I put on some sort of gorgeous dress and gorgeous eyeliner. The grief has given me a sort of consumption chic, with my eyes always super-wide and super-sparkly. Because of the crying.

Also, I've had a lot of time to practice doing my makeup while I was busy not leaving my house.

There's a dozen or so of us, all Ubering to the other side of town to get dinner and drinks. The plan for everyone else is to go to some party or another afterwards. Ring in 2016 with some sort of intention. 

[I have a different plan][gin]. 

The sun rises at 7:30. 

It sets at 4:30. 

I get up somewhere in between. Take the elevator from the fifteenth floor to the basement garage, drive to work with the sky so low and heavy that it feels like a wool blanket - like a literal wool blanket. Thirty minutes to the underground, unheated parking lot at work, then the elevator to my windowless office. 

You keep living in [the city][Kirkwall] where [the bad things][Winter] happened. 

Madison is a small city. A quarter of a million people. The isthmus is even smaller - less than a mile from lake to lake. 

Dragon Age: Origins is a hero story.

Dragon Age Two is not.

For one thing, you win at the end of Origins.

I spent four years at a tiny women's college. I am open and unafraid, like a tasty animal that doesn't know to hide from the sailors who just landed on shore.

I am in a new place, and I have new friends. I trust them very quickly and very fiercely. It's not hard for them to make me love them.

Here is my playing field: the one I am closest with once told me that I made him feel like he was rotting inside. A few hours later, he showed up drunk at my door.

I let him in anyway.

Winter is a promise. Winter is a threat.

Every day. It is in the air months before it's on the ground. That ashy, chemical smell that the air gets in winter in cities? A little acrid, burns your nose? In Madison, we get that in October. We get it in September. It gets [darker every day][the darkness]. 

Kirkwall is not a nice place. The city of chains. 

You're stuck there. You had to indenture yourself to a smuggler to get enough money to enter the city. Your family home is there, if you can figure out a way to get enough money to buy it back. And the whole game takes place in its streets and alleys, its underground slums, the docks, the outskirts. 

We'll skip the details, Elia. You, your mother, your brother, and your new warrior friend catch the last ship across the sea to Kirkwall. Mom tells you that you have an uncle there, and a family fortune. 

She was right about the [uncle][Gamlen]. 

I wake up face down on the end of his bed, wearing his sweater, with my tights missing, with my underwear missing. 

Three-ish memories, out of sync. The room turning orange. The realization I should call someone to pick me up, but not being able to make my tongue work right. And the side of my face against his comforter, watching the strings on his guitar sway back and forth.