(So...just kidding again on the tears guys...at almost 3K words, I had to cut it again. Next chapter though...its coming. I think I might have screwed up and had the Rift spit out 3 waves of demons and its supposed to just be 2 sets in the game...its been a while since I played and 3 sets was more epic in my head so all well. Also, thanks for being so patient. I live in Florida and when Matthew rolled in, it was bonkers for about a week there. Sorry for the delays...triplets plus hurricanes plus life = slooooooow writing. Thanks for sticking with me! Love you guys! Oooh, and side note, listen to the song "This is a war" by The Phantoms, it was my theme song for this chapter.)

The sound was so much louder. Like a banshee's wail. Her ears rang as her body was lifted from the snow by long, spindly limbs. Claws raked up her legs and back, tearing through fabric and flesh. The elven mage cried out beneath the shriek of the Terror demon that shot out of the ground and thrust her into the air.

She felt, more than heard, the pop of magic snap into place around her as Solas recast his barrier an instant before she landed in a heap in the snow. All the air rushed out of her lungs in a huff of pain, but the barrier had probably kept her from breaking any bones and for that small miracle, she was grateful.

Isala scrambled to regain her bearings as the demon towered over her and shrieked once more. A sound that could have paralyzed the sturdiest of men shook the ground around her and the Inquisitor gasped for breath. Her mouth gaped wildly, like a fish deprived of water, but her lungs had seized from the impact and she couldn't breathe.

The Terror demon raised its impossibly long arms to strike the elf down, but as it reared back, Isala saw the point of a sword burst through its chest. The sound shook the snow from the tree limbs as the demon howled in pain. Isala watched in breathless horror as the demon spun on its assailant. The blade never budging from its impaled flesh as it whirled on Cullen, striking the human with one long, clawed limb.

Isala tried to scream his name, but no sound would come out. She was still struggling for breath and now the demon had turned its ire to the Commander.

The Inquisitor thrust her hand into the sky. There was no time to think, she could only react. Magic unlike anything she'd felt before it coursed through her veins, following a path that began in the center of her palm. The Anchor flared suddenly until its green light shone brightly from her delicate skin. She called that strange magic to her, felt the Fade glimmering in the air like the invisible waves of heat rising from a flame. She could see the delicate fabric of the Veil and with the Anchor she sundered it and formed a maelstrom all her own.

The Terror demon shrieked wildly as the momentary rift began pulling it apart and back into the Fade. Shades dissipated and shredded to their barest parts as the immense gravity of the Inquisitor's power pulled them back across the Veil.

Isala's hand shook with the effort to keep the tear open for as long as she could, long enough to remove the Terror demon that threatened them from existence. The small rift above them snapped closed with an audible sound as the elven mage collapsed back into the snow. She'd removed the immediate threats, but the Rift in the gully remained unaffected. Her magic had only removed some of them, but more demons remained, and even more had yet to come.

There was a shift in the snow beside her. Cullen fell to his knees at her side, his strong arms gathering her into his lap. Her lungs burned, but she was just beginning to get full, deep breaths into them.

"Isala." His voice was shaking. The concern that colored those three syllables was palpable.

The elf focused the pale waters of her eyes on the human holding her. She could hear shouting, fighting, magic and metal all around them. She had to get up. Had to get to her feet. She was the only one who could close the rift. The only one who could chase back the nightmares that poured in from across the Veil.

"Go." She choked on that one word.

Cullen's face contorted in soft defiance as she dismissed him once more.

"Commander, we've found someone!" A soldier shouted from across the embankment. Cullen's attentions went to his men for but a moment before those amber pools were back on the elf in his arms.

"Go with your men, Cullen. Get them out of here!" Isala commanded, lifting herself into something between sitting and reclining. Her world swam and Cullen steadied her.

"You're injured."

"I'm fine." She insisted, swallowing back the nausea that blurred her vision momentarily.

"Isala…"

"This is not a discussion, Commander. Take your men, and go!" She insisted, sitting up fully.

"Please…I'm afraid you'll…you're hurt…I can't leave you…I don't want to lose y—"

"Cole!" Isala snapped a warning to the waif-like boy as he appeared close by, reading thoughts that weren't his own.

Solas approached, still glowing faintly with spent magic. His staff glittering with icy mist in his hand. He held a draught of red liquid out to the Inquisitor. A healing potion. It would numb the pain, speed up clotting in her blood, ward off shock and exhaustion.

"Inquisitor, there are still two Pride demons in the gully. The others are containing their advances but only you can close that rift." Solas stated firmly as she took the tonic from him.

Isala nodded and pulled the cork free from the glass flask. She drank the crimson potion in one long draw and left the glass in the snow.

"Alright." She murmured, taking hold of Solas' suddenly outstretched hand. Isala let the other elf pull her too her feet and she turned back to the Commander as he rose back onto his own. "You have your orders, Commander." Her voice was cold and without compromise.

Cullen's shoulders straightened and he nodded, even as his lips were drawn into a tight line, his eyes narrowed in defiance.

"Fall back!" He called out suddenly, directing his soldiers away from the fray.

Isala's lips parted as if she might say something else, but the blood curdling timber of laughter echoing out of the gully stopped anything she hadn't yet thought to utter.

In an instant, the Inquisitor's attentions were once again on the rift and now, on the two towering behemoths that stalked out from its center.

Cole disappeared in a cloud of smoke, understanding that they were once again racing into battle. The crystal at the end of Solas' staff pulsed with renewed power as he adjusted his grip into something more aggressive.

Isala pulled the staff from her back, surprised it hadn't snapped with the impact of her fall. The runes enchanted into the weapon continued to glow a yellowish hue and only brightened as her bare hands touched the wood.

She glanced back at Cullen and could see the war raging behind his eyes. He didn't want to leave, but she couldn't risk…

"Go, Commander!"

It was the last order she gave him before she wrapped the Fade around her and raced back down the embankment in a blur of ghostly blue light.

The first sound that met her as she emerged from her Fade Step was the roar of Cassandra's War Cry. The strong sound of her voice instantly drew the attentions of the Pride demons. Normally, Isala would have opened a small rift just over the monsters, but she'd already spent what energy she'd held to expel the Shades and Terror demons. She simply didn't possess the strength to repeat the spell.

Isala raced past the two goliaths, careful not to draw their ire to her intentions as both Cole and Solas stopped within striking range of the beasts. The Inquisitor thrust her hand into the sky, as she'd done earlier, the energy of the anchor instantly responding to the rift. She couldn't disrupt it fully with the Pride demons still raging on this side of the Veil, but she could send a shock through the hulking giants. Stagger them. Stun them. Remind them who they were up against.

As the rift shattered with dislocated energies, the demons staggered, their cruel mouths turning toward the Inquisitor. Cassandra and Blackwall both called out to the beasts, trying to hold their attentions, but the demons would not be swayed. They now understood who threatened them most.

Solas was just suddenly there by her side, the cool balm of his barrier strengthening around her as he renewed the defensive magic.

From somewhere to her left she heard The Iron Bull roar wildly into the night, before the enormous Qunari barreled between the Pride demons, his axe swinging in a whirlwind of damage.

Isala heard the pop of magic spring up around them as Vivienne created a Distortion Field, slowing the demon's advances.

Sera was a blur of rapid fire, bouncing in and out of the demon's range, flasks of fire exploding around the creatures as she lit them up with arrows and threw bees into their faces.

The elven mage didn't wait for her friends to finish the demons. She hurled boulders of magic from the Fade itself toward the demons and created gravitational maelstroms to bind them in place.

Bit by bit, the group picked the colossal demons apart, until they grew too weak to even move. Isala was already disrupting the rift once more as the Pride demons became little more than displaced energy. The rift burst in a contorted amalgamation of light before its eerie green tendrils pointed out that three more demons would push their way through before it could be sealed.

She heard the flasks of health draughts hit the icy ground as the wounded regrouped. Magic shimmered to life in renewed barriers and held spells in preparation for what was about to emerge from the rift. Sera had her bow drawn and Varric was staring down the sights of Bianca. Solas began casting Dispel on one of the glowing circles of light in an attempt to prevent at least one of the demons from emerging.

Three seemed like a small number of assailants. Unless…

"Everyone back up!" Isala shouted an instant before the rift boomed and two more Pride demons tore their way across the veil.

Two demons. Not three.

"Did your dispel work?" She asked Solas, but the hedge mage gave her the answer with the sheer concern in his steely eyes.

"I did not get to fully cast…"

"Then where is the third?" Isala asked. Her eyes were wide, a little too much of the white showing as a thousand horrific scenarios played out in her mind.

Solas opened his mouth and closed it. When he started to speak again, Isala heard the humming of electricity tearing through the air. She dove at the bare-faced elf and sent them both into a tumble across the snow-covered ground an instant before the electric whip cut through the space where they'd been standing. Arcs of electricity burst from the singed space and burnt the bottoms of the Inquisitor's feet and stung her ankles. Isala cried out above Solas as the magic burned her and the Pride demon chuckled low in its chest.

"Inquisitor!" Solas' eyes were wide as he called out beneath her. Isala winced but scrambled to her feet, gritting her teeth through the pain biting into her heels.

"Move!" She shouted, wrapping her fingers around her forgotten staff and pulling the Fade around her. Solas didn't question her intentions for an instant and with a kind of psychic tandem, echoed her spell with his own. The pair of elves stepped through the Fade at nearly the same moment, emerging behind the safety of a warrior's shield.

"Inquisitor, are you alright?" Cassandra asked, though she never took her eyes from the demons ahead of them.

Isala took a deep breath and steadied herself through the pain in her legs. "I'm fi—" She started to say, but was suddenly jerked out of the fray. Her body flying through the air by a force she hadn't seen coming.

She landed in a heap in the snow halfway across the battlefield. Her back ached with an all-too-familiar soreness as the air whooshed from her lungs, the last of her barrier depleting as her eyes focused on the chilling sight that towered over her.

It held a round metal shield and was shrouded in the armor of the dead. It stared down at her with a face shrunken back with death. Teeth exposed on a lipless mouth. Empty eyes glowing red with contempt as it reached for its sword, the blade buried in the snow.

A Revenant.

It had to have been the death of one of the scouts that had drawn it across the Veil and given it form. Part of Isala mourned the loss of one of her soldiers, but she couldn't worry about that now. Not with the towering demon raising its sword to end her.

The Inquisitor reached for her staff, fingertips stretching for purchase in the snow. She felt the edge of the wood as the Revenant brought his massive blade down. There was a cold echo of sound as the blade of her staff bit against the demon's weapon mere inches from her face. Isala's arms trembled with the effort to hold the Revenant's sword at bay. The undead warrior made no sound as it bared down on the elven mage and she felt the edge of its blade cut a slow, searing line against her jaw. Her teeth clenched against the pain as she swallowed a sound in her throat.

Creators…

Ice sped through the air at a speed that could only be created with magic. It crashed against the Revenant's arms in a spray of snow and blue light before spreading up and down the demon's arms.

"Inquisitor!" Solas called out, his magic flying through the air once more to burst across the undead's armor.

Cole burst into being with the scent of brimstone lingering around him. His blades a fury of death as he cut into the Revenant over and over again.

The creature forgot the Inquisitor for only a moment, focusing on the new attackers and Isala quickly rolled out of its path feeling the welcomed relief of Solas' barrier an instant later.

"Over here you ugly bastard!" Blackwall shouted, banging against his shield as he charged toward them.

The Revenant descended on the others. Its ire drawn out by their combined efforts. Isala risked a quick glance around the battlefield. They'd bested at least one of the Pride demons and were decimating the second. As the undead moved toward the Grey Warden taunting it, the demon shuddered suddenly. Isala caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. Like watching a phantom slipping in and out of the Revenant's form. Vivienne burst from within the demon like some specter made of light and magic. Her Fade Cloak falling away from her as her Spirit Blade shimmered back to life.

The Inquisitor climbed to her feet, pain lancing across her bare feet and up her legs from the Pride demon's whip. She took in a mouthful of air and lifted her staff. Fire cracked from the crystal peak of the weapon as she began throwing magic at the demon. She whirled and thrust her staff toward the Revenant as her companions directed their attacks. All the while, the pale-haired elf was backing up to position herself between both the undead and the remaining Pride demon. When she'd reached a point evenly between them, she drew on what reserves she still possessed to tear open another rift in the Fade. One that would pull at the two demons until there was nothing left of them on this side of the Veil.

As the small rift began disassembling the remaining demons, Isala raised her hand to the pulsating breach that had allowed the demons across in the first place. She could feel it weakening, shrinking, growing more unstable. The anchor flared, pulsed, burned across her palm. She opened her fingers, splayed them wide, and disrupted the rift one final time. The resulting explosion of light and shadow was accompanied with the dying echoes of demons being trapped once more behind the Veil.

The elven mage closed her fingers into a fist as she collapsed to her knees in the snow. She had to tell herself that it could have been worse. That so many more might have died if she hadn't made the decisions she'd chosen to make. People she wasn't prepared to lose.

"You need a healer." Cassandra's voice brought her out of her melancholy and Isala turned her tropical eyes on the Seeker.

"I'm fine." She reassured her, even as her body began to ache.

"I'm afraid she is right, Inquisitor." It was Solas' voice scolding her now. The other mage knelt beside her in the snow, his thumb caressing the line of her jaw. Isala winced and hissed between clenched teeth. "The blade cut deeply here." He murmured, his eyes softening ever-so-slightly at her pain.

"You two with the no shoes." Sera huffed. "Now you're all Miss Burny Feet."

Solas' attention moved to the singed flesh of Isala's bare feet and ankles. The skin around his eyes tightened, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

"As I said, she needs a healer." Cassandra growled.

"Well, let's get her back to one then." Varric huffed.

Bull grunted, moving his bulk into the circle gathering around her. "C'mon Boss, I saw the fall you took from that demon on the hill. You've got some nasty gashes there. Up you go." He didn't ask her permission, didn't give her the choice. The Iron Bull lifted the small elven woman into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all. She wasn't sure if she'd have protested…much. She was exhausted. Between Adamant and now this…she could handle being the one getting carried for once.