Chapter 1: Shattered Sky

For the tenth time, Cassandra Pentaghast prayed to the Maker that she would open her eyes and wake up from the nightmare she found herself in. Just like every time before, it didn't work. She opened her eyes and the world had still gone mad.

The temple was still a pile of scorched rubble. Hundreds were still dead. The Divine was still dead. The sky was still broken. And the only chance for answers she had was a hunk of metal.

She looked over to where the strange object sat, scuffed and dented, with lines of jagged grooves crisscrossing its black surfaces, like an entire pack of deepstalkers had taken their claws to it. It was dense, having taken four Chantry soldiers to carry it from the center of the temple where it had been spat out of the Fade, even as newly arrived demons rained down around them.

In the distance there was a crack like thunder, a sound that everyone in the valley over the last several hours had come to associate with the massive wound in the sky growing again, another step towards consuming Thedas.

Just like the times before, the pulse of the sky was met with a crackle of energy from the object, and the telltale emerald-green flicker of Fade energy. Since seeing it react for the first time, Cassandra had gotten the distinct impression that the light was coming from inside the strange wedge, somehow shining through solid metal.

Her observation was interrupted by the appearance of the elven mage circling around from the other side of the object, staff and hands flickering with magic, muttering arcane words under his breath. Solas, as he had introduced himself, remarkably calmly considering the chaos that had surrounded them in the aftermath of the explosion. He finished whatever spell he had been weaving and stepped back, a look of surprise mixed with curiosity on his face.

"What is it?" Cassandra asked him, gauntleted fingers drumming anxiously on the hilt of the sword sheathed at her hip. Every instinct she had was to join the fight against the demons that poured from the rift in the sky, and the many smaller ones that had begun popping up soon after the original explosion. She knew soldiers of the Chantry were fighting and dying trying to hold back the horde, and wished she was there to help. But Solas had told her that the study of this… thing, and its connection to the Fade, could be key in ending this madness.

The elven mage didn't turn as he answered, eyes still locked on the metal construct, trying to discern its secrets. "I cast the spells twice, to make sure there was no possible error." he said, his steady voice undermined by the slightest hint of uncertainty. "Unless I have made some kind of drastic error in my examinations, or woven the magic improperly…"

"The point, Solas." Cassandra said impatiently. She appreciated the elf's magical expertise, but even only knowing him a few hours, she had gotten the district feeling that he could—and would— explain the workings of his craft in unnecessary detail, like a long-winded teacher at lecture. Solas took the interruption in stride.

"My apologies. But if I am correct, this object is mostly hollow." he replied. Cassandra shot him a look of disbelief.

"How? You saw how heavy it is. How could that be if it's just a shell?"

Solas gave a shake of his head. "This… inner chamber, isn't empty. It contains a number of metals and materials, many of which I cannot currently identify. But it's unmistakable. There is circulation, respiration. A pulse."

Cassandra's eyes snapped back to the scuffed metal of the object, as if seeing it in a whole new light. "Are you saying what I think you're saying, mage?"

Solas finally turned away from the black wedge to face the armored woman, his face now set in absolute certainty. "I'm saying that there is something alive in there. And whatever this mark is, has attached itself to them."

=][=

For the second time that day, Ravenor awoke unbalanced and with no idea where he was. Even without looking around, he was certain that he wasn't in the strange shifting realm of earlier. He could feel that the space around him was solid in its existence, not the strange flux of space and energy from before. Though there was something at the edge of his psychic perception, something that felt like it was tugging at him…

Ravenor forced himself to focus. He was an Inquisitor of the Imperium of Man. He would not allow himself to be distracted when he was in unfamiliar, potentially dangerous territory. He turned his attention to his surroundings, the majority of his chair's optic sensors thankfully undamaged.

He found himself in a dim room, fairly small, with the only light sources being a couple of torches ensconced in the walls. He was also surrounded. Four people, with peaked helmets and solid steel breastplates over leather and padding. All had longswords at their sides, but curiously no sign of holsters or firearms. Odd. Ravenor thought. Even the most poorly furnished of fighters could usually scrape up some kind of gun, be it a second-hand civilian model or one cobbled together from spare parts. There were few in his experience that would handicap themselves so much by carrying only blades, unless they were forced to.

The guards were all human as far as Ravenor could discern. No visible mutations or unique characteristics. Even without reaching out mentally, Ravenor could tell that his watchers were on edge. Most of them had their hands on their weapons, ready to draw steel at a moment's notice, and anxiously glanced between Ravenor's chair and the set of double wooden doors at the end of the room, as if not entirely sure which to be more worried about.

There was a loud knock, and a shout from the other side. One of the men in the room looked relieved and shouted something back, and the rasp of a metal deadbolt being pulled was audible. The language wasn't any form of Gothic, or any of the myriad of regional or planetary dialects that Ravenor was familiar with.

The heavy doors were pushed open, letting in an almost blinding light that silhouetted the new arrivals as they walked in. More soldiers, attired almost identically to the others, but lugging bundles of equipment with them. Ravenor saw chisels, metal spikes, sledgehammers, and full sized pickaxes. And their intention was undeniably on Ravenor's chair.

The integrity of his chair's armor had already been compromised by his encounter with those strange wraith creatures, as well as his rough journey through their realm. Ravenor doubted it would hold up long to a dedicated work team, especially if they found the seams of the armor plates.

The new soldiers started passing out tools, and Ravenor knew he had little time. It was a risk to reach out with his mind, not knowing the state of the Immaterium here, and with his mental defenses potentially compromised by his injuries and grogginess. But the only other alternative was violence, and he wished to keep that a last resort. With a shred of hesitation, the inquisitor threw his mind out to the nearest guard.

It was a quick and messy mind-scan, not like Ravenor's usual subtle and carefully crafted mental probes. The man stopped halfway through hefting a pickaxe, suddenly raising his hand to his head and grunting in pain. It didn't last long, the soldier straightening up after a moment and waving off the concern of his compatriots, attention back on breaking open the strange object before them. But Ravenor had what he needed.

Under other circumstances he would have pulled everything he could from the guard's mind, to possibly shed some light on where he had ended up. But he was hurried, and settled for pulling out anything related to language, dragging it back to his own mind like a thief with a bag of loot. Trying to quickly mesh together the rush of new information with his existing knowledge of language sent Ravenor's already disoriented mind spinning in pain and light-headedness, but he bore it. In the end, he only really needed one word.

He turned the Voxsponder that served as his voice up to maximum volume and spoke, near deafening in the small room.

"STOP!"

=][=

After the guards had finished scrambling backwards from the unexpected blast of monotone sound in a clatter of tools being dropped to the floor, forgotten as they rushed to draw their swords, Ravenor waited. He had mostly finished the processing of his new language, and could say more, but he chose not to. He wanted to see how the unknown soldiers would react.

After a few moments of confused yelling, one of them, a veteran judging by the lines of age on his face, grabbed another by the shoulder and practically pushed them out the door, gruffly ordering to go "get the Seeker."

After that there was silence in the room, the guards spread out in a loose half circle around Ravenor's force-chair, swords held tightly in gauntleted hands.

A few minutes passed in a tense standoff before the doors opened again. Two new figures entered, the messenger guard from before trailing shortly behind. Both were women, and judging by the deferential way the other guards stepped aside, possessed some measure of authority.

The first woman was clad in plate and mail, a wide shield secured across her back. Unlike the guards she wore a tabard with an unfamiliar symbol, a stylized wide-open eye in front of a had close-cropped black hair and an angular face that gave her a stern look. She was scarred, a jagged line running from her cheek down to her jaw on the left side of her face, and a tiny slash across the cheekbone of her right.

While the first woman shared the military bearing of the soldiers next to her, the second moved much differently. She moved with careful grace, piercing blue eyes surveying everything about Ravenor's force-chair. She was armored less heavily than the first woman, with leather and light chain mail, and wore a purple shawl-like hood over her head, hints of orange-red hair peeking out from underneath. On her chest was a silver medallion engraved with the same eye-symbol as the first woman.

The dark-haired woman stepped in front of the loose line of guards, her hand at the hilt of her own longsword, but not yet drawn.

"Can you understand me?" she asked steadily, with an accent unfamiliar to Ravenor.

"Yes." he replied, voxsponder volume turned back down to its normal level.

"What are you?" she asked. "A spirit? A demon?" Ravenor resisted the urge to snort at that. Him a daemon? They were all still alive weren't they?

"No," he replied, mirth hidden behind the metallic crackle of his 'voice' "I am human." A look of clear doubt passed over the woman's face, but any response was cut off by the sudden crackle of energy that Ravenor belatedly realized coming from him. Pain shot through him, and he let out a grunt of pain that his voxsponder rendered into a burst of static more than anything else. An external pict-corder showed Ravenor the flicker of emerald light shining from within his chair, all too similar to the one that the cracked orb had before it pulled him in.

"How do you explain that?" demanded the woman, anger and frustration boiling up from underneath her mask of stoicism.

"…I cannot." admitted Ravenor after a moment. He was almost certain that the strange mark was on his body itself, inside his life support chamber, but he had no way to observe it directly. No eyes to see it, no hands to feel it… it was infuriating.

"What do you mean you can't?" the woman said, voice almost a yell now, her hand tightening on the grip of her sword. Rage practically radiated from her, but there was something else behind it; something that only someone with a lifetime of experience ferreting out people's secrets could pick up on. Sadness, despair even. Just when Ravenor thought she might draw her weapon and attack him for a moment, the hooded woman laid a hand on the other's shoulder.

"Peace Cassandra," she said softly. "It and the mark may be the key to all this."

"He," supplied Ravenor. "And what are you talking about? What is happening?" Both of the women turned to look at him with disbelief, as if he had just asked what color the sky was, but quickly composed themselves.

"Come, see for yourself." said Cassandra, gesturing to the door. After a moment of hesitation, the guards broke formation and to allow Ravenor passage. He started up the anti-gravs on his chair, the sudden rise of it and the hum of power startling the guards, but Ravenor ignored them, and followed Cassandra outside.

=][=

As soon as Ravenor exited the building he was confronted with it. A massive gaping wound in the sky, swirling and crackling with sickly green energy. Clouds swirled around it, like it was the center of its own little tempest. At its center was a twisting hole in reality, beyond which nothing was visible but more of the pulsing green light. Ravenor was certain that it was the source of the strange pull he felt whenever he reached out with his mind, like it was trying to consume everything. Ravenor felt it wasn't impossible that it might do so.

"We call it 'The Breach'," said Cassandra, still keeping a bit of distance between her and the floating chair. "It's a massive rift into the world of demons, and it grows larger by the hour."

"That's… that's not possible." said Ravenor, any softness and confusion lost in the metallic rasp of his substitute voice.

"A day ago I would have said the same thing. But it's real." Cassandra said wearily. As much as she clearly tried to hide it, Ravenor could tell she was worn down, a soldier who had spent too much time on the front line.

"No. Not impossible that it's here. Impossible we still are." he explained. A tear into the Immaterium that large? This world should have fallen already, consumed by the horrors of the Warp.

Cassandra looked back at the chair in confusion, but before she could ask what he was talking about, the sky lit up. The green energy of the Breach intensified for a moment, strands of green lighting lashing out at the clouds around it and the ground below. A heartbeat later the mark on Ravenor pulsed yet again, pain shooting through him, ever so slightly worse than before, only lasting a second before it faded away yet again.

His chair's automated systems flashed an alert to Ravenor, warning of the stress the spurts of agony were putting on his heart.

While he was busy with the effects of the mark, Cassandra had taken a few steps towards Ravenor and leaned down. She stared at the weathered black metal surface, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the person that claimed to be behind it.

"…It's killing me." said Ravenor, once he had regained his composure and silenced the alarm. Cassandra nodded, not even a hint of pity slipping through.

"We suspected as much. But we also think that it—that you— may be the key to stopping it before it's too late." She let the implication that it also might be the one thing that could keep him alive stand unspoken.

"Then it seems we need each other. For the moment." Ravenor said, pivoting his chair slightly to point directly at Cassandra. "Lead the way."

=][=

As his supposed captor led him down a small hill, Ravenor was able to take in more of his surroundings, once he tore his attention away from the Breach. They were in a valley of some kind, tall mountains rising all around them. Snow dusted the ground, and light hails of flakes drifted lazily down from the sky. They were in a small settlement, the building they had been in before the largest, the rest were small constructions of wood.

Ravenor saw no recognizable signs of the Imperium as they walked. No aquilas, no depictions of the God-Emperor, nothing. He also saw no sign of any real technology more advanced than horses and carts, feeding his suspicion that he was far from the reach of the Imperium. Much of the open ground between buildings had been taken up by clusters of tents, some properly set up, others makeshift, like the village had been expanded on short notice to shelter an influx of people.

And there were plenty of people. They lined the dirt street that Cassandra led Ravenor down, some soldiers attired like he had seen before, but many who looked to be civilians, unarmed and dressed in simple clothes. Practically every single one of them looked at the woman and the floating metal wedge as they went down the street, most with their eyes trained on Ravenor. On the faces of the crowd, Ravenor saw confusion, suspicion, even outright hatred directed at him. Both visually and from a bit of passive insight provided by his nature as a psyker, Ravenor also picked up on an undercurrent of shock and despair.

"They think you responsible, for all of this." Cassandra explained as they wove their way through the streets, whispers of condemnation and fear following them. "For the death of the Most Holy. For all those who died at the Conclave. For the loss of any chance of peace between mages and templars."

"…I shall be honest with you Cassandra; that is your name?"

"Seeker." she said, face back to stern impassivity. "It is my rank. You may use it, if you must."

"Very well Seeker." Ravenor said, pausing a moment as they left the streets of the small village behind, and all the people lining them. "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." The only templars Ravenor knew were a chapter of Space Marines, and he doubted that she was talking about them. The rest meant nothing to him.

The Seeker stopped abruptly, halfway down a small hill, and turned to him in open disbelief. "What? You know nothing about the conclave? About the explosion that destroyed the temple and opened the Breach?"

"Nothing. Last I remember I was investigating a suspicious artifact, when it opened some kind of rift and pulled me in." Ravenor said.

"And that's all you remember?" Cassandra asked, having shaken herself from her shock and resumed leading him down the hill, towards a stone bridge spanning a gorge.

If Ravenor had still been capable of furrowing his brows, he would have. "There was one more thing." he admitted. "I was in a strange place, shifting, abstract. There were creatures there, clawing at me, trying to devour me. And then there was a woman who reached out to me…" The entire event was honestly a blur in Ravenor's mind, between the pain he had been in and the absurd amount of drugs his chair had pumped into him.

Cassandra frowned slightly, clearly in thought. "That does match what the scouts that found you told us." she said slowly, as if reluctant to admit he might be telling the truth. "They said you came out of a rift in the Fade, that there was a glowing figure behind you, before the rift closed."

"The Fade?" questioned Ravenor.

Cassandra nodded. "It's a realm, separate from our own, where spirits and demons come from." she gave a slight shrug of her armored shoulders, mail and plate clinking. "You'd have to ask a mage if you want a better explanation. I only know enough about as is necessary for my duties.

Cassandra's description of the Fade sounded worryingly like that of the Warp, sans the part about spirits, but that made little sense to Ravenor. He knew what the warp felt, like it was impossible not to as a psyker, and where he had been before wasn't it. There were similarities, the strange ever twisting thought-scape, the formless creatures of power and hunger, but too many differences for them to be the same. Had I been dragged physically into the Warp, there wouldn't be anything left of me. Ravenor thought grimly.

They arrived at the bridge, soldiers strewn haphazardly down its length. Some were clearly on guard duty, others tending to injured comrades. Some whispered as the two approached, but most had the discipline to remain focused on the Breach in the distance.

As they crossed the bridge, Ravenor heard soldiers muttering to themselves, some with their hands clasped in front of them. Ravenor knew praying when he saw it. He knew it was impolite to intrude on such things, but he needed a definitive answer to his worries, and tuned his chair's audio receptors to listen closely

"Maker though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the light. Let my strikes be true, my resolve strong…" the soldier prayed, continuing on to ask his god's protection and strength. Ravenor knew that some worlds worshiped the Emperor differently than was prescribed by the Ecclesiarchy, usually steeped in local traditions and folklore, but there were always certain constants. Ravenor heard none of them as the man continued his prayer. No mention of the Golden Throne, no mention of Holy Terra, nothing of the God-Emperor. Only this "Maker". So I am truly beyond the Imperium's reach. Ravenor thought to himself.

Ravenor was broken from his revelation by Cassandra shouting for the large wooden gate at the end of the bridge to be opened. "I assume you have a plan?" Ravenor asked as they passed over the threshold, the gates beginning to creak shut behind them. She nodded, moving with purpose up a snowy path hugging the cliff face.

"This mark of yours needs to be tested on something smaller than the Breach. There are smaller rifts down in the valley that we can use. If you can close those, maybe you can close the Breach." She explained, rushing with him past hastily constructed barricades manned by more of her organization's soldiers manning them. I really do need to find out what that is, considering they seem to command a small army. He thought. Cassandra spoke with calm precision, but Ravenor could detect an undertone of something else in her voice. Whether it was hope or desperation he wasn't sure. Maybe both.

Ravenor kept pace with the armored woman as she hurried further into the valley. They passed dozens of soldiers, some working fervently to set up more makeshift barricades, trying to establish fall-back positions. Others were simply running for their lives. Cassandra sent icy glares at those, and many men shrank from her gaze. But she seemed to decide that there was no time to deal with them, and pushed onward.

Another pulse came from the Breach, and Ravenor once again growled in pain as the mark flared. Cassandra heard the crackle and turned to him. There was concern on her face, but not the kind reserved for a person in pain. More the kind of concern you felt when you realized your weapon might break or fail on you in the middle of battle. Good. Thought Ravenor. She's objective. That was very well what might be needed to stop the world from being swallowed up by the rift in the sky.

"The pulses are coming faster." She noted.

"Then we need to keep moving." he said quickly, pushing forward, followed a moment later by Cassandra. They came to a second bridge, fortified by beleaguered defenders much like the first.

"Through here." Cassandra said, gesturing to the other end of the bridge. "I have reports there are rifts not too far from—" The only warning was a brief crackle of energy and pressure, before a glowing green rock the size of a man spat from the Breach tore through the bridge. A heartbeat later, the entire structure cracked and shifted, before collapsing under its own weight.

Both of them were sent tumbling down in a shower of dust and rubble. Ravenor slammed his chair's anti-gravs up to full power, their humming increasing to a fever pitch. It was enough to soften his landing, but he was still jarred when he slammed into the frozen river beneath the bridge, ice cracking, but holding. Cassandra landed next, managing to throw herself into a roll that, while awkward in her armor, dispersed the worst of the fall's force.

They barely had a moment to collect themselves before another rock slammed into a snowy hillside not far from them. No sooner had it landed then Ravenor saw something shift in the rubble, his mind's eye and his digital ones seeing power coalesce and bubble from the rock. He could feel it had both physical form and the shifting presence of a creature from the beyond.

Two creatures resolved themselves from the simmering power, both floating gray-skinned things with elongated heads wrapped in ratty cloth and leather, like some strange imitation of a funeral shawl. Their spindly arms each ended in curved claws.

Cassandra had her sword and shield drawn in an instant, shouting for Ravenor to stay behind her. He was still shaking off the fall, and had no intention of rushing forward. But that decision quickly ceased to matter as he felt more power bubbling out from the rubble of the bridge behind him, quickly resolving itself into another of the eldritch creatures. Seems I've no choice then.

In the past Ravenor had often left the business of violence to the rest of his retinue, preferring to observe and manipulate events from a distance. That did not mean he wasn't adept at defending himself.

His chair's inbuilt psycannons had been damaged in his short trip through the Fade, so he would have to be a little crude, but that would have little effect on his effectiveness.

The creature half screeched half gurgled an inhuman sound, and leapt at Ravenor, claws extended. It barely made it halfway before a chunk of rubble a bit larger than a fist tore itself free from the pile and slammed into the creature's side, sending it sprawling to the ice.

It twisted to look up in something resembling confusion before a second rock shot into the back of its head with a crack. As it fell again, Ravenor saw a black tar-like substance leaking from a gash at the back of its head. So they bleed. Or something close to it. His curiosity satisfied, Ravenor telekinetically pulled a piece of stone the size of a person from the rubble pile.

=][=

Cassandra had heard the third shade screech from behind her, and mentally berated herself for not expecting an attack from behind. She had no choice though, to turn back to help the floating metal wedge would have let the other two shades tear her to shreds. The Seeker could only try to finish her fight as quickly as possible and hope that metal shell was as sturdy as it looked.

Ignoring the weariness in her arms, Cassandra raised her shield and charged. She slammed full force with her shield into the first shade, the weight of her body and armor putting enough force behind the charge to knock the Fade creature to the ice. The second shade tried to swing around beside Cassandra, past the protection of her wide shield, but she slammed it away with a back-handed blow from her shield, finishing the downed shade with a single stab of the sword in her other hand.

With only a single demon to suffer her attention, the second shade fell quickly to a pair of carefully placed slashes. The last day of fighting these things had taught Cassandra that the shades were dangerous in groups, or with the element of surprise, but relatively fragile in a straight fight. If only they were the worst thing to come out of the Breach.

That done, the Seeker whirled around back to her companion, expecting to have to jump in and kill at least one more foe. Instead she turned around just in time to watch a massive chunk of floating rubble crush the entire upper body of a shade. The metal shell sat further back, having barely moved since the fall.

"That was you?" She asked, sword still up in a hesitant guard.

He—something she was still trying to imagine when she looked at the faceless piece of metal—replied with that same emotionless metallic voice that he had all the times before.

"Of course."

"So, you're a mage then." Cassandra said, brows furrowing. She had seen mages do magic on the fly before, but most required a staff or some other kind of focus to channel their spells through. Otherwise, all but the most powerful of mages were limited to weak magical tricks without preparation or assistance. Then again, who knows what he has inside all that armor?

A harsh scratching noise that could be vaguely likened to a chuckle echoed from the shell. "I've never been called that before. Witch. Sorcerer. Never a mage." He said. "I suppose it is close enough."

"Just keep behind me. And don't try any more of that." Cassandra said, glancing further down the twisting path of the frozen riverbed, trying to reorient herself towards where Solas and the dwarf were supposed to be waiting.

A sigh rasped from the shell. "I've scared you." Its occupant said. Cassandra's head snapped back around, hand tightening on the grip of her sword.

"You think you scare me?" she asked, anger flashing in her eyes.

"I apologize. Scared was the wrong word. But my… magic, has you concerned about me. Now you see me as another threat to keep track of." The shell paused a moment and floated a little closer to the Seeker, like a person leaning in to speak in confidence. Cassandra only just restrained herself from jerking away and raising her weapon at the motion.

"You have enough threats as it is, Seeker. The only reason you let me out of that cell was because you thought I could be an asset in this fight. Let me."

Cassandra opened her mouth to yell back a refusal, but stopped herself. Take a breath, cast aside emotion, evaluate the situation. That was what her Seeker training had taught her, and what had kept her alive more than once over the years. And looking through that lens, she couldn't deny that what he said made tactical sense. A frontline knight backed up by a mage's power was a deadly combination.

"You're right." She said reluctantly. "It will be an uphill battle as it is. We will need all the strength we can muster. I suppose I must trust you."

"We must trust each other, Seeker." He said, the front of his metal shell rising slightly "Lest you forget, my life is on the line here as well."

Cassandra nodded. "Very well. Let's get this done then." She started to turn away, but then a thought occurred to her. "I never thought to ask before. Do you have a name?"

"Of course."

"And?"

He paused for a moment before speaking. "Ravenor. Gideon Ravenor." An odd name, but Cassandra was fully aware that she had no room to stand where it came to strange names.

"Cassandra Pentaghast." she offered, leaving out the four middle names her family had insisted upon. "Now Gideon, shall we go fix the sky?"