Ravens. It was always the ravens. They settled on the gables of the Chantry before the injured became the dead, and watched with their bleak, emotionless eyes as men drew their final breaths.
The town-square ran red. Blood flooding the gutter, the fountain, even seeping in-between the cracks in the pavement. Corpses were strewn across the city, and barely any ground could be seen underneath the bodies and the blood.
Ostwick had been invaded by Templars driven utterly mad by withdrawals of Lyrium due to their separation from the Chantry, and every able-bodied man who knew the sharp end of a blade from the hilt had been called on to defend their home.
And that had involved Bann Trevelyan, and his oldest son.
Cantis Trevelyan, eldest to the his line and only child to the lord and lady Trevelyan, rolled himself over and onto his back. His whole body was racked by pain, and his blood was pounding in his ears and behind his eyes. He could feel every last instant that passed as the agony grew worse and worse, and he could feel his arm wrenching in his socket where a Templar had shattered the joint with a warhammer. He breathed hard, and clutched the broken limb.
The silence stretched out as he breathed. The square was covered with the stench of death and corpses, a deep, sickly odor of decaying corpses and what smelled like stale fish, crept up and into his nostrils. The pain was worse: Every muscle in his upper body was burning.
With every ounce of strength that he had in his body, he stood. He knew what would happen to him if he remained here in the gutter: He would slowly run out of blood, and the dying would join the dead. His legs wobbled, and he could feel the blood drain from his head, but he remained standing.
He leaned against a nearby wall, blinking away the haze of death in his eyes, and watched the ravens above him.
Not today.
Father and his soldiers would be on the other side of the square, and they would have the Bann's healers, as well as bandages and Elfroot, or, at the very least, someone to slot his arm back into his body.
That wasn't the case.
He stumbled across the square, stumbling and falling several times even in just the short distance, gasping for breath as though there were a spear driven through his chest. His whole body shook in a shuttering gasp of breath, and he stood again.
One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other...
Cantis froze when he saw what had been his father's chokepoint. Corpses decorated the cobblestone roads, laying in their final positions before death. Some were even still clutching their wounds, their terror of death kept on their faces even in death.
"Father!" He called in a voice that was strangled, not sounding at all like himself. "Dad!" Cantis looked around frantically, eyes darting from corpse to corpse. The street was not only covered in the dead of Ostwick, but of the Templars as well, which made it all the harder to pick out a single body amongst the massacre.
And then he saw his father.
Bann Trevelyan lay on the cold stones that ran with blood, with two arrows in his back, and long gashes and flesh wounds across his whole body.
"Dad!" Cantis cried in shock, and ran as best he could to his father's side. "No, no no." He sobbed, using his only good arm to roll his father onto his back, where he saw that the throat of Bann Trevelyan had been slit. "No. You can't be dead." He knelt, and felt his father's heart, even though he, deep in his heart, knew it was useless. "Please don't be dead."
Cantis Trevelyan hung his head, and wept.