Dragon Age: Origins

Last of the Elvhenan

Chapter Two: The Demon's Cavern

The day I met Duncan was both the best and the worst day of my life. It would bring about great change for me, change I was not willing to wholly submit to. It would bring about the end of all that I knew, loved and cherished. But it would also bring with it a beginning, and for that I must remain grateful, even now.

It was in the twenty-second year of my life when the day arrived. I still remember the warmth of the sun that filtered through the trees of the great and vast Brecillian forest. I can still recall the scent of spring that lingered on the softly blowing wind. I already felt that it would be a vagarious year for me, though I knew not to what extent, what adventures the coming days would hold, what experiences lie in wait. What I did know was that I had a strange feeling the morning of the incident, like the trembling of a sapling caught in a harsh wind. Soon, I would be caught in a gale storm of uncontrollable events that, had I been alone, would have left me broken.

The morning had been a fairly typical one. Tired of assisting Master Varathorn, I quickly conjured up some excuse or another to get out of my duties as early as elvenly possible. With assurances to Ashalle that I would return safely from the forest before nightfall, I donned my deerskin hunting leathers, grabbed a bow and quiver of arrows along with a couple Dar'Misu blades for extra safety, and set off into the shadowy trees in search of Tamlen. Fenarel, a friend of Tamlen's who he often sparred with, had told me before that Tamlen had gone on an early morning hunt alone. I was certain I could locate him. He and I had made something of a game of it over the past few years we'd both been training to become hunters. One of us would disappear into the forest, doing their best to cover their tracks, and the other would follow. While Tamlen was a better hunter than I, I had always been the better tracker, quicker to spot the telltale signs of passage and movement within the depths of the forest. With this game and his other assistances, I had been progressing in my training quickly, and I suspected that before the season ended I would be granted the chance to prove myself as a Dalish hunter, just as Tamlen had.

Our clan had situated themselves in the far northeastern parts of the Brecillian forest, where the terrain was wilder and more difficult to navigate over. It's said the Veil is not as thin here as in other parts of the forest, but I had little doubt that the threat of wandering spirits existed everywhere. The history of the untamed Brecillian forest was long and bloody, and the Veil separating our world from the Beyond was so thin there are parts where it became setheneran-one could not tell where waking ended and dreaming began. It was perhaps foolish of Tamlen and I, so young in mind and heart, to ever think we knew and respected the forest well enough to be able to pass safely through its depths.

In spite of the thick trees and thin, winding paths, I found Tamlen's trail fairly easily and began to follow it at a leisurely pace, taking my time as an elf should, because I was certain I would find Tamlen soon. True enough, I eventually sensed his presence nearby, as tangibly as I had since I was a child, and heard his familiar voice ringing softly through the trees.

"...are somewhere you shouldn't be."

I was surprised at first. Tamlen was not speaking in our tongue, the soft, flowing tongue of the Dalish, which we sometimes still struggled to recall, each decade adding more words to our repertoire with every Arlathvhen. He was speaking in the quick, heavy tongue of the shemlen, inelegant and clumsy-sounding by comparison. After the fall of the Dales, our tribes learned the shem language by formality only, a formality our Keepers begrudgingly upheld in hopes of keeping racial tension between our peoples as low as possible when we happened to cross paths. I disliked the language, and used it as little as possible. So, I knew for fact, did Tamlen.

"Let us by, elf!" an unfamiliar voice suddenly shouted. "You have no right to stop us."

"No?" Tamlen replied in a dangerous whisper. "We shall see about that, won't we?"

His back came into view, his arms pulling his bow taught, an arrow trained on three bedraggled humans who glowered at him with a mixture of apprehension and contempt. Crossing the remaining space between us swiftly, I drew my own bow and fixed an arrow on the three intruders, appearing beside Tamlen as silently and suddenly as a shadow. The three humans had been anxious under the threatening gaze of one Dalish. With two, their fear was now palpable.

Tamlen cast a sideways glance at me upon my arrival. "You're just in time, lethallan," he said calmly, speaking to me once again in our native tongue, causing the humans even more discomfort. They did not possess the same courtesy we Dalish do, and few bother to learn even a handful of our words, let alone enough to become fluent. "I found these humans lurking within the forest. The are undoubtedly bandits."

"They will cause trouble, lethallin," I cautioned impassively. "Better to be rid of them now."

The humans did not understand our conversation, but it was not difficult for them to pick up on our obvious disdain for their presence. One quickly began babbling fearfully, a clumsy plea for us not to harm any of them, a plea that elicited no pity from either Tamlen or myself.

"Pathetic," Tamlen said coolly to the humans. "I will never understand how you shemlen managed to drive us from our homelands, not once, but twice." The fall of Arlathan and the reneging of the Dales were both tales all of us knew well.

"We-we've never done anything to you Dalish!" the human protested. "We didn't even know this forest was yours!"

"This forest isn't ours, fool. You've stumbled too close to our camp. You shem are like vermin-we cannot trust you not to make mischief. What do you say, lethallan?" Tamlen asked without bothering to switch dialect, a sign to the humans that their fates were firmly in our hands this time. "What should we do with them?"

My expression caused another of the humans to speak up quickly, a tone a pitch higher than the man would probably normally have used. "Look, we didn't come here to cause trouble, by the Maker I swear! We found a cave, with ruins like we've never seen. We thought there might be...ah..."

"Treasure?" Tamlen finished for him. "So you are more akin to thieves than bandits."

"We're not bandits, we were just exploring the cave, and-"

I addressed the human directly for the first time. His language was bitter on my tongue, and I spoke it with less ease than Tamlen did, my flowing accent slightly more pronounced. "We know this forest well. There is no cave. You lie."

"We have proof!" One of the humans moved his hand to a satchel tied to his hip, an action that caused our arrows to pull tighter, warningly. He produced something and carefully placed it on the ground a few steps ahead of the others. "We found this, just inside the entrance." Tamlen pulled the object forward with his foot, and examined it while I kept my mark checked on the three would-be treasure hunters. I glanced at the artifact only once. It was a small statue of a woman, with antlers like a halla, the moon under her right foot, and two hares beside her. The base of the statue was covered in strange markings I could not identify, but Tamlen could.

"Is this...elvish? Written elvish?"

I knew of few things our clan or any of the clans possessed that contained our written language, which none but the Keepers could translate. I asked Tamlen how he recognized it, and he told me he had seen something similar on Keeper Marethari's scrolls.

"There's more in the ruins," the human pressed on, hopeful now that he had caught us off guard. "We would have looked further, but we didn't get very far in."

"Why not?" I asked.

"There was a demon! A huge, ferocious thing, eyes as black as darkness, and teeth and claws like knives! Thank the Maker, we were just barely able to outrun it."

Tamlen scoffed at the idea of a demon, but inquired as to where the cave was located.

"Off to the west, I think," the human said hesitantly. "Follow the narrow path in the trees, and you come to a rock face, with a hole just inside. It leads to the cave."

Tamlen and I knew the area well, but knew of no cave we had ever seen. It was more probable, I thought, that they were lying to us, as any human commonly would. Yet the humans must have gotten the elven artifact from somewhere. It was a curiosity, at the very least, and one we weren't willing to ignore.

There were still the humans to deal with, however. "Well?" Tamlen asked me cautiously in our own dialect, unsure now that the situation had yielded a strange surprise. "Do you trust them? Should we let them go?"

"So the can bring in the mob to drive us out?" I replied with neither malice nor pity. It was a simple statement: "Kill them."

Three arrows flew, and their bodies fell accordingly. It was a hasty decision, made in ignorance on both my part and Tamlen's. We did not know enough about humans outside our legends to feel anything other than mild repugnance. It wasn't murder by our logic; just as a human farmer feels nothing for killing the locusts that devour their crops, we felt no passion or regret for removing that which we saw only as a nuisance. We stepped over their bodies without a backward glance. The forest would consume them.

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The humans had run clumsily through the brush, and once Tamlen and I started out west together, we located their trail without difficulty. Tamlen held the small statue as we walked, examining it from every angle. It was a pretty little thing, and looked old, very old. He ran his thumb over the elvish words engraved at the base, a deferential action.

"Imagine if the shems were telling the truth about this cave," he said to me, placing the statue carefully in a deerskin bag tied to his belt. "Maybe there are other artifacts within, something greater we could take back to the clan. Some lost lore of our people, some ancient relic forgotten for centuries until we uncovered it."

"Keeper Marethari would be pleased," I agreed, smiling at the growing excitement in his voice.

"Yes," Tamlen said, "and perhaps then she would forgive me for...well, all that had happened."

My smile was more sympathetic now. Keeper Marethari had been cross with Tamlen for some time now after he was caught brawling with several others. The childhood code between the two of us still existed as strongly now as it ever had, and in spite of being punished, Tamlen had not given any names of those who were with him.

"Thank you for covering for me, Tamlen."

"Of course," Tamlen shrugged off the remark. "You know I would do anything for you, lethallan."

I knew.

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It didn't take us very long to find the cave. A small worn path twisted beside the rock face and disappeared into the opening of a hole in the cliff side. Tamlen and I both recognized the area, had passed by it before, but had never noticed the tunnel. Descending down into it, we arrived at the opening to the cave, which seemed to lead into the dusty remains of what looked like ruins of some sort. It looked as though the shem had been telling us the truth, though the ruins appeared to be more of human make than elven. Why an elven relic would have been located there, I did not know.

Amidst the crumbling rocks and boulders, there were stones and pillars that had been carefully carved and placed for support and to create the walls and rooms the ruins consisted of. Ancient pathways and corridors had been hollowed out through the rock, leading to derelict chambers that had probably been very impressive at one point in time. Now, they hung thick with cobwebs and the cocoons of vast spiders storing away some unfortunate creature for a midday snack. Whatever had once existed before had long been abandoned to the unyielding yoke of time.

"What is this place?" I asked softly, cautiously, for the air was heavy and gave a sense that something should not be carelessly disturbed. If nothing else, we didn't need the Giant Spiders coming to try and make a snack out of us.

"I don't know," was Tamlen's reply. "It looks like it might have been a place where people lived. There are enough bones to suggest as much," he added with a nod towards the various scattered piles that appeared as though they had been there for ages, long before the spiders. "But the architecture is human. Why would elven artifacts be here?"

"Could they have been slaves to humans?" I suggested, but Tamlen didn't seem to agree with the thought. After all, it took a long time for the shemlen slavery to steal our history from us. The signs of both the humans and the elves we saw suggested a less violent past, but there was never a time that I remembered where humans and elves were said to have coexisted peacefully in caves.

In spite of our careful treading, we soon alerted the oversized arachnids lurking about to our presence, and were engaged in a few skirmishes in order to ensure we didn't end up as their next meal. Giant Spiders were the least of our worries. We had dealt with them before, and they were common in the darker places of the Brecillian forest, where the Veil was thinner and could cause such creatures to grow to such sizes. With my bow and twin Dar'Misu and Tamlen's bow and long sword, even the trickiest of them proved to be little of a challenge. No, there was something else that made us speak in barely above a whisper, to tread cautiously over every path, to warily remain as close as possible to one another. Something in the shadows, in the very air itself. Something that told us we should not be there.

But as Tamlen said time and time again, a Dalish hunter fears nothing, and thus we pressed on. Whatever secrets the place concealed, we were imprudently determined to uncover them.

We reached a narrow hallway when Tamlen stopped. I thought at first he had become wearied from our last short battle with the Giant Spiders, when a particularly violent one had entangled him in a thrown web and charged. It was slowed by several of my arrows, but not stopped, and only when it drew close and I swung my hunting bow violently at it's disgusting head with all my might, resulting in a satisfying crunch, did it fall. However, Tamlen's attention was not drawn from fatigue, but rather by a statue.

"I can't believe this," he said, reaching for it reverently. "You recognize this statue, don't you?"

I studied it. It was worn and fractured in some areas, but appeared to be the statue of a figure, standing proudly with arms outstretched. I was certain I had seen something vaguely familiar before. Upon a few moments of reflection, I did recognize it. It was a statue of Falon'Din, one of our gods, known as the Friend of the Dead and he who guided our peoples' souls across the spirit realm and into the Beyond.

"Back when our people lived in Arlathan, statues like these honored the Creators," Tamlen said as we both stood respectfully before Falon'Din. "This looks like human architecture...but with a statue dedicated to our people." He frowned. "Could these ruins date back to the time of Arlathan?"

"How could they?" I asked. "We are nowhere near Arlathan. In all our tales and lost lore, neither Hahren Paivel nor Keeper Marethari ever mentioned a time when humans and elves lived together in caves."

"Yet that seems to be what this statue suggests, don't you think?" he asked. "Why else would a statue of our kin be built and located in a human ruin?"

I could not answer that question any more than he could.

A sudden movement in the close passage drew our attention away from the statue. For a fleeting second, I thought that others had appeared around us, perhaps beings who still lived within the ruins and had heard us disturbing the sculpture of the old spirit shepherd, coming to answer our questions and assuage our confusion. However, while they indeed inhabited the ruins, the creatures before us were no longer living. The corpses and skeletons that had crudely decorated the ground leapt to their feet and surrounded us, raking at us with sharp bone fingers and hissing out of gaping decayed maws. A flash of horror overtook my mind and was only broken by Tamlen's cry as he readied his sword. I abandoned any thought of using my bow in such close quarters and grabbed my twin elven blades. We stood back to back to engage the fiends. Tamlen's sword offered him strength and greater reach, but my dual weapons were quicker and my battle style was more precise.

I do not know what caused their initial deaths, but I do know that killing the undead a second time is much more difficult than the first. Psychological fear of fighting walking corpses aside, they did not bleed, and were more resistant to physical trauma than a living creature would have been. It wasn't simply a matter of wounding the monster enough that it fell-we had to hack each and every one of them into pieces to ensure they did not rise again to continue their assault. To make matters worse, the ruins weren't lacking in possessed corpses, while there were only two of us. Neither relished the idea of adding our bones to their numbers, and we fought with growing desperation.

The hallway we were currently in had connected to the previous chamber by way of two entrances, causing it to wrap around as a long tunnel and meet in the middle where the statue was located. This offered two paths from which the skeletons were coming, catching Tamlen and I from both fronts. The second path, the one we had not used to get to the statue, was far more dilapidated than the first. Chunks of the walls and ceiling littered the ground, exposing part of a support pillar that was tilting hazardously to the side. As Tamlen and I viciously cut down the enemies around us, more and more of them began clawing their way through the second passage in an attempt to flank us. This caused a sudden thought to strike my mind. It was perhaps not a very wise one, but Tamlen and I were both becoming exhausted from being vastly outnumbered, and while we could hold our own, we could not last forever. With as much speed as I could gather in the close quarters, I ran and threw my entire weight against the leaning pillar, the stone support crumbling far more easily than I would have expected. It must have been very old to give way so readily, but I had not noticed that near the top it was cracked almost all the way through. The pillar fell, and I stumbled back as rocks and loose stones cascaded down upon the approaching skeletons, blocking off the second path completely. Yet it didn't stop there. The hallway we were in began to tremble, and the sudden fear that perhaps the old ruins were less sturdy than I initially thought crossed my mind. Tamlen grabbed my hand and dragged me into a door across from the statue of Falon'Din that I had not noticed before, throwing it open and slamming it shut behind us. We listened, breathing heavily and coughing a bit on kicked-up dirt, but the trembling stopped and silence lingered in the air along with the clouds of dust. We waited, but no more skeletons seemed to be approaching.

"Walking corpses," Tamlen said after he steadied his breathing. "This place is haunted! Something must have happened here...enough people must have died to make this place a land of waking dreams. The Veil is so thin that spirits were able to-what is it, lethallan?"

He had released my hand when he closed the door behind us, but I was now grasping his wrist tightly and looking into the chamber we had just entered. He turned and followed my gaze.

I had wondered since entering the cave if perhaps the Giant Spiders were the "demons" the humans had been frightened off by. After all, I reasoned, shems are probably less capable of dealing with such creatures. Yet now I saw that was not the case. The room Tamlen and I had run in to was free of skeletons, but something greater was prowling about. Something large and vicious, with eyes blacker than the surrounding darkness, teeth and claws like knives, and a towering, powerful body. Were I to choose something to liken the beast to, I suppose it would have been a bear, but I think the term "demon" fits. I assume the only reason it had not already disemboweled us both was because our sudden entrance had startled it.

It overcame that quickly, and stood on its hind legs, towering over us at full height and letting loose a dreadful growling noise that caused my skin to prickle. Then it charged.

Tamlen and I both darted in opposite directions as the demon-bear attacked. The crazed beast made up what little mind it possessed, and as I spun around I saw it chasing down Tamlen. Resheathing my blades in my belt, I tore my hunting bow from my back and fired as rapidly as I could, shouting at the beast to try and draw its attention. Yet its skin was thick, with bones protruding like spikes from beneath thin, wiry hair. Even after I had riddled it with various arrows, it seemed to hardly notice.

Tamlen ducked a swipe from a clawed arm that shattered the stones in the wall, bringing his long sword up across his chest in an attempt to block a second blow that flung him backwards. He stumbled to his feet, ducked another strike, and dashed forward in an attempt to put distance between himself and the creature, scrambling around a glittering structure that sat in the very center of the room. My shouting, along with the creature's own roaring, echoed through the small spaces and seemed to confuse the monster, and it thrashed and galloped about in an unpredictable frenzy. With long, full bodied-strides, it was upon me before I could even fully react.

"Ilysiade!"

I skipped back a pace to avoid a violent blow. Grabbing two arrows from my quiver, I fired them simultaneously at the demon-bear's forehead, where they struck deep and remained. The creature roared and again stood on its back legs, its forepaws raised threateningly. My next arrow struck it in the throat, resulting in a horrid gagging noise that cut its fierce cry short.

Tamlen was in front of me in an instant, and he threw himself forward to skewer the creature with his blade, ripping upward with as much strength as he could. A brackish, foul-smelling liquid drenched his arms and torso, thicker than blood and tainted with an evil scent. He released his blade and jumped back as the creature fell. It did not rise again.

"By the Creators," Tamlen gasped, when enough time had passed that we were sure the monster was dead. "What was that?"

"Whatever it was," I said shakily, "it was evil. Tainted. Some spirit must have possessed and twisted the creature; no monster like that could have been born in this forest."

"Perhaps whatever force caused the corpses to walk also warped that thing." Tamlen shook his head. He may have been remembering the humans' terrified words, for he mumbled, "Demon, indeed."

"Walking undead, demon creatures, Giant Spiders," I shivered as if cold. "The Veil is so thin here, thinner than anywhere else I have seen in the forest. This place is...wrong. Let's get out of here."

Tamlen agreed, and we would have left right away had he not stopped to try and retrieve his sword. While he did so, I glanced around the chamber, and my eyes settled upon the shiny structure that sat in the middle of the room. I had been so focused on the demon that I hadn't even noticed it before, and now that I studied it, I realized what it was. It was a stone structure that sat upon a square dais, with two figures much bigger than Tamlen or I supporting a large glass mirror between them. There were ancient inscriptions and writings scrawled across the edges, much like the ones on the small statue Tamlen carried. Unlike everything else in the ruins, it was not marred by age. No cracks ran along the stone or the glass, no deep grooves spoiled its perfect structure. In fact, it looked almost as though the years it had been concealed within the dark ruins had done no harm to it whatsoever.

Tamlen, having finally recovered his blade, stood beside me and looked up at it. There appeared to be a cool, glittering light dancing along its surface, like the water of a pool bathed in moonlight. Oddly enough, our reflections in the mirror's surface were dull and strangely unfocused. Though the desire to leave that dank place was strong within me, the desire to examine the structure proved stronger, as if some force greater than polite curiosity was drawing me in.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Tamlen said softly. "I wonder what the writing says."

"I don't know, though perhaps the Keeper could translate it." I frowned. "Odd, that it isn't broken like everything else around here, especially with that...creature lumbering about."

Tamlen made a noise in agreement. His expression was contemplative. "I wish I could read it. Maybe it isn't even-wait, did you see that?" His eyes were fixed on the mirror's shimmering surface. They narrowed slightly. "I think something moved inside the mirror."

"Inside the mirror?"

"Look, don't you see it? There it is again."

"I don't see anything, lethallin..."

"You're not looking closely enough. See, right there..."

He stepped forward, onto the raised surface of the dais. I peered closely. I thought I saw something flicker across the mirror's face, like a ripple.

"Can you feel that?" Tamlen asked me. "I...I think it knows we're here..."

I did feel it, and I didn't like the feeling. Something wasn't right. A sudden chill went skipping down my spine. "Get away from it, Tamlen..."

"I just want to take a closer look..."

He reached his hand out and brushed the mirror's glassy plane. It quivered under his touch, like a stone disturbing the water. His blue eyes were curious and intense. Our reflections vanished, replaced with nothing but silver light.

"It's...showing me places," Tamlen said. "I can see a great city, underground. There are things moving about, and...there's a great blackness...something bigger, drawing closer..."

I could not see such things from where I was, and began to draw closer, but the cold feeling caused me to pause.

Tamlen's body suddenly tensed, his hand rigid upon the mirror's glass. "It saw me..." His blue eyes grew wide, his voice strained and fearful. "It saw me! Help...! I can't look away!"

"Tamlen!"

I reached for him, too late. I remember a flash of light, my body struck by a sudden force, and then nothing.

I think I had a dream. There was a face floating above me, dark-skinned and strong. Someone was speaking to me in a voice I did not know, questioning me, apologizing. Someone was carrying me. Tamlen, I thought.

Tamlen...