Death and the Maiden

by Gene Dark

AU story from the Landsmeet to the End Game, including the events of Return to Ostagar, Soldier's Peak and Awakenings. General Loghain and Warden-Commander Tabris campaign against the Blight.

13. Chapter 13: Invictus

Author's Note: Yay - I updated! I am officially NOT DEAD :) I can only apologize to everyone who has waited for these chapters, and everyone to whom I owe emails, reviews, PMs and Betaring. Work, family, the London Wine Fair, the house move from hell, no internet for THREE WEEKS and an operation conspired against me.

I found this quite hard to write - partly because I had to do it in such small doses and partly because I tried to cram too much in (Ril's hang-gliders ended up on the cutting-room floor!) Love and hugs to icey cold and Shakespira, who were there for me during my last-minute author-angst before posting and stepped up to do an excellent job as Betas.

The following people have helped more than they know:

Tyanilth: our conversations have been food for thought, and your short fic "Cat's Cradle" is the best depiction of Ser Otto I've read.

Josie: you write my favourite Jowan, and "Retribution" has some awesome Chantry/Orlesian politics.

lisakodysam: your portrayal of the different spell schools and how they tie in with mage personality types from "In Blackest Envy" makes perfect sense.

analect: for Elven pride and the Shianni perspective.

Arsinoe: for suggesting that if Ril and Loghain were to forge an alliance before the Landsmeet, they might be in time to stop the horde before it reaches Denerim. What follows is down to you.

icey cold: for the gruesome Serge/Evraille scene from Trovommi Amor.

Shakespira: your theories on the origin of darkspawn from The Lion's Den are canon for me. Although DATM doesn't delve into the secrets of the past, the idea has been a major influence on the way I write darkspawn and the storyline I am working towards.

Naomis8329: it was lovely to get a surprise review before I posted! :)

And special mention to Dragonracer13, my patient Betaree. I had the adorable Kallian in mind during the *skyball* reference - I couldn't resist!

Other influences: Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion series (shout-out to fellow fan Tyanilth!) Guy Sajer: The Forgotten Soldier, Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel and Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage. Film-wise it's got to be Gladiator, LOTR, Stalingrad and Death Watch. And slightly bizarrely I wrote most of this to Daniel Lanois: Acadie and Evanescence: Fallen...

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

The first curve of the rising sun bloodied the new day.

"Form ranks!"

Cauthrien passed the order as she always did, her voice almost soft, disdainful of the parade-ground bellowing typical of other commanders. The last of Loghain's - no, the Warden's - troops fell into place; the Dalish and the Templars headed to the opposite side of the valley. The rose light turned the Hafter River into living green translucence. The splashing of their feet turned the water into hysterical brilliance.

The men snapped to attention as Loghain and the Warden walked slowly down the line. They cheered the Warden - their talisman, their good-luck charm - but at Loghain's approach they were watchful and respectful. He paused to draw a sword from a scabbard to check that it was properly sharpened - adjust a buckle on a young soldier's armour - opened several backpacks to make sure the equipment was properly stowed. He ordered one man to string his bow, then chewed him out over the fact that the string was not properly waxed and the ends were frayed.

After Loghain stepped past, Cauthrien gave the unfortunate a withering gaze and made a point of nodding toward the clean, battle-ready lines of the Dalish - a reminder that both units of archers were playing a vital role in the coming battle.

Loghain's four units of pikemen formed clean, regimented lines, weapons carried upright: a stark forest of iron trees. Those held by the men in the rear rank were fully twenty feet long. The first and second ranks held correspondingly shorter ones, so that when the butts were braced against the earth, the points were a uniform barrier of waiting steel.

The majority of Denerim's army was infantry: disciplined men who fought as units. In pairs, they moved as one: deflecting with shields to strike with shortswords; parrying with swords to smash with shields. They were accompanied by engineers, carrying portable barriers.

The portable barriers were Nathaniel's project. They were simple articles. The two ends were short poles lashed in a cross. Smaller poles lashed between provided strength while creating an encumbrance to the advancing darkspawn. Additionally, the connecting poles were strung with stout cord and metal hooks. Nevertheless, they could only be considered a nuisance - small, light and fairly quickly destroyed.

Dworkin made them deadly. Each barrier carried a small leather sack filled with the glittering black powder, containing his improved formula of lyrium sand, and a fuse somewhat longer than before. The accuracy of the "four-minute delay" remained questionable, but so far no-one had been injured during testing.

A flash of bright silver caught Cauthrien's eye. The Knight-Commander, in the mirror-bright Templar armour that shone like a beacon to approaching darkspawn. Cauthrien frowned, thinking of how harshly the woman had criticized Loghain and the Warden for the decision to have Jowan use his magic to provide long-range fire.

The source of the disagreement was standing a short distance away. The thin young mage was dressed in white-coloured tunic and trousers. He looked like a penitent. He shuffled his feet. The hesitancy was something Cauthrien had noticed before in mages: there was something indirect about them, a suggestion they viewed the world obliquely rather than head-on. The young man beside him was someone Cauthrien would have been pleased to number among her own soldiers. She did not suffer the self-consciousness others did when dealing with Ser Otto: her grandfather had been blind, and still the rock of her childhood. It was others who spoke tactlessly: people seemed to think a blind man lost hearing too, or maybe just wasn't man enough to matter.

Jowan and Ser Otto fell in behind Loghain. The mage's thin, reedy whine floated back to her: "I won't be able to keep up with these soldiers."

Loghain said: "You'll travel mounted, with my reserve. Our footpace is too much for you. I'll assign a man as escort. When we engage the darkspawn, I'll try to get word to you where I want you to use your spells. If I can't reach you, let the escort decide where you're to strike."

Jowan's jaw tightened. His mouth worked, biting off unspoken words. His Templar companion shrugged good-naturedly. "It's nothing personal. The Teyrn wouldn't act offended if you explained how magic works. All he's asking you to do is afford his assistant the same respect."

"He's telling me I don't belong, that only my magic is important. 'Warriors to the front - Jowan and Ser Otto to the rear with the women and children.'"

Cauthrien rolled her eyes. It was incredible that Jowan could say such a thing to the ex-Templar without a blush. For a moment, the knight's scarred face went rather still - then he gave a wry smile.

The marching drum rumbled its assembly call. The snakelike columns of men wound their way south of the valley in dun-coloured ribbons. The earth was churned in furrows underfoot, like freshly-tilled soil. The Warden and Loghain rode together in the middle of the second column, the red head and the black bent close over some discussion. How unlike they are, Cauthrien thought - and then a sudden perception startled her:

The Warden takes what the world gives and uses it. Show her ten doors and she'll pick one without hesitation, and kick it open if it resists. She's in love: she wants to marry fate and sleep with glory.

Loghain fights for Ferelden. She's no wife to him, doesn't warm his heart. Yet the need to defend her will always come first.

They're different. They're the same.

Sometimes, the Warden looked or spoke as if from another place. That was the only way Cauthrien could phrase it. When she was like that - and Cauthrien couldn't even describe any change in her appearance - the word that came to her was "mystic". Not like the Chantry's babble about Andraste and dark mages, but a sense of head-long, unpreventable consequence.

While the Warden seemed to have a sense of hanging on to a whirlwind that was taking her where she wanted to go, Loghain wanted control of his country and its destiny.

Sooner or later those two are going to run head-on into each other. I hope they're going very slowly when it happens...

---

The Warden seemed unusually chatty - her mood a little too buoyant for the gravity of the situation. For the most part, Loghain let the babble wash over him - paying attention only when she touched on the terrain, the Wardens or the coming battle. Youthfully straight, graceful in the saddle, vaguely improbable in the storybook armour. Occasionally, she sang - ballads that ranged from the patriotic to the obscene. He gritted his teeth through the rendition of an Orlesian ditty about the Empress' bedroom patrol - which she seemed to sing with particular relish. Somewhere between her talk of Anora's preparations in Denerim, she startled him with a personal question:

"What was Anora like as a child?"

Loghain's first instinct was to tell her to mind her own business. By chance, however, she had hit on the one subject - aside from his beloved Ferelden - that he could warm to. Though annoyed with himself for doing so, he answered her:

"So far as anyone could tell she was the undisputed monarch of the whole world," he said, his voice warming to the chuckle he felt, "She'd fall, skin her knees, and command them to stop stinging!"

"Did she have many friends?"

"Gwaren sits between the Brecilian forest and the south. There were always children to play with - charcoal burners' sons and daughters. They'd form into noisy gangs in the courtyard. But Anora never joined them."

"That sounds lonely."

"Perhaps it was. She read a great deal. She followed her mother like a shadow. She practiced archery and swordplay. She was never idle. Solitude isn't terrible, you know."

"I wouldn't know," the Warden said, "I've never been alone."

It struck Loghain that the Warden had once been a little girl. He saw her on the front step of an Alienage hovel, her chin on her knees and arms around hard skinny shins, scowling out at the world. Neither had he been alone as farmhand, outlaw and soldier. Privacy was an impossible thing on campaign - perhaps that was why the Warden felt so at home here.

"Well - except at Arl Howe's estate," the Warden added, more to herself, with an oddly flat half-smile. One hand absently reached for the thin scar across her left cheekbone: he wondered idly what weapon had made such a clean wound. It must have been during the murder - she had not had it before.

No - he had not been alone until Ostagar - until the bitter-cold throne of Ferelden's de facto ruler…

Catching his glance, the Warden gave a jaunty little shrug. "Oh – you know. When I hid in the attic, right over his magnificent four-poster bed, and oh-so-carefully lowered a basket to the floor. The speckled snake within crawled out very slowly...coiled around the foot of the bed...slithered into his nightshirt." She paused dramatically, heightening the suspense, then gave a mournful little sigh. "Alas, it was the snake that died of poisoning – so I had to finish the job myself."

Loghain rolled his eyes, mildly impressed that she had still not run out of Howe stories, and sighed.

"Well - one thing you'd better learn, Warden," he said, "If you're going to command, you'll have to accept being alone, clear through."

Riordan's scouting told them the darkspawn were spread in a sickle shape from north of Lothering to the western edge of the Drakon River, with the main bulk ravaging the southern Bannorn: the very lands of Loghain's childhood. By the second day, they saw the results themselves. Darkspawn predation was like flash fire: no habitation stood where they passed. They found the bodies of men, children, old women - but the myth that darkspawn did not take prisoners was exploded. Loghain caught himself remembering the occupation. He remembered eyes watering and nostrils smarting, assaulted by the stink of homes burning, of death pyres. Far, far back in his mind he heard the sound of women screaming. His mouth went dry. Not dry enough to kill the taste of battle, of smoke, of fear, of air redolent with blood. What they faced was worse - thanks to the Warden's explanation he knew the fate of women taken by darkspawn. He had never flinched at the notion of women fighting during the rebellion - the risks were no worse than the fate of those who did not - now the knowledge weighed on him. He had no choice but to hide his profane knowledge: nearly a sixth of the army were women - he could not send them home, or damage morale. But it felt murky, in a way hiding his knowledge of the Wardens' ultimate sacrifice did not. That was the duty and purpose of the Order after all. There were worse fates than a quick, glorious end.

Passing one such farmhold, they came upon the bodies of several fallen darkspawn. By night, the wolves of the area had gorged on them, taking in ruin and darkness along with their meal. Vultures gathered in a writhing cloud, screaming angrily at the disturbance. A thought struck Loghain, chilling: could the taint be spread by these airborne, doomed creatures? Uncovered now, they saw the decaying darkspawn flesh - the diseased skin torn by beaks in their haste to reach the entrails. The wind shifted, pulling the stench towards them. Their mounts gave a smothered squeal and shied away; Loghain spoke soothingly to his, calming the creature. The Warden dismounted and led her horse gently toward the mound of reeking flesh, stroking his muzzle. The animal stamped and blew, disgusted but reassured.

"Alistair told me you should always do that with whatever scares a horse," the Warden explained cheerfully.

Gliders and explosives notwithstanding, it was probably the most intelligent thing he'd seen this campaign. Trying to avoid awareness of her smug grin, he followed suit, accustoming his own mount to the scent of darkspawn.

"I didn't know there were so many vultures in Ferelden," the Warden said - the greenish tint of her face making it clear she was talking to keep her breakfast down. "What do you suppose they live on, when there's no fighting?"

"There's always fighting. War's a game that never ends."

Loghain continued to educate his Commander on tactics and strategy. Often, during those discussions, he would forget it was not one of his fellows he was talking to - until some careless soldier's bluntness set the Warden's back up like a ruffled cat. Her prickliness was rarer now: rough, wary, touchy, their contact was warmed by a secret, mutual enjoyment of each other's challenges. That afternoon, she presented him with a long leather tube: in return, she said, for the lessons. He would have gruffly told her it was in everyone's interests she reach at least some level of competence, but for the little smirk that told him he was the butt of some joke. He unrolled the gift to find a beautifully detailed map of Ferelden - and no familiar landmarks, strategic markings, or trade routes in sight. All it contained was a series of illustrations of herbs and flowers. Militarily useless, it told him where to find these rare botanist's specimens. "I thought you might need a break from defending borders," she told him, her suppressed grin now spiralling out of control.

By the time the sun sank toward the western horizon, there was no longer any doubt they faced a land choked by Blight: dark, tentacular ribbons of taint wormed across soil - the hills and forests east of the Drakon River seemed to hold up a sky like a pewter bowl. Clouds merged into amorphous, ever-changing shapes like half-forgotten ghost stories. An oily richness crept through the air at the edges of their vision, drop by drop like congealing blood. Crows, swift black darts across the swirl, were eerily furtive. Loghain chose to camp upon a series of hills nestled into a fork of the Drakon River, its dark iridescent sheen forming a natural moat. Had they pressed on, they could not have remained unseen against that pale grey soil, where every protuberance was marked by dark shadow.

Eamon and the supply train caught up just as the dying sun streaked a purple smear across the horizon. The south was an empty deadness stretching into infinity, bleak dunes against which the distant, dark-crawling mass stood out starkly. Eamon, Bryland and Nathaniel Howe joined him as he stood at the edge of camp, staring outward. Eamon looked old and ill, visibly affected by the loss of familiar dimensions: the enclosing mountains around Redcliffe, the blue arc of Lake Calenhad, his political machinations. He looked away from the unknowable vastness and unfurled a map.

"I...believe this field is named Taskerdell. Beyond is...is Longmeadow, nestled in the arch of the West Road. That...that black cloud must be what the Orlesian Warden terms a "Blightstorm"- though he refused to explain what..."

Loghain turned to him in dark, clipped fury. "This was farmland," he grated out, "They've corrupted the very earth our country is built on. Who cares what the field was called, or what a Blightstorm is - look at what's left: it's obscene!"

The three men stared at him. Loghain knew it was unusual for him to convey so much passion. He saw the vision go through the pale faces like slow ice. They saw it, then: the glistening horror, the sparse, starved trees that littered, rather than bordered, the field's edges. The roiling mass was a greasy black pall drifting sluggishly north. They avoided looking at it after that. And did not speak of it.

Loghain called for the leader of the scout squad he had sent to inspect the surrounding area, sitting him down in the command tent with the Warden and the Banns. The youngster was clearly awed to be the centre of attention, but when asked what he had discovered, he answered confidently. Loghain made a point of knowing all his soldiers' names: this rawboned former farmer was Carver Hawke, who had served at Ostagar. A fine young soldier - cut from different cloth than the mother and sister who camped among the refugees and did nothing but complain, possessing a sense of entitlement that would have done the Banns proud, had they any standing to back it up.

Carver shifted his feet, looking at the ground.

"You did well. Tell Captain Varel I compliment him."

The young man saluted and swaggered off. Loghain was pleased to see him break into a self-satisfied smile when he thought he was unobserved. That sort of spirit would prove vital in the coming battle.

---

The final War-Council was nothing like the first. The broader strategy had been decided; Rilian let Loghain handle the practical details, listened carefully, and learned. "Ferelden's infantry and the Templars will remain north, under my command." He sketched the position on the map, then illustrated the tactical withdrawal and encirclement. "The Dalish and Night Elves will attack from either flank, from the forests of South Reach and the Imperial Highway north of Lothering. Warden: the cavalry must leave an hour before dawn, and head south, then west. The forest will cover you until you reach the gully - here. When I give the signal, drop onto the rear and flank of the horde main strength."

With any luck, the magical contribution of Merrill, Velanna and Morrigan would remain unnoticed by their Templar allies - and Wynne was trusted as much as they trusted any Circle mage. But Rilian was not surprised to see Rylock lean forward, renewing her argument regarding Jowan. That long-boned face - hard as a winter vegetable - was set into unyielding planes. Rilian pictured the decades fighting the worst abuses of magic - and after the horrors at the Circle Tower and Arl Howe's estate she had some idea what that entailed. The worst use of magic she had ever seen - the creation of a plague that targeted one race and spared another - still filled her with cold rage. She could see what those years had added to Rylock, and what they had taken away. Her face was scored by icy courage. But she was alone.

"A mage may prove useful in times of war - under strict supervision," the Templar told her - that curiously flat monotone was something Rilian had noticed before: only Alistair and Ser Otto seemed immune. Dry, distant, professional - lifeless. "But there is no place in Thedas for a Blood Mage. The mere knowledge warrants a sentence of death."

"So does murder," Rilian blurted before she thought, "And yet - I was conscripted. The authority of the Wardens supersedes that of the Chantry - as you well know."

Rylock's frown came slowly, unusually delicate - the expression of someone noting but choosing to ignore a regrettable descent into bad taste. Rilian blushed - aware of the scrutiny of the nobles at the round table; Loghain's exasperated frown. Arl Urien was dead - but Vaughan had had friends here...

"The Wardens have ever been a home for murderers and maleficars," the woman acknowledged dryly.

Rilian leaned forward - meeting the glittering dark eyes - ticked off a couple of seconds until she could warm Rylock with her sincerity. "I give you my word: I will not permit the use of Blood Magic against another living soul. Only against the darkspawn." Guiltily, she tried to avoid the memory of Jowan healing her with Howe's blood - those shimmering amorphous red tendrils of life. Writhing...coalescing...crawling... Nausea rose in her; she paled with the effort of hiding it.

"You do not understand the ways in which magic works," the Templar countered, "The knowledge of Blood Magic, once gained, cannot be unlearned. It becomes part of the whole: a drop of red dye in water. To expect the maleficar to use only permitted magics is like...like asking him to see only green, or only red. The only way to choke this addiction is to cut it off at the root: expecting the Blood Mage to only use his power at your behest is like expecting a drunk to take only a sip of wine - one sip, no more."

The Knight-Commander would know all about addiction, Rilian thought, remembering Alistair's words. She kept the thought to herself. It did not diminish Rylock's point. The Templars' use of lyrium to counter magic was no more unpleasant and no less necessary than the Wardens' Joining - a thing that blighted their older years for the sake of protecting others. All it meant was that Rylock knew of what she spoke. "I will not ally myself with a force equal to the worst excesses of the darkspawn," Rylock stated flatly, "We Templars will fight: but it must be the right fight."

Before Rilian could speak, Loghain beat her to it, irritation rolling off him in waves. "Madam: you have never been a soldier. The right fight ends when the dust has cleared and you're still standing. The wrong fight ends when you do."

Was that it, Rilian wondered - was that why she and Loghain saw things differently to Rylock? A good Templar - like a good Guardsman - was incorruptible. A soldier understood what war required.

"I assure you," Rylock countered, "That whatever lives this Blood Mage might save will not be outweighed by those lost should he lose control. Each time he uses Blood Magic - each time he accepts that power - he moves one step closer to becoming an abomination. You tested the black powder until you created a reliable mix - you cannot test for the point at which Jowan breaks."

Rilian struggled against the memories of Jowan's spell: the drowning...the sinking ship. It had only been the Joining that allowed her to resist. A mage could use the litany of Adralla; for everyone else, there was no defence. She countered it with memories of Jowan standing beside her...Jowan's willingness to redeem himself, even if it meant risking his very soul in the Fade with Connor.

"You're comparing Jowan with a mindless piece of equipment," she began slowly, searching for words to break through the uncompromising steel, "Your assumption is based on the idea that Jowan is his magic - a thing, as the lyrium dust is a thing: that he does not choose, or believe, or have worth as a person. As a man - I trust him."

Rylock received this argument with a closed face. Rilian stopped and studied her, trying to see past her face into her mind. Rylock was as closed as a piece of flint. In an effort to rally her thoughts, Rilian poured more wine for herself, and drank it rather too quickly.

"Do you think a mage can't be honest?" she asked softly, "Do you think that talent - an accident of birth - precludes loyalty? Or compassion? Or ethics?"

Still Rylock didn't shift - sitting as ramrod straight as though born with a sword for a spine. "In the end," she articulated flatly, "No mage is loyal to anyone but himself. That's the nature of power. It seduces - it requires. A mage can appear loyal only so long as his power and his loyalty don't come into conflict. The magic teaches them - no, it forces them - to believe they're more important than other people. Because they can do more. They have the power to remake the world in their own image. If they're smart enough, and strong enough, and nobody gets in their way, they can change the outcome of the world. So how can they let anything stand in their way? How can they submit to any kind of control? They can't, Warden - you'll find out that they can't. And when you find that out, you'll find out they're your enemy. Even if you think Jowan honest now, and loyal, and trustworthy, you'll learn that he wants you dead. You'll learn that it's better for him to use Blood Control than take the risk you might get in his way."

The virulence - not of Rylock's tone but of her belief - shocked Rilian. The chilling memory of the time Jowan had used that spell on her washed through her in a wave of ice. He had been desperate - and scared - and acting on Howe's orders: but he had done it.

"What would he have to do to make you trust him?" she snapped, the memory making her savage, "Slaughter every mage ever born? Exterminate talent from the world?"

With a small flick of her hand, Rylock dismissed the protest. "Even that would not be enough. The mage I trust is the one who kills himself."

Rilian met that flat glittering stare - no shades of grey, no depth of vision - with a complex inward shudder. Then came a chilling comprehension. As a mage-hunter, Rylock was at a level of commitment people never achieved under normal circumstances. Nor could anyone hope to do so for long and remain normal. This woman who would have no husband, no children - all normal emotion channelled into ideals - a dried haw withered on a dead stem. In that moment Rilian touched the edges of her being - felt the lightest tremor of the blood-race of fanaticism.

She loathed that contact.

They have the power to remake the world in their own image. So how can they let anything stand in their way?

Rylock was right: she knew mages who met that description. Uldred had been one of them. Zathrien too, in his quest to avenge his family. They had murdered those who stood in their way. Innocents, who knew nothing of "The Sacred Cause".

It isn't magic that corrupts - it's having power...

She knew non-mages who met that description. Branka, in her quest to regain the Dwarven heritage. Loghain - who would let nothing stand in the way of protecting Ferelden.

We can make a better world than this. I have power now - I lead these armies. I'll demand justice for our people...

If she meant it - really meant her words to Shianni - she might be one herself.

"No, Warden," Rylock said like a sharp stone, "You cannot sway me with well-intentioned arguments. Cold corpses argue louder than abstract notions of redemption."

Numb, shaken, Rilian could only say flatly, "It is not your choice to make, Knight-Commander. Jowan numbers among the Wardens." And nobody around the table would know that calling Jowan a Warden did not make him one. "He is therefore under command of Weisshaupt. The Grand Cleric may take the matter up with them - after Ferelden is secured. For now, I promise you this: I will forbid the use of Blood Magic, even against darkspawn - Jowan will have to fight by normal spells. Ser Otto will be there to hold him to it - and strike him down if he fails. Will that do? Because it's all I can promise."

The silence stretched tautly. Finally, Rylock nodded. Her voice was chill and dark.

"That will do, Warden - for now."

Implicit in that was the promise that she would bring the matter before the Grand Cleric as soon as the war allowed.

Rilian decided that she and Jowan would have to take what breathing space they could. Jowan's future was no less secure than her own - and, she thought sourly, the only doubt was when she would die against the Archdemon, not if.

Rilian poured herself another glass.

---

In the dark, the slumbering camp nestled like a ghostly half-way house between the world Rilian knew and the wasteland beyond - caught between life and death as between night and morning. She shook off the thought, concentrating instead on how the hill jutted like a dockside wharf over the unknowable blackness of ocean. Tents formed a domino-like patchwork reminiscent of home; some formed sleek, triangular shapes, black and glistening as the fins of sea creatures, rimed with moonlight. Rilian remembered the kites she and Soris had flown as children, made of waxed cloth over a latticework of Vhenadahl bark. She thought of the gliders - as yet existing only in her mind - of dragon wings...

Softly - more softly than she had ever managed - Rilian ducked back inside the tent she shared with Shianni. A tender smile quirked her lips as she glanced at her cousin - curled as neatly and tidily as she did everything else. Making no more noise than the rats that scampered across their kitchen floor, she gathered backpack and belongings and pieces of armour. She buckled these on outside. Dying campfires dotted the ground in little glittering blisters: rust-coloured scabs across the black-and-white patchwork. Snail-trails of smoke rose like the ghosts of tadpoles. Her men were gathered by the narrow silty stream that trickled greasily past: the knights of Redcliffe, Denerim's small cavalry unit, and Sten.

Before she joined them she spoke to each of her companions, her instructions quiet and matter-of-fact. Morrigan's primal magic would complement the skills of Pir Surana's archers - her ability to shapeshift would lend her all the stealth she needed. Leliana and Zevran would join her. Oghren was fighting under Cauthrien's command, though they had clashed several times over the Dwarf's drinking. No more than Wynne clashed with Loghain - yet her healing spells would prove vital to the infantry. And Rilian was forced to tell a horrified Jowan that he must prevail with primal spells alone: the use of Blood Magic, even against darkspawn, was not permitted. She did not linger over goodbyes. As with Shianni, the farewell that mattered had been spoken. Rilian headed toward where Racer was tied. She stroked the silky mane - leaned against the bunched power, the warm solidity like the hearth in which a great fire burned. She turned - there was Shianni coming towards her. Rumpled from sleep, her hair held more expression than other people's faces. Her normally steady amber eyes were bright and changeable as music. Rilian expected to be taken to task for not waking her - but her cousin only shook her head and said softly, "I'll relay your instructions to the Dalish."

Rilian blinked. "You don't have to take messages for me."

Shianni smiled as though Rilian were being dense. "You're a General, now, cousin - you need to concentrate on winning us the battle." She said it lightly, but with more than a touch of pride.

"You seem very cheerful?"

Shianni made a strange sound, somewhere between a sniff and a snort. Her lower lip quirked oddly. "I know we may be killed today. But at least it's our choice. At least it's an honourable death." A strange look flitted over her face, twisting her features as though she might suddenly burst into tears. "While I was...with Vaughan...a quick, clean death seemed like it would be a wonderful thing."

Rilian hugged her, as well as she could through the chill Dragonbone. Shianni held her for a moment, ruffled her hair, and let go.

"But I suppose I must stay alive for now. Uncle needs me - and you need someone to tell you what to do!" She sighed, straightened up, and stepped back. She made Rilian relay the instructions, repeating them until she had them right. "Good luck, cousin - Warden-Commander, I mean."

Rilian stepped forward, hands outstretched, but Shianni had already turned, heading toward the dark-shrouded Dalish camp.

Rilian whistled Ravenous to her and walked to her first command.

Dawn was an hour away, but the camp was teeming with furtive, whispering activity: the sounds and smells were alive as the Alienage nights had been; fear coated them like sweat. In the shuffling, hovering darkness, preparations were made. Confidences, never before spoken aloud, some never before thought through to conclusions, were shared. Those who slept at all twitched and muttered. Others lay in silent wakefulness, intrigued by living as only those aware of death's hovering presence can be.

---

Jowan rolled slowly off his sleeping roll and pulled on his clothes. His meagre belongings took on strange, threatening shapes in the stifling blackness; his frayed backpack sulked in one corner in dishevelled, abject misery. Compared with the conditions he was used to - the airless sarcophagus of the apprentice dorms, saturated with the snores and farts of hundreds; the countless nights on the run spent shivering in ditches - having his own tent and drawing a ration of army food was luxury. The Chantry bitch had tried to insist he share the tent with his keeper - Ser Otto himself had shot that down. Jowan had known several Templars who liked nothing better than to abuse the mages in their care - Ser Otto was not one of them. Clearly, the knight had better things to do than share his space with a scrawny, fear-sodden apostate. Which, considering Jowan's intentions, was a mercy.

His mind chased dark, winding trails - like the hunted stag that scarcely knows it runs. He saw the Warden's face: leaner and harder than the young woman who had rescued him from the Arlessa's dungeon, drawn into planes and angles that spoke of years lived in months. The cool disinterest of her instructions: "No Blood Magic - not even against the darkspawn. Use primal spells only." This - after he had healed her with Blood Magic; after she had promised that fighting darkspawn was the right use of its power!

Wisps of memory fluttered like thistledown: of fearfully-hissed incantations under bedside covers - the smell of books and mould and dust of ages - the gnawing unease as the spells trickled like sludge from a stagnant pool while Thomas' flowed like a bright river. The fear that grew like a terrible second heartbeat as his Harrowing approached. He had never envied Thomas his brilliance - only for being the kind of person who never ran from anything - but it had been a compulsion with him to hide his struggles. Once again, he felt that insidious hum along his veins; the whisper of the Fade monster which, like a soft-bodied maggot, had burrowed unerringly toward the hollow core of his mana, growing to fill what emptiness it enlarged, offering an alternative.

Use primal spells only. How - when he could barely light a candle with them!

The river of memory flowed onward: the bargain made, the horrified delight when Senior Enchanter Uldred complimented him on his progress. And then: sweet notes that made his soul sing - an auburn-haired lass kneeling in the Chapel... She had been everything that was good and pure; it had seemed a miracle that this exquisite starry girl returned his love. For the first time, he had allowed himself to dream: wild, sweet, secret dreams he had known could never - should not - come true. Her presence had burned away the thrum of yearning beneath his veins and the terrors of the future. He had dreamed of giving up his magic - all magic - and settling down in a farmers' cottage. Jowan, who had come to the Tower when he was four years old, had never even cooked a meal for himself; he would have learned, for her sake...

And then had come the accusation of Blood Magic - Knight-Commander Greagoir's signature approving the Rite of Tranquillity. With the desperation of a drowning man - an addict for whom cunning outlasts conscience - he had lied to Thomas, and lied to Lily, and involved them in his escape.

Time rushed to meet him; images blossomed like repeated lightning flashes. The burn of adrenaline - the thrill of triumph - the dumb horror as the armoured figures approached. And then the blind rage - the glittering thrum in opened veins that reared up like a nest of snakes. The iron-scented coils - like reddish-brown curtains - writhing, coagulating, spawning. The Templars left to bleed out their lives on the Tower floor - the unimaginable sight of Thomas, collapsed beside them with the jerky meaninglessness of a broken marionette.

Jowan had not waited - too frozen by horror even to check whether Thomas was still alive. Instincts learned from the days of his mother's strap took over - he bolted for the door and ran till his breath was a knife in his lungs.

The Templars had caught him. Like a hunted fox, he had run through all his tricks - reflexes and cunning quickly mapped, countered and contained. The numbing shock of their powers, hitting from several directions at once - a lightning bolt through body and mind like the childhood fits he had outgrown. And then - rescue. Soldiers in grey-and-yellow livery, promising redemption. A task for the Regent, against a treacherous noble...

His mind balked, fragmented. He replayed the terror and triumph of his journey to the Fade - the one time he had refused to run. But it had made no difference: he saw again those two old men - sporting near-identical beards that entered a room as an advance guard for the rest of them. One with pretensions of nobility; the other of wisdom. Sadly - gravely - solemnly, Arl Eamon and First Enchanter Irving had decided his fate. He saw the Warden: sweat-matted hair hanging in limp, rust-coloured strands across a face softer than it was now, staring between them with the blankness of exhaustion. She had argued for him - but in her eyes had been a kind of hopeless resignation: the a-priori assumption that she could do nothing against mages and nobles. Irving's dry, scholarly explanation of the Rite had gone over her head. "Will he be harmed?" she had asked - and Irving had assured her he would not.

Liar.

When the First Enchanter told him what had been done to Thomas he had wanted to howl his grief. Could any harm be as vicious, as irreversible, as the Rite that had turned his friend - full of talent and drive and that brilliant quirky sense of humour - into an automaton. More than anything else, it had been the prospect of seeing Thomas again - working in the Circle stockroom, void eyes blank as blue chips - that had filled him with nauseous horror.

And so he had run. Back into the waiting arms of Arl Howe, and the thrum of Blood Magic...

Remorse lay a bitter blade through his heart; he wanted time to unroll its scroll and let him undo the bargain. He would have been made Tranquil - but Lily would still be singing in the Chapel, though the notes would have meant no more to him than mathematical equations - Thomas would still be pranking the Knight-Commander. But time flowed like a great river: always one way, always down to death. He swallowed the knotted anguish - in all its confusion of meanings and feelings - and tried to focus on the present. He could not survive the battle - he could not be what the Warden wanted: those several, contradictory things she wanted. He swallowed hard, and felt an insidious relaxation. He had tried - he had failed - he should have expected that. It wasn't his fault - he had done his best...

Upon the tent roof, the first desultory needles of oily rain pattered down. No matter. Jowan was used to being soaked through, dog-tired, and on the run. Cat softly, he made his way past the tent flap. The stars were like tiny ice crystals. With the swift silence that had seen him through many midnight trysts with Lily, he headed for the horses on their picket lines. Looming, vaguely threatening shapes showed up as a deeper darkness against the pearly dark-grey river.

Jowan disliked horses. They bit. They kicked. When he mounted, they schemed to throw him off. When he rode, they chafed his crotch and pounded his backside. He was still sore from yesterday's riding. The prospect of further such indignity was a torment worthy of the most perverted mind.

He had no choice. He wouldn't get far on foot. The Templars wouldn't let anything as trivial as a war get in the way of their Sacred Duty.

A soft footfall behind him nearly made him jump out of his skin. Jowan froze for long minutes - an animal with only one thought - his blood turned to ice. Slowly, the realisation trickled through his fear numbed brain that the steps were slow - oddly hesitant - nothing like the iron-shod bootfalls of a Templar. He smelled his own acrid sweat, mingled with the rain on the wool of his cloak, and took several long breaths.

The stars wheeled further into their turns.

Jowan reached the horses. They were demonic in the blackness, strange and alien, the raw animal smell overpowering. They snorted and stamped and blew. Faint wisps of breath rose in lacy curlicues; a sensory memory of his mother's embroidery fluttered through his mind. Jowan hesitantly put out a hand: a blind, white cave-creature fumbling in the dark. The horse nudged him. Encouraged, he wrapped his sweating palm around the hilt of his small knife. He raised his arm - about to cut the rope.

The cursed creature head-butted him. Jowan windmilled backwards - the blade drew a painful line across his palm. Hissing in shock, he smelled the familiar iron-scented yearning; the low hum of forbidden power roared to life.

A hand grasped his shoulder. Its palm was dry and hard - he could feel the years of gauntlets and sword-grips and hard training. He felt the low, familiar hum - the aura that turned the choppy waters of mana to a dead ice-crusted lake. A bolt of terror arced through him like lightning.

Templar...

---

Ser Otto dreamed in colour.

Since the maleficar had darkened his world in a burst of flame, his dreams were of a new order. No narrative, no familiar faces, just forces, as if giant colours or weights drenched or tore him. A colossal wave at his back - a wall of black oil a mile high - advanced towards him. Its shadow crept towards a goblet of cool silver water in front. He always turned and faced it, though he knew it must annihilate him when it crashed. But it never crashed at all. It engulfed him and forced him to bear its weight.

He woke lying on his back upon the familiar hardness of his sleeping roll, callused hands behind his head, staring up into impenetrable darkness. Not that being able to see the roof of his tent would have proven any more exciting. One might say there was more scope for imagination without. He could powder it with brilliant stars; a swirl of light like the skyball he had owned as a child. He could sketch the beauty of the Bannorn in springtime; the wavering branches that had sheltered him as he sunbathed in his father's fields.

Ser Otto came to himself, a little embarrassed by the flight of fancy; surely unseemly in a Templar knight. The reality was rain: staccato needles upon the acrid-smelling leather, and the familiar belongings laid out with the discipline of Templars the evening before. He rose and dressed, moving with unerring precision, then pushed open the tent flap.

He could tell at once that it was perhaps an hour before dawn. The faint sighs and murmurs of camp were too wakeful for night-time and too muted for morning. The air was chill upon his nose and cheeks, but did not have the bite of midnight - its edge was softened by the faint currents of dawn's warmth rolling in from the east. The rain fell in an uneven patchwork upon the areas of his scalp that still had feeling, and those that did not. It anchored him. The shimmering curtain of sound gave shape to the void as the Maker had done. Its rhythm against leather sketched the positions of tents for him; the soft wet splatter into mud drew a trail to follow. The scent of damp loam went up his nostrils - along with the bitter hemlock of taint. It puzzled him - he knew the General would never camp in an area obviously Blighted, but he could sense the wrongness spreading like poison through the veins of the earth. To the east, the droplets stirred the stale water of the Drakon River - he caught the sharp tang of the tethered horses. It woke memories of tending the Chantry's horses: they owned more than the rest of Ferelden combined. The army camp was a map, recalled as precisely as the chess matches he played with his charge - he only needed Jowan to call out his moves. He had taught Rilian - The Warden-Commander, he reminded himself, to give her her due - the game when he had first met her in the Alienage; he remembered it as though it had been yesterday.

Five years ago, after the sunburst that had reached searing tendrils through eyes and skin, Knight-Commander Tavish had assigned him to the Alienage. Had he stayed, he would have been a living reminder to the young recruits of the cost of service. The same reasoning pensioned off the older lyrium-addled generation - those not fortunate enough to die in battle. His task had been to escort Revered Mother Boann as she distributed alms, performed ceremonies, and taught at her school - though it had been she who had steadied his steps, and not the other way round. One morning, when she had been late, and the Arl's soldiers had sniggered at his faltering steps, a stranger had offered an arm. Unlike the roses and violets of clerical robes, her tunic had smelled of salt and brine; her hand firm and callused from lifting crates. "I don't need pity," he had snapped - for he had been very afraid of kindness back then. "Just as well," had come the low pure alto, "I had to waste mine on those ignorant shems who never learned basic manners." The response had startled him into becoming her friend - and thereafter they had sat beneath the Vhenadahl when she came off shift, in the darkness that made them equals, and shared stories. He had made the world outside the Alienage visible to her - and she had answered his tales with scurrilous anecdotes: who was courting who in the Alienage, which guardsman had been Helm-Piddle's latest target - and which Templars she had seen by the docks, slipping a backhander for a crate of lyrium to go...missing. He had sternly felt she should be reproved - but been undone by an unholy desire to laugh. Thereafter, she and the young Mother had become his friends; he had moved into the cottage beside the schoolroom and they had visited - or he had visited the Warden and her father, who had made minor miracles with the food he bought with his small pension. Mother Boann had shared her plans to expand the school and he had thought them wonderful; a hand up rather than a hand-out. He had been alternately amused and horrified by the Warden's not-so-subtle attempts at matchmaking, and had explained the vows they had taken. It had almost been enough to squash the smothered yearning for roses and violets and soft laughter...

He thought of the young cleric, and the black sorrow pierced him. Would it - could it have been different if he had told her? Might she not have gone to Ostagar? But the very thought was insulting: she would no more have refused to go than he would have refused his calling. Such a woman - after such a death - would have gone straight to the Maker's arms; it was ridiculous - arrogant - to picture her shade hanging around unsatisfied because of him.

Deep in thought, Ser Otto had not realised his feet were following their own trail, down to the tethered horses and the ripple in the air he was not aware of consciously. Not until the luminous blaze blossomed against the darkness. It was not vision that decoded the ripple in the Fade - but he experienced it as sight. Just as his fellow Templars appeared as cobalt blue: lit like dim flames by the lyrium in their veins - so a mage burned like a white sun. The figure was moving furtively; he sensed a trickle like treacle beneath the dull flow of mana: a darker, thicker current. And he heard the jingle of harness...smelled the rain upon woollen cloak and leather. It was far too early for anyone but the cavalry to leave. He stepped forward - gripped his charge by the thin shoulder.

"Jowan."

A smothered yelp - a sudden sharpening of sweat - a rustle as the mage spun round.

"I wasn't...I was just...that is, I..."

"What you are doing is attempting to desert. What I don't understand is - why?"

"Why? Why?" The voice came out thinner and higher. "Because I can't do what the Warden expects! I know - I feel - that Blood Magic is the only way I can - and she wants me to do it without! I could never master so much as a simple primal spell - I couldn't have passed my Harrowing - I'm going to be killed today, and so are you!"

Something about the babble of words puzzled the Templar. "I was not aware the Circle were so lacklustre in their training. If you were having problems studying, didn't you ask someone for help?"

"No," Jowan muttered.

"You know," Ser Otto began as delicately as his nature allowed, "If you'd just tell the whole damn truth to start with, we wouldn't have these little problems."

"I know. But if they'd known...you don't know what the Tower was like. It's better for them to make a child Tranquil than take the risk he might lose control. Damn it - mages aren't monsters!" His voice echoed loudly, edging toward hysteria, and he bit the sound off.

"I know - the Warden told me - what you did to rescue the possessed child; I don't know many men who would have been as brave. You defeated a demon - and you must have done that by normal spells. Using Blood Magic in a demon's realm would have opened you to possession. If that isn't passing your Harrowing, I don't know what is. You have a storyteller's instinct, that's all, that lets you talk yourself helpless."

"That was one demon - not a whole horde of darkspawn."

"And this time you'll have an army between you and them. You said it yourself," he reminded with a hint of a dry chuckle, "Jowan and Ser Otto to the rear with the women and children. Besides, even if we fail, you'll at least die a man and not an Abomination."

"And you'll go straight to the Maker's side!" Jowan shouted furiously, "You Templars are all the same - so damn worried about gaining your foothold in the Golden City you don't care about the rest of us! It's not enough to have the best of everything down here - you have to lord it over us up there too..."

He was shouting - sweating - the Veil crackled like the air before thunder. Ser Otto felt the pressure of something dire building - he knew when Jowan gestured with a hand that trailed the iron scent of his own blood that he was losing control.

"Jowan..." he warned dangerously.

The iron swirled around him - and a hot fist seemed to squeeze the Templar's heart in his chest. Memory...

...He burned in a fire that reached molten tendrils through his veins; turned his blood to lava. Flames seared his lungs; burned his eyes to nothing. Voices swam around him, half-drowned through the roar in his ears. Ser Tavish called on him to hold the line, to stand against the Blood Mage, to endure. Those had been his last orders...the Knight-Commander trusted him to hold...

He forced one breath after another through stiff lips, felt his heart settle once more into a steady rhythm. He had faced the worst of Blood Magic...he could handle one adolescent tantrum. His powerful arm came up and smashed Jowan in the face...the pressure vanished...a dull thud and squelch as he hit the muddy ground.

"You stupid, stupid fool," Ser Otto sighed, exasperated. He knelt, made sure Jowan was still breathing, then cocked his head, listening in all directions. Could he be lucky enough that no-one had heard the yelling? No - there was the sound of iron-shod boots - and the blue sparkle of lyrium-fired veins. For the first time, he inwardly groaned at the approach of one of his own, his mind racing quickly. Ser Otto had never lied since the day he took his vows...but as a boy he had had long practice coming up with excuses for his feckless younger brother.

"Ser Otto?" Damn - it was Ser Rylock!

He turned - stood awkwardly, and saluted. "Knight-Commander. I am...as you see...attempting to rouse my charge. You were right to insist I share his tent. In my absence, he has managed to drink himself into a stupor before the battle - I am trying to wake him."

A long silence. Only ingrained Templar discipline kept him from shifting from foot to foot. Finally, a dry, mirthless huff.

"Mages," the Knight-Commander muttered in disgust, "And they ask why we need to watch over them."

She waited a moment, turned smartly, and he heard the wet sound of her footsteps receding. He waited till they blended into the sensuous forest of sound before attempting to wake Jowan.

A change in the quality of silence told him the mage was awake. His skin prickled - he felt the eyes on him.

"You hit me," came the hoarse whisper, sounding half-muffled through an obviously-broken nose.

"That I did. You used Blood Magic."

A long silence - the faint dry rustle of cloth. Was he up to magic again? But Ser Otto felt nothing out of the ordinary. "I'm sorry," came the low mutter, "I shouldn't have done that."

"Indeed. Where would you be if you'd killed me, eh?"

"I... didn't mean to. I just lost my temper." It sounded sulky - but then, Jowan's face must have hurt a lot.

"And you wonder why I won't let you ride off into the sunrise? Should I believe freedom will teach you restraint? Or mercy? Yes, it's hard on mages to give up their freedom - but it's hard on everyone else when they abuse their powers! I can't allow that: I can't have you - trying - to control yourself, and not doing it."

A sigh, then, long and gusty. "What are you going to do with me?"

"I ask myself that. I should have let the Knight-Commander kill you. But I'll tell you what: I need you to be my eyes in the coming battle, and you give me something to do."

"You'll let me live because I give you something to do?"

"Yes. But use Blood Magic just once more and you're dead."

A hesitation. "What do you want me to do?"

"For one thing, you can guide me to the supply tent; I'm hungry."

Jowan mumbled and huffed, sounding almost affronted to have the knight interested in something else. "We may die with full bellies, but we're still going to die - if the Warden didn't want me to use Blood Magic, she should have said so before."

Ser Otto did not like the self-righteous whine in that voice. As far as he was concerned, Blood Mages had no right to be self-righteous.

"And then," he continued, as if Jowan had not spoken, "We're going to spend the time we have practicing fighting in tandem. You have basic spells - you have a staff - and you'll be able to tell me where to swing my mace..."

"Oh, Maker."

"...and afterwards - if we survive - I'm going to send you to Senior Enchanter Wynne, whom we are fortunate to have with us."

"Wynne the Wise? Just kill me now..."

The two headed to the supply tent, where Cyrion was making a hot mixed grain mash for the men. Ser Otto's stomach rumbled loudly - he never ate so well as before a battle. Jowan complained that he couldn't eat a bite. They sat with a group of refugees - Ser Otto heard them exclaiming over Jowan's face and muttering darkly about Templar brutality. Jowan accepted the sympathy with a martyred voice.

It was going to take all Ser Otto's training to maintain his temper - and then only in the belief that the Maker was testing him. Whether or not he passed the trial remained to be seen. Ser Otto would not have laid bets on himself.

---

Rilian and her cavalry rode down the eastern slope, guiding their horses carefully across the rocky scrub, past the eerily glinting river that flowed with the toxic heaviness of mercury. Rilian found herself thinking of molten metal - of the blades Nelaros had forged - of the rivers of lava and the dragon that roared in the deeps. The death-shrouded forest muffled sight and sound - but the taint pulled at her consciousness. Like a black-veined spider's web, she was aware of the teeming creatures that carpeted the south-west plain; insects crawling over dead grey dunes. Gauzy curtains of pink began to roll over the tops of skeletal trees, as though rose champagne were being poured from the east. The rosy sheen gilded the forest, beauty and death close-woven, like the taint in her veins, the wings in her heart.

The column of five-hundred riders became an arrow, slashing through the forest, the brooding silence overwhelmed by the tempo of pounding hooves. The irony of the situation tugged at Rilian's consciousness. Were darkspawn like any other creatures, the forest would be stripped bare: they would have felled trees for firewood and hunted for food. But darkspawn did not eat, did not sleep - did not breed, though they were born from woman - were less alive than the poorest of the Maker's creatures. Yet they spread as virulently as the invisible dirt-creatures Wynne had explained caused sickness. A dark insight glimmered at the edges of her mind, gone before she could grasp it. The horde was gathered upon the open plain, heading with the blind instinct of plague for the largest mass of humanity. The autumn-blasted woods were rank with falling leaves and rotting vegetation - the murky dimness muffled sight and sound. And because they remained unseen, Loghain's plan had a chance.

They headed south, then west, making for the valley north of the Southron Hills, as the sun climbed higher into the sky. The yellowish-green light was curiously thick: like looking up, half-drowned, through water. The Dalish would be following by now, taking up positions south-east of the darkspawn right flank, sheltered by what the nobles fondly termed the forest of South Reach - close to where Rilian had first met Lanaya's clan.

Ser Perth nudged his horse ahead, coming abreast of her. "Just beyond that fir with the lightning-blasted top is the gully. We'll be able to see the Teyrn's signal from there, Warden-Commander."

Even when the approaching battle should be the uppermost - the only - thought in her mind - the title jolted her. It made her look at herself in a different light. Loghain would have told her she looked the part - she could hear his dry, sardonic tones - but she did not feel it. She was stiflingly hot inside the red metal cage. She wore the red-plumed helm, as all Loghain's commanders did - a visible rallying centre, bright and lucid as a point of flame amid the chaos. The unfamiliar weight of the kite shield Loghain had insisted she wear dragged at her left arm. She still wore Adaia's dagger, belted around her waist, but the weapon that had served through countless skirmishes, street fights and tunnel crawls would be no use in pitched battle: would not defend against genlock arrow or hurlock spear, or block a rush to her left side. It was a fine shield - emblazoned with the red-and-green emblem of Redcliffe - but she had no training with it; and lacked the height and strength to position it effectively on foot. Her left hand grasped the reins; her right was curled in a frantic spasm around her sword-hilt. Inside the gauntlets, her palms were slippery with sweat. She was still trying to quell her growing uncertainty when Sten caught up to them. He was riding the largest horse in the Arl's stables - a good sixteen hands high - and he still made it look small. Forcing firmness, uncomfortably dry-mouthed, she asked, "Is everyone sure of their orders? One mistake - just one - and we sleep in the Fade tonight."

Ser Perth said: "Today is not our day to die: your presence ensures that, Warden-Commander."

Rilian winced inwardly.

Sten was primed to fight. Unnaturally bright, widened eyes betrayed his temper even before his gruff answer. "Whatever orders you give, we'll do our job. We'll destroy the darkspawn."

Rilian reached to grip the Qunari's taut right arm. "Your fighting is the one thing I depend on without question, my friend."

The sun was streaking fire along the tops of trees. The rain shimmered like an iridescent curtain: a strange juxtaposition of water and light. It was as if the blaze rose to join with the falling sheets. She found colour in air and rain: it was strangely heavy, like a vast, luminous bruise of glowing purples and reds and golds, all running into each other like paints dissolved in water. The eerie quality of light - the heaviness in the air - reminded Rilian of the voice she had heard in the docks, singing through the storm as she hid from Arl Howe's men. She could hear it in her mind: a vivid sensory memory. The rain seemed to mourn: chilling, a sense of women lamenting. Towards the south, the Blightstorm advanced northward in a vibrating mass. When the black cloud came directly overhead, it would turn the day to night; the rain to treacle.

The knoll rose in the distance, beyond the horde, its stark greyness jutting into the throbbing sky. The three hills looked like decaying molars: she could just make out the insect-sized forms on top. A ripple of activity as they descended. She pictured the army on the march - Loghain keeping the men together - the engineers readying the portable barriers and black powder. Pir Surana's archers were veering westward, holding to the lowest and best cover. She pictured them spreading out at extended intervals upon the ruins of the Imperial Highway - a natural ridge along the darkspawn left flank - imagined she could hear the scrape as they readied their bows.

Her forehead was drenched with sweat. She could not wipe it with the gauntlets that covered her hands like reptilian skin. As if sympathising, Ravenous nudged her, whining softly. "Be ready, my friend," Rilian whispered, scratching behind the alert ears.

Silently, she asked herself what more they could have done to pick the battlefield, what more they could have done to prepare the troops, what equipment they might have developed to help them. Her eyes strained to pierce the distance, to the main bulk of the infantry. There wasn't enough open space here for the horses to bolt, so she could handle it perfectly well. Loghain's experience would be more important at the point of first contact. The flanking archers and rear attack would drive the horde northward like corralling sheep - straight into the encircling arc of Loghain's infantry. The farming metaphor belonged to Loghain: Rilian, who had never seen a sheep save on a platter at Arl Eamon's estate, would have to take his word for it. She'd seen guardsmen drive and pen the crowds during the Alienage summer riots, and guessed that was close enough.

The stream of dun-coloured dots trickled onto the plain like the sands of an hourglass - there was a ripple as they met the swarm of black insects, like two contradictory waves colliding. Rilian jerked upright in the saddle, dry-mouthed. The sunlight had vanished - the approaching cloud turned the air to a shimmering murky curtain - but she was stiflingly hot. She took in greedy gulps of thick, acid-tinged air, yearning to remove her helm. The acrid pre-battle stink of men and horses was familiar - but the Blightstorm created an evil putrescence. It was like inhaling mud.

One of the dun-coloured dots fell - and then another. The plain was carpeted with darkspawn dead - she guessed at least three hundred - but they could afford five times that many. The infantry could spare none.

"Get back," she whispered, not hearing Ravenous' sympathetic growl, "Fall back now, Loghain."

She spat continually despite a raging thirst, trying to get rid of the cold metallic bitterness on her tongue. Her men were dying - her soldiers - who had expected her to save them from the darkspawn. The wait for the signal stretched tautly to infinity. She imagined she could identity individual cries of the wounded, and inside she screamed wordless, soundless rage. She turned to regard her men. Ser Perth's eyes were orbs of raw fear behind the glittering visor. She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.

---

The murky half-light of the enshrouding forest was threaded with echoes like sly whispers, dissolving like rumours when faced directly. Autumn-blasted leaves clung to trees like rags around corpses, waiting for winter to strip the bones. Terribly, incongruously, Shianni remembered her cousin: soft green wedding dress tattered and blood-drenched, falling around bone-hard limbs that dodged and struck like the armaments of some lethal machine. It was a strange, mist-woven landscape, and Shianni found herself remembering Hahren Valendrian's stories: of woods where the Veil was thin, and spirits wandered between the mortal world and the Fade; enchanted realms from which a traveller might return to find a hundred years had passed, everyone he knew crumbled to dust.

Tiny fronds of sunlight formed a dappled counterpoint to the latticework of branches. The rain and strange greasiness in the air gave the light an oily richness; she thought of lemon juice drizzled onto a plate of chicken bones. She shook her head at her own foolishness: there was no sense in thinking of food now! This morning, when Cyrion had offered her the hot mixed grain mash that was both tasty and filling, she had pushed the plate away. Despite her hatred of waste - despite a lifetime's conditioning to treasure every scant mouthful - she had been unable to eat a bite.

Shianni's Dalish armour - leather, painted with stripes and shading to blend chameleon-like with their surroundings - encased her like a cold, bulky, alien frog. The weight of her bow was awkward - the buckets she carried back home were heavier, but the balance familiar. She could barely see the warriors in front: they were forest ghosts. With each step they seemed to grow beyond boundaries, become spirit-like. She felt both flat-footed and flat-eared - and winced as she underscored the thought by tripping noisily on a branch. Merrill and Velanna walked beside her. Their robes also matched the forest: graceful candleflame forms who carried staves that bled a low, oppressive thrum of power like the air before a storm. Cale had told her to remain in the rear with the two Keepers: she had objected, knowing she had no spells to complement them: that it was for her own protection, nothing more. With battle less than an hour away, the fierce fires of determination had shrivelled to a cold lump of ash in her belly.

The archers headed southward, until they reached the ash-grey arc of the Drakon River. Then they fanned out, the front line sheltered at the very edge of the forest, at regular intervals all along the darkspawn right flank. They waited for the signal: the shemlen General would have his mage send up a shower of sparks, high above the treeline. Along the line, the warriors communicated with handsignals - an intricate language Shianni had just begun to learn. A muted buzz rippled along the line as the information passed from one Elf to the next. Bows were nocked and drawn. It was an eerie, almost soundless enthusiasm: they knew surprise was their best weapon, and only silence could protect it. Shianni strained to pierce the eerie, liquid shadows: the world under dim grey water, or seen through a dark pane. She tried to imagine the darkspawn army: roiling northward like the oily tides at the harbour, glistening with shemlen filth. The air stretched thinly - Shianni felt her nerves drawn taut as Rilian's lute strings, her fear shrilling to a thin high wail.

Then a blaze exploded above the canopy: a fire-shower of light that rained through the piebald reddish-brown patchwork, threadbare as a tattered quilt. Shianni could see little beyond the trees ahead and the backs of the archers in front - the open ground showed as a glimmer of light seen through a long spyglass - but she heard the swarm of loosed arrows. An undulating, confused murmur, carrying a shiver of violence. A cacophony of crashes up ahead - a roar, a squeal, pounding footsteps. The vibrations snaked towards her. Crashes - a juddering of leaves - dark shapes fleeing, familiar features eroded to shapes of horror. The archers melted into cover, weapons unsuited for close combat. Shianni's bow nearly slid through sweat-sodden hands: she froze, mind white and empty, instinct screaming flight.

Beside her, Merrill and Velanna stood their ground. Shianni gasped at the sight of Merrill. The familiar gawky figure - so slight she seemed much younger than her years - was encased in armour of living rock! She might have been one of the golems in Rilian's stories, and moved with the bulky, ponderous purpose of a shem knight. A familiar face - a tentative friend - morphed with dreamlike horror into a stranger. Merrill pounded the hilt of her staff into the earth: a white coruscation budded and bloomed; turned the rain to silver tapestries. Droplets hovered in tiny, perfect spheres, holding the pearly luminescence of marbles. The swirl of energy gathered, coalesced: spears of lightning split the murky air like knives through rags. Ahead, the looming misshapen hulks howled in hideous pain: the stench of burning, diseased flesh made her gag. Merrill aimed her staff like a molten spear: unerring flames roiled among the stricken creatures. The colliding currents of light turned the storm-lashed forest to a kaleidoscope of silver and scarlet. Shianni struggled to make sense of a world dissolved in delirium. It was like trying to build a stained-glass window with coloured water.

Amid the flickering cornucopia of sound and light, Velanna stood like a force growing from the earth. Her wraith-slender arms were raised to the sky like the spikes of a thorntree. As the first of the darkspawn stumbled through the sea of flame and lightning - Shianni's inchoate impressions were of flayed mockeries of men - she had an intimation of a magic darker and more potent than Merrill's. White attenuated fingers jabbed like points of vengeance. The soil around the darkspawn began to crack and crumble, split by a writhing nest of roots. The bone-hard tentacular birth split darkspawn armour: turned the taint-ravaged creatures to a shrieking, heaving mound of tortured flesh. The screams were unearthly: bestial howls that threatened to split her skull, and emptied her mind of anything but anguish. The living mesh of thorns splintered flesh and bone to bloody rags. Roots rose where the taint ought to have killed them, rearing like obscene fingers as if in echo of their flesh-and-blood sister. They writhed back underground, only to explode elsewhere, pulping another mass of darkspawn to glistening black ruin. Revulsion shook Shianni like the tremors of the Tevinter plague. In the Alienage the roots of the Vhenadahl birthed the branches that sheltered them - tied them to the past and anchored the future. There was something horrible about seeing them used this way: harnessed by raw power to breed death, not life. Velanna's teeth showed, white and malign, between her lips; arrogance stretched all emotion from her features. She looked like a malevolent albino cat.

A darkspawn stumbled through the twin storms of nature and light. Shianni's mind balked, fragmented: she saw it as a series of separate images, looming larger and larger in her vision. Ridiculously, she thought of a story Rilian had once told her -about a shem nobleman whose dark deeds showed only in his portrait. Terror rooted her to the spot. Her fevered impressions showed a hideous vitiation of humanity: muscles jutting starkly beneath grey, diseased skin, scored by thick, ropy scars and bulging tumours, encased in armour that seemed to be corroding from within. At first glance, it appeared to be grinning. But that was not a smile: its lips, like its nose, were eaten away. Inured to the agony of its bodily corruption, it came on steadily, the broken spike of a thornroot jutting from its shoulder. It was joined by another: a shorter, squarer creature, squirming and slinking low-bodied behind. Shianni's fear left her in a rush, leaving her numb and empty as a glass in winter sunlight. She lifted her bow: felt its weight settle like a familiar burden, flesh and wood drawn taut in a strange duet. The soft middle finger of her right hand was scored by training cuts, but the sharp sting seemed to float around her, disconnected. Cale had only just begun teaching her to use the larger bow - but at this range she couldn't miss.

The darkspawn came on howling: black eyed skull faced bloody-mouthed fiends.

They died like men.

---

The moss-covered white stone of the Imperial Highway was half-crumbled into the plain. At regular intervals, observation posts jutted like molars. Zevran followed Pir Surana's Night Elves, the Antivan assassin having no trouble following the loping gait. Pir Surana was small even for an Elven man, but his scarred, shaven head, viper-sharp face and predator's eyes gave lie to first impressions. He had a granite-hard presence of purpose, and all the Elves who had fought beside Loghain during the Orlesian occupation followed him without question. His quiet second-in-command was a study in contrasts: though nearly a head taller than the Elf, Bann Nathaniel Howe seemed to float alongside him with a curious loose limbed grace. Under the eerie, luminescent sky the road itself formed a pearly, gleaming arc: a long blade above the roiling, glistening sea of darkspawn below. Once, the monument to ancient Tevintan grandeur had stretched between Ostagar and Aeonar. Only fragments remained. They had scaled this one under cover of Lothering forest - now they headed north along the pale, shining ribbon. Amid the strange, green-and-white patchwork of shadows, angled stone and long-forgotten statues, the archers took up position at regular intervals. Zevran drew the shadows about him with the instinct of a hunter. His devouring jewel eyes were disinterested as glass, lit by compressed energy void of feeling. Beside him, he was aware of Leliana's shiver of tension, taut as a drawn bow. Her exhaling hiss was no heavier than the whir of a mosquito. It was charged with a yearning excitement that underscored Zevran's own dark-shrouded sigh.

Bows were nocked and drawn - a forest of arrowtips that bristled all along the white road, malevolent as the fangs of snakes.

"Ready...aim...loose!" Pir Surana barked the order. The bone-sharp gauntness of his face - pale as a bleached insect - was set into unyielding planes. Near-colourless eyes seemed to reflect the hues around him, holding less emotion than diamond chips. A thrum of sound - like the low drone of a flight of wasps - and the spiky, steel-tipped rain fell upon the heaving, grunting mass below. A crash - a juddering roar - and suddenly the tides of darkspawn parted as if in fear. A pale-grey, horned monolith in feculent rags crashed through, towering above the rest like rocks above ocean. Eerily, for such a large creature, it advanced in stark silence. One bulbous, misshapen hand, skin beginning to slough off around jagged bone, reached toward the rubble.

"Bring it down!" Surana's hoarse command carried a strained urgency. For Zevran, the world unfolded in brilliant clarity. Its sensual bloom of glory was padding around a steel mesh: the patterns of strike and defence, of razored attention to detail, that kept him alive. One side of Zevran was hotblooded: a hunter who lived for the kill as much as by it. The other side was a killer too, but cold and logical. The reptile part of his brain dispassionately calculated odds. Aware that he had twice the creature's speed - that his bow would pierce even ogre hide at this range - Zevran drew back, relaxed as a willow branch, and loosed. The needle sharp projectile pierced the dark, lost hole of one gaping eye.

The ogre didn't even blink with the other. It advanced with the slow inevitability of landslide, hand reaching downwards, grasping, finding purchase, rearing back like a pendulum.

The entire section of rock shuddered at the impact. Only Zevran's quick reflexes saved him - he stared, in blank astonishment, at the shattered red smear where one of the Elves had been. Three more were ripped by sheared off shards. Ragged, spinning like leaves, they fell backward into the maelstrom below. A few more hits, and the ogre had cleared a path of rubble for its kin: they came scrabbling up the slope: a squirming, flesh-crawling mass of giant, greyish-skinned insects. Zevran raised an eyebrow. Not for the first time, he wondered at his choice of companions. Granted, he'd had little choice when he pledged himself to Rilian's service - but he'd had plenty of opportunity to leave. He'd take the Crows over darkspawn any day. Leliana - the romantic - believed the Elven woman reminded him of someone: but Rilian was nothing like Rinna. Rinna had been sensual, velvet-eyed, wicked, a shadow against dark, perfumed Antivan nights: not a frighteningly impractical idealist who rallied troops in flaming armour and possessed the grace and stealth of a peacock. He shrugged inwardly: the approaching darkspawn were not interested in the answer. Instead, he gave them the steel spikes of his arrows. Beside him, Leliana was a machine: sighting, loosing, killing. Zevran, as keen at reading people as he was at deflecting their blades, saw past the unknowable person sowing destruction, sensed the complex of hurts that drove her.

In the erratic mist-veiled shadows, Morrigan was demonic: hurling spells in a fire-shower of ruin. Silk and feathers fluttered like cobwebs around her white, gracile form - she seemed to float among the motes of spelllight, oddly attenuated, as though the air were water. She cradled - tenderly as a child - a shimmering orb of liquid ice - the unerring projectile coated the darkspawn. Splinters of ice held them in place, like jagged crystalline flowers. Tiny flickers of electrical energy blossomed and faded like seeds of lightning. A cobalt-blue arc shattered the brittle creatures into shards. Those following simply scrambled atop the bodies - closing before the witch could cast again. Morrigan raised her arms to the sky in feral triumph: gossamer rags billowed like sails; covered her body like a shroud. A strange crawling ripple writhed beneath. The cloth leeched inward around a suddenly empty husk. Where the witch had been was now a writhing black cloud. The cloud split open like the carapace of a beetle - exploding into a swarm of insects - wisps of clothing falling to the ground like corpserags. Beyond the unsettling intimation of decay, Zevran had only one thought: he'd always appreciated the outfit that displayed the witch's ample charms - Wynne was not the only one with a magical bosom - he realised now that the strategic array of beads and feathers held a practical purpose too. Far harder to shapeshift in and out of something solid.

The darkspawn stumbled into the amorphous cloud in fury and puzzlement. Zevran drew the light, razor-edged, Antivan longsword and dagger - bent low in a feral crouch, ready to spring. Softly - so softly it seemed an echo of the rain-shadows and the oily light- a low croon wound through the air. He stared in disbelief - Leliana was singing. Singing! Before he could ask what she was doing he saw to his amazement that all the nearest creatures were held in thrall - the low, insidious notes a siren song that competed with the Call. Rilian - when she had had too much to drink - had once confided that Leliana's voice was the only thing that drove away the dark dirge that flickered at the edges of her mind. The darkspawn were held in place - as if caught in the slipstream of two colliding currents. They hovered in a strange stillness of time and blankness of mind, as if neither movement nor will were possible. Zevran padded quietly behind them. The long Antivan dagger glimmered like a dragon's tooth. Knowing the corrosive dangers of darkspawn blood, he silently blessed the gloves that were the Warden's gift. Light as silk and tougher than bullhide, the Dalish leather was treated with the same waterproof wax as the aravel sails. Like a snake, his left arm curved behind the first mottled, hairless skull. A well-practiced reflex opened the throat.

Zevran had seen many dead faces in his lifetime, parading in a ghostly procession behind his eyes. Of all of them - both human and monster - the look in these dead grey orbs was the most peaceful.