"I thought I'd yelled at a Grey Warden," the red-bearded dwarf huffed, trying to catch his breath. Athadra arched a brow and looked around, before Alistair's face glinted with recognition.
"I have seen him before," the taller Warden remarked. "At Tapsters. Oghren, right? You say you were Branka's husband?" He had refused to stay behind, proclaiming that he would rather die to the darkspawn in the Deep Roads as a Warden than on the surface as a king.
"Aye," the dwarf rumbled. "Still am, 'sfar as I know. Anyway, I heard tell that today was the day. Little nug-humper couldn't get his sodding vote off in the Assembly, so he's sendin' you all out into the Deeps."
Athadra frowned; the prince had indeed failed to get his acclaim. He'd sent them on their mission with his regrets, and his regards. All of her party stood in sight of the mines, and the complement of guards constantly on watch there to keep unwary dwarves from leaving the city...or anything else from getting in. Their packs were heavy with hardbread and a special paste that Behlen assured them would make their bellies full for hours with a single mouthful. They'd packed enough to last them for half a year, if they were careful. That thought alone was enough to turn the elf's stomach. "What of it?"
Oghren woozed and stifled a belch, and the faint stink of alcohol rose above the sulfur from Orzammar's magma river. "Ancestors' balls, I've been tryin' to get someone in this sodding city to go after Branka for two years." Suddenly Athadra recalled passing him the week before, the first time she set foot in the Diamond Quarter proper; he'd been making identical complaints to a guard, then. "If you're goin' into the Deep Roads lookin' for Branka, I'm comin' with you."
"You don't say. Aren't you barred from carrying weapons?" Athadra's head tilted as she regarded the dwarf's ale-soaked expression.
"Just in the city bounds," he said, a bit defensively. The dwarf nodded his head at the line of guards a dozen feet away. "Those are the city bounds, glarin' at me right now. Whaddaya say?"
Athadra looked around again, at the throng she'd picked up on her journey. Each of them followed at their leisure, but none had balked when she asked them to follow her into the Deep Roads, and none objected to another blade between them and the darkspawn they were sure to encounter. "Very well," she said at last, and she nodded at the Sten. The Qunari shared a wordless glance and unshouldered the axe she'd recently forsaken. "You'll have to feed yourself, though."
"Good," was all Oghren had to say as he took it up. The haft was taller than he was, but he showed no trouble hefting the weapon. "Deepstalker's good eats," he breathed with a chuckle. "You'll see."
A rumble went through the line of guards as the newly-enlarged group approached; they weren't pleased to see the red-haired dwarf with a waraxe, but they parted without challenge. "Ancestors' favour on your journey," the captain said with a fist clapped to his chest. Athadra nodded and swallowed hard, and she was the first across the line, into the mines. Orzammar lay behind her, while the Deep Roads stood in front; every step came more difficult than the last until she reached the first in a series of three enormous doors.
Every one of her companions followed her. Oghren clapped hands with a miner who manned the doors, but Athadra did not catch the words they shared. When the miner pulled his lever those double doors slid silently open, followed by the middle set. The third doors would not open unless the first were closed, so the Wardens and their companions had to fill the space between them. When the last line of defence sealed behind them, Athadra's stomach rumbled again as a whisper passed through her. The door was mangled and pitted from the ceaseless war between the dwarves and the darkspawn.
"Well," Oghren said with another belch, "let's get this little stroll started already. Where we goin'?"
The Warden hesitated for another moment before she turned to regard the wide passage of the Deep Roads, before them. "Caridin's Cross. Behlen's map tells us it's that way," she pointed to the left fork in the Road's three-way split.
"Pashaara," the Sten announced. "It draws no closer while we stand, Kadan." Athadra shared another glance with him and then nodded, gripping the hilts of the daggers resting at her hips. Without another word she started marching where the map indicated, into the dank, dim dust of the Deep Roads.
Her blood crawled more than ever; Alistair seemed jumpy as well, his eyes darting around for the enemies that his Warden senses told him were all around. It was half a day before the tension could break, but only because a pack of vicious worm-like creatures on two legs assaulted them. Oghren called them deepstalkers, and seemed all too happy to test out his new axe on the vexing creatures. When the deepstalkers lay bloody around them, however, the sense of foreboding returned.
"Must be the Blight," Oghren mused a few hours later as they set up camp in a rocky outcropping. "Usually there's at least a few scouts this close to the city." He'd brought along a few carcasses, and was in the process of dressing them. The rest of the party took their prepared rations and settled in for an uneasy rest.
The next few days passed similarly, with the whispers growing to a low chorus in Athadra's mind. The wide Road made easy marching, save the occasional wild bronto they'd have to dispatch or collapse they'd need to navigate around. In all, it took them a week to reach Caridin's Cross, and when they arrived it wasn't darkspawn who greeted them at the crossroads' approaches; instead a small scouting party of Harrowmont's tried to convince them to turn back. Athadra didn't even draw Ageless; her daggers and Morrigan's spells cut through half of the foes, while the rest of her companions quibbled over who'd slain the most.
They didn't have long to celebrate the victory, though; shortly afterward Athadra's blood surged with joy as they rounded a corner and stumbled across a clutch of genlocks. She felt something approaching understanding as she engaged in battle with the fiends this time. Rather than overwhelm her, the taint in her blood sharpened her focus, and she lost count of how many of the monsters her daggers claimed before she drew her greatblade.
The settlement of Caridin's Cross proper did not disappoint her, either. Her mind had no more room for worry when the white-fleshed beasts threatened her on three sides. She couldn't tell how much time had passed when the last of the hordes melted away. Once her party's injuries were tended, Oghren pointed them to the ancient colony called the Ortan thaig, where he was certain Branka would have gone.
The Deep Roads were relatively clear between the two settlements, but no one spoke more than a few times during the journey. The gloaming darkness sucked the stories from their hearts, and the passages were too dangerous for each to pitch their private tents. Oghren was the only one who'd set foot into the Deeps before, but he had no advice to offer, fixated as he was on finding the Smith Caste woman he'd taken for a wife. Leliana spoke briefly about her inquiries regarding the two contenders for the throne, but despite her training as an Orlesian bard, she'd been unable to uncover much more than they'd gathered from the criers and the spittle-flecked screams of partisans.
After a few days, the Ortan thaig broke their stony silence, filled as it was with giant spiders and another knot of darkspawn. The hours passed unevenly, furious battle broken by long stretches of rest, until the dwarven colony lay as peaceful as the tomb the darkspawn had turned it into, centuries before. Zevran discovered an uncorrupted journal near to the thaig's Southern exit to the underground highway, and Oghren couldn't contain his excitement when it turned out that Branka had left it there, apparently for him to discover.
"I knew she still cared," he exulted. "Says here she's taken her folk to Bownammar to try and find the sodding anvil."
"What's a Bownammar?" wondered Alistair, a smidge of his wit threatening to return.
It was lost on the dwarf. "It is...or, rather, it was a fortress that was used by the Legion of the Dead." When that failed to impress, he explained about the Legion-an order of dwarves who pledged their lives to Orzammar's defence, who took in anyone crazy enough to join them, regardless of their cast or crimes they might have committed. New recruits held funerals before passing into the Deep Roads, and almost none would see their great city again. "Now it's more like a soddin' mausoleum than anything. With the darkspawn this thin underground, though, we just might run into the Legion there."
"And Branka went there, for certain?" Athadra scanned the diary, but could not read the runes scratched on the parchment.
"I'm sure of it, or she tried. It's...a bit out of the way, if you get me. Almost two of your surface weeks, I'd reckon, if we're lucky."
Their luck was tested by the trip; twice, cave-ins diverted them from the Deep Roads proper, and once they even came across a mixed horde of darkspawn in the wide ancient lane of the Road they traveled. The group was beyond maps now; Oghren guided them with the runes in the walls and the distinctive chipping that Branka had made into the rock as she'd blazed the trail the previous year. In all it took them eleven days to comb their way through the passages until their chosen Road petered out to little more than a mineshaft. Not that Athadra could keep track of the time; the low lights which occasionally peeked through fissures in the rock overhead never flickered, but Oghren seemed to know when the sun rose and set far above, though he didn't bother explaining how.
One wall of the passage dropped away, and their path became something of a ledge to an enormous chasm. Athadra's blood tingled powerfully all of a sudden and she threw an arm back. "Down!" She didn't watch to see if her companions had followed her lead, but she simply threw herself to the ground, taking refuge behind a boulder which shielded her from view. Far below them, a formless ocean of darkspawn hived, grunting and bellowing in a distant chorus. Alistair edged closer to her, ducking even lower than she had.
"Do you feel that?"
She looked at him sharply, but nodded; just at the back of her mind, the whispers changed, and she could barely discern an echo of a rapturous song. At once it made her stomach turn and her heart leap with anticipation, and she found herself fighting the idea of throwing herself down the canyon to get closer...except that the song was getting closer on its own, and a moment later, the Wardens learned why.
In the distance an enormous silhouette emerged from the cleft in the rock, its gnarled wings flapping almost lazily. Athadra couldn't resist peeking around the boulder for a closer look; though it was far away, she felt its eyes lock onto her for an instant, and she froze. It was a gigantic dragon, easily larger than the one they'd spied past Haven, and it was clearly tainted by the corruption which linked the Wardens to the darkspawn. The instant passed when the dragon sent a gout of purple flame high into the cave's ceiling, and it twisted around, flicking back into the darkness and away from them. The great mass of darkspawn moved as one, following the dragon Southward into the void.
After half an hour, Alistair risked looking down into the empty gorge, and breathed a long sigh. "It's official," he breathed. "This really is a Blight."
"It refers to the bird-lizard?" The golem, Shale, stepped away from the wall that it had nearly disappeared amongst. Its antipathy for flying creatures was evident in its tone, despite the terrible vision the dragon had presented.
"The Archdemon, yes." The human Warden shook his head. "It's going South, deeper into Ferelden."
"Maybe all the way to the Korcari Wilds," suggested Athadra. Alistair nodded. "Let's see if we can find this sodding Paragon we're after, and then we can go kill it." Now that the song had left her, the Warden felt the urge to rob the life from something...or several somethings, if she were lucky.
Athadra's luck had improved, it seemed; in no time at all their path led them to the entrance of Bownammar, where a group of tattooed dwarves were doing battle with a larger force of darkspawn. The fear and desire the Archdemon had wrought in her was forgotten once more as her sword met armour and corrupted flesh. She even gave voice to her joy, trading battle cries with the dwarves. When the last darkspawn had fallen or retreated across a great bridge which spanned the trench and led to Bownammar itself, the leader of the squad of dwarves introduced himself as Kardol, a commander of the Legion of the Dead. The man offered them a few hours' rest and even gave Oghren some rations of his own, to keep the man from having to stomach more of the cave worms.
"Politics," he spat, when the Warden's troop had recovered a bit of their strength. "I owe Orzammar my life, not Prince Behlen nor Lord Harrowmont. We keep watch here for the 'spawn, but we don't have the numbers to restore the fortress. If you want to look for some dead smith in there, be my guest; my cohort's staying right here, ready to kill anything you send our way."
Athadra was eager to go; she didn't want to wait for the Archdemon to swoop back. Despite the veritable army of darkspawn which had left the fortress, it still proved nearly impossible to penetrate. Four days of near-constant combat took them from the far end of the bridge to the last chamber of Bownammar, and by the end, no one voiced their complaints at the spells Athadra cast in her own blood. Garahel remained close and offered his own life energy when she required it. Eventually they discovered a half-mad dwarven woman who mistook them for her own fevered imagination, but her ramblings painted a bleak picture about what Branka had done in her mad rush to find the Anvil of the Void.
When the Blight-touched woman disappeared, Athadra had them make camp in one of the final defensible chambers of the fortress. She could sense more darkspawn nearby, but she managed a few more hours of sleep before she broke camp and led the way into what she thought was the Deep Roads beyond; the crazed woman had mentioned something about Branka being nearby, and yet still lost.
The Warden wanted to turn back around almost immediately. Flesh-like filth covered the walls beyond the chamber, and the stink was truly atrocious. The demented dwarf had also mentioned a Broodmother, though she couldn't explain what that meant. When Athadra stepped around an outcropping of stone, however, she learned all too quickly.
An enormous...thing sat against the far wall of the wide cave that fronted the next section of the Deep Roads. It might have been a woman, once, but it had longsince transformed into something monstrous. Gigantic folds of flesh held it fast to the floor, nipples adorning several rows in a grotesque parody of breasts. Athadra heard dry heaving behind her; the Orlesian soothsinger proved unequal to the sight, for just a moment. The moment passed when the Broodmother bellowed a challenge at the intruders, and the Warden cut through her own disgust along with the fleshy tentacles which rose from the foul ground and walls. The nearby darkspawn rushed to their Broodmother's defence, but the Warden's party was equal to the task, and eventually the fiends lay still.
When the Broodmother had given its last guttering gasp, the ghastly dwarven woman appeared and repeated the poem she'd composed, which implied that the creature had been one of Branka's companions...and that Branka herself was to blame for the transformation. The poetess fell-or jumped-into a chasm and left the group alone amongst the carnage. The Deep Roads were nearly a relief. A scant two days later, they tracked Branka down to Caridin's final refuge.
The woman was clearly mad beyond all reason, despite Oghren's attempts to reach her. She'd sacrificed every single dwarf she'd taken with her to find the Anvil; even now, it lay beyond a series of traps Caridin had set in place to protect it. And when her comrades had begun to balk, Branka had given the survivors over to the darkspawn, so that the women could become Broodmothers and bear innumerable children to get past Caridin's gauntlet. How she expected the darkspawn to retrieve the Anvil intact was never made quite clear, but it was obvious that she would not return to Orzammar without it.
Athadra considered simply killing the woman, but she didn't think that Oghren would like that at all...and she didn't think that she could make it back to Orzammar without him. So, after a few hours' rest, she led her merry band back into the darkspawn's den. The nascent cooperation they'd shown to Branka did not seem to extend to the Grey Wardens, however, and so the elf and her companions had to clear the path to the first task with fire and steel. The beasts died slowly, but that was merely the start of the Wardens' work.
Caridin's traps took three days and nearly all of their skills to pass unmolested, and at the end of the gauntlet they met Caridin himself; he'd been turned into a golem, and revealed to them that all of the golems had come from living dwarves, just like him. The long-dead King of Orzammar had forced the casteless and criminals to feel the hammer's blow, and eventually Caridin himself, when he balked at the king's thirst for power. Athadra could recall that same thirst lurking in Behlen's gaze, and she could see Branka's supposedly noble intentions getting warped by the power that the Anvil offered...so when Branka herself emerged from the disarmed traps and demanded control of the Anvil, Athadra had to decide.
She was right that Oghren didn't take kindly to his wife's death, but the dwarf took the killing blow himself, and didn't blame the Warden. For his part, Caridin forged them a truly ugly crown upon the Anvil for Athadra to give to whomever she saw fit to sit Orzammar's throne, and he asked only that she destroy the Anvil of the Void. As she and the Sten did so, Caridin pulled Shale off to one side, and told the smaller golem about its own forging; according to the Paragon, Shale had been a female volunteer from Cadash thaig, South of Caridin's Cross. After the pair had conversed a while and the Anvil was irreparably wrecked, Caridin bid them farewell, and went to his final rest in a river of molten rock.
After another resting period, Shale approached the Warden. "I have a request of it," it, or rather she, said. When Athadra nodded, she continued. "Caridin mentioned Cadash thaig, my former home. I believe I would know how to get there from Caridin's Cross; I felt some stirrings while we were there the last time, but I did not think you would divert your course."
The Warden looked across the sloping ground at her companions. They were each of them covered in grime and blood, some nursing wounds that would take weeks to mend even with magic. It was a miracle none of them had been tainted, except her and Alistair. "I don't know, Shale," she said at last. "What do you hope to find?"
The golem frowned, her eyes dimming in thought. "Myself, I think. Memories of the life I might have lived before...this." She shrugged her stone shoulders. "If it does not think it wise..."
Athadra breathed a long sigh. "I would want to know, too. But I can't ask everyone to come. You, me, and the Sten will scout out this thaig while everyone else gets back to Orzammar."
"I hope you do not intend to make me babysit Alistair," Morrigan chimed in, settling close to the Warden. "I'd say he can look after himself, but we both know 'tis not true."
"Hey..." the taller Warden whined. "I want to come, too. I don't think the Assembly will believe the story if it's just me, anyway." Leliana was quick in echoing that assessment, and Zevran cracked that he didn't want to have to carry Oghren's ale all by himself.
"Congratulations," the red-bearded dwarf said in between draws from his aleskin; it never seemed to empty, causing Athadra to wonder if he had an ale rune to match the water rune she carried...it would not be above dwarven engineering, she supposed. "Sounds like we're goin' onna detour. H'ray. Sodding Hespith..." He hadn't recovered from the realization that Branka and 'the poetess' had been lovers, before Branka's avarice chased her wits away.
"Seems that way," Athadra said with a shrug, offering Shale a crooked smile.