"Are you all right?"

Seth glances up from his bedroll, flashing a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "I'm fine. How are you holding up?"

Dorian sighs. "Don't do that."

"What?"

"I wasn't asking the Inquisitor," Dorian says, settling in beside him. "I was asking you." He studies his lover's features in the bloody glow of the torchlight. All around them, the Legion of the Dead go about their business, speaking in the low voices of the condemned. There's a cavernous silence about the place – except for the occasional burst of rough laughter from a game of bones going on in the corner. A few of the Legionnaires are taking what enjoyment they can in this forgotten corner of the world, trading war stories and good-natured jibes over a few mugs of ale. Perfectly understandable, yet it feels jarring and out of place here, like laughter at a funeral. Which is not far from the truth.

Seth watches them absently, avoiding Dorian's question – as though the answer isn't written all over him. He's even paler than usual. A thin sheen of sweat plasters his silver hair to his temples, and his fingers pluck restlessly at the blankets. He is very obviously not fine, because of course he isn't. He's spent most of his life in the sylvan embrace of the wilds. A world of green leaves and sun-dappled earth, of crystal waters and sweet breezes under a broad sweep of sky. He still finds Skyhold suffocating, and now here they are in the Deep Roads, a dark, stinking warren of cramped passages and stale air that would make any creature higher than a nug question its life choices.

"The torchlight," Seth says. "It makes the walls seem to move. To close in. Don't you think?"

Dorian starts to agree with him, but what good will that do? He decides on a different approach. "I know you're not overly fond of walls, amatus, but they have their virtues. They afford one privacy, for example. All these shadowed nooks and crannies… One could get up to all sorts of delicious mischief." He pauses to let that sink in, eying his lover coyly. "What do you say?"

The elf is half incredulous, half amused. "Are you seriously suggesting a quickie in the Deep Roads?"

"Not the height of romance, I grant you. The possibility of being stumbled on by a tattooed dwarf does nothing to enhance the mood."

"And what about darkspawn? How are they for the mood?"

"There are drawbacks, to be sure, but I think the ambience affords ample opportunity for some interesting role play. You can be the heroic but damaged Grey Warden haunted by his past. I'll be…"

"The damsel in distress?"

"The incredibly charismatic and handsome nobleman in distress. I'll be an incorrigible flirt; you'll play hard to get, weighed down by duty, et cetera. We'll quarrel a little, but ultimately you'll be powerless to resist my charms, and then…"

Seth arches an eyebrow expectantly.

Dorian leans in and whispers a few suggestions for the climax of this little tale, pitching his voice in that low purr that always brings goosebumps to the elf's skin. This time is no exception, and Seth closes his eyes, shivering. "Oh dear," he murmurs. "Imagine if the darkspawn caught us doing that."

"They might find it educational. Why, it might just revolutionize their whole society. They could take this newfound knowledge back to their nest and…"

They stare at each other for a moment. Then Seth snorts with barely suppressed laughter, and Dorian can't keep it together; they collapse onto Seth's bedroll, giggling like schoolboys.

They lie shoulder to shoulder, close enough to touch but no so close that they'll raise any eyebrows. Everyone's heard the rumours by now, of course, but public displays of affection would feel as out of place here as… Well, snogging at a funeral.

Seth is still chuckling to himself. "Of all the tactics I thought you might use to distract me, I admit I was not expecting darkspawn orgies."

"I'm glad to hear it. One does so hate to be predictable."

The elf threads his fingers through Dorian's. "I love you."

"How could you not?"

There's a stretch of companionable silence. "What do you think we'll find down here?" Seth asks at length.

"Nothing good. But at least we can check the Deep Roads off our to-do list. We'll have seen every corner of Thedas by the time this thing is done."

"And then we'll live happily ever after," Seth says, with only a hint of wryness.

"We will," Dorian says, bringing the elf's hand to his lips and pressing a fleeting kiss to his knuckles. "I promise."

A reckless promise, that. Even then, Dorian had known he couldn't possibly keep it. There were simply too many things standing in their way. Duty. Incompatible cultures. The suffocating weight of history. And yet how trivial those things seemed now. How very surmountable. We should have tried harder, Dorian thought dully as he squeezed Ellana's hand. We should have taken every moment we had left.

He glanced at her. How long had they been sitting there, the two of them, lost in their own thoughts while the others speculated and argued? "Are you all right?" he asked gently. When she didn't respond, he kept talking to fill the silence. "I was just thinking about the first time we came down here, your brother and I. He hated it. We all did, but he had an especially difficult go of it."

She nodded. "He said so in his letters. That it was like being trapped in a crypt. I understand what he meant now." Her gaze skimmed over the ceiling. "I keep thinking it's going to collapse on us."

Well, actually… Cave-ins were all too common down here, but now did not seem like the best time to say so. Instead, he went with something a little more cheerful. "Ironically enough, this is also the place where we came across the most amazing thing any of us had ever seen. We talked about it for years afterward. Did he tell you about that, too?"

Her eyes brightened with curiosity. "I don't think so."

"Deeper underground, past the Deep Roads, there are caverns so vast they seem boundless. There's a whole world down there. Stalagmites the size of mountains. A heaving sea pounding against the rocks. Plants and animals you never knew existed. The walls are aglow with veins of lyrium, and when you look up…" He tipped his head toward the ceiling, and Ellana followed his gaze, imagining with him. "The blackness is filled with tiny pricks of blue light, glittering like stars on a clear night."

"It sounds beautiful."

"It is. Genuinely breathtaking." He started to say more, but suddenly Cassandra was looming over them, tightening her sword belt.

"Are the two of you ready to head out again?"

Ellana sprang to her feet. "Of course. Where are we going?"

"Rainier will stay here. He needs to recover his strength." A mutter of protest came from where Thom was sitting, but Cassandra cut him off with a gesture. "The rest of us will return to the ruins where we found the prisoners."

Dorian frowned. "Won't the Wardens be long gone by now?"

"Let us hope so," Cassandra said. "But Rainier believes we will find a map there."

"These tunnels go on forever," Thom put in from where he sat by the fire. "It took our party the better part of a week to find the thaig where the Promisers were holed up, and that's when they were all in one place. If we're to have any chance of finding the others, we need to know where we're going. Even the Promisers can't keep it straight, so they all carry maps. With any luck, you can sneak into the ruins, steal one, and get out before anyone notices. The Promisers should be distracted looking for the escaped Wardens."

Ellana sighed. "I guess we went with your plan after all, Dorian. Without even meaning to."

"We set the Wardens free," Cullen said. "Thanks to us, they have a decent chance of making it out alive. If that presents us with an opportunity, we'd be fools not to take advantage of it."

"Then let us make haste and do so," Cassandra said impatiently.

Dorian glanced at Rainier. "Will you be all right on your own?"

"I can still defend myself," he said, patting the sword he'd taken off one of the men Dorian killed.

"I'll leave Maggie with you. She'll warn you if anyone comes near. And I'll set more mines in the corridor outside."

"Thank you. But don't waste time worrying about me. Just find our people."

"We will," Cassandra said firmly, already leading the way out.

Dorian wasn't pleased to be backtracking already, but he couldn't deny it made sense. They couldn't afford to blunder around blindly, wasting time and putting themselves at unnecessary risk. A map would help them find what they were looking for – hopefully while avoiding the main road the Promisers were using to clear rubble.

The thought gave him pause. "If Malkar's people have been down here for months, why are they still digging? What are they looking for?"

"One more question to add to the list," Cullen muttered. "We ought to start writing them down."

It didn't take long to make it back to the ruins, and when they got there, they found their hosts in a state of disarray. The place was practically deserted, and from the sounds of things, those who remained were none too happy.

"It doesn't matter how they got the knife," growled an Orlesian woman, her voice floating down the empty corridor. "They shouldn't have been able to get past this door. Maker, half of them could barely walk! Henri should be flogged for this."

"He wasn't even here!"

"Exactly. And now he's off chasing the mice he let escape, and we're the ones who will have to pick up the slack."

"What slack? What are you even talking about?"

"Imbécile. What if the darkspawn fall upon us again? Who will fight them off, hein? The researchers, with their soft hands and their feather quills? Non. It will be you and me. Two against however many."

Dorian and the others exchanged a look.

"Well," Cullen whispered, "that's handy."

"We should split up," Ellana murmured. "We can cover more ground."

Predictably, Cullen didn't look happy about that suggestion. "It's risky."

"We're in the Deep Roads," Dorian snapped. "Everything is risky."

Cullen sighed. "Fair enough. I'll go with Ellana. You and Divine Victoria—"

Cassandra growled impatiently. "This is hardly the time for honourifics. Let us hurry." Jerking her head for the others to follow, she slipped into the corridor and set off in the opposite direction from the arguing Promisers. They soon reached a T, and that's where they split up, Dorian and Cassandra making a right while the others went left.

The first room they came across was lined with books. The research library, presumably, such as it was. Dorian scanned a few of the titles, but they weren't especially interesting. Books on the Blight, mostly, and some anatomy texts. They pressed on. The next room seemed to serve as a private office of sorts, consisting of a single desk covered in stacks of paper. Well, now. This looks promising. Dorian leafed through the pages as quickly as he could. Much of it was routine – inventories, requisitions, et cetera – but there were notes on each test subject. How they were infected and what happened to them; how long it took for them to die. The final notation for each was the same: No response to treatment. Apparently, Malkar's efforts to cure the Blight weren't going well. Limited value in using live subjects, the notes said. Research to concentrate on ghouls until further notice.

Dorian made a face. They must have been keeping the ghouls somewhere nearby. In separate cages, presumably, so they didn't eat each other. Not the sort of scene he fancied stumbling across.

He resumed his search, opening a drawer in the desk, and…

"Hello," he murmured. "What have we here?"

The soft blue glow of lyrium emanated from the back of the drawer. Opening it further, Dorian discovered a scrap of metal with lyrium woven into it. A broken fragment, from the look of it, belonging to something larger. There were sketches here too, and equations, with notes in the margins: Temperature? DO NOT BOIL. Stirred into molten metal? Injected into semi-hardened?

Much as he wanted to pocket the piece of metal, that would almost certainly be noticed. Notes, however, could plausibly have gone astray, so Dorian grabbed the sketches and jammed them in his pouch.

"Hsst!" Cassandra was motioning at him from the doorway. Time to leave. He started for the door, but she made a slashing gesture with her arm. "No time! Conceal yourself!"

Conceal himself? Was she blind? There was nothing in here but a desk! His gaze raked the room, but no better option presented itself, so he scurried under the desk and curled up in a ball like a bloody child playing peek-and-hide. Cassandra, meanwhile, pressed herself into a shadowed corner, blade at the ready.

Dorian hugged his knees to his chest and fumed. It was absurd, cowering under a desk when he could be setting these vermin on fire. But if word got out they were down here, they'd lose the element of surprise, and that would almost certainly prove fatal for all of them, their friends included.

Voices reached them from the corridor. "We shouldn't leave the experiment for too long. I want to observe the effects."

"You can stare at that damned thing all day if it suits you. I haven't eaten since this morning. Besides, we're not going to get anything new out of it. We need fresh blood. Literally."

"New shipment's coming in today, so they say. Most of it's for the dig, but they've got a fresh crop of knife-ears, too."

Dorian's heart froze in his chest. A fresh crop of knife-ears. Follow the shipment, find the elves. Find Seth, and Sera too. If they were still alive.

"We should put in a requisition."

"What for? Thought we were done testing the living?"

"Yeah, but I got an idea. Just one or two."

It was extremely difficult not to set them on fire. Dorian could only promise himself that they would pay eventually, even if he had to hunt down every last one of these bastards himself.

"Oh, you got an idea, huh? Is it worth the risk?"

The voices were right outside the door now, and the footsteps stopped abruptly. "What're you on about?"

"Haven't you heard? Been going on for weeks now. Darkspawn are drawn to the fresh ones. Must be able to smell them or something. The minute a new shipment of subjects comes in, the darkspawn are on them like flies on shit. Best think twice before we bring that to our door, is all I'm saying."

The footsteps resumed, the voices receding gradually down the corridor until all was silent.

Cassandra stepped out of the shadows. "Let's go."

Dorian crawled out from under the desk, but instead of following her back the way they'd come, he headed toward the room the researchers had come out of.

"What are you doing?" Cassandra hissed.

"This must be their laboratory. I want to see what they're doing in here." Dorian opened the door – and immediately regretted it. A familiar wave of nausea rolled over him, and his head throbbed. A huge shard of red lyrium sat on a dissection table, its malevolent glow painting the entire room blood-red. "Never mind," Dorian said, closing the door. Whatever they were doing with that poison, it wasn't worth risking madness to find out.

They retraced their steps to the passageway and found Cullen and Ellana waiting for them – the latter wearing a cheeky grin.

"Success, I take it?" Dorian whispered.

She nodded, patting a pocket. "Let's go. We can look at it back at camp."

Rainier was asleep when they got there, and he jerked awake with a snort, sword in hand. He gave Maggie an accusing look, but she just wagged her tail.

"She only barks at strangers," Dorian said airily, giving the wolf a scratch.

"You were right, Thom." Ellana smoothed a sheet of vellum out on the floor between them. "Just look at this spider's web. It would take weeks to go through all these tunnels."

"Here," Cassandra said, tapping the map. "This crossroads. This is the camp mentioned in the note we found. A new shipment is due to arrive there today."

"There are elves in that shipment," Dorian said. "If we follow it, they'll lead us straight to the elven prisoners."

Ellana closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to Mythal.

"It's not far from here," Cullen said excitedly. "We could be there before nightfall, provided we don't encounter too many problems along the way."

A silly thing to say, since it all but guaranteed that they would. So be it. If there was even a chance Seth was being held in that camp, Dorian would fight through every blighted creature on Thedas to get to him.

Hold on, amatus, he thought, already striding for the door. I'm coming.