If Coracavus wasn't missing huge chunks of its ceiling, it could hardly have been called a ruin. The jade and marble architecture still shone, and the original floor tiles were mostly still intact. It might even be called beautiful, were it not for the iron cages still hanging from chains off the ceiling which gave away its true purpose.

"I've heard of this place," Dorian said, his voice echoing through the enormous vestibule, where haphazard battle lines made of wooden planks and sandbags were still in place. The Venatori must have found the ruins already occupied. "Coracavus. A prison for local petty thieves, and political prisoners too useful to kill but not useful enough to keep close. Word has it they'd hear the name Coracavus and beg for the death sentence. Better to die known than live forgotten."

"Unless you've lived forever like Cornefiffus, and you remember everything," Sera called out from the bridge she'd wandered off to. "There must be something here that he wants back."

"The Venatori who were left to watch the entrance were killed," Blackwall observed, pointing his sword towards the back of a fallen Venatori mage, lying face-down. "But not replaced. Someone else wanted what they're looking for first. The Carta?"

Varric rolled the corpse onto its front and inspected. "Nah. The Carta are professionals. This is a mess. Must not have been expecting visitors."

The room to the left held some promise; letters and scrolls about the prisoners once kept here, and the slaves tasked with running the prison's day-to-day affairs. One letter came from a Tevinter mage instructing his slave to remove the teeth of a woman whose most influential power was her beauty.

When they reached a dead end, they headed towards the corridor to the right. Then, the sand between the broken floor tiles began to shift, and there was a groaning rumble that shook the building's very foundation. Blackwall charged through the walkway before anyone else could draw their weapons and disappeared.

"Blackwall, wait!" Ellethir shouted.

"I knew it! Darkspawn!" He yelled back.

"Shit. Everyone except for Blackwall, keep your distance!"

Fae had never actually fought darkspawn herself. They were murky dark creatures in her childhood memories, but they were so much worse now that she saw them properly before her. Some looked like disfigured human skeletons, still rotting and weakening, and some looked more like demons than corpses, but they all fought with the prowess of living warriors.

In the aftermath, as a hurlock lay sizzling at her feet, she caught a glimpse of something shiny. "Blackwall?" she called. "Can you come get this? It's got something."

Blackwall jogged over, and pried the object from the hurlock's bony fingers. "It's a key. I assume to this door," he patted the closed door in front of them. "Well done."

"It's got something else, look! Eughh," Sera pointed, refusing to get any closer.

Blackwall kneeled down again and plucked a rolled-up note lodged in the hurlock's jagged chest plate. "Hah!" He barked, startling a few members of the group as they gathered around. "The old Tevinters built this place on top of an even older Deep Roads entrance. The Venatori started digging, and up came the darkspawn. They've already had skirmishes, we can see that, but if that grumbling noise had anything to do with it, they're still here. We're close."

Behind the locked door was an office, where an entire skeleton still sat at the desk, slumped forward with a long-dried ink spill coating the wood in a dark stain.

"It's just like the ruins we went through earlier," Fae mused. "Frozen in time."

"These people aren't stuck still like the last place," Cole corrected her. "It's just been a very long time."

"What was he writing?" Cassandra peered over the desk, carefully snagging the parchment which looked as if it might crumble just from being looked at. "Ah. A list of prisoners. Maker, the date…This pre-dates the Second Blight."

"Well, I did say it was an ancient prison," Dorian pointed out. The ground beneath them shook again.

"Wait a minute," Bull's eyes began to sparkle. "They're footfalls. Aw, fuck yeah! Dragon!" He took off, and the others ran hot on his heels, all the way to an outdoor courtyard, where they did not find a dragon, but a giant. The hulking creature noticed them immediately and roared, preparing to swipe at them with an enormous battleaxe.

"How do you kill a giant?" Fae squeaked.

Varric loaded Bianca. "Start hitting it with everything you've got, and don't stop hitting until it stops moving. And then hit it a few more times just to be sure!"

No one had seen Bull so in his element since the battle against the high dragon in Crestwood. He dodged and weaved around the increasingly agitated giant like he was leading a dance in the Winter Palace, keeping its focus while everyone else chipped away at the giant's chances of survival until the beast finally succumbed to its wounds. After a few rounds of whooping and cheering, the courtyard fell mostly silent, while everyone caught their breath or tended wounds.

The group began to look for more leads, and found only one more note, on the body of a fallen labourer, at the entrance to a gap in the floor which had allowed the darkspawn in. Servis' lead was from the same Lucanus they'd heard of earlier, and the lead was a kind of power that would render the use of lyrium or even blood magic redundant. Fortunately, it seemed Servis had run out of surviving excavators, and had been forced to retreat after a second wave of darkspawn had killed what few survivors were left. Which meant that Servis was on the run, and they almost had him.

With Sera's help tracking, the Inquisition found Servis and a small squadron of Venatori mages attempting to mount a defense from another nearby ruin, Echoback Fort. They had the upper ground, but they were unprepared for the Inquisition, and couldn't hold it for long. Servis himself was introduced to Ellethir while lying winded on his back, Cassandra's greatsword casually pointed at his throat.

"Servis, I presume?" Ellethir asked, arms crossed. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

He scowled up at her. "Does it look like—ARGH!"

"Sera!"

Sera shook out her foot after kicking Servis in the side, and made eye contact with an unimpressed Ellethir.

She shrugged. "Do we kill him or what?"

Servis did not like the sound of that. "I am a businessman first, Inquisitor," he rambled. "This was bad business, I agree, if I could just- ACK!"

"Sera," Ellethir repeated, annoyed. "Just—we'll take him back with us to Skyhold. For now, we're returning to Griffon Wing Keep. You—Do you know of any other Venatori parties out here in the desert? We heard word of slaves. If you want leniency, you could start with giving us a better lead than you."

Servis nodded vigorously. "In the Wastes, further north. I don't know what they're doing, but I did see slave wagons. I only saw them, I swear- OW, alright, little shit!" he snarled at Sera, who leaned against her bow, unbothered. "Fine! I provided the wagons, but only the wagons, not the slaves. You can put anything in a wagon, after all, Inquisitor."

Ellethir looked nothing short of exhausted. "Fine. We'll see if what you said lines up with what our scouts have found. Let's go."

Fortunately for Servis, his story did line up; the Inquisitor had barely passed through the front gate when one of Scout Harding's runners approached with a letter, describing slaves being seen worked to death to dig up more ruins in the Hissing Wastes; the part of the desert which was barely still able to be called a desert- the land itself was dead, and the creatures who still eked out a habitat there were hardy, but flighty, making it surprisingly safe for travel, if anyone ever had a mind to. Which no one usually ever did.