Outside of the Landsmeet hall, a pocket of resistance was holding its ground against the darkspawn that had invaded the city. They couldn't know that their presence had made it easier for the two live Wardens left in the city to get to the top of Fort Drakon, where the Archdemon in all of its beastly glory had landed with a wounded wing. They had no idea that they were attracting all of the darkspawn in the lower city with their noise and resistance, painting themselves as the biggest target in the city. All they knew was that they were hanging onto life by the thinnest of threads, and the darkspawn were coming to try and cut that frail little chord of hope.
A barrier of overturned carts and bodies both darkspawn and human ringed the outside of the hall, creating a small space for the soldiers and guardsmen to fight in and glean some defense from the horde. Outside of this small ring of protection, assaulted by any number of magical spells that brought devastation to the ranks of the mindless creatures they were preparing for another assault.
The ogre barreled through their defenses with a rumbling roar and the shaking of ground as it charged, lowering its horns and charged, sending men and splintered wood flying off in either direction. A rush of darkspawn filled in after the ogre, flooding past the defensive wall like a stream that had been held back by a dam. Solona dropped a fireball on the horde and the creatures let an ungodly scream rise from their collective throats as some died and others fell to the ground writing and twitching.
The ogre roared and furiously tried to shake off the fire coating its shoulders, burning at its purple mottled skin and its gaze snapped up, singling out the mage. With another terrifying battle cry the beast lowered its hands, poised for another charge and rushed forward to crush the source of its pain.
Aedan saw the beast charge, had a split second to act, and thrust Solona partially out of the way. The horns of the beast collided with him, smashing in his armor and knocking him sprawling in the dirt. Solona screamed as she went flying, the thick slap of a meaty fist breaking bones sounding as the ogre clobbered her with a flying fist.
Darkness hovered around the corners of his vision. It was hard to breathe, harder to think, and impossible to move. For a few terrifying seconds he thought he was dead, then the rush of sound and light assaulted him and he realized that not only was he alive, but he was going to have to fight to stay that way. As he rose he saw the ogre thrashing about, trying to pummel anyone that got too close. With wandering eyes he spotted the limp form of Solona, her body curled around the corpse of a dead man where she'd landed, her staff lying a few feet away and appearing entirely unconscious.
Anger gripped him then, the emotion fiercely riding his sensibilities until he suddenly found himself right behind the creature. It turned and he laid the thick muscle of its unprotected back wide with his blade, black blood spraying out of the wound as the creature roared in protest. It swung a large fist at him but hit only the stones below its feet, Aedan having moved around behind it already to sink his blade into the creature's exposed ribs. It reared, claws reaching for the sky and quickly turned, throwing out its arm in an effort to clothesline Aedan. He rose his shield and ducked, bracing himself and was pushed backwards by the force of the creature's arm, losing his brace at the last second and fumbled backwards a few steps. The ogre spread its arms and roared, beating a challenge against its bleeding chest and Aedan accepted, rushing forward quickly to take advantage of the openings that the monstrosity presented.
Arrows hissed from behind the front lines, several embedding themselves in the ogre's side. It turned to look, and that was all the time that Aedan needed to make the kill. A clawed hand came from his left and he deflected it with a powerful push of his shield. Crouching slightly he leapt, the ogre looking at him at the last second, too late to make any sort of move to stop what was about to happen. His blade found its mark in the center of the creature's chest, sinking almost half way into the muscled mass before Aedan drew it back out with a reverse pull, slashing at the ogre's other hand as it tried to claw the human off it's chest. He severed a finger and the creature fell backward under the impact of Aedan's weight, screaming in the feral way that dying creatures did when they realized their doom was upon them. He slashed his blade across the creature's throat, another spray of blood erupting from its flesh when the thick veins there were cut. The ogre flailed, unwilling to give up yet and Aedan plunged his blade through its chest again, gripping the hilt with both hands and twisted. It gave one final roar, weaker this time, then the ogre went still and Aedan withdrew his blade, backing over the creature's body then turned and jumped down.
Suddenly the earth seemed to shift, a wave of light blinding him for a brief second. When it cleared and he could see again, he looked up to the source of the light and saw nothing, then became aware of the darkspawn around them that had flooded into their barricade turn tail and run. They made horrid noises as they fled, not stopping to defend themselves if soldiers intervened to cut them down. They just kept running.
A cheer went up all around as they realized they had won, that the flash must have been the death of the Archdemon and that the Blight was now over. Aedan didn't join them in the celebration.
He sheathed his sword clumsily, uncaring that it was covered in darkspawn gore when he put it away and rushed to where he'd seen Solona land. He found her lying deathly still and touched her shoulders gently, noting that she looked unnaturally pale and instantly assumed the worst.
"No, no, you're not dead, you can't be." He whispered frantically, shrugging off his shield and bent to listen at her chest for a heartbeat. At first he heard nothing, then she coughed and relief washed over him. Thank the Maker!
"Aedan…" She whispered, managing to open her eyes, her breath wheezing when she drew it and coughed again, weakly clutching at her chest as she did so, obviously in pain.
"I'm here." He muttered in return, smoothing her hair out of her face. "It's over. The Blight's over. We won."
Solona smiled, her expression distant. "Good. I was… getting worried."
He sensed more than saw the presence over his shoulder and looked up to see Derik standing over them both, an unreadable expression on his face. "She's exhausted." He said plainly without any inflection. "I can barely sense her magic, but I can practically see the Fade clinging to her. She's in a bad way."
Aedan nodded. He knew something of what Derik was talking about from the journal that had changed everything about the way he perceived mages and the Fade. He would never be an adept a Templar as Derik, for he would not willingly imbibe raw lyrium, but he had become more sensitive to magic simply because he was aware of it in a way that he never had been before. The Fade was in Solona's eyes when she could open them to look at the two men standing over her, a troubling sign that indicated a dangerous thinning of the Veil.
Seeing how she labored for breath, Aedan immediately set her so that she lay completely flat on the ground. "Her ribs are either cracked or broken." He supplied quietly, concealing his frightening level of worry for the woman behind a likewise unreadable mask. In truth, he was simply too tired to muster an outward expression of the fear that raged against the realization of her condition. Physically wounded, magically exhausted, and sitting in the middle of a huge battleground, she was the perfect recipe for creating an abomination. Aedan didn't even have the capacity to worry about himself. For the exhaustion that seemed to reach down into his bones, or the shaking of his hands or the burning in his side from a wound that was still leaking blood through his armor.
Around them the men continued to cheer and celebrate, forgetting their exhaustion and fear in the wake of the victory, completely oblivious of the quiet suffering shared by the Templar and the young man who had led them in their most trying time.
•º•.•º•
The explosion rocked all of Denerim. Everyone felt it within the city's walls, and all gazes were drawn skyward when the blindingly white light seared through the city. In its wake, darkspawn dropped their weapon and fled, hardly even bothering to defend themselves if a soldier raised their blade against them. Cheers of victory rose from every corner of the city where surviving warriors remained, and an effort to drive the last of the straggling darkspawn out of the city was mounted.
The hurlock that Kallian had been fighting was felled with an arrow in its eye, and once it became apparent that there was to be no more resistance from the darkspawn she threw her arms around Shianni, the cousins celebrating with joyous tears in their eyes. It was over. They were safe. The Alienage was safe.
Before the celebrating could get underway in earnest, Kallian slipped away from the crowd, navigating her way through the twisting corpse-filled streets toward the solitary monolith of Fort Drakon where the flash had come from. She was not the only one who had it in mind to go to the fort and see what had become of the Wardens. As Kallian made her way steadily through the city, a cell of mixed soldiers bearing either the Cousland crest or the rampant bear of Amaranthine on their kite shields appeared, marching along in neatly formed lines.
Hope kindled in her heart, and she quickly joined the marching cell of men, picking her way to the front of the formation. She fell in step next to the human who looked at her with utmost curiosity displayed plain as day on his helmeted head. Kallian paid the awkwardness no mind, figuring that the man had no idea she was in cahoots with his Teyrn, or rather, the brother of his Teyrn. "Were you from the units inside the city, or outside?" She asked quickly, having to walk a little faster to keep up with the human man's longer pace and forced march speed.
The soldier nodded once, still looking at Kallian curiously, surprised that an elf would be so forthright. "We marched with the forces sent to Redcliffe." The soldier replied promptly despite the awkwardness of explaining things to an elf. But the spatter of blood covering her front and the weapons she proudly displayed on her back convinced him enough that withholding the information would do nobody any good.
She tried not to show her disappointment, and was not entirely successful. "So I wouldn't suppose you happen to know where Aedan Cousland is, do you?" She wasn't sure if Aedan actually had a title to be properly addressed by. She knew little of the various ranks of the nobility, and besides, Aedan was always just going to be Basher to her.
"His Grace, Teyrn Fergus, sent us in to observe the destruction of the city and find his brother, if possible." The soldier replied in a deadpan, clearly wanting to answer no more questions from the overly curious elf. Her interestingness as a warrior had worn off on him, and he no longer had the patience to be dealing with a lesser being.
Realizing that her time was up, Kallian thanked the man with as little bitterness as she could manage and decided to follow them for a ways. When they crossed the western bridge to Fort Drakon, she began to notice piles of darkspawn stacked almost like a wall, creating random choke points along the path. At first she was intensely curious, but the more she saw of the walls, the more that the novelty wore off on her, and they became simply part of the scenery as everything else was.
She traveled with the soldiers as they made their way to Fort Drakon, only stopping to take care of stragglers that hadn't fled already, but they were few and far between. Most of the darkspawn simply ran for it when they heard the marching humans coming their way. It would take a wide net to capture all of them at the rate that they scattered. There was some grumbling from the soldiers about the efforts it would take to make sure the last of the darkspawn in the city were gone, but Kallian tuned them out, watching the streets for any sign of a familiar corpse.
When they reached a crossroads, the man leading the expedition party turned left instead of continuing on toward the fort. Kallian paused, looking up at the imposing tower from which the flash of light had come and then at the retreating backs of the soldiers. In a moment of indecision she tossed between the two options, and then finally headed for the fort, taking the road up the slight incline to the huge tower.
The courtyard in front of Fort Drakon was absolutely strewn with the corpses of darkspawn, dwarves, elves and a spattering of mages. Victims of the war, drawn here to certain death by the treaties forged before modern memory that still held all the major factions of the nation accountable in the event of a Blight. Kallian looked closely at every elf she saw, fearing to find Theron among their numbers but luckily did not find him numbered among the dead. She checked for Solona and Aedan as well, but her searching came up delightfully fruitless as well. The inside was in much the same state, though the number of slain darkspawn far outnumbered the amount of other races that Kallian could see.
With a mix of cautious hope and dread she scaled the tower ahead of the soldiers who took the time to look through every hallway and room in search of anything living, darkspawn or otherwise. When she finally reached the top floor she was thoroughly winded, resting her head against the huge double doors that lead up onto the fort's roof, her hand gripping the handle. She was scared that she would come out and see a horde of darkspawn aimlessly wandering the roof around the corpse of the Archdemon, Theron and everyone else he'd taken with him to the top lying dead in pools of their own blood.
Gathering her courage and her breath, Kallian stepped through the doors and out into the bloody red light of the afternoon. She was immediately hit with the stench of burning darkspawn flesh, a scent that had become far too familiar for her taste and she only just barely kept from puking her guts out. Lifting a sleeve to her nose, she picked her way across the roof, not pausing to look at the masses of dead bodies here, her eyes on the huge corpse of the Archdemon, the dragon lying on its side with its tattered wings spread everywhere.
Movement caught her eye and she quickly looked up to see a handful of dwarves picking their way amongst the dead. A singular golem seemed to be helping someone up, and she immediately recognized the elderly mage woman, Wynne. Ignoring the fact that she was likely to trip over a sword or dismembered arm, Kallian ran for the familiar faces, eager to hear what had become of the two Grey Wardens that they accompanied. She spotted Alistair lying a little distance away from where Wynne stood, sitting up from a pool of tainted blood that had formed around him from the bodies of over half a dozen Hurlocks and Genlocks that he had felled. She didn't see Theron though, and Wynne immediately noted her distress, coming over to comfort her.
"Kallian-"
The elf shook her head, backing away from the motherly voice that Wynne had put on. "What happened? Be straight with me. Don't… don't try and hide it."
Alistair sat up fully and shook his head to clear it of the annoying headache that had sprang up, feeling an awfully lot like a really bad hangover. He met Kallian's pained gazed for a moment, and then turned his eyes on the body of the Archdemon. "Theron, he… He slew the Archdemon. Put a sword in it's head-"
Tears immediately filled Kallian's eyes relief pouring through her. "Oh thank the Maker." She breathed, but Alistair did not look relieved. She hesitated, the brief flare of joy dimming when the warrior did not meet her gaze straight on. "That's good, right? It means he survived, right? He's just unconscious or something, like you were…" Her gaze traveled around, looking for the telltale shock of blonde-white hair that would serve as a beacon to find out wherever it was that Theron had fallen.
Alistair slowly got to his feet with a pained groan and a squeal of metal where one of his heavy plates had been bashed in and wasn't cooperating with the rest of his suit of armor. "Kallian, he can't be-"
"There!" She didn't wait to hear what Alistair had to say on the matter, spotting Theron among the carnage on the roof. Quickly, Kallian picked her way through the bodies and the gore, kneeling next to Theron who was lying on his back, eyes closed and carrying no weapons, the palms of his hands looking like they had been seared by a hot brand. He didn't appear to be breathing, and with tears pricking the backs of her eyes Kallian fumbled to try and get a feel for his pulse, her fingers pressing against Theron's long narrow neck. Behind her she could hear the rustle of armor and the stomping as Shale and Alistair quietly made their way over.
"I'm so sorry Kallian." Alistair said quietly, bending down to place a gauntleted hand on her shoulder.
But Kallian made no movements, her face suddenly quite blank. "Idiot." She whispered quietly, bursting out into teary laughter, which made Alistair worry deeply for her sanity. "He's alive!"
"He- what?"
"The dumb ass is playing possum." Kallian giggled, sniffling as tears flowed freely down her face. She wiped at them once, smearing some blood on her cheek when she did so. "He's got a pulse! It's very weak, but he's alive. He's really alive."
Alistair looked like he could have been pushed over with a feather, the dumbfounded look on his face far surpassing anything that Kallian could imagine that the man could actually pull off. He stared first at Kallian's blood and tear stained face, then at the passive expression on Theron's unconscious one. "Wynne!" He suddenly shouted, attracting the attention of the elderly woman who was going around tending to the other wounded on the roof that came to her.
When she heard the frantic tone in Alistair's voice, she immediately stopped in the middle of counseling a dwarf on how to take care of his newly repaired arm and hurried over. "Alistair? What is it?" She looked like she expected to see darkspawn tunneling up from under their feet, her staff gripped tightly in one hand and a wary expression on her face.
"It's Theron, he needs healing immediately." Alistair replied to her look of concern, gesturing down toward the elf. Without another word Wynne let her hands become enveloped in healing blue, her hands waving in the air over his body.
Suddenly Theron sputtered and drew a deep wheezing breath, his whole body tensing up and a pained expression crossed his face. As Wynne continued to use her magic, he settled down, slowly opening his eyes, his lips moving to frame a string of broken elfish that none of them could understand. His gaze focused first on Kallian, and immediately he looked confused, his brows furrowing together. "Lethallan?"
Kallain nodded furiously, taking one of his hands in both of her own and resting them on top of his chest. "Yeah, it's me. But by Andraste's damned ashes, you gave me a scare."
A wistful smile graced his face and his lifted his free hand, burnt palms and all to trail the back of his fingers over the planes of her cheek, the blood that she'd put there earlier smearing further and tucked a lock of Kallian's errant red hair behind one of her elongated ears. "I am glad you are safe."
Kallian chuckled and sniffed, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. "Of course. It's going to take more than a Blight to knock me out for good." Uncaring of the others watching the scene, she threaded her fingers through his hair, her thumb resting on the crest of one of the tattoo lines on his face. "And you kept your promise, too."
His smile was pained and distant, but it was a smile all the same. "So I did."
•º•.•º•
Aedan clutched her hand, uncaring that blood smeared his palms. "You can't die, not after all this." One of the Circle's mages was tending to her wounds, healing the largest of them. The boy was ragged though, worn from the toll of the battle and nearing the limit of his endurance. The flow of magic stopped and the boy sat abruptly, shaking with fatigue.
Derik, his plate armor covered in darkspawn ichor, walked through the door flap of the tent. He put a hand on the mage's shoulder in a comforting sort of way. "You've done well. Fetch some poultices and bandages if there are any left." The boy nodded and got up to leave. With the mage gone Derik walked to Solona's side and removed one of his gloves, touching her forehead. "Her mana is depleted completely. How many lyrium potions did she take?"
Aedan fumbled for the number, the battle already seeming a lifetime away. "Five? Maybe more."
"Phew, Maker's beard, five?" Derik took off his other glove and stuffed the both of them in his belt. "She'll probably go into shock just from lyrium overdose. Or fall into a coma. Maybe sprout a second head."
Aedan squeezed Solona's hand between his own. "I'm not seeing how humor is going to help this." He muttered, dangerously close to snapping.
Derik sat, looking at Solona's face before turning his gaze on Aedan. "Well, I can be morbid if you'd prefer. I'm here to make sure that when she wakes up, it's not Sola plus an extra passenger." He leaned back in his chair, making to fold his hands over his chest then thought better of it when he remembered the darkspwan goo on him. "Mages have this crazy ability to make contracts with demons to save their lives."
"Solona wouldn't-"
Derik held up his hand, cutting Aedan off. "Death, especially mass death like what we've seen today, thins the Veil. An exhausted mage on the brink of dying is easy prey for demons in conditions like this. All of the mages here are in danger, and are being watched over by the Templars."
Aedan could not argue that point. He knew the danger as well as Derik. Maybe more. He had been to the Fade and personally fought one of Solona's demons, and could only imagine what it must be like for those demonic creatures to have an even easier time slipping between Fade and reality. He simply didn't want a second voice to echo his own fears. It made them real. Tangible. Inescapable.
The shaking mage came back, the break from healing obviously having done him some good as he'd regained a bit of his color. "She doesn't appear to have contracted the Taint." He said, laying down the wad of gauze and single poultice, a rag and bowl of water on her bedside. "The wounds need cleaning. I stopped the worst of the bleeding, but I can't use more magic to fill in the rest."
"You've done well." Derik replied with a thin smile. At the mage's hesitation to continue, Derik quietly shrugged. "Don't mind me. I'm just a precaution."
The mage nodded, nervous, then faced Aedan. "Ser, help me lift her please."
Cleaning and binding Solona's wounds took a good deal of time. Food was brought around halfway through the procedure and after the mage boy had eaten he looked a world better. Once Solona had been thoroughly wrapped and tended he looked Derik over, Aedan unwilling to move or be touched, then bandaged the Templar's bigger wounds and checked for the Taint before excusing himself.
The two men left behind were silent for a long time. It was Derik that finally broke the silence. "She needs to disappear." He mumbled quietly.
Aedan looked up sharply, his battle fatigue pushed away for the moment. "What do you mean?"
"The other Templars know that she's alive." Derik supplied quietly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "That's why I came to Denerim in the first place looking for the both of you. Without a phylactery it is impossible to trace her by normal means. However, she is a very high-priority target. She's killed too many Templars for the Order to simply forget her. Now that the darkspawn have fled back to the Deep Roads, the Templars will be back to rounding up apostates that escaped during the chaos of the Blight."
Aedan contemplated that quietly, tracing the lines of Solona's scars with the pad of his thumb. "We could leave Ferelden."
"That's an option." Derik conceded quietly. "But the arm of the Order spans nations. You'd be best off in Tevinter if that was the way you wanted to go." Silence elapsed for a few more seconds, the sounds of the dying and the wounded outside an appropriate ambiance for their conversation.
"Then what do you suggest?" Aedan asked after a protracted silence in which he had contemplated the possible ways that they could throw off the trail of the Templars.
Derik looked at Solona's face then met Aedan's eyes. "I do not know yet. When she wakes up, I think it would be best if we discussed the matter then. Until she wakes though… you should probably get that looked at." He gestured to Aedan's side. He was still in full battle gear, darkspawn blood flaking off of his armor now that it was dry and leaving corroded patches in its wake. His side was not black however, but a dark red with his own blood. Sometime during the fight he had been wounded and the attack from the ogre had intensified the severity of the wound. He was light headed and raw from the battle and loss of blood, but was pushing it all aside with the overwhelming concern he held for the mage lying unconscious before him. "Take a break. Go get cleaned up and a little rest. I'll watch her."
He debated the offer for a long quiet moment. Aedan wanted to do nothing of the sort, but the more he thought about it, the more his body screamed at him for being reckless and abusive. His side throbbed with pain, his head fuzzy with blood loss and his hands shaking from the crash after such a prolonged intense adrenaline high. All of a sudden the days of battling caught up with him and he felt thirty years older. Silently Aedan rose to his feet, laying Solona's hand he had been holding over her chest. "I'll be back before long." He promised, not knowing if he would actually be able to sit through a bandaging without falling asleep on the medic. Or if he would be able to find one at all.
Derik simply nodded and watched Aedan go, then rested his chin on his folded hands and contemplated the childhood friend that now lay before him on the brink of death.
In the end, it was finding a free healer that had taken the most time that he spent wandering the medical compound. By the time he did find some one to help out, his only option was a tired bar maid he recognized from the Gnawed Noble. Then, just as predicted, he wavered on the brink of consciousness and eventually fell asleep on the poor woman. When he woke up, it was already bordering on nightfall. Picking himself up despite his protesting bones, Aedan made his way back to the medical tent where he'd left Solona and Derik.
He was on the other side of the Landsmeet hall from them now; he had to look that far away just to find someone that wasn't dealing with amputations. Aedan had left his armor off, there was no point in wearing it. Putting the breastplate back on would only dig into the wound at his side and make it worse. But he refused to go unarmed. There were still darkspawn afoot, and even in the middle of the hastily thrown together medical camp, he wasn't going to risk being attacked.
Just a street over from where he needed to be, he spotted Derik. The Templar had his back turned to him and seemed to be talking quietly with two other Templars that looked just as beaten up as the bloodhound. He didn't stick around to find out what they were talking about, and instead walked faster back to the medic tent, worry gnawing at the pit of his stomach that only eased up when he got to the medical tent.
He pushed open the front flap quietly, thinking that Solona was probably still asleep and walked in. Immediately he saw that the cot where she was supposed to be resting was empty, and his heart leapt in his throat. A noise attracted his attention, and he looked away from the empty cot to come face to face with an abomination. Solona's staff was held in the monstrosity's hand, its warped twisted flesh half merging with the wooden staff so that the weapon and the beast became one.
The abomination was little more than a fleshy mass for a torso, and a singular beady eye was riveted on him from the twisted lump that had once been Solona's head. The abomination gurgled at him, sizing him up, then charged with all the rage of a mindless animal. Aedan forgot about the sword in his hand.
•º•.•º•
Kallian stumbled over a dead man, slipping when his wrist shifted out from under her foot as she had stepped on what at first appeared to only be a harmless puddle. That puddle turned out to be made entirely of blood, which had pooled from the slit throat of the dead man lying next to it. She silently vowed to watch the puddles more carefully from now on and continued through the gathering of misery, desperately searching for any familiar faces.
Theron was in good hands with Wynne and her cousin. Even though Shianni had initially been wary of him, she'd decided that even she could keep an eye on an unconscious man well enough. Hovering over him wasn't going to help anybody, and Kallian desperately wanted to see who else had survived the fight. As it turned out, the answer was not very many.
Among the hastily erected medical tents it was a maze of the dead, the near dead, and the frantic living who were trying to keep those on the cusp of the Void from passing over the threshold. Most were unsuccessful at the task. Kallian passed through mostly unnoticed, keeping her head down and her eyes moving, looking for anyone that would be of help. Every once and a while she asked someone who didn't look too busy if they happened to know where the Lord of Highever had holed up. She got conflicting reports. Some said that he was dead, others claimed that he'd been single-handedly routing files of darkspawn on his own last they saw him. Slightly more reliable reports directed her in the general vicinity of the Landsmeet hall, and as she picked her way across the ruined city toward that distant goal, she came across piles of dead darkspawn strewn over makeshift barriers. She was surprised the first time, but as she came across several more stations that were inexplicably piled high with darkspawn corpses, she began to take less notice of the phenomena and began to hope that it was a good sign.
The Landsmeet hall was a wreck. The front had been painted with darkspawn blood, a ring of corpses both human and other augmenting the uneven wall of crates and barrels and wagons that served as a defensive wall. The front of the hall was missing chunks and scorched with all sorts of magical burns. The massive doors were open, one hanging ajar, its weight held up only by sheer stubbornness. Soldiers and citizens alike moved in and out of the doors, carrying bodies and supplies. A few hastily erected canvas tents stood out on the plaza, the moans of the wounded and dying making a rankling chorus that had become all too familiar. When she asked a woman tying off the bloody stump of what used to be a man's arm where Aedan had gotten off to, she silently pointed to one of the tents near the hanging door and wiped her hands off on her bloody apron before resuming her work.
Relief washed over her, glad that at least she was finally in the right area, but she kept that relief from turning into hope. She could still find him dead. Kallian trotted over to the tent, looking around for the entrance before finally finding it and poked her head in. Immediately her eyes alighted on the back of Aedan's head, recognizing him even through the heavy layers of darkspawn blood that coated him, evidence of a fierce hard fought battle. His armor had been taken off, replaced by a mostly clean shirt and he sat gingerly holding his left arm, rubbing it absently as he stared forward without noticing that someone had come inside. Kallian looked up and saw a horrible corpse lying on the cot. A pool of crimson blood had poured out of the back of the creature's chest, the sword that had killed it still sticking solidly where it had slain the beast. She'd never seen an abomination before, but right then Kallian knew without a doubt that this was exactly what one looked like.
She must have made a sound of surprise, because Aedan finally turned around to see who had come inside. His eyes were bloodshot from no rest and hard fighting, his face mostly clean though still flecked with a splash of dark dried blood on the side of his cheek. He looked like the living dead, his expression somber, though he managed a small smile to see Kallian. "You're alive."
Kallian blinked, having to tear her gaze away from the warped fleshy mass that had once been a person on the cot and turned her gaze back to Aedan, meeting his gaze. "Yeah. Barely. You made it too. Who...?" She glanced back to the abomination, too shocked by the sight to entertain any sort of conversation.
Aedan wiped his hand across his mouth, looking down at the corpse and pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes against the sight. Wordlessly he bent down and picked up the staff that she hadn't seen lying underneath the cot and held it up for Kallian to take.
She didn't understand at first and gently took the staff, shooting a bewildered look at Aedan, but he wouldn't meet her gaze. With dreadful shock she suddenly realized what she was holding and almost dropped it, her hands trembling violently at the realization. "Ammy..." The word was all she could get out through the choking sob that suddenly rose to block her throat.
"She used too much magic." Aedan said grimly, his voice a harsh rasp that bordered on breaking. "She lost."
The sob that was desperately trying to escape finally managed and Kallian's vision swam with sudden tears, her hands clutching the staff so hard that her knuckles turned white. Aedan got unsteadily to his feet and suddenly she found herself pressed against his chest, her arms wrapped around him and cried loudly. She didn't even notice that he too was trembling with silently agony. They'd both lost a friend.
So, I think one more chapter, and then Epilogues for what's left of the surviving cast. MUWAHAHAHAHAHA! This would have been up earlier today, but I forgot that I was baby sitting an infant. Anyway, cheers. See ya'll on Monday!