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.

21. Chapter 21: All Flesh Is Grass

Because all flesh is grass and all its beauty as the blossom of the field; the grass withers and the blossom fades.

1 Peter 1:24

Fat, heavy droplets of brightly glinting rain splashed in silver streams into the reddish earth. They soaked the grey stone of Castle Redcliffe, turning its red-and-green pennants into sodden sails. Alistair breathed deeply, enjoying the mingled scents of rain and earth and growth. As always before a battle, his Warden senses had sharpened to a brilliant awareness of the life he might soon be leaving.

The rusted iron drawbridge gleamed like a rack of red-tinged spears. He stepped through, into the torch-lit shadows and quiet old stone of the keep. So much quieter than the last time he and Rilian had done this…

...wraiths turned the air into a mass of swirling rags. Ravenous yipped as the mabari poked his head through the old mill tunnel, emerging into chaos. Ril was right behind, her mother's dagger and Greensteel leading, scurrying behind them and going for eyeless sockets while Alistair readied his Smite.

"Don't look straight at 'em - they've got you that way!" he shouted. His Templar training told him wraiths fed off the fears and sorrows of man; bled thoughts and will away until all resistance seemed futile. Rilian obeyed, trusting him without question…

They had come straight from the carnage in the Circle Tower. Knight Commander Greagoir and First Enchanter Irving were leading the surviving mages and Templars. The Tower itself was nothing but a spirit-haunted ruin; the Veil irrevocably torn. Knight-Commander Rylock - who scared Alistair a little - was leading her men: the bringers of the Right of Annulment, sent from Denerim. Except the Right had been aborted at the last minute: after Ril had convinced Rylock to stand down. While Greagoir and Irving were arguing like old men at a beer drink about allowing the mages to aid the Wardens, Rilian had focused on Rylock's sense of duty:

"The darkspawn are enemies created by the foulest of Blood Magic and spawned from the Black City. They've already taken Mother Boann at Ostagar and Knight Commander Bryant at Lothering. There's your duty, Knight Commander."

Rylock had made her decision with the speed of a soldier - alternatives snipped away, pared down to absolutes - and the faith that flared like light beneath her taut face and tough keen eyes. "When you have mustered your armies, send word to Denerim. I will be there."…

Redcliffe had been meant to be a rallying point for the Wardens' armies and a stopover for Rylock's men. Instead they had walked into a witch's cauldron of trouble. Undead, abominations, shades and revenants, descending on the village. The Arlessa had blamed Jowan. While the armies of Templars and mages held off the assault, Alistair, Ril, Ravenous and Morrigan had gone straight through the castle's hidden entrance, to cut the problem off at the root.

And found the root wasn't Jowan at all, but Cailan's own nephew, Connor. Alistair would forever be grateful for what Rilian had done. She'd gone out of her way to help Arl Eamon and his family - the only family Alistair had, though they didn't want him. They'd both known Connor would be granted no mercy by Rylock or Greagoir. Mages who failed their Harrowing and became possessed were given no second chances: they would not have let him live. But Rilian had known that Knight Commander Harith had a stash of lyrium put by because she had supplied it.

"Grey Warden confiscation," she had told him gleefully - knowing he could not admit his five-vial-a-day habit, nor his dealings with the Mage's Collective. Morrigan had used the lyrium to power a trip to the Fade - and Jowan had entered it, saving Connor's soul.

Alistair didn't much like Blood Mages: but he owed Jowan more than he could repay for taking the blame for everything that had happened. The truth would not have saved him - it would only have damned Connor as well as himself. Jowan had protected Connor - and right before he was due to be handed over had mysteriously escaped. Rilian swore blind her lock-picking skills had not been involved - but Alistair knew better. The only other person who knew the truth was Ser Otto. Alistair knew the Templar who had been his mentor since childhood would not betray the secret. Ser Otto believed in redemption - even for Blood Mages.

He headed inside the castle, to the main hall, finding himself comparing the differences between then and now. Gone were the blackened corpses, the overturned tables, the blood and the ichor. The hideous Orlesian furniture and tapestries remained. Alistair found himself standing under one he knew all too well. It depicted a passage from the Chant of Light that declared: "And down they fell into darkness and despair". The tapestry was dark, fat with rolling boils of smoke and the angular char of burned trees and buildings. Here and there, sharp yellow teeth of flames scavenged what was left.

Alistair disliked the quotation. He disliked the tapestry, though he had never confessed it to the Arl. A beating was the least he could have expected for such impertinence.

The furniture arrangement in the great hall was the same, with a short table against one wall, where the Arl has sat at the centre. Two longer tables ranged down the flanking walls. Large fireplaces, set into the walls, backed up each table. That illumination was augmented by a square chandelier holding three tiers of candles, as well as smaller candelabra on the tables. The windows were arrow-slits, allowing hotter air an escape near the ceiling. In spite of that ventilation, there was smoke in the air, and the light created by the flames had a roseate, muted glow.

Alistair liked it. It gave the warmth of the enormous chamber a cosy element that suggested snugness. Now that mage and mundane children ate alongside each other - staying at Redcliffe Castle until the Tower was cleansed or a replacement found - it had a rather family-like atmosphere. Expressions and animation were undisguised, colours were unsullied. Alistair had an impression of softness, of a space without edges.

The expressions of the five men who awaited him were not soft, however, but granite-hard. Riordan's features were grave, shadowed. The Orlesian Warden had been with them since leaving Rilian's camp at the Hafter River, and had become for Alistair a mentor and friend. Teagan's handsome, youthful face was a shade paler than usual. Greagoir looked older and greyer since the events at Kinloch Hold - he'd never been exactly fun-loving; now he was more dour than ever. Irving's bristly grey beard grew all over his face like fungus: he hadn't trimmed it in weeks. And Teyrn Fergus Cousland - a survivor of both the Highever and Ostagar massacres- looked nearly as barbaric as his Chasind army.

Riordan did not waste time with formalities.

"The darkspawn that attacked Redcliffe were relatively few in number, I'm afraid. I was wrong in my assessment: they are headed north-east. Teyrn Loghain and Warden-Commander Tabris have won a mighty victory against the darkspawn at the Drakon River - but thirty thousand are massed south of Lake Calenhad. We must attack from the rear, drive them east - along the path of the Frostback River so they cannot escape to the Wilds - towards Ostagar. The Teyrn plans a double-envelopment in which the darkspawn are trapped between Ostagar, the river, and us."

Alistair frowned. The only thing worse than being forced to ally with the murdering bastard Loghain was seeing him proved right. If they had listened to Riordan and Arl Eamon, the horde would be devastating Denerim by now.

"Are you sure?" he asked eagerly, "Is Ril - I mean, the Warden Commander: are you sure she's alright?"

"I ventured close enough to "listen in" as it were. The Warden Commander defeated one of the two Generals leading the horde. Their army will now retake Ostagar. But the second General is more powerful still: an emissary."

"And what about the Archdemon?"

"Unknown. It is my hope that, with half the horde slain, the creature's rise to the surface will be delayed. Attrition may mean the Archdemon won't even manifest - it's obviously waiting for a critical threshold."

"If not, then Maker preserve us," Teagan breathed.

"The Chasind travel light and fast," Fergus injected, "We can march tomorrow."

Greagoir and Irving traded a glance - as if daring the other to back out. Sometimes they reminded Alistair of nothing so much as an old married couple.

Teagan was frowning, concerned. "What news of my brother?"

"Unknown. You must take command of the remaining Redcliffe force. There can be no more delays."

Alistair breathed deeply, enjoying the blood-rush through his body, the life roaring through his veins. "Then let's do it. Let's go to war."

The meeting broke up, each moving to rally his own men. Neither Alistair nor Riordan had a specific command: they would fight or advise as they saw fit. As he headed up to his room - his old room, that still bore echoes of the boy he had been, before the Arlessa had exiled him to the stables, he was surprised to see Isolde seek him out. Her fine-boned, exhausted face was unsure, hesitant. Her voice - which Alistair had once compared to the wails of demons in the Black City - was softer than usual, its shrill Orlesian accent muted.

"Alistair," she began, a little hesitantly, "I have not always been nice to you."

She spoke as if imparting a great secret. Alistair waited, nonplussed.

"But you and Rilian Tabris have saved my Connor. Because of you he has his mind back. He will never be…what Eamon and I hoped. But he will grow up."

In a clumsy attempt at comfort, Alistair said: "The Circle's not so bad…well, it won't be, once they've got rid of the abominations and everything. I'm sure he'll fit in just fine."

"Now that the mages are forced to stay here for a time…he seems happier. Already mage children and the children of the castle are mixing. Mother Hannah and I…we have been talking about that. She thinks they should never go back to the Tower. She tells me Warden Rilian found the Sacred Ashes in a mountain fortress above a village called Haven. She believes that's where the mages should rebuild the Circle. The Templars would still be their guardians, of course - but it would be more…more like a community. And I could visit."

Alistair turned that over. "I think that's a great idea," he agreed enthusiastically, "Do you think old Greagoir will allow it?"

"You should speak of your former commander with more respect, Alistair," she chided him - but her voice had still not returned to its former incarnation. "I do not know. It is not really for him to decide, but the Grand Cleric."

"Grand Cleric Leanna is an old - an old woman," Alistair amended hastily, "She doesn't like change. She thinks it's all mad, and bad, and the work of maleficarum. But maybe Sister Leliana could do something. She and Ril are famous now: the finders of the Ashes."

"Because of them - and you - my husband and son live. I will not forget. I will pray for Eamon tomorrow - and for you too."

---

The Frostback River curved like a bright blade, all the way from Lake Calenhad to the foot of the Frostback mountain range to the Hinterlands. The morning sky was hot and clear. Dauntless shivered under Alistair's soothing hands. The warhorse had been his ever since caring for him in the Templar Order. A pale Orlesian destrier, fifteen hands high. Alistair's childhood in the stables and his Templar training had made him a superb rider. Teagan had told him he resembled King Maric in every way but this. He had even taught Rilian. It had been Fergus' idea to give a white horse to Riordan too, and to each of their messengers. Everyone knew they carried important information, and cleared the way.

Fergus caught Alistair's gaze. Across the intervening distance, he saluted, raising and lowering his blade. Alistair mirrored him.

Before the afternoon shadows lengthened, one or both of them might be dead. The idea touched Alistair with a sad excitement. He wondered about Fergus. The loss of the Highever Teyrn's whole family was a thing Alistair's mind shrank from imagining. For himself, he didn't want to die. He didn't expect to. That brought a smile of self-mockery: not many men did. The human mind was capable of infinite dissembling. Every warrior who saw his friends killed accepted their deaths as proof of their bad luck or mistakes. It also confirmed his own immortality.

That was why Riordan's news had been a body-blow. He still saw, as if it had been yesterday, Riordan's sad, grave face as he joined Alistair at the Hafter River…

…"You are new to the Order and you may not have been told how an Archdemon is slain. I need to know if this is so."

"It is. Duncan didn't have time. Loghain - that bastard…" He choked the words off; the memory of betrayal - at Ostagar, at the Landsmeet - still raw.. How could Rilian have sided with that monster!

"I…see. I had simply assumed…no matter. I'll give you the truth, then."…

Alistair thought of immortality - of the woman he still loved, despite never really having known her - and of Riordan's truth. Then he shut his thoughts off with a click. He couldn't bear to follow that road to its conclusion. Didn't want to remember what had followed.

He shook the thoughts off the way a dog shakes off water, glancing around at the glittering dark mass of riders, infantry and supply wagons that followed. Those in the distance looked like an enormous single organism, many-eyed, many-minded, moving with a slow, ponderous crawl towards the inevitable reckoning. They boasted a higher percentage of horseman than Rilian's arm of the campaign. Teagan was the inheritor of his sister's cavalry. Small, fleet Ferelden warhorses and skilled riders formed a fast, mobile unit. Teagan had explained to him how, during the rebellion, Rowan had pioneered the principle of lightning manoeuvre: strike and retreat, wheel and strike again. As swiftly as one unit would attack, they would retreat. Enemies that gave chase found themselves gored from a different direction by a different unit. The Templars were cavalry too, but the iron-shelled men and huge, heavily caparisoned Orlesian destriers were a fist rather than a fleet spike. When Templars clambered aboard a horse, it was to ride over someone, not around him. Alistair caught sight of Knight Commander Harith. His narrow pale face was a shade whiter than usual; his black hair slicked back in a ponytail. Eyes so pale they seemed to reflect the colours around them were strained. The confiscation of his lyrium stash and the logistical nightmare of housing the extra Templars and mages that had come to Redcliffe had aged him by a decade. Beside him, the good-natured, goofy young odd-ball Carroll was twitchy as a cat on a hot roof.

"This new clarity is so strange, man," he had confided, "Everything looks super-sharp - and bright - I wonder if the mages think so too."

The mages were not having an easy time of it - most never having sat a horse in their lives. Only the Senior Enchanters - Irving, Sweeney, Ines, Leorah and Karl - were allowed the comfort of a wagon. Sweeney and Ines sat sunning themselves, staring out at the heaving, sweating mass of Templars with identical beaming smiles. One of the bolder and more ill-natured Templars had complained. Irving's reply had been diplomatic, his gravelly whine soothing - but Sweeney had interrupted him and snapped, "When you get to my age, young man, you'll have earned the same. We Enchanters are worth a dozen Templars in battle - be thankful we don't eat a dozen times the food!"

Perhaps the most fearsome sight were the Chasind, led by Fergus. They rode the horses they caught loose in the Ferelden hills and valleys: small, sturdy creatures with iron nerves. The Chasind were unorthodox believers: merging Chantry doctrine with their own traditions. One example was their war-paint. A Chasind warrior believed he entered the Fade as he left this world. They painted their faces in anticipation of death, believing that a warrior fought his way from the Fade to the Maker's side. Or, conversely, was killed again, and became a wandering spirit, destined to haunt the world of men.

The design was a stark white death's head, the eyes black holes. The mouth was painted red: a gaping, toothed maw with red streaks at the corners. Alistair thought of the old Alamarri wars - of Conobar and Flemeth - thought how chilling it must have been to discover that face at arm's length, black eyes inflamed with combat madness.

Fergus, leading them, looked scarcely less wild. A broad bear of a man, scarred from where the darkspawn in the Wilds had sliced open his face from left cheekbone to jaw. Grey-blue eyes combined a man's courage with an animal's ferocity. He was here, he had said, because a Cousland always did his duty first. Alistair did not envy the Howe brothers when he caught up with them afterward. The Chasind who had saved him were already fearsome warriors, skilled in individual combat. Fergus had taught them how to support each other, how to manoeuvre by unit, small unit control, and effective communications. Iron discipline, imposed on men who'd fought since childhood, created a fearsome shock team.

War-drums were part of their communications. Each drum roared individually, in sequence. The eastern drum always sounded first; the rotation went north around the perimeter, ending at the starter. Alistair watched the one nearest to him, a short distance to his left. Mounted on a cart, it was a man's reach across and half again as deep. Suspended by leather straps, it was a uniform tube of vertical wooden slats glued together and bound with braided leather. The leather striking surface was hauled tight by an intricate web of lines. Waxed and polished to the colour of honey, the instrument rode perhaps five feet off the ground. The drummer perched on the cart, armed with unpadded sticks. When it was his turn to pound, the drummer struck as hard and fast as he could. When he stopped, the next one rolled. They created a flat, visceral pulse that brought to mind the Song: the black tendrils of the darkspawn hive mind that always flickered at the edges of Alistair's consciousness.

Their thunder circled through the valley. Thick, ominous silence followed the last solo. As soon as the eastern drum set the new rhythm, all joined.

The thirty thousand darkspawn they followed were a seething mass that had stripped the land beyond like a plague of locusts. They stretched all the way from the Hinterlands near Ostagar back to an old Tevinter fort barely a mile ahead. Riordan, scouting, had been surprised to find the rearguard holed up here: it was unusual for darkspawn to have any grasp of strategy. They were led by a Genlock emissary - beyond that, he was uncertain.

Fergus, Teagan and Alistair would be first into the fort. He saw Fergus raise the pre-assault flag.

The flags were also Fergus' idea. Fergus had argued with the tribal elders - a mage and warrior - over adopting the system, Alistair had been amused to see how their obstinate resistance to change reminded him of Greagoir and Irving.

Fergus galloped up, war paint spangled by pearls of sweat. His mabari war hound watched its master closely for signals. Chasind horses shuffled and snorted. Many men had swords out, swinging them, loosening muscles. Teagan was calmer - the knights of Redcliffe, including some who had survived the quest for the Ashes, were quiet, focused.

Behind the shock team, a line of mages led by Irving and Sweeney fired over the heads of their allies, pounding at the wall of the fort. Among them was a young man named Anders. Alistair thought Anders reminded him of someone, though he could not have said whom. He had overhead Anders joking with Karl about "fragging" the Templars in front of them. Alistair was not sure what that meant, but it didn't sound good. He was slightly worried to see him in the line behind him.

The fir trees around the fort were burning, lit by magic. A Stonefist had smashed a breach into the wall itself. Seeing it, a thin, hungry smile split Fergus' face. Too small to allow a charge, the gap was widening all the time as the mages pounded away. Alistair sent a runner back to tell Riordan of the breach.

Soon afterward, another white horse rider was sent forward, confirming the mages and Templars were ready. The pace of the drums quickened. Alistair, Fergus and Teagan looked at the fort, where the smoke and flame boiled fiercely.

Then, all at once, a shiver of magic lashed outward. The next thing Alistair knew, the world was aflame around him, white-hot. Air itself lived; sizzled viciously. Heat seared his exposed face, crackled like dry, breaking sticks. A noxious stench scorched his nostrils, sucked the moisture from his throat. Beside him, Teagan hunched over his horse's neck, retching.

Alistair fought to focus, gathered his Templar powers and met the attack with a Cleanse Area. Cool blue beams flooded outward, like water made into light. It washed away the heavy, roiling stink. Around him, he was dimly aware of men gasping, like grains of sand thrown against his concentration.

A second power of lightening; a terror of thunder.

Air flooded his chest. It stank; it tasted of taint. Alistair summoned his powers again. He knew he was unusual in being able to use them without lyrium. He didn't know if that was something to do with being a Warden, or just him, or if all Templars could have done so, given the chance.

One of the carts was engulfed in fire. More dangerous than the flames were stampeding horses. Several broke free of the control of their riders and nearly trampled the mages behind them. Anders was running forward. He cast a powerful Blizzard spell that froze the flames. It also turned the air into knifing cold. Cold like that didn't ache, Alistair discovered, it burned.

Shifting light, colour and wind imbued the air with an eerie liveliness. Alistair thought of the misshapen ferocities that had poured from the Harrowing Chamber.

Teagan laid a hand on his arm. "Nice work. Look: the flags. The breach is ready."

Standing in the stirrups, Fergus twisted his mount around by main strength, then charged forward. He screamed: a sound that combined a man's voice with the howl of a wolf. A similar sound broke from the throats of the following Chasind. Fergus never slowed. He sped through the fringe of burning trees and arrived at the fort just as the yellow pre-assault flag dropped and the black assault flag whipped up. Repeating his cry, Fergus galloped for the breached wall. His men streamed after him.

Coming through the trees, they looked ragged, no more than three streaming units, much longer than wide. Within a few strides, they were forming into distinct columns, each one four men abreast. The centre one was close-ranked, its head even with the middle of the columns on either side. The men of the flanking columns were spaced much further apart, side to side as well as front to back. The charge looked like a fork with two long, thin lines and one short, fat central one.

Genlock archers already manned the breach. Only twice the height of a tall man, the wall offered no overwhelming tactical advantage. Still, the Genlocks were protected, feral and desperate. Arrow-tips were coated with the poison of their own blood. They loosed: and the doomed victims fell, screaming. Chasind, Redcliffe knights and horses fell, some ridden down by those still coming.

The riders of the Chasind flanking columns were perhaps seventy paces from the defenders when the mounted archers returned fire. The Chasind wielded shortbows with incredible skill from horseback. Only the first rank shot, but they were amazingly quick to get off second and third arrows. With the third, the reason for their spacing became apparent. Each rider wheeled left, retreating parallel to the ranks they'd led moments before. Each row repeated the manoeuvre. A constant stream of arrows rose from the columns, spiking the walls like the bristles of a hedgehog, skimming over them, lodging in darkspawn throats.

The centre column lifted shields as they drove full-gallop at the flaming, smoking hole in the wall.

Alistair rode with them; dismounted inside. Fergus was inside already, facing back against the wall, directing his men. Half drove right, half left. Alistair threw himself into the battle on his left. Fergus held up a red flag, indicating new arrivals should ride past him and push forward. Soon the red was replaced by a black and white pennant. Men pouring through the breach saw that, dismounted, and sought cover. The colour told them they were now the counter-attack force, to hold position until needed.

That need came moments later. Alistair was busy with a trio of Genlocks in ill-fitting Legion armour when the first men from the penetration column started reappearing, forced back by the shrieking, raging horde. Armed with everything from clubs to stolen Ferelden swords, they swarmed over the knights and Chasind. Fergus and Teagan's men cut them down like grass - but there seemed to be two to take the place of every one killed. Sheer pressure forced the attackers in on themselves.

Alistair dropped down on one knee - punched outward with his sword. The strike got the Genlock through the belly - foul ichor oozed forth, coating his blade as the doomed creature shrilled a shriek of agony. Slicing through the dying creature as he turned, Alistair took the sword-arm of the next just at the wrist. The Genlock roared, the sound punctuated by the crack of crushed bone. Alistair rose, bowled the third over with his shield, then finished the creature with a throat stroke.

Step by step, Alistair's section backed until the still-fiery firs singed his clothes. The black and white pennant dropped, replaced by the red. The counter-attack force, rising from various hiding places, hurtled into the flank of the overeager, badly organized darkspawn.

A Genlock arrow struck Alistair's armour, gouging a wicked furrow, then sheared away. The vibrating shaft twanged nasally on its way to dash itself against the stone wall.

Mages and Templars streamed through the gap on the heels of the shock team of Chasind and Redcliffe fighters. A couple of Stonefists smashed the wooden doors of the fort itself to smithereens.

"On me!" Alistair cried, and charged through. Teagan followed him - Fergus was already several paces ahead. They found themselves in an empty, echoing chamber that held the pregnant hush of calm before a storm. Abandoned wooden perches flanked the surprised attackers. Alistair felt a crackle in the air.

"Look out!" he screamed. At once the air darkened, alive with boiling, purple flames, a choking black fog that had its own, terrible consciousness. Shades reared up all around them, their eyes orbs of black floating on beds of dark red.

Screams shrilled around him, echoing and re-echoing. Alistair cleaved the swirling chaos, sword leading. Templar training told him to ignore the shadows and focus on the root of the problem.

The Genlock conjurer stood at the far end of the hall. A head-dress made of human and dwarf finger-bones bristled outward like a crown of thorns. Alistair lashed out with his own powers, backed up by Teagan's men. At once the solid, corrupted form began to melt and crawl and change, slow decay happening in seconds. Soiled robes collapsed inward like a deflating gourd, and from its folds a corrupted cloud of writhing, buzzing insects burst forth. Alistair gaped. He had never seen this magic - Morrigan's magic - performed by a darkspawn before.

"Get back!" he warned, horrified, as the warriors around him were assailed by the plague cloud: insects who spread taint with their stingers the way mosquitoes spread disease. His Holy Smite was the only thing that could touch the abomination - he struck, and struck again, forcing the emissary to shift back to its original form to defend itself.

Alistair cleaved his sword straight ahead, shattering the blue light of several warding glyphs, searing the enchantments into nothingness. Energy coursed into his arm, burning him, but he ignored the pain. His sword became a crackling, living thing as it tore through magical defences, drove through the arm that held the staff, through the creature's jawbone…deep into its skull.

A hand on his shoulder nearly bowled him over. "Good work!" Fergus called, laughing in an excitement that touched on madness. Alistair, Fergus and Teagan led their men forward, individuals transformed into a tempest of destruction.

---

Slumped next to his horse, listening to Dauntless' racking breathing, Alistair noted the droplets of darkness congealing at the corners of the world and marvelled that time could have passed so quickly. The fort had fallen. Over it hung the acrid smells of smoke and charred wood, the stink of blood and entrails, taint and grimy sweat. His exhausted gaze went to his sword arm. Black blood completely covered his right side, from ear to heel. Splotches on his left told of cross-strokes to that side.

He remembered nothing.

A murky sense of triumph seethed through inchoate thoughts. There was also foreboding - which made no sense, since the battle was won.

He closed his eyes; was assailed by dots of remembrance. Glint of edged weapons. Low thud of clubs absorbed by armour. The crackle of dark magic. Darkspawn snarling; teeth rending.

A hand on his shoulder brought his eyes open. Teagan - gauntlets protecting him from the tainted blood. His drawn face held the look of years lived in hours, but he smiled.

"Everyone talks of how you fought."

Alistair looked to the south, towards the pale clean lake that budded from the Frostback River. "Let's go wash off the muck."

"You ought to have waited, before you dashed off alone to fight that emissary. I could have killed you for it when we were milling in the hall." Teagan was feeling the reaction - not only to his fears for Alistair, but to all he had seen and done.

Fergus, joining them, said, "I promised you a show today. You outdid me. You outdid everyone."

The army did not camp in the ruined, tainted fort but the valley beyond, pitched tents gleaming in the light drizzle like the wet fins of sea-creatures.

After they had sluiced off the blood and filth of battle, Alistair walked Dauntless cool, washed the stained and matted flanks, rubbed him down, fed and watered him. He asked Ines to apply poultices to his legs, to draw out any remaining soreness. Then he and Teagan set up their campfire. Around them, a thousand such fires bloomed to life. Their wet cloaks steamed in the heat as they boiled water. So did the coats of mabaris and horses. The smells of wet wool and wet horses expanded to fill the valley...comforting to the boy who had grown up in Eamon's stables. His head felt heavy, stuffed with thick smells and memories…he ran a hand through his wet, ruffled hair. Zevran was always teasing him about the cut…he smiled, thinking of the companions who remained with Rilian's force. Thoughts of Rilian herself washed through in a coloured storm of emotions. The final memory - of her sword slicing through his palm at the Landsmeet - stung; he absently ran a thumb along the thin scar.

They ate soaked wheat and beans, and a lump of soggy bread. Teagan was looking at him as though he had never seen him before.

"Alistair," he said slowly, "I have always followed my brother's orders - his values. I supported his bid to make you King because I wanted to keep the Theirin bloodline on Ferelden's throne. Now, I think," he looked at Alistair hesitantly, as if fearing to hurt him, "that maybe I was wrong. Not because you wouldn't make a fine King but because you are a wonderful Warden."

Alistair looked up, startled. "I always thought I must be a big, fat disappointment."

Teagan winced. "That you felt that way is our fault. You were never a disappointment. Tell me: do you remember a day in your childhood, when the Orlesian First Warden came to Ferelden? She stayed at Castle Redcliffe."

Alistair remembered as though it had been yesterday. As with the rest of his life, he had been shown some mystery, and then it vanished, disappearing like a bubble of light. He had learned to hoard such glimpses, keep them deep in his mind, until he found another and another, linking together like beads on the golden amulet Eamon had given him. He had struggled to make them fit some pattern. Rilian had understood his need to build a fantasy out of disappointing reality - but she had always known what she was, and what her place was, growing out of the Alienage like a young tree. Alistair had had sidelong looks, sly taunts, occasional brief phrases, whispers, suggestions, riddles. "Don't you know, lad?" a guardsmen had once asked him. That guardsman had disappeared soon after. Once, a boy had taunted him: "Only bastards don't know who their parents are."

"Alistair: that Elven woman was your mother. Maric and she had been on a mission to the Deep Roads. Eamon swapped you for another child of Maric's - the baby of a servant girl who died soon after birth."

Alistair's heart thudded as the implication sank in. Goldanna - the family he had tracked down, with Rilian's help - was not his sister.

"My brother wanted to raise a possible heir to the throne - he knew the Landsmeet would never accept a boy of Elven blood. But when Connor was born, he changed his mind. Connor was Cailan's nephew - a true-born heir. That's why you were sent to the Chantry."

Alistair found the look on Teagan's face worse than anything he could have said. He wanted to scream at it, to run from it, to be what all those different people wanted…that they expected him to be without explaining beforehand. He was supposed to guess, to figure it out from hints that were enough for others but had never been enough for him. He had never known where he fit; never known what it was that Eamon wanted - only that he wasn't right. He did not try to express the memories that flooded him now: other children had had brothers and sisters, parents, a pattern into which they fit. All those patterns excluded him: he had been defined, he realized, by negatives. You are not my brother, Teagan's son had said, shoving him away when he would have made friends. He had learned not to ask the adult men if they were his father; he had learned not to ask women if they were his mother. When he had asked those questions, in his innocence, he had been thrust away: you are not my son. He had learned not to ask the questions that crowded into his head for that would risk the little he did have - the little he did know. And in the unknown spaces he could make up his own answers, safe as long as he did not ask, did not seek the truth. He had hoarded the little bright pictures of parents who would come for him - a sister who would welcome him to a cosy cottage - like treasures that would be torn from him if he spoke of them to a soul. His dreams were not lies if he did not ask. Rilian had once said to him: "I've been an oddball for most of my life - causing trouble, having the elders tut at me. But I always knew what I was a rebel from. I knew my father's face, my mother's; I scuffled with Soris, teased Shianni…and I cannot imagine what it would have been like without them. Would I have gone my own way - learned music and reading - if I had not been sure who I was? Have I taken pride in being true to my own vision without realizing how lucky I am to have such a vision?"

Searching for his sister had taken every ounce of courage Alistair possessed. Safer to guard his dreams, his private corners of the mind - what truth could improve them? In his mind, Duncan could be the loving father he had never had - in reality, Duncan had loved him no more than anyone else. Goldanna had hated and resented him. What could anyone build from truths that only took away, that never gave?

"And then," Teagan went on, the quiet, diffident voice flaying him, "came Cailan's instructions before Ostagar. The King wanted Eamon to stay in Redcliffe - wanted an army ready to defend him when he announced his marriage to Empress Celene."

It came to Alistair in a sudden storm that he had been sent to Ishal not by Duncan but by Cailan - because he was a potential heir to Ferelden if things went badly. Cailan was trying to protect him because he knew he had depleted their forces by a third just to safeguard a political marriage. Dully, he thought it was unfair to hate Loghain for his betrayal yet not to hate Cailan and Eamon for the same. But he was too full of anger at himself to feel much anger for anyone else. He was disgusted because he saw now what Rilian had seen - why she had defended Loghain at the Landsmeet. He had hated her for that - had wanted just one person in all the world to put him first - side with him whether right or wrong. Now, as a leader of armies, his longing for something only children wanted ebbed, and he saw the larger picture. Rilian had been true to Duncan's ideals - far truer than Alistair himself had been.

He sat in silence, aware of nothing but exhaustion and the hollow space in his chest. Not that he was beyond surprise, or wise enough to understand all the undercurrents and tangents of the situation. He was too full of regret to be bothered with anger at anyone else. When he tried to tell himself he had messed up because he had been exhausted, a small voice chattered derision: he hadn't been exhausted when he had let Morrigan fry his brains. Alert, but stupid. That covered it pretty well.

"Alistair…"

"I need to speak to Riordan," he said dully, and rose to his feet. Teagan made a gesture - a dismayed, aborted movement to stop him - but Alistair did not turn back.

He found Riordan staring out towards the dark expanse to the north: pools of water and night that swallowed the camp like a gigantic sea creature.

"We have done well - better than I hoped. But the main bulk of the horde is still heading toward Ostagar," Riordan said. "I must reach Warden-Commander Tabris - warn her to be ready."

"How?" Alistair blurted. Fear for Riordan - who had become older brother and mentor - displaced regret and grief. "You'll never get past the horde."

Riordan smiled - and gestured toward a cart that lumbered like an ox, driven by a skilled teamster. The cart carried one of the small boats that had dotted Redcliffe's harbour.

"Across Lake Calenhad."

Alistair blinked. "Riordan: that Lake is full of whatever gunk the mages drop from their Tower. Maker knows what things have grown up in the depths!"

Riordan's lips parted in a devilish grin. Bared teeth gleamed white in the darkness. He gave a louche shrug. It was the smile of a man very near his Calling - the smile of a man who has faced torture and darkspawn and the machinations of Orlesian politics. The smile of a born risk-taker who has very little to lose.

"Have I ever told you that you worry too much?" he chided.

---

Thin, icy needles of hail struck the hard ground with a metallic clatter, like arrows striking steel. The night was a black-and white swirl of hail and darkness. Channon Cousland squinted into the white-washed distance. A pale almost-moon turned the valley beyond into a lake of silver, cast the starkness of fir trees and the towers beyond into sharp relief. The bleak monolith of Ostagar jutted into the throbbing sky. It was a pale shadow of what it must have once been: a Tevinter fortress of sweeping scale and power - but to Channon all such buildings held the grandeur of tradition, the weight of history. This ancient heaviness had always moved him: given him a sense of his own concerns dwarfed into insignificance. But now he saw the site of his brother's death, of Loghain's treachery. Low, oppressive dark clouds shrouded white stone. The eerie quality of light, the cold water-loud night, reminded Channon of a particular piece of music he had liked. Chilling; a sense of women lamenting. The deep bass notes seemed to crush the listener.

"Loghain," he said, under his breath, the name a dark-shrouded sigh. It wasn't clear to him whether the Teyrn had conspired with Rendon Howe to attack Highever or not. Politically the men were allies, Ferelden isolationists, who had been threatened by Bryce Cousland's overtures to Orlais. Loghain must have known - if not the exact form - of some danger. And Channon was very clear on what had happened afterwards.

The bruises that had marked Channon's time away from Vigil's Keep dungeon like organic clocks had bloomed into a riot of colour - burgundy, indigo, back, yellow-green, ochre, blue - and then faded. Not so the scars; those were for life. A warrior's scars mocked and redrawn in fresh blood; his history, his identity re-written. The memories of every degradation Rendon Howe could think of remained too. It wasn't clear to him that his body could carry this new, forced message. Howe had written; he still had the power to burn the book.

It was Delilah who had helped him escape. The girl who had hated him when they were children had been a fellow sufferer. Not that her father would have cheapened her value on the marriage market by touching her that way. But she did not even realize all he had done.

…"One day you'll realize just what he's done to you, and then you'll hate him almost as much as I do"…

Delilah had helped him on the condition that he spare Thomas and Nathaniel. Channon had promised her he would - provided they could prove they'd had nothing to do with the fall of Highever. It was a safe bet: he'd seen Thomas stake his mother and Oriana out in the dirt, slitting Oren's throat in front of them while his men took their pleasure. About Nathaniel he was not so certain. Nathaniel had been summoned from the Marches, where he had been squire to Viscount Dumar of Kirkwall; he doubted Rendon Howe would have risked putting such things in a letter.

He, Delilah, and the imprisoned former seneschal, Varel, had escaped through the tunnels beneath the Vigil's Keep basement. Tunnels that had led all the way to the Deep Roads…moving through them to a smuggler's cove near Amaranthine, to an inn named the Crown and Lion…even to an abandoned wasteland called Drake's Fall. No darkspawn had troubled them; the horde massed in the south. Here the seeds of the rebellion had been planted: rescued men and Elves, some of the Banns not brought to Ostagar. But nothing could have flowered without the one who had joined them when the starving fugitives fled a counterstrike, taking shelter in a mountain fort named Soldier's Peak.

After that things had moved fast. Vigil's Keep was taken right after Rendon Howe summoned Thomas and Nathaniel to the Arl of Denerim's palace; Highever soon after. Lord Eddelbrek's farmlands had been a priceless coup; Channon had offered aid to Queen Anora in return for both Teynrir and Arling. He knew she had lied when she told him her father was innocent of Howe's crimes - and had killed the man to prove it. He knew also she had already promised the North to the sons of Howe, in return for their aid against the darkspawn. He had almost decided to remain in Highever, knowing that possession of the castles would translate to ownership. Let the Howe brothers spend their forces against the darkspawn; they would not unseat him. A Cousland always did his duty first: but duty meant duty to one's lineage, and to the farmers, soldiers and serfs under his protection. The concept of Ferelden as a nation meant little to the Couslands: like all the nobles whose bloodlines predated Calenhad, they had more in common with the knights of Orlais than with those who shared a mere geographical location.

He was not entirely sure why he had not followed that sound reasoning. Was it because, during the months of campaigning, he had come to see how his freeholders and Elven servants lived - that maybe his father had been wrong to suppose their lot would be improved by a union with Orlais? Or because he would not have it said that the last remaining Cousland had shown cowardice?

Or was it the Blood Mage's influence? Perhaps he was not the author of his own thoughts, his decisions.

He turned to the hooded figure beside him. The creature he had rescued from demons at Soldier's Peak now barely resembled the human man he had been. His scalp was dirty, almost hairless, his lips thin and lacking even a hint of pink. The soft cartilage of nose and ears had collapsed into mere vestigial lumps. Loose, ragged flesh hung from the scrawny neck, undulating when he turned his head. His eyes were orbs of black floating on beds of dark red. Channon saw only glimmers of recognition reflective of the man he had been. It wasn't so much an emotion or expression but rather the way a certain shadow fell across his face, in a manner more obscuring of the gaze of an abomination than revealing of his human self. The black eyes were piercing - Channon could see the potential for horror there - but behind them was a depth and a darkness that transcended humanity, a wisdom that reached back through two centuries, an intelligence connected to a higher realm. Avernus was a being possessed of powerful magic. Diabolical magic, yes - but after what Channon had endured good and evil were malleable terms.

"So what is your payment for helping me, Blood Mage? I've never understood."

"Besides the pleasure of your company?"

Channon's smile was thin, like the gleam of a knife. "Yes, besides that."

"To face the horde, of course. I am a Warden - have always been a Warden, long before I became…something else. I can sense there is a Blight. I can sense where the largest mass of the creatures will assemble. And I seek power. The power to do what I want to do…need to do."

He reminded Channon of a raven, preening its oily black feathers. "And what is it that you want to do?"

"I want to learn the secrets of this taint of ours…the taint Wardens share with the darkspawn. I want to learn of its origin, and how it may be conquered. There are secrets so dark, so deep, that the only way to discover them is to tear open the Black City and root about in its foundations."

Corruption cloaked this strange, altered man so palpably that Channon had the sensation that if he reached to touch him, his hand would mire in gelatinous, clinging taint.

"You speak strangely, Warden," Channon said slowly, "Death and taint - I thought they were the same thing."

Avernus grinned maliciously, though at what Channon was not certain. "Oh no - not remotely. The taint - is change. From human to…something else."

Avernus' black eyes lost their lustre - for a moment, the encircling red seemed to vanish entirely, leaving only holes in a darkened skull. An oppressive tension filled the night. "My dreams - those few nights when sleep actually comes - are full of the Call. Of the decaying hulk with colossal wings - of the memories rising like bubbles from a rotting mind, calling the darkspawn to the surface. Of the silver mesh of the Song - and the dark web of the hive-mind between. You do not see that all you have suffered - all the deaths in one puny Civil war - are as nothing compared to what will come - if we do not prevent it. I have helped you because you will bring me to that battle."

The Blood Mage's mottled staff seemed a living thing; something pulled against its will from beneath rock. As Avernus held it before him, the wind lifted his cloak, spreading it like wings. For a moment, the wavering darkness made him a thing: a demon out of legend. Channon wondered why he was not more angry over being used as a pawn. He had the strange sense that he himself had stepped into the pages of a story - almost as if, but for a twist of fate, he had been meant to be here all along.

---

Three weeks after entering Cailan's tent, Rilian went to sleep in the same spot - within the golden tent that had been her gift from the soldiers. It had taken the army a week to reach Ostagar - and another week before the Dalish Keepers had cleansed the taint that shrouded it by magical fire. The sight had been inexpressibly moving: an intimation of what might lie on the other side of the Veil. The rotten tendrils and inky shadows sloughed off like a defiled, clinging garment, to fall away like cast-off rags. The green-and-purple flames reaching high, leaving white stone as freshly-scrubbed as Cyrion's floor, like the bleached bones of some vast noble creature. There was a power in the flames that was not just burning - Rilian had had an inchoate sense of the Wild's power to re-create itself, absorb and transmute even the Blight. Keeper Marethari had been surprised and gratified when she hesitantly broached the subject - and Rilian and the old healer had spent many hours cloistered in Ostagar's Temple, which Rilian had commandeered for her research. She had the sense that the Keeper's magic would prove important somehow.

Not that she had made any other progress. Along with Wynne and Jowan, she had tested her sample of blood, made what notes she could - but they were hampered by lack of knowledge and lack of equipment. What she wouldn't give for a mage's worktable! One lead had been Wynne's story of a potion given to King Maric by Enchanter Remille, to protect him from taint. But Loghain had exploded that story as a lie, a placebo. The Orlesians had had no interest in protecting Ferelden's King. His untimely death on a fool's mission would have played into their hands.

Something scratched at the tent flap. Rilian ignored it, turning over, still half-asleep. One hand reached out - caressed the smooth neck of the instrument Valendrian had made for her. He had followed Rilian's design - a longer, slimmer version of her lute, six-stringed, traced by runes of lightning that gave the chords a wailing twang never heard in Thedas before. Her companions were not convinced - Wynne and Loghain remarked darkly that music was not what it had been in their day, Shianni compared it with the mating cry of One-Eyed Sal, and Rylock told her it made her think of the sound of souls hurled into the Void. Even Leliana listened with a curiously frozen expression - the look of someone noting but choosing to ignore the assassination of good music. Rilian remained undaunted. She conceded the instrument required a whole new style of play - but set herself to experimenting. She hadn't decided on a name yet.

The scratching at the tent flap became an ear-splitting yell. Ravenous exploded into fierce barking. Prepared for anything, Rilian reached for Dworkin's crossbow.

It was, in fact, Dworkin himself. "Only me." Excitement rang in the simple words. Muttering sleepily, Rilian flung open the tent flap. Dworkin bustled in, grabbing Rilian's arm. "You're not dressed," he observed, and bubbled on, undisturbed by Rilian's glower. "I've got something to show you. Simplest thing in the world. Can't imagine why I didn't think of it sooner."

All Rilian's questions earned the same knowing grin. Soon she was smiling too. Dworkin's enthusiasm was irresistible. She shooed him out and pulled on one of Alistair's old tunics, her black leggings, and Adaia's boots. Then she got up to follow. One hand absently stroked the smooth slab of Ravenous' square head.

"Go back to sleep, boy. Big day tomorrow."

As soon as she stepped outside she saw that the landscape had been transformed overnight. The Maker had been at work - scattering the land with a frozen shower of snow, diamond-bright ice crystals that covered the bleak stone like ice on a wedding cake. The surrounding tents were outlined in white like the sails of ships in harbour; the cuneiform of bird's footprints speckled the wooden stockades. The courtyard by the main gates gleamed like a great, grey frozen lake - the valley beyond was a blue-and-white moonscape stretching to the dark edge of the pre-dawn sky. What had been a poisoned, decaying stone hulk was now a white city, dressed like a bride for her husband. Discovering the world's power to reshape itself, Rilian was speechless, euphoric.

She followed Dworkin west, towards the kennels. Near the western gate, the white, dead tree still stood - but now it was wreathed in silver ice that transformed it to an intricate latticework, as fine and delicate as lace. The shimmering mesh seemed to hold up the milky, opaque sky. It was like living inside a pearl. The pale sun was rising behind them, splintering into spears of light, as of ethereal armies. Translucent fog swayed and danced like a sea of ghosts.

The stone courtyard was vast and featureless as a lake of ice. Rilian and Dworkin were alone, though the faint light of torches bobbed around the perimeter, and the clattering of pots to the north told her Cyrion and his crew were up and about. In the quiet and stillness, Rilian felt solid and real, far removed from the ghost the Architect had made of her. Whenever she tried to think of the Architect her mind balked, fragmented...her thoughts skittered away. Even her memory of him had taken on the surreality of nightmare...she saw his rippling, robed form melt and crawl and change like a misshapen candle, becoming that of a huge black spider that held her down, injected a proboscis that pumped her full of poison...her whole body torn open, everything exposed. Nothing left that was hers.

But she was alive, as numb and empty as a glass in the winter sunlight, bathed in the impersonal vastness of the fortress.

Behind the mabari kennels was the long wooden structure of the stables; newly built. Ferelden's army had fielded only a small number of horses...used by Loghain's men in their charge from cover. Now, the addition of the Templar horses proved a logistical nightmare. Loghain argued fiercely with Rylock that the animals were useless mouths - and she retorted that she would rather roast and eat him than the destriers. So they were kept here, and looked after by the Templars like four-legged altars, fed better than the Templars themselves.

They passed three Templars left on duty, huddled together like survivors in the wreckage of a storm. Snatches of their impassioned conversation drifted over:

"You want to know what happened? I'll tell you. The Orlesian Chantry wrote to Grand Cleric Odila and told her not to send men to Ostagar...and she obeyed." Templar-Sergeant Rocald - whom Rilian privately knew as Rockhead - was speaking. Head like a rock, face scarred like a battle-axe. He'd joined the Order late in life - after his wife and children were slain at Redcliffe castle by the demon inside Connor.

"What?!" That was Merriot, a younger son of Bann Franderel. He looked too young to be fighting at all. The third man was Irminric. After his ordeal in Arl Howe's dungeon, he still looked faintly otherworldly, his fair hair prematurely greying.

"Wait, just wait. It gets better. When our Knight Commander went to her replacement, Grand Cleric Leanna forbade her to lead us against the darkspawn. Oh yes. Because they were orders from the Knight Divine. Ser Gerard Caron ordered us to do nothing against the Blight - and allowed Revered Mother Boann to be defiled!"

Rocald looked strange - fierce - his dark eyes burning in his corrugated face. Sweat gleamed on his cheekbones. Blood pulsed under his skin.

Rilian knew Rylock was no politician; she had told only her most senior officers what they had discovered at Ostagar. She would not have opened Boann's grave, shown the dead face, to become a rallying cry. But someone had talked. At first Rilian had thought it was one of the Templar officers. But she had reconsidered. After all, who gained from a schism between the Ferelden and Orlesian Chantries? Loghain was a wily old Ferelden mabari, and doubtless some of Rendon Howe's guile had rubbed off.

Not that they were accusing the Divine herself: the habit of worship was too strong. It was the Knight Divine on whom was laid the burden of condemnation. He was too close to the Throne, they said, and had taken advantage of the Divine's age and illness to do the Empress' bidding.

"Who told you?"

"Who told me? Ha! Who told me! I'll tell you who told me!" Rilian wondered if he were going a little mad. Food was not the only thing in short supply. The new Grand Cleric, the former Revered Mother Leanna of Amaranthine, had refused to send the customary supplies of lyrium. Rylock had been too proud to bring this to her attention - but, like all good Alienage citizens, Rilian was good at keeping her ear to the ground. She had sent a message to her old supervisor Garn Brosca for help - and the duster Rogek had arrived in camp yesterday bearing gifts. Rilian had no way of knowing whether his bootleg lyrium was the same as the official version - who knew what the Chantry added to theirs? - and guessed it must taste like Alarith's white cider compared with champagne. Rylock had hesitated before accepting - a bitter struggle between morals and necessity - and had darkly remarked: "I had wondered at the hold you seemed to possess over Knight Commander Harith. Now much is made clear." Rilian had never wanted her friend to know that she had supplemented her docks income with Brosca's trade - or that, during her ragtag rebellion against Loghain, she had sold to Godwin at Kinloch Hold for fifty sovereigns.

"Our Knight Commander doesn't take orders from Ser Gerard le Craven Caron! We'll shoulder our weapons to fight the darkspawn though it cost us our lives! We won't play games of ransom with the birthplace of Andraste! We're going to stay and fight to our last drop of blood!"

Teeth like tombstones under his bloodshot glare. A ravaged crater of a face: dark, frozen, twisted. A living, walking apocalypse.

"But if there were orders..."

"Damn the orders! We'll fight without orders!"

And he was off - like a stone from a catapult - to spread the word.

Dworkin led her past the Templars... past the stables, where a young squire gave them a cheery wave...finally stopping at an enormous pile of manure! Rilian quickly clapped a hand to her nose. Dworkin showed her what he called his methane production tank with the pride of a man discussing fine jewellery. Rilian considered his preoccupation with horse shit just another facet of Dworkin's oddness, and was just wondering if this was what she had come to see when he brought her to what he called his "office". An out of the way cranny, Rilian was not surprised to learn it had been a stall before Dworkin claimed it as his own. Now it had a new window, freshly cut, and a long worktable that stretched the length of one of the walls. The opposite wall was fitted with shelves. The space remaining in the centre was just enough for a man to turn about. The table was littered with jars of all sizes and shapes, a large mortar and pestle, and a crude scale. Dworkin posed under the window, grinning like a child with a secret. Rilian finally had to ask what she was supposed to see.

Dworkin was crestfallen. "You didn't notice? Can't you smell it?"

Patiently, Rilian replied: "I haven't been able to smell anything else since I got here. I've got to tell you, Dworkin, it doesn't intrigue me."

Roaring with laughter, Dworkin said: "Not the manure. This!" He hoisted a sack off the shelf. "The cloudheads use it all the time. For the soil. They doctor the horses with it."

Mystified, Rilian looked in the bag. "Sulphur?" she asked. She heard her voice questioning Dworkin's sanity.

Dworkin was even more amused. "You just don't see it, do you?" With his hands on Rilian's shoulders, he steered her outside: "Look over there - that charcoal oven. Now the sulphur. And now..." he guided her to stare down into the feculent mass of the manure settling pond. A kind of white scum floated on top.

"That white stuff?" Rilian asked blankly, "Like salt?"

"Salt." Scorn dripped from the word. "Don't you cloudheads know anything? That "white stuff" is Salis Petrae - similar in composition to lyrium sand. The charcoal oven. The sulphur. Doesn't that suggest anything to you?"

"Oh Maker," Rilian said, breathing hard, "Gaatlok. You're working on the formula for Gaatlok."

Dworkin practically trotted back into his office, leaving Rilian with no choice but to follow. "I knew I was close before: the mixture of lyrium sand, sulphur and charcoal in the grenades was good for starting fires. But no oomph, you know. It riled me to think of those hornheads being able to manage something we dwarves couldn't. I even wondered if we had invented the stuff, way back when - and been forbidden to use it. Explosions in an underground city - casteless being able to get their hands on the stuff - it wouldn't have pleased the deshyrs. I reckon I'm reinventing Dwarven Blackpowder."

He pointed out jars of the white powder, then pots with a black, grainy substance. "I've got a pretty good supply now - those Templar horses are sent by the Ancestors! But I can't get the mix to work right." He banged one of the jars on the table and sent Rilian into an instinctive cringe. Memories of her experience lighting the grenades with Nathaniel Howe were vivid in her mind. "This is good charcoal. Willow. And the sulphur's straight from the Frostbacks. Pure as the morning's snow." As he talked he was dumping dabs of each in a different pot, stirring it round with a stick. He poked at it viciously. The pot rolled drunkenly.

Rilian grabbed his arm. "Be careful!" she squeaked. "If you blow us up, it's going to be a problem."

"If we don't find a trump card against the spawn we won't have any more problems. Ever."

His argument couldn't be denied.

Dworkin dumped the newest batch into his tiny firepit. It sizzled and spat blue flame that smoked horribly. He shook his head sadly.

Rilian thought of the Alienage story of the box. What was invented couldn't be uninvented. She saw again the pool, its reflections disturbed, rippling outwards. But Dworkin was right.

"Anything you need - supplies or workers - I'll get you. Make this for Ferelden, Dworkin. We need this."

"Aye, Warden, you'll have your explosives. Bigger and better."

Rilian turned to leave - and a messenger caught up to her, breathless from running.

"Warden-Commander! Armies. Armies at Ostagar's gates!"

Rilian headed south immediately, towards the chill enormous racks of iron spears, encased in snow. The camp was alive, energised. She saw Loghain, striding out of the tent he shared with Cauthrien, like a grizzled Ferelden juggernaut. She passed the Quartermaster's office, then the mage encampment - now home to just Wynne, Jowan and Morrigan, the Dalish Keepers remaining with their own. Morrigan and Wynne were already finding the encampment not big enough for the both of them, while Jowan remained with Ser Otto out of choice, finding him better company than either of them. A cluster of Templars stood nearby. They looked anxious and confused.

"...I never trusted the Knight Divine. I always said so, didn't I? I always said he had the heart of a mercenary."

"Orlesians are all the same." That was handsome young Cullen, whom Rylock had recruited straight after the horrors at the Circle Tower. Knight Commander Greagoir had not trusted him to remain with the surviving mages, and he had found in Rylock an unexpected support. When no more than his age, she had survived a similar experience. He was fired up, nervous, twitching like a fly on a fishhook.

"He's a politician, pure and simple. He joined the Order to seek his fortune, not to fight for the Maker."

"Wasn't he once in the Empress' service?"

"That's right. And do you know why he left? Because Celene promised him her cousin's hand, and then broke her promise. That's why he joined the Order - because he missed out on marrying royalty. He was never a true Templar."

"And by his order, Ostagar and Lothering fell. Ser Bryant and his knights died to the last man. And Revered Mother Boann..." but Cullen could not finish.

"May the Maker strike him down for his sinfulness."

Rilian looked past them - to the quiet figure sitting by the tents. She had never seen her friend like that: despairing, staring blankly into his darkness. She could hardly bear to look at Ser Otto, sitting beside Jowan over an untouched game of chess. She wanted to go to him - needed to, because their shared love for Boann meant that no-one else in the world could come as near to him right now. But her coward feet remained rooted in the snow. His face was breaking her heart.

Relieved - hating herself - she allowed herself to be swept along - caught up in the excitement of their unexpected reinforcements.

---

Not all the reinforcements were unexpected. Riordan had journeyed from Redcliffe, sailing across Lake Calenhad to avoid the horde to the south, bringing word that the armies of Redcliffe, led by Bann Teagan, and the mages and Templars of Kinloch Hold, led by Knight Commander Greagoir and First Enchanter Irving, were on the march, commanded by Warden Alistair. They'd successfully defended Redcliffe from a darkspawn attack, and were now harrying the main force, driving them toward Ostagar. This was part of Loghain's plan.

Also expected were the Dwarves, who had marched from Orzammar. They had come out of the Deep Roads near Kinloch Hold, crossed the River Dane, then headed south.

What neither Rilian nor Loghain had expected was the army of grim, hard fighting men - many of them mercenaries and some of them Elves! - who followed Teyrn Channon Cousland. Nelaros had spoken of a fun-loving young nobleman whose tousled fair hair and easy charm was better suited to wooing the ladies than fighting. This pale wraith with strange scars seemed very different.

"My "army"," he said with repressed bitterness as he, Loghain, Rilian, Riordan and Kardol of the Legion met in the command tent, at the round table, "Or what is left of it after my father's men fell to Howe's treachery, and my brother's fell..." to yours, hung in the air as he stared with knifing enmity at Loghain "...at Ostagar," he finished, "and my battle mage - " and here he glanced at Rilian, with none of the usual scorn Ferelden nobles had for Elves, "are at your disposal."

"Yes," Rilian said, unable to take her eyes from the - man? - sitting beside Channon. The story Channon had told - of how his rebellion had sought shelter in an old abandoned keep while on the run from Howe's men - how that keep had once belonged to the Wardens - and how this Blood Mage was a survivor of a battle fought two-hundred years ago - was incredible. She could hardly wait for the war council to be finished so she could question him privately.

She found the...man, Avernus, staring at her just as intently. The taint crackled darkly between them. She felt forcibly the conflict between his decaying face and the awful vitality of his black eyes. They boiled with intelligence. His self-contradictory visage, the disfocus of his hot eyes, made him look wild - an appearance aggravated by his few remaining tufts of hair that clung to his mottled scalp like tendrils of taint. And yet his skeletal hands made reassuring gestures; his stance was welcoming, even deferential.

Perhaps because of the nightmare the Architect had become for her, Rilian was struck by the thought that Avernus resembled a spider. The keep Channon described - Soldier's Peak - seemed like the centre of his web; its tunnels the strands. Channon had been caught in it - an out-numbered fugitive mounting a near hopeless rebellion - and Avernus had used him for his own ends, to defeat the demons who held him captive and bring him here.

Loghain was explaining his strategy to Channon. "The forces of Warden Alistair will drive the horde toward us, using the Frostback River to prevent them retreating to the Wilds. My men and the armies of King Bhelen will block the escape route to the north, between east of Lake Calenhad and Lothering Forest. The Templars under Knight Commander Rylock, the Dalish archers and mages, will hold Ostagar. Between us, we will encircle the darkspawn, crush the horde against itself."

The meeting showed no sign of ending soon. Rilian rose with a thin smile.

"Excuse me, gentlemen. My fellow Warden and I have much to discuss. Avernus - come with me to my laboratory, if you would."

Avernus rose, his spidery fingers steepled together, and followed her like a ghost, a wraith. Rilian thought, once more, of the Architect. The living dead and the dead living...

She hurried past the bustle of camp, ignoring greetings and exclamations of surprise, not stopping until she reached the cool shelter of the monolithic Old Temple. The area was cordoned off - Rilian allowed only Jowan and Wynne access here. At the moment, it was deserted.

She helped Avernus to one of the chairs she had "borrowed" from Arl Eamon's tent. His breathing had a thick tubercular wheeze that was painful to hear. She sat opposite him, with her worktable and notes between.

At last she had the opportunity to observe him more closely. He conveyed an impression of suppressed haste, as though he were trying to resist the acceleration of some internal process. His movements were deliberate, tightly controlled; but his eyes flicked from side to side with a discernible rhythm, like a heartbeat being gradually goaded faster by adrenaline.

He is like the Architect! she realised. Once away from whatever enchantments kept him alive, he too was racing against dissolution.

Swallowing hard to clear her throat, she said: "There are things I must know: about how to create the Joining mixture. We lost the last at Ostagar."

In response, he let out a bark of laughter. The sound of it wheezed and rasped in the shadowed silence. "They sent you to face an Archdemon and they didn't even tell you that?"

Rilian was in no mood for levity. "I know enough to give my life against the Archdemon. I have fought Broodmothers and sentient darkspawn and Hurlock Generals while you mouldered away, imprisoned by your own mistakes."

Abruptly, he unfolded one age-spotted hand from his chest to stab his index finger in her direction. "I have done more than that," he hissed intensely, "I have brought supplies of the Joining mixture with me - my own improved formula, which increases Warden powers considerably and prevents any need for a Calling."

Rilian sat bolt upright, hope jolting through her like lightning. "You have it here! And you say you can prevent the Calling - does that mean you've found a cure for Taint?!"

"Not a cure. It is a disease that cannot be cured - it can only be slowed down. Assimilated by increasing the power in the blood, so that the worst effects - the deaths during the Joining, the accelerated decrepitude, the female infertility - can be ameliorated. Warden-Commander Dryden was very specific about the last requirement."

Rilian clapped a hand to her mouth to smother the hysterical, delighted laugh that threatened to tear forth. "But don't you see - that is a cure! How many diseases has mankind assimilated over the millennia? Children get marshfever, and then recover. What remains still exists within then, making them immune to other illnesses. The disease is neutralised." And to herself, she wondered: is this what the Architect was searching for? "Tell me of your studies," she went on, "Tell me everything."

"I doubt you would understand. I have no wish to waste the little time remaining to me." He flicked his eyes at her, and then away, back and forth in turn, their rhythm eloquent of mounting pressure, perhaps even of violence.

Rilian felt the skin of her face tighten: a smile thin as the blade of a knife. "Try me."

"I sought to refine the Joining - isolate the true power found in darkspawn blood, leaving behind the evil that kills us. So close...but I feel the corruption congealing within my blood, like droplets of darkness. I am starting to hear things, even when awake. A voice - more beautiful than any other - calls to me from the depths. In my dreams, I see the Black City and am drawn towards it. There is something there, an answer to what this taint is, this taint we share with the darkspawn."

Softly, Rilian said: "I believe the answer would lie within the ruins of Arlathan. I believe that the Black City was tainted long before the magisters invaded. I believe that demons and taint come from the same roots."

Without warning, Avernus snapped, "The Elves!" He sounded grimly angry - but the expression in his eyes might have been gratitude for this missing piece of the puzzle. Whatever emotions appeared on his ruined face or in his voice had no effect on the movement of his eyes. The rhythm continued as he told his story from the beginning: the rebellion against the tyrant Arland, led by Sophia Dryden - her orders that led him to sacrifice countless Wardens to test his formula - their final, desperate last stand that ended when the demons summoned by Blood Magic turned on friend and foe alike.

As he spoke the edges of Rilian's vision went dim with the red rush of fury. "So," she said, her contempt pouring forth, rich and dark as taint, "Your experiments in resisting taint were motivated not by a quest to cure humanity, but to satisfy one woman's greed for longer life, political power, and children. Did you not realise what you held in your hands?! That if a version of this formula were administered to people - even to the Old Gods themselves - there would be no more Blights? No - all you sought was a means of granting more power to the Wardens themselves! Didn't it occur to you that the true purpose of Wardens is to render themselves unnecessary?"

At once, a spasm of fury twisted his face. He squeezed his eyes shut. As if they weren't under his control, his hands curled into clawed fists and began punching at his temples. She saw that he was holding his breath.

Fiercely, he sucked in a deep breath through his decayed nose and opened his eyes. One muscle at a time, as if, by a supreme act of will, he regained command of himself.

He said, absently, "So, you are a visionary too. Perhaps what Sophia Dryden should have been." The rhythm of his eyes was faster, however, flicking to her and away like the stalking beat of his death.

Rilian thought, once more, of the Architect. Now that she had grasped what she could of Avernus' formula, she realised it wouldn't save his people. It would save hers - it might even save the Old Gods - because their own untainted blood existed alongside the infection. Darkspawn blood was the fruit of a rotten tree; there wasn't anything left to salvage.

If I could have shown him this, would it have changed anything? Perhaps not - he would still see the Children as a way of creating life from death - a new species. Never knowing what it is to be untainted, he would not know the difference. Yet...I saw his vision in my mind. When I meet him again, could I show him mine?

The strain of holding onto life brought sweat to Avernus' forehead. He spoke to the rhythm of his eyes:

"If you intend to be the one to die, you'd better make sure you have people to carry on our work. To the Joining; without delay."

The words were a clammy hand on the small of Rilian's back.

---

When Jowan realised Ser Otto's heart wasn't in the chess-game, he suggested they play later. The Templar didn't even look up. Jowan shuffled towards his own tent. Smells of morning broth, grimy sweat, herbs, leather and woodsmoke assailed him. He rooted around in his backpack - found a silver needle and thread given him by Wynne - and set about stitching a tear in his clean white tunic and trousers. Jowan liked the colour - it was safe, soothing, as far from the colour of blood as was possible. Wynne passed him - heading towards some commotion at the front gates - and called out. Jowan pretended he hadn't heard. Wynne was always giving him unwanted advice; Morrigan was less irritating, but she frightened him.

A coarse shout made him look up. Here came the Templar squires, Ord and Welf, who tormented him whenever Ser Otto wasn't there to look out for him. Ord exuded a smell of rotten vegetables. The charm of a dead cow, the wit of a swamp. Beside him, Welf the parsnip. Long, pale and stringy. Slouching along in oversized Templar tunics, the purple skirts flapping limply around their skinny calves.

What a splendid pair. What an inspiration. With those two on our side, who needs the Maker?

"So what are you doing, pretty maid?" Welf airing his stunted sense of humour. "Sewing your trousseau? Eh? Sewing your bridal gown?"

"That's right. Knight Commander Rylock has asked me to marry her."

A soggy explosion of sniggers from Welf. Ord just stood there. Wouldn't know a joke if it bit him on the behind. Still, they were the least of Jowan's problems. Ser Cullen, Ser Irminric, and Templar Sergeant Rocald all looked at him like hounds scenting a fox. He supposed they had reason to be angry. Rocald had lost his family to the undead at Redcliffe. Cullen had been one of the knights knocked off his feet by Blood Magic during Jowan's desperate escape from the Tower - probably blamed him for Uldred too. Irminric was still not recovered from his time in Howe's dungeon.

It wasn't fair! He wanted to tell them the abominations were Connor's doing - he'd had nothing to do with Uldred's schemes - he hadn't asked Howe to rescue him, or imprison his captors. But they wouldn't believe him anyhow.

A trio of Loghain's soldiers passed by. They peered at the tableaux, sizing them up, then sniffed in a neutral sort of way. Jowan caught snatches of their conversation - something about a letter the Teyrn had had from the Orlesian Chantry.

..."I wonder how long," one said, "before it comes to war."

"We are at war," said another, "it's only a matter of where we shall fight the battle. It would be impious to attack the Chantry. But sooner or later we shall have to deal with the chevaliers."

"Are you sure? The louder they bark, the more you can see their rotten teeth."

"Not so rotten we can do with them in our backsides when we fight the darkspawn."...

The rest of the conversation drifted into the wind.

Jowan could make no sense of the shifting political tides - had no idea what it might mean for him, or anyone else. The Circle mages were considered neither Ferelden nor Orlesian - they enjoyed the protection of no nation, and were considered to hold no loyalty. They were just...just mages. The talk of strategy - of where they would fight the darkspawn, and how - was a foreign language. Incomprehensible to him unless Ser Otto explained it - as the knight had shaped the howling chaos of their last battle into pieces that made sense, helped Jowan conquer fear.

Now that Ser Otto was closed in on himself, and communicated nothing but grief, Jowan found that he was increasingly handicapped. Adrift, not knowing what would happen or what his role might be. The gifts of chess and strategy and perception were being taken away from him. Ser Otto was like a man who was dying - and Jowan was like a man who was gradually going blind.

The two squires were suddenly scattered by a presence scarcely less fearful than an angry Knight Commander.

A long red shadow loomed before him. The Warden-Commander faced him in her Dragonscale armour, blocking his light. Her eyes were bright with sleeplessness; skin so pale it seemed translucent over her angular bone structure. No soft tissue; no fat - like a mechanism of overdriven steel and wire. Sword-point pupils black and inescapable.

Jowan knew - before she even opened her mouth - that this boded nothing good.

---

Duncan had been wrong - quite wrong, Rilian realised, in his assumption that the Wardens would have no more recruits if the secret of the Joining came to light. In fact, they had better recruits - men and women who knew the risks and chose to take them. Rilian thought of poor Ser Jory with a sigh. She didn't doubt that Duncan had believed his own argument - but she strongly suspected the edict had come from the First Warden simply to prevent nations creating their own Wardens, unbound to Weisshaupt.

When she delivered a short speech at the army camp, six men and women stepped forward. Ser Otto was first - then came five soldiers under Loghain's command. His young scout, Carver Hawke, two knights from Denerim: Rowland and Mhairi, and one of his Captains, a flame-haired woman named Aveline Vallen. Last to step forward was Alim Surana. Rilian also spoke to Kardol, and strongly recommended the women in the Legion Join as a matter of course - to protect them from the fate that awaited untainted darkspawn prisoners. The only two women - an icy blonde and a wiry dark-haired scout - agreed quite willingly. The final candidate was the one who brought a guilty pang to Rilian's chest. The only one who had been given no choice, no option - Jowan.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened about the camp, casting oblong pillars into red-tinged dragon's teeth, Rilian spoke briefly with the nine. She interviewed them in her laboratory - test-tubes, syringes, notes and vials of blood carefully tidied away. On the worktable was a pitcher containing her favourite Dalish invention: hot water infused with dried herbs. It looked like dirty water. It tasted delicious. She offered the young Denerim knight Mhairi a cup, then ran through the risks of the Joining as calmly as she could. Mhairi seemed not to hear her.

"To defend my country against the greatest threat of all. I cannot imagine a greater honour."

Rowland, next, seemed cut from the same cloth. He actually blushed when he took her hand.

"To fight alongside the Dragonslayer!"

Rilian was torn between the desires to preen, and to weep for his innocence.

Captain Vallen was another surprise. A red-haired Amazon tall as Rylock, and broader in the shoulder. Rilian felt instantly that here was a rock she could rely on. Something in the dour, no-nonsense manner reminded her of Shianni.

"If you don't mind me asking - why would one of Loghain's Captains want to Join?" she questioned, genuinely curious.

The square-jawed face echoed Wynne's when she had accused Loghain. Vivid green eyes blazed; freckles standing out sharp and clear on her pale skin. "I began as a Captain in the King's service, not the Teyrn's. I fought beside him when he was slain. I barely escaped with my life. Because of the Teyrn's actions, the village of Lothering was next to fall - along with all its Templars, including my husband. I fled east, protecting the lad Carver Hawke and his family. We had...help, getting to Gwaren. I'm not sure you'd believe me if I told you. At Gwaren we faced the choice: flee Ferelden, or take ship to Denerim. I...could not bear to desert my country - but neither do I wish to serve under the man who betrayed me and so many others!"

Carver told a similar story. He was a pragmatic youngster who did not seem to feel personally betrayed by Loghain. He even respected him - as much as he was capable of respecting any authority. He talked so much about his family Rilian felt as if she knew them. The lovely, gentle twin sister who had died at Lothering - the erratic mother with her dreams of restoring the family name - and the firebrand older sibling who had promised to make that happen. "But that's Emily's goal - not mine. I have to be something on my own. I want to look forward, not back."

She already knew why Alim wanted to Join. The young Night Elf - built like a horseship, skin the colour of toasted almonds, dark eyes that missed nothing - was very clear about his need to avenge his father.

"What about Tia?" Rilian found herself asking. Alim blushed.

"She'll wait for me," he said stolidly, "Wardens aren't like Templars - are they?" His face creased with worry.

"No," said Rilian, smiling, "We can have relationships."

"And I could be of use to you," he added, with a cocky smile. Rilian exclaimed aloud when a small blue spark shot from his fingertips.

"You're a mage!"

He shrugged. "I can spark my arrowheads, make my aim a bit truer, keep myself warm in winter. I wouldn't have cut it in the Circle - and your Templar never sensed me. They'd have probably made me one of those funny fellows who never change expression."

"Does Loghain know?"

"Of course! Father was always honest with him. He's a decent man - he knows what apostates did for the rebellion. He contrived to remain carefully ignorant."

"Surana..." Rilian mused. "Surana. Do you know a Lia Surana?"

"My father's cousin. She married into the Denerim Alienage."

"I know her! She had a daughter who went to the Circle." Rilian was delighted to meet someone with whom she shared a history. Gossip about family and relations was part of the Alienage life blood.

"The Suranas have always had magic in our blood. Sometimes it skips a generation, but it always crops back."

Next came Ser Otto and Jowan. Although the mage guided the knight, it seemed to be Otto leading him and not the other way round. Jowan's face was pale, tense - he looked like he was going to be sick. Quietly, Rilian whispered to Ser Otto:

"You don't have to Join just because Jowan does. I need you to keep him on the straight and narrow but..."

"Do you think I could send a brother into danger and remain aloof myself?" Ser Otto asked mildly. And then - so softly Rilian wasn't sure whether she had imagined it - added, "Perhaps as a Warden I will hear her call me."

The two Dwarven women came last. Rilian and Sigrun clicked instantly; she knew she had found a kindred spirit when Sigrun remarked: "Does the land always do this - drop funny white stuff like rock crystals that melt in my hand?" Sigrun laughed off the effects of the Joining: "I'm already dead! I've nothing to lose."

The other woman was...harder to understand at first. She was blonde, pale, with eyes that burned like blue-hot opals, full of shifting fires. Rilian found them cold and repellent - like the predatory stare of a shark - but she felt their intelligence as a force behind them.

"My name was Gedren Aeducan," she said - in a low alto voice resonant of command, "Now I am known as Sarela."

"Kinslayer," Rilian translated.

"So not all Elves are as ignorant as Casteless." Her smile was a glint like a dagger drawn. "Kinslayer - indeed."

Rilian decided it was best to ask no questions.

The woman said: "But if you are not ignorant - I find it harder to understand what you did."

"What I did?"

"You have destroyed our future. You were swayed by Caridin's arguments about your people's slavery - but you of all people should know the fate of those forced to live as strangers in strange lands. The Alienages exist in the shadow of human walls - the Dalish cling to scraps of lost glory - yet by destroying the golems you will force us to accept the same, one day. You have lost your own culture and destroyed another - and felt yourself justified in making the decision for the sake of individual souls. But we Dwarves return to the Stone when we die - and what better way than as a golem, defending Orzammar. You denied us the chance to make the Ultimate Sacrifice, even as the Wardens vaunt it."

Shadows turned the face before her into stone, pale and unchanging. Rilian seemed to hear Wynne's voice: You thought you had the right. That is the root of all evil.

"I knew it wouldn't only be volunteers made into golems. It would be the Casteless - political prisoners - Bhelen's enemies..."

"And are all your Wardens volunteers?"

Jowan...

"I...believe in life above culture. I believe that life can adapt anywhere and - though it might bear no resemblance to that which spawned it - it is the life and the living that matters."

The Architect would say the same...

"But our souls live on in the bones of our ancestors, nestled for all time within the stone our cities are built upon - the cities that, thanks to you, will lie forever in darkness and filth. Our children's children will live in exile, unsouled, unmourned, with nothing to bequeath to the next generation."

"I begin to see," Rilian said softly - with the sense she was touching something as sacred as the Vhenadahl or the Qun or the Templars' Sacrament - "why your people are such great builders."

"Yes: building is worship to us - quite literally. It is our history and our future - our immortality."

Rilian could not rid herself of the strange conviction that this was a peer: one who might have stood where she was, held the fate of Ferelden in her hands, had chance not decided otherwise. She felt an ache of regret for a dream that would never be born - along with a slight whisper of relief, sighing through her like the shiver of wind around old stone.

"We all fight the darkness through the prism of our own beliefs. You are a builder: hence golems. I am an Elf: hence a medical cure for the taint."

"You have such a cure?"

"I'm - working on it," Rilian admitted.

"Perhaps," Sarela mused, "Your way might be as valid as mine - if you have the vision and the ability to back it up. Time will tell - but we do not have much left."

Less than you think. The Architect has these things too, and he never sleeps...

Rilian was not entirely surprised when both Rylock and Wynne sought her out, independently of each other. Both volunteered to take her place against the Archdemon. Rilian wanted to cry - but shot down the offers as quickly and baldly as she could. Rylock would survive the Joining because she had survived Blight sickness - but Rilian needed her to command the Templars. Wynne would likely not even survive Avernus' potion. Nonetheless, Rilian felt steadier, happier, less alone when they had left.

And - at the very last minute - she found herself facing one more recruit. Oghren collared her just as she headed toward the ruined courtyard outside the temple. His red beard made a splash of colour against the snow and stone, bristling in all directions.

"Thought I'd try my hand at becoming a bona-fide Grey Warden!"

Rilian blinked. "You understand the risks, right?"

"I piss on risk! It looks like you could use the extra hands."

Rilian sighed. "Alright," she agreed slowly.

"Good," Oghren said stoutly, "Like the old saying goes: nothing settles the stomach like the taste of darkspawn blood."

"I must've missed that one," Rilian muttered.

Oghren met her gaze, a surprisingly keen look in his brilliant green eyes - normally cloudy with ale. "You're looking a bit green around the gills, yourself. Tunnels don't agree with you, I take it?"

So - he'd heard about her encounter with the Architect. Something, anyway. "No," she said curtly.

He nodded expectantly, inviting the tale. When that yielded no result, he leaned forward and pointedly waggled his eyebrows.

With a sigh, Rilian capitulated. She told it as quickly and baldly as she could. Oghren was not one for subtleties.

"Hard thing - especially on a kid your age," he muttered darkly.

"I'm twenty!" Rilian told him indignantly.

"Like I said."

They sat in silence for a few moments. Rilian caught Oghren looking in the direction of his belt, and tracked his gaze down to his wineskin. He untied the string and handed it to her. She took a long, fortifying swig - and instantly coughed it up again. Oghren thumped her on the back.

"And after all that, you're going back down there. A good thing it is, to know the measure of your friends."

Their eyes linked in understanding. Rilian's long, fragile Elven fingers entwined with his stubby digits. They walked together, reaching the courtyard, facing what was to come. Rilian gazed up at a cloud castle floating gently past, at the sun like a burning red orb, and gathered herself.

---

The courtyard outside the old temple was blanketed in snow, and the brooding stone columns seemed to hold up the blank, milky sky. Rilian could hear the faint sounds of camp from beyond, but they seemed curiously unimportant: as if she and the ten recruits existed inside a bubble. Avernus and Riordan flanked her - and they summoned the ghosts of Alistair and Duncan…

…I will not lie; we Wardens pay a heavy price to become what we are…

…We're going to drink the blood of those - creatures?!...

…Alistair, if you would…

Rilian had gone over the creation of both versions of the mixture several times, supervised by Riordan and Avernus. Her tattered journal was riddled with notes. She turned to the Blood Mage:

"You said this works on those of us who have already Joined, right? Then I'll test it myself."

"Allow me," Riordan offered gallantly, "My death would not be such a loss; the taint will not spare me much longer."

He took the chalice from Avernus' claw-like hands, drank, and handed it back. He didn't even lose consciousness.

"It's strange. I don't know what the difference is…but I feel renewed, somehow."

Rilian stepped forward. Avernus extended his hands.

Rilian's mind exploded into fragments of memory…

…The offered cup might kill her. Arguments for living or dying raged…

…Nelaros was dead. Because Vaughan had wanted a night of pleasure…

…Vaughan's agonized screams when she…

…Rilian Tabris. Cyrion's daughter. Murderer…

Rilian took the few remaining steps toward Avernus with a feeling of risk that neared ecstasy. She took the chalice - drank deep…

Life thrilled in her veins; hot as molten gold. In the shadow of death, she lived. Her senses were sharper; her mind clearer. She looked around, and found colour in clouds and snow. It was as if she were seeing the world through one layer removed. She had never realized before how much the taint had seeped into her consciousness, stealing colour and warmth and life. She felt like an invalid feeling the sun on her face for the first time in years.

She turned toward her recruits, proffered them the new formula. "Jowan - it's time."

Jowan took a step back. His face seemed in constant motion. "I'm not a battle mage," he burbled, "Ser Otto killed those four darkspawn on the hill, not me. I'd be of no use…"

"I don't need a battle mage. I need a researcher. You'll be snug in your own laboratory, studying." Rilian's tone barely missed being contemptuous.

"I haven't been given a choice. Why am I the only one not given a choice?"

As if by magic, Rilian felt the panes of her face shift, morph and harden into new alignments. Her mind took on the blank implacability of Dragonbone. Her voice took on a heavy, resonant timbre. She recognized the tone she had used against the Architect with chilling fingers of memory.

"You made the choice the day you dealt with a demon. There is no other place on Thedas for a Blood Mage. The chalice or the sword. There is no turning back."

She was sickened to realize Avernus was looking at her with approval gleaming in his black, spider's eyes.

Ser Otto stepped forward, put a hand on Jowan's shoulder. "You can do this," he said quietly, "You faced your demons in Redcliffe Castle - took your own personal Harrowing. You have it within you to be a Warden - I know you do."

Despite his grief, he had not closed his heart to a fellow mortal creature. Rilian felt even more deeply her shame.

Jowan took the cup with trembling hands, whispered, "Lily," then drank. Ser Otto caught him as he fell, eased him to the ground. Rilian knelt over him, listened to his tremulous, shallow breathing. Only when she was sure he would survive did she rise and pass the cup to the next.

Sigrun and Sarela were as brave and matter-of-fact as Rilian had expected. Both survived. Alim looked as though he might hesitate - then a dark cloud twisted his face, making him old and ugly.

"For my father." He drank - and he, too, lived. As did Carver and Captain Vallen.

Oghren stepped forward. "Hand me the giant cup. I'll gargle and spit."

"You're not allowed to spit."

"Heh heh heh. That's what I always say."

Rilian felt a hysterical giggle clawing the back of her throat. She choked it back.

Oghren didn't even lose consciousness. White eyes raised to the sky, he simply remarked, "Hmm. Not bad," and smacked his lips.

Rilian was feeling positively buoyant as she passed the cup to the final two: Rowland and Mhairi. Rowland took the cup bravely, drank deeply. He arched his back, cried out in agony, and fell, thrashing. But he lived.

Mhairi did not. Rilian knelt by the still form in a stunned emptiness, unable to believe it. She felt for a pulse, tried to breathe life back into the frozen, pain-twisted lips. A sound scratched at her mind: the heavy breath of robes swishing on snow. A shadow loomed over her.

Rilian rounded on Avernus. "You said your mixture was safe!"

"What an infantile statement," Avernus remarked coldly, "One death in ten is a vast improvement."

Rilian shuddered, hating him. But he was right. It was just that…she could see how much work there was to be done before his mixture could become a cure. They could not decimate a population.

What if I gave them my blood, mixed with lyrium? It worked on Loghain and Rylock. But how do I know it wasn't also because Loghain had been exposed before, and Rylock's blood altered by lyrium? I'll need to put by samples of my blood, for the soldiers, even so. If only we could get our hands on the Architect's research!

Ser Otto knelt down and very gently closed the young woman's eyes. "Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls, from whose emerald waters doth life begin anew. Come to me, my child, and I shall embrace you. In my arms lies eternity."

His other hand reached outward, inviting the cup. Rilian took an involuntary step back.

"No, no! Not you too…"

But his hand closed about her wrist and his grip was tender but firm. Her own shaking nearly spilled the mixture to the ground as she handed it to him. Ser Otto drank deeply, closed his eyes, and sank back. There was hardly any change between the milky eyes and the white, and his expression was the peacefulest she had seen. He lived.

Avernus knelt down beside them, something like triumph gleaming in his pitch-black gaze.

"Warden-Commander: you have given meaning to our failed rebellion and two hundred years of imprisonment. All my victims died so you could have this, and make of it what you will."

He sighed, eyes closing, an oddly peaceful look on his decaying face. When he crumpled, it reminded Rilian of the collapsing sacks in the Tower: there was nothing left but dust and cloth. The old man surrendered his life as he had surrendered his knowledge, passing the torch to the next generation.

Rilian sank down onto the stone, not caring that the snow wetted trousers and boots. She drew her knees up to her chest and folded her arms across them, resting her chin on her hands. So much death; so much work… Arranging the funerals of Avernus and poor Mhairi felt like more than she could bear.

The heavy thudding of iron-shod boots interrupted her despair. "Eh, Orlesian - how about we get those poor sods inside; try to make them decent-looking. Won't help much with the mage, but…"

"I agree." The weary, musical Orlesian voice floated over her head. Rilian watched Oghren and Riordan carry the bodies inside the temple with inexpressible gratitude. She followed them into the cool darkness. The sun was too low in the sky to reach inside, and with the candles snuffed out it was no more than a mausoleum.

"I shall speak to Loghain and Channon," she said dully, "and make the arrangements."

"I'll go," Oghren offered, "You stay with your Wardens."

Rilian wrapped her arms around him and kissed his bristly cheek. His mingled smell of sour ale, rank sweat and dried blood was familiar and comforting.

"What's this? A peck on the cheek? You my sister or something?"

Rilian managed a smile. She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation and then, posing: "Recover from the Joining, I'll come back and give you one of those on the lips. I do you one of my late-night-specials while you're in this shape, you are dead. All that darkspawn blood comes steaming out of your ears in one big hiss. Bye bye Oghren."

"Heh heh heh." Oghren took a long, satisfying swig of his wineskin and strode away, boots making slushy lakes in the pristine snow.

Riordan smiled at her. Bared teeth gleamed white in the darkness. His movements seemed swifter since he had drunk the mixture; freed from the pain and weakness that were the after-effects of Loghain's torture.

"I must be leaving too. The movement of armies will not wait for one old man."

"Isn't it dangerous? What if the darkspawn sense you?"

"Alistair's armies are marching east, driving the horde along the path of the Frostback River. I shall head north and then west, curving around. Is there any message you wish to send?"

"Thank you," Rilian whispered. She searched among the eerily disorderly jumble of her laboratory - shards of glinting glass and pools of darkness like solid spheres of night - until she found her backpack. She pulled out a sealed letter and gave it to him.

Riordan took a long, silent look around. "Walk with me," he said. She followed him to the archway. Tendrils of snow seeped inside, like the fingers of some high, pale, remote god who sought to clean away the mess of humanity.

"You have told me of this…creature, the Architect. You have told me of the fate of Warden-Commander Duncan." His breath hitched slightly; but when she looked at him his face was expressionless, his dark eyes hooded. "And you are right: the Wardens of Thedas must unite, must put aside politics. But this…" He waved a hand in the direction of the laboratory: an elegant reflex that carried the absent-minded grace of his culture. "Is this wise?"

"I believe so." Rilian tried to keep the angry defensiveness form her voice. "What I don't understand is how Weisshaupt had four-hundred years after the battle of Ayesleigh and never discovered this! Four-hundred years of fighting darkspawn - of sending men to die, and be transformed, and begin the cycle again! Darkspawn are like rats: we'll never get them all. The only way is to inoculate humanity. If we could find the remaining Old Gods and inoculate them, we'd have no more Blights."

"Was that not the plan of the Architect? Instead he ended up tainting the Old God. The risk is simply too great."

"We have no time to weigh the risks. If the Architect makes more of these Children we could be overrun in a generation. Less. I feel his transformation of Wardens into darkspawn is the key. It was Duncan who made the…the Mother into what she was, not the Architect. If he had done it she'd be like any other Broodmother. There's something lost in darkspawn males that Duncan still had: the ability for his offspring to breed true. For the Mother's Children to become Broodmothers also. That's why we can't have any more Wardens taking their Calling. That's why we need to cure the taint. A military solution will buy us time. You must lead the Wardens of Montsimmard. Knight Commander Rylock will lead the Templars."

"I would prefer it if you led the Wardens and I faced Urthemiel. You are young; you have your life ahead of you."

Rilian shook her head, quickly. "The Wardens of Montsimmard wouldn't listen to me."

"Nonetheless…if we were to enter the Deep Roads from an entrance in the Dales, perhaps we could reach the Archdemon together."

Rilian stared down at the featureless ocean of snow, her boot making little ripples. She drew an hourglass with the tip of her toe. "I will get there first," she said softly, without looking up, "And…I can't bear to hope. Foolish: a waste of time and energy and life. I can't let myself - not even for a moment - else I'll never be able to do what I have to."

"It warms my heart to see such courage…sister."

He shook her hand - her friend and equal now - his grip cool and firm. Then he turned and walked away; a black shadow against silver.

Rilian sat down, keeping silent watch beside her eight unconscious Wardens, her mind full of her research. She could hardly wait for Jowan to begin. When the young mage stirred, cried out, and rolled over, mewling, she went to him eagerly.

"Jowan, you survived! This is wonderful! We have so much work…"

Jowan paled, clutched his stomach and mumbled, "Feel as if I'm going to…" Then he staggered to his feet and made a run for his tent.

What did you expect? Rilian cursed herself for her own terrible bedside manner. Had she forgotten everything about her own Joining?!

Next to wake was Ser Otto. Rilian half-wondered whether it was the lyrium in their systems that made the mage and Templar the next to recover. Oghren had been first - but he was a devotee of Aqua Magus, which was said to kill even seasoned lyrium addicts!

Rilian sat beside her friend. "Did you have dreams?" she asked softly, "I had terrible dreams after my Joining."

Ser Otto's beautiful, scarred face was sombre, shadowed. "I thought…perhaps…I might dream of her."

Rilian felt a lump like a huge ball of grief catch in her throat, allowing no words to pass. She choked out: "The Architect made her incapable of hearing the Song. He didn't even leave her that. Not even that."

In spite of herself she put her head against Ser Otto's shoulder and lay still while the knight gently moved the hair from where it was sweat-pressed to her face. Rilian knew this was a terrible surrender - even now she felt a little compartment of herself filling up with shame. She was the Warden-Commander - she could not indulge. But she couldn't help it - she'd known him too long and been too close, and she was just too damn tired to put up a front. Ser Otto's quiet, salving gentleness, the scents of leather and steel and lyrium, the clean, cool smell of his skin, were irresistible. She pressed her face against the taut muscles of his shoulder, feeling the sweat cooling on her own skin, hearing herself whispering, "Sorry…sorry…sorry…" Ser Otto sat and rocked her, very gently, back and forth, his arm around her back.

Very gradually, Rilian eased herself away. She held his hand instead.

"Knight Commander Rylock came to see me," he said, very quietly, "She told me something Boann had once said to her: that the very worst thing that could ever happen to us would be to prove unworthy of the Maker. That anything else is just hard - and hard things can always be endured. Rylock believes it. I am not sure, now. What happened to Boann seems to prove that there are griefs beyond even the Maker's embrace - that suffering can be pointless and do no-one any good."

"I think Rylock is right," Rilian whispered, "Because when we give Boann the mercy of death her soul will rise to Him untouched. Guiltless. The only shadows we take with us are our own deeds - not what was done to us. She will go to Him as if she had sloughed off a defiled, wet, clinging garment, and He will take her in His arms."

"Thank you, Rilian." Ser Otto kissed her forehead. "Do you remember how you refused to sing after your mother died?"

Rilian managed a tremulous smile. "I do. You told me I should sing - because she would have liked to hear me."

Memories danced through her mind; colourful and radiant as the iridescence of light on water. The scrawny Elf and the wounded Templar, sitting underneath the Vhenadahl, singing together. The sideways looks and tutting of her neighbours mattered not at all - they existed in a garden of dreams, a living fragment of the Golden City, perfectly belonging.

The shared memory leapt between them without need for words. Ser Otto's deep, resonant baritone melded with Rilian's contralto as they raised their voices to the evening sky, drenched with rose and gold:

Oh, oh deep water

Black, and cold like the night

I stand with arms wide open

I've run a twisted mile

I'm a stranger

In the eyes of the Maker

I could not see, for the fog in my eyes

I could not feel, for the fear in my life

When from across the great divide

In the distance - I saw light

Andraste, walking to me with the Maker…

Together, sharing heartache, sharing love, they sang together until the first of the other Wardens stirred fitfully. Ser Otto comforted Rowland - the young knight devastated by his comrade's death. The Templar's steps seemed firmer, his shoulders steadier…his purpose sure again.

Rilian delivered a short speech, welcoming the survivors to the Wardens and explaining their role in the coming battle. She told them everything but the last, greatest secret - the reason only a Warden could kill an Archdemon. She was afraid Ser Otto or Oghren would volunteer to take her place - afraid of her own weakness, her yearning to have the bitter cup taken from her lips, to have another drink it. That had to remain a secret until the end. She shored up her own courage by refusing to dwell on it. When death came, she wanted it to be quick - a small step into the Beyond - like the transition from dreaming to waking.

They held Mhairi and Avernus' funeral rites as the sun dropped below the horizon, and every one of Loghain's knights and the new Wardens attended. Rilian was exhausted by the time she returned to her tent. Ravenous was gone; being spoiled by Cyrion.

She found she did not mind when Wynne followed her. Wynne had been like a mother hen with a chick ever since her capture at Ostagar. She smiled. It was nice to be pampered - nice to feel like a little girl again, if only for a moment.

"That was beautiful," Wynne said quietly, "Now that poor young woman is at peace."

Rilian said: "I will bring peace to Boann - to Duncan - to Urthemiel himself. Come in…I have something to show you."

Wynne followed her into the shadows of her richly appointed tent. Candlelight fell upon soft drapes and a mess of cushions - upon the mahogany chest at the foot of Rilian's bed. Rilian lifted the lid - showed Wynne what lay inside. "This is the peace I will bring."

Wynne gasped. "That's Cailan's sword! When - how - where did you find this?"

"Among the ruins at Ostagar when we prepared the pyre. Loghain never saw me. I think the darkspawn couldn't touch it."

Her back to the tent flap, protected from all sides, Rilian pulled the blade from its scabbard and showed it to Wynne. Polished, honed, the runes played with light as a child plays with fire. Without being aware of it she bent her shoulders forward, as if she'd draw herself around the weapon in a protective circle of her own flesh.

It was only when she turned to look at Wynne's reaction that she became aware of her misgivings. There was no discernible change in Wynne's face or voice, but she sensed a confusion and resistance in her, as if she'd seen something repellent but couldn't bring herself to turn away from it. It made no sense: there was nothing to see but the rich beauty of the sword - yet Rilian couldn't let go of the feeling that something had disturbed Wynne deeply.

Wynne said: "Shouldn't you tell Loghain?"

"Why? Why should I let it become a symbol, to be fought over between Loghain and Nathaniel Howe and Channon Cousland? Or hang in the Landsmeet Chamber to be gawked at by the Banns? I think Cailan was saving this sword for the Archdemon. I will do what he intended."

A pair of light quick footsteps interrupted their conversation. Rilian quickly replaced the sword, trusting Wynne to tell no-one.

It was Morrigan: dark, beautiful, feral. "Do not be alarmed. Tis only I."

Song inspirations were:

Alistair, Eamon, Isolde: Professor Green ft Emeli Sande - Read All About It

Rilian: Cold Specks - All Flesh Is Grass

Avernus: The Cure - Lullaby

The Joining: Killing Joke - Love Like Blood

Rilian and Ser Otto: Daniel Lanois - The Maker

AN: Rilian and Ser Otto's song is adapted from "The Maker" by Daniel Lanois. It's my favourite off the album "Acadie" and has inspired more than one scene in DATM.

Does anyone else notice that the position of Redcliffe on the game map (south of Lake Calenhad) differs from its position in the map for the books (west of Lake Calenhad)? I've placed it to the west, near Sulcher's Pass, as Arl Eamon's influence is supposed to be based on guarding Gherlen's Pass and the route to Orzammar. That's how come Riordan is able to sail across the lake to avoid the horde to the south.

Channon Cousland's back-story was inspired by Arsinoe's plot mabari "Cousland PC escapes and raises the Teynrir against Arl Howe". Likewise the idea that the Deep Roads connect nearly all the major locations in Amaranthine. The idea of him and his ragtag group holing up in Soldier's Peak was planted in my head after watching episode 13 of Merlin, Season 3 (yes, I have outed myself as a Merlin fan!) It made no sense to me that Avernus doesn't know in canon that there is a Blight until you tell him - why couldn't he sense the Archdemon, as Duncan did? So in my version he follows Channon to Ostagar on his own initiative, after Channon helps him against the demons.

Alim Surana's situation was also inspired by Arsinoe: her theory on magic being a sliding scale. He has just enough to rouse the interest of the Templars but not enough to really cut it as a mage. He uses it to improve his archery instead - he's essentially the Arcane Archer class from Neverwinter Nights :)

I see no reason why Dworkin couldn't stumble on the formula for Gaatlok independently. My guess is that his bombs in Awakenings use sulphur, charcoal, and lyrium sand. He swaps lyrium sand for Salis Petrae (saltpeter) and voila!

To those who think making saltpeter (potassium nitrate) out of horse shit is me having a laugh - it's actually true, and found under the "french method" of making saltpeter in Wikipedia. Niter-beds are prepared by mixing manure with wood ashes, earth and straw to make a compost pile. This is kept undercover, moistened with urine, turned often, and finally leached with water to make calcium nitrate. Calcium nitrate is converted to potassium nitrate by the filtering through of potash from wood ashes. I did use poetic licence to speed things up (the process is supposed to take up to a year) but I decided there's no limit to what Dworkin can do with his mad skillz :) The thought of the Templar horses Loghain condemns as useless mouths being responsible for the breakthrough was just too good to leave out!

It may even be possible that Orzammar already knew of the idea, but suppressed it - much as the Chinese did - knowing that such an invention would be unsafe in a city below ground. They would not want the casteless getting their hands on it, upsetting the status quo. It seems likely to me that Dworkin will find himself dodging Dwarven assassins as well as Qunari...