by David Gaider
The dwarven ruins were now covered in black soot, scorched from one end of the cavern to the other. The dust still clung to the air, but most of the webbing that had covered the upper reaches of the thaig was now gone. The faint torchlight did not allow them to see up that far, but there were hints of what the dwarves who had once lived here might have seen: great stone buttresses carved with runes and enormous crumbling statues of dwarven kings staring down from the heights at their people.
The sight of those ancient statues filled Katriel with a sense of sadness. How must they have felt now, to see their people fled, their city fallen to pieces and covered in ash?
“Is it possible to get higher?” she asked. “If we could shine a bit more light on the roof, I could see more of the statues.”
Rowan stared at her incredulously. “Those statues are probably covered in the spiders’ nests. Do you really want that close a look at them?”
Katriel shuddered at that thought and reluctantly shook her head. Still, she couldn’t help but wish there was a way to convey this story to those who had no hint of the ancient lands that lay under their feet. As much as her bard training made her a spy, it also made her a storyteller. These ruins cried out to her, and it broke her heart that they needed to pass by it all so quickly.
The group moved through what might once have been a great promenade of the city. Once a palace had been carved into the face of the rock wall itself, and Katriel pictured beautiful archways and stairs leading from one gentle terrace to the next. She imagined merchants selling goods from their stalls on the colored cobblestones, with great fountains shooting columns of water in the air. Once there had been grandeur, but now there was little more than crumbling ruin and the husks of buildings so fallen apart, they could not even be approached for all the scattered rocks and collapsed floors.
The remnants of the palace now showed only as broken columns and worn holes that no doubt led into a veritable labyrinth of passages within the rock. The home of the spiders, Loghain pointed out. Indeed, as they passed through the promenade, it was easy to see that here the greatest amount of burnt webbing had collapsed from above. Great mounds of charred ash and sticky tendrils clung to everything, some of it several feet thick or worse.
As the webs had burned and collapsed, they had brought down with them the charred remains of spiders, some of them still quivering lifelessly as they lay on their backs with hairy legs splayed. There were many bones, as well, black and burnt. Most were only small shards, while others seemed to be bigger and a few were even whole. Katriel noticed something odd amid the piles and fished it out. It was a skull, vaguely human but clearly monstrous. And large. The entire promenade was all but filled with bones just like it, like a great rat’s nest of a graveyard had been spilled over the entire ruin all at once.
“This must be what they eat,” Katriel said quietly.
“They eat darkspawn?” Maric asked, looking at the skull uncertainly.
There was no answer to give. None of them had ever seen a darkspawn before, and until they saw the bones, they had never seen anything that might have suggested the tales of the old wars, of times when the darkspawn had spilled onto the surface world in great events called Blights, might actually be true. But there they were.
“Those bones could be anything,” Rowan suggested.
Nobody could answer. If those bones didn’t belong to darkspawn, then they belonged to something else just as monstrous, something equally unknown.
They trudged through the soot and bones, sometimes wading through piles up to their hips in order to keep going. They then climbed over a large region so choked with piles of rubble, there was no telling what sorts of buildings might once have been there. Not a single wall or column remained upright. It was if the entire area had been leveled by some great event, or maybe just had not been built as well as the rest of the city to begin with.
“These could be the slums,” Katriel remarked as they climbed. “All the thaigs were supposed to have them, areas where the casteless lived. There are stories that when the noble houses pulled out of the Deep Roads, they actually left the casteless behind. Forgot them.” She spread her arms to indicate the crumbled stones around them. “One day the casteless came out of their slums only to find everyone else gone. An empty city with no one left to protect them from the darkspawn.”
Maric shuddered. “Surely they wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Katriel asked him sharply. “Every society has its lowest of the low. Do you think it would be so different in human society? Do you think anyone would go out of their way to ensure that the elves in the alienages were safe if a crisis came to the city?”
Maric seemed taken aback. “I would.”
The anger dissolved in her immediately, and she chuckled, shaking her head. Well, of course Maric would. And coming from him, one could almost believe it was true. She wondered if he would be different once years of power had worn on him, chipped away at his naïveté. Would he still be the same man?
“It’s said some of the casteless tried to run,” she continued, “tried to reach Orzammar on their own. But they couldn’t run fast enough. The rest of them simply . . . waited for the end.”
“Really?” Rowan snorted with derision. “And who would have survived to carry that tale, then?”
Katriel shrugged, unfazed. “Not all of them died, perhaps. Some of those who fled must have reached Orzammar. The rest perhaps lie under our feet even now.”
“We’ve heard enough stories,” Loghain snapped, though even he looked disturbed. Katriel shot him an annoyed glance but remained silent. She wasn’t trying to frighten anyone; these things actually happened here, and there was no point in pretending that they didn’t. But she wasn’t about to press the idea.
None of them spoke after that. The thought that they were climbing over the bodies of dwarves seemed worse, somehow, than dead spiders and darkspawn. Not fled but left behind to die, their screams still echoing in the caves centuries later.
It seemed like hours before they finally found the way out of the thaig. A great set of metal doors, over forty feet high, led into the rock face. Unlike the doors they had encountered at the cave entrance up on the surface, these had not fallen through age and rust but had been burst inward by some force powerful enough to buckle metal many feet thick. Mostly they lay in rusted pieces, having long ago admitted whatever invader had come to decimate what the dwarves had left behind.
Beyond it lay only shadows.
“How do we know this is the way to Gwaren?” Loghain asked.
Maric turned to Katriel. “Is there anything you can do?” he asked her.
“I can try,” she said hesitantly.
Kneeling with her torch and studying the various runes nearby for over an hour, she declared most of them scoured beyond reading. Much of the rock surface had been cracked or chipped off through whatever violent event had knocked the fortress doors inward, and try though she might, Katriel could not find a single rune that she recognized.
“I don’t know where this passage leads,” she confessed, “or if there are even directions.” She felt frustrated. It was her advice that had led them down into the Deep Roads, and they were counting on her to guide them. But it seemed increasingly likely that they would die down there, perish in the darkness with so much dirt and rock pressing down over their heads, and that made it so much worse.
“Wonderful,” Rowan swore under her breath.
Maric looked down at the rubble strewn on the ground, and after a moment’s hesitation reached down to pick something up. The others turned, surprised to see him holding an axe. It was large, with a wickedly curved blade and a spike on the reverse end to prove that it had never been meant for any tree. The more interesting aspect, however, was its primitive make. This was made by no dwarven smith; it was a rusted piece of black metal, crudely attached to its long handle and heavy enough that Maric needed both hands even to pick it up.
As Maric stared at Loghain
grimly, the axe head finally fell off the handle and landed back on the floor with a loud thud. The echoes rang throughout the cavern, and almost seemed to be answered by distant clicking back in the ruins.
“Let’s go,” Loghain murmured.
Several hours were spent cautiously traveling down this new branch of the Deep Roads. There was still webbing, and some of it was strewn across the passages waiting to ensnare them. These they needed to burn through, but Loghain remarked that there seemed to be far less of it than before.
Instead, it seemed as if the passages were darker, if that were possible. The torches shone less brightly, and the shadows closed in on them as if they resented the presence of travelers. Even the stone of the walls seemed tainted, somehow. There was a feeling of oppression that made it difficult to breathe, and all of them waited in anticipation for what was to come at them next.
And something was coming. They could feel it.
“Perhaps we should turn back,” Rowan suggested quietly. Her voice was low and afraid, and she stared off into the distant blackness. It truly felt as if there were eyes out there, watching. Circling.
“Back to the spiders?” Maric rolled his eyes. “No, thanks.”
“We’ve no webs to burn down this time, should the spiders come again,” Loghain said with concern. He, too, stared off into the distance, and seemed less than pleased with the nothing he saw.
Katriel took out her dagger warily. “But there’s no other way. We have to continue.” The fear crawled into her stomach and settled there. She was not unaccustomed to battle—but her training had been in fighting men. She knew how to cut a throat, and how to plant her dagger in a vulnerable spot such as an armpit. She could take on an opponent far more armored than herself without fear. None of her training had prepared her to fight monsters.
Maric sensed her discomfort and put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. It was a small gesture, but still Katriel appreciated it.
They had no choice but to press forward. The number of bones strewn about slowly increased, as did general litter and the smell of earthy decay. The walls gradually became wet-looking and sticky, speckled with rot and fungus. Some of the fungus even glowed in the dark, but did so with a strange purplish tinge that unnerved them far more than it actually lit their path.
They passed an area full of old spider corpses. Some of them were easily twice the size of the creatures they had fought, old and desiccated husks that were dusty and brittle to the touch. Most of them were in pieces.
“Something ate these,” Loghain pointed out.
“Ate the spiders?” Maric made a disgusted face. “Maybe it was revenge.”
“Maybe whatever ate them doesn’t care what it eats,” Rowan remarked.
“Darkspawn,” Katriel said ominously, and then scowled when the others looked at her reproachfully. “There is no need to avoid the truth. Obviously they hunt each other.”
Rowan glanced at the rot on the walls, looking nauseated. “Should we be worried . . . about disease? The darkspawn spread some kind of sickness, don’t they?”
“They taint the land around them with their very touch,” Katriel spoke in a hushed voice. “We’re seeing it now, on the wall and everything else here. We are in their domain.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Maric said lightly. “All we need is a dragon to come along now, to really top off our day.”
Loghain snorted. “You insisted on coming down here.”
“So now it’s my fault, is it?”
“I know whose fault it isn’t.”
“Great!” Maric shrugged. “Just throw me at the darkspawn, then, whenever they show up. The rest of you can get a head start while they gobble me up.”
Loghain hid his amused smile. “Nice of you to offer. You have been getting a little chubby these last months. There’s more of you to eat, I’ll wager.”
“Chubby, he says.” Maric laughed lightly, looking toward Katriel. “If they ate him, they’d choke on the bile.”
“Hey, now,” Loghain complained without heat.
“There is no ‘hey, now.’ You started it.”
Rowan sighed. “You two are like such little boys sometimes, I swear.”
“I was just offering up a very reasonable—” His words were cut off as a new sound came from far ahead in the passages, a soft and unnatural rasping sound. Like many things awakening in the darkness, like many things slithering gently over the rocks. They all spun and stared ahead into the shadows, rooted to the spot.
The sound was gone as quickly as it began, and they shuddered.
“On second thought,” Maric muttered, “don’t throw me to them.”
Their weapons out and ready, they edged forward carefully. It was not long before they came to an area where much of the passage walls had collapsed, revealing caves beyond. There were more underground passages than the ones they walked in, it seemed. Everything was coated in black fungus, and the smell grew increasingly more potent, more rancid. Dead maggots littered the floor amid bones and pieces of armor.
The skeleton of a dwarf lay against the wall. He still wore a rusty breastplate and a large helmet that covered most of his skull. It seemed as if he had merely sat down to rest, or to contemplate his death in these roads so far from his home.
“What’s that?” Maric said curiously, approaching the skeleton. These were the first bones they had seen so far that actually indicated that anything other than monsters had once moved through these passages. Katriel wondered why the body would have been left undisturbed, if it had died here. There seemed to be no shortage of creatures in these parts willing to feed on corpses. Or that was her assumption.
“Be careful,” Katriel warned him. “The Veil is thin in places like this, and it could attack you.” Wherever there had been a great deal of death the Veil became thin, allowing spirits and demons to cross over from their realm. They hungrily possessed anything alive, or that had once been alive. This was where tales of walking corpses and skeletons had come from, spirits driven mad to find themselves in a body devoid of the life they craved. She had never seen one herself, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Maric slowed his approach and poked the skeleton’s helmet carefully, and exhaled in relief as it did nothing. Then, his eyes squinted curiously as he noticed something strange. He moved to look where the dwarf’s right hand was covered by several large rocks and gingerly stuck his own hands in between them and tried to pull something out.
“You need help?” Loghain offered.
“No, I think I—” Maric suddenly stumbled back as the rocks gave way. The skeleton toppled over, the helmet falling loose and rattling loudly on the ground, and most of the bones crumpled under the weight of the old armor. Maric fell backwards, his hands coming up with a longsword that he waved about while trying to get his balance.
Loghain darted forward, ducking under Maric’s inadvertent swing and catching him. “Careful, there,” he said with annoyance.
Maric was about to reply, but when he held up the longsword he had pried from the stones, he became enraptured with it instead. The entire weapon was a pale ivory hue, the hilt wrought with gentle curves and the blade inlaid with brightly glowing runes. It was untouched by rust, and the blue glow from the runes was almost brighter than the light from their torches. Maric swung it about gently, his eyes wide with awe.
“Andraste’s blood,” he swore under his breath. “It’s so light! Like it weighs nothing!”
“Dragonbone,” Katriel said without hesitation. She could tell from the hue, as well as from the fact that it contained so many runes. Enchanters claimed that certain metals held the magical runes far better than others, and dragonbone best of all. It was why the Nevarran dragon hunters were said to have hunted dragons nearly to extinction ages ago. The value of such a sword was incalculable.
Rowan’s brow furrowed. “And why was it just sitting there? Why wouldn’t these darkspawn have found and taken it?”
As if in answer to the
ir question, one of Maric’s swings brought the longsword close to the wall. In response, the black foulness that clung there crawled to move away from the blade. He paused and touched the sword to the wall directly, and the rot moved away even more quickly. It made a faint unpleasant keening sound, and after a moment the stone where the sword touched was bare.
“Maybe they couldn’t take it,” Maric commented, awed.
They stood and stared at the remnants of the crumbled skeleton. How long had he sat there? Had he tried to hide the sword, or had the rocks fallen upon him? Was this some dwarven nobleman, or one of the casteless who had tried to make the dangerous journey to Orzammar? Had he died here alone?
“I guess you got yourself a new sword,” Loghain remarked.
“I think it suits a king.” Katriel smiled at the thought of Maric having a magical sword, just like in the old tales where it seemed every handsome king and every erstwhile hero possessed such a blade. More often they wrested such weapons from the hands of terrible beasts or found them in the treasure hordes of mighty dragons—but the idea that Maric could be such a king like in those tales pleased her. Those tales always ended well, didn’t they? The hero got out of the labyrinth, and the hero always ended up with his true love. Everything turned out well.
Rowan nodded to the skeleton. “He may have been a king as well, for all we know. Let’s hope we don’t end up with a similar fate.”
It was a sobering thought.
The minutes inched by as they moved on, leaving the dwarven skeleton behind. Maric walked at the fore, his new blade bared. The soft glow from its runes offered a small degree of comfort, though it was fleeting. The faint sounds of movement ahead got more frequent, and along with them, they began to hear a strange humming. It was deep and alien, a reverberating sound that they felt in their chests and that made their skin crawl.
“What is that?” Rowan asked. She looked at Katriel. “Do you know?”
Katriel shrugged, bewildered. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“It’s getting louder.” Loghain frowned. He wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead and glanced at Maric. “How many do you think there will be?”
