9:30 Nubulis 19
Southern Amaranthine Ocean
It didn't take Marian very long to decide that she hated boats.
The Chasind witch who was probably an abomination and apparently the actual legendary Flemeth had somehow managed to teleport them across a couple hundred miles instantly — Marian suspected it'd involved crossing the Veil at some point...or maybe just skimming along it? She wasn't certain, there'd been color flying all over the place, and it'd made her very dizzy, Marian hadn't been able to tell what was happening. One second, they were in the Southron Hills just outside Lothering, the next they were in the hinterlands of the Teyrnir of Gwaren, only a few hours' walk from the city itself.
Flemeth had just pointed in the direction of the city, visible only as a dim collection of flickering lights low on the horizon, and told them to go. They hadn't needed telling twice.
Marian was pretty sure long-distance transportation magic was supposed to be impossible — the Imperium had had to build all those bloody roads for a reason. Of course, being able to turn into a huge fuck-all dragon was also, well. She didn't want to try the terrifyingly powerful mage's patience lingering after she'd been shooed off, and apparently everyone else had very much agreed.
Gwaren was the largest city Marian had ever set foot in, the only place really deserving of being called one, and also the oldest and the wealthiest. After taking a quick nap on the roadside, Bethany filled their ears with stories she'd heard about the city (mostly from Leliana) — apparently, it had originally been built as a dwarven outpost long ago, before the Imperium had even stretched this far south, the dwarves' primary access to the sea trade lanes. When the dwarven kingdoms fell apart in the early years of the First Blight, the subterranean half of the city had been abandoned, its residents coming up to mix with the humans and elves on the surface.
Which she guessed explained how weird the city looked. It was damn huge, yes — buildings and buildings and buildings and more buildings, the city had to be a mile across, which was ridiculous — but while the wooden homes and shops and such stretching out from the center in a random, tangled mess seemed perfectly normal, pluck one out and drop it in Lothering and it wouldn't seem out of place — though, they did have tall, pointed roofs, she assumed they got more snow around here — the city center itself was...odd. Stone, some of it pale granite and some reddish-yellowish sandstone, made all in sweeping lines and arcing curves, looking strangely fluid and graceful considering it was all made out of solid rock.
From a distance, Marian had recognised a number of thin, needle-like towers, their edges hard-angled and almost crooked-looking — that was definitely Tevinter shit, which did make sense, the city had been around back then. Under them, what Marian had taken to be oddly even little hills not far from the shore, covered in tile, at second glance were actually more buildings, their roofs looking like bowls set down on their rim. That was... No, that couldn't be right. Even if they could shape stone to make a curved ceiling like that, how would they prop it up? No, she must be imagining it, must be something else going on there.
Walking through the city was sort of miserable. The outer city didn't look much different from Lothering, the buildings packed a bit closer together, and obviously there were many, many more of them. (Also, much less friendly — nobody called out to them at all, which was weird. Travellers walking through Lothering would always get stopped by someone for a chat, unless they looked particularly scary...which she guessed they sort of did, three of the five of them armed and armored and streaked with ash and darkspawn blood...) More or less familiar, anyway. The smell was new, though, that was awful. She guessed with all these people in here, their shit (both metaphorically and literally) had nowhere to go, so, that did make sense. She still rushed them through as quickly as possible though, because, ugh.
And people chose to live here? Maybe you got used to it...
The inner city was...less familiar. Completely alien, really. The streets were paved with stone, the bricks fitted together in complex, interlocking shapes, all the homes and warehouses and...guildhalls? Marian wasn't entirely certain what a guildhall even was, but that's what the signs on the outsides said. Anyway, they were all huge, some of them striking her as sprawling palaces, larger even than the Bann's estate up by the Highway. And there were metal accents on things here and there, gleaming silver and bronze and gold, sometimes shiny enough the glare from the sun hurt her eyes, there was glass everywhere. Decorative, yes, stained a rainbow of colors and fitted together into murals of all sorts, but there were also windows. Marian had heard of glass windows before, but she'd never actually seen one — glass clear enough for the purpose was extremely expensive, not something anyone in Lothering or even Redcliffe could ever afford. But it was all over the place! Marian had thought at first a lot of these buildings just had holes cut into them, which seemed a foolish thing to do, given the wind cutting through the streets, constant and heavy with water and salt, but eventually she noticed the shimmer of sunlight reflecting off of them, it was glass, so pure she'd hardly even noticed it was there, and there was so much of it...
Also? Those inverted bowls really were the roofs of buildings, a whole bunch of them not far from the dockyard, the edges traced with complex swirls and figures of bronze, stained glass lining the walls beneath. That... How did they do that?! Marian was tempted to try to see if she could get inside one of them, just to see how the roof was propped up, because she was pretty sure that shouldn't be possible, and also they were much larger than she'd thought from the hills outside, could probably fit the Chantry back in Lothering in some of them, and, just, HOW?!
Probably not a good idea, though. Even just walking into the inner city they'd nearly been stopped, a few heavily-armed men in the yellow and black of the Teyrnir asking them what they thought they were doing here — if Aveline hadn't handled it, Marian didn't know if she would have been able to talk their way out, might have gotten ugly. Trying to force her way into one of these things to see how their roofs worked probably wouldn't go over well.
Besides, Gwaren was old, this might well be Tevinter construction. They were probably magic.
The dockyards also smelled pretty bad, but a more salty, fishy kind of smell, which was somewhat more tolerable...and also confusingly familiar. People back in Lothering did do a little fishing on the river, but not at any kind of scale, nothing that would produce a stench like this. She knew Redcliffe was on Lake Calenhad, but she didn't remember living there, not really — she'd been very young when they'd moved to Lothering, she had only the vaguest impressions of anything before that. Also, they hadn't lived in town, she didn't think? But she couldn't figure where else she would have been around anything like this. Hmm.
Also? The ocean was fucking big. As soon as they'd gotten around the warehouses and things, stepping out onto the edges of the dockyard, their view mostly uninterrupted save for a few sails here and there, Marian had frozen, just staring out over the water — and she wasn't the only one either, she was pretty sure both of the twins had a similar reaction. A deep greenish-blue, sunlight sparkling off the undulating surface, stretching on and on and on, and on. Marian had an odd moment of vertigo, the way the water seemed to rise to meet the horizon an impossible distance away, fuzzy and indistinct, it looked higher than the shore, her head swimming as she tried to make sense of what she was looking at...
Obviously, Marian would never have seen the ocean before — she'd been born in Redcliffe, had spent most of her life in Lothering, had ranged as far south as Ostagar and as far east as South Bend, and that was really it. The largest body of water she'd ever seen was Lake Calenhad, but she didn't really remember that. There was a finger of the lake that stretched east only a few miles short of the Crossroads, Marian had been there with Father once (though so long ago she couldn't remember why). She knew she'd swum in the lake there, which was the largest body of water she actually remembered, but that little bit of it wasn't so big, small enough she could see the opposite shore no problem. Kind of fuzzy and gray with distance, yes, but still definitely visible.
This wasn't like that. Just, in all directions, everywhere, it was...
Big. It was big.
(Marian tried not to think about it.)
It was, surprisingly, not difficult at all to find someone willing to bring them north. After only maybe an hour of asking around, she managed to find someone to take them up to Denerim. They were hauling a bunch of things up the coast, most of the cargo the same apple vinegar Marian traded for with Cenna. It was one of the more valuable trades coming out of Gwaren, she knew, supposedly the shit was all over the place throughout Ferelden and the Free Marches. This ship would be going up to Denerim, where they'd sell the vinegar and whatever else they could offload, use the coin to buy up a bunch of wool sourced from the sheep raised in the Bannorn, and then come back to sell it here. They were more than willing to take five passengers along for the ride, especially if they were being paid for it.
Marian left the negotiations up to Aveline — she knew absolutely nothing about these things, couldn't begin to guess what would be fair. Even after Aveline negotiated the captain — a big, barrel-chested man with a scraggly, gray-threaded beard, named Osik (wasn't that an Avvar name?) — down to two silvers for the lot of them, Marian didn't quite hide a wince. That was kind of a lot of money in Lothering...but Lothering didn't really use much coin, just in general. Between themselves, the people in the area would swap a thing they had for a thing they needed someone else had, made deals and traded favors, which got everyone by just fine. Coin was mostly only used for outside trade — which everyone did need to do a little bit of, since they couldn't make everything they needed in Lothering, but that didn't come out to very much for most people.
Two silvers was more than she'd spent all at once in her entire life. Or, not really, but if she was buying something she was almost always also selling something, she usually came out ahead, so it certainly seemed like it. They had roughly a whole sovereign on them, but still...
Trying not to cringe, Marian had handed the man a silver, telling him he'd get the other when they arrive. Thankfully, Osik hadn't taken that personally, just chuckled a bit and told them to be ready to go by high-tide. (He'd conveniently pointed at the spot in the sky the sun should be at when they all looked uncertain.) Once he was gone, Aveline had handed her a smaller silver coin to cover her share, though it took Marian a second to recognize it — it was a half-shilling. Marian hardly ever saw them, she preferred to gather the full silvers, just because it was easier to count if all her coins had the same value. That made Marian feel a little less uncomfortable, so.
That was also the first that Aveline had indicated she was coming with them, at least as far as Denerim. Though Marian wasn't surprised — she was pretty sure Aveline was headed to Denerim, so she could go back to doing her duty serving the Queen. Marian had expected her to tag along at least that far.
Now, well, they'd just have to see now.
They'd been on the water for a couple days now, and Marian had hated absolutely every single second of it. There was no privacy to speak of, which clearly bothered Bethany and Mother, but Marian didn't really care so much. It wasn't like there was really any privacy at home either (or at Ostagar, of course). These were strangers, sure, but Osik's men were friendly and polite enough. Honestly, it wasn't any worse than the times she'd gone swimming in the river back when she'd been a kid — better, really, since it wasn't like she was planning on getting completely naked here or anything. There were always people around, and yes, relieving herself was slightly embarrassing, but she wasn't that bothered, really.
Actually, it was better than Ostagar, in some ways. At least none of the sailors had tried to hit on her yet.
(The way Carver stuck close to Bethany at all times, presumably to make sure none of the sailors got it in their heads to try anything, was really quite adorable. Honestly, Carver, she was a mage, she could blow up the whole ship if she wanted to...)
No, instead it was just horribly cold, and wet, Maker, she didn't know it was possible to feel this wet all the time. Not, like, soaked through, like it were raining or something — that she'd be able to deal with, just put up her rain-blocking spell, or suffer it as she had when she was a kid before she figured it out. Fine. But it was just a...constant, low-level dampness that she couldn't avoid, her underclothes and her hair sticking to her skin, the leather in her (sort of stolen?) armor squeaking whenever she moved, and she felt cold and clammy and gross everywhere, constantly, it was awful.
If she didn't have magic, she suspected she would have ended up too cold at some point. She'd been keeping a close eye on Mother and Carver and Aveline just in case.
Also, everything kept moving, all the time. It hadn't bothered her at first — there'd been a brief moment of disorientation when the ship had first started moving off the pier, her mind taking a second to make sense of the city slowly sliding away, but she'd adapted quickly. Bethany was completely miserable, they'd only been on the water for a few minutes before she retreated belowdecks, and even then the gentle rocking of the waves had her terribly dizzy, she laid down on her bunk rather than attempt to walk without falling over. (Which made Carver's self-appointed mission of following her around much easier.) So long as they'd been in the harbor Marian had felt fine, somewhat uncomfortable, but certainly not debilitatingly nauseous...
...but then, some hours before sunset still, they'd left the harbor. The waves out on the open sea, even this close to the shore, came higher and faster, the ship tilting and rolling and creaking around them. Not only were the noises the ship made as the water tossed it around seriously unnerving — Marian was repeatedly struck with a paranoid certainty that the damn thing was breaking apart around them — but the constant, random moving made her terribly sick. It'd come as enough of a surprise that she'd barely made it to the edge of the ship in time to avoid hurling all over the deck, and after her stomach was emptied she'd felt less sick, but not better, exactly — without Aveline's help, she wasn't certain she'd have been able to stagger her way down to the bunks set aside for them, her head was spinning just too damn much.
Carver seemed to find it funny, that the mages were so badly affected and they ordinary mortals were just fine. After his teasing had gone on too long, Bethany had kicked him in the side, but Marian hadn't enough energy to do anything more than flip him off, and beg for the sweet release of unconsciousness.
(Not that she managed it, she'd barely slept since they'd gotten on this damn thing.)
Their first full day out, they'd passed through a storm. It was practically always raining along the east coast of the country, so Osik had expected they would. He hadn't warned her just how fucking awful it would be. The inside of the ship somehow getting even colder and wetter than it'd been before, the rocking got much worse, occasionally a hard thrum running through the ship as they hit a wave at an odd angle, suddenly tossing them one direction or another. Several times she heard something somewhere knocked loose, the sailors yelling at each other to firm up one thing or another, occasionally laughing and joking with each other, because they were clearly all fucking madmen.
Aveline had gone out to help a little — she didn't know any more about sailing than Marian did, but she was more than strong enough to lend a hand here or there — but Marian and her family had spent the whole time hunkered down belowdecks, all of them completely miserable. The storm was enough that Mom had been getting sea-sickness too, and even Carver a bit (though never bad enough to make him sick up, the lucky little shit). That would be bad enough, but the fucking noise, the groaning and the cracking had been far too much, Bethany had clung to Carver, her face pressed against his shirt for hours, refusing to let go, Marian curled up on her bunk, Father's coat wrapped around her head, her arms squeezing it tight around her, trying to muffle out the noise, praying for this stupid bundle of sticks to hold itself together...
Now, the sea was calmer, just little lapping waves like what there'd been back by Gwaren. They'd come into the Firth of Drakon earlier in the day, though it'd still taken a while for Marian to recover at least a little, enough to stumble her way up. Leaning weakly against the rail ringing the deck, Marian looked out over the water toward Denerim.
She'd never seen the capital before, but of course she hadn't — Marian had never been this far north in her life. She didn't think Mom had ever been to Denerim either, when she and Dad had run away to Ferelden they'd made for Redcliffe by way of West Hill and the River Dane, they'd never gotten any further east than Lothering. None of her family had been to Denerim, which was somewhat unusual among even the people of their village. It was, supposedly, the birthplace of Andraste, it was a tradition going back who even knew how long for everybody to make a pilgrimage to the city at least once in their life, which was much easier for people who lived as close as Lothering to do than it was for people in say, northern Orlais, or something. But, travel like that wasn't a great idea with young children, and now... Well, the only one of them who was particularly religious was Bethany, and she had plenty of time to do that kind of thing on her own later if she really wanted to.
Marian had no idea why she'd want to do such a thing, though. She'd spoken to people who'd made the pilgrimage before, and most had admitted to it being a disappointment. Nothing in the city remained from the time of Andraste — of course, that had been over a thousand years ago, not much lasted that long. (Fort Drakon pre-dated Andraste, she guessed, but no Chantry pilgrim was coming to see that.) There had been a very impressive cathedral in the city once upon a time, supposedly holding relics of some of Andraste's first disciples in its catacombs, but it'd been damaged in a civil war and then entirely ruined during the Orlesian invasion, the relics mostly lost in the chaos. The Orlesians had decided to rebuild the Cathedral of Our Lady Redeemer in Amaranthine, claiming it was a better place for such a thing, considering it had been Andraste's city more than Denerim — Andraste's husband had been an early Avvar arl, Amaranthine the heart of his kingdom, her first sermons had been given there.
That Amaranthine happened to be the city the Orlesians had decided to rule Ferelden from was just a happy coincidence, Marian guessed.
The point was, Denerim might be the capital city, but it wasn't really anything more than that — a city. It was big, obviously, even bigger than Gwaren. Marian couldn't see in much detail from here, floating a mile or two out on the water, but the northern city, on the right side of the river, sprawled out like a dirty brown-gray bruise, the streets making random crosses and curls, hundreds and hundreds of buildings of all shapes and sizes, blurring into an indistinct mess from this distance. The left side was less flat, ascending the slope of a hill leading to the enormous blocky shape of Fort Drakon, the tower stretching up to the sky, dwarfing everything else around, even the sunburst of the Chantry across the river looking like a couple little pins stuck into the fabric of the city by comparison. That half of the city, the buildings looked large, mostly made of stone, and more colorful, but Marian really couldn't make out much from here.
They weren't getting closer, she'd noticed. And they weren't the only ones, there were what had to be dozens of ships just sitting out in the harbor, masts looking weird and skeletal without their sails flying. Just...waiting.
A little skimmer had come up to them a while ago, shouting up at Osik and his men, before peeling off again. There'd been some discussion, the sailors clearly deciding what to do. And then they were running off getting to work, the sails unfurling, and the ship slowly jerked into motion...
...turning away from the city.
As soon as the pack of sailors around Osik had cleared up a bit, Marian sidled up to him, asked him what was happening. She listened, grimly, for a minute or two before agreeing, yes, they were perfectly fine with going on to Amaranthine instead, she wasn't going to hold out his second silver on him. (Especially since they were going further, that would be a kind of shitty thing to do.) Except, they were going to have to go through the Straights of Alamar, that was going to be terrible — she grimaced at the thought, Osik just laughed at her. But fine, sure, she was fine with that.
Except, now she had to have a talk with Aveline. This was going to be fun...
Since Marian was kind of working on a deadline — as soon as they got too far away from the city, deeper out of the Firth, she'd be completely useless from sea-sickness again — she started looking for Aveline right away. She'd expected to find her helping the sailors again, so it took some minutes before she finally spotted the knight below-decks, sitting alone in the middle of the cargo hold, her bag at her feet...writing? Yes, she was definitely writing, a rough, somewhat sloppy-looking leather-bound book laid out in her lap, scratching at it with a little pointed length of charcoal. (Or, probably not actually charcoal, it just sort of looked like it, Marian didn't know the proper term.) That was...odd. Also, seemed somewhat impractical — she'd think all the dampness everywhere would just make the paper all soft and useless, the charcoal washed out of it. But okay.
Shaking the thought off, Marian walked over, plopped down on a nearby barrel of something (mead, she thought). She glanced around quick to make sure they were alone, then cast a narrow chink of fadelight over her book — there were lamps around, but it was rather dark, Aveline should barely be able to see what she was doing.
The woman startled, glanced up at her. "Oh, thank you, Marian." She sounded sincere enough, but she didn't keep writing, folded the book closed and leaned back a bit. Must be private, whatever that was. "Are we finally coming in to harbor? I thought I felt the ship start moving again a moment ago."
"Yeah, that's what I'm here to talk to you about." Marian paused a moment, giving the older woman a quick once over. (Though she couldn't be that much older than Marian, maybe as old as thirty, but she kind of doubted it.) After a couple hours at sea, Aveline had stripped off her armor, stashing it under her bunk, leaving her in tight-fitting leather trousers and a linen shirt. Without it, it was even more obvious it wasn't just her armor making her look it, Aveline was a big woman. Only a few inches taller than Marian, she was a lot thicker, probably the single most muscular woman Marian had ever met. Not nearly as burly as some men she'd seen, of course, but for a woman it was still... Well, she could probably kill Marian with her bare hands, just leave it at that.
She'd caught Carver sneaking glances at her, which was understandable, she guessed. Did nothing for Marian, though.
(Of course, the only person who ever had done anything for her had been a Dalish elf girl, which wasn't something she wanted to think about right now. Or possibly ever.)
When she wasn't helping out somewhere on the boat, Aveline had mostly been hanging around the family — she talked quietly with Mom (they got on surprisingly well), or shared stories of her time with the Kingsmen to distract Bethany from her misery. She...seemed to be doing okay? Marian had never seen Aveline being obviously miserable, she meant. She was always doing something, not sinking into that empty listlessness like Mom had after Dad died, or talking to someone, always perfectly calm, her voice firm but kind. Besides those few tears she'd spotted back immediately after putting her husband out of his misery, Marian didn't think she'd seen Aveline cry, or even seem mildly out of sorts.
Though, she didn't spend all of her time around them, she did disappear for a bit here and there. She was probably just keeping her grief to herself.
The point was, she seemed mostly fine, which was good, because Marian had no idea how she'd react if Marian asked if she was okay. It wasn't like they were friends, after all, they hardly knew each other, and Aveline came off very stiff and formal, so. Yes, good. "Ah, we're not stopping in Denerim. Osik decided to move on to Amaranthine."
Aveline's only reaction was to raise both of her eyebrows a little. After a couple seconds, she said, in that low, smooth voice of hers, "I see. Did the Captain explain to you why he changed his plans on us?"
"His plans sort of got changed for him." Marian hesitated for a second. "This might be...not fun to hear. Just, before we get into it, everyone's fine. No, I mean, obviously not everyone is fine, but the Queen is safe, is what I meant."
A suspicious frown narrowed Aveline's brow at that — since, if she thought it necessary to reassure her the Queen was fine, something bad must have happened. "Just tell me, Hawke."
That still sounded weird, Marian was used to "Hawke" being her father. Aveline was really the only person who'd ever called her that, a couple times back running from the darkspawn...and also a couple times when she was annoyed with her. Right. "Okay, then: there was a peasant uprising in Denerim a week ago."
Aveline winced. "Ah. So they're searching all the ships coming in and out, then."
"Yeah. And since so much trade comes through Denerim, that's a lot of searching to do. Especially since a lot of their men are tied up in the city making sure nobody tries anything." The impression Osik had been given was that there were still some people trying to fight, which was pretty crazy — when peasant rebellions went down, they usually went down hard. Apparently, the people of Denerim had some serious fire in their blood, if they were still fighting back. "People in little boats are going out and explaining the situation to everyone, and Osik was told it could be a couple days before we can even get to shore. We can get to Amaranthine faster than that, and he can do all his trading just as good there anyway."
"That does make sense. Amaranthine is only a few days' walk from Denerim — it's inconvenient, but I'll make do."
"Yes, well, there's more." Marian paused for a moment, biting her lip. She didn't understand a lot of what was going on — and Osik hadn't been able to tell her much anyway — but she was pretty sure Aveline was not going to like this. "Something happened to the Arl of Denerim's family, I don't really know what." Maybe related to that peasant rebellion? "Rendon Howe is running things until the Landsmeet can pick a new one."
Aveline grimaced, a dark cast falling over her face. "Putting him in charge of the capital in the aftermath of a peasant uprising is very foolish. Arl Rendon is... He had a hard go of it in the Rebellion, and I'm told he hasn't been the same man since. I fear he will only make things worse."
Yes, Marian had heard the same rumors — though not until Ostagar, people in Lothering had little reason to gossip about the local lords of a place so distant as Amaranthine. Of course, since Aveline had been serving the King directly, she'd probably met the man before, she would know better than the people spreading the rumors. "That's Osik's feeling, another reason to go to Amaranthine instead. There was another bit of news, though, our brave Captain didn't know enough to get the significance of it."
"Spit it out, Hawke."
"Sure: Teyrn Loghain was named Regent, he's ruling in the Queen's name."
Aveline went very, very still. "Loghain rules Ferelden."
"Yes."
For long seconds, Aveline didn't say or do anything, sitting there silent and unmoving. It took a bit for Marian to realize it wasn't shock, or something — no, Aveline was frozen with rage. Her hands in her lap had tightened into fists, her shoulders rigid, barely visible in the darkness the tendons in her neck sticking out, clenching her jaw. She just glared at the wall, steely with quiet fury, almost seeming to hold her breath.
...Honestly, Marian had expected an explosion. Which was really quite silly when she thought about it, she'd had no reason to expect that, Aveline had never given any sign that she was ever anything but entirely in control of herself. Even when she was clearly murderously enraged, here she sat, quiet and...mostly calm, and...
Scary lady, this one. That's all she meant, that it was, just, vaguely intimidating, sitting next to Aveline while her entire life imploded and she just...calmly simmered. It might not be so bad if she hadn't also seen Aveline fight, Maker...
Of course, when she wasn't angry, chatting with Mother or sharing stories with the twins, or even just walking through the streets of Gwaren, standing next to Aveline made Marian feel rather stupid and clumsy, very much the...poor, classless farmer she was, she guessed. Which was a different kind of intimidation she guessed, so, not an unusual feeling. Still.
(She kind of hated it, if she was being honest, but that wasn't really Aveline's fault, she was trying not to hold it against her. Marian hadn't exactly spent a lot of time around people who were literally from the royal court in Denerim, she wasn't used to people this...classy. She'd get over it.)
Marian was drawn out of her thoughts when Aveline finally spoke. "I can't go back to Denerim, then. Loghain will have me killed if I show my face there. I do have friends in the city that I could try to find, but..." Aveline sighed, absently rubbing at the side of her head. "And do what, organize a conspiracy to remove him from power? I wouldn't even know where to start. I expect I would only get myself and all my friends killed."
That seemed very likely, yes — Aveline wasn't a schemer, Marian didn't think. Too honorable. "I'm sorry." That seemed...terribly inadequate, but she didn't know what else to say. Mostly just so Aveline wouldn't have to find some way to respond to that, Marian asked, "So, what are you going to do now? You said you were from...West Hill, was it? That's a little further from Amaranthine than Denerim, I think, but..."
Aveline sighed. "No, I haven't been back there in years. My family returned to Orlais after the Rebellion — my father and I were the only ones who stayed behind, and he died several years ago now. There's no place for me in West Hill anymore." There was a brief silence, in which Marian almost heard an unspoken There's no place for me in Ferelden anymore. "I'll have to...think about it. When did Osik say we'll be in Amaranthine?"
"Tomorrow. Maybe the next day, if the winds catch us bad."
"I'll have time to think about it, then." Her bit of not-charcoal pulled out from somewhere and — after a quick glance at Marian, probably checking she couldn't read it from this angle — she peeled her book open, splaying it across her lap. "Could you put that light on again?" Marian had let her light spell lapse a while ago, she hadn't been paying attention to it. "It is dark in here, and I'm guessing it's only going to be darker on the Storm Coast."
She didn't doubt it, supposedly they never got any damn sun up there. "I could. I'm pretty sure I can't hold it through walls though, so I'd have to stay here."
"Never mind, then."
"I wasn't saying I wouldn't do it, just not sure you want me hanging around when you're trying to do...whatever you're doing. What is that, anyway?"
Aveline glanced up, her lips twitching a little. "Haven't you ever seen anyone keep a diary, Hawke?"
"Um...no? What's a diary?" At the surprised look on the knight's face, Marian rolled her eyes. "I grew up in Lothering, Aveline. There aren't exactly a lot of books around — my parents are literally the only people I knew growing up who owned any." Excluding the Chantry and the Bann, obviously, they didn't count. "If it's a writing...thing only big hats do, I'm not likely to have heard of it."
There was a slight scoff at the low-class term, but Aveline nodded. "I'm sorry, I didn't think of that. It's a practice of organizing your thoughts in written form. It can help you see patterns or work out complicated problems, or just to record events in more detail than you could remember later on. It's quite common among people of means, I picked it up at court."
...That seemed absurdly indulgent — books were expensive. But all right. "Okay, no, I've never heard of that before. I kept a book back home, but that was just to help keep track of the trades I was doing." And most of that was just names, tally marks, and numbers, so.
"That's called a ledger."
"Sure." Honestly, Marian didn't give a shit what the 'proper' term was. It wasn't like anyone had taught her to do it, with fancy words attached to the whole thing, just something she'd figured out herself to keep everything straight. "Anyway, I can stay here and keep the lights on for you, if you like. You'll have to carry me back to my bunk, though — I have the feeling the Straights of Alamar are going to be miserable."
Aveline smiled, just a little. "I couldn't ask you to do that."
"You don't have to. It's not like I have anything else to do." Besides, she did kind of owe her — Marian wasn't certain they would have survived long enough for Flemeth to swoop in and save their asses without Aveline's help. At the very least, they would have had to leave Mom behind, and maybe Carver too...and getting Bethany to agree to fly off without them would have been impossible, so.
Marian didn't even want to think about that.
She cast a chink of fadelight again, after a moment of thought binding it to the book. As narrowly-focused as the glow was, she wasn't even certain it'd be visible from the other side of the hold, which was good for reasons of not getting caught out for an apostate while in the middle of the damn ocean, and it should follow the pages if Aveline moved around. But, "It might stick to the pages, if it's not still lit up right when you turn to the next one tell me and I'll recast it."
Aveline hardly reacted to the sudden appearance of magical light at all, just gave her a firm nod. "I understand. Thank you, Marian."
"No problem." Fadelight hardly took any effort to cast, it wasn't like it was a big ask...
Marian slid down to the floor to lay down on her back, wooden boards hammered smooth by the passing of hundreds of feet and weight of who knew how many loads of whatever to be shipped around. Once they got onto open water, she wouldn't want to be sitting up anymore anyway — besides, despite how cold and vaguely damp it was, it was comfortable enough. She stared up at the murky ceiling, the faint greenish glow barely visible above her to her left, Aveline slowly scratching at the page in silence.
She made it a few minutes before her itching curiosity got the better of her. "You know, no one's ever, just, casually asked me to do something little. Like cast a light for them, I mean."
"No? Not even your family?"
"Nope." Of course, they didn't really need to, Marian or Bethany took care of most anything Mom or Carver would ask for on their own anyway. "A few people have found me out before, but... Well, you seem unusually comfortable with magic, is what I guess I'm saying."
"You're wondering what I think about you and your sister being apostates," Aveline said, an almost sly sort of drawl on her voice.
"Yeah, I guess, if you want to be blunt about it."
"I see." Aveline was silent a moment — Marian couldn't see her face right now, but she assumed it was hesitation, picking over how she wanted to word something. Or, come to think of it, taking care not to say something cruel, worried she might get a lightning bolt in her face if what she said was taken badly. (She'd rarely dealt with people who knew what she was, but she hadn't forgotten how silly the Warden recruits had been about her and Alim.) "Honestly, I'm not sure what I think about it. I have met mages before, but I never knew any of them very well. And none of them were apostates."
Meaning she only had what the Chantry said about magic to go on, and whatever her Templar husband might have told her. Not likely to be a charitable perspective, then.
"I'll admit what I've been told is...not flattering." Called it. "But that doesn't mean I... My father used to say that words are fluid things, malleable in a way the world is not. That what is said of a time or a place or a man might be very different from the reality. Rumors might have a grain of truth in them, but it's foolish to judge a man entirely on what you are told — instead, watch him, and let him show you who he is by his actions."
That seemed like common sense to Marian — she'd even heard a dozen little proverbs from one person or another over the years that said more or less the same thing, and here Aveline was quoting her father like it was some great secret wisdom he'd passed down to her. But, who knows, maybe people of means needed to be told these things. "So my actions don't match the stories, then."
Aveline snorted. "You know the things people say about apostates. Listen to the Chantry, and you might think they're all going around practicing blood magic and consorting with demons."
"You're not watching me all the time," Marian teased, smirking up at the ceiling. "Maybe I do exactly those things."
"I don't believe it for a second. All I've seen of you, Marian, is an honest woman trying to do her best by her family. And Bethany is such a sweet girl. I can't imagine either of you doing something so horrible as blood magic."
Joke's on her: Marian had taught Bethany blood magic, so they'd definitely both used it. Not the sort of thing Aveline imagined when she thought of blood magic, but still.
"Leandra assured me your father was Circle-trained, and did his best to make sure you would be safe, and that you passed his lessons on to Bethany." Oh, had she? Marian had completely missed that conversation happening somehow. "So, I'm not sure. Am I uneasy travelling in the company of apostates? A little. Magic is dangerous. But so is a blade, and no man is held accountable for every atrocity committed by the sword simply for carrying one. Your actions so far have shown me no reason to distrust you, so I'm trying not to.
"I have no plans to turn you in to the first Templar we come across, if that's what you're worried about."
She had been, a little bit. After all, this woman had married a Templar, she'd expect Aveline's loyalties to be more with them than Marian and her sister, two strangers she just happened to meet on the road. Sure, those two strangers had saved her life, but still. "Okay, I get it. You can relax, Aveline, I'm not going to set you on fire for being a little awkward about this."
"Oh good, glad to hear it. Being set on fire would put a damper on our friendship, you know."
"Ha! Yeah, let's avoid that. Anyway, it's just as weird for me as it is for you, honestly, before Ostagar I've never really been around people who knew I was a mage. Other than my family, obviously."
"Really? I'd think that'd be hard to hide in a place like Lothering."
"Oh, we didn't live in the village — our land is a few miles east, right on the edge of the Bannir. There are these little hills all around, breaks line of sight with the surrounding farms, if we're doing small stuff. If we wanted to practice big stuff, we'd go out into the hills. During a storm, preferably."
"That makes sense. Even so, you must have been very careful to go that long without being discovered. I can't imagine how—"
The only warning Marian had was a slight shiver running through the floor, and then it canted under her, first one way and then the other, the frame of the ship creaking around her. Her stomach immediately lurching, a wave of nauseatingly warm tingles rushing across her skin, Marian grimaced. "Andraste have mercy, not again..."
Aveline laughed.
9:30 Nubulis 17
Redcliffe, Chasingard, Kingdom of Ferelden
As the sun dipped below the hills to the west, the defenders gathered on the road outside the lodge, at the edge of the village. And they waited for the attack to come.
Lýna did her best to conceal her annoyance. She still thought gathering here, waiting for the dead to come down to them instead of meeting them at the gates, was a stupid idea. She didn't much like the plan in general. But there was only so much she could do about that when the people making decisions wouldn't listen to her. She lead the Wardens, sure — the only one who might not follow was Keran, but she could tell joining forces with the villagers was getting her more on-side, so that might change soon — but everybody else followed Teagan. And Teagan, Lýna was now thoroughly convinced, was an idiot.
Not in terms the Alamarri would use — she had no doubt he knew all the things these bann people (she still wasn't clear on what a bann or an arl was) were supposed to know, had almost certainly read more books than Lýna had ever even seen. But Lýna had the very clear feeling Teagan had never lead his people into battle before this thing with the dead, had probably never been in a serious fight in his life. And it showed.
But she'd done all she could to fill in the gaps Teagan missed in his ignorance, all she could think of in the time she had. And she was out of time to agonize over it. All that was left to do was to carry it out, to push their way through who knew how many walking corpses and take out the mage or spirit causing this mess.
Fighting, at least, was something she was very good at.
The humans and dwarves (mostly) shifted around her, some rather more nervously than others. She barely stopped herself from throwing an irritated glare at a pair of men nearly shaking in their boots, their voices high and squeaky as they discussed the battle to come — she wasn't wearing her cloak right now (washing it after would be a pain), she actually had to watch her expression.
On either side of the heavily-armored humans (and Morrigan) who'd be pushing up the road, and the spearmen and bowmen huddled behind them who'd be taking stabs over their shoulders, were wings of lighter-armored, quicker men and women carrying a few swords but mostly axes, who would sweep in from the sides once the front lines of the dead were broken, clear them out so the center could advance. (And also protect their sides, but Lýna didn't like their chances if the dead actually tried to flank them.) One of Fergus's more fleet-footed men was leading the right wing — Perry was also over there, but he hadn't been put in charge — and Lýna the left. The dozen or so people in her wing kept shooting her wary glances, eyes repeatedly tracing the blades at her hips, the vines across her face. If they meant to hide how uneasy they were with her, they were terrible at it.
She assumed glaring back at them would just make this stupid battle even more difficult than Teagan had already made it.
Luckily, both for Lýna's patience and her wing's nerves, they didn't have to wait very long. The western sky was still warm with orange and red, night not yet fallen, when Lýna heard an odd clanking and grinding from the direction of the castle — quiet, hardly noticeable from this distance. From among the archers, Alim shouted, "They're opening the gate!" the call immediately repeated in a much louder, deeper voice. (Fergus, Lýna thought, but she wasn't sure, so many of these human men sounded the same to her.) A frisson shot through the crowd, people stiffening with fear or anticipation, discordant scrapes shivering across the air as blades were drawn from sheathes.
She didn't bother reaching for hers yet — the first ranks wouldn't be making it this far anyway.
Her arms crossed low over her hips, Lýna waited, one minute, another, the people around her shifting and hissing. She spotted them before she heard them, crossing over the curve of the hill up the road, still a few minutes away. At this distance, they were nothing more than a shifting mob of color, too many bodies and limbs mixed up with each other to make out much in the way of detail. Apparently the humans could see them too (though probably in even less detail than she could), because the shivering got worse, the nervous chatter abruptly cutting off.
The dead spilled down the hill, mostly following the road into the village but spread out too wide to fit, many stumbling clumsily down the hillside. There were more than Lýna had thought. It was impossible to count them, obviously, but there were dozens in view now, more still spilling over the curve of the hill. Had to be at least a hundred of them, probably more.
Lýna took a glance over the huddled group of defenders, fought the urge to sigh. Altogether, Wardens, knights, and villagers, they had maybe sixty or seventy — that should have been more than enough to deal with the undead, even before they and Fergus's people had shown up. Walking corpses were hard to put down, yes, but they were clumsy and stupid, completely incapable of any kind of tactics or strategy. With a bit of preparation, proper use of barricades and shields and what oil they had lying around, this should have been easy to deal with. Seeing a horde of dead people rushing at you could be unnerving, she didn't doubt that — she'd never even heard of this many corpses being raised at once — but the difficulty then was to avoid being surrounded. That was the basic, first problem the villagers should have been addressing, but they hadn't dug any trenches to direct them at all. There were a few barricades in the village itself, blocking off certain routes between buildings, but no more than that. Disagreeing with Teagan's dramatic claims, Fergus said they had come out ahead the last couple days, steadily chipping away at their numbers, but...
This whole thing was stupid, it should never have happened. Lýna was trying not to think about it, because if she did she would only get annoyed, and she still hoped to negotiate a proper alliance tonight.
The dead were almost halfway down the hill now, close enough she could start making out individual corpses. The magics that raised them didn't stop them from rotting, and some of them had clearly been dead longer than others — some still looked mostly human, pale and marked with terrible injuries but mostly intact, others bloated and blackened, streaked with putrid fluids, others hardly more than skeletons, bits of thoroughly unrecognizable flesh still stuck to them here and there, fuzzy mold sprouting white and blue-ish.
Lýna grimaced — this was going to be disgusting.
Some distance away, maybe a quarter of the distance up the hill, two lamps were sitting on the road, one several paces higher up than the other, their lights thin but constant in the increasing darkness. The dead, shifting and unsteady, stumbled past the first, the little flame flickering in and out as half-rotted limbs got in the way. Lýna heard a crackle of flame behind her and to her right, and a ball of fire appeared in the air, arcing up, up, and then dropping again, searing down to the ground, splashing over the road around the closer lamp.
There was a second where the oil caught, with a windy whoomf Lýna heard from here, the dead who'd just started to approach the spot where the fire had landed, a few unlucky corpses caught alight, flailing and screeching. (Lýna winced at the high, bone-grinding sound, but it didn't seem to bother the humans.) Twin trails of flame shot down both sides of the road, stretching a few paces away from them, and then turning down into the ditch left and right.
There was a crackle of energy, blue-purple fingers of lightning flashing, just for a blink. And then the front ranks of the dead exploded.
At the piercing sun-white light, the deep boom that shivered in Lýna's chest and stabbed into her ears, she cringed away, looking down to the ground, her hands rising halfway to her head before she stopped herself. Okay, that hurt. Shaking off the faint nausea left behind by the too-loud noise rattling her skull as well as she could, Lýna looked back up. A large circle about a quarter of the way up the hill was aglow with fire, burning bright and hot enough she almost thought she could feel it on her face from here, dozens of corpses bodily thrown off their feet, some ripped apart by the force of the explosion, clotted blood and even viler fluids splashed around and then boiled in the heat. Dozens of the survivors were aflame, flailing about for only a couple seconds before the magics animating them failed, collapsing limp to the ground here and there, still fitfully smoldering.
The explosion had seemingly flung streams of burning oil in all directions. Some had ended up falling their way, streaks of fire burning out as she watched, leaving thin trails of char across the hillside. The front third or so of the horde of walking corpses — Lýna could make out the rear now, had a better grasp of their numbers — had been devastated, scattered and burned, others further back still picking themselves clumsily up from where they'd been thrown, the charge entirely halted for a moment.
So, that's why Alim had wanted to know where the village's apothecary was. Supposedly, he'd also taken a bit of lyrium out of the Chantry's supply (which they had for some reason that hadn't been explained) — it looked like he'd made a liquid version of dwarven explosives, more suited to splashing burning oil all over animated corpses. Very clever, Lýna admitted, smiling to herself.
Once Weisshaupt caught up with Duncan's death, Lýna was definitely recommending Alim for promotion. Constable, maybe? She'd think about it.
Even while the fire on the road burned out, its fuel consumed, flames continued to spread out away from the road. Lýna hadn't known exactly what their trap on the road was going to be, but she hadn't needed to to plan accordingly: the fire thrown by the explosion lit off the oil she and Morrigan had borrowed a few people to dribble over the dirt. It spread slowly, the low-quality oil she'd found not nearly as volatile as the explosives Alim had mixed up, but it would burn longer. (With how much the hillside had soaked up, probably for hours in places.) It didn't spread evenly, but along the lines they'd taken across the hillside, splintering away from both sides of the road like the branches of a tree, many spots left untouched but each of these islands surrounded by low-burning flame, impassible.
It would take some minutes for every line they'd set to catch, but it didn't matter — the dead wouldn't be able to leave the road and come around behind them. Even as she watched, some of the dead further back who'd left the road stepped over lines of fire, not bursting into flame so much as licked at up to their knees. But it didn't matter, even that much was enough to disrupt the magics keeping them moving, every one that stumbled into the fire was collapsing motionless a few seconds later. Whoever was directing the horde realized the problem quickly, the dead awkwardly cramming themselves onto the road, spilling into the shallow ditches on either side (which Lýna had left clear so they'd have room to maneuver), but especially close to the front there wasn't enough room, the dead on the fringes quickly falling.
Lýna smiled. Well, at least that had worked perfectly.
There was some surprised shouting from around her — most of the defenders, including Lýna, hadn't expected the explosion, and few were aware anything else had been done to prepare — but soon they were laughing, the fearful tension suddenly lifting away. Almost like they were realizing they might actually live through this. (Of course they were going to live through this, the Wardens alone could probably deal with this many walking corpses if they really had to, with the proper preparation.) Rising above the chatter came a deep, booming voice, maybe Fergus, "Up to the gates, lads! Shield, advance!"
The men in heavy armor started up the road, a great honey-brown bear looming in the center of the line. Lýna waited for a handful of seconds before, drawing her gifted silverite sword, waving for her wing to follow, trailing behind the line on the left side of the road.
At the slow pace the line set (it was hard to move very fast wearing all that metal), it was a couple minutes before they met the first rank of corpses. While they were still a few paces away, arrows skimmed over their heads to fall into the horde — most of them weren't particularly good shots, arrows sprouting from chests and shoulders and limbs, but it didn't really matter, the damage would make the dead even slower and clumsier. (Besides, it didn't look like any of the dead were wearing armor, so their aim didn't need to be very good.) A few lucky shots struck in the head — crossbow bolts tearing straight through skulls, one Lýna spotted had an arrow shaft stuck through its eye socket — a handful falling limply to the dirt.
The volley staggering the horde for a moment, the shield-bearers took advantage, "SLAM!" skipped forward a few steps with speed Lýna hadn't thought them capable of, crashing into the dead shield-first, knocking a dozen off their feet, the force of the impact halting their advance in its tracks, Morrigan lifting up on two paws for a second before crashing down on the middle, crushing a pair of them into the dirt. The shield-bearers didn't trade blows so much as stand there and take them, trusting in their armor to protect them, spears jabbed over their shoulders wounding the dead, Morrigan's claws tearing corpses into scattered pieces with a single swipe.
The shield-bearers held the road, but faced with the solid wall the dead started to flow around to the sides. Some were pushed out onto the fitfully burning hillside, but several trickled through the gap between the left-most man and the fires, the nearest spearman catching the first in the gut. Lýna darted forward — the nearness of her fire trap like a physical thing, pushing at her hotter and heavier and drier than the harshest summer winds — swinging with both hands, the hilt jerking only a little with the impact, the almost skeletal head neatly severed from the corpse's shoulders. (Apparently, the magics holding the dead together weren't doing a very good job.) Her right hand coming down to hold the spear in place, Lýna kicked at the corpse, freeing the spearman's weapon for him.
Lýna skipped up to the next corpse clumsily waddling through the gap, ducking under the wild swing of a sword — it glittered in the firelight all around, finely-crafted, perhaps one of Eamon's guards', though the corpse holding it was plainly dressed — swiping across the corpse's hips as she went, deep enough its legs went limp. One of her wing was coming in, an axe swinging down toward the back of its neck, so she moved on. The next in the line had what looked very much like a work knife in its skeletal hand, she side-stepped the wild stab and severed the arm at the elbow, kicked it out of her way to be set upon by two of the men behind her. Another was charging at her, this one unarmed but rather less falling apart, could almost be alive if not for its stiffness, how deathly pale it was, the empty, glassy stare of its eyes. Lýna turned her shoulder to it, shifted to a two-handed grip again, waited for it to take another couple steps before darting forward and low, slashing up. This one sturdier than the first she'd beheaded, her blade stuck in its spine with a bone-shivering jerk, the force knocking it to its knees, the incredibly sharp silverite easily sliding out, Lýna whirled around and slashed downward, dropping to a knee as she struck, with a wrenching jolt this time cutting all the way through.
She jumped to her feet, sidling out of the way of a particularly vile-looking corpse, she could smell it even through the smoke and the lingering oil, swiping as she went, the blade clicking awkwardly off its hip bone, the corpse sent staggering, knocked onto its back by an axe in the chest, a second falling for its throat. Another was stumbling through the gap at her, Lýna deflected its sword to the side with a smooth flick, instinctively followed through to stab the corpse low over its hip — which was pointless, obviously the dead didn't need to worry about blood loss. Before the corpse could bring its own weapon back around, Lýna slid closer, snatching out her father's dagger and driving it up under the thing's jaw. She must have severed its spine, because it went limp instantly, she wrenched both blades out of the rotting corpse, grimacing at the putrid smell surrounding the thing like a physical weight.
By this point, the ranks of people with spears and other long-handled weapons had reorganized themselves somewhat, some still stabbing out over the shield-bearers' shoulders but others angled to the side, jabbing at the dead attempting to slip through the gap between armor and fire. The were no calls for the wings to move in, the shield-bearers instead picking their way forward, executing the wounded corpses as they went, a slow but steady tromp up the hill, a few of the men grunting out a low chant of some kind to set the pace. Apparently, they'd realized the dead squeezing past them meant the wings couldn't get around, so the original plan wouldn't work.
Which, Lýna could have (and had) told them that. There was no reason to expect the dead would politely stay on the road to face their shield-bearers — Lýna didn't stay on the roads travelling, she failed to see why an attacking force of walking corpses should. (She still wasn't sure what the point of roads was, honestly.) Squeezed between the shield-bearers and the burning hillside, a few spearmen and Lýna's wing could more than take care of the few who slipped past.
But if she hadn't found that oil and set her trap up, though, they would be in serious trouble right about now. She wondered what Teagan had thought was supposed to happen if the dead just went around their line...
With that slight adjustment, the fight went smoothly enough. The shield-bearers slowly pushed forward step by step, most of the dead slipping past wounded by the line of spears, damaged enough they were hardly a threat, easily dispatched by Lýna's wing. She focused on the lucky few who got by without being tagged, or any carrying weapons — less than half of the corpses were armed — leaving the rest for her wing to handle.
Most of the time, she didn't even bother taking the time to properly decapitate them, instead disarming them or crippling them badly enough the people in her wing, mostly untrained, could finish them off without too much difficulty. (Her fine silverite sword was extremely sharp and she suspected it was enchanted into impossible durability, but too lightweight, axes were still better for this kind of work.) She would only spend a couple seconds on each corpse she faced, a single slash at a hip, one of the armed ones she might turn a blow aside before cutting the arm to or through the bone, maybe kicking one into the nearby flames if the opportunity presented itself, before moving on, pausing only long enough to spot the next corpse in line.
Her wing had reorganized a little, there were two men with swords in the front with her, quick crippling the dead for the rest to handle in their wake. She noticed quickly that they both hesitated a little when one carrying a weapon slipped through, so Lýna made sure she took all of those she could herself, both men growing more confident as they easily pushed their way through the horde, cutting down one after the other after the other.
Walking corpses were hardly challenging to fight, the routine so easy it was almost mindless, but that didn't mean it wasn't hard work. There were a lot of them, and they didn't exactly have the space to move back and catch their breath, so the fighting was constant, Lýna moving from one clash to the next to the next without an instant's pause. Before, she definitely would have been struggling; after the Joining her breath was hard in her throat, her sword arm aching a bit, but it wasn't so bad. Even constantly running around as she was, darting back and forth to catch the more threatening of the dead, she could probably keep this up for a long while.
One of the two swordsmen at the front with her took a nasty scrape across his shoulder at one point, after dispatching the corpse that'd done it Lýna reached up to grab him by the collar, pushed him back out of harm's way, called for him to be passed back to the healers following behind. It might have come out in the wrong language.
The worst part was the heat. By this point the flames had spread across the entire hillside, to her left all she could see was flickering orange and red, almost painfully bright in the darkening night, stretching on and on until the trees rose on the slope up to the opposite cliff, muted by smoke and blurred by heat. The air was thick and hot, smoke clawing at her throat and her eyes, sweating from the heat, leather clinging uncomfortably to her skin, her hair to her neck, more than a few times dripping into her eyes, once nearly blinding her at an inconvenient moment, she had to abandon a parry to dodge instead. By the time they'd been fighting for...she wasn't sure, they had to be halfway up the hill by now, the thirst was starting to get to her.
As uncomfortable as it was, the alternative — allowing the dead to spill across the hillside freely, to surround them and overwhelm them — was undoubtedly worse. They'd just have to suffer it for a few more minutes, there couldn't be that many left...
The fighting went on and on and on, in a constant stream of motion and reaction Lýna was really only half-conscious of. Until, abruptly, it ended. Turning to move on to the next walking corpse, she couldn't find one, staggering a bit as the movement came up short. There were still sounds of fighting to her right, a glance over there showed the shield-bearers were in the process of executing the last few of the dead. (Was Alistair's sword glowing? Hmm.) But that was it, the rest were gone. They were only a few paces from the top of the hill, the fires at their backs, the flat, open space clear of threats all the way to the moody red walls of the castle a short distance away.
Right. That was the first part done.
Instead of immediately moving on to the castle, their group hung back to catch their breath for a moment. Lýna drained her wineskin dry, traded it with a runner for a fresh one. Taking a gulp, Lýna noticed a tang of vinegar, made a face but kept drinking anyway — she knew by now Alamarri usually put vinegar in their water or just drank beer instead, so it would keep without being contaminated, and Lýna didn't like their beer much. (She thought the similar drink the Chasind made was much better.) After making sure nobody in her wing was seriously injured — they'd be splitting up from here, but it seemed the thing to do anyway — Lýna tracked down the Wardens and their companions to confirm they'd made it through all right.
Alistair and Keran were both bruised and winded, Keran more than Alistair, but otherwise fine — Alistair was cheerfully joking with Fergus when she found them, so. Morrigan, human-shaped again, had little scratches along her hands, arms, and face, weeping thin trails of blood here and there. They might have been rather deep cuts as a bear, but as a much smaller human they were hardly even a nuisance — Morrigan set about healing them, seeming more annoyed than anything. Perry was uninjured, but exhausted, laid out on the ground trading breathless comments with several other men in his wing. Alim and Leliana, having hung back with the archers the whole time, were perfectly fine, the second looking out over the scattered corpses grim and pitying, the first practically bouncing on his toes with excitement.
He'd been strangely cheerful, even more than usual, ever since they'd decided he'd be bringing down the gates. Lýna didn't know what that was about, but she also didn't care. Maybe he just liked blowing things up?
Noticing her watching them, Alim turned to her, chirped, "Was that you? All of...that," waving at the hillside below them, still blanketed in flames. Lýna followed the gesture instinctively.
...A couple of the buildings at the edge of the village were on fire. Oops? Oh well, they'd already been abandoned and stripped of anything useful anyway. "Yes, my idea, so they don't come around. Good trap you made."
"You think I made a good trap? Lýna, you set the entire hillside on fire. That's insane."
"May be, but it works."
Alim burst out giggling; standing nearby, Leliana was apparently trying not to smile, and not doing a very good job of it.
After everyone had caught their breath, roughly half of their group — the Wardens, Fergus's people, all of the archers and a few people from the wings — moved on toward the castle. The rest would be staying behind, making sure any walking corpses they might have missed didn't get down to the village while they were distracted, and also keeping the road open for their runners. (Lýna didn't think that was necessary, with her big fire trap in place, but she also didn't think they'd need the rest of them to find and deal with the person behind this anyway.) Half of their half stopped at what Lýna guessed to be the outside of bow range from the top of the castle wall, their more heavily-armored fighters continuing on toward the gate with Alim tucked between them, their shields raised.
And good thing they did, too: they were halfway there when a handful of crossbow bolts suddenly speared into shields, the men staggering with the impacts. There was one cry of pain Lýna picked out, one of the men on the left side cringing — squinting, she saw a bolt had pierced far enough through the shield to stab into the man's arm just under his shoulder. But, hissing and cursing loud enough Lýna could hear it from here, he continued advancing with the others, their shield wall unbroken.
Okay, some Alamarri weren't soft and pathetic, she'd give them that much.
Just as Lýna was wondering how she was supposed to get up there to down the archers — the walls looked too smooth to climb very easily — there was a tingle of magic from behind her, and a crow went fluttering into the air, heading toward one of the...little round rooms on either side of the gate. (Lýna had no idea what those were called.) Black feathers in the shadows, Lýna could barely see the bird slip through one of the narrow windows, instantly followed by a noisy crashing and heavy flanging of magic being unleashed in an enclosed space. Shortly after silence fell again, Morrigan appeared on the wall, strolling toward the opposite little round room, beheading a lone corpse over the gate with a narrow flash of green light, not even breaking stride. She disappeared inside even as a second volley of bolts fell, this one rather thinner, half of the bowmen already gone. There was another explosion of noise, a spray of dust gusting out of one of the windows.
Then a crow was soaring out again, lazily gliding over toward Lýna. Only a few paces away, there was another flicker of magic, the bird's form twisting, and Morrigan reappeared, skipping to a halt a little to Lýna's right. "Thank you, Morrigan," Lýna said, in Chasind. "I had no idea how I was going to get up there."
Morrigan smirked at her, the sheet of flames behind her throwing her face into shadows. "I'm sure you would have figured it out somehow."
"I think I would have gotten shot trying to climb the walls." She still would have tried, of course — Alim was the only one who could get the gates open, they couldn't risk him being hit with a lucky shot — but she doubted it would have ended well.
"I guess it's fortunate for you I'm here then, isn't it?"
Yes, it was. Lýna would definitely be doing something to give her thanks to the All-Mother tomorrow.
(It was still surreal, the thought that the All-Mother — who was still alive, even active in the physical world, if in the body of a Chasind human — had sent her flesh and blood daughter to help Lýna against the Blight. She had absolutely no idea how to feel about that, it was too big, she tried not to think about it.)
While Lýna had been distracted by Morrigan, the shield-bearers had reached the gate. They still kept Alim covered just in case, there were enough big human bodies covered with metal in the way she couldn't make out the comparatively little elf at all. After a few seconds, though, Lýna felt a bone-deep thrum rush across the air, a dim flash of blue light — Alim must have started his casting. He was using several glyphs, he'd warned her, it would take at least a couple minutes for him to bring the gate down. At the time, they'd been worried about keeping him protected from any walking corpses still around, but there didn't seem to be any. So Lýna waved her group forward, started walking toward the gates.
They were about halfway there when Lýna started hearing it. The song of the magic Alim was casting was bright and eager, almost viciously ecstatic, but tight and precise, the notes falling in a clear repeating pattern, exact. Stepping closer, she felt it prickling at her skin, but not unpleasantly, a shiver running down her spine, Lýna had to shake her head to clear it, rolling her shoulders.
That was a lot of magic.
The song seemed to rise to a fever pitch, there was a flash of intense white light (Lýna blinked spots from her eyes), the shield-bearers let out shouts of surprise, stumbling back as little white filaments raced up the huge door, branching lines of fire — not on the surface of the wood, but inside, the glow oddly diffuse — stretching high over Lýna's head. They burned brighter over the next few seconds, until the entire huge wooden barrier was entirely filled with it, a solid mass of gleaming white.
The humans having backed off, she could see Alim now, crouched on a knee with one hand pressed against the wood, wreathed with burning white glyphs, so bright he was only visible as a silhouette between Lýna and the light, throwing wild shadows behind him. Squinting through the blaze, she could see Alim set his shoulders, his hand twisting, and several of the glyphs winked out — instead of dimming, the light only seemed to become brighter, paired with an ear-grinding roar of fire, the shape of the gate wavering as its surface crawled with flame, steam from absorbed water bursting out in a single puff, smoke already starting to curl thick over the walkway on the wall.
After a couple seconds, Alim reached up, his free hand touching a set of glyphs floating in wait near his shoulder, these a steely blue. They blinked out immediately, for a moment his hand glowing with the power the spell contained, but he quickly turned, slamming his palm against the door.
Agony crashed over Lýna's head, the echo reverberating in her chest in one large thump she felt all the way to her toes — sound, too loud for her to even say what kind of sound it was, just noise, the single loudest thing she'd ever heard, her bones shivering and her head spinning. Badly enough, her ears aching and her brain wobbling in her skull and her stomach churning, for a moment she thought she'd actually be sick.
She jumped at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, squinted through the colorful blotches left in her vision. Leliana, that was Leliana. "What?" Her voice felt funny, echoing uncomfortably through her head.
"Are you all right?" She sounded oddly thick and muffled, the subtle edges smoothed off a bit, leaving it flat and impersonal.
Lýna shook her head — and instantly regretted it, it just made her more dizzy. "I am well. Too loud."
"Yes, elves do have more sensitive hearing, don't they." Her voice still too flat for Lýna to really tell, the blotches in her vision were clearing enough to make out what she was pretty sure was a concerned expression on Leliana's face. "Do you need to stay back? I'm certain Alistair and the others can—"
"No." She glanced up, and— "Chyy..."
The gate — or, the wooden part of the door, at least, the arch of stone surrounding it was mostly untouched — was just gone. The entire span, three men high and four or five wide, was now open, the space beyond streaked with debris, much of the scattered bits still burning with stubborn white flame. There were a few trees inside, crumpled shapes she assumed must have been more walking corpses, but they'd all been caught aflame, the branches of a tree Lýna could see from this angle blazing like a torch in the night.
Fires of the First, that was... That was seriously impressive. Lýna didn't know much about castle gates, obviously, but she knew enough about magic to appreciate how exceptional this was.
Alim had passed out, but even so.
Lýna made for the shield-bearer scooping the unconscious mage into his arms (ignoring how wobbly her first few steps were), stopped the human to check over Alim quick. His heart was still beating, breath thin but there. He'd burned his hand a little bit, but she was pretty sure that was just from touching the door while he incinerated it — it didn't look like he'd actually injured himself channelling too much magic at once. She wasn't an expert, but she thought he'd be fine. Good. He waved the man carrying him off to the healers, to get those burns looked at if nothing else.
The rest of the shield-bearers, Alistair and Fergus at the lead, were already walking through the gates, so Lýna followed after them. Directly past where the door used to be was a big open space, looked roughly as large as the square back in the village. The white fire had gone out by now, leaving scattered streaks of ash behind — and also large globs of twisted metal here and there, still glowing as though in the heat of a forge. Where Alim's extremely destructive spell touched off other things, mostly trees along the edges and bits of equipment too ruined for Lýna to identify, those were still burning orange and red, quickly filling the square with smoke.
Up a set of stone stairs as wide as the gate on the other side of the square was another large door — shorter and narrower than the gate, but still thick and heavy, the edges glimmering with metal. These were hanging open, though, they wouldn't need Alim to blow this one.
As Alistair and Fergus reached about the middle of the square, more walking corpses started shambling out of the door. Two, four, six...less than a dozen, not anything to worry about. Hardly thinking, Lýna's bow was in her hand, she drew and fired, aiming for the head of one in the lead — and missed, badly, her arrow clattering against the wall behind it. Cursing to herself, she returned her bow to her back, drew her sword again instead. Her head was still pounding a little, the world listing slightly around her, apparently she wouldn't be able to shoot again until it stopped.
"REVENANT!"
Lýna didn't know that word, but by the frightened cursing from the Alamarri, it couldn't be anything good. At the rear of the approaching dead was a figure wearing intact armor, its shield showing the same tower on a red hill as Teagan's (Eamon's) men. It was much less clumsy than the others, descending the stairs smoothly and gracefully, longsword held in a more confident grip. Also, the air seemed to waver around it, like heat over the earth on a high summer day, under its helmet its eyes glowing a harsh red-purple.
Oh, she knew this, "revenant" must be what Alamarri called Dread Knights. When a person died, obviously their connection to the Beyond died with them — spirits who possessed living bodies could usually cast whatever magic they liked, but those possessing corpses couldn't. But, sometimes, if a spirit were powerful enough it could reach into the Beyond itself. Not very well, she'd been told, the magic they could do was limited, though they were still very dangerous.
Lýna had only heard of them, never seen such a thing before herself. But, from what she'd heard, depending on what kind of spirit was in there they could be in very serious trouble.
"Leave it to me," Alistair called, "keep the others off me!" He barreled through the column of corpses, whapping some with his shield or pushing them aside with his shoulder, one he casually cut the legs out from in passing. The Dread Knight drove its sword into the ground, the stones cracking from the force, freeing its hand for a moment, magic sparking around its gauntleted fingers, a casual wave flinging several of the dead out of the way, opening up the space between them.
...Alistair's sword was definitely glowing. She'd thought it had been before, but she hadn't been able to make it out very well at the time, and there had been fire everywhere. But as Alistair approached the Dread Knight, this time it was very obvious, soft golden light starting from his hand and quickly spreading up toward the tip, wavering like the surface of a mug of mead, the shadows thrown much deeper and longer than such a soft light should cast.
That must be Templar stuff. She knew Alistair did have some kind of anti-magic abilities, though she'd never actually seen him use them before. Back when they'd been talking about the battle, he'd claimed he also had things he could do against animated corpses and abominations. This must be that.
Okay, then. Dread Knights were seriously dangerous, but if Alistair thought he could handle it on his own, she'd just leave that to him.
With the numbers of shield-bearers and corpses, especially with half of the dead already flung onto the ground, it didn't take long at all for them to be dealt with. Darting forward, Lýna stabbed down through the throat of one that hadn't managed to pick itself up yet, the silverite digging a little bit into the stone underneath. She wrenched it out, putrid blood splashing over her boot — her lip curled with disgust, washing this all later was going to be awful — she came up behind a corpse flinging itself at a man's shield, sliced low over its hips. The corpse stumbled, the human's sword caught it in the shoulder, holding it in place steady enough Lýna could neatly lop off its head with a heavy two-handed stroke.
And that was it, they'd all fallen. Alistair and the Dread Knight were still fighting, the shield-bearers keeping back, hands shifting on hilts, waiting. Despite its loose one-handed grip, every swing of the dead abomination's sword was so quick and heavy it parted the wind, whistling and keening. Alistair didn't bother meeting its blows, dancing and ducking around them, with more agility than Lýna had thought he could manage in that heavy armor. (More than she could, that was for sure.) In the moments between swings, Alistair's sword would nip in, biting at the thing's sword arm, one leg from knee to hip, once slipping over its shield to jab into its shoulder. Most hits bounced off its armor, but when the glowing blade edged through gaps to the corpse beneath it would let out a screech, staggering a little, pale smoke leaking out of its wounds, some kind of magic at work.
Or, not-magic, she guessed — she had absolutely no idea how this Templar stuff worked, she should ask at some point.
With each wound, the Dread Knight was slowed a little more, its movements turning more awkward and clumsy. Apparently realizing it was in trouble, it lurched away, striking out toward the nearest of the shield-bearers. Lýna sprinted off toward him, reaching out to—
Alistair's shield bounced off the back of the abomination's head, spinning away to clatter to the ground. It staggered with the impact, turned around and belted out an inhuman screech — Lýna's head shivering with dizzying pain, she grimaced, grinding her teeth. Alistair just ignored it, stomping steadily forward, mail jangling. The Dread Knight raised its sword, but Alistair got there first, skipped forward to drive his glowing blade into the thing's chest. Somehow, the golden light flashing brighter for an instant, the blade stabbed right through solid plate, the possessed corpse within, and then through the plate on the other side, soft light spilling out of the thing's back.
While it reeled — that would would kill a person, but not an animated corpse — Alistair's free hand came up, tore off the thing's helmet, pressed his hand against its face. There was another flash of golden light, burning deep in the Dread Knight's open mouth and its empty eyes, reflected shimmering in Alistair's. It screamed again, thin trails of smoke wafting off of its withered skin.
Then, abruptly, it went limp, dead once more. Alistair let it crumple to the ground, with a boot on one of its shoulders wrenched his sword free — the metal looking perfectly ordinary again, pale silverite streaked with half-rotten gore.
Well. That was...interesting.
The other shield-bearers, a few others who'd followed with Lýna, bowed their heads, gauntlets clanking against breast-plates or mail. A few of them muttered a few words, though she didn't pick any of them out in particular. The gesture seemed peculiarly religious to her...which, when she thought about it, made perfect sense. Weren't the Templars gifted their anti-magic abilities by the Alamarri god? Watching a person use those gifts to strike down a seriously deadly magical threat right in front of them would be quite an experience for people who actually followed their weird magic-hating religion, she would think.
Wait, did that mean Templars were shamans too? Or, only the Templars, since Leliana had said the people Lýna had thought talked to their god actually didn't. She didn't know, Alamarri were confusing...
After only a moment to gather themselves, Alistair plucking his shield up from where it'd fallen, they moved on. The shield-bearers heavily tromped up the stairs, Lýna lightly skipping up the incline alongside — even Alistair seemed slower now, she assumed his unusual speed during his fight with the Dread Knight had been another Templar not-magic thing, like Mẽrhiᶅ and the Keeper could do. They poured through the heavy door, stepping into a hallway made of more red stone, colorful things hanging on the walls Lýna didn't bother taking in. There were a couple doors off to the sides but, after confirming there were no dead lying in wait to ambush them, Alistair and Fergus ignored them, leading their group onward.
The opposite end of the hallway opened up into a much wider, high-ceilinged room. Rugs criss-crossed the floor, hanging from the walls richly-dyed and embroidered tapestries, old shields and weapons. Straight across from the door they entered by, the wall was dominated with an over-large fireplace, a moody fire flickering low within, glinting off the golden accents here and there on the stone hearth. On either side of that line down the middle were long tables, a row of finely-carved wooden chairs on the far side of each.
There were also about two dozen more animated corpses in the room, gathered in tight ranks between the tables, but not only those — a single figure stood on the raised floor in front of the fire, the hearth framing them from behind. It was relatively short for a human man, its figure so narrow as to be almost skeletal, but it clearly wasn't another of the dead. Its skin was obviously the wrong color, a sickly yellowish-blue, pock-marked with purple sores. The body was also still intact, though only in the sense that it wasn't in the process of rotting: the limbs were oddly kinked, the trunk looking slightly lopsided, the lips set in an angry gash so wide Lýna wasn't sure humans were normally capable of it. The eyes, she noted, were entirely black — not just the pupils, but the iris and even the whites, a pair of shadowed pits in the discolored face — streaks of frost sparkling in its hair, along its clothes, its shadow seeming much too large, darker than it should be, stretching all the way to them by the door and also branching off to the sides and across the ceiling, seeming to twist and shimmer, as though cast by something moving around the figure unseen.
That was definitely an abomination, in the sense of a living mage possessed by a hostile spirit. And it was a powerful one too, if it were capable of animating so many dead at once.
The abomination spoke, its unnaturally deep voice — undercut with a higher, moaning whisper, as though speaking with multiple throats at once — echoing off the hard stone walls, but nobody paused to listen to it. Alistair and Fergus both charged recklessly toward the dead, the rest of the shield-bearers hesitating only an instant before following after them. Hissing with rage, the abomination raised a hand, the air seeming to shimmer around its fingers, the colors of the hearth behind it blurring, magic clanging harsh and discordant in Lýna's ears, she heard another twitter behind her, Morrigan scrambling to stop it from finishing its spell.
But Alistair got there first. Slapping the first of the dead aside with his shield, his sword trust into the air over his head, there was a flash of white light and the abomination screeched — Lýna grit her teeth at the piercing noise, her skull seeming to vibrate with it — sent reeling and staggering as though it'd been physically knocked over the head. When it straightened, it stared over the dead directly at Alistair, and she thought she could see fear in its night-black eyes, almost seeming to cringe away from the grim Alamarri warrior's presence.
Instead of trying to cast again, or join in the melee with its dead puppets, already in the process of being methodically torn apart by the shield-bearers, it turned away, and it ran. The movement unnaturally quick and graceful, it flew over the floor, heading for a door to Lýna's right. Pinned by the dead, the barrier of the table between them, it was impossible for the heavily-armored men to get there in time.
But Lýna was lighter, and faster.
She darted to the side, easily hopped up onto the table (though she teetered a little once she was on it, the world around her still unsteady), crossed it in four steps. She leapt straight down at the abomination, only a few paces short of the door out of the hall, her sword flying in at its neck. The abomination noticed her too late, spinning around, its black eyes wide. Its figure shimmered, the colors bleeding out, a desperate clangoring of magic on the air, and then it seemed to shrink, its head noticeably dropping — it was changing its shape, trying to avoid her blade by simply not being in its path anymore, Lýna yanked down, adjusting her swing to—
Silverite bit into pale, peachy flesh, jerking to a sudden stop against bone.
The rest of the world seemed to fall away, the noise of the battle behind her an inaudible murmur, the sight before her all she knew, an instant that lasted too long, Lýna hanging in the air, frozen in time.
The abomination was gone.
Instead, standing in front of her was a human child. A boy, perhaps somewhere between seven and twelve years of age — Lýna had never spent much time around human children, she wasn't confident in her ability to guess. Young, though, definitely a child, shoulders narrow and face soft and delicate, warm golden-brown eyes larger than in grown humans, his hair a dark auburn, altogether looking almost elf-like.
Blood slipped down his neck, vivid against his skin, staining the bright green collar of his shirt.
The sword, in her hand, had just cut halfway through this boy's neck.
The too-long instant unstuck, Lýna's momentum carrying her forward, the boy falling to her right, the movement enough for the blade to easily slip out. A tingling, creeping, nauseating horror crashing over her all at once, her sword clattered against the floor, fallen from nerveless fingers, she dropped to her knees next to the boy, her hand instinctively coming to the bloody gash in the boy's neck—
"Keep pressure on it, child," Ashaᶅ said, her voice confident and firm, a reassuring grip on Lýna's shoulder lifting away as she stood. "I'll be back with our First as soon as I can." And she was gone, Lýna leaned a little harder over Fẽbharĩ, he hissed, his unnervingly pale face twisting with pain, she was hurting him, but she didn't back off, she'd been told to keep pressing down, it was okay, she murmured, Mẽrhiᶅ was coming, help was coming, he'd be okay—
—but she knew it was pointless, a wound like that, even with the most skilled of spirit-healers immediately to hand he might not make it, her ears buzzing and her head pounding, something sick and painful clawing up her throat, and she was babbling, she hadn't even meant to say anything, the boy paling second to second as she watched, shaking fingers clutching at her arms, his eyes wide and uncomprehending, blood smeared all over his throat, the cloth over his shoulder sopping red, meaningless blithering spilled past her lips, she hadn't meant to, she hadn't known, hardly even aware of the words, probably not in a language he'd understand anyway—
"...I'm sorry, child." It sounded almost painfully inadequate for the circumstances, but by the strained, exhausted look on her face the Keeper knew that. Besides, Lýna doubted Sula understood a word of it, thrashing against the men holding her back as Menaś led Iribhẽ away — they couldn't cure Blight sickness, death was a mercy, but killing a child in front of her mother was unnecessary cruelty — tears streaming down her face, Sula screamed for her daughter, curses filling the air, the hunters restraining her grim, Keraśĩ nearby quietly weeping—
—the boy's eyes were swimming with tears, his mouth moving, as though he were trying to say something, breathless gasps too weak and thin, drawing ever thinner, he was almost gone already, but she hadn't meant to, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...
Until his breaths stopped, the blood slowed against her fingers, and the focus went out of his eyes, staring up at her unseeing. An unnatural stillness settling over him, and he was gone, she'd killed him. Her hands jumped away from his skin as though scalded, and she jerked away, falling hard on her rear, her vision swimming and her head pounding, her chest filling up with something tight and hot and unpleasant, until she thought it would burst out of her—
It was a boy, pale skin and black hair, Chasind, laid out in the middle of what had been a village. His limbs were splayed at random, a wicked bloody gash carved into the side of his neck, pain and terror left frozen on his face. Lýna's eyes were drawn back to him again and again, as the hunters scoured the area for lingering darkspawn, she could hardly move, frozen to the spot. She nearly jumped when Ashaᶅ appeared next to her, an arm coming around her shoulders, she didn't know what was wrong with her, she'd seen dead people before. "It's always harder when it's a child, Lýna. If the sight of a murdered child doesn't bother you, that would be something to worry about..."
She'd killed him.
She hadn't meant to, she hadn't known.
She didn't...
It hadn't been darkspawn who attacked the village — their stores had been ransacked. No, the hunters were sure, it had been a competing tribe, probably other Chasind. Curses were bit out from multiple directions, invoking the First of the Sun, wishing the spirits of the dead here would find their vengeance in the Beyond. Lýna thought she might be sick, one of the other apprentices actually was, this boy had been murdered by other humans, and he wasn't the only one here. The kind of person who would murder a child — and hardly even seem to hesitate, by the look of the place — Lýna hoped, no matter how desperate the clan became, she could never become that, even if they were human children, no their People, she didn't...
A sound she couldn't identify was wrenched out of her throat, the pressure tearing at her chest almost too much, she couldn't stand it.
She hadn't meant to.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...
He was moving, magic bubbling and sparking on the air, echoing in her ears, the boy's body wrenched at unnatural angles, his blood running black, tendrils blue and purple whipping around him, the wind icy and vile. The abomination lurched to its feet, face pulled into an eerie, inhuman grin, looming over her, reaching for magic, for the kill.
Lýna didn't move.
—wishing the dead would find their vengeance—
She'd killed him.
It was only fair for the boy to kill her back.
And then Alistair was there, his golden-glowing sword vanishing in the abomination's heart, his hand on its face, light burning out...
And then it fell to the floor again. No, not it, he. The boy lay on his back on the stone floor, still in death. The vicious bloody gash in his neck was gone, she saw, instead a furrow carved through his chest, blood streaking down his front, already starting to pool around him. Blood leaking from his nose, his eyes, rolling down his face like tears.
But she remembered. She'd put it there. She saw it again and again, every time she blinked, blood vivid against pale skin, the boy's eyes pained and panicking, she couldn't stop it, she hadn't meant to—
Alistair was kneeling in front of her, frowning with...fear? No, concern, she thought that was concern. (Human faces were so blocky and unreadable sometimes.) His mouth moved, he said something but she couldn't hear it, his voice muffled and far away. His hand fell on her shoulder, but she barely felt it, feeling all too numb and distant, still frozen in that moment, her hand pressed against the dying boy's neck, words spilling thoughtlessly past her lips, she didn't meant to, she didn't know, she was—
There was a flash of golden light, not only outside but inside, soft warmth shooting through her. Something heavy and suffocating in her head broke apart, and her mind was her own again — she hadn't even noticed she'd been under the influence of something until it was gone. That pressure in her chest lurched, a thick, harsh noise of some kind wrenched itself past her throat, she clamped a hand over her own mouth.
Her hand was wet, warm, tacky. Blood.
The boy's blood. The cut was gone, now, but at the time it had been real. His blood was still all over her hand.
Jolting apart, blood was left behind on her cheek, smeared across her lips, she moaned with disgust, scrubbed at her face with her arm, silverite scales painfully clawing at her skin, she couldn't get it off, her stomach clenched, bile clawing up her throat—
Alistair grabbed her wrist, pulled it away from her face. Before she could protest (her throat so tight she probably couldn't speak anyway) he'd pulled a cloth out from somewhere, started mopping at her face with it. There was a bizarre moment where nothing felt quite real, like she was seeing this from the outside, Alistair wiping her face like a dutiful father cleaning up a messy child, and then reality came crashing cruelly back, her skin still twinging with horror, her eyes stinging with tears, and she could barely breathe, her hands were shaking as though shivering from deathly cold.
The boy's blood was still on her hand, she couldn't un-see it, his accusing eyes meeting hers whenever she blinked.
"Lyna," Alistair murmured, his voice quiet, soft. He still couldn't say her name right. "Can you hear me?"
She wasn't sure her voice would work right now, so she settled for nodding.
"The abomination tried to enthrall you. Ah, I mean, it messed with your head, your feelings, to stop you from killing it. Whatever you saw, it wasn't real."
It sure seemed pretty fucking real to her. "I killed him. The boy."
"No, Lyna, you didn't."
"The blood." Alistair had moved on to her hand now, wiping her glove, gently along her bare fingers. "His blood." It must have been real, if his blood was still on her hand.
"Connor was possessed, Lyna." She blinked dumbly — was that the boy's name? how did Alistair know that? "The demon had already taken him. There was nothing you could do."
"I– I'm not... I—"
Suddenly, she jumped at the unexpected movement, Alistair's arms were around her, loosely hugging her to his chest. Which was rather uncomfortable, given he was in full armor, the edge of his breastplate digging into her throat. But that something in her chest lurched again, bubbling up, she couldn't— "It wasn't your fault, Lyna. You didn't kill him. You're okay."
Before Lýna realized what was happening, a harsh sob was torn out of her chest. And once it started, she couldn't stop.
There were a few minutes where she hardly realized what was happening around her, clinging instinctively at a seam in Alistair's armor, shuddering tears agonizingly wrung out of her (she couldn't remember the last time she'd cried) until she was left raw, everything just hurt, exhausted to the point she could barely think straight. She didn't know how long it was, indistinct voices flittering back and forth over her head, eventually she was pulled shakily to her feet, the room blurry and instinct around her. Alistair was letting go of her, handing her off to...
Oh, Leliana. It took a moment for Lýna to recognize her, her eyes refusing to quite focus properly and her head too stuffed and fuzzy, but that was the soft-voiced, orange-haired Alamarri shaman. Right.
Alistair was telling Leliana to get her out of here, somewhere far away from all the dead bodies lying around. Maybe outside somewhere — didn't Dalish like being outside? And then Alistair was walking away and—
"Wait." Alistair halted, only a few steps away, turned back to look at her. It took her a moment to put together why she'd stopped him. "The... With Eamon, I..."
His voice still unusually gentle, he breathed, "I'll take care of it, Lyna. I know the Arl, remember, it'll be fine."
"I..." She was supposed to handle these things. Warden things. It was her job. She remembered that, no matter how distant and fuzzy everything seemed at the moment, she still had a job to do.
Alistair's face flickered, but she didn't really have the energy at the moment to figure out what that expression was. "I broke the demon's spell on you, but it'll still take a while for it to wear off all the way. You need to focus on recovering, Lyna. I'll take care of everything until you're back to normal."
...He was right. She was no good for anything like this. She could barely think straight. It was still almost painful, forcing herself to give in, the "okay" mumbled thick and unsteady.
A blink later, and Leliana was guiding her away — her right arm wrapped up with Lýna's, her left around her shoulders — back into the hallway toward the square outside. "Lyna?" Leliana also couldn't say her name right, but she was closer than Alistair. "Where do you want to go? The trees are just off the road up here..."
"No, the lake. I...really want to wash up right about now." It wasn't until after she finished the sentence that she realized she'd said it in Deluvẽ.
"...Ah, the lake?" Oh, right, Leliana knew a little elvish. Good. "We can go to the water. The other side of the old Chantry is best, I think. Come on, this way..."
Lýna let Leliana lead her away, numb and stiff and tired, leaving the hall, the dead boy far behind. But she remembered, she couldn't un-see it. She tried to keep her eyes open, as much as she could, not really processing anything she was saying. She just didn't want to close them.
Every time she blinked, his accusing eyes found hers, red blood vivid against pale skin.
[half-shilling] — Obviously, there are more than just the three denominations that are in the games — it'd be really impractical to count out fifty silvers for something, and carrying around that many coins all the time would be really annoying. So, yes, partial and higher-count coins exist. In Alamarri-speaking areas (Ferelden and some of the Free Marches), I'll be using some old pre-decimal British terminology. A sovereign is gold, a shilling is silver, and a farthing (or bit) is bronze. (A "penny" is actually five farthings, not four, the number was rounded off at a time after the name stuck.) A coin called "a silver" is almost always a one shilling coin, common folk especially don't usually use the word "shilling". Their values don't work out exactly the same as in the old British coins or in the games — I haven't yet picked a precise number for how many shillings there are in a sovereign, but it's probably somewhere around sixty (note Marian in a previous chapter saying she had a few dozen silvers, which was almost a full sovereign), and the number of bits in a shilling is probably pretty similar. Common folk in rural areas, like Lothering, will only ever use bits, and have probably never seen a sovereign in their life; bigger economies like in cities do a lot of business in silver (partial, full, or higher-count shillings), but sovereigns are only ever tossed around in luxury trades.
In other countries, the terminology will be different, as well as the value of the coins, different numbers of silver coins in a gold, etc. However, it's not unusual to see Orlesian or Antivan coins in circulation in Ferelden, and people often don't know the currency works different there, they'll just use them as though they're the same as similar Fereldan coins, even if they aren't exactly. A clever person could make a living on the Orlesian–Fereldan border just trading coins back and forth.
Because it turns out medieval monetary systems are complicated. Bluh.
[lodge] — This the tavern, btw. Lýna's more familiar with the Chasind concept (which was mentioned a couple times in previous chapters), so she'd just decided they're the same thing. They are mostly equivalent, so, fair.
So that's a thing that happened. Nothing unusual or concerning going on here, not at all.
Just as mages have been adjusted to fit with lore a little better, the same has to be done with Templars. I don't know about any of you, but I never found Templars in DA2 or DA:I particularly threatening. In DA:O, at least, they can be — I'm doing a replay right now, and in Broken Circle a Templar once one-shotted both my Warden and Wynne with a single holy smite, Christ. The holy smite itself isn't a thing, for lore reasons, but they do have OP magic-disruption abilities. Long story short, one on one between a mage (or most abominations) and a Templar, the Templar wins.
Also, abominations are more threatening, for the same lore reasons mages were beefed up. (I've always thought it was ridiculous how many of these supposedly horrifying monsters you carve through in DA:O and DA2 like they're nuisances.) They're basically mages, but even more powerful than they were before possession, and also operating on completely alien blue and orange morality. Being directly in the physical world and with boosted magic makes their ability to influence people's minds far more dangerous — if they're desperate, just *poke in brain* INSTANT TRAUMA is totally possible.
As Lýna just learned first-hand. Poor girl.
Also, Cullen? Yeesh...
Anyway, that's all I have to babble about. Next chapter is some aftermath stuff, and then it's straight off to the Circle. I'm sure that will go perfectly smoothly and absolutely nothing bad will happen.