They are legion.
For what seems like days, we fight them, until our muscles scream with exhaustion and our bones are bruised from the jarring impact of sword and shield and mace. We fight them until their blood runs black and stinging and noxious into our eyes, blinding us to the battlefield. Alistair and I with our backs together, each of us facing the unholy ones in a jeering, shrieking half moon before our upraised blades.
I didn't want him to be here. I couldn't stop thinking it, no matter how hard I tried. From the moment we set out across the city, the words "You are our king, you will remain behind," danced behind my lips, and I willed myself to say them, no matter how much he might hate me for it. The moment I saw Cailan's armor on him, made whole and bent back into its proper shape by dwarven smiths after the ogre crushed it into so many killing shards of gilded plate steel, it seemed to me a bad omen – the endless night of Ostagar all over again. Above the breastplate, once glittering and now splattered with darkspawn gore, I can only see his dead brother's face. His, and all the rest.
I didn't want him to be here, standing before the archdemon itself at my side. As if he would have willingly stood down. But I could have forced it. A king he might be, but I am the Warden Commander of Ferelden, and no matter what crown he wears, he is a Warden first and a king second. Even if he was not, the Grey Wardens recognize the command of no king unless it is in their best interest to do so. It was the same for every Commander who bore the armor before me, and I am no different than them.
I could have ordered him to stay behind, and he would have obeyed my command. Because in his heart, Alistair will always be a follower – go along to get along, he always says. And in most things he is right.
But I did not order him then, and I cannot order his retreat now, at the height of danger to our people; in my heart, I know if Alistair truly means to lead this nation, he must prove it to himself before he proves it to the rest of us.
Watching him fight the horde, so accustomed to having him at my side the tandem nature of our strikes is like breathing, like muscle memory, I cannot bear to imagine what I will do if he falls in this battle, if in the end I am the one left standing alone. After all of the blood I have waded through to get to this point, after listening to his soft snores by crackling campfire light, after listening to him curse at Leliana over Wicked Grace or rankle Wynn with his easy jokes… no Maker, no manner of gods or Paragons could be so monstrously cruel.
A Hurlock throws itself at me, screeching a carrion-laced war cry, and I jerk back out of reach without thinking twice. But before I can counterstrike, Maric's sword is gleaming through the air like a gilded magic trick and a black spout of blood gushes where the darkspawn's head had been half a second before. The head went tumbling to the Denerim cobblestones, its razor-toothed maw still biting reflexively, like the head of a viper chopped off by a farmer's scythe. Dead, but still dangerous. Like the Wardens themselves. A lot has changed in a year – we are no longer the uncertain recruits we were before. We have been reforged by tragedy.
"You owe me for that one," Alistair says, breathless, as I whirl around to impale a chittering genlock rogue attempting unsuccessfully to flank him. Not on my watch, I think grimly. Part of me is flashing him an answering grin to show him I heard him and I'm listening – he thinks nobody ever listens to him, but I hear every word. Part of me is already sweeping through the rest of the darkspawn before us, my sword swinging on and on, moving ever forward, the sensation feeling like throwing myself against living, roaring, writing tide again and again. I have long since stopped hearing my own horrified angry screams. I am angry and horrified and frightened but I am filled with disgust too – every one of their faces glows with evil incarnate, darkness made flesh. They are an assault on the eye and the mind and the heart. Pure purgatory this is, and I feel like this night will never end. Deliriously I begin to imagine that maybe we have always been apart of it, as if we have somehow been caught in the Fade again by Sloth and have been fighting this same battle for four hundred years, wading through nightmares as visceral and thick as rancid syrup.
But even now, as I think it, part of me senses the archdemon approaching us across the city, the hypnotic pulse of its Call the pounding of a diseased supernatural heart that only I and Alistair and Riordan can hear…. And I know the end is coming.
One way or the other.