It's nasty. Unprocessed, it can cause blisters, nausea, and in bad cases, basically dementia. Processed stuff is safe to handle as long as you're careful. Processed and ingested, it's addictive, but it also gives Templars their power. Or at least so I'm told, I'm not an expert.

[She exhales, not quite a sigh.]

They experimented on us rifters with lyrium. Not the red kind, but the regular was bad enough. It hit all of us a little differently. For me, it started with fatigue, bad circulation, intense thirst. Eventually there was a ... strong disorientation effect. It was hard to distinguish memory from present experience, and either one from dreams. But that was only toward they very end. They tried to keep me lucid to get information from my home reality out of me for as long as they could.