I could vividly imagine how Leliana must have felt during her long journey through Ferelden after Marjolaine’s betrayal, alone and destroyed.
The fictional events that Leliana went through were far more serious than what happened to me over the course of my university years (and I had never turned to religion as a means of recovery) but the parallels were there. The nuances of her past that had sailed over my head as a teenager now struck me square in the chest: I watched as Leliana slowly revealed how she was groomed by Marjolaine as a teenager, manipulated into a relationship for many years, suddenly and devastatingly abandoned for a perceived slight, and then how she so clearly latched onto the Chantry in a desperate bid for some semblance of identity. What wasn’t predictable was how Leliana’s story hit me like a freight train the second time around.
