- See also: The Calling
Codex text
So many refuse to speak of it, but how can we know it, how can we identify it, if we do not share it? The Calling is not a source of shame. The song that whispers in the back of my mind is no evil upon my soul, but the mark of a life well lived in service of a greater good. If all things come from the Maker, then is this too not part of His plan? Could it not be a gift, a final haunting melody to send us into the afterlife with hearts opened? Could this not be His song?
It scratches at my thoughts, the music almost a voice, at once unearthly and beautiful. I found myself humming it aloud a few days past. Where once it intruded, it now feels a natural part of my mind's course. It coils around memories I hold dear—training with Ser Keller, riding in the moonlight, my mother's face the last time I saw her—and inserts itself into them, so that I could almost swear that music, that sense of a presence watching and calling, had always been a part of what I remember.
This is what the senior Wardens warned us of, I imagine. I should not find it beautiful. I must remember the corruption and recognize that my mind is slowly losing the wit to differentiate between this world, and that which would consume and destroy it. I must. I can.
I will tell the Wardens tomorrow. I have seen their looks. They already know, I suspect. I will heed the Calling and go to the Deep Roads to die with the dwarves, fighting as a Grey Warden should.
But if I am to die, after all I have given, can I not at least allow myself the pleasure of the song's beauty?
—The final pages of To My Fellow Wardens, by Ser Marjorie Berran