Bownammar is huge. Crisscrossing halls, crumbling bridges raised above massive canyons and trenches, stairs leading up into the darkness and down into the hot glow of lava. Huge, and absolutely overrun. Savreen can hardly believe what she sees—in fact, she wouldn't believe it if they hadn't seen the horde from a distance, if they hadn't seen the sheer size of it. If she hadn't dreamed of it countless times before. The place is teeming.
While the layout and structure reminds her of Orzammar, nearly every inch of this fortress city is covered in a slimy black lichen of sorts, or maybe a mold. The stuff seems closest to the rotten flesh and skin of the Darkspawn themselves, a half-living, mostly dead thing, made of the Blight itself. Everywhere Savreen looks there are countless hurlocks and genlocks, swarmed around smoky and greasy fires that seem to burn only on the fuel of bones. Cadres of sharlocks lurk in dark corners, too, and even a few ogres loom over the whole scene, their massive horns twisting viciously against their impossible forms. Everywhere, jaws rip into flesh, feeding. The source of their meal is unknown. It feels to Savreen as though she's stuck in one of her nightmares, and she can't help but remember the innkeeper from Lothering, the strips of his own muscle and skin dangling from his teeth.
Despite the horrifying scene they now walk through, no attention has been drawn to them, no eyes turned their way. Their disguises are working. Alistair leads them, moving in artificially shambling steps, not too slow nor too fast. Each of them adopts the same pace, the same wilted and decaying posture. If it weren't for the fear that runs like acid through Savreen's veins and the drum beat of her heart on the inside of her chest, she might think they are, after all, just as dead as the Darkspawn. But they aren't, and that's the rub. If they were dead, after all, they would hardly need to keep up this charade. They might have an easier time. They wouldn't have needed to bother with the putrid fabric swathed around them, or the helmets that reek of rot. Life might be easier if they were dead.
The absurdity helps to keep Savreen's mind clear, the incongruence. It gives her something to think of besides the way they are simply inching along through the once abandoned city streets that now play host to a wave of horrors. It almost makes it possible to ignore the song of the Darkspawn blood that mutters and whimpers and at times roars in the back of her head. She half expects the sound of it to peak and screech at any moment, heralding the return of the Archdemon, and the anticipation mixes with the adrenaline rushing through her limbs so that the muscles of her arms flex and tense at any new sound, ready to jump to her swords and yet terrified of breaking their cover.
Finally, they make it through the first hall. They pass through a gate into a narrower corridor, one that slopes gently down, into the bowels of Bownammar. The smell of Darkspawn flesh and rot and putrefaction lessens somewhat in here, as does the volume of the song, and Savreen allows herself a deep breath. The black growth from above, too, is lessened, as though this route is one less frequently used. A small comfort. Up ahead, Alistair turns, looking over his shoulder to count them all, to make sure none have fallen behind. His eyes find Savreen's and she nods ever so slightly. She is fine—they should continue. As Alistair picks up his pace once more, Savreen finds herself eyeing the walls, searching for any sign of Banka's passage, of her samples. There are so many paths down which the Paragon could have led her people, but if Kardol is to be believed and she did, in fact, enter Bownammar from the main roads, how could she have gotten past the first hall? How could she have known where to go?
Oghren lets out a strangled, whispering cry. It gurgles in his throat, almost a death rattle, and Savreen feels as though her pulse stutters with fear. But then she sees him rushing forward, toward the wall. Beyond all possibilities, all reason, there, on a large slab of stone, is a small chisel mark that has become so very familiar. They are on Branka's trail.
It leaves Savreen with even more questions.
No one dares to speak. They follow Branka's trail down, down, down. Down sloping halls and staircases carved with near impossible steepness into the rock. Talvinder stays as close to Alistair as she can, Abarie likewise cleaving close to her side. The hound's ears twitch back and forth, always held close to her skull, and she walks with her hackles raised and head low between her shoulders. Tali can't help but think that Abarie looks how she feels. Since leaving the main hall for the passage Alistair had pointed out on Kardol's map—the one that, as best as they could tell, was the most direct (and intact) route to the ancient smithies and vaults at the heart of Bownammar—they've seen only a few Darkspawn. It should comfort Tali: they seem to be moving through the worst of the horde, and with Branka's samples still showing on the walls at regular intervals, they're closer to their goal than they've been since leaving Orzammar.
But there's been something…off about each rare spawn they've passed, something unsettling, and that sense only increases as they continue down. There are only a handful of them, less than ten, but they stare at the passing group with ever-growing awareness, an intelligence that is disconcerting and makes Tali feel as though she walks naked through the halls of this fortress, this thaig, this pit of hell. There is still less and less of the strange black growth on the walls, but slowly, they start to see something altogether fleshier. Fresher. It's as if something has spread its organs like roots through Bownammar, twisting through the stones like a nervous system. For her part, Tali's mind is drawn inexorably to her nightmares. The great, looming shape, the urge to go to it, to protect it, to join it. Could it have been the Archdemon? Could they be descending toward it, even now? No, no that doesn't seem right. Whenever she's dreamed of the Archdemon, it's been clear. Whatever this is, it must be—it feels—different.
Tali's foot connects with something, and when she looks down, her heart jumps into her throat, thankfully choking back the sound of the scream that she forgets to silence. The others all freeze at the strangled gasp that escapes her lips, and when they look down, they see it, too: a dwarven helm, heavy and ornately decorated with geometric designs, fresh, relatively clean, and still holding the severed and decaying head of its owner. Abarie lets out a low growl, sniffing the air and then backing up. Her movement makes room for Oghren, who approaches gingerly, almost hesitantly, crouching into a squat in the middle of the hall. He reaches out and takes the helm in his hands, righting it so that he can look more clearly at the face within.
"I recognize him," Oghren says after a time, and there's a guilty relief in his voice. Tali knows its source as she hooks her fingers around Alistair's, fighting back the tremors of shock that threaten to crack her apart. "Ignar. Used to be a guard. One of the ones who deserted to go with Branka." Oghren stays crouched, knees bent, helm and head held close. He seems uncertain of something, debating with himself, but eventually he sets down the helm, upright and against the wall. "We should keep moving." Though he stands quickly, his eyes remain trained on Ignar's head as they begin walking once more, until the curve of the walls makes it impossible.
It's not the last sign they see of Branka's passage, not by a long shot. They find a gauntleted hand a short way down. Then a leg, the shin mangled and the sabatons still inexplicably in place. An ear here, a finger there. Some of the cuts are clean. Some are not. It becomes impossible to ignore after the sixth body part: they haven't seen another of Branka's chisel marks since before Ignar's head. The pieces are laid out in the middle of the hall at regular intervals. They sit as though placed there. They are the trail, now.
The hall comes to another staircase. Silently, the party climbs down. At the bottom of the long spiraling set of steps, a forked path greets them. One way, the left path, is dark. Rubble and refuse litters the floor, spiderwebs lacing the ceiling. The other is lit. It is no comfort. It would be better if it were not. Someone has revived the lava troughs that run through the walls, pouring their molten light from octagonal sconces once more. That light illuminates a hall covered in viscera, both living and dead. More of the strange organic growths cling to the walls, thrumming and beating like living tapestries. Fleshy lumps, damp and glistening in colors of mottled grey and pink, hang from the ceiling. Some of the larger ones wriggle and twitch.
Beneath it all, the floor is carpeted with the dead. Corpses, some picked clean, others still fleshy. The bloodier bodies are, nearly to a one, swarmed by larval forms that feed with a lazy sort of hunger. Tali's stomach lurches. Without a word, Alistair diverts down the darkened hallway, but it's a half-hearted exercise, one he knows is doomed to fail, and fail it does when they run into a dead end. There's only one way forward, and they all know it to be through the charnel house in the other hall.
Tali's feet are heavy and leaden as they retrace their steps back to the fork. Once more she is greeted by the sight of…whatever it is that they've stumbled upon. Alistair turns to make eye contact with Tali, and then with Savreen, and then with the all the others in turn. No one objects, and he clears his throat and takes a step forward, and then another. The larvae don't react. Nothing gives any indication of caring about the presence of these interlopers. Tali lets out a breath held without her own knowledge and walks gingerly after Alistair, and with that, everyone follows.
The smell of rotting meat grows ever worse as they continue down the hall, following its twists and turns. At times the way forward cuts from the completed construction of ancient Bownammar into clumsily excavated passages that run like rabbit warrens through the rock, signs of a corruption older and more well-established than Tali would like. As they continue, she notices that the hanging lumps seem to be clustered together in discrete groups, often with a greater concentration of larvae beneath them, almost always feasting on the body of a dwarf. Oghren is silent through all of this. If he recognizes any of the corpses, he says nothing about it—but truth be told, there are few that are left in a recognizable state.
They turn yet another corner and the hallway opens up into a roughly octagonal shaped room. In its center lies a body that might have been alive only a few days hence, appearing almost untouched. Betraying no hesitancy, except in the slight tremble of his fingers, Oghren walks toward it. There is something that feels unspeakably wrong about the scene, though perhaps that isn't saying much given what they've walked through so far. At least there are none of the larval…things, Tali thinks, even if those awful twitching lumps hang, distended, from the fleshy growths that crisscross the ceiling. But those thoughts are interrupted by a distinctly audible gasp from Oghren as he kneels in front of the body, turning it face-up. His voice breaks as he speaks, as though unable to hold the weight of his words.
"It's Onkar," he says, and though his body is turned away from them all, Tali thinks she knows what she would see if she could see his face. She begins walking forward, towards him, uncertain of her goal once she reaches his side but certain that even Oghren might need comfort. "Branka's brother. H-he—his throat's been slit. His sodding—who could have done this?" Those words freeze Tali in her tracks. The sense of wrongness returns.
"Where's the blood?" she asks, and her voice is hoarse as she uses it for the first time in hours.
"Wha'd'you soddin' mean, where's the blood? By the ancestors—" Oghren's voice begins rising in volume, his ire provoked by the mixture of shock and grief, set off by Tali's question. Before he continues, Tali shushes him desperately. One of the ceiling lumps twitches, as though responding to the sound, and then stills. She swallows, and then speaks again, in a whisper.
"If he was killed here, there—there would be blood. Where is it?" No one answers her question, not as the realization lands on all of them.
"He was killed somewhere else and brought here," Sav says, at Tali's side with movements quieter than the stone around them. "Someone brought him here on purpose for…something." Uncomprehending, Oghren stares at the body resting on the ground in front of him. Tali can see he wears the garb of a smith, not a warrior. Not armor. The clean, deep gash across his neck is dry. She's thankful for that. Unbidden, she recalls a ruby necklace, a smock of crimson. She shoves it back. "Why bring his body here? Why not just leave it where he fell?" Sav is looking around now, trying to decipher the meaning of the room, of the scene, of this horrible endless corridor of carnage.
The truth becomes clear when another lump twitches yet again. And again. Dread takes over Tali as she watches it, writhing and jerking with increasing movement, swaying from side to side. Then its bottom splits open, and a small, greyish thing hits the floor with a disgusting wet splat. It wriggles, and Tali lets out a short scream, truncated by her own hands on her mouth. It's the same as the larvae from before, and it moves with strange precision for Onkar's corpse.
Oghren yells and leaps to his feet. Before anyone else can react, he stomps on the larvae, sending a wave of horrid smell and black guts in a spray on the ground.
"It's a nursery," Tali whispers, staring at the smear on the ground. "It's a nursery."
The bodies. The larvae. The egg sacs. Tali is right, and Savreen wonders how they didn't see it before. How could they not have? The tunnels, like the massive meandering tendrils of some great insectoid hive, become all the more threatening for the realization. A nursery. A Darkspawn nursery.
But why does Branka's trail lead right through it?
The group seems about to descend into panic. Oghren stares at the goo under his foot, his mouth open and wordless. Zevran, usually so above it all, swears vociferously in Antivan. Leliana's hand covers her mouth, trying to suppress the dry heaves that shake her torso and fight with her posture, sending her doubled over into the corner. Morrigan and Sten both take staff and sword to the egg sacs hanging from the ceiling, and the smell of the flame and the loud frenzied hacking of metal through flesh is enough to turn Savreen's stomach, too. Ranjit paces back and forth, trying to ascertain if anyone—or anything—has heard the commotion, and Tali and Alistair debate something Savreen can't decipher.
She simply stands there, staring at the bloodless body, left for food. Left by whom? He's certainly not well fed, but he isn't starved, either. There are no defensive wounds on his hands, just the marks of restraints on his wrists. His eyes are not even yet as clouded and decayed as a Darkspawn's, though there are signs of Blight sickness. He hardly smells. He is fresh, and he was kept alive.
Everyone's voices blend together in Savreen's ears. She stares at the body. She stares. She cannot look away. How will they find Branka? She could be any of the bodies picked clean, flesh flayed, ground to a pulp. She could have been dead the moment she entered Bownammar. Maybe Kardol was right, and this is a foolish endeavor. But then if they are to give up, how will they make it out again? How will they ever make it out? Cold terror seizes at Savreen in that moment as she realizes something worse, far worse, than the nature of the rooms through which they've been moving. Even if they find Branka, they're trapped here, in the bowels of a fortress overrun by Darkspawn. They're no less dead than Onkar is.
Savreen wants to grip her head. Everything gets louder. Zevran is saying something in a frantic voice, now, speaking to Alistair. And Ranjit—Ranjit is raising his voice, too, trying to say something. The Darkspawn song is back, too, clawing its way from the compartment of Savreen's mind where she had successfully sequestered it. All she can do is stand there, hands balled into fists at her sides, and begin to count. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. One—
There is someone else counting.
"Stop!" Savreen yells. Everyone does. No one speaks. No one speaks, and yet someone still counts.
"First day, they come and catch everyone." A chill runs down Savreen's spine. She draws her swords. There is one hall forward, one hall back the way they came. The voice floats, singsong and warbling, from the hall that leads onwards. It is almost certainly a mistake to follow it.
Savreen does so anyway.
"Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat." There's no tune to the words; they're just a whispered refrain. And yet Savreen can hear them following the timbre of the Darkspawn song in her mind, the same frenetic beat. The others fall in line behind her, weapons drawn. Savreen isn't even sure if any of them hear the voice, but still they follow her.
"Third day, the men are all gnawed on again." Murmured expressions of shock, surprise, fear—the others hear her, too. Savreen is fairly certain it's a woman, at least, with the way the voice sounds. Lilting. Almost like the ring of a bell. The hall narrows around them.
"Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate." There are more egg sacs, here. Fresher ones. Newer. They hang from the ceiling in multitudes. One brushes the top of Savreen's head.
"Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn." She does not want to know what the words mean. She does not want to know. They grate on the insides of her bones, worming their way into her flesh. She wants them to stop.
"Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams." One foot after the other. Moving forward, slowly, gingerly, inexorably. Savreen's dreams return to her. Her nightmares. The Blight, the horde, the thing that's down here, somewhere, calling to her, watching her. Every hair on her body stands on end.
"Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew." She thinks she might understand. She might understand where the eggs come from. She might understand the bodies. She might understand the fact that they haven't seen any women—not yet.
"Eighth day, we hated as she is violated." The end of the hall is near, now. The voice is unmistakable. It is no figment. Closer, now, Savreen can hear the over-enunciation of the words, as if spoken through a stiff and clumsy jaw.
"Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin." They are at the end of the hall. There is no door between them and the next room. Savreen steps over the threshold, and the light of the lava troughs glints in little daggers off the steel of her swords.
"Now she does feast, as she's become the beast."
Savreen had hoped they'd seen the worst of things. Any room they've passed now could have been the greatest horror this city of the dead had to offer, and it would have been enough for a lifetime. But what she sees before her makes her dizzy and faint, knees weak. The room itself is small. At one time, it may have been a vestibule of some sort, an entry chamber. At the far end, Savreen sees a huge octagonal door, carved from dark, heavy bedrock and set with a wheel and gear system meant to open it. Some kind of vault, or a fire door. There is something inside it, that much she knows, and it reaches out to her. But the voice does not come from behind the door. It comes from a woman sat in front of it.
With placid—no, resigned—eyes, she sits on a crumbling carven chair. A dwarf, with a sturdy build and a straight posture. She is surrounded by larvae, their grey bodies wriggling against the stained remnants of her clothes: a jerkin and trousers, boots worn through at the soles. Her skin is sallow and pale, blotted with bruises and sores and patches of skin that look as though they are covered in a growth of grey mold. She is Blighted, tainted—that much is clear. Beneath all the marks on her skin, the spiraling, spiderweb lines of her blackened veins are visible, coursing ruined blood through her body. Her eyes, too, are already clouding, curdling. And it is as she stares at them all with those clouded eyes, her singsong refrain silenced in her throat, that Savreen realizes the larvae are not just wriggling about her. They are nursing on her.
"What is this?" the woman says, in a voice altogether uninterested. Devoid of hope. "Human? Bland and unlikely. Feeding time brings only kin and clan." It's as if all of them have forgotten how to speak—Savreen most of all. She stares at one of the larvae, at where it suckles at a cut on the woman's arm, drinking her blood. She cannot remember what it is they are here for. "You say nothing. You are a dream, then. As I expected. Do not torment me." Wide-eyed, Tali steps forward. She tries to speak, and the words die on her tongue. The woman turns her attention in the direction of Savreen's cousin, her eyes struggling to focus, and Tali tries again.
"You—you've been forced to eat your kin?" There is the briefest flash of expression across the woman's face, but it vanishes before Savreen can decipher it. When she answers Tali, it seems that she still doesn't entirely believe them all to be real, speaking more to herself than anyone else.
"And others. Fresh, not those who turn. Killed right here. Blood to drink and flesh to eat. And Hespith is fed, oh yes. But Laryn first. I wished it, after all. I wished it upon her so that I might be spared. So that I might…how foolish, Hespith." Hespith. Her name is Hespith. Savreen glances to Oghren, trying to ascertain if he knows the woman, and she's met with a blank stare of horror. So he does know her. "I watched. I watched, and I saw her change, and then I knew they would come for me. How does one endure that? How did Branka endure?" At the mention of Branka's name, Oghren is startled into action, breaking out of his terrified trance to shout hoarsely.
"Branka? Where is she? Hespith, where is Branka?" When Hespith sees Oghren, it is as though a veil is tugged momentarily from her vision, from her mind. Confusion runs through her like a jolt, and her body shudders, detaching a few larvae from her skin and sending them tumbling fleshily to the ground. Black blood weeps, brackish and slow, from their vacated positions.
"Oghren? No, Oghren did not come with us. Oghren did not come—Branka left him. She told me she left him behind for me. For Hespith. But no—no we do not talk of Branka, we do not talk of what she did. Ancestors preserve us. Forgive me." Oh. Oh, no. For all the rot and carrion in the room, suddenly the only thing Savreen can smell, taste, feel on the air is the utter grief that brings Oghren to his knees. "I was her captain, and I did not stop her. Her lover, and I could not turn her." A sob, angry and baleful, poorly suppressed, breaks through Oghren's chest. It gives Hespith pause, and once more she looks at Oghren, at all of them, as though seeing them for the first time. "Are you not a dream? Are you more than the grasping desperation in my bones? What are you? Oghren cannot be here. Branka did not bring him."
Tali speaks first, before Savreen can even decide what to say. Once more, she is grateful. The weight of Hespith's gaze is too much. It confounds her. It feels as though it will claim her, drag her down into the stone beneath her feet.
"We're no dream, Hespith. We're Grey Wardens. We can help you." Violently, Hespith shakes her head. More larvae fall from her limbs; more blood weeps across her skin in their absence.
"No. No, you can't. There's nothing left. Nothing to help. There's body and there's hope, and both are already turning—turned. They come, you see. They come, they vomit, they violate, and they chant. They scream—oh, how they scream—and then the change comes." Savreen is revolted by the sight before her. She can do nothing to hide it from herself any longer. It leaves her both terrified and disgusted. Then there is the guilt, the guilt that they did not arrive sooner, that they could not prevent this.
"What change? What are they doing to you?" Tali does not let up her questioning. She steps forward, toward Hespith, her voice soft and low. It does not placate the woman. Once more she shakes her head.
"Nothing more than what they are allowed. What they must. And Branka—Branka…Branka." Her voice trails into tears, and as she whispers Branka's name a third time, Oghren joins her. Tali, though, is still going. She kneels in front of Hespith, looking up into the woman's eyes. Savreen cannot bear to see the way her cousin's eyes, grey, meet Hespith's eyes—milky. It feels too much like a mirror, a promise, a reminder of their fate. She wants to dart forward and snatch Tali away, to run.
"Hespith, can you tell me what Branka did?" A tear rolls from Hespith's eye, down her cheek.
"I will not speak of her," she chokes out. "Of what she did, of what we have become. I will not turn—I cannot think about it. I cannot become what I have seen—I will not. Not Laryn. Not Branka. Never Branka." Oghren's tears have stopped, his sobs ceased. Now he stares at Hespith, and Savreen cannot tell what it is he thinks.
"If you can't speak about her, Hespith, can you tell us when you last saw her?" The gentleness of Tali's questions grates on Savreen. Not because of their kindness, but because of this room, this horrible place, the very lack of gentleness everywhere else, everywhere around her. Reluctantly, Hespith answers Tali's question. Or at least, she attempts to answer.
"No more than a few breaths, but longer than an eon. Oh, it has been long enough. Long enough to miss her, to love her again, to hate her more than ever." For a moment, Hespith pauses. It almost looks as though she hears something, and she turns her head toward the door at the back of the room. When she continues, she does so with a sudden clarity. "She left for the Anvil. It is in the darkness, surrounded by it, pulling Branka in—but no, no I swore not to speak of it, not to think of it." With a shake of her head, sharp and quick, meant to dislodge her very thoughts, Hespith begins to hum, the tempo frantic and notes imprecise. "I will not hear any more about Branka." Savreen watches as Tali sighs. She watches as Tali lifts her hand, hesitates, and then places it atop Hespith's. The action startles the woman, and she freezes, looking for all intents and purposes like a hare poised to bolt. And yet she does not.
"Hespith—Hespith, we have to know what happened. We have to know where to go, where to find Branka. I know you don't want to talk about it, but please." Hespith's eyes search Tali's face, looking for something. Duplicity, perhaps. Whatever it is, she seems satisfied with what she finds, and she nods. When she begins to speak again, her voice is sad and reluctant.
"There was no other way forward. We thought she would go to the Legion. She did not." As Savreen watches, Tali leans in closer, encouraging Hespith. She ignores the larvae still nursing from the woman's veins. "She brought us to the fortress, and she gave them Laryn. She gave them others, too. An exchange for safe passage." An exchange. Those words startle Savreen more than any others, acting like a cold bath. An exchange? Made how? With whom? The Darkspawn, clearly, but it does not add up. They cannot even speak. "They made Laryn eat the others. Our friends. Our family. She tore off her own husband's face and drank his blood." Savreen looks to Alistair, seeking any recognition, any information he might have to offer, but she finds him confused, too. He shakes his head in bewilderment when she catches his eye.
"We lingered too long. They wanted more. She gave more. The men, they kill. They are food. But the women, they want." When Savreen glances to Alistair this time, she sees grim recognition. She is not certain if it is better or worse that there is precedent for some of Hespith's story. "They want to feed, to infect, to mold, to change until you are filled with them." The revulsion from before returns to Savreen's gut, this time with an entirely different sharpness. It twists inside her, and she thinks she might be sick. "We tried to escape. We did. There was no other way out, only forward, into the darkness, through the door that hides in the dark. They took us back. Turned us all. Kept us. We fed Laryn, more and more."
A low keening sound comes from Oghren's mouth, and Savreen cannot help but pity him. All this time, searching for his wife, the woman he loved—because it's clear now that he did love her, even if it isn't in a way Savreen understands. Maybe he still does love her. Or the thought of her, the memory of her. All this time, and all they've found so far is a path carved in blood. All this time, and it turns out they might hunt a monster as much as they hunt a Paragon.
"And while she ate, she grew." Hespith looks away from Tali as she says it, looks down at her own body. Is it Savreen's imagination, or is her belly distended beneath her clothes, beneath the feeding larvae? "She swelled and turned grey and she smelled like them. They remade her in their image." No, no it's not her imagination. "Then she made more of them." A noise like retching comes from the back of Alistair's throat. "She became Broodmother." When Savreen looks at Tali's face once more, she finds her cousin stricken with such a pallor she might think her dead. Her mouth hangs slack, her chest rising and falling too quickly as she pants in panic. "That's where they come from. That's why they hate us, and that's why they need us." The singsong quality returns to Hespith's voice, and it almost seems to comfort her for a moment. To Savreen, it sounds only like the song of the Darkspawn, the Archdemon. "That's why they take us, that's why they feed us."
Silence. Silence and nothing but the song.
"Hespith…" Tali's voice is a whispered wail when she speaks. Her hand grips Hespith's tightly. The woman nods.
"You asked what happened. I have told you. The true abomination is not that it occurred, but that it was allowed. You see now why I cannot speak of her. I will not. Oh, Branka, my love. My enemy. Laryn, my cousin. My failure." Something in Hespith's words spurs Tali to action, and she stands abruptly, relinquishing the woman's hand and reaching instead for the larvae—the Darkspawn larvae—and pulling them from her flesh, casting them to the floor. Her chest heaves as she does so, but Hespith sits through it all, still and unflinching. "This is my punishment. The Stone has punished me. Do you understand?"
"No!" Tali says, halfway to a shout. "No, you'll make it out of this. Come with us." Once more, Hespith shakes her head. This time, the motion is smooth and slow.
"I am already dying, dying of something worse than death. Betrayal. You should end it now, before it makes me like her. Like Branka." Her words only incense Tali further, and Savreen watches as her cousin begins to shake, and then takes to stamping on the larval Darkspawn forms that wriggle across the floor.
"You don't have to be like Branka. You don't—we can save you, we can—" At last, Hespith stands. Doing so reveals the depth of the changes to her form: not just the swollen belly, but the beginnings of tentacles, nascent limbs sprouting from her torso, her arms too long, too jointed as she lifts them from her sides. Squeezing her eyes shut, Savreen holds onto her composure with all that she has. Against the emptiness of her closed eyelids, she hears the gasps of the others and the thud of Tali falling back to her knees.
"You cannot save me. I am full of them. I will be next, after Laryn." When Savreen opens her eyes once again, she cannot help but look at her companions. Their faces betray their horror. "To save me is to end me." Savreen looks back to Hespith, back to Tali. On the floor, Tali shakes her head. Savreen looks up to Hespith, and the woman sees her. Her eyes are pleading. "To save me is to end me," she repeats. "I cannot hear the song of the Stone any longer." Savreen grits her teeth. For the first time in a long time, she thinks of Highever.
Her hand is on her kirpan before she knows her own mind. She crosses the distance between herself and Hespith, and when Alistair sees her moving, he steps in and helps pull Tali away and to her feet. Savreen is grateful. It is a change to be grateful. At Hespith's side, she pauses. The woman speaks one last time.
"Return me to the Stone." Savreen bends down, setting her forehead against Hespith's and closing her eyes. She brings her free hand to the woman's shoulder, holding her, comforting her. There are no words for her to say. Her other hand plunges her kirpan into the base of Hespith's skull, and the woman goes limp.
Savreen catches her and lays her down slowly, and then she turns to the door.