David Gaider - The Calling

The sound of their footsteps changed suddenly. It became a loud crunching noise, as if they were crushing gravel underfoot. “Look,” Kell said.

Duncan looked down. The floor of the gallery was all but covered in a sea of bones. Darkspawn bones. Many of the skeletons were still intact, the corrupted flesh long since dried up until it was a leathery sheath. They still wore their blackened breastplates and weapons, as well. A great battle had occurred here, these darkspawn pressing inward toward … what, exactly? And what had killed them all?

Their numbers grew greater the farther in they walked. It was possible to pick a path among the bones, but not easy. Duncan began to identify dwarven skeletons among the darkspawn. They had been outnumbered. Dozens and dozens of darkspawn for every defender. He saw one dwarven corpse still in its rusted armor, surrounded by a pile of darkspawn bones in a way that made it look as if they had all died while the creatures had been tearing the dwarf apart. All at once. That couldn’t be right, could it?

“This is bizarre,” Maric said beside him, mirroring his thoughts as he looked around. Duncan simply nodded. “And her brother came through here?”

“There is a trail,” Kell commented from nearby.

“But is it his?”

The hunter looked at Maric with his pale eyes and said nothing, the answer in them clear: He didn’t know. Genevieve was not letting that stop her, however. If anything, she was speeding up as she moved through the gallery, almost as if she fully expected to find her brother on the other side.

Duncan had his doubts. Could anything be alive in here other than them? If Genevieve’s brother was here, how could he not have heard their approach? Their crunching steps were echoing loudly in the gallery, a cacophony that seemed violently at odds with the serenity of this graveyard. He had heard stories of skeletons possessed by demons that would get up and lash out at anything living—he half expected these bones to do just that, rising to silence the intruders in their silent domain.

A pair of giant stone doors loomed ahead of them, appearing out of the gloom like twin monoliths towering over the bones below. The doors had been battered inward by some great force, and it was easy to see what that was. There were huge darkspawn corpses in front of the doors, massive things that must have once been twelve feet tall with great, curved horns protruding from their skulls. They were called ogres, if he remembered, but he’d never actually seen a living one.

Their battering rams lay next to their corpses, wicked-looking hunks of metal that they must have used to force in those doors. How long that had taken, one could only imagine. Days, probably. There were all sorts of debris on the other side of the doors, some massive barricade that the darkspawn had finally broken their way through and poured past, dying by the hundreds as they did so.

Genevieve approached the doors cautiously, her eyes wide as she strained to peer beyond them. With a wave of her gauntlet to Nicolas, she sent him around the other side of the ogre corpses. Nothing stirred.

“More light,” she ordered Fiona.

The mage frowned, and with concentration her staff suddenly flared into brilliance. Duncan squinted and covered his eyes. Suddenly he could see all the dead skeletons in the gallery, stretching out for hundreds and hundreds of feet behind him. An entire army. He could make out the runes carved into the pillars, and the great beams still criss-crossing the ceiling a hundred feet overhead.

Beyond the doors lay a round, domed chamber. The first thing Duncan noticed was the throne that sat on a stone dais in the center of it. The second thing was the sea of skeletons. They were dwarves, all of them, a layer of bones so thick it was impossible to see the floor. The dais itself was bare, but one lone skeleton sat on that throne. A single, silent witness to the carnage, now covered in a layer of dust.

One by one, the group moved into the chamber. They picked their footing carefully among the fallen bodies, staring around with wonder. The hush was palpable. It was as if they were stepping foot into something dark and terrible, where the light from Fiona’s staff seemed harsh and unwelcome.

“Look at them all,” Fiona said in awe.

The skeletons in the room were thickest near the doors. At first his assumption had been simply that the dwarves had been fighting the darkspawn as they’d burst through the doors, the last ditch defense of their dwarven ruler. But where were the darkspawn corpses inside the throne room? There were none.

Utha made a gesture, her eyes wide. Kell nodded. “I agree. This is too strange.”

“We should go,” Maric said quietly.

“No,” Genevieve snapped. Sword out, she began to move closer to the throne. “There is something here. I can feel it.”

“Something, yes,” Maric shouted after her. “But not your brother!”

She ignored him.

Duncan walked to the corpses that were right next to the door, kneeling down to get a closer look. Fiona was behind him, also intrigued. He noticed that only some of them still had weapons, now rusted and useless. The rest of them had nothing. Outside in the gallery, the skeletons were all still holding their blades, or their blades were nearby, but in here the weapons were just somewhere on the floor.

Fiona breathed in sharply. “Look on the doors!”

In the light he could see it clearly: The inside of the doors were covered in scratches . Long, shallow scratches everywhere. Some of the skeletons still reached up with their limbs, still clawed at the door. It was the same on the wall by the doors. Some of the finger bones were worn down to the knuckles.

These dwarves hadn’t been fighting the darkspawn. They had been trying to get out even as the darkspawn were battering their way in. Something had frightened them so terribly they had tried to claw their way out with their bare hands. And then they had died. All of them, at once. And the darkspawn had died with them.

What had happened here?

Something was terribly, terribly wrong. Duncan turned around and saw Genevieve stepping up onto the dais, with Maric and the others just behind her. She seemed transfixed by the single dwarven skeleton that sat on that throne. It seemed to recline there, in a stone chair that was far larger than it was, as if it had simply fallen asleep with its arms still on the rests. It wore an elaborate black helmet, with small horns and an iron face guard, and black chain armor still draped across its bones. And there was not a single other corpse within thirty feet of it.

The dwarves had been trying to get away from the throne.

“Wait!” Duncan called out.

Genevieve stopped and turned back, curious, and he watched in horror as the skeleton on the throne beside her suddenly moved. It lifted its head, its eye sockets alight with a red, sinister glow. A thick power swelled in the shadows around them, a susurrus of voices in their ears as an old magic took form.

The Commander wheeled on the skeleton, her eyes wide with terror, and held out her sword threateningly. “Get back! Get back!” she shouted to the others. Utha and Kell backed up slowly, the hunter with his bow drawn. Hafter stayed at his side, growling menacingly. Maric and Nicolas remained at Genevieve’s back, drawing their weapons.

*YOU HAVE COME.* The voice both came from the skeleton on the dais as well as rang out in Duncan’s head. He could feel it slithering into his mind like an eel, like something that left a disgusting trail behind it that made him shiver. *I HAVE WAITED, AND AT LAST YOU HAVE COME.*

Nicolas roared in rage and charged at the skeleton, his shield up and his mace high over his head. The skeleton waved a hand at him and a surge of power sent him flying off the dais, crashing hard to the ground amid the skeletons.