"All right, everyone," said Cullen, in full Commander mode now. "This is it. Once we blow the gaatlock, there's no turning back. If anyone has any last-minute questions, now's the time."
Dorian had a lot of questions. Since when are darkspawn our allies? How do we know this explosion won't bring the entire cavern down around our ears? Am I the only sane person here?
He did not ask these questions, as they were unlikely to produce satisfying answers.
Instead, he drummed his fingers impatiently on his folded arms as he waited for the farewells to be over. The farewell he cared about most had already taken place, and the longer they stood around, the more time he had to contemplate all the horrible things that could be happening to his amatus at this very moment. Though on the plus side, worrying about Seth had the advantage of keeping his mind off his own mortality, which would be staring him in the face soon enough.
"We won't be able to see you from down below," Cullen went on. "So it'll be up to you to keep an eye on our progress and brace yourselves when we light the gaatlock."
Dorian scowled. "And how exactly are we meant to do that?"
"We hold on tight," Ellana said with a thin smile.
"Good luck," Cullen said, his eyes fixed firmly on the younger Lavellan. "Maker be with you."
Ellana started to say something, stopped, turned a fetching shade of pink, and finally managed, "And you."
Honestly, it would have been just too adorable, were it not for the fact that they were all going to die.
"Have fun with the darkspawn," Sera said, making a face. "You sure they're going to follow you, Thom?"
Rainier nodded. "It's a Grey Warden thing. The darkspawn can sense us as surely as we sense them, and they'll be itching to put me down. Should be easy enough to lead them on a merry chase."
"What do you mean, sense you?"
Rainier scratched his beard and glanced away. "Best not to ask too many questions about that."
Dorian was about to say something waspish, but happily, he wasn't the only one impatient to be off. "Let us get on with it," Cassandra said, ducking into her helm. "There is no time to lose."
They split up, the warriors heading in the direction of Heidrun Thaig while Dorian and the rogues continued on to the Bastion of the Pure. Already, they could hear the muffled boom of distant explosions as the Promisers detonated small charges at the base of the cavern. "This path Seth showed you," Dorian said to Ellana as they jogged toward yet another flight of stairs. "Are you sure the Promisers don't know it?"
"If they do, I doubt they'd bother with it. They've got that ancient lift, and the path we're taking is cramped and dark and really steep. Not very practical if you've got a better way down."
As it turned out, really steep was something of an understatement. Dorian spent as much time slip-sliding as he did walking, relying on his staff to keep him from going arse over teakettle.
"Too bad we don't have shields," Sera remarked as they skidded along. "Could've ridden them straight to the bottom. Like sleds, yeah?"
"Yes, exactly," Dorian said. "Straight to the bottom – and right off the edge of a thousand-foot cliff."
"Spoilsport."
Down they went, and farther still, until Dorian's wrist ached and his right butt cheek quivered with the strain. But eventually the ground levelled off, and they heard the muted roar of waves in the distance. "We're here," Ellana said, and a moment later they stepped into the vast, glittering cavern of the Bastion of the Pure.
It was just as Dorian remembered it: beautiful and subtly terrifying, as if it had been designed expressly to make a man contemplate his own insignificance. Stalagmites the size of chantry spires thrust up from the ground to meet equally massive stalactites dangling from the ceiling, row upon row of shadowed stone fangs pressing in on them as though they stood clasped in the jaws of some colossal beast. It was, Dorian reflected, like staring into the teeth of your own doom.
Sera had never been here before, and she took in the sight with an awed expression. "Wow. It's…"
"Incredible," Ellana said wistfully.
"I was going to say creepy. There should not be an ocean down here. There just… shouldn't." She shuddered. "Let's just plug these arseholes, get Varric, and get out of here."
Sensible suggestions all, but Dorian had a feeling it wasn't going to be that easy. Already, he could see signs of heavy traffic along the wider pathway to their left; it didn't take the tracking skills of a Dalish hunter to see that the Promisers were down here in numbers. If Cassandra and the others couldn't draw off enough of the guards…
Stop it. There was no point in worrying now. Besides, they had more immediate problems, like not dashing themselves to pieces upon the rocks.
They followed the path to the right, keeping to the ledge overlooking the underground sea as they worked their way gradually down. They could hear the work going on far below, the cold staccato of pickaxes ringing out between the roar of the waves. Dorian was starting to wonder just how close they planned to get when Ellana called them to a halt at the top of a steep slope. "This is it," she said, craning her neck to look up. "Once we get up there, we can cut across until we're practically on top of the miners' camp."
Dorian eyed the rock face they were meant to be climbing, a twenty-foot wall of stone bathed in the blue-white glow of lyrium. Veins of the stuff grew like naked tree branches out of the rock, giving off a gentle buzz of energy that stood the hairs of his arms on end. "Exactly how are we meant to climb that?"
"Just do as I do." A crevice about six inches wide ran vertically up the rock, and Ellana jammed the toe of her boot into it, using it as a foothold to propel herself up to a small ledge. Grabbing on with her hands, she hoisted herself up to her chest and yanked her boot free, only to jam it back in a few feet higher. "Like so," she said. "This part isn't too bad."
This part. How tremendously comforting. Sighing, Dorian jammed his boot in the crack and followed Ellana's lead, alternating his weight from hand to foot until he reached the top of the ledge. From here, it was a relatively gentle slope down toward the sea – broken only by the occasional ten-foot leap between outcroppings of mildew-slick rock.
Marvellous.
He watched, stomach squirming, as Ellana sprang effortlessly across the first gap, alighting on the downslope as if she weighed nothing at all. Sera went next, with a similar result. Then it was Dorian's turn. It's only ten feet, he told himself. You can jump across ten feet. He took a bit of a run at it just to be sure – which turned out to be a rather large mistake. He made it across, all right – and just kept going, hitting the damp stone with so much momentum that his boots slipped right out from under him, landing him flat on his back and sending him skidding uncontrollably down the slope. He clawed frantically at the stone, tearing his fingernails to shreds as he skittered toward the edge. If it hadn't been for Ellana throwing herself on her stomach and grabbing the staff strapped to his back, he'd have gone right over; as it was, he nearly took her with him, sliding all the way to his armpits and clinging on for dear life as his boots dangled a hundred feet above the pounding waves of the underground sea.
It took both Ellana and Sera to haul him back up, and the three of them flopped onto their backs, panting in relief and staring up at the lyrium stars overhead.
"Fuck, Dorian," Sera managed finally. "Clumsy much?"
"I feel compelled to point out that my accoutrements are not ideally suited to death-defying leaps."
She frowned bemusedly at the ceiling. "Dangly bits make it harder to jump?"
Ellana muffled a laugh with her hand. "I think he means his clothes, not his... er, bits."
"Why not just say that? Better yet, maybe don't wear a dress next time."
Dorian scowled. "They are mage robes, not… Oh, never mind. Let's just keep moving, shall we?"
The next jump was a little shorter, thank the Maker, though his disastrous first effort had left Dorian shaken enough that he nearly made a hash of the second one, too. Eventually, however, his nerves settled, and the three of them managed to make their way down to a ledge overlooking the miners' camp. Now came the waiting part.
They lay on their bellies, watching the activity below. The miners sat huddled in groups, resting between shifts under the watchful gaze of a dozen Promisers. "Seth says those ones are the Anointed," Ellana whispered, pointing at a hulk of a knight with a crest of red lyrium shards running down his spine. "There's a couple of Qunari ones, too." And so there were: Dorian spied at least three of them, lyrium-horned and massive, with blades of red lyrium protruding from the outer bones of their forearms, like fins on a fish.
"Lovely," Dorian muttered. "A right hook from one of those would knock out your teeth and cut your head off."
"Look." Sera inclined her chin. "There's Varric."
"Where?"
"Right there. Sitting up against the rock."
Dorian squinted at the dwarf in question, a thick-set figure with a ponytail, bushy beard, and significantly more arm hair than was advisable. This ginger yak couldn't possibly be Varric, could it? A Duster, surely? But no – the chest hair peeking out beneath the beard was unmistakable. Somewhere under all that fur was the Viscount of Kirkwall. Even from this distance, Dorian could see that he'd put on weight, all of it muscle. From wielding a pickaxe day after day, no doubt. Well, well, Master Tethras. A proper dwarf after all this time. Dorian would enjoy teasing him about it later – assuming any of them survived.
The odds of which looked… rather better than they ought to, actually.
"There should be more of them," he whispered. "Promisers, I mean."
Ellana frowned. "You're right. There were at least twice that many yesterday. I wonder—"
"Shut it, you two," Sera hissed. "Listen."
Bestial shrieks echoed off the stone. Heads turned all over the mining camp, and a shout of warning went up. The Promiser guards drew swords and bows, all of them gazing out in the direction of the sound.
Up the hill, the path narrowed into a natural choke point before branching in two separate directions. To the left, a steep path hugged the edge of the rocky outcropping on which Dorian and the others perched. To the right, a slightly smoother path cut a longer route back up the slope. This was the direction from which the sound came, and as Dorian watched, a single hurlock came charging down the path, heralding the arrival of a pack of the foul things. The Promisers rushed out to meet it, leaving only a handful of guards behind.
Which was, of course, the idea.
Steady now, Dorian thought, watching the Promisers cut down the hurlock before continuing on to meet the rest of the horde. Wait for it…
He should never have doubted Cullen. After all, it was the Commander's ingenious use of trebuchets during the attack on Haven that had inspired this little gambit of Seth's. No sooner had the Promisers passed the choke point, a thunderous explosion rocked the cavern. The walls shook, the ground shuddered, and an avalanche of stone came roaring down the steep slope just below Dorian and the others.
"Get back!" he cried, yanking Ellana away from the edge just as a massive boulder crashed off the wall. They scurried back as far as they dared, covering their heads with their arms and waiting out the deluge. When at last the rumbling stopped and Dorian peered through the dust, he found a mountain of rubble at the choke point, cutting the enemy off from the camp, preventing them from falling back or reinforcing the guards left behind. On the other side of that rubble, Cassandra, Cullen, and Rainier would let the darkspawn and Promisers fight it out before taking on whoever was left standing.
And on this side of the rubble, where only a handful of guards remained, it was time to start climbing.
"Now comes the hard part," Ellana whispered. The ledge where the archers were perched was about thirty feet below and another thirty in front of them – roughly half of which was empty air. Somehow, the three of them would have to get across that gap and then climb down the rest of the way.
"Look at that," Sera said. "One of those pissbags has Bianca." Dorian followed her glance, and sure enough, one of the archers had appropriated Varric's precious contraption. "I call dibs on that one," Sera said, already nocking an arrow.
But Dorian put a hand on her bow. "Not yet. We're sitting ducks up here."
"He's right," said Ellana. "We need to be ready to jump down the moment we take them out. Which means we have to get across that first."
"I trust you have an idea about that?" Dorian eyed the gap uneasily. "It's too far to jump."
Rummaging through her pack, Ellana came up with a rope.
"You're not serious." When Ellana just looked at him, he laughed darkly. "You are. And how, pray tell, is this meant to work?"
"You see those lyrium veins up there?"
They all glanced up. A thicket of lyrium grew out of the wall above them, several feet out over the gap. As Dorian watched incredulously, Ellana tied the rope to an arrow and shot it over top of the lyrium branches. "This is never going to work," he growled.
"Would you stop being such a pessimist and just…" She wiggled her fingers, exactly the way Seth always did when he wanted to indicate magic.
Sighing, Dorian wreathed his hands in blue light and manipulated the arrow until a solid knot had been tied in the rope, securing it to the thickest of the lyrium branches. "This is madness," he muttered, giving Ellana's end of the rope a hard tug. "Do we even know if this crystal can bear our weight?"
"We're about to find out," she said with a nervous smile.
Sera peered over the ledge at the heaving sea far below. It was hard not to imagine oneself being smashed to bits upon the rocks, or sinking below those cold, unfathomable waves. "This is shit," she said, succinctly.
Ellana went first, taking a solid run at it before throwing herself off the ledge and swinging like some insane pointy-eared monkey across the gap. She landed gracefully, turned around and grinned – something so very like Seth's pirate smile that Dorian's heart gave a little pang. He fetched the rope with a wave of his hand and gave it to Sera.
"Fuck," she said. "Shitballs." Then she gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and swung. She cleared the gap easily, and Ellana grabbed her at the far end. Two across.
Right, Dorian thought as he got a firm grip on the rope. How hard can this be? Like a tree swing over a pond. Except he'd never done that, because even as a child, he'd had some fucking dignity.
Still, there was no help for it, so he took a run at it, held on tight, and jumped.
There was a glorious moment, suspended in time, when it was actually a little bit fun. Not quite as much fun as riding a dragon, perhaps, but delightful in its way. Dorian admired the sight of his boots hovering over the heaving, pounding sea.
And then the lyrium branch broke, because of course it did.
On the upside, Dorian had cleared the gap. On the downside – way, way down – he was now hurtling feet-first toward the ledge where the archers were posted, a fall more than sufficient to shatter both of his legs from ankle to hip bone. But this wasn't his first potentially deadly fall of the day, and he'd had time to reflect on what he ought to do in circumstances such as these. So he extended his arms, palms forward, and shot a pair of carefully-controlled fireballs out of his hands. He timed it perfectly, using the counter-momentum to slow his descent just enough that he managed to land on his feet – in between a pair of enemy archers who were now quite spectacularly on fire.
There was no denying this was a cock-up of epic proportions. And yet Dorian couldn't help feeling just a tiny bit pleased, because it looked bloody magnificent.
Right up until there were half a dozen arrows pointed at his face, at any rate. At which juncture Dorian was forced to admit that he had a problem. Still, it wouldn't do to undermine that glorious entrance with a show of weakness. If he was going to go out, it would be in style, so he pasted on his most infuriating, shit-eating smirk and gathered the Veil around him.
"Morning, chaps," he said, wreathing his forearms in flame. "Shall we?"