Meredith herself that Harrowings take place. By the time he undergoes his at the age of eighteen, Morgan is oddly unfazed by the gravity the Templars place upon the ritual. He has already been broken down by enough harsh words and hands. Either he succeeds and gains a very small degree more freedom, or he fails and they end him there and then. He only asks of First Enchanter Orsino when he councils him before the test to be sure word is sent to the Trevelyan household if he is to die.
“I don’t much mind what you tell the Bann, but please make sure the messenger goes in person to the kitchen staff. Make sure Vaya knows that… I did my best.”
He survives. A Senior Enchanter, one of Morgan’s tutors, even seems to take some pity on him. Seeing his apathy and far from blind to the treatment inflicted on many in the Circle, he fears the young mage will waste away, or take some truly foolish path. He brings this to Orsino, frames all these things are not just wasteful, but obstructive to his own work in and out of the Circle. He contrives just barely to have Morgan transferred to the next Circle whose First Enchanter begs a Harrowed mage to aid in a Senior Enchanter’s current study, for they lack the hands to spare. It is eighteen months, however, before just such a letter arrives from Ostwick. Morgan’s is the first name offered when it does.
Morgan leaves the Gallows less than five months before the destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry.
He will later wonder if he should consider himself lucky to have got out before he likely would have died in the Kirkwall uprising, or if he was instead cursed to have lost the chance to do so while ripping apart some of the Templars who had most tormented him.