War is cruel, but the devices which make war possible are even crueler.
- Caridin Ortan, -245 Ancient
Belinor's staff thrummed, and he heard the music coming up through the ground. Black Lyrium . Ifalwen squatted and touched the moss, listening.
"This was a Tevinter ritual site, a Place of Power," Ifalwen said. She frowned and stood up, hooking her thumbs in her belt. "There was a tower here," she continued, pacing, staring at the center of the clearing as if she were trying to picture something, to remember. "Yes," she said, "it was a smaller tower. The Tevinters performed blood rituals inside it."
"Should we dig?"
"No, Warden-Commander Surana." Ifalwen stopped, stretching out her hands. Belinor felt mana gathering around her, knotting itself tighter and tighter, and then a sudden, explosive release of tension: the ground opened like an ulcer, the moss sloughing off like dead skin, revealing bones and tissue, and neoplasms of Black Lyrium. The cloying, nutty-sweet stench of rot and corpse-gasses billowed up from the excision, as if something had been festering under the moss. "Warded," she said as the wound knitted itself back together, leaving nothing but a raised scar of rock, and the lingering stink of dead things. "The umbrium infected the Tevinter Sigils."
"It isn't Black Lyrium?" he asked.
Ifalwen shook her head. "No, it's infected umbrium," she said. "It can, however, taint lyrium. Umbrium is like cancer to lyrium, and this land is rich with it. The dwarves had several lyrium mines in Viridis: whole smithing and mining thaigs dedicated to processing and handling the stuff. Haldommar was their biggest operation, if memory serves, but the darkspawn destroyed it."
"If umbrium is cancer to lyrium, then what's Red Lyrium?"
"Psychosis."
Belinor blinked, but said nothing.
Ifalwen surveyed them like a veteran sizing up greenhorns. "We will need to wait for a Mongrel patrol," she said, crossing her arms over her cuirass. "Their counterspell is the only way to bypass the ward." When Belinor suggested using his staff's resonance to breach the ward, Ifalwen looked sharply at him and said, "No. If you induce Harmonic Disaster, the tower's substructure will collapse, and with it, our only hope of reaching Sedullos."
"Harmonic Disaster?"
"You know not?" Ifalwen looked annoyed, as if he'd just asked her to repeat some simple concept for the hundredth time. He'd received similar looks from the Senior Enchanters, back when he'd been an apprentice in the Circle. "Magic is a language of cadences, a musical flow," she began. "A Harmonic Disaster occurs when a cadence rapidly oscillates with another until it exceeds and destroys it. You observe it every time a spell overpowers another. Magic, in its rawest form, is music, and everything else—the gestures, the incantations—are just dances and lyrics mages have added over the centuries. Pointless ceremony, though I have a theory that much of it arose from the need of memorizing the cadences, like a rhyme to help children remember important lessons."
The way Ifalwen described magic was how Belinor imagined a bard would describe it to someone who'd never seen magic before—a far cry from the dry, technical language he'd been accustomed to in the Circle, where magic had been tidily and mechanically anatomized into a series of expositions, treatises, and discourses. Had he described magic in such obtuse, poetic terms to his Senior Enchanters, it would have earned him a caning; Belinor shuddered at the memory, feeling the sting across his calves, the unpleasant itchiness of the welts that came after.
"So if magic is just nature playing bard, what does that make the Calling?" he asked at length, peering at Ifalwen.
"A bad performance," Ifalwen replied, the slightest hint of amusement in her tone. But then the amusement was gone, and she was grave and unsmiling again. "The Calling is dissonance to the consonance of magic. Sour chords. It exists outside the Void Song." She paused as if rethinking her words, then said, "Rather, it calved off the Void Song and became its own ugly music. Then again, it's all ugly now." She made a dismissive gesture with her hand, as if fanning away a foul odor. "But enough of that," she announced. "Let's settle into camp. We may be waiting for a while."
They made a hasty camp among the trees, on the east side of the clearing, and waited. It was cold and wet as they sat in the dark, unable to light a fire for fear of alerting the Mongrels to their presence—assuming, Belinor thought, they couldn't already smell them. Ifalwen assured him it didn't work like that, that as long as they stayed quiet and out of sight they wouldn't be discovered.
"The Blood-Dreamer guides them in the same way Emissaries guide lesser darkspawn," Ifalwen informed them. "If the Blood-Dreamer does not know we are here, neither will the Mongrels."
"So if they're the Emissaries," Gil said, from his place beside Leliana, "does that make Gallus the Archdemon?"
"Yes," Ifalwen said.
"Is this a Blight?" Gil asked seriously.
"In a way," Ifalwen answered, looking at him. "A manufactured Blight. A blood ritual on an unimaginable scale, one that, should Gallus succeed, will utterly destroy Thedas, and the Fade. He has turned the Void voracious with his blood magic."
"The Singularity," Belinor said.
"It was a mistake," Ifalwen said, her tone suggesting some sort of personal experience, a memory. She looked at him in the way someone might look at a cowpat they'd just stepped in. "It should have never been done," she intoned, as if she were reading him his last rites. "But there will be no recovery this time, not when the Song is poisoned, and the spirits fester."
"Are you capable of speaking in anything other than riddles?" Gil spat.
"It isn't my story to tell," Ifalwen said sharply. "I was not the one who made the mistake, even if I understand why it was made."
Morrigan rolled her eyes. "Little wonder the elves failed so spectacularly," she remarked.
"Shut up, witch," Ifalwen said.
Morrigan just smiled. Leliana said, "Both of you, knock it off."
They knocked it off, without any argument. Leliana had a talent, Belinor observed, for shutting people up. Whatever the Inquisition had done to her, it had tempered her nerves into steel filaments. "Well done," he said to Leliana, ignoring the scowl Morrigan leveled at him.
"This is nothing," Leliana said, grinning. "You should have seen the arguments I often broke up between Varric and Cassandra, or Scout Harding and Scout Ritts."
"At least one trait survived the ages," Ifalwen said, and when Leliana gave her a questioning look, she shrugged as if to say: doesn't matter.
They waited for a few more hours, and as luck would have it, the ground suddenly opened up like a sinkhole, and out from its depths clambered several Mongrels in black armor. Ifalwen signaled, and they all sprang from the trees and attacked. When the last Mongrel was killed, Ifalwen slashed open its distended belly and plunged a gauntleted hand into its guts with a nauseating squelch, fishing around. And came up with a black bezoar roughly the size of a thumb. A baleful light shone from within it.
"Is that what we need?" Gil asked, wiping his daggers clean and sheathing them on his back.
"The counterspell, yes," she said. "Every Mongrel has one. You all will need a bezoar."
"Wonderful," Morrigan said, leaning on her staff. "We get to dig around in Mongrel guts." She scrunched her nose, then asked, "We do not swallow it, do we?"
"Not unless you wish to die, witch," Ifalwen said. "No, you need not swallow it."
Belinor retrieved a bezoar from the belly of a Mongrel that might have once been a man, but was lost under so much swollen flesh that it was hard to say for certain. The bezoar felt like warm, sticky blood in his palm.
Once the others had retrieved their bezoars, Ifalwen held hers up as if in presentation, and Belinor heard the umbrium's song change into a mournful wail. The ground opened, but this time, it opened to a staircase which wound down into the earth, so deep that they could not see the bottom. The stairs were made of flesh, and the steps squelched and oozed as they made their way down into the festering darkness. The bezoars glowed, lighting their way, the walls glistening like musculature, and Belinor felt as if they were descending into the throat of some sickly leviathan. Here and there, under the sinews and tendons and the metastases of umbrium, Belinor glimpsed stone walls, smooth and black, and ancient Tevinter carvings of dragons and hooded figures—priests, he supposed—with staves.
It felt like an eternity had passed by the time they reached the bottom of the stairwell, and Belinor wondered if it was a substructure at all, or if the ritual tower had sunk in its entirety, swallowed by the same magic that had swallowed Arlathan. The umbrium's song wailed in his ears, and Belinor recoiled at the noise, the chords fulminating in his brain, riding down his spine like a current of lightning.
He pushed the noise away again, smothered it under other thoughts, and soon it quieted, and he could focus again. Morrigan touched his arm, and Belinor smiled. "I'm fine," he said. "Just… very loud down here."
"Do not worry me as you did in Wyrm-Fang Hold," Morrigan fretted, glowering at him.
"Is father all right, mother?" Kieran asked, visibly concerned.
"I'm fine," Belinor said, ruffling Kieran's hair. "Don't worry."
"I can hear it, too," Gil said, wincing.
"This pleases me," Ifalwen said, almost as if their discomfort made her happy. But Belinor didn't sense any maliciousness in her words. If anything, Ifalwen sounded relieved, as if some fear of hers had been allayed.
The spirit in his staff jolted awake, nearly flying out of Belinor's hand. Leliana's longbow, too, roused, and it slipped from her hand and clattered away. Expressionless, Ifalwen picked it up and handed it back to her.
"What was that?" Leliana asked. "It flew out of my hand. I did not throw it."
"You did not," Ifalwen agreed, and moved ahead of the group without another word.
"I heard music," Leliana blurted out. "In the bow."
Ifalwen said nothing.
They walked down a long corridor webbed in sticky ropes of flesh and fat. At the end was a domed chamber, and on the opposite side of the room, among tangles of Mongrel-filth and dark ice, stood an eluvian. But it was unlike any eluvian Belinor had seen: it was roughly the size of a closet door and carved from a slab of umbrium, its glass as smooth as black ice. An evil light flickered deep within the glass. Frigid air radiated from the mirror as if blowing in through an open door, their breath steaming in the air, bodies violently shivering in the bitter cold.
At the foot of the eluvian lay a mummified corpse. The corpse looked as if it had lain there for ages under the dark frost, its face frozen in a permanent scream. Its pointed ears told Belinor it had been an elf, and its armor told him it had once been an elf who had served in the Order of the Exalted Shadow.
Ifalwen kneeled beside the corpse and laid a hand on its shriveled head. "Hamin in sulevin, hahren," she intoned, and gently prised the dar'misaan from the corpse's brittle hand.
"You knew them?" Belinor asked.
"Her name was Valissara, an elder in the order when I was just a recruit," Ifalwen said, looking at him. "She was a good friend, the smith who forged Hellathen, my sword." She looked at Valissara's dar'misaan, and said, "When our work is done, I will conduct the Rite of Imparting and add your spirit to Hellathen, ma falon." She looked around the room, listening, not for anything in the immediate area, but as if someone were talking to her and she was focusing, very intently, on their words. Belinor became aware, then, of the music in Valissara's sword, a cadence which almost gave the impression of words, of intelligent speech. "Valissara took the Far Eluvian here, to use the Place of Power to destroy it. The spell backfired, and the mirror-seal broke. The Mongrels got free, and though Valissara fought, there were too many. She died, alone, but not before imbuing her sword with her spirit."
"Far Eluvian?" Morrigan said, her interest visibly piqued.
"There were very few of them, witch, and we did our best to keep them secret," Ifalwen said, turning her gaze from the sword to Morrigan. "They lead to the Void, and were built by my order. Andruil stole one from us."
"She stole it?"
"Yes. Andruil was once a member of my order," Ifalwen said, frowning. "She betrayed my master at the Kinslaying of Boranehn. She wanted glory, and glory she was given by the people when they raised her up as one of their generals. She and the rest of her ilk. And for what? A war nobody but a few elves remembers." She heaved a sigh and turned toward the eluvian, touching the glass. It crackled under her touch, as if it were a sheet of thin ice. "But I digress," she said, and the glass suddenly tinkled and cracked, and a cold wind gusted from beyond its threshold, cutting through them. "Our time is better spent finding Sedullos, not sticking our fingers into old wounds." She stepped into the eluvian, and was gone.
Belinor steeled himself and went in, and the others filed in after him. Ifalwen walked a few paces ahead of them, down an impossibly long corridor lined with bloodfire sconces, its walls bristling with deposits of umbrium. As they neared the end of the tunnel, they were greeted by a horrific sight: an expansive foundry filled with Anvils of the Void, and at each Anvil stood a mummified dwarf, larger than any Belinor had seen in the east, smelting screaming bodies on the anvils with hammers as large as oxen. Some of the bodies stopped screaming, and those were discarded into the slag-pile, like an enormous cesspit, and others, the ones who didn't stop screaming, were quenched in great vats of liquid umbrium. When the Quenched clambered out of the vats, they were Mongrels, although some emerged as human, and they were shepherded away by lumbering bloodwalkers.
"Andraste's mercy," Leliana whispered, wide-eyed.
The Blood Foundry wasn't hot as Belinor had expected it to be; it was bitterly cold, and his body quaked from the chill.
"W-why is-is it s-so cold?" Gil chattered, trying to warm himself in his cloak.
"It is the umbrium you are feeling," Ifalwen informed him. "Normally, umbrium is invisible to the untrained eye, and deposits were identified by the drops in temperature. When Gallus tainted it with his blood magic, it turned black and crystallized."
Mongrels and their bloodwalker strong-arms patrolled the Foundry, and laborers, their bodies starved to skin-and-bones, toiled over the equipment: they turned great wheels which powered the machinery, pushed huge ladles of liquid umbrium between crucibles, trucked raw umbrium from one refining process to the next in huge steel barrows. Massive furnaces loomed above the work-floor, belching dark frost into the air and glowing with baleful light. People, prisoners of the Reaping Marches who had been unlucky enough to survive their ordeal, were fed to the furnaces. They were melted down, their blood poured down chutes into rows of molds to set. Then, screaming and only vaguely human-shaped, they were taken out of the molds, smelted and shaped on the Anvils, and either discarded into the slag-pile or quenched in the umbrium vats.
"We need to destroy this place," Leliana said.
"I agree," Ifalwen said, and nodded. "My order cannot salvage it, and it will deal a hard blow to Gallus if he loses the Blood Foundry. We must find Sedullos first, however. He can tell us where to find the Foreman, the Blood-Dreamer in charge of this place."
"Good thing we have Alistair," Gil said. "Otherwise we'd never find Sedullos. This place is massive."
"Knowing Gallus, he put Sedullos down in the mines."
"Why in the mines?" Morrigan asked.
"Because of the umbrium, witch," Ifalwen said.
Morrigan gave her an odd look.
"Umbrium," Ifalwen said, "is what remains of spirits when they die, and Sedullos once called those spirits his friends. How would you feel, witch, if your husband, your son, your friends died, and you were forced to desecrate their corpses, over and over again, and listen to their screams?"