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The screaming stops. Quiet falls again.
Kenzie wrenches the knife blade of her staff from the corpse at her feet, and tried not to think about how small it is. Abomination or not, she was still only small in the end. The handprints burned into Kenzie’s face are barely big enough to span her cheeks. Shouldn’t have let the little wretch so close, let her touch when the blue was already burning out of her eyes and the shape of her mouth wore a voice she couldn’t contain.
/“Did you think you could protect her from me?” purred the demon as her flesh blistered under its hands./
No, she hadn’t. If she meant to protect them, she would have fought her way back down the tower when there were still three apprentices left to protect. When there were two. When there was one.
Desire filled their heads with whispers loud enough to drown the screaming out until they couldn’t hear themselves; rage seared their memories black until everything but the worst was ash, and what remained was there to fuel the fire. Desperation, no demon at all but something darker, mortal made, brought them to the edge. And for all that, it was still Kenzie who had put an end to them.
Kenzie knew she killed them before the demons found them, before Lerin put his claws through Carson’s chest and she had to put them both down. Before Mara heard a voice in the flames, saw the dead advance, and panicked.
She killed them, and now she is alone, and no closer to her goal than she was three days ago. Sloth stands between her and the Templars quarters; a veritable army between her and the tower entrance. Nowhere to advance, and no way to return. Three children dead for nothing. She has done a better job there than the demons ever could.
/“We’re going to die aren’t we.” It isn’t a question, but Lerin looks to her regardless. When she doesn’t answer, he sobs quietly into his sleeve./
The undead encroach upon her once more now that the demon is no longer there to keep them back. Demons don’t share their prey with skeletons. Kenzie downs another potion as the last of her mana summons a fireball to drive them all back, grimacing as it burns all the way down and settles as easily as acid in her stomach. Too much lyrium and not enough of anything else to keep her alive has taken its toll. Lyrium poisoning would set in eventually, but she intended to be long dead before then.
It takes precious seconds, longer every time, for the lyrium to finally kick in. Until she feels the nauseous flush of her mana returning all she has is her staff, a cobbled together monstrosity with a blade bound into its fractured base, the crystal at its pinnacle shattered and almost as dangerous. It’s ugly work, nothing of elegance and everything of desperation. Carving them down, breaking, hacking until their pieces are so small no magic in the world could draw them back together. When the magic comes, it burns out of her in lightning flashes and tongues of flame, sets the air scorching too hot to breathe. She doesn’t stop until they have all returned to dust: even the small, ever so small, body at her feet is little more than ash, caught by the air of her passing staff and scattered.
/”You’re the Grey Warden,” Mara whispers, wide eyed and reverent. “And you used to be in the Circle. I had to see you before you left.”/
Quiet again. The air settles, warm with the taste of ash and ozone, and all is still but for her. Sweat stings the burns still fresh on her face. She takes stock, checks the staff for surety, the number of potions left: more than enough to kill her before she kills them. The last of the previous one is still roiling in her belly, sour and irritating. Best to let her mana replenish itself while there’s space to breathe: they would be back again soon enough, and she couldn’t be sure how much longer the lyrium would even work. There had to be a limit, and swiftly approaching at that.
It’s a long night, though it is hard to tell if it’s night at all. There are no windows in the main hall and her sense of time has been warped by lack of sleep and mana fatigue. How many days has it been now? Is there anyone else left in the tower? Is she alone? Where are the rest of the Wardens?
//Alone, all alone,// murmurs a gentle voice somewhere beyond the usual range of her hearing, //and so tired. Why not rest until they come for you?//
She hisses and shakes her head, as if that could clear the touch of a demon. “What kind of half-assed bullshit is this?” she snarls. “I thought demons were more subtle than that. Or are you losing your touch now you’re halfway through the Veil?”
//You’re venturing closer to me, little one,// Sloth replies unperturbed. //Even the most stubborn mages cannot go without sleep forever.//
“Not forever,” she retorts. “Only until they come. They will come for me.”
Or will they? The rest of the Wardens were on their way to Redcliffe the last time she saw them, and for all she knew that’s where they still were. Did they even know what had happened here? What if they had changed their minds and gone on without her? Aeducan and Alistair already had a soft spot for Surana, and she might be enough to persuade them not to come after Kenzie.
“No, you know better than that,” she mutters to herself. It’s easier out loud where she isn’t competing with other voices. “She doesn’t trust you at all anymore. She’d never convince them not to come here. If anything, she’ll be rushing them on to make sure you’re not doing something treacherous.”
The apprentices scream in her ears again; Mara wails as rage twists through her. Her face burns anew. Treachery was something she had yet to unlearn, and they had paid for that. She should have learned, should have been better.
Above her, only one floor above, her reason is probably already dead. Foolish to hope for better. She should never have come.
There is a chill gathering that has nothing to do with her magic. Her fingers are stiff against the wood of her staff.
//A lot of things would be different but for you,// whispers a harsher voice, with the dull, creeping cold of winter. //What have you done here that hasn’t made things worse? Killing children, friends and lovers alike. A demon of a different kind.//
This one is harder to dispute. Despair has always been a tricky one like that, harder to guard against, harder to fight off. It’s what makes them so dangerous.
She grits her teeth and calls up a little fire, barely enough for a candle flame, but enough to feel a glow of warmth to take the edge of the creeping chill.
“I’m everything you say,” she says with a snarl. “But you still don’t get to have me.”
//There’s still a long time to go,// replies Despair. //And you are so very weary. I can wait.//
“You can wait forever,” she hisses and burns its reply from her mind without ever listening. Kenzie’s fingers sting with the physical burn, but it’s worth it. She clenches them tight against her staff and relishes in the feeling. For a moment.
/The thing that was Mara giggles as Kenzie tears her hands away, panting little whimpers through her teeth as she gags on the smell of her own burning flesh./
Time drags on. The dead come in waves, some fresh and wearing familiar faces, others so decayed their flesh hangs like rags from their bones. Lyrium burns through her; she calls the fire; she dispatches the twitching remnants with her staff, and then the routine begins again. There’s comfort in repetition, but it’s dangerous to fall into a rhythm.
She knows the lyrium is starting to work against her, but it still catches her by surprise. The first time she drinks it and gags, feels it burn right back up instead of down, she figures she’s dead. Choking, she lashes out with her staff at the encroaching horde, no finesse, just sheer force. No fire to call, she has to hack them all apart until her scavenged sword blade is dull as bone, her arms shaking with fatigue and carved all to hell by grasping fingers.
/Carson reaches for Mara as she breathes her blood out onto the floor. She cannot speak, and Kenzie cannot read lips well enough to know if she meant to say “sorry” or “run”./
Perhaps it’s a long night, but she’s no longer sure of time. After the second time they come and do a better job of tearing her to pieces than she does to them, she forces the lyrium down because she has no other choice. It does a poor job of restoring her mana, and it sears like nothing since the Joining, but it gives her enough to close up the gouges and stop the bleeding before there’s more on the floor than in her. The burns on her face still refuse to fade.
The gritty, unrelenting ache of fatigue will not budge from her eyes; her limbs. Nausea roils through her, jagged and sour, sharpening to a knife edge in her gut. Overuse is slowly bringing everything inside her to a close.
//So tired, little one,// murmurs a familiar voice.
“Shut up!” she hisses, lashing out with her staff as if there was anything there to strike.
//They haven’t come for you,// whispers another, so numbing cold it’s almost a relief. //You knew they wouldn’t. You cannot hold forever.//
“They’ll come,” she says out loud, too quick. She doesn’t believe it any more than the demon does. The tower’s been too quiet for too long. Everyone is dead but her, and no one is coming. No one but the demons. No one but the dead. They’re all that’s left, and she’s trapped here with them until she’s one or the other.
They come again: she fights, she burns them down. Lyrium scorches whether it stays down or not, whether she chokes on fire or casts it. The demons whispering in her ears are relentless, but she hasn’t the wherewithal to listen anymore, let alone take their offers. All she can hear is them.
/“What do they want?” Lerin whimpers as the dead crowd the doorway. His hands shake where they clench tight on his staff. He stutters his spells and his casting suffers; Kenzie has to cover him./
Kenzie knows she’s all that’s left when Hunger comes looking for her. There are three of them, all twisted hulking remnants of apprentices probably younger than her, hovering at one end of the hall, watching her. Waiting. Their patience will break before hers does: she knows her routine now, and she will not break from that. Her head throbs, her eyes itch, her insides ache relentlessly, even now that she’s long used up the lyrium and has not mustered the will to find more. Everything burns, one way or another.
They advance on her as she knew they would, slow, practised. Maybe they have hunted other survivors and overwhelmed them much the same way. She intends to make it hard for them to do the same to her.
She spins as the first claw comes down, a move that was made to bring a staff to bear for casting but was now to give momentum to its blade. Too dull to shear through anymore, the sword still deals a hefty blow: bones break with a snap like green wood.
/Like dull branches buckling, muffled beneath cloth. The sound of a ribcage shattering isn’t how she expected it at all. Carson doesn’t even scream./
The second throws its head back to roar, and cuts off mid screech as it is encased in frost that steals all the warmth from the air. It shatters after barely a second, but it is a second long enough for Kenzie to throw it down and bludgeon it with the broken headpiece of her staff until it could not rise again even if it had the will to do so.
Lightning cuts through the air and slams into the other two: Kenzie stands removed but untouched within the circle of strikes. A blade that doesn’t belong to her does for one while sleek rogue knives dispatch the last before it can scream again.
/“I want to go home,” Mara sobs, her hands tangled into Kenzie’s tunic. She should never have been in the Enchanters’ quarters, as small as she is: she only came to see the Warden./
It takes longer than it should for her to realise she’s still not alone.
“Kenzie,” says a man that looks like Cousland, reaching for her as he steps forward. Behind him stands a whole group clad in silver and blue, all watching her, waiting. She tightens her grip on her staff, lifts the bladed end to a ready position. He sees; he stops.
“It’s us,” he says, holding his hands up to indicate peace. “You know us.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Kenzie says without inflection. “The Tower is full of demons.”
“You think we’re demons?” asks the man wearing Alistair’s face, incredulous.
“Demons show you what you want to see,” she replies. The pain that twists his face makes no sense to her.
Kenzie backs up another step, not so much as blinking. Her arms tremble; her eyes sting; her face hurts. All their faces are familiar, down to Tabris scowling at the back, but it’s too easy.
“Why have you come for me?”
/“They’ll come for us won’t they?”/
“We came to find you,” says the one who looks like Cousland, earnest; lying. “We promised to catch up to you after Redcliffe.”
“I told them that,” she says, tightening her grip on her staff though it makes her arms shake more. “They would know to say that.”
“We didn’t know you were here,” Surana snaps at her, cradling her head as if it pains her. Kenzie is getting used to hearing her angry but it is still unfamiliar to her. “You were supposed to be dead.”
“Surana!” Aeducan hisses, taken aback. “That’s enough.”
Kenzie wants to laugh, feels it bubbling hysterically in her throat, but she swallows it down. Trust Surana to be the sure sign that this was real. No demon would think to create such a reaction.
“Supposed to be,” she says, and winces to hear her own voice, “but I live to disappoint.”
No one laughs. She didn’t expect them to when she sounds like the Void spat her back out, and she looks little better.
/“How we must look,” Carson says, laughing a little too high as she picks at her bloody robes. She’s the eldest of the three, due to be Harrowed any day. Trying to be tough, stand shoulder to shoulder with Kenzie as if she isn’t terrified. The girl’s got courage if nothing else./
Aeducan touches her arm, and Kenzie almost refrains from flinching. “I’m glad we found you,” Aeducan says. Probably feels she needs to after what Surana said. Natural leader, already trying to look after them as if they’re hers. Maybe they are.
“So am I,” Kenzie replies with a smile. Something resembling a smile.
Cousland is there at her elbow, propping her up. She didn’t realise she was listing quite that badly until she’s upright again. Her vision swims for a moment then rights itself; she thinks she smells lyrium and feels her stomach turn over.
“We need to keep moving if we want to get out of here,” Tabris says. Amazing that she even set foot in the Circle, let alone as it is now. “We’ve cleared the way through.”
“That’s no guarantee more won’t spawn,” someone replies. Alistair? “We can’t leave her on her own.”
“Don’t leave,” Kenzie murmurs without thinking, and feels Cousland’s hand on her tighten.
/”You can’t leave us here!” Carson screams. There will be no more chances to slip past. She has to go now. The children look at her and they know it too./
The Wardens squabble for a minute or two before Aeducan tells them to pack it in. Kenzie catches none of it except the decision that she stays with them, trying to stay upright without giving away how difficult it is becoming. Cousland’s grip on her arm suggests she’s not succeeding there.
There’s something up ahead that’s important. The team carve their way through with no issues, confident enough that Cousland can simply remain holding Kenzie up, whispering the comforting nonsense she can’t make much sense of. She felt the strange blurriness of Wynne’s healing hand on her before they started moving, but she doesn’t know if things were starting to slip before then.
/“Do you think they can hear us?” Mara whispers behind her hand.
“Definitely.” Kenzie has never been one to lie./
The door to the next chamber opens, and she remembers a voice. “Wait-”
It hits her faster than a revelation. Something loosens in her chest, a numbness like blood loss that seeps through her. When it reaches her hands, the staff slips and clatters to the floor: the broken gem set in the head shatters beyond all hope of repair, but the dull blade remains.
“Kenzie?” Cousland says, too soft. Tabris yawns, and Aeducan mumbles something Kenzie cannot make out.
//So tired little one. I will let you sleep.//
Relief is another balm turned to bile.