Prologue

Ferelden

Korcari Wilds

They were coming. She knew it not by the sounds of footsteps, not by the sounds of voices down the dank hall, but by the way the girls around her began to fidget. They paced in their cages making foolish utterances echo against the sounds of dripping stalactites.

They whispered about hope. They whispered about families. They whispered about mercy.

The young girl crouched in the corner merely scowled. Mercy. Like their captors had any interest in such things. They'd gone through all the trouble of kidnapping them from their very homes. Just why in the hells would those same men and women release them after all that effort?

It was a foolish notion, and one that she had given up on long, long ago. While five years wasn't all that daunting to the average person, five years trapped in an underground dungeon felt more like five decades.

The beatings. The fighting. The starving.

After five years of waiting for her captors to finally get her torment over with, Adamine Cousland had made herself a name in this place. She was a feared creature, a female beast more so than a woman, and all she had to do was snap a mage's neck. Barehanded.

Since then, death had become a kind of bartering tool for her. She had gained reverence, an infamy of sorts. No one dared to get too close, and no one dared to steal anything that was hers. That meant food, water, and the clothes of the dead that piled up each day.

She'd become queen of this underground hell, but even with all the benefits that gave her, she continued to plot her escape. Even now, she sat in a darkened corner of her cage. Dirty nails ran under each other, back and forth in a nervous shifting of appendages.

Tonight. Tonight was the night, the night of the red moon her captors had whispered about since the day she'd been taken here. At one point, it had been a mere year away, then a month, then a week, and finally, today.

Staring with an unblinking gaze towards the metal door where her captors came out of each day, Adamine waited. Oh, and she was good at waiting. Five years of sitting in a five foot by five foot metal barred cube had taught her patience. So she continued to stare as the girl she shared the cage with paced about.

"Starving… Just wanna go home… Tired. So… tired." The girl's mutterings rolled around in the air.

Adamine understood the sentiment, but she also understood just how unlikely going home was going to be. The only hope she had came in the form of a part of the cave ceiling where it had fallen to crush some of the girls beneath it. Perhaps, it was a terrible thing to enjoy the view when it came with the price of mortal lives, but Adamine didn't care anymore.

Just the sight of those glittering stars overhead made her heart ache, made her mind remember Castle Cousland and the family she'd been taken from so long ago. In the past, she'd been such an ungrateful daughter, one that would have never gotten into this situation had she not traded her evening wear for a stolen pair of men's trousers.

Had she known that Maleficarum had been watching her movements, plotting a kidnapping for a royal, virgin sacrifice, she might not have been roaming the village in men's clothes. One sneaky trip to the brothel had landed her entrapped within a cage spell and knocked out only to wake up here.

Stripped of her disguise and devoid of all the weaponry she'd been carrying.

Adamine felt a growl forming low in her throat as that memory collided with the sight of her Maleficarum keeper. The man had the accent and patchy facial hair of Tevinter. His followers? All blood mages escaped from the Circle or foundlings taken in from the local Chasind.

With the red moon having crept towards the apex of the heavens above them, Adamine assumed they were to be gathered and taken to the sacrificial chamber.

Funny thing she'd learned about blood magic? It always required more blood. Just how many times could one man bleed himself before he got the idea to take the lives of others?

Instead of gathering at the bars or harping on about wanting to go home, Adamine bided her time. Her dead, cold stare kept the girl she was with from flinging herself at the cage door in hopes of mewling on about how she was hungry or sad. That stare kept Adamine close to the exit, close to her only chance for escape.

Chains jangled in the small space of the dungeon, and Adamine watched the starlight reflect off the metal. Smooth bands. Likely grey iron. Adamine had tasted their metal several times before. Once a month or so when the mages came down to bathe the girls by dunking them headfirst into a bucket of water.

Adamine had never learned how to swim, and thanks to these mages, she had even less inclination to do so. Lucky for her, the mages weren't armed with buckets and staves. Just the staves.

Her emerald eyes glistened in the dim lighting as one by one the choicest victims of the night were selected for the Witching Hour's ritual. Like Adamine, many of the girls were second and third daughters of noble blood. The ones that happened to be elven were likely those same girls' handmaidens.

Adamine was lucky hers wasn't with her. Katja was a fierce elven warrior, a Dalish taken and put into the slave trade. When Adamine snuck out of the castle, it was with Katja's guidance, and when one of them ran off, the other followed suit. Every minute spent here was a minute Adamine praised the Maker that Katja had played decoy to let Adamine sneak out of the castle alone.

Their relationship was an interesting one given that slavery wasn't a legal form of trade in Ferelden. An escape act from the castle to the village had landed Adamine in the lowest reaches of her city's lands where the brothels were abundant and the crooks were in rich supply. An accidental stroll into an alleyway had revealed the pens where the slaves were being kept. Kidnapping an already kidnapped elf added a little excitement to the Black Market trade, and when Adamine had hauled a bewildered Dalish to Castle Cousland, Katja had sworn to serve her.

That sense of servitude had allowed Adamine to sneak out of the castle all the time. Dressed as a common man or soldier, Katja and Adamine would sneak through the village and train in the woodlands. Archery and swordfighting were the preferred trainings but the two of them got into all kinds of trouble together. They were training to get stronger, strong enough to find the Lavellan clan that Katja had been stolen from.

Had Katja been taken when Adamine was… Well, she wasn't sure what she would do. Go crazy likely. Adamine could always withstand a beating—it was why her father had finally agreed to train her as a warrior—but she could never stand for the suffering of others.

A scream from an elven girl only made Adamine grit her teeth, and she looked forward. The rattling chains had come closer, and Adamine watched as a noble girl was torn from her handmaiden. They clung frantically to each other. Each one begging not to go, even going so far as to barter lives. Their self-sacrificing ways earned them each a spell to paralyze and then to silence them. Cuffs were put on afterwards.

It felt like half the night had gone by before the Maleficarum's apprentices finally reached her cell. It was finally Adamine's time to stand, and as soon as she did, she let a wild rage creep outwards from her heart. It slithered into her arms. It crept into her calves. All of her muscles began to tighten in eagerness, and as soon as the key was turned, Adamine's fist slammed into a mage's nose.

It was nothing to celebrate. Adamine had tried escaping a thousand times before. She always failed, even after getting so far as the chamber door at one point. This time would be different, though. This time, Adamine had learned their spells, and knew the time it took to release them.

So when one began to conjure flames within his grasp, Adamine threw her knee into his gut. When his head came down on a wheeze, her twined together fists crushed down against his skull. The mage hit the dungeon floor, but he wasn't completely out. Just out of her way.

Chaos erupted when Adamine grabbed another mage's staff to pull her in close. Teeth clenched and Adamine's head snapped forward. There was an audible crunch when cartilage shattered against the force of her blow. Using the staff as more leverage, Adamine threw the female mage into another one running down the stairs.

It was enough to let a shackled girl wrap her manacled grip around the neck of the mage. Strangling ensued. Gagging. Gasping. Growling. It all came to an end when the chained girl pulled with a force she didn't know she possessed. She discovered how to steal another's life.

Not interested in the other female's victory, Adamine continued to brawl her way up the stairs. With so many mages having opened up cages only to be distracted by Adamine, girls were testing out their fight or flight responses.

Some cowered. Others warred. But it was the ones who felt like they had nothing left to lose that really got something done.

Adamine was one of those girls, and using the distraction of mayhem, she finally made her way to the metal door—for the second time in her life.

Her heart pumped like horses' hooves running in her chest, and she narrowly avoided a lightning bolt to the face when blood mages from deeper into the temple-like structure rushed her. The battle roar she'd long since kept leashed pulled from between her lips, and Adamine laid fist to flesh as she fought her way out of the dungeon.

It was like the battle was never ending as more mages swarmed her. One by one they poured out of the stonework. They came around bends as she searched for an exit. They appeared clean out of nowhere. At one point her body was even held captive a few feet above the floor as a crushing, magical force overwhelmed her.

Gasping breaths couldn't get enough air. Adamine knew there was an exit to be found. She just couldn't find it.

Plucking a knife off a table in what appeared to be a dining room, Adamine threw it end over end, relishing the wet thunk of the blade sinking into a mage's eye. It wasn't enough.

Flames began to lick at her skin, threatening to make it boil and blister. Hair grew singed, and eyebrows became a thing of the past as she ran, stripping off the flaming clothes.

Snarling her frustration at a wooden door that led only to a storage closet, Adamine plucked a chair up to throw it between herself and more fireballs. She was surrounded. No way to escape. Her heart pumped faster and faster in her chest. It was a never ending rush of adrenaline that kept her legs moving through this multi-leveled structure, and once she thought she had reached a door elegant enough to be titled the main entrance, Adamine felt ice freezing her feet to the floor.

She tugged. She writhed. She slammed her fists against the metal door that was so close she could lean over and kiss it, but her feet could no longer guide her.

Against the door, a mage's shadow grew. Malformed and misshapen, it moved as if as flimsy as a sack filled with cats.

She didn't want to turn around, didn't want to see the abomination that had become of a formerly human looking mage. Oddly enough, her skull began to move.

It moved as if she were already possessed, and at this point, she might as well have been. Possessed by her own fear.

Inch by inch the shadow of the abomination came closer, and as soon as she made eye contact with the horribly contorted creature—