Chapter 13: The First Calling
The world dissolved into shrieking stone and putrid flesh.
Daylen was falling through darkness, the air thick with the scent of wet soil and rust. A million whispering voices crawled through his mind, not in words, but in urges—gnawing, digging, consuming. He saw a cavernous deep, a vastness of writhing, scaled flesh pulsing with a sickly green light. A single, colossal eye, slit-pupiled and ancient with malice, opened in the gloom. It saw him. It knew the taint in his blood. A gravitational pull, immense and horrible, yanked at his very marrow.
He jerked awake, a strangled gasp tearing from his throat. His hands were fists, clenched so tight his nails had cut half-moons into his palms. Cool soil was under his fingers, real and grounding. The scent of the campfire, of pine and damp wool, fought against the phantom stench of the Deep.
Across the guttering embers, a shape moved. Alistair was already sitting up, his blanket pooling around his waist. There was no alarm on his face, only a weary understanding.
“First one?” Alistair’s voice was a low rumble in the quiet dark.
Daylen could only nod, hauling air into his lungs like a drowning man. His heart was a wild drum against his ribs. The vividness of the pull, of that eye, lingered on the back of his eyelids.
Alistair nudged the waterskin over with his foot. Daylen uncorked it and drank, the water tasting flat, washing the imagined taste of earth and corruption from his mouth.
“Yeah,” Alistair said softly, staring into the ashes. “They get you like that. Not a dream. More like a… broadcast. Loud and unpleasant.”
“It felt like it was pulling me south.” Daylen’s voice was rough. “Like a hook in my soul.”
“The Calling.” Alistair poked a stick into the embers, sending up a tiny spiral of sparks. “It’s what gets us all in the end. The song from the Black City, or the Archdemon, or whatever’s down there. It calls the taint home. Eventually, you can’t ignore it. You just go.” He said it with a shocking matter-of-factness.
A cold that had nothing to do with the night air settled in Daylen’s gut. “How long?”
Alistair shrugged. “Duncan had thirty years. Some get less. No one gets more. It’s the price of the Joining. The price of being able to sense them, to fight them.”
“A lifetime sentence,” Daylen murmured, the enormity of it pressing down on him. The Circle’s phobias about possession seemed almost quaint now. This was a different kind of damnation, etched into his blood.
“Look at the bright side,” Alistair said, a forced levity in his tone. “You’ll never die of old age. No creaky joints, no worrying about your legacy. Just a clear, definitive expiry date. It’s efficient, really.”
Daylen managed a brittle smile. “You’re a terrible comfort, you know that?”
“It’s my specialty.” Alistair hugged his knees to his chest. “First one’s always the worst. Well, no, that’s a lie. The last one’s probably the worst. But the first one is… shocking. Makes it real.”
From the edge of the firelight, near the ancient oak, Morrigan’s voice slithered through the dark. “It is real. You carry a compass in your veins, mage. Pointing straight to your doom. A most inelegant fate.” She was a silhouette against the lesser dark, having returned silently from her watch.
“Any advice, oh wise witch of the wilds?” Alistair asked, though there was no real bite to it.
“Do not sleep,” she said simply. “A poor solution, but the only certain one.”
“Helpful,” Alistair grunted.
Daylen watched the last coal breathe its orange light. The paralyzing fear was receding, replaced by a cold, hard knot of determination. “Then we’d better make the time count,” he said, more to himself than anyone.
“That’s the spirit,” Alistair said, lying back down. “Just don’t start singing the Chant in your sleep. Leliana might join in, and then we’ll never get any rest.”
A soft snort came from Leliana’s bedroll. “I sing in harmony only, Alistair. It would be a lullaby.”
Sten, across the camp, made a sound like a grinding stone. It might have been a sigh.
Silence descended again, but it was different now. The shared secret of the nightmare hung in the air between the two Wardens, a bond forged in a uniquely terrible understanding. Daylen lay back, staring at the patches of starry sky between the leaves. He didn’t close his eyes. He listened to the forest—the cricket chorus, the sigh of wind, the distant call of a night bird.
He focused on those sounds, anchoring himself in the present. The solid ground beneath him. The weight of his swords leaning against his pack. The slow, steady breathing of his companions—Alistair’s light snore, the rustle as Leliana turned over, the absolute stillness of Sten. Even the predatory quiet of Morrigan, a presence he could now feel like a subtle pressure on the edge of his senses.
The pull from the south was still there, a faint, discordant hum in the back of his skull. But it was overwhelmed by the immediacy of the camp, by the people around him. The templar with the gallows humor, the sister with a hundred songs, the qunari who sought atonement, the witch who saw fate as a shackle to be broken.
His doom had a compass. But he had a blade. And for now, that was enough.
He watched the sky slowly bleed from black to deep indigo, the first faint suggestion of dawn a lighter thread on the eastern horizon. He did not sleep. He kept watch over the quiet, over his strange and shattered company, and over the stubborn, beating rhythm of his own heart against the call of the void.
He kept watch over the quiet, over his strange and shattered company, and over the stubborn, beating rhythm of his own heart against the call of the void. When the sky finally softened to a pale gray, he rose, his joints stiff from the cold ground. Sten was already awake, motionless, his gaze fixed on the eastern tree line as if measuring the coming light.
Daylen walked over, the damp grass whispering against his boots. He sat on a fallen log near the qunari, not too close.
“You do not sleep,” Sten stated, without looking at him.
“Neither do you,” Daylen replied.
“Sleep is a necessity. I have had enough.” Sten finally turned his head, his eyes like chips of flint. “Your watch was unnecessary. Nothing approached.”
“It wasn’t for them.” Daylen picked up a twig, rolling it between his fingers. “The cage in Lothering. The townspeople said you slaughtered a family. Farmers.”
Sten’s expression didn’t change. “They were not wrong.”
The admission sat between them, heavy and bald. Daylen waited. The birds began their first tentative songs overhead.
“Why?” he asked finally.
“They attempted to provide sustenance. It was inadequate. An insult.” Sten spoke as if describing a flawed tool. “My purpose was clouded. The fog of this place… it stains logic.”
“The fog.”
“A lack of clarity. An absence of the Qun. Here, things have no names. People act without purpose. It… infects.” He glanced at his massive hands. “I required my sword. They did not understand its necessity.”
“Your sword is your purpose,” Daylen said, echoing Sten’s earlier lesson.
The qunari’s gaze remained on his hands, but his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “The purpose was shattered. It lies broken where I fell.” He inhaled, a deep rasp. “Darkspawn. Many of them. A scouting force emerged near the lake called Calenhad. I engaged.”
He said it like a report, but the words were carved from something deeper.
“You were alone?” Daylen asked.
“Isolation is irrelevant. I was weapon, wall, and will. They were… numberless. A tide from the earth. Their stench, their sound—it is a corruption of sense.” For the first time, Sten’s voice lost its flat precision. It gained a low, granular texture. “It was not the fear of death. It was the… unmaking of order. Their frenzy is a solvent. It dissolves the soul’s geometry.”
Daylen felt the raw truth of it in his own bones. He saw not a cage in Lothering, but the Tower of Ishal at the height of the battle—the chaotic press of bodies, the shrieks, the overwhelming sensory shock that could make even a trained mage’s mind go blank with primal terror. He remembered the moment his own carefully constructed Circle discipline had frayed, leaving only the animal instinct to survive.
“I understand,” Daylen said, the words simple. “I was at Ostagar. In the tower when the horde hit. That noise… it gets inside you. It scrambles everything you know. Makes you a raw nerve.”
Sten’s eyes flicked to him, assessing. He gave a curt nod. Acknowledgment.
“My sword was knocked from my grasp during the press,” he continued. “Into the mud, underfoot. To lose it was… an unacceptable failure. The farmer and his family found me later, searching. My mind was not my own. The fog of their cries mixed with the echoes of the darkspawn song.”
He fell silent. The confession hung there, ugly and complete.
Daylen thought of the treaties in his pack, the impossibly long road. He thought of the broken family, of the wasted death. But he also thought of the massive, silent warrior who had stood watch unbroken through the night, who saw a sword as a soul, and who was now adrift without it.
“We’ll go back for it,” Daylen said.
Sten went very still. “The route is illogical. It retraces steps. The horde’s advance may have covered the ground.”
“Maybe,” Daylen agreed. He stood up, brushing bark from his trousers. “But a Grey Warden without his senses is just a soldier. A Sten without his sword isn’t a Sten. You’re neither right now. We fix that.”
A long pause stretched. The camp was beginning to stir; Alistair groaned and pulled a blanket over his head. Morrigan was already gone, likely foraging.
“The location was on the eastern shore of the lake,” Sten said, his voice returning to its usual timbre, but with a new, solid undercurrent. “Where the old stone pier has collapsed into the water. The fighting was fierce there. The ground will remember it.”
“Then that’s where we start,” Daylen said. He turned towards the awakening camp, raising his voice just enough. “We’re making a detour. Lake Calenhad. We leave in an hour.”
Alistair’s head emerged from the blanket, his hair a disaster. “What?Why? The Circle Tower’s that way,” he said, pointing south and east with a grubby finger.
“Sten’s sword is there,” Daylen said, heading for his pack to begin rolling his bedroll.
“His… you want to backtrack for a sword?” Alistair sat up, disbelief washing over his face. “With the Blight breathing down our necks?”
“Yes,” Daylen and Sten said in unison.
Alistair looked between them, blinked, then threw his hands up. “Fine.Fantastic. A scenic tour of darkspawn-infested shoreline. Just what I wanted.” He kicked off his blankets. “I’ll get the fire going again. Someone tell Morrigan her scenic bog-walking time is over.”
Alistair’s complaint hung in the crisp morning air, mingling with the smell of damp earth and cold ashes.
Daylen cinched the strap on his pack with a sharp tug. “It’s not a detour,” he stated, his voice cutting through the camp’s early murmurs. He looked at Alistair, then at the others now listening. “The Circle Tower is our sworn ally against the Blight. As Wardens, we were headed there anyway to seek their aid.” He hefted the pack onto his shoulder, the motion final. “The sword is near Lake Calenhad, which sits directly on our path to the tower. Recovering it strengthens our hand. This is just being efficient.”
From the tree line, Morrigan materialized, a clutch of dark roots in one hand. “Efficiency.” She infused the word with dripping skepticism. “A quaint notion, when darkspawn boil from the ground. You propose to dig through a recent battlefield like a scavenger.”
Morrigan dropped the roots by the sputtering fire she’d just re-lit with a snap of her fingers. “A quaint notion, when darkspawn boil from the ground. You propose to dig through a recent battlefield like a scavenger.”
Daylen finished securing his bedroll and turned. His voice was calm, but it carried a definitive edge that silenced the morning’s bickering. “Scavenging implies we’re looking for scraps. We’re not. We’re retrieving a specific, necessary tool.” He walked to the center of the clearing, his boots leaving dark impressions in the dew-silvered grass. “Let’s lay it out. We have an Archdemon pulling at our brains. We have treaties demanding we unite kingdoms that currently want us dead. We have a regent who framed us for murdering a king so he could steal a throne.”
He ticked each point off on his fingers, the list hanging in the air, ugly and undeniable. Alistair’s forced morning cheer evaporated completely, replaced by a familiar, grim set to his jaw. Leliana paused in tightening her bootlaces, listening intently.
“Our margin for error,” Daylen continued, looking at each of them in turn, “is zero. We cannot afford a single weak link. Not in our plans, and not in our company.” His gaze landed finally on Sten, a statue of guilt and resolve. “You fight with that sword. It is, by your own words, an answer. A piece of your purpose.”
He shrugged, a small, determined motion. “If having that answer, that purpose, makes you one percent more effective in the shitstorm waiting for us, then it’s not a detour. It’s an investment. We need you at your best. We need all of us at our absolute best.” A slow, sharp smile spread across his face, cutting through the gravitas.“So yeah. We’re going to get him that fucking sword.”
Silence followed, broken only by the crackle of the fire. Alistair stared at Daylen, then burst out with a short, astonished laugh. “You know what? When you put it like a psychotic shopping list, it makes a bizarre kind of sense.”
Sten had not moved, but something in his rigid posture had shifted, like a mountainside settling on a new, firmer foundation. He gave a single, solemn nod. “The logic is sound.”
Morrigan examined Daylen as if he were a new, unpredictable fungus. “Sentiment wrapped in cold pragmatism. An interesting blend. Foolish, but interesting.”
“We’ll call it ‘survival,’” Daylen said, hefting his pack. “Now let’s move. I’d like to reach that pier before whatever’s left there decides to have a second breakfast.”
The journey back north felt different. The oppressive weight of Lothering’s despair was behind them, but a new tension threaded the air—the specific dread of walking towards a place of recent slaughter. The smell changed first. The clean scent of pine and wet stone slowly soured, undercut by a faint, clinging odor of rust and spoiled meat that grew stronger with every mile. No birds sang here.
They found the pier, or what was left of it, as the afternoon sun bled weakly through a high, greasy overcast. The ancient stone fingers had indeed collapsed into the steel-gray waters of Lake Calenhad. The surrounding shore was a churned nightmare of mud and shattered earth.
It wasn’t just a battlefield. It was a garden of atrocities.
Bodies, both human and genlock, lay half-submerged in the muck, bloated and blackened. Broken shields, splintered spear hafts, and the discarded detritus of a shattered militia littered the ground. The air hummed with flies. Every footstep risked sinking into the soft, blood-saturated earth.
“Maker’s breath,” Alistair whispered, his usual cynicism gone, replaced by a hollow reverence. He made the sign of the Chantry across his chest.
Leliana’s face had paled beneath her freckles. She began to hum, very softly, a tuneless note of pure distress.
Sten walked forward without hesitation, his eyes scanning the ground with a painful intensity. This was his failure, rendered in rot and clay. He moved to where the fighting looked most concentrated, near the base of the largest stone block submerged in the water.
Daylen moved with him, his own senses stretched taut. The taint in his blood was a constant, low-grade itch here, like a limb asleep. It made the ruined landscape feel familiar and hostile at once.
“Here,” Sten said abruptly, his voice a gravelly scrape. He was staring at a patch of mud churned into strange, deep furrows. Not footprints. Something heavier had been dragged. He knelt, ignoring the filth, and began digging with his bare hands.
Morrigan hung back, her nostrils flared in distaste. “The veil is thin here. Death was not clean.”
“No kidding,” Alistair muttered, his sword now in his hand, his eyes scanning the treeline. The quiet was too deep, too watchful.
Sten’s hands closed on something. He pulled, muscles corded in his arms and back straining. With a thick, sucking sound, the weapon emerged from the muck. It was caked in a carapace of dried blood, mud, and worse things. But the shape was unmistakable: a massive, cruciform hilt and a broad, brutal blade.
He held it for a moment, water and filth dripping from it, his expression unreadable. Then he stood, walked to the lake’s edge, and began sluicing it methodically in the cold water. The black lake swirled with streaks of brown and deep, coppery red.
The cleaning ritual was almost peaceful. Then the water around Sten’s legs began to bubble.
Not from the sword. From below.
A deformed, clawed hand, webbed and gray, erupted from the water and latched onto his thigh. Then another. Three genlocks, lying submerged and dormant in the shallows, awakened by the disturbance, surged upwards with guttural snarls.
“Contact!” Alistair roared, already splashing forward, shield raised.
Chaos exploded in the quiet.
Sten roared, a sound of pure fury, and swung the half-cleaned sword in a wide, terrible arc. It connected with a genlock’s skull with a wet crunch, cleaving it nearly in two. But the other two were on him, clawing and biting. He stumbled back under their weight.
Daylen didn’t think. He drew one blade and charged into the icy water. He didn’t try for finesse. He kicked one creature off Sten’s back, his boot finding sodden leather and bone. As it turned, spitting, he drove his longsword up under its jaw. The point punched through the roof of its mouth with a sickening scrape.
The last genlock leapt at his exposed side. Daylen braced, but the blow never landed. A whip-crack of force, visible as a distortion in the air, snapped the creature’s neck with an audible pop. It dropped into the water like a sack of stones.
Morrigan lowered her hand, her fingers still curled from the telekinetic blast. “They have been waiting,” she said, her eyes scanning the deeper water. “Feasting on the sunken dead.”
Alistair was helping Sten to his feet. The qunari was bleeding from deep scratches on his leg and arm, but he held his reclaimed sword in a white-knuckled grip. Water streamed from the freshly cleaned blade. The metal was pitted and scarred, but whole. It looked like what it was: a tool that had answered a dire need and survived.
Sten looked from his sword to Daylen, who was wrenching his own blade free from the genlock. Their eyes met. No words passed. None were needed. The debt, the understanding, was settled in the cold lake water and the shared, immediate violence.
“Are we done here?” Alistair asked, his breath pluming in the suddenly cold air. He was shivering, his boots soaked. “Because I’m freezing, I smell worse than a darkspawn’s armpit, and I really don’t want to meet whatever they were saving the bigger pieces for.”
“We are done,” Sten said. He hefted the sword, testing its weight. It seemed to settle into his hands, an extension of his will once more. He gave one last, long look at the ruined pier, the grave of his failure. Then he turned his back on it.
“The path to the tower lies south and east,” he said, his voice restored to its usual implacable certainty. “We should move before more of the scouting vermin return.”
Daylen nodded, wiping his blade clean on a relatively less-fouled patch of his own trousers. The nightmare pull from the south seemed sharper now, a thornier vine wrapped around his thoughts. They had recovered a sword. They had paid for it in blood and fear.
He sloshed out of the water, the cold seeping into his bones. They formed up without a word, a tighter, more grim unit, and left the corpse-shore behind. The road to the Circle Tower stretched ahead, and the Throat of the World, the fabled Mage’s Collective, loomed in the distance, a dark spike against the bruised sky. Its silence felt like a challenge.