CHAPTER 10: Pyrrhic Victory

Alistair was cutting down the closest darkspawn when Loghain pointed out the necromancer.

Magic! Alistair broke into a run, eager as a mabari charging prey, heading straight for the malignant creature. Here was a foe Alistair was uniquely trained to fight.

He was so focused on the necromancer that he missed the much less powerful emissary closer to him, until its fireball caught him in the shoulder. Lying next to his heart, under his armor, Solona's amulet pulsed against his skin once, twice, absorbing the heat, making it bearable. Solona's protection was still with him, though she was long gone.

Far from collapsing in flames, instead Alistair hacked off the emissary's arms without breaking stride, leaving the animated corpse staggering uselessly in his wake, unable to cast. Alistair didn't bother to finish the grunt work of dismembering the thing. He had one target in his sights, and nothing was going to slow him down.

Alistair was working against time: with every second that passed, more of the darkspawn dead that lay between him and the necromancer staggered to their feet, tore rusted weapons from old ice or from soldier bodies, and moved to protect their master.

Alistair had to get close enough to the necromancer that his chant could reach its monstrous senses, and his holy fire could strike it down. He couldn't allow anything else to matter to him: certainly not the frozen, ruined corpses, twisted things without end, that were closing in on him. A growling black thundercloud of a horde, a teeming mass that swarmed out of his nightmare and gaped to devour the whole world.

But the mental fortress of Alistair's focus on his quarry was shaken by the realisation that Loghain wasn't with him. The fiercely protective fury that had flared through the taint, the lightning sword and sheltering shield that had covered for him in all their previous battles, was entirely gone. Alistair was fighting alone.

All alone.

With a desperate roar, Alistair raised his sword and swung it against another attacker's snarling skull.

Maker, what was I thinking the first time? When all I wanted was to fight in the army at Ostagar, when I was so bitter at being sent on a fool's errand: helping Solona light a beacon.

When Duncan sent me there, he saved my life.

Something was burning. The smoke was coming from his own shoulder. Alistair smelled the stench of singed leather, but the rush of the battle left him numb to his burning-hot pauldron.

Solona's amulet could only do so much.

Duncan... Solona... Maker, keep them both. Maker help us. Keep us safe.

"I shall not fear the legion, should they set themselves against me... Though all before me" - before us, Alistair's mind corrected him, us, Loghain needs protection too, wherever he is - "is shadow... Yet shall the Maker be my guide."

The chant came as natural as breathing, as Alistair kept advancing, slicing his way through a turbulent sea of rising corpses. His mind flowed along the rhythmic river of that familiar cadence, and although he missed Loghain's support fiercely, he didn't let it disrupt his focus; although he stabbed and sliced and parried, he kept his eyes and his mind on the goal: the creature he had to stop at any cost. Stop it, and it won't raise any more corpses. Stop it, and maybe we'll stand a chance... "For there is no darkness in the Maker's Light and nothing that He has wrought shall be lost... NOW!"

The necromancer lifted its bone staff and Alistair saw the magical energy gathering at the tip, focusing into a single bursting ball of dark magic, like a thundercloud full of lyrium-infused lightning. Alistair brought all his wavering faith, all his need, all his desperate drive to save his home from the Blight into a single concentrated thought, stretching past his limits, aching to reach that small cliff where the necromancer stood. "I shall embrace the light! I shall weather the storm! I shall endure!"

His heartbeat, his tainted blood, all pulsed in the same frantic rhythm, in harmony with the chant.

We shall embrace the light! We shall weather the storm! We shall endure!

The thundercloud mass at the tip of the bone staff didn't explode after all. Instead it grew smaller, like a melting hump of snow, dripping taint and drifting smoke until it sizzled out and...

There!

Alistair didn't have enough left for one more word of the chant. All the breath in his body left him in one raw, roaring cry. All his anger and all his need concentrated in a burst of righteous fire that exploded from him.

The world went white.

Alistair staggered, blinking away searing afterimages, just in time to see the necromancer plummet over the cliff like a rag doll. It struck the rocks at the foot of the slope and lay there, unmoving.

All around Alistair, all over the pass, darkspawn corpses collapsed back into death.

It was over. Alistair had won.

They won! Together. "Hey, we did it!" Alistair yelled gleefully, relief bursting from him in a shout of triumphant laughter, as he whirled, gaze flicking everywhere at once, searching for a familiar figure in glossy dark plate. "Loghain! We DID it!"

His answer was Dog's cheerful bark and...

Silence. Silence and cold and darkness, growing ever thicker. The sudden absence of sound boomed in Alistair's ears, hollow as a tomb.

"Loghain?" Alistair cried, panic sharp in his gut as he turned in place, staring at the spiky silhouettes of trees, the fractured stone of the cliffs, the taint-black earth and the sea of corpses. "LOGHAAAIIIN!"

His voice echoed weakly from the looming sides of the pass, from the vaulted arches of the bridge far above. He could taste the sour tang of fear, feel it twisting his guts. He tightened his fists to stave off the shaking, but he could do nothing about the pounding of his heart. With a shuddering gasp, he threw his attention from the deceiving shadows of the physical world, into the taint, trying to sense Loghain in it. But all was silent.

All was cold.

For days now - ever since he'd crossed Loghain's path, Alistair realised at last - he'd grown so used to the bedrock-solid reassurance of Loghain's presence with him in the taint. He'd become accustomed to basking in a warmth as certain as the sun. And just like the sun, he'd taken it for granted.

No more. Now, Alistair was cold all over, inside and out, cold down to his soul. As cold and alone as he'd been on the worst day of his life: when Solona had left him behind, Loghain striding at her side.

That thought - that Loghain might be at her side now, that he might have left Alistair all alone in the world once more - wrenched a raw, low "No!" from him, guttural as the grunt of a wounded man.

He jumped at the sound of an answering whine, but it was only the dog, gazing up at him with mournful dark eyes. When their gazes crossed, the hound huffed agreement and dropped his muzzle to the earth, snuffling to and fro, casting about for a scent. Then the mabari gave a single, sharp bark and took off at a run, and Alistair sprinted after him, heart in his throat, stumbling over the dead, making his way deeper into the darkness half-blindly, by feel, by sound.

The dog barked for him. He followed, topping a low rise and seeing a dim blue glow seeping from a dark mass on the ground. It took him a moment to identify the black silhouette as an ogre corpse. He rushed to the hillock-sized mound of the body, climbing toward the low gleam. It came from a foul, gory fissure in the ogre's chest: specifically, from a sword buried in the cavernous wound.

Maric's blade, Alistair could almost hear Loghain's voice choking out the words, I'd know it anywhere.

Alistair seized the hilt and wrenched the sword free of the wound, and as the blade slid clear of the corpse until all its runes were revealed, the blue light intensified until it chased back the shadows. They loomed, held at bay, as Alistair blinked and scrubbed at his bleary eyes with his free hand.

The new light revealed that Maric's wasn't the only blade buried in the ogre's chest. Two more hilts projected from it: a dagger and a sword. Alistair blinked, numb with shock. He would have recognized the designs on those hilts anywhere, at the slightest glance.

Duncan's! He must've killed this thing. The first time around, that is.

But even that didn't really matter to Alistair anymore. Not now. Not when he had to find Loghain. Before he was left with only relics to remember him by, as well.

Where is he?

Alistair stumbled away from the ogre, then spun and ran instantly toward the mabari's sudden burst of barking. In the lyrium-blue glow, Alistair glimpsed a dark figure - human - sprawled at the ogre's feet.

Loghain!

Alistair skidded to a halt, falling to his knees and thrusting Maric's sword into the earth beside him, where it shone like a beacon, its blue glow illuminating an armored man whose head and upper body were drenched in stinking black gore. Alistair panted shallowly through his mouth at the sickening reek of rotten blood, tasting the filth in the air all the same. He ripped off his gauntlet and reached for Loghain's throat, pressed trembling fingertips to soft, gore-wet skin. He needed to know for sure that this man was still alive.

Still warm. There! A shaky sob burst from him as he felt the slow beat of Loghain's pulse. With shaking hands he ripped off his other gauntlet, reached again for Loghain's pulse, this time with both hands, curving them around Loghain's throat as if strangling him, like he'd wanted to so long ago. But instead of crushing the life from the man, Alistair embraced the slow beat of Loghain's lifeblood, cradled the man's pulse in the warm cup of his palms, just like he'd shield the first gleams of fire in kindling from harsh winds. He closed his eyes and searched the taint, felt himself drawn toward the faintest possible flicker. He concentrated on that one tiny spark, like a dragon hoarding his gold in a dark cave.

Kneeling over Loghain's sprawled body, Alistair threw back his head, turned his face to the darkening sky and gave a single broken pant of absolute relief. Alive! He's alive!

...For now, a cautioning inner voice warned him, in a familiar bone-dry baritone.

Under Alistair's hands, Loghain lay as still as death. Alistair's fingers slipped in the black slick of gore that coated Loghain's throat.

Gah, where'd this stuff come from? That ogre? Maker, it's like he's drowning in it.

Drowning! Alistair's eyes widened and he lunged to grab Loghain, turn him onto his side. He splayed his hands on the man's broad back and pushed, throwing his weight behind it, wincing at the creak of cracked ribs, but not daring to relent.

Loghain bled, vomited, wept darkness; it was as if he was made of it and Alistair was wringing his essential taint from him, making it leak from his every pore. Ribbons of inky fluid spilled and stretched from his mouth and nose and ears, trickled like black tears from the corners of his eyes.

Alistair pushed again, chanting under his breath, not the chant, but his chant: "Breathe! Breathe!" He rocked his weight back and forth, pressing down through his braced arms, keeping Loghain's lungs moving in a steady rhythm, the way he'd seen Sister Sarah do once, saving an orphan who'd fallen into the creek near the Chantry.

Come on! Live!

The slow trickle of liquid taint from Loghain's mouth became an abrupt fountain, as the coughing reflex kicked in at last, and spatters of liquid corruption stained the ground.

"Yeah, that's it! Come on," Alistair muttered, his arms around Loghain's chest, supporting him as his whole body was wracked by wrenching spasms of raw, hoarse coughing. At that moment, it was the most welcome sound Alistair could imagine. "I've got you. Breathe! Yes! I've got you."

But after the coughing had subsided, and his breathing had settled into a slow but congested rhythm, Loghain still lay inert. Alistair half-lifted the unconscious man, shouted his name, shook him, tried his damnedest to wake him. Nothing. Loghain's body slumped, limp as a marionette in Alistair's arms. He still felt warm to the touch, but the small amount of skin not covered in blood was deathly pale. An ebbing trickle of blood - too black to be his own - ran from the corner of his mouth, as his head lolled onto his chest.

He's breathing, he has to be all right! Alistair wasn't panicking, he wasn't! He pinched Loghain's ear, hard, but there wasn't even the faintest flinch in the man's closed eyelids. Alistair swallowed convulsively. He couldn't panic. Loghain needed him. Loghain needed poultices, injury kits, but where? Short of slathering them all over him and maybe even forcing them down his throat for good measure, Alistair had no idea what to do. Besides, he didn't have that much on him, the rest of the healing supplies were outside the gate with the horse. Poultices. … Wounds. Oh, Maker!

Alistair was blindsided by the terrifying realisation that he knew very little about healing. Oh, sure, I knew enough to cry for help when Wynne or Solona, or even Morrigan were around, but I've got no magical help now. Neither of us have. The Dog could probably do a better job of healing than me, by licking his wounds clean! But he needs help. Competent help. And there's no one to help but me.

Alistair settled Loghain's head in his lap, ran his fingers carefully through hair caked with clotted blood, feeling his scalp, searching for injuries, fractures, bruising, anything that would explain his unconsciousness. Nothing. His hands darted to the man's armor, hastily loosening straps just enough that he could slip his hands under the plates, checking for injuries, broken bones. He felt the familiar creak of cracked ribs, but sighed relief as no wounds more serious than that met his uncertain touch.

"Right," he muttered with the shaking voice of a man with a longstanding habit of chanting to calm himself down. "You're not badly wounded, not anywhere I can tell. So what's wrong with you?" He frowned, ran his hands over Loghain's lax body, tried to wipe the black taint off his pallid skin. In the gloom of the pass, Loghain's gaunt face, eyesockets shadowed by sleeplessness, looked far too much like a skull. Like just one more of the countless dead that littered the floor of the pass.

A wave of weariness washed over Alistair as he gazed down at Loghain's face: pale and angular as bone flayed bare by pitiless mountain winds. I've got to get you out of here. The sooner the better.

Only one way up and out of this bloody mess, Alistair sighed, scrubbing his eyes as he looked up at the rickety ramps that zigzagged up the side of the pass, and it's not going to be easy, but it's got to be done.

Alistair hauled King Maric's sword out of the ground, knowing that Loghain wouldn't have wanted it left behind. Then his attention was caught by the other blades buried in the ogre's chest. Alistair wrenched out Duncan's sword and dagger, and held them limply in his hands, staring down at their familiar shapes, stained now with unfamiliar rust. He felt none of the triumph he'd always thought he'd feel at recovering Duncan's belongings. Instead, guilt burned in his thoughts as fiercely as that fireball had burned his skin: more so, since no amulet could protect him from his own regrets. As Alistair gazed numbly at Duncan's blades, the realisation hit him: they'd probably be the only mementos of the man that Alistair would ever recover from Ostagar.

Because Alistair knew that he - that they - couldn't afford to stay any longer. They had to get out of here. They had to find somewhere safe. Somewhere to heal.

I talked Loghain into coming here, and now he's almost d... he's in trouble. Alistair could no longer justify risking another man's life to continue his search for relics of the dead. So he served a self-imposed penance for his previous, poor priorities by collecting all three weapons as swiftly as he could and dragging Loghain to the ramps, with only slight assistance from the mabari.

Loghain was a dead weight, head lolling as if his neck had been broken, armored heels dragging as he was hauled slowly up the ramps by Alistair and the dog. His hair hung in his face, stiff with tainted blood. Only the occasional guttural groan, a sound as wet and choked as a drowning victim's, reassured Alistair that he wasn't wasting all his painstaking efforts in hauling a corpse.

"Hang on," Alistair told him after what seemed like forever, as they left the last of the ramps behind, emerging from the tomb-narrow darkness of the pass into the wider, starry night of Ostagar's ruins. "Almost here."

Now in the ghostly glow of starlight on snow, Alistair felt like a lonely corpse collector, surrounded by dead and dying things. Even the weapons at his back, even the amulets over his heart, were rusted, cracked, mementos of the deceased. Even the man in his arms lay hovering on the brink of death.

All because of me!

It was my idea to come here. I'm the one who talked him into this. He was hurt protecting me.

Maker... A litany of thought came to Alistair, as familiar as the chant. The years of templar training had schooled his mind into soliloquy, always with the hope that a higher power was listening. It was as inevitable as breathing, that as his mind calmed, he would put his deepest, most desperate urges into words. Even if those words never made it into speech, into audible chant, yet still they ran in his soul, deeper than any of the Chantry's officially sanctioned verses. This prayer was infinitely more potent than any of the chant, because it was infinitely more personal.

Maker, spare him. Let him live. He can't die, not yet! Wardens know when their end is drawing near, and they choose to go out and meet it on their own terms before it can come for them, and that's only right and noble; but not like this. Not like Duncan! Not yet. It's too soon. The Wardens need him. I need him! Maker, please!

Alistair knew full well that he hardly deserved to ask for such a favour, especially not since he'd once prayed to be the one to kill Loghain, but he didn't know what else to do.

Alistair's thoughts were torn away from prayers by a long, low moan from Loghain, a trailing "Nnnooo..." that broke off in a fit of choked, jolting coughs; they sounded almost like series of sobs. The horrible sound subsided into another low hum of aching, instinctive distress, ending in another half-strangled cry... "mmmMARIC!" Loghain's arms lifted in a single, brief thrash, hands jerking up and out, reaching. And then he slumped and was still once more, and silent apart from the low, bubbling rasp of his breathing.

"What?" Alistair crouched over Loghain, trying to hold on. "Maric? I've got his sword right here, I didn't leave it." He leaned down close enough to feel and hear Loghain's breath in the dark and had to tell himself to keep going.

As he struggled endlessly onward, with a weight that seemed to grow heavier as the moon rose, Alistair's sense of wading through the timeless, twilit unreality of the Fade intensified: his every movement grew sluggish, clumsy with weariness. Even his thoughts faded to a dazed, lightheaded slowness. So many nights he'd spent wrapped in a recurring dream, a normal, human dream, when the hold of the Blight was still new, and some of his dreams were still untainted by darkspawn nightmares. Night after night, he'd dreamed of exactly this: coming back to Ostagar and finding Duncan. Somehow Duncan was still alive. And Alistair singlehandedly rescued his fellow Warden, his hero, and carried him away from all the carnage, away to safety, and everything was all right again. As it should have been.

For that reason, dragging Loghain out of Ostagar to safety felt utterly surreal. As if Alistair's irrational dream had impossibly become reality.

A shudder that was only partly caused by the bitter cold shook him out of his exhausted daze. He had to get them both out of here. His attention narrowed to that thought; the words cadenced to his gasping breaths. Gotta. Get. Out. Gotta...

The singleminded urge to keep going didn't stop until Alistair staggered to a halt among the trees outside Ostagar's front gate. Alistair made for where they'd tethered the horse, hoping against hope that darkspawn or blighted beasts hadn't killed it while they were away. He never thought that familiar four-legged silhouette would look quite so good, or that inquiring whinny would sound so sweet.

Alistair let go of Loghain's shoulders and he slumped to the ground, like one of the horde of dead now covering the ground of Ostagar. But this particular body still had life in it, and Alistair was determined to keep it there. His hands shook with urgency and weariness as he gathered enough wood for a small fire, as he struck the flint against his sword and waited for sparks to settle and for flames to spread.

The dragonscale armor was familiar enough to Alistair that he knew the position and the order of every strap, every buckle. He stripped away the plates in minimum time. The gambeson was more difficult, but at last it was off and Alistair could get a much better idea of the damage. A bit of rag and some water, and he was painstakingly swabbing away streaks of black ichor that had soaked through the gaps in the plate and the layers beneath. In the eerie blue light of the King's blade, he examined Loghain carefully for wounds.

As he'd suspected from his hasty initial examination down in the pass, Loghain's physical injuries weren't life-threatening. Even after the gore was sponged away, his skin was black-and-blue with bruising, and Alistair confirmed the creaking feel of cracked ribs on both sides of Loghain's chest. He used an injury kit and applied a poultice, in the way that had rapidly become familiar during his time on the road with Solona. Although Alistair had always seen someone else use them on him, he figured he'd seen it done enough times to be pretty clear on the principle. After all, Loghain had said he'd done a good job making the poultices; Alistair told himself he couldn't be completely hopeless at being on the other end of the process. He'll heal, in time. He has to!

The relative simplicity of Loghain's physical injuries was a profound relief, at first. But then Alistair had a moment to think it over and really, it was deeply worrying: nothing accounted for Loghain's continuing unconsciousness. Alistair went through an entire injury kit and a generous dose of health poultices, feeling through the dark, taint-sticky clumps of hair to examine Loghain's skull, in case there was a fracture or some other damage he couldn't detect.

For all the good it did, he might as well have saved himself the effort. Loghain lay there, pale and still as death, impossible to wake.

It took the length of rope Loghain had salvaged from Alistair's escape, a lot of ingenuity, and the last reserves of Alistair's strength, but eventually he hoisted Loghain onto the horse. Alistair climbed into the saddle behind him and wrapped his arms around the man as he sagged over the horse's neck, reaching past him to seize the reins in both hands.

As the horse lurched into motion, Alistair found he had strength after all, for one last prayer: Maker, please don't let us fall off!

After calling out Maric's name, Loghain didn't wake throughout the night. He slumped over the saddle as Alistair held the reins and held him, kept him from tumbling off the horse on every turning of the way. Alistair steered cautiously as the horse walked downhill after Dog, on a path even Alistair thought was too overgrown to warrant the name.

At least down here in the foothills they were out of the snow.

Loghain stirred or muttered unintelligibly once or twice, and each time Alistair brushed the heavy braids off his face and tilted his head up, in hopes that the worst was over. But when Alistair thumbed open Loghain's eyelids, his eyes remained glazed and unresponsive, his breathing stayed faint and nearly undetectable, and his limbs were lax and boneless.

What was I thinking, going in without a healer?

For all the holy, magic-cleansing ways any templar was taught inside and out, Alistair still couldn't slide his hands over Loghain's unconscious body and cure him in a heartbeat with a recited chant.

What good were all the canticles in the Chant of Light if they didn't let spirit and faith and mind make a difference when it was needed most? What good was Alistair, when Wynne would've taken care of Loghain in a heartbeat with a single quickly-cast spell, if only she was here instead of him? For all Alistair's templar abilities, for all the chants he knew by heart, it was magic - dangerous, uncertain, demon-spawning magic - that meant the difference between life and death.

And Alistair, for all his studies and all his training, could only ever kill magic, erase it from the world, as if it had never existed. And destroying magic was considered a holy act, declared to be the Maker's will. But how can that be? It makes no sense! Magic saves lives! It's saved mine.

All Alistair could do was hold on, and trust the horse to take them away from that place of death, out through the Wilds and toward shelter.

His hopes were now dependent on a chance. Perhaps an apostate. A maleficar unafraid of the Blighted lands. Alistair didn't know whether it was good or bad luck that they hadn't encountered a maleficar. If they had, and if one had offered him a deal - his blood for a cure - for the first time in his life Alistair had no idea how he would've responded.

Loghain floated, adrift in a black sea of tainted blood. Malicious magic exploded in his face, drenching his senses, drowning him deep. He was dead: dead and rotten, his heart full of black corruption.

His corpse was huge, bloated, frozen. For an endless time it lay inert; then it stirred, jerked out of the grip of ice and death by another's will. Memories stirred, like stagnant water over old decay. Memories of when his body was still alive, reaching out to seize a tempting target, a manikin in shiny gold, with shiny gold hair. He remembered roaring victory and squeezing the shiny thing in his fist, crushing it in a burst of red triumph, flinging it aside, broken. He remembered a darker one springing, stabbing him, climbing his body, punching sharp pain into his chest. He remembered bleeding, stumbling, dying. Dying together with his killer.

The memories didn't matter. Death didn't matter. Now he faced another tiny attacker, even darker than the one that had killed him, dark and sleek as the Archdemon, waving a sword of blue magic light. The creature was defying him, but he was faster and stronger. He ran it down and snatched it up to crush it, like the golden one.

But it wouldn't be crushed. It was as hard as the Archdemon, and its blade hurt like death as it broke his grip, as it stabbed him to the heart, as it killed him again.

Loghain moaned, lost in painful memories that weren't his, but that were now intertwined with his, mingling with his own, as much a part of him as the taint in his blood.

Memories of a golden youth in golden armor: gliding like a butterfly from one glittering prize to the next, crushed like a butterfly in a callous hand, pinned like a butterfly to a collector's board.

Cailan... You could have been my son.

More memories stirred. Another time, another man, lost forever, mourned forever.

The golden mane flowed in the sea breeze, as Maric turned away from Loghain, to board the ship that carried him to death in deep water... Loghain's soul cried out in anguish.

Maric... You could have been my lover.

The red-gold nimbus of short hair glowed in the afternoon sun, and Alistair turned away from Loghain, looking so much like his father before him, holding a rose as red as Rowan's dress, as unforgettable as long lost love, heedless of the thorns.

A searing cry went unvoiced, buried deep, too deep to ever be relieved by grief, by revisiting memories. Because Loghain knew that this Theirin man had not yet joined him in the Fade, and the barrier between Loghain and the living world was now too high for him to cross.

Alistair... Farewell.

Notes

Alistair is using the verses from the Canticle of Trials during the battle with the necromancer.