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.

23. Chapter 23: The Abyss

Warning: this penultimate chapter contains disturbing imagery and themes, and the deaths of several major characters.

"Libera me, Domine!" you sang the Psalm, and when
The Priest pronounced you dead, and flung the mould upon your feet,
A beauty came upon your face, not that of living men,
But seen upon the silent brow when life has ceased to beat.

I loved you first when young and fair, but now I love you most;

The fairest flesh at last is filth on which the worm will feast;
This poor rib-grated dungeon of the holy human ghost,
This house with all its hateful needs no cleaner than the beast,

This coarse diseaseful creature which in Eden was divine,
This Satan-haunted ruin, this little city of sewers,
This wall of solid flesh that comes between your soul and mine,
Will vanish and give place to the beauty that endures.

The Leper's Bride, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Rilian lay, staring up into a darkness that seemed alive with all the space that wasn't her. The familiar shapes - the Orlesian chair, the table with its quill and maps, the bundles of clothes and paintings and gifts, strewn carelessly about the floor - took on strange life in the cold bubble of darkness, all sounds muffled by the black-and-white swirl of snow and inky night. The sashes that kept the wind from the ornate tent swung slowly back and forth. The lamp that Shianni had given her, its candle burned to a nub, was chill and ghostly - a corpse-light, a pale cipher. Rilian tried to paint it as something friendly - the carved pumpkins of Fade's Eve - but the memory of home was painful. She blotted it from her mind as she had moved to this tent, away from Shianni, away from Ravenous. She must cut the silken threads that bound her to friends, family, loved ones - else she would never be able to do what she must.

She had woken from smothering dreams, drenched in cold sweat and jolted repeatedly by violent shudders. People called her a hero and she had come to believe in her own legend - but they did not know of the agonies of rebellion and despair and cowardice, of the shame of lying curled under the blanket, packed as tight into herself as possible, sweating and shivering and dreading first light. The space under her ribcage seemed huge and hollow, bent to the shape of everything she was going to lose. She had thought Riordan's words - his belief that the souls of both Warden and Archdemon would be destroyed - would make no difference. That the legacy she would leave - the wings of ideas and vines that bound her to the future, to life - would be enough. Now they showed as an ephemeral flicker across the void - a shiver of flame that danced and fought to stay alive above a vast pit of emptiness. She stared downwards and quailed before it. Once, she panicked so badly she found herself on the floor with her knees hugged against her chest and no idea how she got there. She lashed herself with her own contempt but found no help in it.

At last she rose, thin shift clinging to damp skin. She hugged herself, and padded over to the candles contained in one bag - tripping over another as she did so. An ungainly scramble - shuffling and cursing - and she stood with prize in hand. Her hands floated in the dark like pale flying creatures, fumbling with flint and tinder. The sudden blaze of warmth created an orange cocoon which kept shadows at bay. Next, she reached for the suit of Dragonscale - a rust-coloured sentinel that now lay inert, like the scab over a wound. She yearned for its cold embrace: her body felt like a boneless sack of blood - she wanted as much armour around it as possible. She fought with individual pieces - clipping shin-guards, vambraces, pauldrons and sabatons in place - sweating when she struggled with the chest-piece. Then, armoured like a golem - envying them fiercely, for they had already passed through the death that lay before her - she paced. Back and forth. Back and forth...

Sabatons clicked like a cold and precise time-piece; the sands of her hourglass bleeding out. Always one way...always down to death. She stared fixedly at the green luminous glow of the Deep Roads bracelet Rylock had given her. It was a pale firefly...the light stored during daytime had nearly faded.

The air lightened imperceptibly - droplets of a red dawn melding with the black.

She heard footsteps - slow, inexorable. Firm and steady...faltering...quick and light. Her Wardens and her friends.

There was Loghain. A wave of gratitude rose in her as she saw he had not brought Ravenous. Ravenous had more than an animal's intelligence - but not enough to understand why she left without him. He said, "Good luck, Warden. It has been an honour to have fought at your side, however briefly. May the Maker watch over you."

Rilian blinked in surprise. "I didn't think you believed in the Maker - or anything at all besides Ferelden."

"I believe in Him for you, Warden."

Rilian nodded once, briefly. The farewell that mattered had been danced, not spoken.

Quickly, without ceremony, Rylock raised her left arm, removed her right gauntlet, and extended her hand. Rilian clasped it, feeling the strange satin texture of the skin, the uneven striations, the knots and furrows. Rylock unconsciously gripped her hand like a sword of mercy. Rilian made sure she squeezed hard enough for Rylock to feel the pressure though she could not feel the touch.

"Trials 1: 14, Warden," Rylock said, "For there is no darkness in the Maker's sight and nothing He had wrought shall be lost."

Rilian blinked, startled - at once a burst of radiant colour chased away the shadow of oblivion. Riordan had been wrong - her life would be lost; not her soul.

"That's twice you've saved my soul," she said - low enough that the others could not hear - referring to the time she, Alistair, Leliana and Wynne had been imprisoned by the Sloth Demon in the Circle Tower. There she would have stayed - married to a demon wearing Nelaros' face - had Rylock not showed up with her writ of annulment and put an end to their captor.

"I trust," she whispered, smiling, "That when I meet my husband in the Fade, and celebrate the wedding we never had in life, you won't interrupt us again."

Rylock met the flippant remark with a small shake of her head and slight glance ceilingward.

Leliana stood beside Rylock, wearing her archer's leathers rather than her Chantry robe. Today she would be fighting, not praying. "So this is it," she said, a soft gloss of wonderment burnishing the light, feathery Orlesian accent, "It's strange to think that all our fates will be decided in a matter of hours. I wish I could go with you."

Zevran's gilded, handsome face was unusually sombre. "You do not wish me to stand beside you at the end? I would willingly storm the gates of the Black City itself. "

Rilian smiled at her golden friend: the only person she knew who could out-fight, out-think and out-dress her. She thought of the hunt for him that would never truly be over - and it seemed he did too, for there was a light, wistful resignation in his voice when he added, "Ah well - I have a feeling the fates will bring us together again soon. Let's give them something to remember, eh?"

Shianni engulfed her in a fierce hug. On Rilian's tongue she tasted the cider they would not drink together, the songs they would not sing; she felt the warm bodies of the children - Soris' or Shianni's - she would never hold. Maker, it is so hard to die. Of all the things that must be endured, this must surely be the hardest. In her mind Shianni's voice replied tartly that nothing was easy for Elves, nor ever had been. She had done other things that were hard: had seen her mother mutilated in the square, Nelaros' dream-filled green eyes glazed and lifeless; his throat a bloody maw. Had seen Shianni lying brutalised at her feet. She took a deep breath, holding all those things in her mind - all the pain she could remember; all the love she had for family and friends - and tossed them high, with her hope for life. And felt them taken: a vast weight she had not known she carried. She pressed a small, battered journal into Shianni's hands. Its title was: "I Speak Because I Can". Rilian's diary - lost at Ostagar, found again when they cleared Ishal.

"Ask Leliana to read it to you," she whispered, "Her mother was Elven, too."

She gave Wynne her other diary: written in a blank journal found in the Circle Tower. Rilian had swallowed wonder at a world that held so many books - so much treasured paper. She thought Wynne - who felt about the written word the way Rilian felt about the oral tradition of music: sacred by definition - would appreciate her version of everything that had happened to them. On the crisp new paper she had written: "A Maiden's Vow" - and told of the Circle, of Redcliffe and the Ashes, of Orzammar and the discovery of the elusive Dalish. Her entries had become more sporadic since arriving in Denerim - but she had recorded the Landsmeet and the War Council at the Hafter River. She had recorded Loghain's strategy in meticulous detail, and been unable to resist adding some colourful descriptions of the Banns: including a full - a very full - depiction of Loghain himself. His good points and bad had been subjected to the same merciless lucidity. She had described the process of the gliders and her modified lute in great detail, and worked on some songs. She had tried to write about meeting the Architect - only to find that the words she struggled for shrivelled on the page - or else sat too comfortably, hiding the horror beneath.

"I think you'll enjoy my descriptions of Loghain, Greagoir and Irving," she promised.

Wynne embraced her, and she felt the tremors of brittle age and a mother's tenderness.

"I will see you again soon," Wynne choked softly, "Till then - keep out of trouble in the Golden City."

Rilian made a sound half-way between a laugh and a sob. Wynne was right - Rilian was not the only one living on borrowed time.

Her father was next. A strange silence between them.

"Remember when you fell out of the Vhenadahl when you were little - broke your legs?" he muttered.

"Course I do! Didn't I scream!"

"I was relieved," he said.

Rilian blinked. She wasn't sure where he was going with this - wasn't sure she'd understand. Wasn't sure it would help either of them if he articulated it.

"Relieved?"

"I remember thinking: no one breaks their legs twice. Like you'd used it up, see? One of the bad things that could happen. Like it couldn't happen again."

Rilian was shocked by the look on his face; she reached out to him. He put up a hand to ward her off.

She had never seen her father cry. He fought it, made his jaws hard, held her at arm's length as if her embrace would destroy him. He fought as hard as he'd done to feed and protect her all her life, but it kept breaking through. Rilian had lived her whole life and never seen this - his face crumpling, his lips quivering, his whole frame shaking as the sobs bullied their way through.

"Don't, Dad. Oh - don't..."

Cyrion stood bowed with his hands covering his face. Ashamed. Horrified because he hadn't the strength to hold this back. Unmanned completely, he let her put her arms around him. When she pulled his hands from his face his eyes were open, the gnarled, fine-wrinkled cheeks wet with tears and snot. Rilian couldn't believe she'd seen this.

But she met him with a determination magically conjured by his collapse.

"Look at me, Dad," she said - forcing him to see that she could see him like this - that he had lost nothing - that he was her father. "You look at me, now."

"Ah, Rilian, Rilian…Maker…"

"You hush now. I'm going to be alright." Dull pain in her chest. She didn't want to say any more. She hoped he'd understand later that she would be alright, by the Maker's side.

Thank the Maker Voldrik arrived then, with the news that he and his men had cleared away the stone barriers they had put beneath Ishal.

She could manage no coherent words - only a muffled: "Love you" - as she turned away.

Her Wardens, waiting outside the tent, fell in beside her.

---

Rylock left the Warden's tent, walked out into the howling darkness under snow-tormented skies. Her own small campfire struggled desperately to survive. She reached the bleak triangular shadow of her own tent, that showed only as a deeper darkness against snow and the faint dawn-glow. Like a wet black sail - or the shadows that boiled on the colourless dive of an Archdemon's wings.

Inside, she made her way through the familiar darkness - counted steps to the wooden cross that formed Andraste's stake and the hard prayer mat, knelt, and prayed.

She knew it would be presumptuous - wrong - to pray to the Maker for anything at all. What more did she need than Him? Only Him. But the outcome she would have died for played out in eidetic images around her. The darkness and the silence became a playground for memory...

... The rain hissed and spattered upon her Templar armour, plastered her short hair to her scalp. Ser Guy had got a campfire going within the shelter of a small cave - he gestured her towards it, waving a languid hand.

"Gah - no apostate's going to give us trouble in this downpour. There's one thing they value more than freedom and that's their own comfort. One whiff of our cookfire and he'll turn himself in."

Twenty-year-old Rylock relaxed and sighed in contentment, sure he was right. The fire made yellowish sparks that danced towards the heavens, seemed to become part of the first pinpricks of stars. As they shared the stew - cooked by Rylock and flavoured by Guy's Orlesian herbs - Rylock remembered his many lessons in spar, his words when she finally beat him: "Now I know why they call you Broomstick: you hit hard and sweep clean!" - the words that had transmuted the mocking childhood nickname to something to be proud of. She smiled. She wasn't smug. The ugly duckling hadn't transformed into a swan. But she had found the Maker - and He had seen her. She did not feel Him during prayer or in the Chantry. But when she sparred, or when she did His work, she was aware of His presence, close as her own shadow. Except she was the shadow, and He was light.

There was a shuffle at the edges of her hearing; her Templar senses crackled to life. Guy heard it too. Both rose quickly, hands on sword-hilts, and fanned out. Rylock squinted into the rain-washed darkness - caught a shape that only showed up as a deeper darkness against the glint of rain and stars. A mage's sodden robe, its wet darkness gleaming like the fin of a shark.

A moment later the figure stepped out. His hands were raised. He had abandoned his staff. Rylock snatched a glance at Guy - what to do? Knight Commander Greagoir had told them the mage - one of First Enchanter Remille's most trusted colleagues - was no threat.

"Don't hurt me - I'll come quietly," came the cultured voice. He sighed - a note of weary resignation - and said: "Your friend is right: I'll give you no trouble in this downpour. Getting warm matters more to me than freedom."

At a nod from Guy, Rylock lowered her sword. "You will be returned to the Tower," she said stiffly.

He spread his hands wide. An ingratiating smile slithered across full lips. "Surely you could spare some of that stew before turning me in?"

Rylock did not think it proper to sit and eat with an apostate - but before she could say so Guy had already resumed stirring the pot. It seemed to them both that the lazy fool was no threat.

"Why, thank you," the man said - speaking to Rylock even though it had not been her idea. "You are a gracious host."

There was a hint of a private smile that unnerved Rylock - while the word "host" seemed a little razor-edged. To be safe, she struck out with a Smite to completely drain his Mana. That should take care of things.

Then she took a step forward - reached to tie his hands.

There was a strange inward prickle. An alien energy - something that slid into her mind like an insect's stinger. Rylock tried to shout a warning but her lips would not move. The words were stones in her mouth. And then - terribly, unimaginably - the sight of her own hand moving...a long-fingered pale spider...white; a horror. The pale, alien thing grasped the hilt of her sword - drew it from its scabbard with a hiss like metallic rain.

"Rylock?" came Guy's voice, confused, "You don't have to hurt the old..."

The old man smiled. Lips and teeth were stained red where he had bitten into his own tongue.

All her body's history unrolled before her against the background of the storm:

Muted adolescent yearnings associated with sin. The touch of first blood on her thigh.

The mocking laughter of her fellow squires: "No wonder you're training to be a Templar - you'd freeze the cock off any man who tried to touch you."

And then Guy's training that had transformed it to a thing of pride and joy - muscles coming awake, reflexes honed and sharpened like steel...sweaty, triumphant sessions of spar and the joy of her first friendship.

Here, now, the Blood Mage inverted it all - made Guy's training and her own hard-won skills the instrument of his defeat. Made her dance like a foul puppet till he lay bleeding on the ground. The root-system of her history a conspiracy of culprits: the above-ground plant a marionette, reflexes and muscle-memory hijacked by a will not her own. Her body - thoughts - feelings - memories - worn like armour: a costume to amuse evil. Her mind torn open; a filthy and malicious hand pawing memories that were golden bubbles of light.

Blood Control traced and mapped the web between the five senses and the ability to govern response. It interposed its will between, sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will, while hellishly articulate and agile in the service of the mage's.

It was Rylock's own hands that struck her friend down and then tied him, helpless and aware, with her own sash. That used her Knife of the Divine to turn his body to a map of torment that would make a demon smile. And her own body that experienced the orgasms of the mage that crowned his despoliations.

Rylock's will - her choice - was her last citadel. The choice between letting sanity bleed away into the void - so she wouldn't have to look out of her own eyes; see and feel what she did to him - and remaining aware. She chose the latter. It was all she could do for him. She couldn't help him, but she could be with him in his suffering.

His eyes knew it. They looked into hers and saw the person behind the blood puppet. He whispered: "You are guiltless."

So the mage made her blind him. Guy's face - turned toward her at the hour of his death - seemed to weep scarlet tears. But his last movement before death was to smile...

Rylock knew that yearning was only weakness - that the Maker intended reality to be endured, not wished away. But she had wished so many times that she had not learned to fight so well - that Guy could have won that battle and ended her instead.

Now the evils of the world tormented the young woman she called friend and the cleric she called sister with the same dilemma. What Rylock had experienced for only a few hours, Boann now experienced forever. To be a monster, mute and limbless - to know one is a monster; feel it in every cell - and not be able to stop it. To be used to create nightmares. Unless Rilian could end her.

Even if the young woman succeeded, Rylock knew she would never see Rilian in life again. She reminded Rylock so much of Guy - and of Meredith Stannard - and she would join them at the Maker's side. Rylock had not known until the night of grass and darkness that she had loved those two comrades. She would not have acted on it if she had. Some Orlesian poet Guy had liked had called love food for the soul - but the soul, like the body, must eat to live - it mustn't live to eat. The soul must live to serve the Maker. Guy had translated the Maker's light for her. Some subtle influence had passed from him to her, and for the first time in her life she had seen in His world the wonder she had always looked for, and always missed. Meredith - so talented, so lost - could be infuriating: an opponent, a monster with a vision, a comrade. Rilian was so like Guy in her flippant love of life, her courage - so like Meredith in her wilful belief that only she could make things right - she might have been their daughter. Rylock saw her that way.

After Guy's death, Boann had said to Rylock: The very worst thing that could ever happen to us would be to prove unworthy of the Maker. Anything else is just hard: and hard things can always be endured. You were with Ser Guy in his darkness - you did not abandon him. But now he is with the Maker. Do not remember him like that. Do not follow him into the Dark, for he is in the Light. Rylock had remembered their years as Chantry children: her own jealousy of Mother Leanna's favourite, and the way she had despised Boann for crying in the dorms at night. Learning why she had cried - the source of her hard-won wisdom - had made Rylock bitterly ashamed. Boann had given Rylock the bracelet made from rock of the Deep Roads to keep time during her stay in Aeonar, a necessary measure for all those touched by Blood Magic.

Rylock had kept those words in mind when she returned to active duty: straight into the mess of Remille's rebellion. Rylock, Greagoir and every other Templar who did not support Orlais had been imprisoned; rescued by Loghain. To meet another maleficar and have it happen all over again would be hard. But to abandon her calling and have it happen to someone else - someone who would not know in his bones and body what to expect from a Blood Mage - would be to prove unworthy.

Would Boann still remember those words? Would Rilian be there for her in the dark? Who would be there for Rilian, at the end?

Rylock knelt - whispered the prayer of Transubstantiation - and drank the lyrium Rilian had given her. The ill-gotten mixture made by Rilian's Dwarven supplier was foul. The Maker transformed it to an expression of His light nonetheless.

There was meaning in that. Rylock hoped it was not weakness to feel comforted.

---

Loghain stood atop the fourth floor of the Tower of Ishal. It afforded him a view of Lothering Forest to the north and the horde approaching from the west, chased by the armies of Warden Alistair. The dark green mass of the Wilds loomed to the south - and to the east, a luminous line of dawn like rose champagne set on fire. The pink line turned the frozen surface of Ostagar to a pearly rose sheen. The courtyard was an eerie, uncoloured paleness. He could see soldiers by the gate; dark against the dawnlit snow. The snow had stopped; all was quiet. The calm before the storm.

The Warden - Rilian, he allowed himself to think, though he had thought of her as The Warden ever since she had forbidden him to call her by her name (my father calls me that - the father you tried to sell to Tevinter!) - and her men had been consigned to the deeps. In the tunnels beneath, she was moving toward her fate. At the thought, he patted Ravenous' square slab of a head with absent-minded gentleness. Beside him stood Knight Commander Rylock, Nathaniel Howe, and Wynne.

Wynne said: "Alistair's armies will have been chasing the horde all night. They'll be worn out."

Loghain said: "The advantage of surprise will outweigh that." There was no point in saying that for all they knew the horde had already turned and crushed Alistair's men. That thought was in every mind already.

The nascence of a smile lightly brushed Nathaniel's lips. "At least they've got relief coming. The chevalier volunteers won't be far behind." In another mood, Loghain might have found that amusing. Now the effort to lighten the mood went ignored.

The young Howe gestured towards the trebuchet in the courtyard below and the catapults spread across the battlements. They were black against the rose heavens. "Dworkin's Blackpowder jars fired from trebuchets will work like magical fire".

Loghain knew he was being reminded that bringing Dworkin from Vigil's Keep had been Nathaniel's idea. Now that Channon Cousland was credited with supplying much-needed reinforcements, he no doubt wished to even the balance. But Nathaniel went on: "Perhaps we should have given more to Cauthrien's force to the north. They could use the Blackpowder in the portable barriers."

Cauthrien was commanding the Ferelden infantry stationed between Lothering Forest and Lake Calenhad. The men of Thomas Howe, Channon Cousland, Bryland, Ceorlic and Loren were stationed there. If Nathaniel were concerned for his brother that was surprising - Loghain got the impression the younger Howe saw the buffoon as nothing more than an albatross around the neck of the Howe name.

His answer was curt. "We don't have an unlimited supply. The catapults are much more effective." His own voice surprised him. He didn't mean to sound so unpleasant. The worry for Cauthrien was eating into him.

The gathering cloud of the Blightstorm darkened the sky; began to turn the fallen snow to black ashes. No-one spoke of it - but a communal, almost psychic awareness told them a not-understood menace stalked them. A melancholy vista stretched before them. Fallow fields sported malevolent rows of angled posts, sharpened ends aimed to disembowel any darkspawn foolish enough to charge. At the edge of the Lothering Forest, shadowy forms drifted in and out of trees.

To the west, the line of darkness that was the horde rippled slowly forward. Behind them, a drum sounded - heavy and dark. Loghain jerked his head in that direction. "The Chasind," he said, and when that beat stopped, he pointed, "They'll work all the way round from their east-facing point to their northern, western and southern. They're telling us they're here." The second drum fell silent. A third roared to life.

They went no further before the first flashes of the Circle's magic lit the western sky. The illumination turned dim purple clouds to a violet glow, like faerie fire. Arrows from both sides pierced the clouds at their apogee before ripping downward to fall like metallic rain. Their humming, unceasing passage played melody to the Chasind drums. Darkspawn screamed. A magical explosion rocked the earth. This time, the cries were all-too-human.

"The emissary," Rylock said grimly.

The Chasind drums were incessant. Promising.

As soon as the horde came in range, the catapults atop Ostagar's walls and the trebuchet in the courtyard fired into the valley. Anxiety brushed Loghain's mind - he hoped the Dwarven engineer had calculated the range correctly - that he would not tear apart Alistair's army along with the horde. The catapult shafts were coated with Dworkin's Blackpowder and set on fire. Voldrik, empowered by his brother's mixture and his own knowledge, was a machine: sighting, firing, killing. Nathaniel and his archers - Loghain had placed him in command of the Orlesian bard, the Warden's cousin, the Dalish and Night Elves - rushed to spread out along the wall beside the catapult crews.

Catapults and bows turned the horde into a shambles. Darkspawn sang from guttural throats - a visceral, compelling paean that Loghain felt rather than heard - screamed as they fell down into death. They died in heaps. Their own archers drew blood aplenty. A young Night Elf spun from his crenel; dropped to the battlewalk below. More staggered back, clawing at wounds.

Dworkin was manic with glee, in his element. With his jars of Blackpowder he blasted holes in grouped darkspawn, sundering the very ground where they had stood. Nathaniel, beside him, worked his bow with deadly precision.

The darkspawn attack shattered on the missiles. When the survivors broke and retreated, the soldiers and Templars facing west howled victory.

They nearly drowned out the alarm raised by the southern wall. Men streamed off the battlewalk. Catapults stood abandoned. Some defenders dropped to their knees, clawing at their throats, their eyes. Many more were seized by violent coughing.

Loghain looked to see a gigantic ogre throw a stone that collapsed the top section of the wall. The weight of it tore out an equally long section of wooden battlewalk. The mass dropped onto the roof of the stables. The screams of broken animals mingled with those of broken men.

Another hurled stone enlarged the damaged area.

Loghain realised the Maker-damned, intelligent darkspawn General had tricked them. Through the hive-mind, he was commanding a second mass of darkspawn who streamed southward from the Wilds themselves. Loghain had thought the darkspawn magic to the west had signalled the General's position. But clearly there was more than one emissary in the horde. The General attacked from the south - a black, suppurating cloud of taint blooming from his staff. It choked the surprised defenders. They were terrifying to see; agonised. Their cries were horrible. When death came, it came very hard.

Alistair's armies were now sandwiched between the horde they had chased from the west and the mass that attacked from the south.

And from below the foot of the valley the darkness gathered into motion.

---

Far behind the writhing mass of battling men and darkspawn - where Alistair, Teagan and Fergus led the front lines - the mages of the Circle gave them supporting fire. Thus, while the armies of Chasind and Bannorn found themselves surrounded by the southern assault, Irving and his people saw it from a distance.

As the sun rose, the sky modulated from purple-blue to pink, then pearl, transforming to vastness the black catapults and flags that fluttered above Ostagar. But the valley where Irving stood remained in a clenched gloom. His companions - Sweeney, Ines, and Karl - shuffled their feet. Some of them studied the ground. They seemed decidedly unadventurous. They had the air of people who would prefer to be at home reading.

Irving would have preferred to be at home himself, but "home" was a charred ruin now - their exile at Redcliffe could not last. The First Enchanter found himself hurled into chaos as though the pieces of a carefully-placed chess game had been swept at random across the board. And he knew that, if they were to make it out of this valley alive, his powers must be good for something.

Greagoir was ordering the mages and Templars to fall back. Irving scowled. It was all very well to protect mages and Templars, but what about the poor bastards in the front lines?

"Is it right to abandon the rest?" he asked Greagoir. Greagoir didn't answer, and Irving didn't expect him to. He wasn't talking because he wanted answers - or even reassurance. He was talking to keep himself from dithering.

Irving didn't like danger. Philosophically, he didn't approve of it. Magic was for research and experimentation, for understanding and knowledge, not for bloodshed. For that very reason, he approved passionately of the creation of the Circles. And the conflicts inherent in his own position had made him an indecisive mediator: someone who - as that insolent young firebrand Anders had once observed - couldn't keep his feet out of the shit on either side of the fence because he couldn't get the fencepost out of his arse.

Well, he had made decisions at last. On the Warden's request, he had brought the Circle here, into this mess, because he believed it was the right thing to do. But he still needed to keep talking.

"You had yourself a nice rest while we Enchanters were being treated to Uldred's hospitality. Wouldn't even fight alongside the Warden to get us out. Damned if I'm going to let you be so lazy again."

"Oh, shut up, Irving," Greagoir muttered; but he obviously didn't expect the First Enchanter to heed him.

Irving turned to Sweeney. "A few Stonefists at that new bunch of darkspawn wouldn't go amiss."

Sweeney might be older than anyone in the Tower, and senile, but he understood Stonefists: he'd been teaching magic for decades. Somehow, he seemed to put himself in the right frame of mind without effort; achieve the right kind of concentration as simply as striking a flint for light.

He sent his missiles straight into the mass of darkspawn ahead, timing it perfectly.

"Cover ourselves, you old fools!" Greagoir shouted. "You're practically begging them to cut you down!"

Both men ignored him.

Sweeney had his eyes closed. Maybe he was taking a nap. Abruptly, a darkspawn interrupted his pleasant time in the Fade. Sweeney smote the creature's ruin upon the rock of the valley, waving his hands and screeching: "Shoo! Shoo! Go back to where you came from!"

"Well Greagoir," Irving taunted his long-time friend and foe, "Can your Templars do better?"

Greagoir's sigh was weary, resigned. "Very well. We'll draw the horde away from Alistair's force. We're a pair of old fools."

"Then we'll die as brave fools."

The mages and Templars rained magic and arrows upon the horde until the creatures turned en masse from their quarry. At Greagoir's signal, his men formed defensive ranks, Irving and mages behind them, firing over their heads. He dimly heard Anders mutter:

"We'll leave the bucket-heads for another time, Karl. Those helms look stupid - but the darkspawn look worse."

Irving remembered a childhood that was longer ago than he cared to admit. A childhood of peace in a small Ferelden farmhold. He remember the time he'd watched a fox try to escape a mabari. Caught in the open, it turned, yelping defiance and terror. It scratched the mabari's nose, and the peaceful summer's day was shattered by the mabari's unbelieving roar of outrage.

It swatted the small animal once.

That last image was clearest of all in Irving's mind as the bulk of the horde charged forward to claim their vengeance.

---

Commander Cauthrien acted quickly when she saw what was happening in the valley to the south. She moved to outflank the horde which had flanked Alistair's army. Channon was impressed by her speedy organisation - and by the way she cleverly kept him at opposite sides to Thomas Howe and the mingled Highever and Amaranthine forces. The men absorbed from the fall of Highever hailed him as their rightful leader - but as the results of the Northern Civil War weren't yet known Cauthrien would be unwise to antagonise the Howe brothers. Channon only commanded the army of Elven and human rebels he had brought with him.

"If we survive this - and if I'm still heir of Highever - I will marry you, Cauthrien," he promised with feigned solemnity.

Cauthrien laughed shortly. "Be serious, my lord! What would a pampered nobleman like you do with a soldier like me?"

"Ask not what you can do for me but what I could do for you! I'd give you the opportunity to squander my inheritance."

Cauthrien huffed and turned away. "Nobles!" she scoffed.

It was strange how flashes of the old Channon emerged now and then. But when he turned to regard Thomas Howe, his emotions flattened and bled out till what remained resembled the instinct of a stalking leopard - a patient hunter waiting in the long grasses near a water hole.

The armies met with a thunderous clash. Archers from atop Ishal fired into the horde below. They went down under so many arrows that the bodies and snow seemed to magically sprout feathered shafts. Of course, it was hard in the confusion to tell the difference. One such arrow claimed the life of Thomas Howe. Channon reached him amid the chaos - stared down blankly. He felt nothing, only numb - freed from the constant need to hate this man. When he looked at the arrow, he was not as surprised as he might have been to see a feather bearing the Howe crest. He looked up - to where the tiny figure of Nathaniel commanded the archers. Nathaniel must have been aiming for him. He stood up, waiting for him to draw again, refusing to be snuffed out without facing his enemy.

But Nathaniel did not loose again. One hand absently moved in an elegant reflex: the salute of one noble to another.

Channon understood. The younger Howe did not want his brother's actions revealed at the Landsmeet, when Channon challenged him. He knew the oaf would shame the Howe name and ruin their chances of inheriting the Arling. From this Channon deduced that there was no remaining evidence of Bryce Cousland's dialogue with Orlais. The Cousland position must be stronger than he'd realised. Someone had disposed of the incriminating documents - a person Channon did not know but considered a friend.

Channon had been considering murdering Thomas in the heat of battle himself. Loghain he would choose to duel, if it came to that, but he owed no such honour to animals. To duel publicly would be to hurt Delilah and ensure that details of his mother's death were bandied about as salacious gossip; he couldn't bear that.

Thomas Howe had died far easier than he had deserved; but all in all Channon was pleased. He gazed up towards Ishal and returned the salute.

Then charged forward, spitting a nearby Hurlock on the Highever blade.

---

On the southern flank of the darkspawn reinforcements, the mages concentrated grimly, working their magic against impossible odds.

That was to say, Irving concentrated grimly, grinding his courage into focus with such urgency that beads of sweat broke from his skin and glittered on his enormous growth of beard. For all the distress Sweeney showed he might have been casting spells in his sleep. Standing to Irving's left, with his eyes closed and an old man's mumble on his lips, he raised his staff and simply let every darkspawn near him fall to his blends of Cone of Cold and Stonefist - trusting, no doubt, that the haste and frenzy of his casting would protect him from a direct attack on his person. Ines - his wife in all but name for more than forty years - stood beside him: casting when he rested, timing her nature-based primal spells to complement his.

On Irving's other side, dying mages and Templars lay together, embraced in a brotherhood of loss. Karl was among them, handsome, grave face empty as a shattered glass. Anders knelt over him, the young man's face pale with grief. Beside him, Greagoir sat with back pressed against an ogre's flung rock, forcing his torso erect. The red froth of a lung wound speckled his lips. The silver hair that had always seemed so metallic, so helmet-like, was lifeless in limp disarray. He coughed violently, then wiped the blood off his armour with the purple sash around his waist. He glared at the stain as though it were a personal affront. Irving literally felt the will of the man - the refusal to concede that his life was draining away. His gaze swept past the battle, out to a view that only he could see. Irving was reminded of the hawks that sometimes landed atop Kinloch Hold - the way their proud eyes claimed the land to its farthest end.

Unable to help him - unable to help any of his colleagues, his friends, his family - Irving forced himself to cast and cast, on and on, when every nerve in his body wailed to flinch away from the howls and snarls and gibbering of the creatures coming at them.

Unhappily, from where he stood he could see clearly that their efforts would not be enough. He watched Alistair, Fergus, Teagan and their men, fighting back-to-back, forming a defensive circle, ever narrower and surrounded by a howling darkness. They didn't stand a chance.

---

As soon as they charged the northern flank of the darkspawn reinforcements, Cauthrien saw the situation of Alistair, Fergus and Teagan was desperate. The darkspawn were a many-headed hydra - each time one fell, two more rushed to take its place.

To rush in and draw their attention would be suicide. Yet if she did nothing, they would lose the only remaining Warden on the surface. If the Warden-Commander's mission to the Deep Roads failed, and the Archdemon rose, they would have no-one.

Cauthrien made her choice.

"On me!" she howled, and without waiting to see the order obeyed charged forward. She didn't need to look. The soldiers of Maric's Shield would have followed her to the Fade. She swung the Summer Sword in glittering, perfected arcs. A Genlock backed up, swinging desperately, trying to use its pitted axe as a shield. A single blow nearly cut the creature in half. Cauthrien spun around, catlike, ducking low as a darkspawn charged in with levelled spear. She delivered a back-handed slash while down on one knee, cutting the Hurlock's leg off at mid-thigh as it charged past. She heard the shouts and rallying calls of the men of Maric's Shield, close behind: the elite soldiers gathering men to them in a tight formation, like a smashing fist. Cauthrien became part of the formation, so much more powerful than a mass of individual warriors, and they drove forward into the darkspawn flank. She was more than herself - more than the farmgirl who had watched the Teyrn fight and dreamed of being a hero - the living many-armed spike was a single entity, driven by her will.

Still, they could not hope to win - could only hope to thin out the combat around Alistair and his men, allowing them to fight their way to the shelter of the southern gates. By the time they reached their destination, darkspawn had eroded the unit like water seeping through cracks in rock, breaking them apart to fragments. These were dragged down into the teeming mass. The horde surged over them - swallowed them. Cauthrien fought back to back with two old friends: Durgen and Corwin. As a darkspawn lunged at Corwin she hammered its stolen sword towards the earth. She took a hard blow to her right side from another. Corwin finished the first - she whirled to block the second as it moved to finish her. No space for a swing - she hit out with a pommel strike. It staggered back, skull-like features pulped into a curdled mass of taint and bone.

She did not count the number of creatures the three of the sent to the void, her soldier's mind rejecting the overall, the general, for a razored attention to specific details: a blade to block, an exposed place to strike. Somehow, the entity that was Cauthrien-Corwin-Durgen became four, then ten, as they reached Alistair's men. Alistair, Fergus and Teagan joined them, and they formed a defensive square, letting the horde batter themselves on shields like surf against rock, while steel like the spines of a hedgehog pierced the unwary. In this way, they held on, while Knight Commander Rylock led her men in a charge from the southern gates, pushing toward them.

Cauthrien fought and fought, on and on, the sweat stinging her eyes and the world on fire around her. She went on fighting, long after she had lost her strength and her balance and even her reason. She wore the soulless battle-face that Loghain had drilled into her for more than twenty years.

...He saw me - he chose me. What hero does that for a scrawny farm lass? He gave me the opportunity to make myself more than I dreamed I could be. He looked at me and knew...

A blow for Loghain. A blow for Maric's Shield. And one for Ferelden. Then back to the beginning again. A blow for everyone she had ever loved, every soldier of Ferelden who had ever died.

There was a hole in her side. Her own blood, mixed with the tar-like tainted filth the Hurlocks spread across their blades, seeped out, making the gambeson she wore under chain mail stick to her sweat-drenched skin. She couldn't tell whether it hurt or not, but it made her catch her breath in a way she couldn't escape.

An emissary loomed before her. Its magic knocked her to the ground.

Cauthrien dreaded that fall - knew her wounded side couldn't take it. Fortunately, she landed on the body of a dead Chasind. She rolled onto her back, swept the Summer Sword upward, and took the creature's legs from under it.

It snarled. Even as she watched, its taint-driven magic closed the wounds.

Fergus was standing over her, then, fighting for both of them as the General came on. Blows on all sides; chips of rusted darkspawn armour and iron sword-shards flying. His scar burned as though his life were on fire in his face.

Alistair ran to help him. He didn't even see the Hurlock that loomed behind.

Teagan did. He put up his shield to cover Alistair.

Someone shouted: "My lord Teagan - watch out!"

It was too late. Even as Teagan turned, a spear-point burst right through the centre of his chest.

Then - as if someone had opened a window in the sky - came a sudden terrifying rush of rocks and flaming pitch. They slammed down from Ostagar's own battlements, howling torrentially downward over human and darkspawn alike. Cauthrien stared upward at the sky that had changed places with the ground, and saw her own death.

Oh, well. Loghain had said: Other people tell me what to do. You help me do it. We make a good team. That was more than enough for any lifetime.

---

After Cousland's salute and their private understanding, Nathaniel turned back to the fighting. He felt nothing for the older brother he had barely known - Nathaniel had been a child when he was sent to Kirkwall. The stories of the fall of Highever Thomas had drunkenly related had convinced Nathaniel he was a liability. He put the dead fool from his mind and concentrated on the darkspawn. His archers gave careful supporting fire. Loghain had ordered Voldrik to hold off: catapults were far too dangerous for their allies below. Loghain was a living flame, here and there: organising, directing. Rylock was leading her Templars in a charge out of the main gates, to aid Alistair's army. Rylock looked gaunt; strained and exhausted around the eyes. Yet she had an air of worth, almost of triumph, as if she knew she was doing the right thing.

For some reason, Arl Eamon chose this moment to say: "You know: my wife begged Teagan and I to remain at Castle Redcliffe. She said what happened had made us too frail for such going's-on. If we fail to return, she'll be angry." Without warning, his old eyes spilled tears. He turned and blundered around with an old man's fumbling slowness; a teary husband's confusion.

But when they heard the cry: "My lord Teagan - watch out!" he sprang from the battlements as if galvanised. The familiar name wrenched him out of his customary stupor, brought him to his feet crying madly: "Teagan? Teagan? Oh, my brother!"

He had no idea what was going on: his eyes held nothing but exhaustion and distress. The broken part of his mind only made him urgent; it didn't make him sane. Sobbing: "I'll save you!" he rushed to to the courtard below – to Voldrik's trebuchet. He had shoved the startled crew aside before anyone knew what he was about. Aiming it into the writhing chaos below, he began firing. There was nothing to stop the tremendous and convulsive tremor that split the earth below, scattering broken men along with broken darkspawn. It tore apart the stone of Ostagar's outer southern wall, reducing it to rubble.

By now Loghain had reached him. He knocked Eamon out with a mailed fist. It was a mercy - Eamon wasn't conscious to see the retreating soldiers streaming through the gate, carrying his brother's body. Full of terrible defeat, Loghain hardly noticed that the inner walls remained. That was a tiny consolation: almost an insult in the face of the general ruin.

The withdrawal of Alistair's and Cauthrien's forces into the southern gates of Ostagar was stubborn, starred with heroism. They knowingly abandoned no wounded or dead. Alistair carried Teagan; Fergus carried Cauthrien. A group of mages and Templars carried their dying Knight Commander. Yard by yard, they gave ground, while Rylock and Loghain led their men out to cover the withdrawal. At the courtyard, they held for the siege weapons and hospital wagons to cross before following. From the battlements, Nathaniel's archers covered the final retreat.

They were now trapped inside Ostagar, cut off from aid, surrounded on all sides.

Ferelden soldiers, Templars, mages and Chasind milled in many-coloured confusion. Two brothers found the other they had thought dead. Channon's eyes went wide - he rushed to where Fergus knelt over a dead soldier. Fergus looked up, bleary-eyed, blood-spattered - and gave a great roar. Then he thundered to his feet, swept his slighter brother up into an enormous hug, laughed and cried.

Those watching nearby - some wounded, all bone-weary, each battle-hardened - saw that Channon wept as well. And for some reason none of them found it appropriate to laugh at this deplorable unmasculinity.

"Let me through - I'm a healer!" Wynne cried. She was joined by the surviving mages of the Circle. Irving was bent over Greagoir. Sweeney and Ines were leaning on each other. Anders was staring blankly off into some thought of his own. When Wynne reached the Knight Commander Greagoir waved her off:

"You can't get the point out without killing me. Don't waste the time."

"I have to try. My credo..."

"Has no place here. I'm dying. Don't trouble yourself."

Loghain walked among his men, reassuring the wounded - promising the dying he would support their families. This was a vow Loghain held sacred.

When he saw Cauthrien's body among the dead, he covered his face with his hands.

As he stood looking down at the familiar face, staring upward into a future that was no longer hers to claim, he tried to speak - to rally the remaining defenders - organise them. But he couldn't; he was breathing too hard. The sight of Cauthrien's death hit him harder than he was prepared for; dealt him a blow for which he had thought he had been braced and now realised he wasn't. Loghain wasn't young anymore. He had been alone for a long time - since Maric and Rowan had died; comforted - or at least understood - only by Cauthrien. His chest began to heave, and he fought for air urgently, in great gasps. To stifle the sound, he clamped his hands over his mouth, against the sides of his nose; but he couldn't restrain his harsh respiration - his labour against grief.

The cost of his efforts to save Ferelden kept on growing. Without Cauthrien, his Night Elves, his soldiers, there would be no Ferelden to defend; no General to be so profligate with the blood of those who loved him.

A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled round to see Maric standing next to him: Maric looking as he had done when the rebel army was annihilated at West Hill.

"It was the right fight; for the right reasons. Those soldiers understood," he said in a rough attempt at comfort, "They bought us a chance. We've got to figure out what to do with it."

The image cleared - Loghain saw Alistair beside him. Another time he would have been embarrassed to be caught like that. For now, he had other concerns - they both did. He nodded. And so, having nothing more they could do for the dead, and plenty they had to do for the living, the two moved to organise the defence.

---

The night before entering the Deep Roads, Ser Otto dreamed.

…He stood on a vast and featureless plain of misty grey, as though submerged beneath the chill, drifting waters of a lake. Out of that formless void a shape began to coalesce: a slender, swift-moving form graceful as a bird. It took a moment before he recognized Boann. She whirled and spun, her fair hair blowing in an unfelt wind. He saw her mouth curl in delighted laughter as she beckoned him forward…his heart soared to watch her unfettered dance.

Boann swept along before him, silently pleading with him to follow…to follow! All his will called out to her…he found himself moving without walking, drifting closer. A new shape began to form out of the emptiness: a silver tree of liquid light. Boann stretched out her palms to cup the droplets that fell from its leaves within a silver chalice.

The Sangreal, he thought. Rilian's Cure.

He tried to take her hand but could not. The grey mist pulled them apart. He fought it, knowing desperately that he must not lose her.

He was tiring, as a swimmer tires far out at sea. He reached for her hand and felt a touch - feather-light - in his. Then he slipped closer to the grey…and then the grey passed into blackness. A colossal wave at his back - a wall of black oil a mile high - advanced towards him. Its shadow crept towards the silver chalice. He turned to face it - though he knew it must annihilate him when it crashed.

It never crashed at all. It engulfed him and forced him to bear its weight...

…He was standing before Grand Cleric Odila, in the magnificent Denerim Chantry, Boann beside him.

"You are become one, but your strength is multiplied, not added, because in all things you will be more than two. Swear to each other that you are husband and wife in heart as well as in mind, in truth as well as in law."

A vast circle of their friends and comrades passed before them. Each carried a wedding gift.

The pile of gifts grew larger - he turned to his radiant bride and blushed. There were flowers, baskets of fruit, and even a skyball such as he had owned as a child. Even as he reached to take it, his eye was caught by the flowers. They were rotting before his eyes, blackening and curling up like skin shrivelled in flame. The flowers dried to ashy flakes; the fruit bloomed with mould and then diminished to grey dust. As he watched in horror, even the wedding guests - all the knights and soldiers of Denerim who had been his friends - were stripped of flesh in heartbeats by a pulsing mass of squirming black grubs. He fought to keep his footing in the roiling decay. Where was Boann? Where was she! She would be consumed like the others unless he rescued her! He strode forward, shovelling through the squirming dark mass…but he couldn't find her…unless that was a wink of gold, down there in the abyss. He sank deeper into the dark-veined womb of rotten earth, arms reaching…reaching for the slender hand with its golden wedding ring…

When he woke, sweating and shivering, he had no time to feel the horror; it faded like wisps of smoke. He joined Jowan, Aveline, Carver, Alim, Rowland and Oghren; together, they followed Rilian and the Legion down into the tunnels beneath Ishal.

These were alive and teeming with sound, smell, sense - even colour. He caught the faint drip of moisture from the ceiling - felt its droplets on the patches of his scalp that still had feeling. The rock itself seemed to sweat the stink of taint. In front of him, the pounding boots of the Legion of the Dead created a storm-sense, giving shape to the Void as the Maker had done. His Warden senses were just beginning to come awake - hastened, perhaps, by what they faced. He had always been able to experience the glow of Mana within his fellow Templars and their mage charges as sight. A Templar shone a dim cobalt-blue. A mage burned like a white sun. He noted with some amusement that Oghren blazed too - the indescribable scent of Aqua Magus tickled his nostrils.

He politely refused when Oghren offered him some. To someone who took no more than the customary one vial of lyrium per day, Oghren's mixture was as fierce as one-hundred-percent proof. Murder.

"What's it like, being a Templar?" the Dwarven Warden asked.

Puzzled, Ser Otto answered, "Do you mean our training or our beliefs?"

"No," the dwarf chortled, "To always have to wear a skirt!"

Ser Otto had the feeling they were going to get along fine. Unlike so many of his fellows, Oghren treated him no differently than anyone else. Everyone was treated to the Berserker's unique brand of wit.

Beside him, Jowan fought hard to keep up. He clutched Ser Otto's mailed arm in a death-grip, explaining he was afraid to leave the blind Templar behind, in case Ser Otto got lost. Ser Otto did not contradict him. Jowan had always felt different to other mages. The darker, thicker current of Blood Magic - a dull red trickle like oil, or treacle - had flowed like sludge beneath the silvery Mana. Since Ser Otto had worked with him, this had dimmed and faded. He admired how hard Jowan worked to repress his addiction. Now, the Joining replaced that current with something similar, yet different: black sludge, slow-crawling, like a stagnant lake in winter. It was in all the Wardens - in Ser Otto himself - and he suspected Rilian must be right in her belief that Blood Magic, demons and taint all had the same beginnings. They were linked, intimately.

Jowan wove a tapestry of descriptions: the dank gloom of the tunnels, the way Rowland and Aveline's faces looked a bit peaky after darkspawn-infested dreams, the way Rilian marched beside Kardol, as warrior and equal, so focused she seemed a mechanism of overdriven steel and wire. Most of all, he listened as Jowan described the Legion:

"They're dressed in golden plate, spiked all over - they remind me of a whole battalion of hedgehogs! The plate is painted with octagons - like the runes the Tranquil use - and they're carrying shortspears, shields, axes and maces. Their warpaint is damned creepy: they all look like fanged skulls!" Jowan shuddered, "They remind me of those berserk Chasind."

A Legion warrior named Jukka overheard him and laughed uproariously. "And who do you think taught the Chasind? Have you not heard the tale of Luthias Dwarfson!"

Ser Otto, who admired both peoples, considered this carefully. He knew the Chasind painted their faces in anticipation of death, believing they fought their way from the Fade to the Maker's side. Or were killed again, and became lost spirits, destined to haunt the world of men. But when those Berserker warriors threw themselves into battle, it was with the knowledge that they may die. They might live, to a grand old age with many children to carry on their names and stories. When the Legion went to battle, it was with the certain knowledge they must die. And there would be no comfort. They neither expected nor yearned for the Maker's embrace. Only that of cold, hard stone. Ser Otto admired a belief that fought for no reward, whether in this life or the next. He wished he had more time to learn of these heroes. No wonder they had taught their traditions to a tribe outside Orzammar: otherwise the knowledge would have died with them. The Dwarven Shaperate kept no records of how they fought, how they died. Only a list of their names, carved into stone. Someone must bring these stories to those who would listen.

"The blue lanterns they carry are bobbing like one solid Dwarven river," Jowan went on. Ser Otto smiled: grateful for Jowan's way with words - grateful that he took the time to translate the world for him. Suddenly, the knight felt a cool current brush his skin, his forehead colder than the back of his neck, proving the space in front was fed by an air-duct.

"We're coming into an open space now - looks like…like…like the basement of Kinloch Hold! Full of phylacteries, and blood, and…oh!"

Ser Otto felt it too. A writhing tendril at the edges of his mind: a deep inward prickle of alien energy.

"Maker damn you, Architect!" Rilian roared. An ecstasy of clashes, the grate of steel on steel, a sound like a thousand voices all screaming in unison as the darkspawn rushed the Legion.

Even the sighted Wardens stayed out of the Legion's formation. Ser Otto had studied enough about them to know they practiced a defensive formation similar to the Tevinter testudo. Their shields formed a giant turtle: their spears thrust outward like the spines of a hedgehog. The Wardens - all except for Oghren - were too tall to fit correctly. And Oghren was too undisciplined.

"On me!" Ser Otto cried, and the Wardens rallied around him. Otto, Aveline, Rowland and Carver formed a defensive triangle around Jowan and Alim, allowing the mage and mage-archer to fire with impunity over their heads. Ser Otto was very, very grateful to find Rilian not among them. He knew what she was going to do - what her priority would be. He blessed her for it.

Oghren, of course, fought with neither strategy nor pattern. Such was anathema to his nature. His war howl echoed and re-echoed like a thousand drums around the chamber.

Dream and reality seemed almost completely interwoven, Ser Otto's personal blackness awash in sound and writhing movement, but he carried on with the resolve that had seen him through many dreadful battles against Blood Mages. The darkspawn showed to his senses as a black mass of veins: a network of rotten capillaries that powered movement. What he could not see was the breadth and shape of the weapons each carried - all different. Measuring thrusts determined the extent of each. This was not unlike the chess he played with Jowan. He remembered the board exactly - Jowan called out his moves - and the knight saw the developing strategy in his mind as a series of discrete images. Here, too, knowledge of sword-craft and anatomy told him how and where the spawn would place their weapons. Blade at blade, he killed two.

He heard Aveline's swift, sharp grunt of pain as a darkspawn slipped past her defences. Ser Otto put out his shield to cover her. A moment later, Jowan's magical bolt sizzled into the Genlock who would have caught him under his outstretched arm.

"Shift sides," he told Aveline. He had come up on her right side - her strong side - she needed him at her left. A shuffle as they swapped places. He felt the current of Jowan's healing magic; heard her soft sigh, like falling leaves. He felt her movement at his back, a shifting from leg to leg more menacing than nervous. Then her quiet mutter of explanation: "Nine Hurlocks around us; led by some kind of general. It's wearing volcanic aurum- never seen anything like it."

Ser Otto nodded. Even as Jowan withdrew his healing, knowing it had been enough, the Templar loosed his own powers. Jowan's had the quality of lamplight or firelight - it would burn as well as heal. The Templar Smite was pure anti-magic, light only, like scouring wind and water. Except - anti-magic was not quite right. It was more like the source of all magic, that could dispel what it had birthed. Lyrium - the Waters of the Fade. Ser Otto's power sent the darkspawn reeling backwards, hissing.

He felt the touch of their own magic - the foulness on their breath - their thoughts through the black web eroded by decay into shapes of horror. He felt the weight of their despair and hatred like stones pressed into his flesh. Beyond them, to the west, was the hollow sound of water dropped into a pit, a long way down. Far below came unspeakable sounds as something groaned and writhed, as if scorched. Then Rilian's voice - the beacon of her lyrium-traced sword - as she sought to give The Mother peace. Ser Otto just had time to send all his prayers, all his hope, when he felt Aveline lunge away from his back, and nearly fell backwards into her. That stagger saved him; the blade aimed at his throat missed, and he had his shield back up by then.

His mace clashed on three - he was too busy to calculate his chances. He swung, smashed, swung again; a darkspawn axe lunged too far for his shield and he felt it burn along his side. He sagged to one knee; another slash caught his right arm, slicing deep. His fingers opened; his mace fell. He ducked, grabbed a darkspawn boot, and yanked; a thud as the creature fell, and scrabbled back out of reach. The Templar's arm and side itched, intolerably, as the burn of Jowan's magic coursed through him, knitting flesh. Aveline's sword sang loudly, ringing a wild music off her attackers' blades. Ser Otto was back in the fight, smashing his mace into the first darkspawn he sensed. He fought through towards the leader - the general - taking another slashing blade across his shoulders.

The general felt like no darkspawn Ser Otto had ever encountered. Its manic, insane howl raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It was a quick, darting shadow, like black flame, and it wielded a pair of daggers that scorched its own skin. Ser Otto smelled the burning - the tar of taint - the crisp purity of Silverite: an alloy of lyrium. Even in madness and agony, the creature Rilian had described as The First would not give them up.

Ser Otto understood. The First had once been a Warden Commander. Even after six months of the Architect's experimentation, he had retained remnants of his former self. Driven to such lorn heroism by the fact that he alone knew of the Architect's design, and must warn others. After passing the truth to Rilian, he had sunk into the blackness. And Ser Otto, who admired heroism, found he could not hate this creature. No - not even though he knew The First had been the one to violate Boann and create The Mother. To father The Children. He focused solely on engaging him, trusting Jowan, Aveline and the others to guard his back. Fought with all the skill trained into him; muscle memory that had lasted beyond sight.

When The First fell, it was almost gladly, as if the buried part of him approved of this ending. Uncaring of the shrieks and echoing howls of battle that raged all around him, Ser Otto knelt down, brushed his gauntleted hand lightly over the craters and hollows of the eroded face, closed its eyes.

"You are guiltless. Peace be with you at last."

---

Rilian looked down upon a vast, roiling black mass of uncounted multitudes. The decaying white faces of darkspawn - shrunken inward like the petals of rotting roses - seemed to rise and fall amid the darkness. An ocean of taint, the dimness of consciousness crawling sluggishly within. Writhing, decaying, spawning. The corrupted drones served one being: the breeder. The Mother. Black tentacles reared like towering waves - swept vast swathes of the battling Dwarves and darkspawn down into the pit. Rilian could see the Legion fighting with perfect discipline: forming the turtle-shape with their shields, thrusting outward with shortspears…and it was not enough to save them. Behind the Legion, her own Wardens formed a Circle, with the mage and archer in the middle. She saw Ser Otto's death-struggle with the creature that had once been Duncan. Then saw an enormous Hurlock swing a two-handed maul towards his back. Ser Otto barely turned in time. He faced it fearlessly, joined by Rowland and Aveline. The thing took Rowland in the chest. The young knight crumpled like a leaf in winter, collapsing backward. Then a terrible sound from Aveline: a sobbing howl so raw with pain it sounded bloody. She collapsed forwards over her splintered kneecap. Ser Otto pushed her behind him, fighting on - but she could see he had no hope against this monster.

Then Jowan's mind-blast altered the odds.

She could not help them - could not even look back to watch. All her attention was needed to keep her balance as she inched with agonizing slowness across the crumbling inner ledge of the pit: half-ape, half-acrobat, wholly-insane. She stood on the tenuous perch and tore her eyes from the abyss below. She had a sense of demand from the writhing void: vertigo threatened to pitch her forward.

Half-buried within the walls of the pit were the fleshy sacks that contained half-formed Children, umbilicus-joined by tendrils to The Mother. Fang sliced open the nearest, and her mind spasmed away from the horror that spilled out. Not before the worst of all: the recognition of the Child - innocent child? - as offspring to Boann and Duncan. Fang ended the life of the pitiful, sickening thing, and her own vomit stained the stone.

Do I have the right to end a life of gross deformity, when all the days will be lived in pain? I do not know. I only know I have the duty…

At this, The Mother screamed, shrilly, and turned its head on that long, pale, glistening neck. White, delicate, like the stem of a flower. Atop the unspeakable gluttonous hulk below, the trunk was still that of a woman. Pale, perfect breasts, luminous skin, slender shoulders. Rilian looked past the horror to the fractured dark eyes…

My friend. Even now, my friend. She still has the most beautiful eyes…

"Boann?" she called, softly.

The waking of expressive soul from subsuming madness encapsulated all the horror of Boann's violation: she moved backward through time. Her memories played out from the day of Ostagar to the present, in unbearable clarity:

"Do it to Odila…not me…Odila. Violate her…rip her arms off, I don't care…just not that filth PLEASE!"

Rasping, almost sobbing, Rilian called her name.

"Maker…Maker…Maker…help me, Rilian! Oh Maker, help me. Drowning in decay. Get me out of this prison…this twisted shell…my body has betrayed me…I want RID of it!"

It was a woman's soul she saw there - dark eyes wide in human fear and horror - Rilian looked into vast wells of grief. Boann gazed her entire soul into Rilian's, and Rilian had to fight not to crawl off into some dark corner of her own mind and never look out of her own eyes again. Didn't a mortal being have enough of their own grief, that they must also take the full measure of another's? But that was what it meant to be mortal: to share another's pain as the only thing one could do for them…she could not turn away. She absorbed the fear and pain and horror like a vast black wave. It engulfed her and forced her to bear its weight. This was love's terrifying promise: that it could expand to contain all imaginable grief.

She held up the bracelet Rylock had given her: the bracelet made from rock of the Deep Roads, that glowed with its own light. The dark eyes recognized it. Rilian knew Boann had been given it by Mother Ailis when she had entered the Chantry as a child of ten. When Boann woke in the dorms from smothering dreams, and had needed to know what remained of the night's sentence, she had consulted it instead of an hourglass. She had been orphaned after her father's death of third-stage syphilis, after the disease had taken his mind and transformed his body to a mass of putrefaction that made those about him retch and vomit. It had made Boann very strong - was the source of her words to Rylock after the Templar's personal horror - and her words to Rilian after Adaia's death. Rilian held out the bracelet - and in her other hand she held out Fang. She didn't look downward to where the taint had turned her friend's body into something not even syphilis could imagine, only into her eyes. Boann bared her throat for the strike.

"Goodbye, my friend. I hope the Maker gave you strength. I love Him too. I shall see you in His light."

---

Rilian did not know how long she remained, staring into the opaque dead eyes of Boann, watching the blind, slow-crawling trickle of taint seep from the slashed throat. It was only when a dark prickle of alien energy flared along her nerves, sang in the channels of her spine, that she tore her eyes away. Across the black divide - at the same level as her own - the Architect stood, back to an inky mouth of tunnel that opened to the west. Fifty feet below, a wider tunnel fed the pit itself, dark water sloshing from some unknown source. There was no way across from either tunnel - but Rilian knew with despair that the creature wouldn't need one. It could float like a black angel across the roiling pit - or simply blast her with magic from where it stood.

She braced for death, refusing to be snuffed out without facing her enemy.

That bone-dry, inflectionless voice, all strictest scholarship, said mildly: "You have ended The Mother and The First - but there will be others. I have enough of the Joining mixture to make a hundred Wardens - and the means to accelerate their Calling. They will create new Mothers."

Raising her chin, Rilian screamed:

"All your creatures are born to die! Do you know the origins of Taint? Do you know how the first of my people sought to preserve immortality by drinking the blood of the Tree of Life? The Tree in which all worlds are held - the Tree that the Chantry calls the Golden City. Its living veins are pure lyrium: the Waters of the Fade. Transcendent perversion - and for that they were cursed to live forever beyond the Veil, jealous of the life they could see, but never touch. But their corrupted blood remained, seeping into the dying tree, tainting the Black City - lying in wait for the magisters to bring the taint to earth. Your kind were never more than hosts - biological machines driven by infection. Lyrium and silverite - the closest substance to the blood of the Tree - will forever purge and burn you. You know no love and can breed only by perverting life, never by creating it. And now - because of your experiments - the pestilence of Taint will spread without control. The Mothers, breeding Children to become Broodmothers, will overrun Thedas in a generation. But with all humanity sterile and tainted there can be no more Fathers. Your demise will come from the famine of your kind."

"NO!" She did not know how loudly the Architect screamed the word - or if it was even loud at all - but the negation was flung into the void with all the intensity of which the decaying voice was capable. But behind it the knowledge was already there, desperately denied at heart - for the Architect could manage basic calculations. A Broodmother bred only once and died soon after - but in nine months all the life the woman would ever have held in her body, throughout her lifetime, would be born - and matured within a year. She saw the knowledge in the brilliant pearlescent eyes - wide and fractured with blazing, jealous hatred.

"THEN NO-ONE!"

The air itself seemed to thicken, the storm of grief and rage building, building, with a riptide of desperation added. Rilian felt it as a hammer to her mind, thundering through the web of taint that linked them, She staggered at the blast, but would not back down. As Blood Magic had once tried to do to her, she hijacked the link - sent her thoughts down the glistening taint-crawling strands like a spider - slid into the alien mind, cold as stone, and set every nerve on fire. Her mental voice cracked, whip-sharp:

"Just because you can't have the life you yearn for, you're going to kill it everywhere, is that it? So kill, then! You have the power. But know what you are killing…"

Rilian had always been able to transmit imagination the way other women could transmit desire. She had used it to share, inspire, rally. But now she used it to wound - chose her images like knives, thrown one after the other at their target. All Rilian's memories: a lifetime of silver strands of love and joy and family, played out before the alien mind, danced like silver fire above the void.

The Architect reeled backward as if from a blow, put long, attenuated arms up as if to shield itself. In her own mind, Rilian felt the howl of grief, vast as an ocean, as if a whole universe wept for loss.

"Take it back!" it whispered - in what in a human would have been the hot breath of strangled weeping, "This dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the filth it is!"

Rilian felt the crackle of magic in the air - a clear fire that hurt her eyes, burned her flesh, so that the bright air writhed and pressed smothering in on her like a weighted wind. A dark-red cloud of flame balled, billowed outward - a cataclysm that scorched, not Rilian, but the teeming mass below. Smoke and vapour surged from the pit as the drones within - the feeders of the Mother - were twisted to charnel horrors of bone and wet gristle. The thing that had been Boann burned too - the monstrous bloated body blackening and curling like a spider in flame.

Rilian stood, pressed against the terrifyingly fragile ledge, as the firestorm howled beneath, eyes shut, lungs scorched. An eternity seemed to pass before the storm cleared - and when she opened her eyes the merest fraction, she saw the Architect had gone.

She cowered on the ledge, the pain of burned face and hands seeping slowly into consciousness, not daring to look down into the void - unable to climb up. Then an incongruously chirpy vice floated down:

"I've got you! Catch this. You're safe."

Rilian caught the rope that Sigrun had flung down, and called up: "I'm wearing armour. You'll never be able to…"

Sigrun only scoffed, and the tough little woman, braced against a slab of rock in the laboratory above, began to pull.

Rilian hit the edge of the pit and willing hands helped her over. She landed in an ungainly scramble - the scrape of the stone raw pain against the burns - and emerged into a scene of scarcely less devastation than the one below. Twenty members of the Legion were slain - many more would never fight again. Rilian exclaimed in outrage when these bared their throats for Kardol to finish them, but Sarela gripped her forearm so tightly it ripped a gasp of pain from her.

"Where would they go, Warden? Orzammar? None of us can return there. It is better so."

Sigrun was hunched over the body of her friend, Jukka. Her face was turned away from them, her voice strangely muffled when she muttered:

"You'd think I'd have learned to accept it by now. In the Legion, death looms over us constantly like a dirty uncle."

"C..commander?" Rilian whirled - and her heart thudded painfully. Rowland was half-sitting, supported by Carver and Ser Otto, with Jowan working over him. Jowan's face was streaked with tears. "I can't do it…knitting flesh, yes...not bone. I'm not Wynne. I wish I'd listened to her!" Rowland's chest was smashed - and from the dark red froth that speckled his lips, Rilian could see the broken ribs had pierced his lungs.

"I'm here, Rowland," she murmured, kneeling beside him.

"I…I wish…I could have fought at your side…just once..." Rowland's breath trailed off in a bubbling sigh. He did not take another.

I should have fought beside him! If I had, he might still be alive... She took in the tortured form of Aveline - alive, but with one knee crushed, unable to stand without support. Jowan had done what he could for the pain, but he lacked the skill or knowledge to do more. He looked up:

"Commander - we can still get her to Wynne. Ser Otto and I can go."

"Leave me," Aveline gritted through clenched teeth, "You can't spare the men."

Rilian thought rapidly. "We're a day's journey from Ishal. If you go back, it could be into victory or defeat. No way to tell." Then she squared her shoulders. "But I trust Loghain." She moved rapidly, searching through the remains of the laboratory even as she felt the blue wash of Jowan's magic soothe her burns. She gathered notes written in a spidery, frenetic scrawl - and wondered at the searing determination that had led one born into a taint-stinking, filth-drowning brood to learn reading. One passage stood out starkly:

…The blood. The blood is always the key…

"The Architect was wrong," she whispered, so low she didn't think the others heard her, "It was the Blood that rose to create demons and taint. It takes something else to heal evil."

Sigrun slipped a hand into hers and squeezed. "I was told that evil always triumphs because good is stupid," she confided - and Rilian startled herself by bursting out into a half-sob, half-laugh.

"Andraste chose sacrifice over power. She knew that evil can be healed only by love," Ser Otto murmured. He walked with unerring steps to the edge of the pit. Rilian gasped in shock. But the knight had the blind man's sense of open spaces. He stopped at its edge, head bowed - and Rilian could only bless the maleficar who had taken his sight. So, the Maker had some mercy after all. She joined him and they held each other. This time, it was Rilian who whispered the words of prayer:

"Here lies the Abyss, the well of all souls. From whose emerald waters doth life begin anew. Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you. In my arms lies eternity."

"Rilian," Ser Otto said quietly, "Let me be the one to go on. You go back with Jowan and the others." He did not need to see her shake her head to sense the movement. "In the deepest tunnels," he pointed out, "I will be less blind than you."

"It isn't that I don't think you capable of defeating Urthemiel," Rilian murmured, "And I know you wish to be beside the woman you love. But no-one but you could convince the Chantry to allow this kind of research. To cure the taint - redeem what my people did wrong, millennia ago - ensure no other suffers as Boann suffered. That is love. Maker, it hurts! But that is love."

As Rilian, Carver, Alim, Oghren and the Legion marched onward, her last sight was of Ser Otto guiding his small group. A blind man led them home.

---

Through the taint that linked them, the Architect was aware when the Warden Commander chose to send three of her Wardens back towards the structure called Ishal. He followed her thoughts onward to her destination: Ortan Thaig. He waited until the web stopped tingling with their presence - until they became faint dark smears within his consciousness - and then not even that. Then he returned to the pit - to the blackened hulk and its dead feeders below.

How strange, he thought, the bright bubbles of the memories of the woman named Rilian floating within the sea of taint, that we share an exile. Rilian had been a stranger among her people because, even as a child, she had heard the Song. Not the Call of the Old Gods but the Source itself it merely echoed: the faint notes of unearthly music she had called "the Spark". It had made her impractical, made her neglect the things that mattered to her people, made her a being who always saw the world a little differently to others.

He had been the same. An alien even among the feral vat from which his brethren sprang. A watcher, observing his kind from one layer removed. Except he had been an alien for not hearing the Song. Perhaps, though, he and Rilian had sought the same thing. He, too, had yearned for the Source rather than its corrupted echo. The plans, goals, dreams of the society his kind would build had burned in his mind, sweet and bitter as the fruit of the tree of knowledge was said to be. But Rilian had been right - it was not possible to create life from death. The world he had sought had never been theirs to claim. He had never seen this so clearly. He was a stranger in the eyes of the Maker.

It would take several more blasts of his cataclysm to ensure the filth below was cleansed. He had been forced to wait until Rilian was safely away. Now he gathered his powers. Unlike all others of his kind, he did not cast through taint alone. He was connected to the Fade. He knew what it was to dream. From there, he had stared up at the Black City forever on the horizon and wondered at it. From there, he had contacted his first human study, First Enchanter Remille. From Remille and from Warden-Commander Bregan he had come to understand the darker side of human nature completely - but not love.

The tainted air cleared for a moment and then a brilliant column of pure, sterilizing light a million times more powerful than flame poured down. Everything within the pit was gone, obliterated. Even the rock itself was turned to translucent diamond.

Purged.

The Architect recalled his own words to Rilian: "What would I have do to make you trust me? Kill the Mother - kill every one of my kind?"

She had said: "Even that would not be enough. The darkspawn I trust is the one who kills himself."

The air was silent, still, waiting for his choice.

---

Song inspirations were:

Rilian before the dawn: Emeli Sande - Heaven

Rylock and Boann: Abide With Me (I like Emeli Sande's version)

The Architect's plan: Simon and Garfunkel - The Sound Of Silence

AN: I know I promised this would be the final chapter, but there's one more to come. I suspect many will need a break at this point. I know I do.