David Gaider - The Calling

Bregan waited for a time. He felt around a bit more on the floor and discovered no weapon, nor any armor. Perhaps he was still not trusted? It didn’t matter, really. The habit of keeping a weapon with him was something born of a lifetime spent as a warrior, a lifetime of preparation for a war he would never get to fight.

It was a lifetime he had despised.

How glorious simply to realize that. He wanted to leap around and shout it out loud. Certainly there was nothing stopping him—but who would care? Let his sword rot wherever it had ended up.

After what seemed like an hour spent pacing around the small chamber, he realized that he was waiting for the Architect to appear. It was an odd thing to discover. The darkspawn was not his friend, after all. He had chosen to remain, yes, but he still wasn’t certain why. Ostensibly he thought it was important to end the Blights, but the same part of him that had always hated being a Grey Warden wondered why he even cared about that. What did it matter to him now? Was he not the walking dead, his own suicide postponed by the Architect’s plan?

These thoughts made him strangely impatient. He found himself listening to that far-off music, the calling that reached in and cradled him each time he began to pay attention to it. It almost made him swoon, and each time he felt forced to shake it off. There were more important matters to deal with.

Bregan walked to the metal door and discovered it unlocked. It creaked open loudly, the sound reverberating throughout the hush that permeated the place. He almost expected a hue and cry to begin, and darkspawn to come rushing to restrain him, but none did. The quiet returned, punctuated only by the rise and fall of the distant chorus.

As he edged out into the hall, he realized that things were coming slowly into focus. He was making out the rough edges of the wall in front of him, and he could almost see the door he had just opened. It was as if he was walking in a deep forest, his eyes only just now becoming accustomed to the faint moonlight sifting in through the branches and revealing a shrouded world of trees and roots and rocks. Here there were only ancient stone walls and debris, however, and no light at all to which he might become accustomed. How was he able to see anything?

As he blinked and stared into the slowly receding shadows, Bregan realized that something was approaching. He froze, terror racing through him, and cursed the fact that his ability to sense darkspawn appeared to have fled him completely. It was a shriek, one of the tall and lanky creatures that the Grey Wardens had always considered the assassins of the darkspawn. They used stealth to their advantage, striking from the shadows and rending an opponent to ribbons with wickedly long claws. Their battle cry was a terrifying shriek—hence the name—that he had heard only once before in his life, and even then it was only in the distance as a lone one of these creatures stalked a forest, picking off any Warden it could find in the darkness.

The thing hunched down as soon as it spotted him, baring its long fangs in a threatening grimace. It hissed, brandishing those signature claws, but did not advance. Bregan tensed, a lone bead of sweat making its way inexorably down his brow. The shriek then calmed. Perhaps it had decided it was not about to be attacked? Bregan could not be certain. What ever the reason, it cautiously loped its way past him in the hall, keeping its dead eyes trained on him as it did so.

And then it was gone, disappeared back into the shadows. He waited, his heart racing, and wondered if it would return now and strike him from behind. But there was no surprise attack. It had simply passed him by. Bregan was alien enough to have caused it suspicion and even alarm, but not enough to be considered a threat.

He shuddered. He felt chilled, and the strangeness of his skin made him wooden. For a moment he was almost overcome by the desire to claw at his flesh, and to keep clawing at it until he peeled it back and scraped his way past what ever sludge had made its home just under the surface. And then that moment passed. His fear ebbed, and a sense of detachment returned.

If he could see, even poorly, perhaps this was a good time to explore.

It felt strange, walking around the remains of the dwarven fortress. The encroachment of the darkspawn corruption was enough that some areas were either completely impassable or impossible to determine what their function might once have been, but others seemed remarkably untouched. He found what might have been a kitchen, with a fire pit now encrusted with black moss and dirt surrounded by rusted pans and even knives. He recognized a counter and assorted barrels and cabinets all tossed about, as if some great calamity had turned the entire kitchen upside down and then simply left it to be overtaken by dust and time and the taint.

Indeed, that’s very likely what had happened here. What use would the darkspawn have for a kitchen, after all? Nothing the Grey Wardens had ever found gave them reason to think the darkspawn ate anything. The taint sustained them.

That thought brought to mind the fact that his own hunger had vanished. He had eaten nothing for days, and yet now he felt … full. Not sated, precisely, but unpleasantly filled with something that precluded actual hunger. The idea was disturbing, and he tried to turn his mind away from it.

He wondered where the dwarven bodies were. Had it been so long that even their skeletons had turned to dust? Had the darkspawn removed them? Had the dwarves all fled before the darkspawn had taken over this part of the Deep Roads? It occurred to him at the same time that he had no idea what the darkspawn did with their dead. There were no bones to be seen, yet he imagined they had to perish from natural causes like any other living creature. If they lived here, then where did they die?

Perhaps lived was too strong a word. There was no evidence that the darkspawn occupied the ruin in the same sense that humans or dwarves might have. There were no sleeping quarters, no places where they kept belongings. He knew that they were capable of forging equipment and building structures when they needed to, but if they did such things, they certainly didn’t do them here. Darkspawn clearly passed through and patrolled the ruin, but otherwise it felt very empty indeed.

As Bregan moved about the abandoned halls, he slowly realized that he could hear a new sound over the chorus. It was a strange, insistent scratching. He couldn’t place what it might be, only that it felt out of place amid the shadows and the gloom. Curiosity slowly overcame his apprehension. Cocking his head to listen, he felt his way around the halls and searched for a way to zero in on where it was coming from.

It didn’t take long to find. The light he noticed before anything else, a bright beacon shining through a far-off doorway that immediately hurt his eyes even though he was only seeing it from a distance. He had to put up his hands and blink through tears before he acclimated enough to approach. The closer he got, the more the dazzling light pained him. The sound became clearer, however—it was someone writing, as if with a quill. Interesting that he was able to pick that up from so far away. Fighting through his discomfort, he made his way to the doorway and looked inside.

It was difficult to see through the glare, but even what Bregan could see shocked him. The room he looked into was a library, not corrupted in any way and filled beyond capacity with books. There were great, wooden shelves lining the walls, each of them bursting with haphazardly stacked tomes. The books did not restrict themselves to the shelves, however. They littered the floor in tall piles that looked as if they might teeter over at any moment. Some lay open, others were leaned against the wall, still more formed a mountain of texts on an elaborate stone desk that took up much of the central chamber. The entire scene would not have looked out of place in some cultured dwarven nobleman’s estate in Orzammar, were it not for the disorganized chaos.