David Gaider - The Calling

As he sat there, chin on his chest and listening to his own hard and ragged breathing, he found that he didn’t. Was it not the job of the Grey Wardens to seek an end to the darkspawn threat? And when had they ever actually been close to succeeding at that goal? Each time the Blight came, it brought with it a war that came that much closer to wiping out humanity altogether. Each time the world had to scramble to save itself, and each time it had barely managed to succeed.

How many more times could it do so? Would the next Blight be when the darkspawn finally succeeded in wiping out all life from the surface of Thedas? How many would die then?

Bregan suddenly recalled the man who had inducted him into the order. Kristoff had been a grizzled and uncompromising warrior, all hard edges and frowns. He had been Commander of the Grey for many years before succumbing to the taint. Bregan had accompanied him down to Orzammar, feasted with him at a table full of boisterous and drunken dwarves, and then watched him walk out into the Deep Roads.

At the time, Bregan had been overcome with grief. For all his taciturn manner, Kristoff had been his only real friend within the order. He’d allowed his student to care for his horse and sweep his quarters, knowing that Bregan would rather do such tasks than carouse with the other recruits. He’d played queens with Bregan on a dusty old board and sparred with him indoors when it rained. It was Kristoff’s recommendation that named Bregan as Commander of the Grey after him, despite Genevieve’s unspoken jealousy at the promotion, and Bregan had accepted it only because Kristoff had demanded he do so.

What he remembered of his grey-haired mentor that final night, however, was the man’s relief. While it had been all Bregan could do to choke back embarrassing tears, Kristoff had been calm and composed. The sense of serenity around him was palpable, all the grumbling tension that was present for all the years Bregan had known him completely gone. He’d walked into the shadows of the Deep Roads, head held high as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and stopped only to give his former student a few final words of advice.

“You will guard them,” he’d said, “and they will hate you for it. Whenever there is not a Blight actively crawling over the surface, humanity will do its best to forget how much they need us. And that’s good. We need to stand apart from them, even if they have to push us away to make us do it. That is the only way we can ever make the hard decisions.”

At the time Bregan had thought, What hard decisions? There had been no Blight in centuries, and at worst the order dealt with darkspawn raids that popped up on the surface from time to time. The hardest decisions a Commander of the Grey was forced to make were which recruits could be given the test to join the order. It was never an easy thing, as even the hardiest of them often perished, but it seemed hardly worth Kristoff’s words.

The Grey Wardens watched and waited as they always had, but now the order was but a shadow of what they had once been during the wars of long ago. Late at night in the quiet of his cell, Bregan had allowed himself the private luxury of believing that the days of the darkspawn were well and truly done.

At least, he had believed that until now.

“You say nothing,” the Architect murmured uneasily.

“What should I say?”

The emissary gathered its robes closer around itself and circled Bregan warily. It seemed to be watching for some sign, its pale eyes intent. “My experience with humans is limited,” it admitted. “What you will or will not do at any given moment is a mystery to me. Your kind is often irrational. Yet I was expecting … anger, perhaps?”

“And what am I feeling now, do you think?”

It blinked. “I would say that you are sad.”

Bregan felt leaden. His thoughts became fuzzy, and for a brief moment it seemed as if the mad humming was a world away. He simply sat there in the quiet shadows, sweat running down his moist and corrupted skin as the robed darkspawn looked down upon him. How very unreal this all was, somehow. “Can you do it?” he finally asked. “This thing you plan. Can you actually do it?”

“Not alone.” The Architect offered no further elaboration, and he wasn’t sure that he would get any even if he pressed. Part of him wondered, in a much removed fashion, if perhaps he should attack this darkspawn after all. If he had thought the creature dangerous earlier, now it might possibly be the most dangerous thing in the entire world.

He did nothing. He sat there and stared down at the cracked floor, chipped away by an eon of wear. Once there had been stone tiles there, delicately inlaid with a geometric design typical of the dwarves. He’d seen something much like that within a bathhouse in Orzammar. Perhaps this had once been a similar place? He tried to imagine it filled with bright lamps and steamy tubs and curvaceous dwarven noble-hunters giggling behind their fans. Instead he conjured only images of corrupted flesh and pools of stagnant foulness. A cancer had taken over this place, a dank sickness that grew in secret until it spilled out onto the surface.

That was the truth, wasn’t it? The world was sick. Since their inception, the Grey Wardens had fought back the symptoms time and time again. But they had never defeated the disease. Maybe the time had come for a more radical treatment.

The Architect beckoned to him with a black and withered hand. “Come with me, Grey Warden.” It did not wait to see if he followed, but Bregan did not hesitate this time. Groaning with effort, he pulled himself up off the floor and stumbled after the emissary as it walked away from the cavern and went back the way they’d come.

They didn’t return to the cell, however. They spent a fair amount of time crossing a maze of passages, some small, others huge and supported by crumbling arches that Bregan could barely see the tops of. He quickly lost track of where they headed, doing his best to fight against the gnawing weakness inside him and to keep the emissary within range of the glowstone’s light. For all the fact that it didn’t seem to exert itself, it moved so quickly he began to fear that he might actually get left behind.

Twice they encountered darkspawn. Once it was but a handful of the short genlocks. The second time it was an entire group of hurlocks, one of them a powerful alpha, armed and armored in metal that glistened like dark obsidian. Bregan tensed both times, expecting to be attacked, but the creatures did nothing more than make wary hisses and keep their distance. At first he thought it was him that they reacted to, an enemy Grey Warden in their midst. But then, as he watched their reactions more closely, he realized the truth.

It was the Architect they feared.

The emissary paid them little heed, merely holding out his gnarled staff threateningly as he passed among them. They backed off, making angry thrumming noises from deep in their throats, like dogs confronted with a clearly superior hound and salvaging what little of their dignity they could as they pulled their tails between their legs. Bregan was amazed, and found himself disconcerted to be so universally ignored.

Did they see him as a darkspawn, now? So full of corruption running through his veins that he wasn’t even distinguishable as a Grey Warden? That idea disturbed him far more.

After a time, Bregan began to perceive that they were moving upward. They climbed a long flight of stairs, an ascent that left him gasping and shaking with exhaustion, and then entered a long tunnel that seemed to slope toward the surface. The stone there was mostly still free from the darkspawn taint, and he began to wonder just how far they had traveled. He had the impression that the dwarven ruins remained unbroken around them, that they had not moved into natural caverns, but who could truly say how far such ruins spread? Some of the oldest thaigs, according to the dwarven Shaperate, had been larger than Orzammar itself. Now they were all part of the festering underground world occupied by the darkspawn.