Chapter 35: Reunion of Fire and Flesh
The air in the temple tasted different. Thinner. Smaller. Daylen looked at Abe’las, and for the first time, he truly saw the ancient elf not as a sage, but as a man—frail, finite, standing before a force he could barely comprehend. The ghostly sentinel trees seemed to huddle closer, their whispers tinged with awe and fear.
“Ages passed for you,” Abe’las said, his voice a dry leaf compared to the thunder in Daylen’s memories. “Here, the candle flame did not flicker. You left and returned between one breath and the next.”
Daylen nodded, the motion feeling deliberate, like moving a mountain with a thought. He could feel the pressure of his own presence, the way the Veil around him strained and thinned like over-stretched parchment. He needed to contain it. He focused inward, on the core of stellar fire that was now his being, and willed it to compact, to cool, to disguise itself.
The crimson and gold plate of Mesmer the Impaler shimmered, its metallic essence dissolving into motes of amber light that flowed into the palm of his raised hand, vanishing. Beneath it was simple, worn traveler’s leather, the same he had worn into the forest an eternity ago. It felt like a fiction, a painted scabbard over a star-forged blade, but it would serve. He pulled his cloak around his shoulders, the coarse fabric a strange sensation against skin that had forgotten anything but the kiss of astral wind and god-blood.
“I must return to my companions,” Daylen said. His voice was too deep, too resonant. He softened it, forcing the timbre back towards something familiar.
Abe’las simply bowed his head, a gesture of profound deference. “Walk softly, Sun-Carver. The world is not yet ready for your dawn.”
The path back through the Brecilian felt like a dream. The oppressive, ancient magic of the forest now registered as a faint buzz, a trivial resistance against the ocean of power within him. He moved without sound, his steps not disturbing a single fallen leaf. He saw the patterns in the chaos—the glide of a spider on its web, the root systems breathing beneath the soil, the slow, grieving song of the ruins. It was all so simple. So fragile.
The scent of their campfire reached him long before the clearing came into view—woodsmoke, burnt stew, the familiar, comforting stink of wet dog from the mabari. The sounds of casual life felt alien: Alistair’s off-key humming, the soft clink of a whetstone on steel, the rustle of Morrigan turning a page in her grimoire. A ache, sharp and surprising, pierced the monolithic calm within him. This. This small, mortal pocket of existence was why he had endured the millennia of dying. To protect this.
He stepped from the treeline.
The fire crackled. Alistair was midway through a story, a spoon pointing at Sten. “—and then I said, ‘No, ser, that’s not a drake, that’s your wife’s—’”
He froze. The spoon clattered into the pot.
Morrigan looked up from her book. Her sharp, golden eyes widened, the tome slipping from her fingers to thud on the mossy ground.
Wynne, who was mending a tunic by the fire’s light, let out a soft, sharp gasp, the needle pricking her thumb. A bead of blood welled, forgotten.
Sten merely stood, his hand drifting instinctively to his sword hilt, his stoic face a mask of pure, uncomprehending assessment.
The mabari, Barkspawn, whined, a low, submissive sound deep in his throat, and slunk behind Alistair’s legs.
Daylen saw himself through their eyes. He was taller. His frame, always lean and muscular, now seemed carved from something denser than flesh, a topography of latent power barely contained by the simple leathers. His hair, a wild, dark river tumbling down his back, was a shocking change from the shaved head of the Circle mage. But it was the eyes that held them. In the firelight, they were not the warm hazel they remembered. They were reflective, deep-set pools holding captured nebulae—swirls of gold and dying red stars, a vista of ancient, violent creation.
He held up a hand, palm out. A placating gesture, though the air around it shimmered faintly with heat haze. “I suspect,” he said, his voice carefully modulated to a familiar pitch, though it carried an undertone of grinding stone, “that you have questions.”
Silence hung thick for three heartbeats.
Alistair found his voice first, a strained chuckle escaping him. “Questions? Daylen, you look like you ate a demigod and decided to wear his bones as a fancy hat. What in the Maker’s name happened back there? You went into some creepy elven hut and come out looking like… like that?” He gestured vaguely at all of Daylen.
“It is not a ‘hat,’ Alistair,” Daylen said, a flicker of his old dry humor surfacing. “And it is… complicated.”
“Complicated?” Morrigan whispered, rising to her feet. She approached him, not with fear, but with the cautious intensity of a scholar approaching a fascinating, dangerous new artifact. Her nostrils flared. “You smell… different. Of ozone and old stone. Your aura… it is not just stronger. It is of a different language altogether.”
“The elven sage, Abe’las,” Daylen began, choosing his words with the care of a sapper disarming a glyph. “He showed me a path. A… testing ground. A place outside of time.”
“Outside of time?” Wynne asked, her healer’s instincts overriding her shock. She moved closer, her own magical senses reaching out, then recoiling as if touched by a hot stove. “That is not possible.”
“It is. I lived centuries there. Millennia, perhaps. I died… thousands of times. I learned.” He flexed his hand, and for a bare instant, the air above his palm folded in on itself, a miniature, silent gravitational collapse that snuffed out the light from a patch of firelight before releasing it again. “The power I carried, the Light of the Crimson Orb, it was a seed. There, I let it grow.”
Alistair’s face cycled from shock to a kind of bewildered hurt. “You… you lived centuries? And you didn’t think to mention this? ‘Hey Alistair, just popping into a mirror for a quick thousand-year war, hold my ale’? We were sitting here worrying you’d tripped over a root!”
Daylen met his friend’s gaze, the cosmic swirl in his eyes softening. “From your perspective, Alistair, I was gone for less than a minute. From mine… it was long enough to forget the sound of your voice.” The admission landed heavily. “This change came upon me suddenly. Violently. Had I not taken the route Abe’las offered, the power would have consumed me. I would have perished here, and you would have found only a cinder where I stood.”
Alistair scrubbed a hand over his face. “Right. Okay. Sudden and violent magical metamorphosis. I can… sort of grasp that. I mean, as much as one can grasp ‘I died a few thousand times and came back taller.’ It’s just… a lot to keep hidden, you know?”
A ghost of a smile touched Daylen’s lips. “Is it? Until yesterday, you had hidden the rather significant fact that you are Cailan’s brother, and heir to the throne of Ferelden. A secret that, if revealed, could place you on the greatest seat of power and become the single largest threat and obstacle to our mission to stop the Blight.” He let the words hang in the smoky air. “We all carry burdens we do not yet know how to share.”
Alistair stared, his mouth slightly open. Then he deflated, a rueful, conceding smirk replacing his indignation. He nodded slowly, the movement carrying the weight of their shared, complicated history. “Fair. That’s… a fair comment. Point taken.” He sighed, looking from Daylen’s impossible eyes to the normal-looking campfire. “So. Millennia. Does this mean you’re finally old enough to buy the drinks?”
The tension broke. Sten gave a grunt that might have been approval. Wynne managed a shaky, relieved smile.
Morrigan, however, did not look away from Daylen. Her gaze was possessive, awed, and fiercely curious. “You have changed,” she murmured, too low for the others to hear. “The man I knew is still there. I see him. But he now resides in a… titan.”
Later, when the others had settled into a wary, exhausted sleep, she came to his bedroll on the edge of the camp. Without a word, she pressed him back onto the furs, her hands exploring the new landscape of his body with a desperate, probing hunger. Her mouth found his, and the kiss was not one of passion alone, but of recognition. Of claiming. She rode him with a frantic intensity under the cold Brecilian moon, her nails scoring the leather of his harness, her cries swallowed by his hand over her mouth. She peaked again and again, each climax wracking her slender frame, until finally, with a choked gasp, her eyes rolled back and she went limp, collapsing onto his chest in a dead faint. He held her, this wild, sharp-edged, brilliant woman, feeling the frantic beat of her mortal heart against the deep, eternal rhythm of his own, and wondered how anything so fragile could ever be worth the infinite, terrible power he now wielded.