They came upon Fiann curled up at the base of a lofty spire at the remains of yet another ancient, subterranean campsite. Hollowed out by hunger he was, but otherwise alive—drawing breath deeply while he slept. Donna set down the lantern and ran to him, her heart overflowing with the unimaginable joy at finding the one person alive she'd not imagined to ever see again. Where was Erin? Obviously not present. Donna swallowed back the sadness as she placed a hand on Fiann's.

"Hey," she said softly. "Wake up."

He started upright, his cry of fear echoing in the cavern. Then he took in those who surrounded him and flung himself into Donna's arms.

"Maker's bollocks, I never thought I'd see you again!" He shook with emotion, and there was still strength enough in him to squeeze the breath out of Donna.

Never mind. Donna hugged him right back as the tears welled up in her eyes. "We're getting out of here, love."

"Aye, that I believe now that I see you." He hugged her even harder.

"We'd better get out," Seith added.

"Not far now. You will feel the sun on your face again," Cole said. "No more jumping at shadows in the deeper darkness. But come, we must hurry. They are hungry."

Donna didn't want to ask who 'they' were.

Fiann leaned heavily on her as he rose. "Have you anything to eat?"

"No."

"Damn. I'm about ready to eat my own boots."

"Where is Erin?" Donna had to ask. She already hated that the answer she'd get would not be one she'd like.

"The long story is one best told in daylight, but the short of it involves spiders." He shuddered. "She was brave." His breath hitched. "She told me to run. She'd follow. Except…"

He rested his head on her shoulder.

Donna felt her eyes grow scratchy. Behind her, Evan said, "Damn."

"We must go then," said Seith.

Fiann looked up. "But that's not all." He leaned over to retrieve a makeshift sack that looked to be ancient canvas from a tent that had somehow endured through the ages. He'd been using it as a pillow, and he reached inside to retrieve an object that he held out to the others for inspection. "I found this."

An orb. Dull metal. Roughly the size of an over-large apple and inscribed with sinuous grooves all over its surface.

Seith stepped forward with a sharp intake of breath, his hand half outstretched.

Fiann gave a dry chuckle. "You recognise it, don't you? I'm sure you do."

Donna felt all the blood drain from her face and pool at her feet. "I don't know much about arcane lore but I've read… How can this be? I thought it was destroyed when the Inquisitor finished Corypheus."

"There are others, it is said," Seith whispered. "But not all who seek them have the power to unlock these orbs' potential. My father was looking for another… Though he didn't say as much, but this is now what I've come to suspect."

"So was Mihanin, apparently," Fiann said with a grimace. "As luck would have it, I stumbled upon it in the dark trying to find a way out of a series of interlocking caverns not long after Erin and I were…separated."

"To think that bastard elf," Evan started, "has dozens of folk grubbing away in the dirt for weeks, if not months, and then you just 'stumble' upon it?"

"The Maker moves in mysterious ways," Fiann said.

"Maybe it wanted to be found," Seith murmured. "We don't know all that is needed to be known about these objects. They themselves might be imbued with powerful spirits associated with the gods."

"Well, we can't just leave it here for that dreadful git to find it," Fiann said. "I believe the Inquisition will be able to best ensure that this stays out of the wrong hands."

"Best destroy it," Evan said. "The last one caused enough trouble as it is."

"How?" Seith said. "No one but my mother was able to. It's valuable. We could use it."

"Are you mad?" Evan started. "Look what happened the last time!"

Donna heaved a sigh. "All right. Enough now. I think we can all agree that it's better that we press on. We're not out of the dark yet. What we'll do when we get out the other side, Maker alone knows, but we're not going to get there any faster for bickering like a bunch of whores over marks on payday."

"Are you sure you don't have anything to eat?" Fiann asked.

"I wish." Donna gave him a light kiss on his stubbled cheek. "We'll figure things out once we get out the other side.

"Come," said Cole. "I can show you the way to the light. But we must be quick. There are things darker, hungrier than spiders spinning webs."

"Let me guess," Evan muttered. "It begins with a 'D'."

For how long they travelled, Donna wasn't sure. All she knew was that she wouldn't let go of Fiann's hand as they stumbled along.

They drank the salty, mineral-rich water from pools that formed in hollows. They found a cavern where strange fungi grew in profusion. Fiann swore he recognised them from his travels and that they were edible—in moderation. They tasted revolting and as mineral-tangy as the water she'd been drinking, and her stomach rebelled with every mouthful she swallowed—but food was food, no matter what its shape or form.

And while the sustenance didn't fill out all the hollows, she was strengthened somewhat, and her reserves that had been near empty, were filled enough for her to hope that they might still feel sunlight warm her face. What must it be like for her ancestors, who still possessed Stone sense? Now that would have been helpful round about now.

But the real terror began with the sound of distant drums.

Donna's pulse quickened. Drums in the deep. The air, close and festering, not clean like before. Their path had dipped into a warren of narrow, winding tunnels where their feet squelched through unimaginable gunk. Cole did not have to tell them that they must keep quiet. Not even a whisper.

Darkspawn. She didn't want to say it.

Of course there would be bleeding darkspawn.

They hurried. By the aching in her legs and the shortness of her breath, Donna knew they weren't pausing to rest like they usually did. Cole loped ahead, carrying their precious light, and they hurried after the strange boy with his sing-song words that made her feel as if he could see within her very heart.

She wanted to cry; her eyes grew sandy at the corners and there was a tightness in her chest that had less to do with their exertions and more with the sick sense of dread that was creeping up on her that her life would be no more than a whimper and a crunch of bone in the eternal night.

What glimpses she caught of her companions in the wavering, wobbling light of the lantern revealed equally grim expressions as they stumbled along despite the long hours. So close now. So. Bloody. Close. They weren't going to give up and die now. They'd fight, tooth and nail.

Eventually they could go no further. Cole knew without being told, and finger to his lips, he guided them into a crevasse down one of the lateral passages. It was a tight fit, and they were packed in like salted fish in a barrel so far as Donna could tell. Yet she was grateful for the warmth of her friends' bodies, the fluttering of breath. Shivering, Fiann pulled her close, planted a kiss on her forehead. His lips trembled as she returned the kiss. When Cole extinguished the lantern, the darkness was a solid thing that pressed down on them on all sides. Donna gasped. Fiann clasped her hand in his. He didn't need to speak, and she stilled her heart as best she could while she waited for sleep to overtake her.

Those infernal drums followed her into oblivion.

The forest around him susurrated with life as Seith moved along the path that curved between the buttress roots of giants that held up the canopy. A threnody of insects sawed away at their curtain of sound while small amphibians, hidden among spiralled fronds popped and clicked in counterpoint.

Yet this wasn't real. He was walking in his dreams because he didn't feel the moist air, didn't hear the whine of mosquitoes about his head. Seith held up a trembling hand and studied the nails—clean, though bitten to the quick. Not real. For a moment his vision wavered as he became aware of the sensation of existing in two places simultaneously, his body wedged tightly against that of Evan's in that endlessly dark place. It would be ridiculously easy for him to pull the rest of himself through. He knew how. He could even bring his friends with now that the connection—

The glow up ahead stopped him short.

He'd been here before. In the material world where there was only a crater now where once an altar stood. Yet in a bubble halfway between the material world and the Fade, there was a woman there, trapped outside of time. How many occasions he'd dreamed just this, approaching her. Sometimes talking. Seith's pace quickened and he crossed a shallow, winding river. No time to worry about leeches. Besides, he was the one who was little more than a wraith here.

Up a rise. He flowed, like mist.

In the waking world, there was but a scooped-out crater where nothing grew. Not so now; it was as if he'd found that moment in the past, before the calamity occurred.

And there she was, forever striving forward, reaching out, the strain on her features evident as she tried to place her outstretched hand an empty plinth flanked by two statues of wolves.

"Teniël," he called softly.

The woman had a slight figure, like him; he'd inherited nothing of his father's build. Feral, near-vulpine face. Like him. It hurt him deep in his chest to see her. A ragged banner of black hair coalescing about her face as if she were underwater and lit up by that weird, unearthly glow. Green crackled energy by her outstretched left hand.

After two circumnavigations of the sphere of entrapment, Seith stopped opposite the plinth, facing his mother. She stared forward, unseeing. The flare of jade-green light from her palm crackled and sputtered as she reached forever outward, the Mark possibly reacting to his presence.

"Why did you go?" he asked. "I was still in swaddling. Barely three months old. Why did you leave me?"

There. He'd said it, and the words opened up an aching void deep within him. It was best that he didn't examine these scars, but here, now, he couldn't help but unpick the stitches and open up the past.

His mother stared into eternity, unblinking, her lips parted slightly as if she was calling someone's name. Seith was certain he knew exactly to whom she was calling out. She couldn't be that much older than he was right now. A slip of a girl who'd carried the fate of Thedas on her shoulders for three years.

"Damn you, Father!" he howled, and his cry seemed to reverberate with a lashing of power that caused his vision to fracture at the edges. He stepped back, turned around on his heel, screaming Solas's name with a string of ancient Elvhen curses that tore up from deep within.

The scene with Teniël shivered then shattered, and Seith was flung head over heels into nothingness. He tried to grasp at the essence of where he'd been: anything to anchor the vision, but it was like trying to snatch at smoke with his fingers. The scene shredded as fast as he strained to hold it.

Further maledictions flew from his lips as he cursed Solas soundly, with every scrap of vocabulary at his command. The hatred that poured out of him as he recalled the sadness of Commander Cullen, who had forever been second best to the heartless bastard who'd fathered Seith.

"Face me! Damn you! You craven coward! You knew, didn't you? You locked her away! It was you she was looking for, wasn't it? And you couldn't bear to face her! Why? If you're such a powerful god, as some seem to think you are, that you can cause an entire people to fear that you might catch their scent, then why did you leave her there? Alone? For all these years? You're no god! A real god wouldn't be afraid."

He didn't want any of it to be true, all those conversations that he'd had with Solas over the years making so much sense when recast with what he'd figured out from the journal: the caginess of the man when certain topics were broached, how he seemed to always know just that little too much. Then snide remarks of ghost-haired Mihanin who seemed to accept Solas's true identity all too easily. Unasked for confirmation Seith didn't want.

So, this is what it likes to be the unwanted spawn of an evil trickster.

Deep in the limitless darkness, drifting, he felt his face contort into a rictus grin. And his own name, so close in form to an ancient Elvhen word for 'malediction'. Oh, how he'd laughed the day he'd found that out. A name that could be spat out.

"It's an ambiguous naming word," Solas had pointed out to him years before. "It is dignified by the other glyphs around it. Meaning can shift."

But he'd never seen the glyph in any places other than the overgrown, forgotten shrines dedicated to Fen'Harel. And none of the surrounding glyphs had ever improved the context.

I was a curse to my mother the moment I was born.

Something clasped his shoulder.

A voice, as if from a great distance, spoke his name.

Seith!

Seith bit back a shriek as he started awake in the darkness.

"It's okay! You're okay!" Donna whispered in his ear. She'd pulled him to her, and he was aware of Evan's arm around him from behind, the human lending him a physicality.

"Where…" They were here, in the Deep Roads somewhere beneath Western Orlais. Escaping. Not fractured and falling forever into nothingness.

A hiss of breath escaped him, and Seith allowed himself to relax.

"Are you all right?" Donna asked. "You started… It was like you were about to have a seizure of something."

"Or you were going to start shrieking enough for the darkspawn to find us," Evan added.

"Will you guys pipe down a bit?" Fiann muttered.

Seith felt Donna turn.

"What, and leave him to start screeching in his nightmare? That would've brought them down on us for sure."

"Well, by Andraste's sacred tits, can you please just shut up. Cole said he's worried, and he's been gone so long so now I'm worried."

"We should go," Donna whispered.

"Not in the dark," Evan said.

"We daren't light the lantern," Donna said.

So they waited, squished in the fissure in which they'd slept. For once, Seith was grateful for the close quarters, for the air was dank, heavy with cold. They all shivered, but at least offered each other a modicum of warmth. They had one bad moment when there was a chittering and huffing of breath, and the stamping of many feet that was accompanied by the jingling of armour.

Darkspawn. The stench of decay and something unnatural, that sent weevils of stark terror crawling through Seith's veins, had him and his fellows hold absolutely still for fear of discovery. He didn't need to think about what would happen if they were found, dragged from their crevasse the way wading birds plucked worms out of their burrows at ebb tide. Eaten alive, corrupted, torn to ribbons.

They waited without moving for what seemed like an entire age, until the sound of their breathing seemed to be preternaturally loud. This was it; they were stuck here forever—

"You can come out." Cole's voice sounded from the opening of their hiding place. "They are gone, for now. We must hurry. Another patrol passes here soon."

Seith scrambled after the dwarves, glad Evan was the one bringing up the rear. Cole lit the lantern, but he kept the shutter open only a fraction, so that they only had the barest sliver of light by which to see the path they must follow. Their progress was slower, and they paused often to listen for the sounds of pursuit.

With his unerring sense of direction, Cole guided them through one twisting tunnel after the other. At times they crawled; sometimes they made their way through what felt like caverns larger than any of the ruins Seith had ever encountered. And always, there was the muted roar and rumble of many feet and evil voices; the darkspawn were always near.

Seith allowed this constant stress to wash over him until he stumbled along in dull resignation to their fate. There was no end. They'd be here forever. Perhaps he already had fallen into a Fade nightmare, doomed to repeat the same action over and over again until his body eventually perished. Or maybe his spirit was sucked into the Fade to wander forevermore.

"Hssst." Evan pulled an arm around Seith and stopped him.

He nearly bumped into Donna. Cole had closed the lantern, but he was outlined in a glow nonetheless.

Fractured light sent hazy bars down from above, illuminating a vast chamber tiered with what appeared to be the remnants of a forgotten thaig. The delicate spans of walkways criss-crossed overhead, mocking them with a way out if they could only reach them. And perhaps that way out would have been feasible, if it weren't for the grim company guarding what seemed to be the only staircase leading up to the first level. A dozen, maybe a score of brigands. It was difficult to tell, because Seith's eyes were struggling to handle the overabundance of illumination. A figure turned just so that a shock of ash-white hair was illuminated.

Mihanin. Here.

Disappointment soured Seith's mouth.

The spindly ancient Elvhen tilted his head just so, as though he was listening out. Then he straightened, facing exactly where Seith and his friends were hidden behind a chunk of shattered masonry.

"Ah, so good of you to join our little gathering. We were placing bets to see whether the foul ones would get you. Seems I'm owed a few silver pieces. You can come out now. We'd like to do a head count so we can figure out by exactly how much I'll be the richer."

Seith didn't need to see the creature's face to know that that Mihanin was sneering.