Chapter Text
When Althea can finally summon the breath to scream, the wind knocks her expression of primal terror out from her mouth and into the open sky, to tumble down to the world that gallops by below. Like a blind worm she flails without grasping anything, unable to find purchase. The dragon’s claws around her tighten to constrict her movements.
In a wild furious moment she calls on the Fade and it answers, magic sparks on her fingertips, she is ready to drive ice beneath the beast's scales like splinters to get it to release her. And then she realises that she would rather not be dropped. Not from this height, anyway.
With her spell disintegrated into white glimmers that run across her skin, she attempts to call out again, this time to Abelas. Her loudest, strongest attempt to project herself across the distance is gulped up and swallowed completely by the rush of the air around her.
This is going to be an unpleasant ride.
For a while she attempts to figure out where they are by locating any distinctive landmarks. She is not familiar with the terrain, however, and it’s not quite clear to her what to look for to determine Tevinter from Antiva and Antiva from the Free Marches. She figures that they will not be crossing Rivain—they are heading northeast, a direction she has worked out by their angle compared to the sun which seems to be so much brighter up here at this height. The sky seems to be more blue, too, and the world to be covered in a thin gauzy white haze. Everything is bright below her.
She marvels at the luminous vista for a time which is for her impossible to track. The sun seems to stay steadily in one spot, unmoving, as if perhaps they were moving faster than the sun itself.
Eventually, the landscape does shift. They pass over low-lying clouds casting lakes of shadow over the land. They soar through the valley of a gathering thunderstorm, grey looming aerial mountains that flash their anger out in brilliant violet strikes that leave the air rent and every one of her hairs standing as taut as her nerves. Eventually the lavish green of foliage below becomes sparser and sparser and succumbs gradually to barren hues of browns and reds of parched earth.
This arid land stretches on, and on. The monotony wears on her despite the situation, and with nothing else she can do, her thoughts begin to wander through her recollection of the past few days. In the light of day, with the wind of the world crashing around her, what Abelas said only last night to her seems less and less likely, and more and more like an interesting but meaningless coincidence. If Flemeth and Andraste had any link—well, then what in the world was human history? The design of an ancient elf? A series of guided coincidences?
Though, even with her reasoned doubts, there are some connections even now she is making: Andraste was an Alamarri woman who returned to her ancestral lands, a place that would one day be Ferelden and not so far from where Morrigan would drink from a sacred well and become the latest in a long-line High Priests. Together with Flemeth’s influence on the region throughout history, and the parallels between Trydda and Andraste too, it all appears to Althea like a dense bundle of trouble. Not being Fereldan by blood seems to be a gracious blessing.
And then there is the matter of Shartan, a shadowy, long-eared figure who has been looming near the periphery of her thoughts. Should Abelas’ speculation prove to be even partially correct, should all of history be the trifle of ancient undying elves, could it be that Shartan, an elven lover of a human woman over a thousand years ago, might have been someone else too? Shartan, whom some Chantry scholar believed was not one but many for all the many widespread rebellions raised in his name?
It is a sour thought that brings nausea tight into her throat. The feeling it kindles is not hot and consuming like jealousy, envy, or spite. Rather it is cold and numbing: a realisation that she truly knows less than she ever thought before. It never was lying on his part, not exactly, but what wasn’t said by omission becomes an unfathomable mass of things when it is about how many lives that can lived in the span of eons. Just how many friends and enemies has he known? How many lovers? How many has he killed? How many has he mourned?
Her thoughts dart back to the recent past, fractured dream-memories skittering and glinting like dropped coins. His face, as she remembers it, had held no regret, no softness, no regard—no tenderness. Not that it didn’t mean that those feelings weren’t felt, but what she had seen had been so different. And the worse, most vivid change of all, is how much more he has become. He had been more open and emotive and truly himself than when, in a private moment, he had held up his hands and backed away, claiming he could not say he felt anything but abiding love for her, even when he walked with his back turned away from her as if he could not risk turning it to her. And the way the Fade had rippled around him: as if he were a fish moving through water it commanded, as if the water itself were alive and waiting and wanting to carry out his will. He had been so strong, he had wielded such power, and he was in her dream despite being somewhere else in Thedas, and then forcing her out of it besides. What was he capable of now, if he could so thoroughly influence someone’s physical state from the Fade? If he seemingly could kill with a single thought?
The thought travels through her veins like quicksilver—a cold, quick burn which is hard to not find captivating. The unimaginable havoc he could reap is both chilling and breathtaking. An awesome possibility thought forever lost—and good riddance at that—for the last procession of Ages.
How foolish she had been, back then, when she thought that he had loved her, and she had loved him, and that that was enough, that no matter what could happen they could shelter in each other's arms. In what world would she have been able to keep his attention, let alone change his mind? Even if she had been an elf, someone who at least shared the blood of his beloved People, she doesn't know if it would have made even a sliver of a difference in the weight of his calculations. In those horrible decisions he was determined to make. Or, maybe it might have been the one detail that would have mattered—the blood of elves was special, was it not? Old, or at least older, like him. She bristles. Is that why he had called her a fool?
Forcing herself to other things she remembers her false hand around a stranger’s throat. How hard she had hit him, and her punch had had more force because it lacked flesh to cushion it. She prays to the Maker, hopes that she has not killed him whatever his intentions might have been for them. Then she thinks that perhaps they were slavers, those men who stalked and attacked them, and that’s not an easy thing either. Her body count is far too high for any moral mortal, though what of the lives she might have saved? Had she saved others from potentially being captured and enslaved through her actions? Have any of the hundreds of deaths she’s caused been outweighed by prevented harm?
But such calculus is beyond her, she who is not a god, nor able to overthrow nations, or even negotiate back her noble rights and privileges stripped from her when she had been six years old, surrendered by her family, and stuffed into a Circle to which she was then bound by blood.
They are passing now through a field of creamy white clouds meandering through the sky. This sight is much more pleasant than her thoughts, something which she allows to distract her. So much so that, despite all of her tight muscles and reasonable stress, she lulls into a heady trance that subtly shifts to sleep.
.
At first she panics because of course she does—she is zooming through the sky unaided. Her first thought is that this is beyond her capabilities. Her second thought is that she has been warned off such activities lest she attract the attention of demons: flying when in the Fade is not something that will go unnoticed.
And he had been the one to tell her that, which douses her fear faster than an avalanche of dirt poured onto a fire. The fear succumbs to a weariness which tires her even in her dreams.
Abelas, who is also flying, and who looks ridiculous doing so, comes to her side.
She is the first to speak. ‘Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting this. Or any of it. Though, really, who would have thought you could fly so easily in your dreams?’
At first he seems a bit befuddled by her statement. She is not sure if this is because he has done a great deal of remarkable things in his dreams—and he certainly has had enough time slumbering in which to do them—or if she has simply surprised him with such a nonsensical comment.
‘We do not have to stay airborne. Follow me.’
Then he begins to gracefully float down. She flails, no longer moving at all.
‘Uh.’
With a short exhalation he comes back up, wraps his long fingers around her wrist, and then leads her towards the ground. She has not realised it until now, but they are no longer flying over dry lands with a scarcity of life, there is now an abundance of green bursting with vibrant life ahead of them. The canopy of the forest is tall and grasping higher, a height of ambition which seems remarkable even in a dream in which she is flying.
In silence they approach, and as they do the Fade shifts, another facet of a quickening memory: crystalline spires twined with thick branches in complicated arabesques too grand to be anything wrought by a mortal hand. They are constructed of magic, buildings made and maintained by magic, resonant with a song more melodic and developed than anything ever composed for mere entertainment. Sunlight shining on the buildings is split and magnified and intensified. The buildings are bright, as if the trees are festooned with a lattice of stars. The prismatic light they cast is warming and calming and invigorating all at once.
Wind passing through the branches is like the sigh of the Maker, the satisfied and contented sigh of a creator fulfilled by the meaningful labour of his work.
To her own surprise she finds that she is weeping without sound.
Drawing in a difficult breath, she whispers, ‘Arlathan. Elvhenan.’
‘Yes,’ he answers, and when she turns to him she is struck by the weight of his own solemn reverence for the sight before them. Then the memory changes again and all that awaits them is reaching branches.
They land, all the same still coming to stand in a sacred place full of ancient life. There is power here as well, an ocean of it, a vast thing buried beneath the churning sea of memories above it. When her feet touch down on a leviathan-like branch, she looks left and through a splintered set of memories sees a colourful composite of the tree rustling around them: the nearby canopy is vivacious in autumnal hues of scarlet, gold, ochre, then green as in deepest summer.
She then looks to her right, to Abelas, who has altered somewhat too. The Vallaslin which branch across his face seem to be incandescent, but their dark green glow is nothing compared to the luminous radiance of his new clothing. Indelible white garments shine in the rippling air, the golden metal of his armour shimmering like sunlight upon the roiling sea. She then looks down at herself and finds that she, too, is in altered clothing—cloth the colour of blooming cornflower contours perfectly to her, armour bright and light as silverite gleams along the curves of her body she has not seen for some time. And, strangest of all, are her bare feet, toes curling as she looks down at them in bemused wonder.
With a canted head she looks at Abelas who shrugs after letting go of her wrist.
‘What is this?’ she asks. Her arm is raised so that she can take in every shining inch of her new raiment. Then she lifts her foot up to examine the bottom of her wiggling toes.
‘A quirk of the Fade,’ he says evenly.
She scoffs at that and spins in place, once. The back of her tunic, which is longer than the front, flares out and she catches it. She examines the tapered end of it closely, the fabric smooth and flowing like liquid between her rubbing fingers. The fabric draws to her mind the feel and the sensation of the power of lyrium. Absently she wondered if perhaps that is what the cloth is made out of, at least partially, and if Abelas’ own clothing is made out of lyrium, the clothing which is on his body slumped in the grasp of a dragon back in the waking world.
In the Fade, she expects Abelas to chide her for unseemly frivolity. What he tells her is, ‘It suits you.’
She stares at him in silence. Several repetitions of the statement in her mind is what it takes for her to realise that he has given her a compliment. ‘I...Thank you. It feels odd, though. I do not wish to disrespect your people by taking their clothing.’
At this he makes a grunting noise as if disgusted by the thought that she could do such a thing with such an insignificant gesture. ‘That blue is a bit colourful, but it will do. Anyway, do you have any idea how much longer the trip will be?’
‘I’m afraid I have none. I lost track of time pretty quickly, so I have no idea how fast we are travelling,’ she admits, biting her lower lip. ‘But I do know once we are over the Arlathan Forest, we should come right out to Ventus which is right by the sea.’
Abelas nods. He begins to walk along the branch towards the tree’s massive trunk. She follows him, going quiet as he jumps from the branch down to another and looks back after her, holding out his hand wordlessly. She tense for a moment. And then she is not. As she leaps she does not worry that she will fall to the ground far, far below them, because she is distracted.
Memories quiver against her, crowding, bursting, old. Very faintly the air smells of damp forest, then jasmine flowers, then like a lush garden of crystal grace. Without her realising it wisps have begun trailing after her like curious fireflies.
She lands without trouble. As she pulls herself up with his help, she says to him, ‘Listen, Abelas, I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.’
‘What is that?’
‘About Mythal—about the All-Mother.’
‘Ah,’ he says, and continues to lead her deeper into the forest. She simply follows him without prompting. They move forward in silence. Althea does not think to speak in this pause, allowing him time to respond should he wish to. His back is to her so she cannot read his expression, cannot see if he is considering his words or if he even intends to speak at all. She doesn't need to be told to trust he will respond when she asks.
And time continues to pass.
Finally, after side-stepping a very vertical, very leafy outgrowth, she continues with, ‘If what you say is true… I mean, if it’s correct, then that means that the All-Mother has made bonds with human women, birthed human women, and even given them her legacy. If Sol—…. If the Dread Wolf really intends to bring down the Veil, doesn’t that mean that….’
Before she can finish, however, he has turned to face her with a dire expression sharpening his already pointed features. He holds one finger to his lips, urging her without sound to stop speaking. So they are silent again, and still.
Very faintly, very distantly, something vibrates and it carries through the trees. They barely shake, but a susurrus is diffusing through the air, stirring the trees in a way strangely like spreading whispers.
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Hush. With this many memories they are easy to disturb unintentionally. You don’t know what you’ll attract.’
And it is true, she knows this, the wisps which are following her number in the dozens now, a floating crowd of small sentiences who could help or hinder her. They pulse as they hover there, their glows muted, as if they too are holding their breaths.
But is any attention attracted likely to be bad attention? She thinks this, and then thinks that, in her case, the answer is yes. With her luck, and especially in the Fade.
Then comes a flash of someone else's memory submerging her: she is standing in a hallway, rugs made of silk or something rich like it covering a floor of crystal clear as cut-glass. When she steps on it with her bare feet it seems to chime through her, a sentimental sweetness falling over her like a reverie of recalled youth. Awash in this pleasant bliss she does not realise that someone is rounding the corner ahead of her until Abelas pulls her aside and forces them both flat against a gilt mosaic whose only colours are shades of gleaming gold.
Around the corner comes an impossibly, wondrously gorgeous Elvhen woman, followed by an escort of at least twenty women with downcast eyes and bright Vallaslin coiling around their faces. Four armed guards flank the group of followers.
While Althea had thought her dream-cloths were glamorous, they are little more than roughspun compared to the iridescent gown worn by the leading woman—a noble, perhaps?—that is like a thousand spiders' webs spun into gossamer infused with the faintest hints of twilight. Her sun-warmed skin contrasts in a pleasant way with the flowing icy tumbles of her white hair. Its great lengths, opalescent as if dusted with crushed pearls, is caught up in loops and curls supported by a complicated series of gem-encrusted pins and combs. All of this care and effort made for her appearance, and yet, as is always the way with the clothing of the vulgarly wealthy, the entire ensemble seems as if it would become irrevocably tarnished if she so much as had to look at some dirt.
Compared to this woman’s exquisite splendour the women who come behind her are obviously of a lower station. Each woman has her hair bound up and no adornment save for a patch pinned to her collar depicting what appears to be some sort of stylised sea creature. As the group grows nearer, Althea realises with a rising sickness that the follower-women all have their hands bound in thick shackles welded shut around their wrists.
And she realises that beautiful woman leading them has no Vallaslin.
The air is suddenly heavy with the scent of the ocean—salt which stings the nose, the stench of fish rotting on the shore, sweet and pungent and horrifying.
As if sensing that she is going to react, Abelas catches her by her shoulder and hisses, ‘Don’t .’
But Althea flinches, and it is too late, and the woman is looking right at her with a growing wicked smile on her face. Across the distance she feels the woman’s power: vast and wide as a forgotten past, endless forsaken futures.
And she reaches out—
Abelas forces her out of the memory. They stumble dangerously close to the edge of the tree’s branch and he is doubled-over with exhaustion from his efforts.
Althea opens her mouth, and then closes it, thinks that she should maybe think this through before saying it, in this place where names can rile and summon up the past. There’s no way. Not a chance. That couldn’t have been Ghilan'nain who saw me.
With just a shimmer of warning she slips into a fracture and lands inside another stranger’s strange recollection. Someone nearly dead, lying dying in the snow, bloody pale hand reached towards a red twilit sky ripped open to reveal the Fade. And, hovering there in the open void, suspended in the abyss, is a city of tarnishing, tarnished, tarnishing gold. It is both black and gold and neither all at same time—wavering like this body’s last breaths.
There is a nothingness which is encircling, an emptiness which is neither a comfort nor a terror. It simply isn’t anything.
Just an end.
A shut door.
The void left behind when the light has faded from the eyes.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He had promised. My master promised we would be safe from the Rebel, from the prideful Wolf who thought himself wise enough to survive alone even though everyone knows that wolves are low, savage beasts which cannot survive without the crude cunning of their mongrel pack. This is why no-one should have trusted the Wolf: he could run with many packs, but did not belong to any one.
But my master promised me we would be safe. He told me we would hear our gods again, and that’s why he gave up his wife and his son and why he slit everyone else’s throats and why I was going to die. I was last, and he was too late, and now I cannot follow so what will become of me even though I did what I was told and I did not betray anyone I only asked to be safe so why —
The memory ends. Without any peace.
Whoever or whatever it was is gone. Althea is now being drawn from the Fade. Abelas besides her is wrenched from the Fade and she wakes to the sensation of falling, falling, falling, vanishing into depths.
.
Althea wakes to the wind whipping her startled breath out of her chest and her lungs being crushed by the grip of the dragon hurtling downwards. She, the great powerful beast conveying them, unleashes a screeching roar which tears through Althea and leaves her already brittle mind in ragged tatters. A rising panic claws and scrapes against her and makes getting again hold on her senses all the more difficult.
They are plummeting towards the earth. Something has damaged—and possibly nearly felled—the dragon. She is still alive, at least—but for how much longer?
And, most importantly of all: who could have managed to do this to a dragon so high in the sky?
With a monumental effort Althea strains to turn her neck so that she can see the rapidly approaching earth. The forest canopy is as she remembers it from the Fade: thick, dense, ancient, viridescent, twisted. Then a blast of fire sears past, fast and deadly as a meteorite, leaving behind a bright tail like a comet. The magic which trails after it is feels wrong—so much different than what Althea is used to. A spell which is powerful, to be sure, but the weft of it is so pragmatic and stringent that it takes long seconds to even begin to dissolve and release its hold on the Fade around it. It is like magical detritus is being left in its wake.
She realises that she knows magic like this, has faced it and survived it. Despite the long intervening years the memory of it kindles in her a terror which will quickly become a conflagration: this is the power of a Saarebas, of a collared Qunari mage with a leash held by someone else’s hand.
Another volley of fire comes at them and the dragon clutches Althea’s small, frail mortal body to her great scaled chest. She screeches again and beats her wings—one of which Althea can see has had a significant part of it rent or burnt away—to create a great draft of air. This is a buffer for some of the next blasts, but the Saarebas is controlled by someone who wants this dragon and her passengers dead. The next blast is hot against her skin even as it passes wide, a heat which burns with the hatred of a truly spiteful enemy. In the wrath of this heat Althea remembers vaguely a snatch of conversation once overheard: to kill a dragon is to bring order to chaos. They are powerful and marvelous but shall always be put down like a dog with water sickness.
With a roar the dragon unleashes a great blizzard down on the forest below. The trees creak in protest before freezing and falling and great clamorous crowds of birds take to frenetic flight to escape the fighting. The blizzard is long and cold and powerful.
But still the Saarebas is alive and made to attack. The next flurry of flames catches the dragon’s good wing and stomach and horned head, and right before it happens, Althea knows that she and Abelas are going to be released. She clings out of instinctual desperation to the dragon’s thrashing talons but she is not nearly strong enough to keep her hold for long.
She is falling. It is a struggle to try and right herself so that at least when she hits the trees she will not land back first. With a half-flip she sees that the trees are even closer than she figured and that she has less time than she thought to figure something out. Abelas is falling nearby, his hood flapping about his head and his white braid pulling loose, eyes wide as he waves his hands in the air, and then there is a loud booming like a thunderclap directly beneath them. She does not understand what he has done, not when her mind is so insensate like this, but whatever it is she benefits from it all the same—though still falling her speed has been dramatically reduced.
Her ears crackle, and then she understands. He has eased their descent with the magically amplified force of his will.
Through the aerial abyss between them she nods to him, once, taking inspiration from what she has seen him do. It is possible. This thought is what she rallies around, where she gathers her thoughts and carefully orders them, what she focuses and exerts herself for. And though she cannot reach for any spirits falling as she is, the Veil is thin here, so much so that the power is practically pushing into her fingertips begging to be used. It sparks along her skin as she wills it to create a great burst of force in the world. The pressure she rams into knocks the breath out of her, crushes her consciousness and bends her bones, but it is still a gentler landing than she would have had outright hitting the trees.
Which she still does anyway, a process of grabbing for and getting smacked by branches until she lands with one branch crashing into her side but otherwise halting her uncontrolled descent. For several long minutes she is unable to move, is barely conscious. The dragon still roars in the sky. Circling, the dragon fights against her assailants who have the advantage of cover and continues to be a destructive agent against the forest. Which is something that will not end well. Something old and powerful has been stirred up …
The thought slides away from Althea like bubbles on a jaunty breeze.
With a whimper she twitches her hand, flexes her fingers, then feels along her body to check for slicks of blood, any holes which she might need to plug up. Her staff is still harnessed to her back. Her pack is still attached to her, though it has become a lumpy mass which has lost a good deal of the supplies once filling it. Groaning, she pulls herself up and huffs out several short, shocked breaths stuttered out by lungs squeezed by pain. She has injured ribs for sure, hopefully just bruised and not broken. She takes one step, and then two, and has to stop and decide that she is not going to let it hurt. There will be pain, but suffering is optional.
She repeats this, like a mantra.
From overhead it sounds as if the fighting has moved away from her. This is possibly a good thing but also a distraction, so she forces herself to focus on her first priority: reuniting with Abelas. He must have fallen nearby. The question is, has he survived? Althea figures he must have. She has, after all.
It is very painful to move, with the first few steps being the worst. The pain does not decrease so much as she becomes a little bit more acclimated to it with each step, and that is progress. Althea then stops for several seconds to catch her breath, pausing before contemplating jumping from one tree limb to another, when she hears raised voices farther down towards the ground. In a panic she flattens herself prone against the tree and listens—to a conflict being carried out in foreign languages. She sidles along the rough living surface of the branch to find a better vantage.
She recognises, but does not understand, the Qunlat being tossed around to cut through the forest. There comes an answer in Elvhen. Her heart leaps up into her throat. She sees Abelas facing down a Qunari warrior with a two-handed mace and triple the weight advantage, then witnesses Abelas leaping at the great horned opponent.
It all happens so fast that she is unable to understand the warning she needs to give before it is too late. She pulls at power from the Fade and it wraps around her, then releases as her concentration breaks. Still, something on the edge of her mind tugs with an unheeded urgency, before she begins to fully panic.
Abelas’ strike lands true—a jab into the chest of the Qunari which brushes his hand up against vitaar-hardened skin. The Qunari’s heart is pierced and ruptured and he is dead. Abelas pulls out his dagger and flicks the blood off of it. Then there are voices rising and coming closer, the rest of the group that the dead Qunari had been separated from. Two, three, perhaps more in the encroaching party.
Abelas moves to get away from them and then abruptly stops. He frowns at his legs. He kicks his foot into a great gnarled root, and then he falls over with an uncharacteristic thud.
The pain is immense and terrible but Althea is sliding down the tree and reaching for Abelas and dragging him away from the Qunari body within seconds. A look around reveals to her a hollow opening into a warren of roots which she shoves them towards. First she stashes Abelas—whose relatively lightweight she has never appreciated until now—and he is only able to weakly raise his arms and help balance himself before slumping against a slick, mossed-coated root. She then crams herself in beside him, taking care not to disturb the dirt and ferns and moss anymore than necessary.
Which is all pointless, really, because their trail will be obvious to anyone looking and they will both be slaughtered as easily as one of these Qunari could sneeze.
There is shouting. Arguments. Footsteps and rustling, movement growing closer.
And then the dragon roars. Right above them. The ground and the sheltering trees shake like frightened children.
The voices are loud again and Althea can hear every word though she knows not a single one.
She moves to shelter Abelas, arching between him and the gap in the roots to protect him with her body. She will fight for him, she will die for him, she will not let him suffer anymore for her mistakes and poor decisions. This she promises him breathlessly and he is paralysed and unable to answer.
Then, louder than all the other voices, one which has not yet spoken booms out a simple command, a deep and resonant string of syllables that makes even Althea sit up straight for a moment. It goes quiet after that. So much so that she is sure Abelas can hear the outrageous beating of her heart. Abelas, who is now fighting with great effort to keep his eyes open. Abelas, whose life will soon leave him, an ancient life ended with a prosaic death by poison. His hood is loose around his shoulders, his hair as disheveled as hers. Beneath his flickering eyelids his lips strain to tremble.
Immediately she reaches for the Fade and pulls . Discarding her pack and staff, she shrugs out of her coat as well and wipes at her mouth with her sleeve. She takes Abelas’ arm into her lap and pleads for a spirit to answer her, drawing Abelas’ knife and heating it with magic until it is glowing, then tracing her other hand through the air to begin a spell of negation, cursing herself meanwhile that she never forced herself to better understand the complexities of alchemy.
A spirit responds to her reaching and comes to her side. Something else, too, tugs back at her but whatever it is not besides her so she ignores it.
‘He’s been poisoned,’ she explains. ‘It’s...a magical poison, but there is also a physical element to it, so I cannot simply negate it. I am going to need your help in isolating the toxins. WIll you help me?’
The spirit, which is a wavering luminous gold, nods once in a mortal-mirrored gesture and turns its attention and care to Abelas.
‘This is going to sting a bit,’ Althea whispers to him as she nicks at the skin of his knuckles. The blood trickles in turgid little streams and his lip quivers. With a great final push he tries to convey something to her. And then his eyes roll back into his head.
‘Shit,’ she breathes, then digs deep into herself, and goes carefully searching through the very veins of him.
It is hard work, demanding from her determined, meticulous attention as she scans each capillary in search of even a speck of poison. For long minutes she checks every surface within him. The effort is a massive drain on her mana and the spirit who has lent her its aid.
But they are lucky, for the poison has not spread into his heart, nor farther than she has the stamina to reach and pull it from. With a last fluid gesture she pulls from his index finger’s first knuckle a mote barely larger than a piece of dust. It is added to what she has already removed, a globule of dull red suspended near her shoulder.
Althea’s entire body shudders, and then the light of her spell dims, flickers, vanishes. She nearly collapses onto the Elvhen man but with her remaining strength catches herself and falls instead by his side while the floating poison is incinerated in a burst of white flames. The ashes of the extracted venom is somewhere amongst all the damp moss and lichen ruling this hollow. Sweat has made her sticky and chilled and strange with the sensation of a cracking second skin. She reaches for her discarded coat, wraps it around her, and lets the tears come. Exhaustion tears through her and she is weeping because it is all simply too much. ‘I’m sorry. Please, don’t leave me,’ she whispers.
It is not quiet for long.
Resounding tremors shake the earth, the vibrations travel through the trees and shiver up her limp back. What few animals remain go quiet as whatever it is approaches. Hope as she might against it—with eyes tightly shut and a desperate curse against anyone who might have made her luck this unbelievably bad—it is undeniable that the thing is coming and that it is coming towards them.
What it is, is not something she has seen before. Nor ever heard of, though it does remind her of other things: golems, those fabricated creatures of legends, and like her vaguest conception of what a Titan might be like should she ever be able to see one without being inside one. Whatever it is she does not have a name for it. The thing appears to be a construct built for defense. What serves as its arms are bladed and inscribed with sagas of glowing lyrium runes. It is furred with moss and there are the remnants of a bird’s nest nestled into its shoulder.
Then she can no longer observe the whole of it. It reaches into the roots, smashes aside easily what is in its way, and wraps its cold, stony fingers around her. Her ribs howl in pain at the unrelenting contact.
It pulls her out, pulls her close, and looks at her.
She puts her hands on its hands and writhes within its grasp, frantic despite the pain searing up her side with each twitch against the unbreakable grasp.
For all her terror, fear, panic, and crippling inability to defend herself, Althea does not want to die. She thinks that plainly and clearly: her will to live is driving. It is surprising and overwhelming and more true than anything she has felt in days.
With her want for life expanding in her chest, she looks into the construct’s eyes. It is looking back at her, and she realises, not aggressing—there is something there, she thinks, which is doing the looking back. Perhaps sentience? And yet it does not feel bound, she does not sense a spirit, and surely a demon would find her a much more promising vessel, vulnerable to possession but not too broken to mend.
‘Hello?’ she asks, and she doesn’t know what response she expects, only that she expects one at all.
Then, almost as surprising as the ferocity of her will to live, comes a word up from Abelas who is supporting himself with his staff and staring at the construct. He repeats the word—a command.
Plain and clear, and the giant responds to it by placing her down with a placid reverence, backing up and turning towards the direction it had come.
Once again Abelas speaks an instruction to it.
Its new direction is towards where the Qunaris’ voices had last been heard from. It walks away.
The very last thing she can do is crawl back to her coat to collapse on and hope that nothing else finds them.
.
The next few hours are precarious. Filled with stuttered bouts of consciousness, swirling fears which grip but cannot keep hold. When she wakes sometime in the night it is with a start and a broken cry, a plain terror that Abelas is dead or has left her because she cannot sense him nearby.
But he is not far. He returns to her with stiff movements and passes her a canteen and some cooked game he must have prepared without a fire—she sees no evidence of it, smells no smoke, trusts that he would not risk giving away their position. She takes a swallow of the offered water and then spits up from the sudden pain screaming in her chest. She has forgotten about her own wounds. She has not yet healed them.
‘You shouldn’t have attacked that Qunari like that.’
He watches her carefully, not speaking.
She continues with an effort, ‘they poison their skin with… well, magical poison. It’s like their armour. That’s why they are usually pretty naked.’
‘And you should not have been casting magic. Doing so alerted the defenders of this place.’
She just groans.
He regards her with a frown and lays a firm hand on her chest from which warmth spreads and begins to lull her. ‘I am not a healer. I will see what I can do.’
Whether he can put her back together or not, she relaxes under the familiar feel of his magic. He eases her into sleep. And in the Fade she stays close and does not stray, huddled instead against the mass of foreign memories crowding around and desperate to be seen.
.
When she awakes again she sees that Abelas has tidied their things. Set some semblance of things being put right, brought some order to the uncontainable chaos. It is raining, however, and already their drenched shelter is filling with water.
They cannot stay.
But she cannot bear to stand. Not yet.
She attempts to tell him off as he reaches for her but he hushes her with a finger to his lips—movements fluid again like a river undammed and flowing once more. ‘We have already disturbed enough here. Be calm.’
So she says nothing else as he pulls her onto his back, saddles himself with their belongings, and sets out. Though progress is arduously slow Althea manages to doze most of the day, and heal herself in bouts of mending when she feels lucid. By the fall of twilight she is able to slide off his back and support her own weight. They say nothing that night, nor that day after that as she hobbles by his side and they seem to be making progress away from the heart of the forest: trees are shorter, less dense, there are more smells than damp decay and eternal mist. The sunlight is actually able to warm her.
For several more days they travel like this. In silence, together, slowly but surely. On the fourth they smell the brine of the sea, and that means that they are getting close to their destination.
But, when the edge of the forest begins to cede to Ventus, there are no sounds of civilisation. No signs at all, in fact. It is as quiet as a neglected cemetery with a fetid stench like a mass open grave. Which is, it turns out, something the entirety of the city has become.
Carrion birds keep sentinel watch over the dead when they are not tearing strips of flesh from the already eyeless and tongueless corpses. Occasionally Abelas and Althea see a shambling body animated by a spirit which has come to use it as a shell, like a crab who has found a rotting home with a Qunari axe sticking out of its skull.
After she has cleaned the bile from her mouth she and Abelas skirt around Ventus with nebulous hopes of meeting their contact that soon evaporate in the stark light of the fact that there are no living persons remaining in this benighted place. So they must move on: their best chance is finding the next town, though they are both aware that they are undeniably now without sure aid past the border and into unfamiliar and hostile territory. And yet, turning back is not an option.
They decide to head inland. Away from the sea, away from the Qunaris’ avenue of invasion. If they absolutely must perhaps they can make it to the Vimmarks, or Nevarra or even a Free Marcher state—she does have a house in Kirkwall, after all. Their dwindling supplies are a problem, but not one which will likely be lethal in the next few days.
They make their way next to a road just in case, however, should someone have actually been sent for them, and to ensure that they at least start off in a generally correct direction. Not more than half an hour out of town the paving stones end and the road is nothing more than a pitted track of dirt with slanted edges to provide the rain a run off so that it does not pool and render the road a completely muddy swamp.
Not much farther along besides the road, they catch a rushed sight of something. It causes Althea and Abelas to move until they are fully concealing themselves behind a spiky bush with waxy, wide leaves she does not know the name of. Besides the wind in the trees above there is silence, an eerie pall which shrouds them, the forest, and the caravans they have just spotted. Wagons without horses, riders, or guards, and without windows either, their only exits a single set of heavy doors sealed and chained shut.
There is not a doubt what sort of cargo is carried by caravans like these.
Althea is up and moving, a nascent blur of motion caught by Abelas and dragged back to the ground. His jaw is clenched, teeth nearly grinding.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Those—there are slaves in there, and maybe they are alive still, we have to—’
‘It could be a trap,’ he says plainly, his attention fully on her. He has yet to release his grip on her wrist. ‘An attempt to lure in weakened survivors from the attack.’
‘What does it matter? They need our help, if there’s even a chance that we can help them!’
‘And what about everyone else?’ Abelas asks, his voice low, his eyes hard. There is no accusation to follow, he only asks her, ‘Do you think you can save everyone?’
‘No ,’ she hisses back and wrenches her wrist free. Immediately she regrets the force of her response but it doesn’t soften her sharp sentiment. ‘Of course not. I know I can’t. But it’s the right thing to do, and I couldn’t live with myself if I just walked away without trying. Most likely they are your People too, you know. They are your descendants.’
The disgruntled look on his face tells her all that she needs to know how little his views of his own kind have changed. It is both something infuriating and something which she cannot understand. Is it pride, a bristling rejection of them claiming to be the legacy of the Elvhen? A reminder of how much glory has been lost? But then why would this reminder rankle so much? So much more than all of the others?
‘It doesn’t matter who they are, actually,’ she says as she stands up and gathers her staff to her hand. ‘They are people.’
Something sharp and cold and pointedly unyielding presses into the small of Althea’s back. She does not understand what is happening.
The man at her side looks around and shock registers on his face, obliterating all of the stress of their earlier conversation. He is without words.
The thing against her back presses a little deeper. Through her clothing, steel pricks at her skin.
‘Drop your staff, mage,’ comes a voice from behind her. Deep and husky and haunted, richer than the darkest brew. She complies and her staff drop falls from her hand without much more than a dull thud. Yet the sword does not relent its real threat to her.
‘On the ground. Now.’
So she kneels, hands in the air, then on the ground, and when she sees who is behind her, she never would have guessed it would've been another elf.
. . .