David Gaider - The Calling

As Bregan brought his agonizing heaving under control, shaking and sweating as he did so, he felt blindly for those injuries. His armor was gone, as were his sword and shield, but they had left him his robe and his tunic, encrusted with blood and filth as those were. His injuries, meanwhile, had been dressed. In the utter darkness he couldn’t quite tell what they had been dressed with. Some sort of poultice, it seemed, bound with a rough cloth that felt similar to burlap.

But who had brought him here? Who had tended to his injuries? He remembered reaching a ruined thaig. He remembered being swarmed by darkspawn in the Deep Roads, overwhelmed by their numbers from all sides, and then … ? Nothing. He recalled the feeling of their black blades slicing into his flesh, remembered their talons puncturing his armor and digging into his shoulders and legs. By all rights he should be dead. Darkspawn showed no mercy; they didn’t take prisoners.

Bregan closed his eyes and carefully reached out with his senses. There were darkspawn all around him. Not in the same room, perhaps, but nearby. He could feel them tickling at the edge of his mind. As always, the sensation came with a feeling of foulness, as if a poison had seeped under his skin.

He closed his eyes and attempted to force the awareness of their presence back out. How he had always despised it. Every Grey Warden gained the ability to touch the darkspawn from afar, and most considered it a gift. He had always thought it a curse.

The humming continued. Behind that sound, however, he could hear other things. There was movement, things slithering against rock. The sound of sloshing water. All of these things were muted and faint, but they were there. From time to time the quality of the smell would change, as well; it would become something burnt and charred. He would feel a strange pressure against his mental senses, as if something were … pushing against his mind. And then it would pass.

Apprehension tugged at him, and his heart began to beat more rapidly. Moving awkwardly, Bregan got up off the ground and onto his hands and knees. He felt around blindly to discern the limits of his environment. He felt some kind of fur pelt, dirty enough that he was glad his captors hadn’t decided to toss him onto that instead of the bare floor. He felt smooth walls, definitely a place that was built and not a natural cave.

His hands came across something soft and sticky, like a putrescent growth that spiderwebbed its way across the rock. The darkspawn corruption. He forced down his revulsion. Best not to think too hard about it.

Then a new sound began. Footsteps, boots on stone and not far away. Bregan turned to face the source, the first hint of direction he’d had since he awoke, and sensed a darkspawn approaching. He crawled away from it, his alarm giving way to terror. Was there a door there? Would he even see what ever was approaching him? His inability to adjust to the utter blackness around him was maddening.

The steps grew louder, echoing until they were ringing in his head. And then came the grinding sound of a metal door being opened, and suddenly there was light so bright it seared his eyes. He shouted in pain and recoiled, covering his face as he did so.

“My apologies,” came a male voice. It was soft and oddly resonant, with an unearthly timbre, yet not unpleasant. The words seemed clipped, as if the speaker was unaccustomed to using them.

Bregan sat back up, blinking hard and holding up a hand to block out the worst of the light. It was difficult to make out anything, and his eyes watered from the painful effort. He could make out a vague shadow within the light, carry ing what appeared to be some manner of glowing rock. The shadow moved into the room but maintained a respectful distance.

“The light is necessary,” the cultured voice continued. “I suspect coming in the darkness would have been unpleasant for you. I am correct in assuming that you cannot see in the darkness, yes?”

Was this a darkspawn? The emissaries were capable of speech, but he didn’t recall any record of a Grey Warden having actually spoken to one. They were the spellcasters of the darkspawn, and he had heard one on occasion taunting the front lines, or crying out in anger as the Grey Wardens pressed the attack. He had even heard of them delivering ultimatums from across the battlefield, but never anything like this. He felt with his mental senses, and yes, this was indeed a darkspawn before him. The very same sense of foulness touched his mind.

“I shall wait,” the voice said. “Your sight shall return in time.”

It took only a few moments of rubbing for Bregan’s vision to finally begin to clear. What he saw in the light of the creature’s glowstone did nothing to assuage his confusion. It was an emissary, a darkspawn who might have been mistaken for a human were it not for its corrupted flesh and wide, fishlike eyes. It had no hair, and its lips were peeled back from its sharp fangs to reveal a permanent, hideous grin. Instead of the usual assortment of decayed leathers and pieces of armor that the darkspawn wore, however, this one had a simple, soot-covered brown robe. It carried a gnarled black staff in one hand and the glowstone in the other.

It also seemed quite calm, studying Bregan with its eerie eyes. He shuddered, not sure how to react at first. His instinct was to rush it, to snap its neck and get away. An emissary had command over magic, but like any mage it needed time to summon its power. If he moved quickly enough, even its staff would do it no good.

“Have your injuries healed?” it asked quite suddenly. “I understand humans have the power to heal magically, but alas, that is not something I am capable of. Even our knowledge of your medicines is … limited.”

“I don’t understand,” Bregan stammered.

The creature nodded, seemingly sympathetic to his plight. Bregan was having difficulty resolving the fact that civilized behavior was coming from such a monstrous being. All the lore of the Grey Wardens, centuries upon centuries of knowledge painstakingly gained throughout the Blights … nothing suggested that the darkspawn ever did anything but mindlessly attack and infect any living creature they came across.

“What is it you do not understand?” it asked patiently.

“Are you … a darkspawn?”

It did not seem surprised in the slightest by his question. “Are you a human?” The strange timbre of its voice seemed to roll around the word human as if it were a foreign word. Bregan supposed that, to a darkspawn, it probably was. “I think you are not,” it continued. “I think you are a Grey Warden.”

“I … I am both of those things.”

It blinked at him, but Bregan couldn’t tell if that indicated surprise or disbelief or something else entirely. Were darkspawn capable of emotions? They were capable of coordinated action. They were known to make repairs to their armor, even build crude weapons and structures from the remnants of dwarven supplies they found in the Deep Roads. There had just never been any evidence of actual motivation behind what they did, beyond the dark forces that drove them. Perhaps the Grey Wardens were wrong. Or perhaps they had known all along, and it was yet another of the secrets they kept, even from someone as high ranking as himself.

It wouldn’t be the first time , he thought bitterly. Slowly Bregan sat back, keeping a wary eye on the emissary—assuming that was what it was. If it had meant to kill him, it would already have done so. What Bregan couldn’t be sure of was whether that boded something far worse for him.

The darkspawn shifted in its dirty robes, leaning on its staff in a manner that Bregan found disturbingly human. “Our kind can sense a Grey Warden, just as a Grey Warden can sense us. And you know why this is.” It looked pointedly at him, but he declined to say anything.