i dont know what half the words i just wrote are

She is not at the Conclave by choice. Every step on her endless path has taken her closer to this holy place, closer to finding her faith, but when the harsh mountain wind blows the heavy temple doors out of her hands all she finds is a scene of chaos and the steadily creeping wash of red.

(She will learn later that the red means lyrium, raw and vicious, and when she tastes it refined she will also learn to need it.)

What's going on here? and her voice is high and thin and weak even to her, but it pulls the attention of the towering monster away from his ritual. Shards of something dangerous biting even deeper into flesh as his face twists into a scowl and unattended, the orb he holds aloft falls to the ground, rolls to her feet. The lines and whorls are captivating. Her fingers move of her own accord. A flash, red, green, blinding.

Venaris Lavellan falls away into nothing and she wakes a split second later in an alien world. Her palm sears, something too vibrant flowing into her veins and burning all the way through, and bearing with it a sense of urgency that carries her on unsteady feet towards towards--safety--a being of shining white, suspended in the haze. She has dreamt this before. She has seen that radiance burnt into her eyelids. There is solace there and sanctity and safekeeping from the darkness pulling at her heels.

She will make it. One arm outstretched. She will make it. Breath tearing out of her throat in ragged gasps. She will make it. Mortal skin meets holy light. She will--

She wakes up. A hand grips iron around her arm, pulls her roughly to her feet. Questions fired at her like a barrage of arrows in a language she can only vaguely understand. She is not awake for long.

(The Maker comes to her when she is unconscious. A vast presence pressing against the edges of her mind, sacrosanct, bearing her up in gentle hands to the precipice between mortality and whatever lies beyond. She weeps, and does not know why, and when she wakes the second time with a better grasp of the king's tongue she still cannot think to answer past the sense of loss that begins to plague her.)