Chapter 10: Light in the Dark
The air inside the Tower of Ishal was a dead, breathless cold. It wasn't the chill of stone; it was the absence of life, scraped out by the scabbed feet and corrupted lungs of things that did not belong. The only sounds were their own echoing steps and a wet, chittering rustle that seemed to seep from the walls themselves.
"They're already here," Alistair whispered, his shield held ready. "The deep passages aren't sealed; they're excavated."
Daylen didn't answer. The taint was a pressure behind his eyes, a sour taste coating his tongue. He could feel them above, below, an infestation crawling through the tower's marrow. He flexed his fingers inside his gauntlets, mana coiling around his forearms like snakes of blue light.
They rounded a corner into a guard chamber. The moonlight from a high, narrow window illuminated a scene of recent carnage. Two Fereldan soldiers lay sprawled, their faces frozen in silent screams, their bodies twisted at angles no living joint could manage. Standing over them, feeding, were three hurlocks.
The creatures were hunched, their skin a mottled grey-green, stretched taut over ropy muscle. One looked up, its black, pupilless eyes fixing on the Wardens. A guttural click issued from its throat.
"Right," Alistair said, his voice dropping all pretense of levity. "Let's be quick about this."
The lead hurlock charged, a rusted axe held high. Alistair didn't retreat. He stepped into the charge, bringing his shield up in a brutal, rising arc. The steel rim caught the creature under its jaw with a sickening crack of bone. Before it could stumble back, Alistair twisted his torso and slammed the shield edge-first into its temple. The hurlock dropped like a sack of rocks.
The other two came at Daylen. He didn't draw his swords. Not yet.
He breathed in, pulled the deep cold from the Veil, and exhaled. A jagged, widening fan of frost erupted from his outstretched hand, coating the stone floor, climbing the creatures' legs, encasing their torsos in a thick shell of ice. They stuttered to a halt, frozen statues mid-snarl.
He clenched his other fist. The air around it rippled with compacted force. He punched forward, not at the creatures, but at the space between them. The spell, a detonating Stonefist, hit the first frozen hurlock like a battering ram made of pure kinetic energy.
The spell combo triggered. The frozen body didn't just shatter; it exploded. Razor-sharp shards of ice and flesh erupted outward, tearing into its still-frozen companion. The second statue dissolved into a cloud of crystalline gore and black, clotting blood. A mist of red ice hung in the air, sparkling in the moonlight.
"Show-off," Alistair grunted, yanking his sword from the chest of the first hurlock. "Pretty, though."
"Efficient," Daylen corrected, his breath frosting in the suddenly frigid air. The burst of power had felt good, clean. A precision strike.
The ascent became a brutal, winding gauntlet. The darkspawn poured from stairwells and side corridors—genlocks, smaller and faster, swarming in packs; hurlocks, disciplined and armed; and once, a hulking, grey-skinned ogre that filled an entire landing. Against the giant, Daylen’s ice spells barely slowed it. They fought in sync, Alistair drawing its rage with shield slams and shouted taunts, dancing just outside the reach of its tree-trunk arms, while Daylen harried its flanks with blades coated in crackling lightning. When it finally fell, shaking the tower with its death throes, they were both panting, sweat stinging their eyes.
At the next floor, a wave of genlocks rushed them in a tight, dark pack. Too close for careful magic.
Daylen’s hands found the hilts of his longswords. The shing of steel was a promise. He stepped into the swarm, and the world narrowed to the arc of his blades.
He became a whirlwind of cleaving metal. A diagonal chop severed a genlock’s arm at the shoulder. A reverse backhand took a head. A quick thrust into a gaping maw. He pivoted, elbows and shoulders working in ruthless, efficient geometry. A limb here. A head there. Black blood sprayed in arcs, painting his armor, his helmet, the wolf pelt at his waist. It was exhausting, a savage drain on muscle and wind, but he gave himself over to it. The Circle’s precise forms melted away, replaced by the Warden’s raw necessity: sever, disable, kill.
Beside him, Alistair was a fortress of controlled violence. He used his shield not just to block, but as an offensive weapon. He’d catch a genlock’s crude dagger on the face of his shield, then smash the steel edge into its knee, buckling it. As the creature fell, his sword would find its neck. He’d bull-rush a pair of hurlocks, knocking them off balance with sheer mass, then impale one through the gut while kicking the legs out from the other. He fought with a grim, almost mundane professionalism.
"Left!" Alistair barked.
Daylen ducked without looking. A crossbow bolt meant for his head buried itself in the wooden beam behind him. He spotted the genlock sharpshooter lurking in a doorway. A flick of his wrist and a spike of ice punched through its chest, pinning it to the wall.
They fought their way up, floor by bloody floor. The tower was a chaos of clanging metal, guttural cries, and the wet sounds of butchery. The polished stone grew slick with gore. Daylen’s mana reserves ebbed, then plunged. He drank a lyrium potion, the liquid burning a path of cold fire down his throat, temporarily chasing back the fog of exhaustion and amplifying the taint’s song to a deafening shriek. It was a trade: clarity now, for a deeper price later.
Finally, they burst through a heavy oak door and into the Beacon Chamber. It was a vast, circular room, surprisingly serene. High, arched windows framed a view of the valley below, now shrouded in the unnatural twilight of the battle. The Beacon itself, a massive iron brazier filled with pitch and oil on a central dais, stood cold.
"There," Alistair rasped, pointing to a lever near the eastern window. "The ignition."
A final knot of darkspawn guarded it—two hurlock alpha, bigger and clad in scavenged plate, and a bloated, weeping creature that could only be an emissary, its fingers crackling with sickly green energy.
"No more games," Daylen said, his voice raw.
The emissary hurled a ball of corrosive poison. Daylen batted it aside with a shimmering barrier of force, the spell spattering and eating into the stone floor. He charged the alphas. One swung a massive cleaver. Daylen dropped, sliding on the gore-slick floor beneath the blow, and came up inside its guard. Both his longswords crossed in a scissoring motion. The creature's head toppled from its shoulders.
The second alpha got Alistair’s shield in its face. Three hammering bashes stunned it, each strike ringing like a funeral bell. Alistair finished it with a brutal upward thrust under its breastplate, twisting the blade before pulling it free.
The emissary shrieked, gathering more power. Daylen was spent, his mana scraped hollow. He looked at the oil-soaked wood in the brazier.Simple fire. The most basic of all spells. He gathered the last dregs of his will, the final ember of his energy, and focused.
A tiny, focused jet of flame shot from his fingertip. It touched the pitch.
The Beacon ignited with a deep, thumping whump. Fire roared twenty feet into the air, a brilliant, raging column of gold and orange against the twilight. Heat washed over them, a cleansing wave after the tower’s pervasive chill.
The light. The signal. It was done.
Daylen’s knees buckled. He staggered back, hitting the cold stone wall beside a window, and slid down it. His helmeted head cracked against the masonry. He reached up with trembling, blood-smeared hands, unclasped the helm, and let it clatter to the floor. The cooler air felt like a balm on his sweat-soaked, shaved scalp. A thin trickle of blood escaped one nostril, a side-effect of magical exhaustion and lyrium overdose. He wiped at it with the back of his vambrace, leaving a crimson smear.
Alistair stood by the raging fire, his chest heaving. He looked over at Daylen’s crumpled form and a ragged, breathless laugh escaped him. “We did it. We actually lit the damn thing.” He walked over, his boots leaving bloody prints. He offered a hand. “Come on, up you get. Let’s get a front-row seat for the heroic cavalry charge.”
Daylen gripped his friend’s forearm, letting Alistair haul him to his feet. They moved to the wide eastern window, the Beacon’s heat at their backs, and looked down upon the Valley of Ostagar.
The breath froze in Daylen’s lungs.
The king’s forces, a brilliant splash of gold and crimson, were fully engaged on the valley floor. But they were not crushing the horde between two armies. They were being engulfed by it. A tide of black, churning bodies surged from the tree line, endless, a tsunami of corrupted flesh. And Loghain’s men, the entire Fereldan heavy cavalry and infantry reserve, were not charging to the king’s aid.
They were marching away. In perfect, ordered columns.North. Across the bridge.
Retreating.
“No,” Alistair whispered, the word a puff of disbelieving fog on the cold window glass. “No, he’s… he’s repositioning. He must be.”
But the columns did not wheel. They continued their disciplined, relentless withdrawal. The bridge, their only lifeline, grew smaller as the last of Loghain’s rear guard crossed it. Then, in the distance, tiny with the span, they saw the bridge supports give way. Stone and timber crumbled into the chasm below, severed by precise demolition. The isolated valley became a slaughter pen.
Down on the field, the golden speck that was King Cailan was swallowed by the undulating black mass. The orderly lines of his army dissolved into chaos, then into screaming knots of resistance, then into nothing at all.
The Beacon’s flame roared triumphantly into the sky, a glorious, useless signal to an ally who was already gone.
Alistair’s fist slammed into the stone windowsill. A sharp crack, skin splitting over knuckle bone. He didn’t seem to feel it. His face was blank, all humor, all cynicism scoured away by a colder, more absolute reality.
“He left us,” Alistair said, his voice hollow. “He left the king. He left the army.” He turned to look at Daylen, his eyes wide with a child’s betrayal. “He left us to die.”
Daylen stared at the unfolding massacre, the distant screams carried to them on the wind. The victory in the tower, the spell combos, the severed limbs, the exhausting, glorious fight—it all curdled into ash in his mouth. They had held. They had done everything asked of them.
It meant nothing.
A flaming boulder came flying toward the window of the floor they were on, fired from the darkspawn army. They could do nothing. Everything went black.