Chapter 6: The Witch's Bargain
The fire in the hearth of their borrowed room in the Arl’s estate had burned down to embers, painting everything in a dull, bloody glow. Outside, Denerim screamed. The distant, constant sounds of battle—clashing steel, warped battle-cries, the percussive blast of magic—filtered through the thick stone walls like a fever dream. Tomorrow was the end. Everyone knew it.
Morrigan stood by the window, her back to him, a silhouette against the chaotic orange flashes lighting the sky over the market district. She’d been quiet since Riordan’s revelation at the war council. Since they all learned the true price of killing an Archdemon.
“There is another way.”
Her voice was so low he almost didn’t hear it over the distant din. She didn’t turn.
Conor sat on the edge of the heavy oak bed, methodically checking the straps on his shield. “Is there.”
“A ritual. An old one. Forbidden, as such things tend to be.” She finally turned. The ember-light caught the gold in her eyes, but they were dark, serious. “It requires a soul. A… substitute. To be drawn into the Archdemon instead of the Grey Warden who strikes the blow.”
He set the shield down. “What kind of soul?”
“A new one. Untethered. Born of a Grey Warden.” She held his gaze, her expression unreadable. “Conceived the night before the battle.”
The air left the room. The sounds from outside faded to a muffled roar in his ears. He understood, immediately, completely. The cost was not in a thing, but in a possibility. In her.
“You,” he said.
“It must be performed with a Warden. The child would carry the taint, a beacon for the Old God’s essence.” She crossed her arms, a defensive gesture he rarely saw from her. “It would live. I would raise it. But I would leave. Immediately after. This… this cannot be a beginning for us. It must be a clean end.”
He didn’t ask if she was sure. He didn’t plead. He just looked at her, at the fierce, frightened intelligence in her face, at the woman who had chosen trust against every instinct she possessed. She was offering him life. A future. At the cost of ever seeing her again.
He did not take much convincing.
He stood, walked to her. He didn’t touch her, just searched her face. “You’re certain?”
“It is the only way you survive this.” Her voice wavered, just once. “I have… run the calculations. There is no other variable.”
“Then yes.”
He respected her decision not to be sought after. It was the core of her, the need for a freedom uncomplicated by sentiment. To chase her would be to destroy the gift she was giving. He understood that, too, with a clarity that hurt.
What followed was not like the hungry, playful times in the Wilds, or the desperate, sweating release after the Landsmeet. This was different. A solemn, aching liturgy.
They must have made love five times. Or six. He lost count in the hushed dark, the world outside forgotten. There was no rush, no frantic need for climax, only a deep, relentless commitment to the act itself. Each joining felt like a word in a farewell letter, written on the skin. He was meticulous, worshipful, using his mouth and hands until she trembled, not with passion alone, but with a grief she couldn’t voice. He took her slowly, his eyes locked on hers, moving with a powerful, measured rhythm that felt less like fucking and more like sealing a pact.
There was an obvious turmoil in her. Her usual control shattered not into wildness, but into a raw, silent vulnerability. She clutched him as if he were the edge of a cliff, her sharp nails digging into his back. Once, he felt the hot spill of tears against his neck, though she made no sound. She was giving up the one real connection she’d ever allowed, to save the one person who’d ever earned it. The paradox was killing her.
Exhausted and breathing heavily and unable to focus on anything, she stayed half-conscious until he drifted off to sleep, his plentiful seed resting in her belly. Her last sight was his face in the near-darkness, peaceful in sleep, a stark contrast to the war inside her. She did not sleep. She watched the embers die.
The next morning she was gone.
No time to think about that.
The chaos was immediate. The massive gates of the estate courtyard groaned open at first light to a city descending into a viscerally familiar hell. The darkspawn hadn’t just reached the walls; they were in the streets, pouring up from the sewers, crashing through barricades. The air was a soup of ash, blood, and choking black smoke.
Conor fought.
A shield and morning star were his tools of destruction. He’d swapped his elegant dual blades for something heavier, more crushing. The spiked ball of the morning star whistled as he swung it, a sound that promised annihilation. He fought in the vanguard beside Alistair, a wedge of steel and muscle driving into the teeming horde.
He was a maestro of kinetic force. Spinning and twirling the chain, maintaining momentum in a tireless dance of death. A hurlock lunged; the shield came up, deflected the crude blade, and in the same motion the morning star whirled around in a tight, vicious arc to cave in its ribcage. He used walls, carts, the bodies of fallen darkspawn as pivots, the weapon never stopping, a blur of dark iron and sudden, wet impacts. It wasn’t fencing. It was butchery. Efficient, total.
The darkspawn generals were eliminated with countless ogres. Not child’s play to him and Alistair. The giants waded through their own ranks, clubs the size of tree trunks smashing cobbles to powder. They fought one in the market square, its roar blotting out all other sound. Alistair baited it, a gleaming distraction, while Conor darted in, his morning star cracking against the beast’s ankle, again and again, until tendons snapped with a sound like wet ropes breaking. The ogre crashed down, and Alistair’s greatsword took its head.
Then the alienage. His home.
The vhenadahl was splintered, its branches hanging like broken arms. The square where he’d almost been married was a charnel house. Despair threatened to choke him, sharper than any smoke. He fought with a cold, silent rage that terrified even his companions. He didn’t shout. He just killed. Cleared a path from one cramped house to the next, kicking in doors, his voice flat and commanding as he herded terrified families—faces he knew, children he’d seen grow—towards the secured paths leading to the estate district.
He found Shianni in the basement of the tavern, a rusty kitchen knife in her hand, guarding a dozen cowering elders. Her eyes, wide with terror, met his. For a second, he wasn’t a Warden. He was just Conor. “Go,” he said, his voice rough. “Now. Up the hill.” She nodded, marshaling the others, her own fierce courage returning. She didn’t embrace him. There was no time. Just a last, long look before she vanished into the smoke. The alienage was cleared and its inhabitants moved to safety.
Then Fort Drakon. The high fortress loomed, a nest of corruption. They fought up through its labyrinthine tiers, past tortured prisoners and mutated emissaries. Each floor was a new lesson in horror. Wynne’s healing magic felt like cool water on a burn, Leliana’s arrows hissed past his ear with lethal accuracy, Sten was an immovable object that shattered anything that came near. They were a machine, honed by a year of road and ruin.
And then came the slaying of the Archdemon.
It filled the sky above Fort Drakon’s roof, a vast, serpentine shadow blotting out the sun. Its scales were the color of a deep bruise, its wings tattered membranes that beat with a thunder that vibrated in Conor’s teeth. The air crackled with its malevolent song, a psychic scream that promised oblivion.
Between him, Alistair, Leliana, and Dog, it was a raw, meaty slog. They were insects trying to bring down a mountain. Arrows and spells glanced off its hide. They went for the tendons at the base of its wings, the softer flesh of its underbelly when it landed, its eyes. Dog, brave to the point of insanity, latched onto a claw, shaking his head like he was trying to kill a rat. Alistair shouted himself hoarse, drawing its fiery breath.
Conor saw an opening. The beast lunged at Alistair, its neck extended, one great eye fixed on its target.
He ran. Not away, but along its flank, using the debris of the rooftop as springboards. He vaulted over a fallen battlement, morning star whirling. He slammed it into the joint of the Archdemon’s rear leg. The beast shuddered, its leg buckling. As its head swung around, roaring in pain, he dropped the chain weapon and drew his sword.
He leapt onto its neck, driving the blade into the scale-flesh for purchase, hauling himself up like a climber on a cliff of nightmares. The world pitched and rolled. He could feel the monster’s raw power, the ancient hatred throbbing beneath his feet. He scrambled towards its head.
Its skull crushed by Conor’s morning star had weakened the plates. He saw a fissure, a vulnerable spot near the eye socket. The great yellow eye, slitted like a serpent’s, swiveled to focus on him. He felt the pull then, the dreadful vacuum of the taint, the call for a soul.
He thought of a quiet mere, and a woman asking what then?
With a final, grating heave, he raised his sword two-handed and plunged it through the eye.
The shockwave was silent, and then it wasn’t. A blast of pure force, white and gold, erupted from the dying god. It passed through him, leaving no mark, but he felt it—a scraping, searching hunger that found nothing to claim. It recoiled, lost, and vanished.
The Archdemon gave one last, shuddering spasm and was still.
A profound silence was felt in his soul as the Blight ended and the darkspawn fled. The psychic pressure, the constant background hum of taint he’d lived with for a year, simply snapped off. The sudden quiet inside his own head was deafening.
Around him, the surviving darkspan lost their coordination, their purpose. They broke, scattering, some throwing themselves from the walls in mindless terror.
The silence spread outwards from the rooftop, over the corpse-choked streets, across the broken city. No cheers came, not yet. Only the muffled sobs of the survivors, the groans of the wounded, and the slow, settling dust.
Conor pulled his sword free with a sickening slurp and stood on the dead god’s head, looking over his shattered city. He was alive.
The cost of it sat in his soul, heavy and quiet as the silence that followed the storm.
The cost of it sat in his soul, heavy and quiet as the silence that followed the storm. He climbed down from the carcass, his muscles trembling not from effort but from the simple, shocking fact of being here, alive, breathing air that didn’t taste of despair. Alistair found him leaning against a shattered rampart, staring at nothing. “You’re not dead,” Alistair said, his voice cracked with exhaustion and awe.
“No,” Conor replied. The word felt strange in his mouth.
“How?”
Conor just shook his head, a minute motion. He couldn’t say it. Saying it would make it real, would make her absence a physical hole in the world. Alistair, after a long look, clapped a hand on his shoulder, the grip tight and understanding. They left the question hanging in the sour air.
What followed was ceremony. It was bittersweet.
A week later, in the great hall of the palace—now smelling of sawdust and beeswax instead of blood and panic—they stood before a makeshift throne. Arl Eamon placed a simple silverite crown on Alistair’s head. The boy who never wanted to be king now was one, his shoulders squared under the weight. Anora stood beside him, her expression unreadable, a necessary piece of political machinery. The nobility applauded, the sound politely subdued. Conor watched from the side, still in his battered armor, feeling like a ghost haunting someone else’s celebration.
He had grown close to all of them.
The goodbyes came in pieces over the next few days, as the camp by the palace gates slowly dissolved. Oghren gruffly promised to visit the ‘piss-pot of a Keep’ they were giving him, his rough embrace a testament to a friendship forged in the Deep Roads. Sten simply inclined his head, his sword recovered, his purpose fulfilled. “Your path was clear,” he stated. “You did not waver.” It was the highest praise Conor would ever receive from him.
Wynne fussed over his last few scrapes, her hands glowing with gentle magic. “Remember to sleep, dear,” she chided softly, her eyes wise and sad. “Even heroes need rest.” Leliana kissed his cheek, her smile warm but her eyes already looking down the road, toward new stories. Zevran tossed him a lazy salute, a glint of real affection in his eyes. “Do not become boring in your castle, my friend,” he called. “I may drop in to steal your silver.” Shale, already a distant granite shape on the road, offered a final, “It was marginally less tedious than anticipated.”
They said their goodbyes, except Alistair, now King, who asked if he would stick around to help him see things get off to a smooth start.
“A month,” Alistair said, cornering him after the petitions had died down for the day. They stood on a balcony overlooking a courtyard being cleared of debris. “Just a month. I need someone who doesn’t care about my title to tell me when I’m being an idiot.”
“You’re being an idiot,” Conor said flatly.
Alistair grinned. “See? I need that. Stay. Please.”
So Conor stayed. He spent time in the alienage seeing Shianni and Soris start their lives over.
The gates, now swung wide on broken hinges, led into a place of grim industry. The vhenadahl was a blackened skeleton, but around its base, people were already sweeping ash, patching roofs, mourning their dead, and living. Shianni bossed a crew hauling away rubble, her voice raw but strong. Soris was helping a carpenter rebuild a doorframe, his movements precise and focused.
“They look at you like you’re Andraste herself returned,” Shianni said later, handing him a cup of weak tea in her newly cleaned house. She didn’t meet his eyes. “You saved us. Again.”
“It was everyone,” he mumbled.
“Don’t do that,” she snapped, finally looking up. Her eyes were fierce with unshed tears. “Take the credit. For once in your life, let them thank you.” She sipped her tea. “Heard you’re Warden-Commander now. Fancy title.”
“It’s just a job.”
“It’s a chance,” she said, leaning forward. “Don’t waste it.”
He spent some time talking with Anora, now Queen, about the need for integration.
They met in a sunlit anteroom, a stark contrast to their last encounter in her father’s prison. She was all cool efficiency. “Open gates are a start,” she conceded, tracing a line on a map of Denerim. “And funds can be allocated for development. But sentiment among the bannorn is… fragile. They fear change, even positive change.”
Conor studied her, this woman who had played the Game since childhood. “They fear losing privilege. The Alienage isn’t asking for their manors. It’s asking for walls that don’t cage us in, water that doesn’t poison our children.”
“Which costs money,” Anora countered, though her tone was not hostile, but calculating.
He leaned back. “The Kingdom of Orzammar owes them. A debt of honor, from a Paragon. They have stonecraft, manpower. Put them to work here, paying that debt.”
Anora’s eyebrows rose. She hadn’t considered that. “A tangible repayment. It’s… practical. And it bypasses the treasury.” A flicker of respect crossed her face. “You’re learning to play.”
“I’m learning to build,” he corrected.
She offers a compromise, that the gates of the alienage would be open and more funds would be allocated for its development. Conor points out that the Kingdom of Orzammar owes them.
“The Shaperate will agree, if we frame it as fulfilling a debt to the Hero of Ferelden,” Anora mused, tapping her chin. “It could work.