Soldier's Peak burst into a hive of activity. Everyone suddenly had to wear many different hats to transform the once-haunted keep into a Grey Warden depot, and not a few tempers flared. One's expectation of joining the Wardens rarely included kneeling on stone tiles and scrubbing off grime with a horse hair brush. Such duties differed from a strict, studious life with food and a readied living space provided for. Critical or longing eyes strayed after Elissa and her party, who passed the same back-breaking hours quietly scribbling on paper and chatting with visitors. The warden's party couldn't relieve others of their burdens due to their ongoing mission of fulfilling ancient treaties and hunting down the archdemon, but intellectual knowledge couldn't curb innocent envy. Elissa and Carver also had much to detail to their contacts along the North Road.
The Drydens were invited back into their ancestral land as revived nobles, and with them streamed in Fereldens who sought relief from crowded southern lands and safety in the Wardens' shadow. Elissa summoned her noble training to expeditiously delegate to Levi for front-facing interactions, Alistair for Warden-specific requests, and Leliana for relocation of the local Chantry before foot traffic could bloat the Peak's main paths. The young Cousland also relayed to her brother in the west of Rendon Howe's contracted assassination against her, warning Teyrn Fergus of likewise danger towards him and his family. Carver wasn't looking forward to Fergus's response.
Not that the warden's party would remain in Soldier's Peak to receive it. A letter to Rhiannon designated Bodahn Feddic as the merchant to pass letters through while the party was on the road. Meanwhile, Carver requested an update on Denerim's alienage, particularly the security of an elven child by the name of Amethyne. He had learned on the road through the Bannorn that while Bann Loren and his family had returned to Caer Oswin safely, they had suffered one loss in Lady Landra's lady-in-waiting. In another timeline, the servant's daughter had floated to Denerim's alienage to be adopted by her mother's home community. However, catching sight of the servant lady in Castle Cousland and meeting Arl Urien in person stirred a suspicion in Carver regarding Amethyne's father.
Especially considering Lord Vaughan's inclinations.
Undoubtedly, Bann Loren and his family would passionately oppose arguments against their claim of the girl. However, Carver and all of Denerim knew that Arl Urien was in dire need of a passable heir, and Vaughan had set the bar low enough for a little elven girl to jump over.
Carver wasn't looking forward to Rhiannon's response, either.
To close his letter, Carver ordered the relocation of Brother Weylon from Denerim to Soldier's Peak. The Chantry apprentice served Brother Genitivi as his assistant in all things written, including the security of Genitivi's personal journal and thus life's work. Weylon knew not how to decipher Genitivi's scattered writings, only how to release the complex lock that bound them, and to guard the journal with his life. After all, what could the scholarly Genitivi pursue except the Urn of Sacred Ashes, a priceless figment of history which offered no obvious military value to justify Carver's command?
...Poor Rhiannon.
Truthfully, the location of Haven interested Carver more than a cup of ashes. Still, Carver shamelessly redirected attention to Nails. If Rhiannon wanted direct orders on how to run the royal legion, she could send runners to Ser Nigel down in Ostagar. Anything else — in other words, for Carver — could be sent through Bodahn.
When all paper was finally written and sent, Elissa's party enthusiastically departed Soldier's Keep for less deskwork and more footwork. Exposure to nobility pushed the unused Guerrin legion to the forefront of Elissa's mind, deciding the party's direction for Redcliffe. The journey was long, and as they neared south, they were increasingly intercepted by darkspawn and the wild wolves drawn to their leftovers. Elissa whipped a gaze at Zevran when he first displayed his knife work in battle, only for the Crow to innocently point at Carver.
Snitch.
The many opportunities of battle to trust one another with their lives wore away at everyone's paranoia around the assassin. Zevran's forward personality additionally worked like sandpaper, unwelcome yet smoothening. Definitely unexpected.
"If you have never wooed anyone, how have you met your physical needs?"
Groans rose from the road as Alistair reddened. "This again?"
Zevran prodded. "You have been a young man before, my friend, and the appetite of young men is—"
"I was training to be a Templar," Alistair steered. "I didn't have much opportunity."
"Through your teenage years?" Zevran teased. "Surrounded by initiates the same age as you? Doubtful. Every man can recall the years when his libido was so unquenchable, even working his cock to the point of pain wouldn't have been enough to tide the hunger."
Elissa moaned. "I heard enough of this from my brother."
Wynne hummed. "Young men do have so much energy."
"You see?" Zevran gestured across the party. "And you are handsome, Alistair. It is difficult to believe you have only satisfied yourself alone up to now."
Alistair spluttered. "I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on what Wynne's comment implies."
Wynne rose her brow archly from behind. "I was young too, once."
"Is my virginity so hard to believe?" Alistair bemoaned.
"Of course." Zevran nodded. "Even the quiet Carver here has a sexual appetite, yes?"
"Had."
A chuckle greeted Carver's curtness. "A man's libido observes valleys, my friend, not cliffs."
Carver threw his voice ahead. "Zevran speaks true, Alistair. You might as well reconsider your answer."
Alistair didn't hesitate to return Carver's tone. "Hypocrite."
"You are deflecting," Zevran agreed.
"I didn't hear a question," Carver evaded.
"We have talked at length about myself," Alistair eagerly determined. "I believe it's Carver's turn."
"I had a sexual appetite," Carver admitted, "and then I didn't. Simple."
"You're still a young man." Zevran's curiosity pounced.
Carver sighed. "Can people not lay with others without giving their heart away, and give their heart to others without laying with them? For me, desires of the body are as easily avoidable as those of the heart." As in, not.
Zevran, however, was subdued. "I see," he commented. Carver's roundabout comparison to Zevran's secret past had still deeply struck him.
Alistair's focus was piqued. "I've heard of such, but you said you used to be sexually attracted to others. How could you just –– switch it off?"
Carver inwardly cringed. He couldn't lie to these people, but he couldn't tell them the truth, either. "By having no choice," he settled.
When someone else had arrived in Thedas, they hadn't been able to bear looking at themselves. Their intense, womanly desire for men was difficult with the fact that their vessel was a literal boy. Someone else had had to snuff out their attractions. Quickly. It had been one of many levels of wrongness in their situation that they had had to simply accept as the new normal.
They were severely repressed.
Their messed up situation had helped shape them into the emotionally constipated peanut that they were today.
"Messed up," Bodahn echoed at the tail end of the party.
Carver nodded, then whiplashed. "What—"
The party drew their weapons as the dangling feet of villagers passed overhead. Bodahn and Sandal slowed down into a shrinking shadow upon their cart, its rickety wheels eventually reduced to a whisper. Carver gaped at villager corpses hanging from tree branches above the party, paired with a string of corpses on the dirt road leading uphill to a little town. Children and mabari lied amongst the dead.
Alistair stumbled aside to retch.
Leliana fared no better. "The darkspawn were...playing."
The violated town reflected a twisted, impulsive mind far removed from the conduct of the army in Ostagar. Carver had to wonder if darkspawn were already beginning to splinter based on their sanity level due to the sudden influx of new darkspawn underground. At least true self-awareness was still out of reach. The Architect and the dwarf Warden Utha couldn't have made significant headway on their blood experiments yet...
Duncan.
For the Architect to eventually awaken and conflict with the Mother, he had to have at least one living Warden until then, and Ostagar's heaviest clash hadn't been as hopeless as it could have been. If Duncan, who had been in the worst of the fighting, could have survived, then not all Wardens must have perished aboveground before the darkspawn could have taken them.
Carver suddenly felt as sick as when he had thought of broodmothers. He didn't wish to imagine more living survivors trapped in an underground hell. If Utha was able to complete her experiments in one year using just her own blood, what more could she accomplish using her brethren's blood as well? Even with less overall deaths and abductions from the battle in Ostagar, it was impossible to consider the entire situation as an improvement.
Still, that way lied madness. Carver's thoughts could spiral, or he could move his body and act.
Elissa crested the village's hill and sheathed her sword. "Bodahn," she called back, "reverse your cart. No trade or goods will be found here."
Bodahn pulled up beside the party, undeterred. "I once scavenged the Deep Roads, Warden. No scene of death can upset me more than a missed opportunity. I am afeard simply by the threat of death."
Sandal pointed from the driver's box. "Enchantment!"
Indeed, the frozen rage of a golem was captured past the hill; blood, birdseed, and bird droppings altered the finer features of the stone statue, concealing an etched, human fury. Drawing closer to the motionless golem revealed its awful realness. Alistair himself flinched in sight of it.
Bodahn dismissed Sandal to begin picking at dropped possessions around the village while the merchant searched his own goods.
"Aha!" Bodahn produced a stone wand patterned with runes. "I relieved an unlucky merchant of this relic. He couldn't fetch a half-decent price on a 'counterfeit golem artefact,' so I offered a quarter-decent price. Never told him Sandal had a gift of perceiving authentic runes."
"Is that what I think it is?" Carver ran a hand down his face at the rune pattern.
"Dulen kar?" Bodahn turned to him, surprised.
"No," Carver shook his head, reaching for a memory. "Not the 'rod' of control, but the 'spell.' Dulen…harn."
A tremor split through the village. The party braced themselves with bewilderment as light raced up the frozen golem's body and pooled into its eyes. In sudden movements like a low frame-rate scene, the golem broke free of its wrathful posture and regained its balance with wide, heavy swings of its limbs. Its stone head swivelled in place to point laser eyes at the party.
"Uh, Carver?" Elissa squeaked.
"What's the spell for 'spare me' in dwarven?" Alistair panicked.
"I know no such vocabulary," Sten helpfully stated.
"Veata!" Zevran declared. "Safe word!"
"I'm too old for this," Wynne muttered.
The golem jabbed a finger at Bodahn. "Speak a command."
Half a dozen heads turned his direction. The merchant blinked innocently. "I right believe I'm the first dwarf to dream, to tell a golem to calm down!"
"Dreams usually flow fairer," Leliana reflexively provided.
The golem straightened up with a realisation, and everyone jumped when it loosed a hardy laugh.
"Ha! I bear no compulsion to obey!" It loomed over the party. "Centuries of darkness, then slavery, abruptly broken by ignorance. Now I have no desired direction, save a present curiosity. Speak its name."
Carver watched the party share lost looks before he grudgingly gestured to the side. "Bodahn Feddic, and his son Sandal."
"The squishy creature knows its place." The golem nodded in contentment. "Well! What directs its path? I seek a diversion."
Sten caught on first. "The tool finds us beneath proper address. I am not surprised. Errors abound where a creature lacks purpose."
Elissa looked at Sten. "Are you referring to us chaotic Fereldens, or the sentient golem…?"
"The Blight!" Alistair piped up, ever the warden. "Our motivation for even straying through here is to stop the archdemon and its darkspawn."
"Oh?" the golem hummed. "I have nothing else to do, except crush pigeons."
Had Alistair just invited a psychopathic golem on a formal mission of national importance? Why yes, of course he had.
Carver only had himself to blame. His vague memories of certain downloadable content had triggered an internal compulsion to find answers. Now he had more dominoes to balance, although truthfully, the golem was merely one more troublesome immortal. To be fair from an outsider's point of view, Carver had set a precedent by endorsing an assassin.
Whose instinct in a golem's path was to shout a dwarven sex word.
The rod in Bodahn's hand truly held less power than a candlestick.
As the hidden yet still official supervisor of their party, Carver reluctantly stepped up. "…How shall we address you, then?"
The golem's laser eyes twinkled. "Hmm…'Shale' only feels right. Call me Shale."
The party's journey from Soldier's Peak to Redcliffe had burned through too much time.
They arrived at Redcliffe at night.
"Darkspawn!" Alistair cried out, equipping his sword and shield.
Carver cut through the noise. "No — undead!"
A wave of shambling corpses saw the party at the city gates, breaking into a sprint for their blood. Panic flared through the party as metal and magic hastily met a mindless horde. Unlike the armoured skeletons of Soldier's Peak, the party's foes were fleshy and dressed in recently torn clothes or scratched armour, as if they had been in the midst of mundane, everyday tasks before suddenly up and attacking everything. The undead were also asymmetrical in figure, from a caved-in head to a leg twisted the wrong way. They all had broken skin. Some of them even had the flesh torn from their lower mouths to expose a permanent smile.
Yet none of this deterred them from clawing at the party and haphazardly jabbing swords and spears at the closest opening. They didn't even register cutting one of their own down in the process.
Finally, Alistair and Shale bashed the undead in the incline of their momentum, toppling back a tight radius around the party. The field of undead around the party instantly burst in roaring flames. Just as unnaturally, the flames sputtered out in a sharp exhale.
Wynne lowered her staff. If clouds weren't blocking the moon, Carver suspected even Denerim would be able to see the mage beaded with sweat. When the party blinked through the darkness, they discovered that they had hacked their way through literally half of Redcliffe, blearily arriving at the city's Chantry. Wynne's flash of fire had briefly captured formless figures across the Chantry square, giving locations to the noises of battle around them. In the distance, Sandal was loosing explosive runes at undead around the Feddic family's cart.
"Who goes there!?" a faceless voice barked in the clamour of crossed swords.
"The Grey Wardens!" Elissa shouted back, rejoining the fray. "We seek the Guerrin legion!"
A sharp scoff answered her. "Well, you're bloody fighting them!"
The party had rested only once since leaving Soldier's Peak, and they were exhausted. The warriors and rogues had lost their unequipped helmets in the mayhem, and Alistair had barely been able to loop his arm through his shield. Carver stumbled his way through packed alleys and elbowed whichever body screeched at him. Any sword in his direction was clumsily answered with his own. Only Sten's growling from behind eased the itch on Carver's back.
An undead suddenly rammed Carver off-balance, crashing through him, a wooden door, and a foreign body that wasn't Sten. The stranger wildly struggled from under Carver, who lost grip of his sword to grab his dive knife and sink it into the undead pinning his torso down. A viscous warmth spurted against Carver's bare face as he stabbed again, then twisted his knife with finality. The undead bodily flinched and fell limp.
"Stand on sand and take a deep breath through a short shaft, you nug-humping—!"
The expletives would have flowed on, had Carver not finally rolled the undead off of him and picked himself up from the ground. A dwarf scurried to his feet from under Carver and grabbed a rune-carved axe dimly glowing over his shoulder.
Carver's sword tip found the dwarf's neck faster.
"Easy there," the dwarf shakily exhaled, releasing the axe strapped to his back. "I'm no undead. We're on the same side, see?"
"No?" Carver's voice quirked. "Then why the bolted door?"
Carver and the dwarf were still shedding remains of the wooden door. The dwarf straightened, his temper sharper than the blade at his throat.
"A qunari sword," Carver cut off before the dwarf could speak. "Do you have one?"
The dwarf's neck flushed redder than the glow of his fire runes. "You've lost the right to trade, human!"
"That is a yes, then."
It wasn't Carver who had spoken. Sten stepped past the doorway from behind Carver, blocking even starlight.
Torment and awe stole the dwarf's throat, before a pudgy finger grudgingly pointed to a corner of the room. Carver grabbed the dwarf's collar and shoved the cowardly merchant into the corner where his glowing axe shed light on a sealed crate.
Sten stomped on the crate, once. It shattered.
"Asala..." Sten reverently picked up a glint of steel in the dim light, as long and thin as a clothesline. Sten turned it like it was weightless, revealing a wide greatsword. "Are you sure you are a soldier? You must be an ashkaari, to find one specific sword in the midst of a blight."
Carver pushed the merchant in front of him to help face off the undead. Sten's unexpected reunion with his sword was ill-timed.
"I know what losing a sword means to the Qunari," Carver instead offered. "To not be caught even dead without a sword in hand... Your people are a fighting people." Like the originators of martial arts, transforming farming tools into weapons. Anything to defend one's beliefs.
Still — Carver mused as he threw himself and the dwarf merchant at undead — confirming Asala's location had taken no small effort. Carver had been forced to hound the homeless around Lake Calenhad for clues towards the sword, earning him odd glances from the warden's party when they'd catch him bargaining with a hobo on the street. Carver had been graciously spared from a wild goose chase to Orzammar by at last confirming a certain merchant's name. The scrap of fact was enough for Carver to deduce that should he find the merchant's opportunist contact in Redcliffe, he'd find a qunari sword.
Luck explained why the only qunari sword to float around Ferelden belonged to the qunari travelling with Carver.
A smothered sense of smell and a long, long patience explained why Carver had been able to find it.
At that point, the monetary fortune that was qunari-crafted steel paled in comparison to the peace that came with returning it to its owner.
The mob around Carver surged, and the heavy doors of the Chantry suddenly closed around him and his allies seemingly out of nowhere. In the candlelight of Redcliffe's refuge, the party was still hesitant to catch their breath, as if undead would sprout from the ground like darkspawn did. The oak doors pounded with a hundred fists from outside, matched by a hundred faithful praying indoors.
Carver panted as he squinted through the frail light for the closest Redcliffe soldier. He found and snatched the city mayor instead.
"Why have we stopped fighting?" Carver demanded.
Mayor Murdock shook off Carver's grip. "We have lost too many men and women. We must consider the battle that also awaits us tomorrow night. Rest." Murdock pointed to the densest cluster of candles, where a Chantry mother was nursing candelabras. "Dawn breaks in four hours. The doors will hold until then."
Sten curtly murmured dissatisfaction at the mayor's decision, but a glance through the crowd confirmed that the warden's party was dead on their feet. Bodahn and Sandal were handing out the party's bedrolls that they kept in the cart as part of their protection agreement. Carver exhaled deeply and clunked over to an alcove where he could almost ignore the racket of pounding doors. He didn't remember closing his eyes.
The sun rose over a deserted city.
Murdock, able-bodied men and women, and the warden's party stepped out of the Chantry and gathered what would be useful for the next clash, discarding what wouldn't. Elissa and a number of local fighters borrowed Bodahn's cart to move the dead to a ditch to be burned. The boats were dry-docked, and no arrows could be spared for a proper funeral. The Chantry mother placated woes with a reminder that Andraste had passed away as ashes.
"Karashok."
Sten surprised Carver at the docks. The qunari called party members by their position in the eyes of the Qun, with Carver identified as a foot soldier. It seemed Sten followed such reasoning now, even where Murdock's people shuffled around them. Perhaps the local fighters could not be considered soldiers by the Qun's definition.
Carver looked up from where he was untangling a dead body from a net.
"You voiced an awareness of the Qunari way," Sten continued. "I had only mentioned it in passing once. Yet it has not escaped me that you had been seeking my sword since then."
Carver dropped the untangled net and stood up, gesturing for Sten to follow as he found his next task. "I'm from Lothering."
Sten stared at the non sequitur.
Carver pressed his lips together. "I heard of you in Lothering's tavern. The farmer family you had killed…I had grown up with their children. You regret it."
"I do."
"Because your body is your tool," Carver replied. "No one but you is responsible for what it does, or what happens to it. That is why you let Lothering's legion arrest you and deny you food and drink. The same logic explains why you cared little for dangers that found you since joining Warden Elissa on her quest."
Sten didn't deny it. "Had I somehow managed to cross Ferelden and Tevinter unarmed and alone to report the blight to the Arishok, the Antaam would have slain me on sight. My life had been forfeit since carelessly losing my sword."
"I spoke to the homeless in Lake Calenhad," Carver corrected. "They spoke of darkspawn sprouting from the earth, from one's own shadow, and coursing through all civilisation. They spoke of two qunari corpses, two swords damaged from resisting a hurlock emissary, and one sword lodged in an ogre's chest."
Sten said nothing.
Carver pointed at Sten, then his sword. "Do not cheapen this tool in the loss of the other. Both are yours, and precious. You must understand half of what I'm saying, else you wouldn't have named your sword 'Asala.'"
Soul.
Sten's gaze unfocused, then returned to Carver. "The body is merely a vessel, and a sword is one's extension. However, I will…consider your words, Karashok. …Are those oil barrels?"
As the two of them coordinated with Murdock's people on moving oil barrels, Carver internally sighed. Elissa had recruited Sten at the height of his depression, and Sten had only recently reunited with his desire to live. It would be difficult, but Carver was going to maintain an eye on Sten for a little longer just in case. He was already conscious of Zevran's movements, since the assassin had originally ambushed Elissa with the intent to die. Carver didn't want to lose his allies to purposeful carelessness, curse his bleeding heart.
He was cognisant of his own messed up psyche. For that reason, he knew he couldn't offer to counsel Sten or Zevran.
Passing by the dwarven merchant's safehouse, Carver's oil barrel rolled away from his frozen hands. The undead he had stabbed twice was lying in an impressive splatter of blood, and a near identical undead was splayed motionless behind it outside the building. Carver gravely reached for the latter to turn its face up to the sunlight.
"Foggy," Carver breathed. "Badger."
Sten halted his barrel. "Karasaad," he identified. Higher ranked soldiers. The two corpses were sporting the marks of Maric's Shield in their armour and weapons.
Carver tugged on Foggy's sword, which refused to budge in the old man's grip. It could have been rigor mortis, or a relic of the man's transcending willpower. Carver quietly cursed. "I had sent scouts to Redcliffe prior to arriving at Ostagar, yet they had returned with no noteworthy news. They should have heard otherwise from Foggy and Badger."
A passing local fighter consoled Carver. "The undead fell upon us in a blink, soldier. Them scouts mayhaps 'a been lucky to fly before dusk."
Carver tugged Foggy's helmet off to replace the one Carver had lost. The greaves would demand more effort. "If those who die to the undead end up joining them, who were the first undead?"
The fighter sighed. "Guerrin legion, it was, up from Redcliffe Castle. First night, they leaked out into the city like a bleeding wound, killing and taking their kills. The terrors have been growing every night since then. I don' wanna imagine the state of Redcliffe Castle."
Carver swapped his gauntlets with Foggy's. "Is the entire Guerrin Legion lost?"
The fighter puffed his chest up. "So long as there are hearts 'mong us raring to fight for the arl, the legion ain't lost."
Carver knew the feeling.
Carver rose, returning to his barrel and rolling it along with the others. There had been no servants among the first undead, just soldiers. If Connor had resorted to connecting with a demon to help his father, the demon likely saw the pragmatism of retaining sane servants to maintain the castle and its comforts, while taking over the arl's soldiers to control military power. By intention or not, the demon had set up an inevitability where the undead army would compose the entirety of Redcliffe beyond the castle. More, if the undead could infect nearby settlements and retreat to windowless rooms within the hours of night.
It was clear that gossip and inference alone weren't enough. Carver and the party needed to find out what was happening in Redcliffe Castle themselves — by breaking into the infamously airtight fortress.