Cassandra, who had watched the wordless battle with a remarkable poker face, asked her, "How do you think we should proceed?"
Iralen almost laughed in her face, though she found nothing humorous about this situation. "Now you're asking me what I think?"
"You have the mark," Solas said.
"And you are the one we must keep alive," Cassandra added. "Since we cannot agree on our own –"
She left the sentence hanging.
Iralen struggled with her resentment – none of this had been her choice! But now she was being offered a choice. A choice for how she wished to spend the rest of her undoubtedly short life.
Should she spend it in a careful sustained assault, where soldiers fought to ensure her arrival? Or should she take the mountain path to find out what had become of the lost squad, possibly sacrificing the soldiers in the pass in the process?
Not an easy choice. No. Nothing was ever easy.
She observed the Breach for a few heartbeats, visible now as a misty green ladder leading to the heavens, behind massy, wrecked ridges that had once been walls and an outshot of rock resembling spray from an ocean wave. A couple of standards blew in the gray wind. The wind also rocked a blasted and skeletal evergreen.
When the mark killed her, she imagined she would look no different than that tree.
"I say we charge," she said at last. Charge with the soldiers she knew were still alive. She locked eyes with Cassandra, with Leliana, and then she glared at Roderick. "I won't survive long enough for your trial. Whatever happens, happens now."
Varric moved off with Iralen, who meant to convey haughty disregard both for those clamoring for her execution and for whatever further dangers awaited her on the mountain.
She wasn't sure if it worked. Roderick leaned on the table, scowling down at his maps and papers.
Cassandra touched Leliana's sleeve. "Bring everyone to the forward camp, Leliana," she said. "Everyone."
With a dip of her cowled head, Leliana headed down the bridge, back the way they had come.
As Cassandra passed him, Roderick spoke to the map. "On your head be the consequences, Seeker."
Though Iralen glanced back at him, his tense shoulders and bowed head, Cassandra did not. Stoically, she led the way, while Solas brought up the rear.
The path on the other side of the bridge barely classified as that. It rose sharply, balancing its walkers on a spine of ice and snow three feet across.
The noise was louder up there, thunder cracking high-pitched and rumbling so low it could be felt as well as heard. The green comets rained down as fast and as thick as falling stars, but none landed nearby.
Iralen, who had begun jogging once she reached level ground, slowed and halted. She glanced at Cassandra for confirmation. The Seeker nodded, so Iralen leaned into the wind and continued.
She ran along the path that had reappeared. Around fires that burned even here, at what felt like the roof of the world, past rubble and ruin, a wagon with cut logs waiting to be made into a barricade, more melted rock. She nearly groaned at the sight of a new set of stairs, but these were short and shallow. She took them to the top. Straight in front of her, a matching set of steps led further into what used to be the Temple of Sacred Ashes. From her low vantage, the Breach seemed rooted there, just ahead.
As though it could sense her proximity, the Breach hiccupped and spat. It gathered in, shrinking upon itself.
Then it blew outward in one of its violent pulses. Lurid green wind raced in all directions.
The mark flared, but Iralen didn't feel it much that time. Two soldiers, running as hard as they could toward the steps, toward Iralen, fear stamped all over their faces, were not fast enough to escape the blast. They were swept up by it, along with chunks of stone torn from the steps. Swept up, and then thrown against a stone wall. Then left lying broken and motionless on the stairs.
Iralen stopped at the foot of the steps, stunned by the suddenness, the senselessness of these new deaths and the complete lack of response to them. She had found a pocket of order and quietude, beyond which raged the end of the world. Bemused, she looked around.
This, then, must be the forward camp. It seemed absolutely mad to stake a claim on this bit of land, between the outer and inner walls of the temple complex, but the Fereldens had done it.
It didn't seem right to talk in this place. A few soldiers slept beneath the tortured sky, bundled against the cold and wrapped in their bedrolls. More than a few corpses mimicked their oblivion, shrouded in stained canvas. The single priestess's whispered chants over these lost souls hung on the snow-flecked air, too easy to discern. One soldier sat on her tipped-over helmet, eating a sad, soggy sandwich with grim singlemindedness. Others gathered near the weapons chests, conversing in mutters, cleaning and maintaining their equipment.
Iralen took another look around. Perhaps no one had seen –? Well, one had. A soldier got up, looking as though he had been keeping watch for just such an occurrence, and wearily climbed the stairs to the bodies. Without a word, he hefted one by sticking his arms under its armpits and clasping his hands across its chest. He dragged it down the stairs. Tucked away next to the stairs lay the other bodies in orderly rows. He deposited his load at the end of the row and then went back for the other. The priestess's whispery voice cracked as though her throat had closed up. She had to swallow a few times to begin her chants anew.
When Cassandra brushed by Iralen, she gave herself a mental shake. She followed the human woman to the weapon stockpile. The soldiers there allowed her and the others to trade worn-out arms for newer. It was, Iralen thought, accepting a full quiver from a woman with skin as brown as her armor, as though these gaunt-eyed soldiers could not spare any energy on fear or hatred even when presented with the very elf responsible for this horror, as according to Chancellor Roderick.
Iralen, who sat on a low stool to keep from soaking her trousers on the ground, buckled the quiver in place. Was she responsible? It didn't seem possible. She wasn't even a mage. From where had all this power come?
She reached into the chest by her knee, choosing a stiletto that she started to buckle to her belt. Her fingers, half of them frozen and gloveless, fell from the buckles as though her mind had drifted elsewhere. It hadn't – it was hard to concentrate on anything besides the snow and the death, both so close she could touch them.
Iralen rubbed her palms vigorously on her rough wool trousers and then stood. She was as ready as she was going to get.
Holding that thought in her mind like a torch, she approached the cleared stairs. She waited, observing the Breach activity through the doorless opening at the top, until the others joined her.
No one else tried to return to camp. Iralen mounted the stairs and walked through the opening unhindered. Boots crunching through snow, she took note of a more immediate problem than the Breach. Little clots of two to three fighters dotted the ruined courtyard. Demons and soldiers, soldiers and demons, paired up and dancing to a silent orchestra led by death. No wonder no one else had tried to come through the doorway. Cassandra's soldiers had been overrun by the endless demons spawning from the nearby rift. It clinked and smoked, a sinister and sharp-edged blot on the air.
Iralen knew that she may not make it to sunset. She knew that she may not be the key Cassandra and Solas thought she was. But she had never been one to take things sitting on her ass. Those demons and that rift were in her way.
Iralen jumped from the side of the stairs, firing all the way down. As though of one mind, her escort – who were starting to feel more like an honor guard – leaped into the action as well. Iralen, running and firing as fast as she could, winced against the twinge of regret that twisted in her middle when the nearest soldier fell, half his youthful face clawed to the bone. He looked as though he were laughing, the flap of skin glistening red, the gums bleeding, the teeth yellowish-white against tendons and snow.
He struggled briefly. Blood ran and pooled and froze across and between the flagstones. He lay still.
Uninterested in this offering, the lesser shade demon turned toward Iralen, hissing. She sent an arrow down its throat, glittering with a coating of Solas's ice, and charged toward the next one.
She was not going to end up like that poor human man-child. Not. Today.
Cassandra gave a war cry, hoarsely now, to get the attention of the next shade. The soldier who had been fighting it, forgotten, fell back weakly, but only for a moment. Crying out her rage and her fear and her grief, she rushed the lesser shade from behind. Glinting whitely, her sword swung down and carved hooded head from mutilated body. When Iralen and the others kept going, she went with them, directly underneath the Fade rift, treating it as though it were no more than a black raincloud.
Iralen thrust her hand into the air. She closed her eyes, searching for the magic tied to the mark.
The rift bubbled and belched. The mark flared, sending shooting pain along her entire arm.
Like children popping out of piles of leaves, a wraith and two more lesser demons burst from the rift.
"Clear the way!" Iralen commanded. She could not close the rift, not while demons were still manifest. She did not know from whence this knowledge came, but it was there, clear and green and bright.
To complicate matters, the ground was acting as upset as the sky. Periodically, without warning, black and green geysers erupted with the clanking of chains, eating through armor and limbs like acid. They were all trying to keep one eye on the ground, ready to dash away should it begin to bubble and boil.
Two soldiers had survived, plus another wearing a bear pelt over his armor, helmless, his yellow hair a beacon in the gray light. Iralen vanished behind her charmed powder and slipped nimbly through the battle until she got behind enemy lines. Then she joined Varric in confusing and weakening the demons' assault from the outside.
The last shade fell to the blond man. Iralen tried again to close the rift, but it clanked louder than before, howling in a way that sounded like laughter. It birthed a new wave of demons.
"How many rifts are there?" Varric demanded. He glared indignantly at the one above his head. Then he sent an iron quarrel into a wraith that exploded into mist.
"We must seal it if we are to get past," Solas said. He conjured long ice spikes that took care of two more wraiths.
"Quickly, then!" Cassandra ordered.
I'm trying, Iralen thought angrily, but she did not speak. Instead, she whipped out her dagger and stabbed a lesser shade in its glowing eye. She shoved the stiletto in farther, into what she hoped was a brain.
The shade died in the usual dramatic way, throwing up its arms and wailing. It collapsed like a hellish soufflé, black and stinking and steamy.
Behind it, a new demon rose.
And rose.
Dangling arms and muscle-corded legs as long as Iralen. A skinny barbed tail that lashed like a whip. Bile-colored skin stretched tight over insect-like joints. A melting blob of a head, in which numerous garnet eyes glinted.
This thing threw back its head and released a scream from its middle that turned Iralen's will to water.
It wasn't a scream, exactly, not with a voice. It was more of a squeal. Of a clicking squeal. Of a hundred clicking squeals.
It sounded like . . . like . . .
Iralen clenched her teeth, partly in anger and partly in fear. She couldn't remember, but she knew the terror that went along with it. Something – had once – tried to kill her – squealing like that.
Gasping cries. Words half-formed by shaking lips. The soldier nearest Iralen seemed paralyzed by his terror. His eyes bulged when one of the new demons swooped upon him and picked him up as though he were no more than a toy. Then it brought the sobbing soldier up to its face and – Iralen shoved her hand against her lips to keep from screaming – somehow, without a mouth, the demon bit the soldier clean in half. Blood sprayed out in a sticky rain.
As though it had bitten into a rotten nut, the demon spat out its mouthful of human.
A/N: Some days I don't feel like writing about gross things, and some days I do! LOL I really, really need help with my title, though. I just can't seem to get a grip on my idea in a way that doesn't sound generic. I'm willing to start over at this point. Any ideas?
Reviewer Thanks! St4r Hunter. Politics! Politics are mucking everything up. X3 Still, I kinda like your take on Iralen. Every character in her role is the same, no matter who creates them, but the extra space for inserting personality is considerable and I really enjoy filling it up. Thank you so much for reviewing, my friend!
Until next time,
Anne