[Most] dialogue taken from the Dragon Age: Witch Hunt DLC. Elvhen taken from fan conlanger fenxshiral on tumblr and Ao3. This is the last chapter in Thedas and the last in the Witch Hunt arc. I am taking liberties with some of the canon for Thedas dwarva.
On the fourth day, Dirthamen heard them. He whispered into the mountains and the fallen trees of the forest gathered, shaping an immense and agile spider-like beast. It was the varterral. With lightning speed, vicious strikes, and venomous spit, it drove back the serpent. From then on, it was the guardian of the city and its people.
- From The Tale of the Varterral, as told by Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan of Dalish elves
22 Harvestmere, 9:32 Dragon: Dragonbone Wastes, northern Ferelden
Far to the south of Thedas, nestled between high, forboding mountains, is a place where they say dragons go to die. There, in that harsh and wild land, a dragon at the end of her days would lie down and allow the bitter cold to take her. The Tevinter Imperium believed the tales, and imagined that the bones of these great and ancient beasts must be suffused with power—power they could take for themselves. And thus they sought out the place that their legends spoke of. When they found it, and saw the bones piled upon ancient bones, they named it Drake's Fall.[1]
Going up from the southeast, they stopped in at Denerim so Natia could catch up with "The Bloodhound" Elyssa Cousland-Theirin and King Alistair; Ariane stayed outside the city with Banal'ras, while Finn explored the market district, spending some of the money they'd found in Cadash Thaig. After a day spent with her formerly fellow Wardens, Natia sent off a letter to Antiva, hoping it would somehow reach Darrian and Zevran. They spent another day at Vigil's Keep, where Finn closeted himself with Daylen and the Warden mage named Anders to talk magic and Natia reminisced with Sigrun, the former Legionnaire.
The other dwarf had once been casteless, like herself, but had lost that status the moment she committed herself to an honorable death with the Legion of the Dead. She was approaching middle-age at 80, quite old for a Legionnaire but relatively young compared to most dwarven Wardens. Duran Aeducan himself had been 90 the day he'd gotten his first command, and not quite 91 when he'd died. Most dwarves reached official adulthood at the age of 35, the equivalent of 20 in human years; dusters, however, were forced to mature earlier than other dwarves. Natia had been 15 when her father had left for the Surface and Kalah started drinking. Within a year they'd lost almost everything, and only by sweeping the streets and running messages for the Iron District, home of the Smith Caste, was she able to pay for their rent. By the time she was 28 she had started working for Beraht, and eventually he had grown fond enough of her that he'd agreed to sponsor her sister as a noble hunter. If she hadn't been infertile herself, he would have sponsored her as well, though she wasn't nearly as feminine and beautiful as Rica. Her beard had always been a bit fuller than a female's should be, scruffy instead of neat, her hair thick and unruly, dark rather than her sister's lovely red.
Sigrun had worked for the Carta before Beraht came onto the scene. Natia barely remembered her leaving Dust Town; most of the casteless had shown up to her ceremonial funeral, which was really just an excuse to throw a roaring party and drink all the ale the Legion could supply. That was the night she had met Leske and gotten drunk off her head for the first time, which was why she remembered it at all.
A cloud of bats rose from the dragons' bones as they approached the Dragonbone Wastes, coming off of the Imperial Highway. They circled overhead and winged away from the setting sun in a chorus of squeaks and flapping wings. Natia did not like the implications of that. Bats did not generally like roosting outside of caves.
"We're here. Keep your eyes open for dragons. And mirrors." Finn glanced around over-cautiously, as if expecting the ancient dragons buried there to spring back to life.
"I have experience killing dragons, don't worry," said Natia, but she flexed her hands and pulled her axes ready.
"We should not have come here after dark," muttered Ariane, drawing her bow.
They walked slowly, stealthily, placing one foot in front of the other as carefully as they could manage. Natia, an experienced criminal, and Ariane, the Dalish warrior, made no noise as they went. Finn, the overexuberant mage who had learned quite a bit since leaving Kinloch Hold, didn't make terribly much noise, though to Natia it sounded like a stampeding bronto. He cast light on their path with his staff until it left them night-blind to any dangers outside of their radius of light; Ariane told him with a low hiss to snuff it.
The wolf's eyes reflected the pale half-moon, far above. Other eyes, multiple pairs of eyes, gleamed down at them from atop a nearby skeleton. The wolf's snarling growl was all the warning they had before the dragonlings launched at them, claws tearing and fangs ripping and flames licking at their arms and legs. They tangled in a flurry of steel and dragonfire, and Finn gave them a cautionary shout before blinding them all with a brilliant flash of light. The dragonlings squawked and reeled, their far more sensitive eyes blinded; Natia blinked away afterimages and hacked at the aggressive young dragons before they could recover. Ariane's bowstring thrummed as she struck one after another in their sensitive nostrils and eyes. Her wolf clung grimly to the largest's neck as it tried to shake him off, worrying at its tough hide with his teeth.
And then it was over.
"Not bad," said Natia, putting away her axes and examining the corpses. "Wade will be happy. This will make some fine leather armour."
"Watch out!" Finn shouted, casting fire over her head, catching the stranger who had attempted to leap on her from the shadows. She ducked and rolled away, coming up with her boot-knife in one hand and two smaller throwing knives in the other.
"Shit," said Natia eloquently upon seeing the human who had tried to kill her from behind. "Dragon worshipper. Where there's one, there's—Ariane, behind you!"
Her warning was unnecessary. By the time Ariane had spun around, Banal'ras had leapt on her attacker with a fearsome snarl and latched onto the arm held out to protect the cultist's throat, worrying at it as the human screamed. Natia let one of her throwing-knives fly, ending his misery. Another just missed its mark as more dragon worshippers poured out of the enormous skeletons around them, hitting a ferocious-looking woman in the shoulder instead of the throat. Finn swept his staff in front of them, drawing a wall of fire on the ground between them, giving the two women just enough time to draw their weapons before it dissipated. Three men wearing only hide armor and warpaint charged them all at once, howling madly with blood in their eyes: Natia found herself in fierce battle with the shortest, who could have been a half-dwarf if such a thing existed.
" 'Keep an eye out for dragons,' he says. Dragon cultists seem to be the more dangerous." Ariane shook her head.
"I've never met a dragon worshiper before. Not much for small talk, are they?" Finn called as he caught their two archers in a paralysis hex.
"Why would anyone worship a dragon?" Ariane ducked under a cultist's wild two-handed axe swings and took his head with a sweep of her sword, adding under her breath, "isenathe'dirthelan.[2] I never understood that word before."
"Dragons are big, powerful, and they breathe fire. Some people are easily impressed." The mage shrugged expansively, twirling his staff and planting it firmly enough on a fallen cultist's head that his skull caved in, stilling the man's attempts to slice their ankles open. He grimaced at the mess on his staff and wiped it carefully off on the cleanest bit of cloth he could find on their enemies' bodies. "I, not so much."
Around the next bend they found more cultists, these ones guarding a drake and several much younger dragonlings, freshly hatched out of a nearby nest. The cultists were hampered by their efforts to protect the hatchlings, and were thus dispatched easily enough. The drake took a bit more work to kill, nearly biting Natia in two, instead managing to sink its teeth into her shoulder and shaking her like a dog. He released her when Ariane stabbed it in the side and Finn immediately engulfed it in a burst of electricity, finishing it off.
Natia had landed in a crumpled heap. With Finn assisting, she managed to get to her feet, staggering as they walked. She chewed the elfroot she'd taken from the book in the Circle Tower to stem the pain, though it didn't help much. Ariane scouted ahead with Banal'ras as Finn pulled off her leather cuirass and applied an injury kit. Ariane soon returned with good news: she'd found the cultists' camp. They decided to spend the rest of the night there, while Nat's injury healed.
The bedrolls looked invitingly soft and waterproof, there was some sort of tasty-smelling stew bubbling over the fire, and there was a chest full of stuff the cultists took from innocent passerbys. Finn found a magical amulet shaped like a dragon's head with rubies for eyes which gave the wearer fire resistance; since he was already wearing a pendant that boosted his reserves of magic and Ariane wore a Dalish necklace designed to enhance her attack speed, the dragon necklace went to Natia. As a dwarf she was already resistant to magical fire, but a dragon's fire ignored her natural resistance and regular fire still burned her. This amulet was quite a boon. They would likely be facing more dragonlings in the morning when they made their way through the rest of the Wastes. She used her uninjured arm to tug it on, letting it settle in the valley of her chest next to the Warden amulet she'd gotten months ago from her Joining.
Ariane scouted further with Banal'ras while the other two took stock of what all they had and finished cooking the stew, which turned out to be rabbit-and-potato. When the Dalish warrior returned, she had an odd expression on her face, as if she had tasted a very sour fruit. "E, hronlahnemah—"[3] and then she sneezed, violently, several times in quick succession, her eyes tearing up. "There must be black mold about, that always makes me sneeze."
"Mold makes you sneeze?" Nat found that odd. Dwarves sneezed if they got the flux, though it wasn't easy for them to catch it. She'd seen a plague wrought by Tevinter blood magic in the Denerim Alienage more than a year before, and those elves hadn't really sneezed that she'd seen. Why would mold make Ariane sneeze? Did it carry some sort of Elf-exclusive disease?
"Yes, I don't know why. It always has. My mother is the same way." She screwed up her face as if she would sneeze again, then released a shuddering breath when it became apparent she wouldn't. "I hate it, but there's nothing that can be done."
"It's called an 'allergy'," said Finn knowledgeably. He scraped the bottom of his bowl, gathering the last scraps of stew, and tipped it into his mouth. "This is delicious stew. I didn't realize dragon cultists ate so well."
Nat and Ariane stared at him. "An allergy?" the dwarf prompted.
"Oh, yes. Some people sneeze around hay, some people can't eat nuts, others sneeze around animal hair. It's not very common. Elfroot doesn't really help. But you seem to be fine now, anyways." He ladled himself more stew. "Mmm. Delicious."
In the morning, they made their way through the Wastes, killing the few dragonlings that hadn't found them earlier. Deeper within, they found their way underground blocked by a magical barrier with a giant creature guarding it.
"What...is...that?" Finn charged his staff with a fire spell, backing up a few steps as he did so.
"I've never seen the like, not in all my travels across Ferelden and the Deep Roads," Natia marvelled. "It's like a giant spider...except, it doesn't have as many legs, and it's the size of a High Dragon."
"A...a varterral! It can't be. They're only legends!" Ariane shook her head in bewilderment. "It is said they were rock and tree, wind and rain, given form and breath by the elven gods to protect their people."
"Very poetic," Nat commented.
The beast jumped down from the building it had been standing on. Its shrieking cry hurt their ears; they all covered their ears reflexively, wincing.
"To protect their people? Then why does it look like it's going to eat you?" Finn shouted over the sound.
It attacked by spitting something like spiderweb at them, which caught at their limbs slowed their movements. Each blow from its large pincer-like front legs drove them back, though it mostly tried to snap at them with its horrifying mouth. When it moved, its legs thudded on the ground with the heaviness of a High Dragon's, though it was far more agile. Occasionally it leapt up on all its five limbs and tried to land on one of them. Natia, the only one of them with experience fighting anything this size, used the hooks on the back of her axe-heads to climb up onto the creature's back and hacked at its neck. Meanwhile, two small dragons jumped down from a nearby cave and ran hissing, wings half-extended, at Finn and Ariane, who were trying to avoid the varterral's stunning blows.
"Drakes!" Natia yelled, warning them from her vantage point.
"This is going well!" Finn spun around and cast a paralysis hex at the closest drake, which hesitated a moment before shaking it off and bounding forward with an enraged hiss. "...I think."
Nat jumped from the varterral's corpse as it collapsed and onto the drake's back, killing it upon her landing with a well-placed blow from Aodh, then slid off of that corpse. Finn blocked the other drake's firebreathing with a wall of ice as Ariane attacked it from behind, and her wolf distracted it by attacking its legs. Finally the battle finished. The magical barrier remained, however.
"I'm out of magic," declared Finn, after ineffectually trying to collapse the barrier with a small arcane bolt. "I think that's a spirit barrier...I'll have to attack it with lightning magic once I'm recovered. Meanwhile, I'm hungry!"
"We just ate some very tasty stew," Natia reminded him. "Come to think of it, I'm hungry too. Fighting dragons and varterrals really takes it out of you."
They did not go back to the cultists' camp, where soft bedrolls awaited, though they wanted to; it was too far away, and they had lost a lot of time already. Instead, Banal'ras caught a rabbit and they roasted it over the fire. Finn had a large appetite due to expending all his magical reserves, and Natia had a Warden's high metabolism. Ariane, as a Dalish warrior, also had a high metabolism—but not nearly as high as a Warden's.
Inside the cave, they were briefly distracted by a strange statue in the middle of the water, then Natia saw something casting light in the distance. They crested a rise to find the Eluvian set in the skeleton of a massive High Dragon, glowing, with Morrigan walking around the mirror, examining it.
"The Eluvian! And it's...glowing? We should—" Finn said, excited.
Ariane put a hand out, stopping Finn from moving forward. Morrigan halted, touching the glowing Eluvian with a flat hand. It rippled like water where she touched it. Morrigan glanced back, clearly seeing them, then looked back at the mirror, not pulling her hand away.
"I think she's...expecting you," said Ariane. As Natia moved forward, she added in an undertone, "Ask her about our book!"
Morrigan turned as Nat approached, crossing her arms. "No further, please. One more step and I leave. For good this time."
"There's no need to run," Nat assured her, though that depended entirely on the answers she received.
"I assume you know what this is," the witch said. "I have gone to great lengths to find and activate this portal. Give me reason and I use it, and you will not be able to follow."
"The Eluvians are portals? To where?" This, Natia had to admit, was not a scenario she had been anticipating. Where did Morrigan think she would be going? And why had the apostate waited to go through, knowing she was following? Was there another Eluvian, waiting for her to come through?
"To another place, beyond this world and beyond the Fade. But this portal can only be used once more. Achieving even this much was... difficult. If it is used again after I pass through, I do not what could happen." If it hadn't been Morrigan saying it, Natia would have said she was worried.
"Then why haven't you left, if that's true?"
"I remained to see if it was truly you. I had to know. Tell me: why did you come?" Morrigan held her gaze impassively as she asked. Her usually scornful face had regained the health she had lost over the months spent living in Blighted lands.
"We were friends once, Morrigan." Nat's jaw clenched. She looked away, then back. "You had to know? I have to know. Could you have saved him? Would it—could it have worked?"
"And you once argued with me that love is not weakness. I will never understand you. And you will never understand me." Morrigan turned her face away to study the glimmering surface of the Eluvian. Something passed through her eyes, and she shifted her balance. Natia realized that she was planning to walk through at the soonest opportunity: perhaps even before her questions were answered.
"We helped each other even so. I won't understand unless you help me to. Answer my question, please, Morrigan, love may be a weakness for you...but it is the strength of the dwarva." She stepped closer, imploring the witch who had once been her friend, of sorts. "I am begging you."
"Yes, I suppose we did. I...would not even know where to begin explaining." She looked beyond Natia then, her eyes falling on something distant, beyond the physical realm.
"What is your plan? I want to know."
"I suppose we were friends, of a sort," Morrigan allowed. She turned again to the Eluvian, and Natia saw her as a silhouette against its soft amethyst glow. "I...would not even know where to begin explaining. My plan is to leave, and prepare for what is to come. Such preparations require time. And power. I must have both, if I am to be successful. More than this, I dare not say. Even to you, dwarf."
"Was there no other way?" The dwarf scrubbed dust from her eye with one palm. It was only dust, not tears, never tears, she would not give the Witch of the Wilds the satisfaction.
"I...am sorry, Natia." She paused, then continued, turning back to Nat and fixing her with a hawk's golden gaze. "Allow me to provide you a warning. 'Tis Flemeth you should beware of, not me. Hunt her, if you hunt anyone."
This shocked Nat out of her desperate grief. "Flemeth is dead."
"My mother has tricked her way past death and more. She is no more finished than I am. I thought I knew what Flemeth planned. I thought what she craved was immortality. And yet I was wrong. So very wrong." As she spoke, she descended the steps from the Eluvian. "She is no blood mage, no abomination...she is not even truly human. The ritual was but a means to an end, a herald for what is to come."
"What? Why? What's going to happen?" A chill ran down her spine.
"Change is coming to the world. Many fear change, and will fight it with every fibre of their being. But sometimes change is what they need most. Sometimes, change is what sets them free."
"And is that what you want, to be free?"
"What I want...is unimportant now." Morrigan turned and walked back up to the Eluvian. Nat followed, wincing as the mostly-healed wounds from the earlier skirmishes ached. When they reached the dais, Morrigan turned back to her. "I cannot tarry longer. The time has come for me to go."
"You don't have to do this alone, Morrigan."
"I do. I wish it was not so. There is one last thing I must tell you, if you will allow me. I left you a gift. The Dalish book is there, and something you will find of great interest." She indicated her camp, nestled in the ground nearby. She must have stayed there last night. "Now...will you let me go?"
"Go, then, if you must. But, please, tell me." The dwarf swallowed convulsively. "Tell me. Could you have saved him?"
"Goodbye, my friend." Morrigan did not answer her. She turned and touched the Eluvian again, making color burst across the horizon, then lowered her hand and walked through with a great flare of light. The mirror rippled like a pond where she passed through.
"Morrigan! Tell me! Morrigan!" With a cry of desperate grief and inordinate rage, Natia lunged after the witch, but the mirror stilled before she touched it. It rang like a bell when she slammed her fist against it, then her fist went through as if the glass had become gelatin, sucking her in after it. She fell and fell and fell some more, all of time and space revealed before her eyes: and then the stars all went out at once and she landed in a cold, dark cave, striking her head on a rock, once, twice as she rolled down—she came to rest against a formation of stalagmites and knew no more.
[1]Taken from BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening website
[2]isenathe'dirthelan'en: the plural of isenathe'dirthelan: one who speaks to dragons, dragon talker, dragon friend
[3]hronlahnemah: future participle. about to sneeze; e! similar to oh! or ah!