Shadow and Rose

by Lady Norbert

A/N: There is a scene in this chapter which is directly inspired by an art piece by the lovely and talented Aimo. I saw the picture and was immediately taken by it, and she graciously okayed my use of it for this story. (Aimo also did a sketch card for me of Alistair and Elissa after their duel at Soldier's Peak; you can see it if you go to the TV Tropes page for this story, link is on my profile.)

This is a really long chapter. Orzammar in general is taking a long time to retell, but this chapter is the most crowded - so far, anyway.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Armor of the Legion

Indicative of its namesake, this armor is finely crafted yet purposely unadorned. The hallmark of a shunned hero or a welcomed pariah, the Legion has borne this contradiction since its inception. When equipped in a set with the Legion gloves and boots, the character gains a bonus to damage and constitution.

Well, we're alive.

A lot of what went on in the Deep Roads... I really don't want to write in this journal. This is partly because it was very, very repetitive. We'd enter a new area, kill a bunch of darkspawn (or spiders, or these little lizard-y things Oghren called deepstalkers), look for signs of Branka, and then move on to the next new area. It's also partly because there's just so much that's kind of muddled in my head. But there were some points of interest that are worth noting.

One is that we did, indeed, make our way to Ortan Thaig. Elissa found the documents for the young dwarf Orta, we cleared out the darkspawn and giant spiders that had taken up residence there, and then we found a dwarf. Ruck was his name; Elissa said she'd encountered his mother, Filda, praying for his safe return, and had begged the Warden to bring her any news of him. He was beyond freaky - apparently he'd been lost in the Deep Roads for years and had taken to scavenging, as well as feeding on darkspawn flesh to survive. He was tainted in the extreme, and it's a wonder he hadn't already turned into a ghoul.

At first he wanted no part of us, and we had to follow him into his camp - a camp which, Oghren said, had certainly been occupied by Branka at one point. So we were on the right trail. Ruck kept saying things like "It's my claim! Crunch your bones!" and it took all of Elissa's persuasive power to get him to calm down enough to talk to us at all.

"Pretty lady," he said at length. "Pretty eyes... pretty hair... smells like the stream of burning water, blue as the deepest rock... Pretty lady won't take Ruck's shiny worms and pretty stones?"

"I just want to talk. I won't take anything."

"Oh. Ruck not mind that, maybe." He started ranting again when she mentioned his mother, saying he didn't deserve things like 'warm blanket and stew and soft words.' He said his mother didn't know what he'd done - he'd killed someone, if I understood his babblings correctly, and rather than be sentenced to work in the mines he had run away to the Deep Roads.

"Once you eat... once you takes in the darkness... you not miss the light so much," he said. His words were more than a little haunting to me, especially when he added, "You know, do you not? Ruck sees, yes. He sees the darkness inside you."

"I'm a Grey Warden," Elissa explained patiently. "It's not the same thing."

"Oh. Grey, like stone. Guardians against the darkness," he said, nodding fervently. "Beautiful like waterfalls under the lichen." He kept making reference to the 'dark ones,' meaning the darkspawn, so she asked if he knew where they went. This is where I got even more creeped out.

"I think they went south, pretty lady. Far, far to the south. That is where the dark master calls them with his beautiful voice. So much joy when he awoke!"

"He means the Archdemon," I said, more to our other companions than to Elissa. "They say the Archdemon 'sings' to the darkspawn, so that they won't stop until they find it."

"After the dark master awoke, he called his children and they all went. I wanted to go, too, and gaze upon his beauty..." Ruck continued to babble answers to Elissa's questions, noting that the spiders took "the shinies and the words" - Oghren thought that might be a reference to Branka's notes.

We left Ruck not long after that, Elissa promising to tell Filda that her son was dead so she wouldn't wait for him anymore. We crossed a bridge spanning an underground river, and after fighting the enemies we found there (which included dwarven ghosts, and I'm not even going to try to figure that out), we chased a bunch of giant spiders through a tunnel. This was strange, because they didn't attack, and it wasn't too hard to figure out they were leading us into a trap of sorts. The battle against all the corrupted spiders was pretty intense, and I think we would have fared badly without Wynne.

Once the battle was over, however, we came upon a book that had been written by Branka, and left for others to find. It was in bad shape, but still legible. Branka's notes announced that they had found evidence that the Anvil was not built in Ortan Thaig at all, and so they were headed south to the Dead Trenches. She wrote that her soldiers were persuaded they were all marching to their deaths, since the Dead Trenches were filled with darkspawn, so she was leaving the notes in case they were right and someone else could pick up the search where she left it.

Oghren was delighted that she mentioned him in her final lines. "They say the darkspawn nest in the Dead Trenches," he said. "But if that's where Branka went, then that's where I'm going."

I was never much of a storyteller, and yet here I am. This is taking a long time. I'm going to need a new journal at this rate, the pages in this one are nearly all filled.

When Oghren said that the darkspawn were found in the Dead Trenches in large numbers, he wasn't exaggerating. As we entered the outskirts of the area, we saw that the rock was blazing with light... from the torches being carried by the thousands of darkspawn marching through the narrow cavern below us. "By the ancestors! Look at them all!" Oghren said, dumbstruck, as we peered over the edge of the cliff. That was bad enough, but then...

We have seen the Archdemon.

One screech from the dragon's mouth sent us all ducking for cover, and we could only stare as it perched on a fissure and bellowed orders (or at least I assume they were orders) at the massing darkspawn. At least with so much taint in one place, there was no way in the world the Archdemon could sense Elissa and me. I looked over and saw her face contorting in pure terror as she stared at the beast. She met my eyes; she was so pale, so frightened. We were hidden close enough together that I could take her hand in mine, but the truth was that I was just as scared as she was. It was like seeing the Archdemon finally confirmed everything - this is indeed a Blight, and one of us will have to destroy that thing in order to save the country, if not the world.

Elissa shifted closer, and I put an arm around her as best I could; no easy feat when we're both wearing armor, but I did my best. She was shaking. The dragon flew away, then, and we got to our feet, still clinging to each other somewhat. "Alistair..."

"I know, love. I know."

After another minute of this, we pulled ourselves together. "I apologize for the, ah, lapse of courage," she muttered. "Let's go." She squared her shoulders and set off in the direction of the Dead Trenches. I exchanged a look with Wynne, but really, what could we have said? We just followed, Shale's footsteps tromping loudly behind us. The golem spoke so rarely that if it didn't make so much noise when it moved, I would have forgotten it was there half the time.

As we neared a bridge, a cluster of dwarven soldiers were preparing to do battle with some darkspawn who were rushing across it. "Who are they? I didn't expect to see any dwarves down here," said Wynne.

"The Legion of the Dead," Oghren explained. "Casteless dwarves - murderers, thieves, that sort of thing. Rather than continue to live the kind of life that Dust Town can give them, they sign on with the Legion and become living dead warriors. They have a funeral and everything, and then they come here to the Deep Roads to spend the rest of their lives fighting darkspawn. It gives them a purpose, and really, it's about the only honorable way a casteless can live. Poor blighters," he added.

As the darkspawn fell upon the black-clad warriors, we joined the fray and made quicker work of the matter than they could have done themselves. One of the dwarves, whom I took to be the leader, looked frankly baffled that anyone would have helped them - or, for that matter, been in the area to help them in the first place. "Atrast vala, Grey Warden," he greeted Elissa. "I've never seen one of your kind in the Deep Roads." He introduced himself as Kardol of the Legion of the Dead. "The Blight is obvious to us," he added. "The surprise is not that you have come, but that you have come in so small a number. What do you want here?"

They conversed briefly about the situation in Orzammar. Kardol wasn't very concerned about the Blight, although he was polite enough in answering her questions. We crossed the bridge and took out more darkspawn, and the Legion followed us. Kardol thanked us for helping them to bring the line that they hold closer to the Dead Trenches. "I'll give you credit for backbone."

I needed to take a break from thinking about the Dead Trenches, so I could bring myself to write this next part. For the most part, the Dead Trenches were difficult - I mean, I would go so far as to say they were the most difficult thing we've done yet - but bearable. But then they just got creepy. For starters, we began seeing gobbets of flesh on the walls, much like on the higher levels of the mage's tower way back when that was our most difficult adventure. Maybe darkspawn and demons aren't that far apart, now that I think about it. I mean, they're both connected to the Fade; that's where demons live and that's where darkspawn were first created. That could be the reason. Doesn't make it any less disgusting, but it's a thought.

As we got in farther and farther, we started hearing a poem. Some disembodied voice was chanting about 'First day they come and catch everyone...' and it just got more revolting from there. "That's Hespith," Oghren said finally. "It took me a while to place the voice, but I'm positive that's her."

"Who's Hespith?" I asked.

"She was the head of Branka's household soldiers. Damn fine captain. I wonder what happened to her - she sounds half-dead. But if we can find her, she'll know what happened to Branka."

"That poem is horrid," Wynne observed, and Elissa nodded. "What in the Maker's name is it describing?"

"I think the better question is, do we want to know?"

We found this Hespith crouching in one of the rooms. How we were able to hear her voice through the corridors, I don't know and I don't want to know. She peered up at Elissa with sunken, tainted eyes. "What's this? A human? Bland and unlikely," she said. She decided we were nothing more than a dream.

"Is this darkspawn corruption?" Elissa asked me, and I shrugged. "It looks different."

"Corruption! The men did that!" Hespith wheezed. "Their wounds festered and their minds left. They are like dogs, marched ahead, the first to die. Not us. Not me, not Laryn..."

Well, rather than try to remember all of the ghastly commentary, let me break it down. What we pieced together from Hespith's ramblings is that Branka's household was captured by the darkspawn. The women were retained for - I'm gagging here - breeding purposes. They were forced to eat the men, their own relatives and friends. Hespith herself hadn't quite turned, but the other woman she mentioned, Laryn, had become what Hespith called a broodmother. Hespith, meanwhile, was forced to watch Laryn's transformation into this thing, and she couldn't understand how Branka was able to endure witnessing what happened to them all. Oh, she also mentioned that she was Branka's lover, which set Oghren reeling a bit.

She ran off after that, saying that she would not become what she had seen, and we all sort of looked at each other. What did any of this really mean? What were we supposed to think? Even now I don't know. We continued making our way through the Dead Trenches, with Hespith continuing to speak to us from a distance about Branka's obsession and how it led her to betray her entire house. We entered one part of the Trenches which Oghren called Bownammar.

"This... this is a holy place, is it not?" asked Shale, speaking for the first time in hours. "I... remember this. I think."

Oghren explained that the Paragon Caridin, who deeply admired the Legion of the Dead, had created Bownammar to serve as a mausoleum of sorts for them. So Shale was right, in a way. From there we kept going, kept listening to Hespith much as we didn't want to hear it anymore. At one point Elissa leaned against the wall and dry-heaved from what Hespith was describing; that should give any readers I ever have some idea of why I'm not writing these things down.

And then we rounded a corner and found out just what a broodmother is. Even for a darkspawn, that thing was hideous. Multiple arms, multiple breasts... this was once a dwarven woman! She would vomit, and darkspawn would spring up from the ground! And the tentacles... sweet Andraste, the tentacles. It was easily the worst fight we'd had up to that point. It seemed to last for hours, and Wynne was exhausted from trying to keep us all healthy while defending herself.

The part that will haunt my nightmares, though, is that as we continued to fight so valiantly, the broodmother seized my Elissa in one of those wretched tentacles and - I cringe just at the memory - dashed her against a wall. Twice. Down she went, helmet askew, and she moved no more. Shale was fighting four darkspawn on its own; Oghren's axe was swinging wildly; and I guess you could say I just lost my mind a little. I launched myself at the thing, and with what I'm pretty sure was the last of my strength remaining, I drove my sword, Duncan's sword, down into the broodmother's face. She screamed, and convulsed, and seemed to sink in upon herself, and I tumbled to the ground. Oghren helped Shale finish off the darkspawn, and Wynne basically crawled over to where Elissa lay still.

I wanted to help, but I could barely move myself. Oghren all but collapsed next to me, panting, and I drank half a healing potion and pushed the rest at him. "Here... drink that."

"Aye. Wait, when'd she get here?"

I looked over where he was pointing, and you know, I'm still inclined to think I hit my head. Wynne was bathing Elissa in blue healing light, but Elissa was being propped up by Morrigan. Wynne looked concerned enough, but Morrigan... her expression... it's the first time in all the time I've known her that she's ever looked scared. No. Terrified. "Breathe!" I heard her say. She was genuinely afraid that Elissa was going to die.

Once there was strength enough in my limbs, I stumbled over to join them as Elissa's eyes blinked open. "M-Morrigan? What are you - what are you doing here?"

"'Tis a curious thing, but I suspected you might find yourself in a difficult spot and I felt it would be best if I followed along at a distance," came the reply. "I have been crawling on the ceilings as a giant spider, and you have no idea how utterly distasteful it has been. Well, if you are healed enough to stand once more, I shall return you to the embrace of your doe-eyed fool, and perhaps t'would be wisest for us to leave this place. Whatever lies ahead, I daresay a rest is needed before it is to be faced."