Chapter 33: Fever Dreams
He dreamed in screams and silence.
One moment, he was hacking through a tide of genlocks in the trenches of Ostagar, the taste of blood and rain thick in his mouth. Then the rain was fire, falling in great, greasy sheets from a sky torn open like a gutted fish. A hole, a jagged, bleeding tear in the fabric of the world, and through it poured not darkspawn, but madness. Towers of glowing lyrium erupted from the earth. Mages in templar armor hunted other mages through cobblestone streets choked with ash and panic—a rebellion born of fear, ending in a pyre that lit the continent.
The vision fractured, shifted.
A darkspawn, but not. Ancient, terrible, wearing the form of a man like a ill-fitting skin. Corypheus. The name echoed in the void of the dream, knowledge deposited like a stone in his mind. It spoke of Old Gods, of dragons that were not dragons, of prisons within prisons, and a Black City that was never meant to be black.
And through it all, a sound. A song. Not the oppressive, driving drums of the Blight, but a chorus of a million weeping voices, a mournful dirge that vibrated in his bones.
Then, nothing but heat. A core of impossible pressure centered in his own chest. A Crimson Orb, pulsing like a second heart, woven from the raw stuff of the Fade itself. It was power, vast and depthless. It was also a cage, a sun threatening to go nova. To harness it was to hold a star in his hands. To fail was to be unmade, atomized, leaving only a scorched silhouette on the world.
He reached for it in the dream. Fingers of will and desire stretching towards that shimmering, deadly light.
And he burned.
Daylen jackknifed off the bedroll, a strangled gasp ripping from his throat. Cold sweat sheeted his body, plastering the thin linen to his skin. The air in the tent, which should have been chill with the night, steamed around him. He could feel it, a furnace blast radiating from his own flesh.
“Daylen.”
Morrigan was already awake, propped on one elbow beside him. Not startled, but watchful. Her face was pale in the sliver of moonlight cutting through the tent flap.
He tried to speak. His tongue felt swollen, too dry. He looked at his hands, half-expecting to see embers glowing beneath the skin.
“You were thrashing,” she said, her voice low. “You cried out. Not words. A… tone.”
“The dream,” he managed, the words scraping out. His head pounded, a sick, syncopated rhythm against the phantom drums of the Blightsong still echoing in his skull. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t just darkspawn. It was… after. And before. A hole in the sky. A war among mages. An ancient darkspawn with a name.” He shook his head, the movement sending a lance of pain behind his eyes. “None of it makes sense.”
He reached for the waterskin beside the pallet. The leather was cool, soothing. He drank greedily, water sluicing down his chin. When he lowered it, Morrigan’s fingers were resting lightly on his wrist. Her touch, usually so cool, felt tepid against his fever-heat.
She shifted closer. The concern in her eyes was not the performative kind, not a tool to be used. It was stark, real, and it unsettled him more than the dream.
“Your skin,” she murmured. She pressed her palm flat against his bare chest, over his heart, and snatched it back with a sharp hiss. “By the gods. It is like placing a hand on a forge-stone. A normal man… a normal man’s mind would be broth in his skull right now.”
He stared at her, the truth of it settling in his gut like a lead weight. This wasn’t just fatigue or stress. This was the Orb. The Crimson Orb from the dream. It was here, inside him, a reactor of wild magic and fragmented prophecy cooking him from the inside out. The Circle’s teachings—controlled spells, measured channels, acceptable forms—were a child’s dam against this tidal force. They were what was choking him, forcing the power back in on itself, building pressure.
“It’s growing,” he said, his voice hollow. “The things I saw… they felt like memories of a future. Or a past. I don’t know. But the power… it’s a part of it. I can’t face Flemeth like this. I’ll detonate. Or she’ll see it in me, a weakness to exploit.”
Morrigan was silent for a long moment, her gaze searching his face. The tender worry was still there, but it was being forged into something sharper, more decisive. This was her language: survival.
“You are correct,” she said finally. “You are a tool honed for a specific, narrow purpose. The Circle took a natural wildfire and tried to bind it into a litany of tidy, approved candles. It is no wonder you are burning down.” She chewed her lip, a rare gesture of uncertainty. “There is a place. A secret my mother guarded, though even she feared it. A place where the constraints of shemlen chantries and their ‘acceptable’ magic hold no sway.”
He waited, the fever making his blood hum in his ears.
“Deep within the Arbor Wilds,” she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper, as if the very trees outside might eavesdrop. “There is a temple, carved not from stone, but from the living world itself. The Temple of Mythal. It is not a ruin. It is… tended. By those who remember when elves walked the Fade as a second home. The ancient ones, the elvhen, they yet walk its halls.”
“Ancient elves?” Daylen’s mind, fogged with heat and nightmare, struggled to grasp it. “Like the Dalish keepers tell of?”
“The Dalish grasp at crumbs,” Morrigan said, a faint dismissiveness returning to her tone. “These are the ones who left the table. Their magic is not the parlor tricks of the Circle, nor the blood-soaked shortcuts of Tevinter. It is the magic of nature, of will, of spirit unbound. If any in this world can teach you to harmonize with that… that star you carry inside you, to be one with your true power instead of its prisoner, it would be them.”
The idea was a lifeline thrown into a maelstrom. A path. A dangerous, mythical, likely impossible path, but a path.
“I have to go,” he said, the decision crystallizing even as he spoke. It felt right. It felt necessary.
“You do,” Morrigan agreed. Her hand returned to his cheek, not flinching from the heat this time. Her thumb stroked the line of his jaw. “And you must go alone. This is not a Warden’s pilgrimage. This is a mage’s journey. Alistair, Sten, even Wynne… they would be anchors. Well-meaning anchors that would drown you in their doubts, their doctrines. You must say you are scouting the southern trails, checking for darkspawn movement towards Redcliffe. They will believe it. You are thorough.”
“And you?” he asked, catching her wrist, holding her touch against his skin.
A sad, complicated smile touched her lips. “I will remain. To keep our glorious leader from stumbling into a ravine. To continue our… research. And to prepare.” Her gaze intensified, golden and fierce. “You will learn to be one with your power, Daylen Amell. Not to suppress it, not to channel it through some Chantry-approved focus. To be it. Only then will you be able to do what must be done. For me. For this blighted world. For yourself.”
She leaned in then, and kissed him. It was not a kiss of passion, though the heat was there. It was a seal. A promise. A transfer of will. When she pulled back, her breath was warm on his lips. “Now get out. The chill will do you good. And I need to sleep.”
He dressed in the dark, his movements slow, deliberate. The heat was still there, a banked furnace beneath his skin, but the panic had receded, replaced by a cold, clear purpose. He pulled on his leathers, his armor, feeling the weight of the steel not as a burden, but as a choice.
He ducked out of the tent into the pre-dawn camp. The air was knife-cold, a blessed shock against his fevered skin. He breathed it in, deep and clean, watching the plume of his breath mix with the steam still rising from his own body.
By the dying embers of the central fire, Alistair was on watch, hunched in his cloak.
“Can’t sleep?” Alistair asked, his voice a low grumble.
“Going to scout the southern trails,” Daylen said, the lie falling easily, coated in the truth of his need. “Make sure our victory at Redcliffe didn’t just funnel the horde somewhere else.”
Alistair peered at him in the gloom. “Now? It’s darker than a Templar’s sense of humor out there.”
“Best time for it,” Daylen said, hefting his pack. “Quiet. I’ll be back by nightfall tomorrow.”
Alistair shrugged, a gesture of acceptance. “Don’t get eaten. Wynne will kill me.”
Daylen offered a half-salute and turned, melting into the tree line. With each step away from the camp, from the weight of their expectations and his own stifling control, the pressure in his chest eased a fraction. The forest around him was a cathedral of shadow and whispers. Somewhere to the west, beyond the Frostback Mountains, lay a temple older than nations.
He walked towards it, the Crimson Orb in his chest pulsing in time with his footsteps, a dormant sun waiting for its dawn.
He walked towards it, the Crimson Orb in his chest pulsing in time with his footsteps, a dormant sun waiting for its dawn.
The Arbor Wilds were not like the Fereldan forests he knew. The air grew thicker, warmer, heavy with the scent of blooming rot and vibrant life locked in a perpetual war. Vines as thick as his arm coiled around trunks of petrified wood, and strange, bioluminescent fungi cast a sickly green light across the loam. It felt ancient, watching. And it was infested.
He felt the darkspawn long before he saw them—a greasy nausea at the back of his throat, a pressure behind his eyes that had nothing to do with his fever. They were raiders, a forward skirmish line of genlocks and hurlocks, their crude blades smeared with filth. They’d caught his scent, the tang of his magic, the heat of the Orb. They poured from the thorn-choked gullies ahead, a dozen at least, their guttural clicks filling the humid air.
Daylen didn’t run. He planted his feet.
His plan unfolded in the silent, efficient theater of his mind. His left hand swept out, palm down, tracing a complex sigil in the air that burned with silver light as it stamped itself onto the mossy ground. A Repulsion Glyph. Even as the first shrieks hit his ears, his right hand was moving, fingers weaving a different, tighter pattern that settled over the first like a cage. A Paralyzing Glyph.
The lead genlocks hit the overlapping circles at a sprint. There was a sound like a thunderclap trapped under cloth. The repulsion energy blasted outwards in a silent wave, knocking the front ranks into the ones behind in a tangle of limbs. Then the paralytic magic took hold, seizing muscles, locking joints, transforming the chaotic charge into a still-life of snarling, straining statues.
He didn’t waste the moment. A sharp, pulling gesture gathered the heat from his own blood, from the humid air, from the core of the Orb itself into a swirling point between his hands. He thrust his palms forward. The Fireball was not the polite, controlled sphere the Circle taught. It was a torrent, a comet. It struck the center of the paralyzed cluster and exploded outwards in a hungry orange bloom.
The smell was horrific. He was already moving, flanking the chaos. Three precise jabs of his staff etched Ice Mines into the soft earth before him. A hurlock berserker, avoided the main blast, charged through the smoke, axe high. It took two more bounding steps before its foot landed on the first frozen glyph. The ice erupted upwards, sheathing its leg, then its torso, then its furious face in an instant.
Daylen pivoted, his longsword sighing from its scabbard. A genlock lunged from his blind side. He didn’t even look. He brought the hardened haft of his staff up in a brutal, horizontal block, stopping the rusted blade dead. In the same motion, he drove his own sword up under the creature’s ribcage. A sharp, wet crunch. He shoved the body off his blade.
Another charged the ice-bound berserker. He dropped a Fire Mine at its frozen feet. The subsequent detonation didn’t just kill the new target; it vaporized the frozen one in a shower of steaming, grisly mist.
It was a brutal, elegant calculus. Glyph, spell, mine, steel. Each action flowed into the next, magic and muscle memory fused into a single purpose. The heat inside him, usually a chaotic pressure, found a conduit in this violence. He wasn’t fighting it now. He was using it. He carved through the last of them, his breath steady, his movements clean. The clearing fell quiet, save for the crackle of dying flames and the slow drip of sap from scorched trees.
He cleaned his blade on a patch of unharmed fern and moved on, deeper.
The attacks came in waves after that. Ambushes at river crossings. Pursuits through canyons of twisted root. He met them all with the same detached, ruthless efficiency. He was a one-man battalion, a walking siege engine. The Orb’s power, once a terrifying secret in his chest, became fuel. He learned its rhythms, fed it the violence, and let it burn the darkspawn taint from the air. By the time the foliage began to change—the leaves shifting to veins of pure silver, the bark glowing with a soft, inner light—he had left a small army of blackened corpses in his wake.
He crested a rise, and there it was.
The Temple of Mythal was not built. It was grown. Great trees formed its vaulted ceiling, their branches woven into impossible arches heavy with silver leaves. The walls were living, seamless root and radiant moss. A pool of perfectly clear, starlit water reflected the structure, doubling its majesty. There was no sound. No birds, no insects. Only a profound, humming silence.
He stepped onto the silver-white flagstones that led to the open archway of the temple’s entrance. The air hummed against his skin, a vibration that matched the frequency of the Orb in his chest. It was almost comforting.
A voice spoke. It came from everywhere and nowhere, woven from the rustle of leaves and the trickle of water. It was ancient, melodic, and utterly alien. The words were Elvhen, but not the broken fragments the Dalish used. This was the true tongue, liquid and complex. He shouldn't have understood it.
But he did.
The meaning unfolded directly in his mind, bypassing his ears. "She has sent a shemlen, bearing a light that is not his own, to a place he should not know. Explain this walking contradiction."
Daylen stood before the empty archway, the heat within him a respectful, simmering pulse. He looked up at the shimmering canopy, then back to the still water.
“I’m full of those lately,” he said, his own voice rough from disuse. “I was told you could help me understand the light. Before it consumes what’s left of the man carrying it.”