David Gaider - The Calling

Maric flinched, his eyes filled with stark pain, but he didn’t look away from Katriel. For a long moment there was only silence. Then her expression slowly became resigned, and she nodded desolately. More tears streamed down her cheeks. Duncan felt almost embarrassed to watch, and even Genevieve turned away with a grimace. “I understand,” the elf whispered.

“I wish I could ask you to forgive me.”

She reached up and tenderly brushed aside his hair with a sad smile. “Forgive yourself,” she said. “And forget me.” Then she turned around and walked away. Maric remained where he was, watching her leave. He seemed calm, almost serene. Duncan wasn’t certain why.

It made him doubt. Maybe there were good spirits in the Fade and not just demons. Maybe ghosts were real. Maybe the Maker truly did watch over His children and helped the ones that needed Him the most.

Or maybe it had all been one last trick to try to lure Maric away.

Duncan was suddenly glad they were going to face the demon now. Let them get away from this place or die trying. He was tired of nightmares. The group walked into an elven alienage, a walled-off part of a larger city. The buildings here were mostly hovels, crammed close together and sometimes even on top of one another. It was a haphazard pile of tenements and dirty shops, washing lines strewn across the street sometimes going up two or even three stories high. The street itself was mostly mud, the worn paths filled with stale water and smelling of dung. The only spot of color in the entire quarter was the central square, where a well-tended oak tree spread its branches wide, its vibrantly green leaves forming a canopy that left much of the ground beneath it dry. A wooden stage had been built there, adorned with poles that were covered in bright blue garlands. A place of celebration, Duncan imagined, even if there was nothing on the dusty stage now.

The odd thing, he noted, was that there wasn’t a single person throughout the entire alienage. The street was bare, and not a single elf poked his or her head out of any door or window. Dark clouds billowed overhead and threatened rain, but no one ran about to collect the laundry from the lines. Window shutters clacked rhythmically in the breeze. It looked as if the entire place was deserted.

Duncan drew his daggers. There was an unease to the silence, a strangeness to it that raised the hackles on his neck.

Utha squinted as she looked around and made quick gestures toward Kell.

“You are right,” he murmured. “This seems very different from the other dreams, and it is not solely for the lack of people.”

Duncan had to agree. There was a strange distinctness to his vision, here. It made everything look slightly unreal, as if he were seeing at it all through a pane of glass. Everything also appeared slightly washed out, and that wasn’t just the dinginess of the elven homes. Even the sky was lifeless, nothing but grey clouds from one end to the other. He half expected the clouds to part and reveal the Fade sky with its floating islands on the other side.

“Then where do we find the demon?” Maric asked.

Nobody had an immediate answer. The iron gates leading out of the district were closed up tight. They were solid and forbidding-looking, as apparently the elves were not even permitted to gaze upon the rest of the city and its superior conditions.

Not that the slums of Val Royeaux were much of an improvement over this, Duncan thought. The fact that they were an improvement at all was bad enough—the alienage had the feel of neglect, like the buildings and its people were the refuse that was brushed off the rest of the city. The elves here obviously made the best of it they could, but he imagined even the most down-on-his-luck thief he’d run with in the slums would have turned up his nose rather than stay here.

As Duncan slowly scanned the area, he noticed that not only was the gate closed, but so were all the doors. All except one. A single innocuous building on the other side of the square had its door invitingly open. “Look there.” He pointed.

They all did, and paused. “That almost seems too convenient,” Genevieve muttered. Nobody argued with her, but quietly the group began crossing the square toward the door.

“Will Fiona be here?” Maric asked quietly. “Or just the demon?”

“I don’t know,” Kell admitted.

Genevieve motioned the Wardens to spread out. Kell and Utha went around one side of the great oak while she and Duncan went the other. Maric kept up behind them. Nobody said a word, the only sound the wind through the eaves overhead.

As the group crept through the door, Duncan paused. The hallway just inside wasn’t what he would have expected. It was wide, for one, and the walls were covered in the delicate paper he’d seen sometimes in the homes of the truly wealthy. Here it was decorated with petite roses, each one growing from a vine that stretched up to the peaked white ceiling overhead. The floors here were a polished wood, dark and rich and clean enough to eat off of.

“This can’t be the same place we just entered,” he muttered.

The others were looking around now, as well, their grips tightening on their weapons. “We went through a doorway, didn’t we?” Maric whispered. “We could be anywhere.”

“We are being led,” Genevieve declared. “This is a trap.”

“Do we have much choice?”

She had no answer for him. After a moment’s hesitation the group moved forward again. It became obvious that this was an estate, the home of some Orlesian aristocrat. They passed a luxuriously appointed sitting room, a hallway that seemed to go off into a servant’s wing, and even a conservatory complete with whitewashed doors that opened up onto a sunlit garden filled with flowered bushes.

All of it still had the same unreality that the alienage did, the feeling that everything wasn’t quite right. Duncan noticed, as well, that the estate was similarly abandoned. The hallways should have been teeming with servants and guards, an entire staff bustling about to run the house hold, and yet there was nothing but silence.

“Do you hear that?” Kell asked quietly.

The group stopped in the hall. Duncan cocked his head and ever so faintly heard the sound of a woman crying. It might have been Fiona; it was too far away to tell and would have been impossible to hear if it wasn’t otherwise so quiet. The hunter had good ears.

They moved on, Kell leading the way as he tried to find a path toward the sound. They passed through an open courtyard filled with verdant bushes and a marble statue of Andraste atop a burbling fountain. Opening a sliding window, Kell took them carefully into an empty kitchen. It was large, the sort that would have normally been filled with servants desperate to bake their bread and finish the evening meal, but there was no one. It didn’t even smell as if it had ever been used. The sounds of the whimpering woman were definitely louder, however, and as the hunter brought them to the back of the kitchen they found a narrow flight of stairs leading downward into darkness.

The cries were coming from below.

“Do we go down?” Maric asked nobody in par tic u lar.

There was no answer. They had no way back into the waking world, no way to free themselves from what ever spell the demon had placed upon them. If this was truly a trap, then they had to walk into it with their eyes open and hope that they came out the other side.

Duncan felt growing dread as they descended single file. The stairs creaked ominously beneath their weight, and the air turned chill the farther down they got. His heart began to beat rapidly, and he had to force himself to keep moving. The stones around them changed, becoming natural rock. They entered a dank cave, the sound of the crying ahead echoing past stagnant pools.