Chapter 9: The King's Farewell
The air in Weisshaupt’s grand hall was thin and tasted of incense and cold stone. Kerr stood before the high seat, feeling every league between himself and the damp, earthy warmth of Ferelden. The banners—golden lions, crimson griffons—hung motionless in the still air, their embroidery gleaming under the torchlight. The silence here was a heavy, administrative thing, broken only by the scratch of a quill from a scribe in a distant alcove.
Then a door boomed open, and the silence shattered.
“By the Maker’s dimpled buttocks, look what the mabari dragged in!”
Alistair Theirin’s voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling, a familiar, welcome thunderclap. He strode across the polished floor, not in ceremonial robes, but in worn, practical Warden-issue armor, a longsword strapped to his back. His grin was as wide and irreverent as ever, though the lines around his eyes spoke of years spent staring into the shadows beyond the firelight.
Kerr felt a tension he hadn’t even acknowledged leave his shoulders. “Still leading with your best material, I see.”
They clasped forearms, a hard, resonant clang of vambrace meeting gauntlet. The formality of the hall seemed to recede around them. “When I heard ‘King of Ferelden’ was coming, I expected ermine and a pout,” Alistair said, his eyes scanning Kerr’s travel-stained leathers. “Not… this. You look like you rode through the Anderfels backwards.”
“Feels like I did. Needed to move fast.”
Alistair’s smile faded, his gaze turning shrewd. “This isn’t a social call. The… incident at your farmlands.”
“A probe. Coordinated. It stank of strategy, not hunger.”
“Yeah.” Alistair ran a hand through his hair, the gesture tired. “We’ve been getting… whispers. Strange movements. Not just hordes, but patterns. They’re clustering near the Coast, but the weirdness is centered on Amaranthine. Near the Vigil.”
Kerr’s blood went cold. The Vigil’s Keep was the Grey Wardens’ primary seat in Ferelden, a fortress reclaimed after the Blight. If it was compromised… “How bad?”
“We don’t know. Communications have gotten spotty, then stopped entirely two days ago.” Alistair lowered his voice. “I was assembling a team to ride out at first light. Looks like you’ve just volunteered.”
“You’re leading it?” Kerr asked, a plan solidifying in his mind with brutal clarity.
“Someone has to keep you from charging in and getting your royal head chopped off. So, yes.” Alistair jerked his head toward the archway. “Your horse looks dead on its feet. We’ll get you a fresh one. We leave in an hour.”
The ride north was a blur of bitter wind and grim silence. They pushed the horses hard, trading tales of the past years in terse, breathless phrases between gallops. The camaraderie was there, easy as an old boot, but beneath it ran a current of mounting dread. As they crested the final hill overlooking the Vigil, that dread curdled into reality.
Smoke rose in thick, black pillars against the late afternoon sky. The sounds of battle—the distant shrieks of darkspawn, the clash of steel, the screams of men—drifted up to them. The outer gates were shattered, the courtyard a seething mass of combat. Grey Warden blue mixed with the dull, fungal hues of genlocks and hurlocks.
“Well,” Alistair said, drawing his sword with a steely hiss. “Spotty communications, you said?”
Kerr unslung his hammer, the weight a comfort in his hands. “Let’s go say hello.”
What followed was not a battle but a brutal reclamation. They fought as they always had, a perfected tandem of devastating force. Kerr’s hammer was a bone-breaker, sweeping through clustered darkspawn like a scythe. Alistair was the unyielding wall, his shield deflecting talons and arrows, his sword finding gaps in chitinous armor with lethal precision. They fought their way through the courtyard, into the lower halls, a tide of focused violence.
They found Seneschal Varel backed into the brewery, holding a chokepoint with a handful of surviving guards. Relief washed over his face as the two Wardens carved a path to him. “The Keep is overrun!” Varel yelled over the din. “They came from below! The cellars, the old deep roads tunnels!”
“Seal what you can behind us,” Kerr ordered, his voice leaving no room for argument. “Hold this line. We’ll clear a path.”
Room by room, corridor by corridor, they purged the Vigil. They found allies in the chaos: Anders, the sardonic mage, blasting a group of genlocks off a parapet with a gust of force, complaining about the state of the library all the while. Oghren, a barrel of ale and rage, was discovered drowning his sorrows and a darkspawn emissary in equal measure in the ruined tavern. In the dungeons, they freed Sigrun, a casteless dwarf with dead eyes and deadlier knives, and Nathaniel Howe.
That was… awkward.
Nathaniel, caught trying to loot his family’s former estate for vengeance, looked ready to die when he saw the man whose family his father had betrayed standing over him. But the hatred Kerr expected to feel wasn’t there. He saw only a tired, desperate man with his father’s eyes and none of his cruelty. “The darkspawn don’t care about our family dramas, Howe,” Kerr said, lowering his hammer. “You want to die for your father’s sins, or you want to kill something that actually deserves it?” He conscripted him on the spot. Justice was found later, a spirit of unwavering purpose burning within the corpse of a fallen Warden named Kristoff, a grim companion but an unbreakable one. Velanna, a proud Dalish elf, they encountered in the woods, her sister taken by the creatures; her fury and powerful magic were bent toward their cause.
The Vigil, once reclaimed, was a bleeding wound. The conspiracy within its own ranks—a foolish bargainer named Adewald and his cronies—was rooted out and disposed of with cold efficiency. The silverite mine to the south was choked with darkspawn, but it had to be cleared; the ore was the lifeblood for rebuilding. Deep in the mine’s guts, they met him: The Architect.
He was not like any darkspawn they had ever seen. Tall, strangely articulate, speaking of consciousness and freedom for his kind. He claimed he sought to end the violence, to free the darkspawn from the call of the Old Gods. He offered an alliance. Kerr listened, Anora’s pragmatic voice in his ear, Alistair’s distrustful grumble at his side. The creature’s words were honey, but the scent of his blood was still the same corrupt ichor. They rejected his offer. Violence ensued. He fled, leaving behind a deeper, more unsettling terror than mere mindless hunger.
They rebuilt. With silverite and granite, they shored up the Vigil’s walls. Trade routes were secured, conspirators silenced. Secrets were unearthed in the lost dwarven thaig of Kal’Hirol—a horror of trapped souls and darkspawn experiments that hardened their resolve. They defended the city of Amaranthine from a massive assault, then whirled and raced back to defend the Vigil from another, a punishing dance on two fronts that stretched their forces to the limit. Through it all, Kerr felt the ghost of Anora’s hand on his cheek, the unspoken countdown in the quiet of his tent at night.
The Architect’s trail led them down, deep into the tunnels beneath Amaranthine, to a place where the air grew thick with the smell of rot and sour milk. They found Delilah Howe, Nathaniel’s sister, imprisoned but alive, a fragile thread of hope in the dark. They found Oghren, faced with the possibility of a wife and son he’d thought lost, his coarse exterior crumbling into something vulnerable and terrified. “They’re better off without a drunk bastard like me,” he muttered, staring into the dark. Kerr, thinking of the child he would never let grow up fatherless, gripped the dwarf’s shoulder. “Then stop being just a drunk bastard. Be something else for them.”
And deeper still they went.
The tunnel opened into a cavernous chamber, a nightmare made flesh. Pulsing sacs of mucus clung to the walls, and in the center, rooted to the stone itself, was the Broodmother. She was a vast, monstrous thing, a perversion of fertility, her once-human face stretched and bloated across a body that spilled across the cavern floor. Tentacles tipped with shrieking, toothy maws lashed from her mass. Around her, new darkspawn crawled wet and shrieking from her birthing sacks.
The sight, the smell, struck Kerr with a physical nausea. This was the source. This was the factory.
The battle was a descent into madness. They fought through her wretched children, the room echoing with the screams of the newly born and the dying. Sigrun and Nathaniel darted in, cutting tendons, while Velanna and Anders unleashed torrents of ice and fire. Justice stood firm, a beacon in the chaos. Oghren howled, swinging his axe with a grief turned to rage.
Finally, they carved a path to her bulk. Alistair, shield high, drew her attention, the monstrous face focusing on him with idiot hatred. A tentacle smashed down, but he caught it on his shield, the impact driving him to one knee. As she reeled back, shrieking, he saw his opening—a soft, pulsating spot under her sagging chin.
With a roar that matched her own, Alistair drove his sword upward with all his strength, plunging the blade deep into the fleshy underside of her jaw.
The Broodmother’s roar became a deafening, guttural shriek of pain and fury. Her head jerked back, but Alistair held on, his muscles corded, pushing the blade deeper as she thrashed. Her many mouths gnashed inches from his face, her fetid breath washing over him. He was a mere man holding back a tidal wave of meat and hate, his boots sliding in the muck.
“Kerr!” he yelled, the word strained through clenched teeth.
Kerr moved. He hefted his massive hammer, its head gleaming with darkspawn blood in the eerie light. He didn’t swing for a killing blow—the angle was wrong. Instead, he stepped beside his friend, raised the hammer high, and brought its full, weighted face down onto the crown of the Broodmother’s skull with a wet, final crunch.
The force drove her head down, impaling her further onto Alistair’s blade. The steel tip erupted from the top of her skull in a spray of black fluid and shattered bone. The world seemed to hold its breath.
Her thrashing ceased. The shriek died in her throat, becoming a wet, choking gurgle. Her massive body shuddered, then slumped, a deflating mountain of vile flesh.
Alistair wrenched his sword free and stumbled back, breathing in ragged, heaving gasps. Kerr stood over the dead matriarch, his hammer dripping, the silence of the cavern sudden and absolute.
It was from that silence that the Architect emerged, his expression unreadable. “You see,” he said, his voice echoing softly in the vast chamber. “The cycle is violence. It is all they know. All they can ever know, without my work.”
Kerr turned to face him, exhaustion and fury warring in his veins. He thought of the farmlands burning, of Anora’s fear, of the tiny, fragile hope growing far away from this darkness. He thought of all the Broodmothers that would ever be.
“Your work ends here,” Kerr said, and raised his hammer again.