Chapter 25: Whispers of Possession
It was the best meal Daylen could remember. They ate in companionable silence, the clatter of spoons on bowls and Alistair’s contented sighs the only sounds. Outside, the village continued its tentative return to life.
Then the tavern door burst open, slamming against the wall with a crack. A woman stood silhouetted against the bright square, her fine silks disheveled and travel-stained. It was Lady Isolde, her face a mask of frantic pallor. She scanned the room, her eyes wild, until they latched onto Bann Teagan.
“Teagan! Thank the Maker,” she gasped, rushing forward. She clutched at his sleeve, her knuckles white. “You must come. Now. Alone.”
Teagan steadied her, his expression shifting from surprise to concern. “Isolde, what is it? What’s happened?” His voice was low, meant only for her, but the entire tavern had gone quiet.
“Please,” she insisted, her voice breaking. “No one else. It’s Conner.
It’s Conner.” Her eyes, wide and desperate, flickered past Teagan’s shoulder. They swept over the room, lingering for a heartbeat too long on Alistair. A complex recognition flashed there—a mingling of fear, guilt, and something akin to sorrow—before she snapped her gaze back to Teagan. “I cannot speak of it here. You must come. Alone.”
She turned, silk whispering, and was gone without another word. The silence she left behind was thick and unsettled.
Teagan stood for a moment, his jaw tight. He ran a hand over his face, the weariness from the battle seeming to settle back onto his shoulders with a heavier weight. “Forgive me,” he said to the table, his voice low. “My duty calls. Yours, I fear, is not yet done.”
He leaned closer, his words for them alone. “The castle gates are sealed on Isolde’s orders. But there are other paths for those who know the old stories.” He described a passage beneath the village windmill, a forgotten route through the bedrock that led up into the castle’s lowest foundations. “It will not be pleasant. Or empty. But it is your way in.”
After Teagan left, the remains of breakfast turned to ash in Daylen’s mouth. They finished eating in a grim, purposeful silence. The scrape of a bowl, the final gulp of ale, all carried the weight of a last meal.
Upstairs, they armed themselves. The ritual was familiar now. Leather straps groaned, plate hinges clinked, and the soft chant of Morrigan’s enchantments wove through the cold air. Daylen felt the hum of magic settle into his borrowed breastplate, a second skin of hardened force.
Alistair hefted his shield, testing the weight. “A secret tunnel full of walking corpses. Why is it never a secret tunnel full of cash and friendly nugs?”
“Because the world is not a children’s fable,” Morrigan stated, checking the edge of her staff-blade. “It is a festering wound. We are but the needle and thread.”
The windmill was a skeletal silhouette against the afternoon sky. Its great sails were still, caught in a perpetual freeze. The ground floor smelled of rot and damp grain. Alistair found the hidden lever behind a sack of mildewed flour, his Templar-trained eye spotting the seam in the stone.
A grinding noise echoed up from the floor as a section of flagstones slid away, revealing a set of narrow, slime-slick stairs descending into darkness. The smell that wafted up was unmistakable—decay, earth, and something colder.
The catacombs were a throat of stone. Their torchlight fought a losing battle against a damp that swallowed sound and hope in equal measure. The air was frigid and thick, each breath tasting of tomb dust.
They didn’t have to wait long. A dry rustle, like old parchment dragged across stone, echoed ahead. Then another. Shadows detached themselves from the deeper dark, lurching into the fringe of the torch’s glow. Rotten leather, rusted chainmail, and flesh the color of old cheese. The same vacant stares that had besieged the village.
Daylen didn’t wait for a formation. He stepped forward, drawing mana from the well of his fatigue. A whip-crack of lightning erupted from his outstretched palm, forking through the damp air to connect with the lead corpse. It convulsed, bones rattling, before collapsing into a smoldering heap.
Alistair slammed into the next one, his shield crushing rotted ribs before his sword swept its head clean off. Morrigan’s spell was subtler—a wave of paralyzing fear that rooted two others in place, their jaws working silently until Alistair dismantled them.
They fought in efficient, brutal silence. There was no glory in this, only necessity. The things were slow, but relentless. And there were many.
The catacombs finally opened into a wider, more constructed space—a cellar. Barrels lined the walls, and a heavy door reinforced with iron bands stood ahead. A whimper came from behind it.
Alistair forced the door. The scene inside was a mockery of justice. It was a dungeon, crude and damp. And in the central cell, hunched on a stool, was a man Daylen never thought he’d see again.
Jowan looked up. His face, always slightly pallid, was ghostly in the torchlight. His Circle apprentice robes were stained and torn. For a second, confusion reigned. Then his eyes widened in dawning, abject horror. “Daylen?”
Disbelief, cold and sharp, stabbed through Daylen’s chest. Then it ignited into a white-hot rage. He stepped past Alistair, his boots echoing on the wet stone. “Jowan.” The name felt like poison on his tongue.
“I… I didn’t think… what are you doing here?” Jowan stammered, rising shakily.
“Cleaning up your mess,” Daylen said, his voice low and flat. He stopped just outside the bars. “The Arl is poisoned. The village was overrun by the dead. People are dead, Jowan. Because of you.”
Jowan flinched as if struck. His shoulders slumped. “I know. I heard… the fighting.” He wrung his hands, a pathetic, familiar gesture. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
Daylen stared through the rusted bars. “You meant to poison the Arl. You meant to take the money.” His voice was a calm, cold statement, devoid of heat. It wasn’t a question.
Jowan’s face crumpled. The self-pity was a physical weight dragging his features down. “I was desperate. You don’t know what it’s like, to have them threaten to make you Tranquil—”
“I do know,” Daylen interrupted, his tone flat as slate. “You lied to me while begging for my help. You lied to Lily. You used us both. Your regret is irrelevant.”
Alistair shifted behind him, armor creaking. Morrigan let out a soft, derisive sound from the shadows near the door.
Jowan floundered under that dispassionate gaze. The excuses died in his throat. He looked small in the cell, smaller than he ever had in the Circle’s halls. “It was Loghain,” he whispered, the name a vile secret. “Teyrn Loghain. His agent paid me. Gold. And a promise of… a new life.” A hollow laugh escaped him. “Poison the Arl. Sow chaos in the north. That was the task.”
“And you delivered it,” Daylen said. He didn’t move, didn’t raise his hand. There was no grand pronouncement of judgment. He simply absorbed the fact, filing it away with everything else. “You’ll remain here.”
“What? Daylen, please—” Jowan surged forward, gripping the bars.
“We have a castle to clear,” Daylen said, turning his back on the cell. He looked at Alistair, then Morrigan. “Ser Perth and his men are waiting at the main gate. That’s our objective.”
He walked away, his boots echoing a final, decisive rhythm on the stone. Alistair gave Jowan one last, hard look before following. Morrigan’s golden eyes gleamed in the torchlight as she lingered a moment longer, a predator observing wounded prey.
“A fitting cage for the viper,” she murmured, before turning to follow the others.
Jowan’s pleading cries followed them down the corridor, fading into the oppressive damp until they were just another part of the castle’s silence.
The route from the dungeon upwards was a vertical hunt. They found stairs, narrow and slick, leading to a servants’ corridor. The air changed from tomb-damp to the faint, greasy smell of a kitchen long cold.
They moved in a tight, wordless unit. A shambling corpse in a scullion’s apron lurched from a pantry, a rusted cleaver in its hand. Alistair’s shield bash sent it reeling into a stack of pots with a deafening crash.
Another, dressed in the tattered finery of a castle servant, came at Daylen from a blind side-passage. He felt the shift in the air a second before the clawed hands reached for him. His longsword was a silver arc in the gloom, severing the thing’s arm at the elbow before a reverse stroke took its head. It was brutal, surgical work.
“Clear,” Alistair grunted, shoving the headless body aside with his boot.
They reached a heavy wooden door, banded with iron. Beyond it, they could hear the muffled sounds of combat—the distant clash of steel, guttural moans. This was the main hallway, leading to the castle’s great doors and the courtyard beyond.
Daylen exchanged a glance with Alistair, a silent three-count passing between them. He kicked the door open.
The scene was a choked bottleneck of undead and surviving guards. The Redcliffe soldiers, Ser Perth among them, were backed against the massive interior gates, their formation tight but crumbling. Rotting hands clawed at their shields. The stench of death and blood was thick enough to taste.
“Wardens!” someone shouted, the voice cracking with relief.
Daylen didn’t pause. He charged into the flank of the undead press, his blades becoming a whirlwind of dismemberment. Morrigan’s spell sliced through the air—a cone of biting frost that crusted over a cluster of corpses, slowing them to a crawl.
Alistair bulled his way forward, a living rampart, carving a path toward Ser Perth. “A little late for tea, ser knight!”
“Better late than never, Grey Warden!” Perth roared back, burying his sword in a skeleton’s ribcage. “The gate mechanism! The wheel on the right!”
Daylen saw it—a large, iron-barred winch set into the stone wall, currently held fast by a heavy bar and a knot of shuffling dead. He moved toward it, his movements a fluid blend of martial skill and arcane energy. A burst of force from his palm sent two corpses flying back, clearing a space.
“Alistair! On me!”
Together, they cleared the winch. Daylen sheathed a sword, gripped the cold iron bar, and pulled. Alistair added his strength beside him.
The mechanism groaned in protest, then turned with a shriek of unoiled metal. Chains rattled somewhere deep in the walls. Slowly, with a grinding thunder that vibrated through the stone floor, the great interior gates began to inch apart.
Daylight and clean air flooded the foul hallway. The silhouette of Ser Perth’s militiamen stood outside, weapons ready.
“Forward!” Ser Perth bellowed, and with a unified cry, the remaining guards and the Wardens pushed through the widening gap, driving the last of the castle’s undead before them into the waiting blades of the reinforcements.
In the courtyard, the survivors leaned on their weapons, gasping in the sharp, untainted air. The courtyard itself was a battleground, littered with the remains of the dead, both ancient and newly made.
Ser Perth clapped a heavy, gauntleted hand on Daylen’s shoulder plate. “You have my thanks again. The castle’s lower levels are secured.” His face, grimed with soot and sweat, grew even graver. “But the upper chambers… the Arl’s family wing. That is where the heart of this darkness lies.”