Chapter 17: The Weight of Annulment
The thing that had been a mage shambled forward, its movements a jerky puppet show of broken joints and unnatural angles. A low moan bubbled from its distorted mouth, a sound of pure, mindless agony.
Daylen didn’t hesitate. He moved, the new silverite sword a blur of grey light. He didn’t chant, didn’t weave his hands. The magic was in the muscle, in the will. He channelled force into his legs and launched himself forward, closing the distance in a heartbeat.
The abomination swung a clawed, distended arm. Daylen parried high with his right-hand blade, the steel ringing with a sickening scrape against hardened bone. His left, the silverite, drove forward in a vicious upward arc. It sheared through corrupted flesh and parted the lower ribs with a wet crunch. Black ichor sprayed, sizzling where it hit the enchanted metal.
It didn’t fall. It lurched, gripping the blade in its own body with both claws, trying to pull him closer. Its breath was a foul oven blast of rot.
A golden arrow sprouted in its eye socket. It snapped its head back with a gurgle. Leliana, already nocking another.
Sten’s greatsword cleaved the air in a horizontal arc, taking the creature’s head from its shoulders in one clean, brutal motion. The body slumped, twitching, then lay still.
Silence, thicker than before, rushed back in.
“Charming,” Morrigan remarked, stepping over the pooling black fluid with a look of distaste. “A mere husk, puppeted by a minor rage demon. A crude and wasteful possession.”
“Save the critique for later,” Alistair said, his shield held firm as he scanned the shadowed archways leading deeper into the chamber. “There’ll be a test.”
A soft gasp echoed from above.
They all looked up. A balcony ran along the second level of the grand chamber, accessible by a stone staircase now littered with debris. A figure stood there, clad in the deep blue robes of a senior enchanter. Her face was pale, etched with exhaustion and fear, but her eyes were sharp, intelligent. One hand clutched a staff topped with a glowing crystal; the other pressed against her chest.
Daylen’s breath caught. Wynne.
She looked older than he remembered. Strands of silver woven through her auburn hair, new lines at the corners of her eyes. But her posture was unbent, her gaze assessing them with a fierce, resilient light.
“Daylen Amell?” Her voice, usually so warm and measured, was frayed at the edges. “By the Maker, it is you. We heard you fell at Ostagar.”
“I got back up,” he said, offering a small, weary smile. “It’s good to see you, First Enchanter.”
“Just Wynne, now.” She descended the stairs with careful steps, her eyes flicking over his companions. She gave a curt nod to Alistair in his Warden armor, a longer, more scrutinizing look to Morrigan, who met her gaze with cool defiance. “Grey Wardens. And… others. You should not have come here. This place is lost.”
“Greagoir is preparing the Right of Annulment,” Daylen said bluntly.
The color drained completely from Wynne’s face. Her knuckles turned white around her staff. The crystal at its tip flared, a sudden, painful burst of golden light that made them all flinch. For a moment, a sphere of shimmering energy enveloped her, a protective barrier reacting to her spike of terror and despair. It faded as quickly as it came, leaving the air smelling of ozone and burnt honey.
“He… he cannot,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “There are still dozens of us. Apprentices. Researchers. They are barricaded in the upper library, holding a defensible position. Irving is with them.”
“He’s waiting for our signal,” Daylen said, stepping closer. The urge to reach out, to steady her, was strong. He remembered her patience in the infirmary, her gentle corrections in his early studies. The crush he’d nursed as a young apprentice felt childish now, burned away by the darkspawn and the road, but the respect, the fondness, remained. It was tangled with something else now, something sharper and more desperate. “We have one day. If we can reach Irving, secure the upper floors, and seal whatever breach is letting the demons through, he’ll call it off.”
Wynne closed her eyes, breathing slowly. When she opened them, the fear was still there, but it was sheathed in steel. “Then we fight,” she said, the words firm. “I will not stand by while my students are condemned for crimes they did not commit.”
Alistair shifted his weight. “Not to be the pragmatist, but… you’re one mage. However formidable. The Knight-Commander mentioned abominations. Plural. And demons. Is it just you?”
A sad, tired smile touched Wynne’s lips. “I was in the lower archives when… it happened. I managed to seal the doors from the inside. I’ve been trying to find a way upstairs ever since, but the routes are… watched.” She glanced at the headless corpse on the floor. “I have seen things. Fought things. But alone, I could only hide and hope. Now, with you…” She looked at Daylen, and in her eyes he saw not the senior enchanter looking at a former student, but a fellow warrior assessing an ally. “Now there is hope.”
“Then let’s not keep hope waiting,” Daylen said. He turned to his party. “Wynne fought beside the King’s army at Soldier’s Peak. She’s a battlefield healer, a spirit warrior. She’s with us.”
Morrigan’s eyebrow arched. “A spirit warrior? How… conventional.” Her tone implied it was anything but a compliment.
“I find clinging to life a rather compelling motivation, witch,” Wynne replied, her voice regaining some of its dry warmth. “And I have seen what your ‘ancient ways’ can unleash. I’ll keep my conventional magic, thank you.”
“Enough,” Daylen cut in, though his voice held no real heat. “We clear a path to the library. We find Irving. We stop this.” He looked to Wynne. “You know the Tower. What’s the best route?”
“The main stair is a killing funnel,” she said, all business. “The creatures cluster there. There is an old servants’ passage, behind the kitchens. It leads to the laundry vents, which open near the library’s rear annex. It will be… tight. And likely not uncontested.”
“Lead the way,” Daylen said.
Wynne nodded, turning towards a small arched door half-hidden by a collapsed tapestry. As she moved past him, her shoulder brushed his arm. A jolt went through him, a static charge of mana and something else, something warmer. He caught her scent—parchment, healing poultices, a faint hint of rosewater. She paused, looking up at him. For a fleeting second, her professional mask slipped, and he saw a flash of something raw and grateful and deeply vulnerable.
Then it was gone, replaced by resolve. “Stay close,” she said. “The dark has eyes here.”
They filed through the narrow archway, leaving the grand hall and its grim silence behind. The passage beyond was dark, cramped, smelling of old dust and damp stone. Wynne’s staff provided the only light, a soft white glow that pushed back the shadows just enough to see.
Alistair, bringing up the rear, whispered loud enough for everyone to hear. “So, a healer. That’s new. Usually we just bleed on each other until someone passes out.”
“Your joviality is a beacon in this gloom, Alistair,” Leliana whispered back, her tone amused.
“I try.”
The servant's passage was a throat of darkness, swallowing Wynne’s light whole after a few paces. The air grew thick with the smell of old mildew and something else, something sweetly rotten.
“Lovely,” Alistair muttered behind him, his voice bouncing off the close stone walls. “You’d think a tower full of mages could afford a few more candles.”
“Quiet,” Morrigan hissed. “Sound carries differently here. It twists.”
She was right. The whispers started soon after, not from ahead or behind, but from the walls themselves. They were like the sighs of old stone settling, if stone could weep. Daylen felt the hum of wrongness deep in his molars.
They reached a junction where the passage split. A rusted iron gate blocked the left fork, sagging on broken hinges. The right-hand path sloped downwards into deeper blackness.
Wynne paused, her light flickering over the moisture-slick walls. “The laundry should be straight ahead. This other path… I do not recall it.”
“It smells like a grave that forgot to close,” Sten stated, his deep voice flat.
The whispers coalesced into a word, hissed from the darkness of the left-hand tunnel. “Fresh…”
Daylen didn’t think. He acted. He stepped in front of Wynne, placing himself between her and the source. He sheathed his steel blade to free a hand.
He drew a breath, quieting the hammer of his heart. Then he began to whisper. The words were not the Common Tongue, nor even the lyrical cadence of ancient Tevinter he’d been taught. This was older, harder, a language of stone and deep earth he’d unearthed in forbidden texts. Each syllable felt rough in his throat, like grinding gravel.
“Kareth. Shok ebasit. Thaig,” he breathed.
Power answered. Not a flashy burst, but a slow, relentless crawling sensation up from the floor. Granules of dust and chips of mortar lifted from between the flagstones, swirling around his boots, his legs, his torso. They knit together with a sound like grinding pebbles, forming plates of seamless, granite-like armor over his leathers. It was heavy, solid, a second skin of mountain.
He didn’t stop. “Asala mar solas,” he whispered, his voice dropping to a chant.
Twin points of cool blue light sparked into existence above his shoulders, like miniature, silent stars. They floated there, casting no shadows, but he felt their energy intertwine with his own. His senses sharpened; the whispered word from the dark tunnel clarified into a chorus of hungry voices. His muscles sang with a surcharge of stamina. Spell wisps. Augmentations.
Lastly, he drew the silverite blade again. He held it before him, point aimed at the dark fork. He focused, channeling a thread of his will through the rune-etched metal. The blade didn’t glow with fire or crackle with lightning. Instead, the air around it wavered, like heat rising from a desert dune. It became a focal point, a ready conduit. It would bite deeper, cut cleaner, and when he chose to cast, it would be the perfect lance.
He glanced back. Alistair had his shield up, a solid wall of steel. Sten had his greatsword raised, a monument of impending force. Leliana’s arrow was drawn, its head steady. Morrigan’s hands were wreathed in coiling, violet energy. Wynne watched him, her eyes wide, her expression one of stunned reevaluation.
The team was ready.
“Left,” Daylen said, his voice echoing with newfound resonance behind the rock armor. “We cut the tumor out first.”
He moved forward, the rock plates grating softly with each step. The gate yielded to a single shove from Sten, its shriek of metal tearing through the whispering dark.
The tunnel beyond opened into a forgotten cellar. Barrels of long-soured wine lay smashed against the walls. And in the center of the room, it waited.
It was a mound of pulsating, translucent flesh, a gelatinous mass studded with half-digested scraps of robes and glittering, fractured lyrium. Faces pressed against its surface from the inside, mouths frozen in silent screams, their features sliding and merging into the whole. A dozen trembling, pseudopod arms ended in bony, human-like hands that scrabbled blindly against the floor.
“Maker’s breath,” Alistair choked out.
“A coalescence,” Morrigan said, her voice laced with dark fascination. “Multiple spirits, too weak to claim a single host… so they claimed the remains of many.”
One of the central faces turned towards them. Its mouth unhinged. A sound emerged, a cacophony of all the whispered words layered into a single, deafening shriek.
“GIVE US FORM!”
The mass surged forward, pseudopods lashing out like whips.