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“You know, we could just break it to pieces with the hammers now and save on time and trouble,” Hawke opined.
“Hawke!” Merrill straightened, indignant. “This could be the single biggest achievement in the last hundred years of Dalish history!”
“Right, right,” the tiny, wiry woman sighed, hefting Uncle Gamlen’s wallop mallet. “Then go for it, Merrill.”
Isabela, on the other side of Merrill, readied a similar mallet. Bethany, released from the Circle for the day to deal with ‘urgent family business’, stood in the doorway behind them all. It had been a big favor to trade in to Orsino to get her out, and Hawke hoped it was entirely unnecessary.
Merrill chanted something in elvish - an invocation to Sylaise, she’d told them, a goddess of hearth and fertility - and let magic wash over the broken eluvian. The surface wavered and rippled, glimmering --
-- and then stilled again, becoming grey and lifeless.
“No!” Merrill cried, stamping her foot in frustration. The creaky wooden floor shook slightly; a short, sharp ‘click’ came from the mirror, as some fragment or other dropped into place. All at once, the broken pieces turned silver-bright.
Merrill’s face, reflected now in the mirror, lit up with joy. “It worked! Blessed Sylaise and all the Creators, it worked! I don’t believe it! I don’t --”
Then her reflection turned away.
“Whuh-oh. That’s not right,” Hawke said, swinging the mallet back.
”NO!” Merrill was suddenly dangling from the shaft of the thing. “WAIT AND SEE WHAT IT DOES, HAWKE, PLEASE!”
“If abominations leap out, I better get more than an ‘I told you so,’” she frowned.
“We are getting way more than that,” Isabela chimed in.
Hawke and Merrill both looked at the eluvian. It still showed Merrill’s bedroom, but not exactly its reflection as it ought to have been. For one thing, Hawke and Bethany weren’t visible. For another, Isabela and Merrill were naked. And Isabela was sporting a cock that would have made a kossith jealous.
“What... what does that even mean?” Hawke asked, jaw slack.
Merrill was red to the tips of her ears. “Sylaise is the guardian of the home, and the love of bonded couples,” she said tonelessly, staring at the unfolding tableau. Her image in the eluvian writhed soundlessly on the bed as Isabela slowly impaled her on that impossibly large cock, lips parted in unheard laughter.
Merrill didn’t have to hear it to know what they were saying.
”Let me be your home! Come home, come to me and never leave again! I will hold you - ah! - close and tight forever, lethallan.”
“Forever is a long time, Kitten, but... I don’t know if it will be long enough.”
“I don’t get it,” Isabela said, stepping closer to get a better look. “Does she give out giant penises, too, or what? Why is it showing this?”
As the pirate got nearer to the mirror, the surface flashed again. When it cleared, it showed Isabela, and a man behind her. The real pirate gasped, a name none of them quite caught.
In the mirror, she pushed him away and headed for the door; he caught her hand and spun her back to him. She snarled without sound; Isabela knew the words:
”I did it, I’ll do it again. That’s who I am, a selfish bitch and a slut and you can take it or leave it.”
In her memory, the love-light in his eyes had flickered and died, drowned by pain. But the eluvian showed him lifting a hand to brush her cheek, eyes gentle and accepting. “I love you too much to give you up, Isabela, even if it means I have to share once in a while.”
“That’s a damned lie,” she said, voice low and dangerous to disguise the tremor. The happy couple were retreating to her bunk on the Siren’s Call, shedding clothes along the way. “Merrill, make it stop.”
The elf regarded her with wide, damp eyes. “Who was that, Isabela?”
“It doesn’t bloody matter, I said to make it stop!”
She hoisted her hammer dangerously, prompting Bethany to dash forward. “Wait! It does matter! If we can find the common thread between the two scenes, maybe we can -”
“There it goes again,” Hawke said, as the eluvian flashed.
Bethany in the mirror now, on the ground, robes ripped and torn and soiled by the spend of the crowd of half-armored templars gathered around her. The eluvian showed her crying out as one of the men lifted her by the hips and buried himself in her; another stepped into the scene to grab her hair and thrust into her mouth.
Hawke rounded on her sister in anger and horror. “Did this happen? Did this happen? I swear on Carver’s grave I will kill every sodding last one of -”
“Peace, sister!” Bethany looked awkwardly bashful rather than shell-shocked and traumatized. “It’s... a fancy of mine.”
”What?”
Bethany blew hair out of her face as the templars in the mirror continued to violently abuse her image. “There is no way I can explain this in any way that will make sense to you. I don’t want it to really happen. I... just like to think about it.”
“Maker’s breath, why?”
Bethany shrugged. “I don’t know.” That wasn’t entirely accurate but she knew the truth would be less comprehensible to Marian. “I just do.”
“Were those... fancies of yours, too?” Hawke asked Isabela and Merrill.
Pirate and blood mage were staring at each other. “Yes,” Merrill said softly, tears starting to spill down her cheeks.
“Don’t - don’t look at me like that!” Isabela retreated, towards the door. “I told you what I am!”
“Did you?”
“This is so not our business.” Hawke moved to catch Bethany’s hand. “Let’s go and let them work this -”
The mirror flashed again... and flashed again... and sputtered, light stuttering out a secret code that ended in flat, grey broken shards of eluvian trapped in the twisted golden frame. Merrill turned, dismay on her face; Isabela made her escape.
Hawke grimaced. “...Oops?”
“What did you do to it?” Merrill asked.
“Nothing,” Hawke replied. “Maybe that was the problem.”