She awoke before the rest of them, feeling like an idiot. How careless she'd been. Taking stock of herself, she was still fully clothed, her weapons were where she had left them. There was a worn path down the ravine to the river that flowed between the two cliffs that held the ruins. She crept down there to wash, something she hadn't done in much too long. Drinking always left her feeling dirty, as though there was a film over her skin. The water of the river was cold, clear, and moved swiftly enough that she was reluctant to go further into the water for fear that the current would sweep her away. She sat down in the shallow water so that it covered her head. She dipped her head underwater and massaged her scalp with her fingernails, trying to scrape some of the grime from her hair.

She surfaced and went to the shore. The sun was up and beginning to warm the rocks by the water. She slipped on her small clothes and stretched out on one. Nobody had come to look for her yet. Lying back, she heard a whimper. She got up and, still barefoot, crept in the direction of the sound. As she drew closer, the whining grew higher, and she saw, all collapsed in a pile, a Mabari warhound. Her only experience with the breed was those times during riots when the guards brought them in to intimidate and corral the residents of the alienage. She'd seen one maul an elvish child badly once, and more than a few of her neighbors had been bitten deep enough to leave scars. This one, though, was injured, or sick. She'd heard of dogs who had bitten darkspawn in battle and ingested too much of the blood. They would sicken, and crawl away somewhere to die.

"Are you going to take off one of my arms if I come closer?" she asked the dog. She'd heard that the dogs could understand human speech and obey almost to the word, which made it all the more horrific when the guards set them on civilians. Perhaps another breed would have let instinct take over and kill a person, but Mabaris would never do so, meaning that every time one mauled an elf, his master had instructed him to do so.

But this dog didn't seem to have a master. It whined piteously and looked up at her with large brown eyes and rolled onto its belly in a show of submission. As it did, she saw that the dog had no visible injuries. To her surprise, the animal let her examine it closely without showing any signs of hostility.

"Well I'm not a healer," she said, "But I know one thing to do when you've eaten something that doesn't agree with you…" She went through the small satchel of poisons she'd collected. Most of them were made from various plants that would make a wound worse if you poked it into someone. However, not a few of them would induce vomiting if swallowed. Deciphering her own chicken scratch to discern one bottle from the other, she found what she was looking for.

"I'm not quite sure how this works," she said. She shook the bottle and pantomimed drinking from it. She uncorked it. Obediently, the Mabari sat up and opened his jaws. She poured in a couple of drops.

In an instant, the dog was on its feet and puking what seemed like gallons of black blood onto the riverbank. She recoiled at the smell, not sure what part of the vile liquid was darkspawn blood and what part was digestive juices. It seemed to take an hour for the poor thing to empty its stomach, but when it was done, it looked like it felt much better. It looked up at her, the corners of its mouth turning up in a dog-smile, and panted happily.

"Your breath is seriously evil," she said.

The dog only kept smiling and panting, its tongue lolling from its mouth. It then got down and proceeded to roll around in its own vomit.

"Dear Maker…" she said, "All right, well if you're well enough to do that, you're well enough for me to leave you on your own." She turned and climbed back up the dusty path to the camp. The Mabari followed on her heels, smelling like all of the darkspawn in the Deep Roads had broken wind at once. To her relief, it scampered off to find its master as they got to the camp, and Teneira did the same. She found Duncan by the fire, and the rest of her compatriots still scrambling into their armor.

"You look clean… and remarkably not hung over," Alistair commented as she approached. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked exhausted. She was not sure she trusted him to be at her side, fighting darkspawn. Jory looked like he was in even worse shape, but Daveth looked like he was in top form.

"Elves don't get hangovers," she said, repeating an oft-cited myth. Elves did indeed get hangovers, but only at much greater quantities of liquor consumed. The flip side of that is that an elf's hangover would render him useless for a full day instead of just a morning.

"Your uncanny ability to hold your liquor does not excuse the irresponsibility of getting drunk the night before an important mission," Duncan said.

"If you weren't confident in our ability, why would you be sending us out in this condition?" Teneira asked.

Duncan had no answer for this, but commanded them to leave immediately. The four of them headed to the well-trodden path that led into the Korcari Wilds. Teneira had to keep herself from catching her breath at the beauty of it. It seemed that there had been some Tevinter buildings there, long ago, but the forest had reclaimed them, and now they stood in the swamp as though they had grown there, white stone peaking between curtains of green ivy. The swamp itself wasn't the stinking, festering hole that she had imagined, but just a series of greenish pools, still and reflecting the forests around them.

The stillness was interrupted by a series of guttural war cries. Teneira looked up, drawing her blade instinctively.

Up close, the darkspawn were even uglier than in her nightmares. They looked as though they may once have been humans, elves, and dwarves, but it was as though they had been mutilated beyond recognition. They smelled, too, like walking death, the smell of a corpse riddled with maggots. She had to concentrate on keeping the roll she'd eaten before leaving down as they bore down on them. She drew her blades and fought the way Daveth had taught her. Stick the left one in them, use it to direct their movement while you attack with the right blade. She took a few hits, mostly on her better-armored parts, but still stood as the darkspawn lay in pieces around them. She hadn't had time to be scared when they were living and bearing down upon her, but she felt herself shaking uncontrollably.

"Was that your first battle?" Alistair asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She shook her head. When she'd fought those guards and the lordlings at the Arl of Denerim's estate, she'd been angry, and grief-stricken, too much so to feel afraid. The darkspawn hadn't done anything to piss her off. They weren't people, they were beings of utter evil, whose only purpose was to skewer her on their gray iron blades.

"It's all right," Alistair said, "Sit down for a moment."

She obeyed and sat down on a rock, holding her head in her hands until her heart wandered back into its place and the blood stopped rushing in her ears.

"All right," she said, "Sorry about that, lads."

"I've seen men thrice your size soil their pants the first time they crossed swords with one of those," Alistair said, "Don't be embarrassed for too long."

"And don't soil your pants," Daveth added.

They made their way further into the wild as the sun rose high in the sky, its light filtered through the green canopy of the wilds. It took a little while for Teneira to stop twitching, but eventually she managed to even out her breathing, and the fear in her heart was replaced with a heightened sense of being. It was as though she could see more clearly, her eyes accurately pick out whether each shadow was darkspawn-shaped.

"Wait," Alistair said as they made their way down an overgrown path by the side of a shallow lake, "Look up there."

Teneira tensed and looked where he was pointing. In the distance, in the crumbling ruin of a Tevinter fortress, a circle of the small ones – Genlocks, stood. She strained her eyes to make out their shape, and concluded that the lot of them were just standing around, bullshitting, much like the members of the guard would do during their breaks.

"Those two," Alistair said, indicating two who were not dressed in the crude-looking pig iron armor that the others wore, "They call them Emissaries. They're like mages, drawing their power from the Fade. They'll knock you on your arse as soon as they see you, but they can't take much of a hit. When we approach this group, I want Daveth and Ten to sneak around back and put knives in their backs while Jory and I rush in from the front."

"Sounds dangerous," Jory said, skeptically, "With only two of us drawing the fire."

"There'll be no fire," Teneira said, smiling. She reached into her satchel and her fingers found a leather flask that she'd bought in one of the villages along the road from Denerim. The neck of the bottle was shaped so that one could slide her blade, coating it in a thin layer, without damaging the bottle. She did so, and handed it to Jory, "It's a paralytic agent. Even if the first strike doesn't kill they'll be on the ground limp as a pile of manure before they know what hit them."

"Poison," Jory sighed disdainfully, "Hardly honorable is it."

"This isn't a duel, Jory," Daveth admonished him, the customary smile gone from his face, "Ain't nobody going to question your honor whatever tactics you use against these fiends. They're not people like us."

"She's not people like us," Jory said, gesturing to Teneira.

"Go fuck yourself," Teneira retorted, "This is going to be tedious life indeed if you can't treat me as an equal."

"Stop it, both of you," Alistair scolded.

"Fine," Ten sighed. She followed Daveth, creeping silently across the damp grass. To get behind the group of Darkspawn they would have to wade through the water, something she wasn't sure if she could do quietly, but she did her best. The water was still and slimy, and she slipped through it, hoping she wouldn't slip on something and go under. Drowning under her heavy armor in the fetid water of the Korcari Wilds was not how she'd imagined dying, and damned if she was going to let it happen. She kept her breaths even and steady as they grew closer to the darkspawn.

At that moment, Jory and Alistair began charging across the grass towards the assembled group, and grunts of confusion interrupted the apparent conversation that the demons had been having. The heavy ones picked up their greatswords, and Teneira could have sworn she saw fear in their beady black eyes. She and Daveth snuck up, quiet as could be, and on a silent signal, each plunged their dagger into the neck of a Genlock mage. The mages convulsed and spat black blood. Their deadweight pulled them from the blades, and Ten bore hers up, drawing her left handed knife with a sinister hiss of metal on metal.

The Darkspawn understood at that point that they were surrounded. Jory lopped off the head of a Hurlock, the large one, and Alistair pummeled one into submission with the hilt of his sword. Teneira, feeling brave at watching their bravery, threw herself into the fray with a shrill cry of war. Stick, slash, thrust parry. It seemed natural, this time, even with swamp slime trickling down the backs of her legs and blood both red and black spattered across her face and torso. Their armor was iron, not steel or leather like the Wardens wore, and while solid, was very heavy, and slowed their movements. Every time one of them lifted his arm to strike a blow, the weak spots were revealed. Armpits, necks, all places Teneira could strike at and withdraw, as fast as a snake.

"You look like you enjoyed that entirely too much," Alistair observed after the carnage had ended, and Teneira was wiping her blades on the grass and returning them to their scabbards on her back. She grinned, a fairly horrific sight as her white teeth cut a slash through her bloodspattered face.

"I suppose there are worse lines of work," she replied.

"There's the spirit," Alistair replied, chuckling, and jogged ahead, reaching the ruin. It looked like it had stood there for many centuries before falling. Judging from the lack of wear on the places where the stone had crumbled, it had fallen fairly recently. Otherwise, the cracks would have been worn smooth by the wind and rain. Teneira stood with Daveth at the outside of the ruin, letting the more experienced Grey Warden root through the fallen rocks.

"Not a very secure place to put important diplomatic documents," Teneira commented. The blood covering her face was beginning to dry and crack. Jory and Daveth were scratching, trying to get it off.

"I'll be sure to take it up with Grey Warden leadership just as soon as we've banished all the Darkspawn back to the Deep Roads, Fereldan is safe again, and pigs go flying across the sky like majestic eagles," Alistair replied irritably. He'd managed to yank most of a wooden chest out of the wreckage of the building, "Ten, you've got disturbingly small hands, do you think you could reach in there and wiggle something loose?"

She sighed and went to his aid. She quickly saw what he was talking about. The chest was caught on something behind the rock it was under. She gingerly reached in. It was mostly rubble. She drew it out by the handful until the chest came loose, and Alistair toppled back under its weight. He stood, redfaced, and set it right on the grass. He rattled the clasp, and tried to open it.

"I knew we'd gotten too lucky, this thing being within reach," Alistair said.

"Don't worry yourself," Daveth said, rubbing his hands together, "I can make short work of that."

"So can I," Jory said, rolling his eyes, "Take a blade to it and be done! I'm yearning to go back to camp and have a bath."

Daveth knelt in front of the chest, clearly wanting to show off, "Ten, do you have a hair pin or a nail file or something small and metal like women are supposed to carry?"

"That lock's too big for a hair pin," she said, "Here, try this." She handed him the paring knife she'd used to murder all those guards. She had kept it with her, figuring that the tiny blade had served her well, and might well save her life again one day. Daveth inserted it into the locking mechanism.

"This will be highly instructive," he said, "You just have to insert it in there, find the thingy, and wiggle the other thingy, and…. There we go!" The lock clicked open, "Next time, Ten will try."

"That was not instructive at all," Ten said, thoroughly perplexed. He handed her knife back and she slid it into its case on her belt.

Alistair lifted the lid of the chest, and it opened with a dusty groan. The smell that came from the inside was musty and swampy and about as foul as you'd imagine would issue from a chest that had lain moldering in the wilds for the better part of a century. He lit a match, peering into it.

"Well that was a fool's errand," he sighed, "It's empty."

"I didn't want to be the one to say it," Teneira said, "But don't you think it was kind of suspicious that, even though the building collapsed Maker knows how many years ago, the chest was easily accessible? Shouldn't it be buried somewhere in the large part of the ruin?"

"What do you mean?" Alistair asked.

"I mean, if you had a fortress, and you had a bunch of important documents in a chest, where in the fortress would you keep them?"

"Probably in a vault," Alistair said.

"Look at this ruin," Teneira said, "When it stood, it was probably a solid, if small, fortress. You can see what remains of the front entrance there, over there was a tower. We've all seen Tevinter architecture. If it's anything like the other fortresses, the area where we found the chest here would have corresponded with a side entrance. Look, you can see the arch where the doorway was there." She pointed. She watched the men's faces as they tried to reconstruct the fortress in their heads.

"This chest has been moved since the building collapsed," Teneira continued, "It would have been under a ton of rock, probably over there." She pointed to a pile of rubble thirty feet into the ruin, where the building had probably stood several stories at one time. She scrambled up the pile of rock. Sure enough, at the center of the pile was a hole in the rubble. Hmmm… this is odd, she thought. It was as though someone had just carved a tunnel straight down through the crumbled rock, removed the chest, and left the hole there, perfectly round, though it looked as though it ought to have fallen in on itself. The rocks were just standing there, defying all laws of physics, "Someone dug it out by… means I'm not familiar with."

"What are you talking about?" Alistair asked.

"Well if you'd come here and take a look…" she said. He climbed up the ruin, more slowly as his armor weighed him down.

"What in the fade is that…" he muttered, "This isn't any magic I've seen."

"Magic?" Jory shouted, "Did someone say magic?"

"Yes, Jory, someone said magic," Daveth sighed.

"I knew it! They always said there was a wild mage in these wilds!" the knight exclaimed, "And now she's come and…"

"Let me get this straight, Jory," Daveth said as Teneira and Alistair made their way back down the hill of rubble. "You're saying that a witch of the wild came to a Grey Warden ruin, bored a hole in them, removed a chest, took the documents, and then put it right where more rocks would fall on it?"

The four of them stood there, contemplating how utterly ridiculous the situation sounded.

"I think you'd be surprised at what witches of the wild are capable of," a woman's voice said. Teneira looked around for where it came from, the hair on the back of her neck bristling. Movement caught her eye all of a sudden, and she flinched to see a very large – no, giant, the damn thing came up to her waist – spider crawling towards them. Slowly, before their eyes, the spider changed shape, shedding its form for that of a tall, human woman.

"Say Daveth," Alistair said, not taking his eyes off the woman, but elbowing the rogue, "Say Daveth, what exactly was in that whiskey we drank last night?"

"The finest rye from the Southron Hills," Daveth replied, "Teneira, did you put some of those special mushrooms into the whiskey?"

"I did not," Teneira said. She narrowed her eyes at the woman. Her companions could apparently not break their gazes, mostly because of how impractically scantily she was clad, rags barely covering her ample bosom, leather breeches clinging to her legs like she'd been poured into them.

"You," the woman said, walking up to Teneira. The elf found herself very quickly closer to another woman's breasts than she'd been since she was a suckling infant. She looked up at her, meeting her pale gaze, "You aren't a gawking fool like these men. I'll be talking to you from now on. What's your name?"

"Ten," she said, deciding against a snarky comment about what she should expect were she to expose herself like that. After all, she reasoned, it looked fairly comfortable, and it's not like she was expecting a bunch of men tromping through her wilds.

"Ah, you've decided to be reasonable," the witch said, looking down at her with eyes whose color Ten could not quite discern. Brown? Yellow? Green? Something else entirely? "I am Morrigan."

"She's going to eat us," Jory murmured, "I swear to the Maker she is going to eat us."

"Well there's good news, you'll finally know what it's like to satisfy a woman," Daveth quipped.

"I'm married, you twit," Jory retorted.

"Point stands."

"Are you quite done?" Morrigan asked, her voice taking on the tone of an irritated schoolmarm, "I imagine you're wondering what happened to the contents of that chest there."

"Observant, are you," Teneira commented, "Were you watching us with all eight of your beady little eyes from back there?"

Morrigan was silent, staring at her in judgment, "Yes. Well, the answer is that my mother took them. For safekeeping. If you'll follow me to our house, she would be happy to hand them over, I'm sure."

"I'm not going to any witch's house," Daveth said.

"No, you're not," Morrigan said, "You'd just be staring at my backside the whole way there. And I'm not fool enough to let a templar know where I live. Ten will be coming with. You will be waiting here for her."

"I can't let her go by herself, it's not safe," Alistair protested, "She's my charge, at least for now."

"Well, speaking strictly from a statistical standpoint, she's a good deal safer with me than with the three of you," said Morrigan, "After all, the worst I could do to her is turn her into a toad."

"Well that's… that's not fair at all," Alistair protested.

"It's not pleasant, having assumptions made about you, is it," Morrigan said, "Especially when they're not… necessarily… untrue." Her eyes slid to Jory. He turned red in the face, but remained silent.

"It's fine," said Ten, "I'll go."

Behind her back, Ten had slid her little paring knife out of its sheath and was working on silently unstopping a bottle of the paralyzing agent. She followed Morrigan's back down a path, managing to coat the blade without the witch noticing. She replaced the knife where it waiting within easy reach should the woman decide to make any sudden moves… or turn back into a spider.

"I don't know how you do it," Morrigan said.

"Do what?" Teneira asked. They were moving at a good pace, over hills and rocks, through the swamps, into the very heart of the wilds.

"Live among men," Morrigan said, "Disgusting beasts, aren't they?"

"Case by case basis," Teneira said, "But, as a group, you are correct. So you live here? Without anyone?"

"Just me and dear old mum," Morrigan said.

"Must be lonely," Teneira said.

"I suppose it would be, if everyone I met wasn't insufferable," Morrigan said.

"You're just a ray of sunshine, aren't you," Teneira commented, "You know, my dad always used to tell me, if wherever you go you smell shit, it's probably on your shoe."

"I don't have a dad," Morrigan said, "I imagine if I had one he'd tell me something similar."

They walked along in silence. Teneira grew more relaxed as she became more confident that this woman – shapeshifting witch or not – was probably not going to all of a sudden turn into a spider and sink fangs into her neck. They came upon a ramshackle old place, looking like it had been cobbled together with dead wood, supported by living trees and a post or two from the Tevinter ruins. An aged crone was standing outside, ostensibly waiting for them.

"So this is what the Grey Wardens have come to," the old woman intoned, her voice low and nasal, "A mere child like this?"

"I'm not a child," Ten said, taking off her helmet.

"Not a child, one of the pointy-eared people of the Dales," the old woman said, "Forgive me, I intended no offense, some of you just look like small humans. What do they call you?"

"None taken," Teneira said. The hag was worn and stooped with age. However tall she had been, she had shrunk considerably, Ten imagined, and was barely taller than she.

"She's called Ten," Morrigan offered.

"And I am called Flemeth," the old woman said, "You're lucky we happened along when we did." She began rooting around somewhere in the tiny hut, "The winds and rains are not kind to parchment." She handed Ten sheaf of papers, yellowed with age, but sturdy enough. Ten tucked them under one arm.

"Much appreciated," she said.

Flemeth looked at her, "I'm going to be seeing you again, I think. No sense in conversing now, not with the dark ones surrounding us. I see Morrigan had the good sense to leave the… extraneous ones alone."

"Extraneous?" Ten asked, lowering an eyebrow, "You didn't even know who I was five minutes ago."

"Didn't I?"

Ten herself had been called a witch, at least weekly, ever since she'd started her little business. At first she had tried to explain the very large difference between simply knowing and using the properties of various flora and fauna to ones advantage, and actually commanding the magic of the fade. It was pretty much the same to people who didn't understand either, so she stopped arguing about it eventually. The spider trick was certainly not something she could have brewed, but she wondered if there wasn't something like the hallucinogens she packed into her pipe in the air, and if she had actually seen what she thought she had seen, but all in all, she imagined that the two of them were very different types of witches indeed.

"We're all but threads in a tapestry," Flemeth went on, "Some drab, some colorful, some long, and some short. Some make up the background and…"

"This is a lovely metaphor, but the sun is going down," said Ten, "And if I'm not back soon those three… gentlemen might come tromping through the swamp to find me and bumble through here."

"Strange," said Morrigan, "You said 'gentlemen' but you meant 'idiots.'"

"Yes," Ten said, "It's called irony. You should try it sometime."

"She has a point, mother," Morrigan said.

"Very well. She'll be back," Flemeth said, "See that this child returns to her family."

Ten looked at Morrigan quizzically, who made a "shoo!" gesture. Having been told twice, Teneira took off, back towards the towering hulk of the ruin. The sun was, as she had observed, beginning to go down, and she did not relish the thought of being alone in the wilds in the dark. She clutched the treaties to her chest and ran, her boots squelching in the mud.

"Oh good, we were about to set off after you," Daveth said as she approached the ruin, "We thought you'd been eaten."

"Don't lie, you were terrified," said Jory.

"Of course I was, but I still would have gone after her."

"Sorry to disappoint," she said. She was panting a bit, her cheeks red from running. She handed the papers to Alistair, who looked them over.

"Sure enough," he said, "Dwarves, elves, mages… all the people we'll have to call on once the horde sweeps over us like a tidal wave."

"You sound hopeful," Jory sighed.

"It's just…" Alistair said, "I'm concerned that Duncan sent us to find these. I'm afraid it means he thinks we'll need them. Soon."

"Let's hope the old man's wrong, then," Teneira said.

The four of them set off back to the south where camp was waiting for them. The sun was a dusky orange orb, sinking among the trees to the west.

"Something I've learned," Alistair said, "Is that the old man is very rarely wrong."