Iralen wasn't the only one who coughed and sputtered in revulsion.
The corpse landed on the flagstones and bounced. Iralen stared at it in sick fascination. She could clearly see skin and spine and organs ripped by a thousand fangs. But that thing had no fangs.
At least, it had no fangs for her. Not that she could see.
Squeezing the other half of the corpse so that its juices streamed from its thin fingers and down its cricket-like leg, the demon threw its head back and squealed again.
"It is a terror demon!" the blond man cried. "It will become whatever it is you most fear!"
"Then do not let it!" Cassandra, face blazing, picked up a mace off the ground and hurled it. Sword in hand, she followed it.
The mace smashed into the blob-head and its spider eyes. When the demon staggered, arms windmilling, Cassandra stabbed it in the chest so hard that the point of her sword emerged from its back in a spray of effluvia. Varric, heavy boots pounding the flagstones, got right up close and took a mighty swing with Bianca, smashing the pseudo-face into a pulpy mass.
The demon squealed, but it was fizzing, dying, folding up.
Iralen gasped. The crippling fear lifted slightly. She still felt sick. She was still frightened. But she was no longer hindered by that fear.
Her eyes narrowed. So that was how terror demons operated.
The second terror demon reached toward the ground with both hands, tail lashing. It made a pulling-apart motion, and a rupture opened in the Veil. The demon dived into the rupture feet first. Iralen's arrows, loosed too late, sailed over the spot where it had been standing.
Half a heartbeat later, a rupture opened directly beneath the second solder. She went flying, but the demon's taloned hand arrested her in mid-air. It grabbed hold of her head and tore it from her neck. Her body thudded to the ground in another fountain of blood. It flung out its arms, seeking another victim.
Solas retreated, swinging his staff to ward off the grasping talons. He threw blast after blast of wintry blue ice at the demon, freezing its clawed feet to the flagstones. The blond man and Cassandra jumped in quickly to hack it to bits. The demon shuddered, emitting the crunching, cracking sounds of a stepped-on beetle, only ten thousand times more so.
Iralen stood ready below the rift. As soon as what was left of the terror demon's body sank into a pool of bubbling effluvia, she activated her mark.
She and the rift struggled for mastery for scant seconds that dragged like days. Iralen exerted her will, crushing the rift out of existence. It released her with the usual shockwave, and the mark, sated, quieted in her fist.
Solas approached her warily, as though she were a rabid mabari. His expression was thoughtful, but he was breathing as hard as the rest of them. "Sealed, as before. You are becoming quite proficient at this," he said with a nod of acknowledgement.
"Let's hope it works on the big one," Varric said.
"Lady Cassandra, you managed to close the rift," the blond man said. He grinned in a way that sent faint wrinkles fanning from the corners of his tired eyes. "Well done."
Cassandra, however, sighed. "Do not congratulate me, Commander," she said. "This is the prisoner's doing."
"Is it?" His smile vanished, and his voice deepened. "I hope they're right about you, Lavellan. We've lost a lot of good people to get you here."
"You're not the only one hoping that," she said wryly.
Though Solas cracked the hint of a grin, the other man pinched his brows together. "We'll see soon enough, won't we?" he asked, not as though he wanted an answer. Then he dismissed her from notice and turned back to Cassandra. "The way to the Temple should be clear. Leliana will try to meet you there."
"Then we'd best move quickly," Cassandra said, raising her voice so that the squad of arriving soldiers could hear her. "Give us time, Commander."
"Maker watch over you. For all our sakes," he said under his breath. His eyes, Ferelden amber, pierced Iralen's competent façade, seeing through it to the confused and scared elf beneath. He ran to catch up to the others, one of whom limped at the back of the pack. He shrugged the man's arm over his shoulders and pulled him along, toward the camp no longer under siege.
Iralen watched them go for a few steps, and then she turned her back on them. There were other things to think about.
She picked her way through the courtyard, avoiding corpses, snow drifts, and the black tar and green slime left behind by the demons. Abruptly, the flagstones, which had begun to rise gently, ended at a ledge. She hopped into a thick miasma of smoke.
Smoke that made her stomach churn because it smelled like fat melting off a roasted tusket brisket. She was no meat-eater, and whatever had generated that smell most certainly was not propped over a cookfire.
Like gruesome candles, tallow-colored corpses decorated the ruins, which were open to the bruised, swirling sky. Flames flickered from upturned faces and the hands that had curled into claws. Backs had curved so that each vertebra was distinctly visible. Each face had hardened into a mask of horror. Wide open mouths, teeth crooked and missing. Skin sagging beneath upturned eye sockets. Knees split and broken, unable to bear the weight of agony any longer.
The corpses looked like a field of the Chantry's faithful, struck down as they beseeched mercy from their absent Maker. And the smell . . . Iralen pinched her lips shut, trying not to think about it. Death, in all of its forms, was never, ever pleasant.
The thunder boomed louder here, pervasive and echoing. Iralen approached another drop-off and peered through a blasted wall into what must have been the ancient Temple of Sacred Ashes, little more than a hole in the ground layered here and there with floor stones and piles of gray ash. She looked up. A column of twisting green light clasped a now-familiar rift like a crystalline cameo on a ribbon. The light traveled higher still, far above their heads, to the Breach itself.
The Breach burned like a sun amid its pillowy clouds and orbiting boulders. The lightning flashed green as fresh limes. Iralen stared at it, as mesmerized as she had been down in the village.
"The Breach is a long way up," Varric said quietly, as though afraid his normal volume would waken ghosts best left sleeping. Or maybe the warped reality of the thing had sobered his need to verbally embellish.
Iralen felt the same way. Until then, it had just been a word, a name to explain the sudden chaos that had engulfed their world. Now, this close to the source, Iralen could sense the immense magic that made the air vibrate, a great mass of it just waiting to open like the maw of a dragon and swallow them whole. The mark on her hand, their one weapon against howling madness, seemed pitifully small by comparison.
She watched the clouds swirl, the light beckon, and puzzled over a weird sensation of déjà vu, coupled with an impression of falling endlessly into space.
"You're here!"
Iralen turned at Leliana's relieved cry. The Chantry woman jogged up to Cassandra, her blue eyes checking each of them over in turn as though to make sure they still numbered four, and still possessed all of their limbs. "Thank the Maker."
"Leliana, have your men take up positions around the Temple," Cassandra ordered.
The other woman nodded and turned back to the squad of soldiers who had halted just inside the threshold. She began giving orders in her soft, lilting voice.
Unable to help herself, Iralen returned to gazing at the mind-bending portal torn through the sky. Though the day was frigid, scorched, and still, she could have sworn she felt a fresh breeze, smelling clean as spring, wash the ash and dirt from her face, from her braided hair. Then the breeze was gone, leaving a profound sleepiness in its passing.
Hadn't she slept enough? Days, apparently. Yet the drowsiness stole through her bloodstream, promising weightless comfort.
Cassandra, oblivious, stepped in front of Iralen, breaking her out of her trance.
"This is your chance to end this. Are you ready?" the Nevarran said, her voice tight. It was as though the Breach wasn't affecting her at all. Because of her humanity? Probably.
Iralen glanced from her to Varric, whose ruddy face was hopeful, then to Solas, who looked as though he knew exactly what happened when she looked into the Breach because the same thing happened to him – and then to the rift chinking and clanking right in front of them, an eighth of the way between the Breach and the ground, a mere twenty-five feet off the Temple floor.
"I'm not sure how to even start getting up to that thing," Iralen said, nodding her head toward what she was beginning to think of as the Eye in the Sky. She was careful not to look at it again.
Solas came to her rescue, though he, too, kept his gaze from straying upward. He focused his attention no higher than the Fade rift floating across from them. "No. This rift is the first, and it is the key. Seal it, and perhaps we seal the Breach."
"Then let's find a way down," Cassandra said, once again not questioning the elf's advice. After a pause, she did add, "And be careful."
In a loose group, the four unlikely companions, as Iralen thought of them, turned to their right and began to inch their way through the rubble. At intervals, they passed some of Leliana's archers standing at the ready, facing in to the destroyed heart of the Temple. Iralen trudged forward, thinking of nothing except where to place her boots next.
A deep, rumbling, disembodied voice, as loud as the crash of thunder, caused her to stumble to a stop.
"Now is the hour of our victory," it said, reverberating around the ruins. "Bring forth the sacrifice."
Sacrifice? Iralen repressed a shudder. She inspected the area, searching for the voice's source. It hadn't sounded quite . . . real.
"What are we hearing?" Cassandra asked, for the first time since Iralen had met her, nervously.
"At a guess?" Solas raised his eyebrows, brown and upswept and as decisive as pen strokes. "The person who created the Breach."
Who was not here now, not anymore. Cassandra, and even Varric, seemed confused, but unwilling to turn back. Iralen, less confident than before but beginning to feel the flickering of temper in her chest, moved farther in. She stepped through wisps of fog tinged green by the Breach, over veins of glowing green that popped out of the shadows, running like lava through blasted rock.
A gleam of red, as vibrant as heart's blood, drew her curiosity to the fore. She tiptoed nearer, wide-eyed, to a handful of crimson crystal spires. They were as thick around as she, but taller, malformed and hulking in the gloom. A burning, coal-red light seemed to pulse in their centers, and a carmine corona flickered in the air around them. From the corners of her eyes, she espied the wet char-stuff of her dream – it had been a dream, hadn't it? – fluttering like winged insects. When she turned to look at them, however, they vanished.
Varric's face had gone pasty under its ginger stubble. "You know this stuff is red lyrium, Seeker," he said uneasily.
Iralen blinked. Red lyrium? She'd never heard of such a thing. What she knew of lyrium was that it was phosphorescent blue, and mined from stone by dwarves (for they were immune to the highly volatile and hallucination-inducing nature of lyrium), and liquid when processed, and that some mages drank it to replenish their mana, or magical power.
"I see it, Varric," Cassandra said quellingly.
"But what's it doing here?" Varric's raspy voice came out slightly distorted, as though he had clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.
"Magic could have drawn on lyrium beneath the Temple, corrupted it," Solas said. Even he did not sound entirely steady.
Corrupted. That was a good word for it, this aura that tantalized Iralen, that teased her sight and captured her mind as a half-heard song. The red lyrium sparkled. So pretty.
"Ugh, it's evil," Varric hissed. He pulled Iralen to her feet, for she had knelt to examine the phenomenon more closely. "Don't touch it, whatever you do."
A/N: New title at last! And one that can be construed in several ways as the story moves forward. I'm very happy with it - a thousand thanks to St4r Hunter for suggesting it to me. 3
Reviewer Thanks! St4r Hunter. My one and only reviewer this time - which means so much to me. Thank you for being such a faithful friend and reader!
Yours,
Anne