As they worked their way through the Deep Roads, Lyria found that more and more she didn't mind Oghren's presence so much. He was rude and disgusting and had a multitude of hygiene issues, but also wasn't terribly complicated. She liked that what you saw with Oghren seemed to be what you got with Oghren. No deep dark secrets. No hidden anguish or a multitude of layers. He was just Oghren.
Of course, she wasn't about to actually tell him that considering the singular time she complimented his fighting style, he wouldn't stop trying to grope her for the rest of the day. Even then, he forgave her for the broken finger quickly enough. Or maybe he simply forgot about it once Wynne healed him up.
The closer they got to Branka, the more Darkspawn they encountered. Was it a coincidence, or were they drawn to the anvil somehow?
When they encountered a contingent of the Legion, the tattooed warriors had few answers to offer. But with their help they were able to push deeper into the Dead Trenches on Branka's trail.
"I never thought that someone so set on getting killed would be so friendly," Alistair murmured as they picked through way through a particularly nasty tunnel. The catacombs were starting to smell more and more of taint and rot.
Lyria shoved a dead body out of the way with her foot. "They're people just like anyone. I'm surprised you feel that way considering the fate of every Gray Warden is to meet a similar end. It just takes a little longer for us, right?"
Alistair clucked his tongue. "True, but we don't go around proclaiming ourselves to be the walking dead. That would be kind of creepy and I'm sure we wouldn't get invited to nearly as many parties."
"They didn't know where Branka was, so they can sod off," Oghren grunted, kicking a stone door open. A waft of something rotten blew in from the other side, churning the stomachs of everyone.
It was strange, the deeper they went in, the more twisted the darkspawn taint seemed to be in the walls. At first it was an oily sort of black stain, but now it had grown into thick lumps that were starting to look more and more like globs of rotten flesh growing on the walls. There was something about the darkspawn they started to encounter in the tunnels that was strange as well. They held fewer battle scars and some were completely bereft of armor and clothing, almost as if they were new.
Could it be the anvil?
The answer came in the form of a lilting chant in the halls of the dead trenches where the walls were pulsing with globs of rotted flesh. Every single step elicited a horrible squelching noise and made walking uneasy. The stench had gotten bad enough that some of them wrapped cloth over their faces to try and muffle it.
At first it was hard to make out the words, it was some sort of singsong chant but impossible to make out. But as they followed it it slowly started to clarify, and it was as rotten as the flesh around them. Like a child's playsong twisted and corrupted:
First day, they come and catch everyone.
Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat.
Third day, the men are all gnawed on again.
Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate.
Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn.
Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams.
Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew.
Eighth day, we hated as she is violated.
Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin.
Now she does feast, as she's become the beast.
And then they found her. A broken corrupted dwarven woman who all but ignored them as she chanted to herself and pawed through the corpses scattered around her. Many of the bodies looked like fallen members of the Legion or old rotten corpses so far gone it wasn't possible to tell their origins.
It took Lyria grabbing her arm and wrenching the woman up to face her to break her away from her chanting.
"Ah, my dreams reward me with new faces," she said softly. Her voice sounded like it was beautiful once, but was now so deeply mired in sadness and pain that it was a corrupt and tainted as the rest of her.
"By the Maker, look at her," Alistair murmured. Her skin held dark blotchy patches, her hair was falling out, and her eyes were murky and clouded.
Lyria finally released the woman's arm. "Who are you?"
She smiled, flashing her darkened teeth as her eyes stared at some point past all of them. "Do you want to know who I am, little red haired dream, or who I once was?" She swayed on her feet to the tune of some melody only she could hear. "I was once Hespith, commander of the force brought here to the trenches. But now? Now I am something else. Or perhaps I am nothing at all."
Lyria glanced back at Oghren for confirmation. He shrugged in response. "It's been awhile, but that name sounds familiar. I think Branka's commander was named Hespith."
Hespith's voice suddenly went panicked and loud. "Do not say that name? No no no no la la la la..." She turned back and hunched over the pile of corpses once more. "That one willed all of this to happen. She let us all be taken. Even Hespith. Her lover. Her beloved. Her devoted..."
"Her what now?" Oghren's eyes widened. "Maybe you have your Brankas mixed up. Maybe we're talking about another Branka here in the deep roads that might also have brought her house down here to find the anvil and... yeah, I don't believe myself either. Huh, if I knew she swung that way I'd have been okay with it. Two extra bodies in the bed are warmer than just one." He leaned on his axe.
Morrigan's lips curled. "'Tis good to see that you are taking these events so well, dwarf. Surely a weaker man would have been saddened at the loss of his entire family and the idea that his wife seemed to prefer the company of her own gender after the experience of having him in her bed."
Oghren laughed that gravely laugh of his. "What can I say, I spoiled her for any other man."
"Spoiled seems to be an appropriate word, yes. Like curdled milk." Morrigan shook her head.
"Where's Branka?" Lyria said a little too loudly. "Is she still alive?"
"Stop saying that name," Hespith stood bolt upright and whirled on them. "They took Laryn first. They vomited black bile into her mouth and forced her to eat the flesh of her kin. They warped and twisted her. And I... no no no no no... I WILL NOT ACCEPT!"
The woman was off like a dart after that, dashing down one of the flesh covered tunnels with astounding speed. Lyria growled to herself for not having the foresight to stop her in time and rushed after her with her companions in quick pursuit.
There were a few darkspawn in the tunnels and Lyria carved through them as though she were cutting a path through thick brush. They were all unarmored and unarmed and fell quickly. A few hefted stones and fallen junk from the tunnels, but nothing that made for good weaponry. It unsettled her. The implications of the poem... the newness of the darkspawn...
"At first she was determined. We all were. The anvil would mean rediscovering the secret of the golems. Restoring the greatest army our people have ever known."
There was no way to tell where the voice was coming from. It sounded vaguely as if it were ahead of them, but impossible to pinpoint. All they could do was trudge on, fight, and try to reach her again.
"Then it grew into an obsession. We were on the very lip of rediscovering it, but could go no further. That is when they came. That is when she was consumed."
A horrible rumbling grew around them and the walls seemed less like dead rotting meat and more like something struggling to peel itself from the walls and attack them. Parts of it pulsated and writhed. By the ancestors, parts of it even seemed to be speaking and making noise.
"I was her lover, and I could not stop her. She watched as we were all taken. Branka watched as Laryn was turned and twisted in their image, as they forced black bile down her throat and fed her the meat of her kin. She turned gray and bloated and became like them, falling so far that she soon devoured the body of her own husband. We begged and pleaded and bargained to try and spare ourselves, offering one another if it would mean our own freedom. But Branka watched. And Branka allowed as Laryn was Laryn no longer. She became one of them, and birthed more of them."
The tunnel opened and the creature that waited in the chamber was a monster of nightmare. Rolls of fat puddled down its body to the point that there was no way it could possibly move on its own, it didn't even have any visible feet. The thing's arms were small and looked useless, but large tendrils grew from the piles of darkened flesh to make up for it. Its face was a mass of loose flesh, hairless and distorted. The eyes were hidden under the bloat and decay, and the mouth was nothing but a peeled back maw of teeth that seemed far more predatory and animal than any sentient creature. The only thing that told them that it was female, or once could be humanly considered female, were the rows of bloated and sagging breasts along its front like a nursing pig. It carried the stench of rot and taint.
"Broodmother."
And it saw them.
The noise it made sounded like so much wind being expelled from a pile of rotten meat along with the shrill cry of an animal. Those multitude of tendrils and tentacles suddenly whipped out towards them.
Lyria knew only one thing – Whatever that blob of twisted flesh was, it had to die. Kin or darkspawn or both or neither, it was a monster and it could not be allowed to live. When the first tendril grasped at her, she screamed a combination of rage and disgust at it before madly slicing at it with her swords and kicking the remnants of it away.
The monster's wet bellows summoned more darkspawn from the tunnels and soon they began to pour in to protect their progenitor. Lyria screamed orders as she slashed at anything that got too close, but they all already knew the same thing that she did. The monster needed to die.
Morrigan and Wynne both cast enough magic that the air felt alive with it. Waves of power that weakened the spawn around them and bolstered their own strengths. Leliana's arrows flew like the wrath of the Maker she served, burying themselves into the darkspawn with perfect accuracy. Sten was like an unstoppable giant, bellowing cries of battle in his native tongue that all but drowned out the roar of the enemy. Alistair and the mabari both tore through alongside the Qunari, determined to get to the broodmother. Zevran nowhere to be seen, but all around them monsters would suddenly stop and fall, a throat slit here, a back stabbed there.
Oghren's skill and strength rivaled the Qunari. The dwarf was lacking in so many ways, but not as a warrior. He handled his axe like it was an extension of his own body, twirling and cleaving through any darkspawn that he could reach. He was a creature of war and rage honed to a sharp burning edge.
Lyria plowed her way towards the broodmother alongside Alistair. Leliana's arrows and Morrigan's bolts of magic had impacted it from afar, but both were ineffective. The arrows were swallowed up by the thick rolls of the monster's fat, and there was just enough dwarven blood in the creature that the magic used against it was muted. They would have to kill it at close range.
Sten and Oghren reached it first and began cleaving through the massive tentacles that lashed at them. Lyria glanced up at it as she tried to disentangle the mabari from one before it could be swept up and away. The broodmother's head was small and almost invisible amidst the piles of fat and flesh, but the head was the best target. Every other vital part of it was armored in all the fat and flesh.
"Zevran! The head!" she shouted, hoping the elf was conscious and able to hear her. "We'll keep it busy."
Lyria kept her thoughts as cold as the stone. It's just another darkspawn. It's like the demon in the Circle tower. Don't think about what it used to be, think about what it is now.
Her sword slicked through a tentacle that had grasped Sten's leg. She didn't have the large weaponry or strength to actually hurt the main body from the ground, but she could protect the people who did and who could. The severed tentacle writhed and twisted at the giant's feet almost indignantly before Sten slammed his armored boot down on it and crushed the remaining life from it.
She never saw the elf climb the rock wall or get into place, but suddenly he was above them and leaping at the broodmother's head. One of his daggers buried itself to the hilt into the back of the monster's head, and the other cut the throat deeply enough that it was almost decapitated.
The effect was immediate. It suddenly began to buck and tremble, lashing around wildly and making horrible gurgling noises. Zevran lept from his perch and tumbled neatly to the soft floor of the cavern as the fighters drew back and out of reach as the creature began its death throes.
It seemed to take forever to die, but they had bled it enough and done everything else they possibly could until it finally shuddered and stopped moving altogether. Even then the lot of them stayed back and waited in silence, half expecting it to rise up and attack one last time.
The lot of them bristled as they suddenly heard a soft rustling in the silence.
Hespith stepped into view on a ledge above the creature's corpse, looking down at them sadly. "You see now, my dream friends?" she murmured, the hollow chamber and silence carried her soft voice to their ears. "This is what Branka allowed. This is where the spawn comes from, and why they take as well as kill. I am lost, little dreams. I am lost and dying because I loved and could not stop. I have been poisoned not only by the bile and blood, but by something far far worse... betrayal." She bowed at them and moved out of sight.
Lyria let her go, her eyes were still fixed on the corpse of the broodmother and she quietly swore to herself to carry a dagger with her in some hidden place from that point on. Should she ever fall and find herself taken, she would slit her own throat at the first opportunity.
"We're almost there. Branka will have answers," Oghren said coldly as he wiped the tainted blood away. "Branka must have answers."
Or else Branka will have hell to answer for, Lyria thought.