Chapter 36: Detour
The fire had burned down to embers, painting the camp in deep oranges and long, crawling shadows. The others slept. Morrigan was a still, dark shape curled against the side of his bedroll, her breathing deep and even after her earlier exertions. Wynne and Sten were silent lumps in their tents. Only the soft, occasional snore from Alistair’s direction broke the forest’s quiet hum.
Daylen didn’t sleep. He didn’t need to. The concept felt distant, a ritual of the flesh he had transcended. He watched the dying coals, seeing in their pulsing heat the slow spin of galaxies. He waited until the deepest part of the night, when even the insects held their breath, and then he rose, silent as a shift in the wind.
He crossed the small clearing to Alistair’s bedroll and knelt. He didn’t shake him. He simply let his presence settle, a subtle pressure on the air. Alistair’s Templar-honed instincts kicked in a second later; his eyes snapped open, one hand already sliding toward the dagger under his pillow. He saw Daylen’s silhouette against the star-dusted sky and froze, the sleep clearing from his face to be replaced by wariness.
“We need to talk,” Daylen said, his voice a low rumble that didn’t carry beyond the two of them. “Now. Quietly.”
Alistair sat up, running a hand through his hair. “Can’t it wait until I’ve properly accused the sun of rising too early?”
“No.”
The single word held a finality that erased the last of Alistair’s drowsy humor. He blinked, fully awake now, and looked at his friend. Really looked. In the gloom, Daylen’s new eyes were like smoldering pits, holding their own faint light. “Right. Okay. Talk.”
“There are things we must do,” Daylen began, his gaze fixed on some point beyond the trees. “Paths we must walk, before we face the Archdemon. Before we face anything else in this blighted world.”
Alistair wrapped his blanket around his shoulders against the chill. “Like what? More ancient elven parlour tricks?”
“Training. And a necessary death.”
That got his attention. Alistair’s brows drew together. “Whose death?”
“Flemeth’s.”
A low whistle escaped Alistair’s lips. He glanced instinctively toward where Morrigan slept. “Okay. You’ve officially moved from ‘complicated’ to ‘batshit.’ You know that, right? The Witch of the Wilds? Morrigan’s mother? The dragon? That Flemeth?”
“The same. But first, the training.” Daylen leaned closer, the ember-glow catching the planes of his face. “You think you are a Grey Warden. A Templar. A prince hiding from his throne.”
Alistair’s expression tightened, a familiar defensiveness rising. “I am a Grey Warden. The Templar thing didn’t stick, and the prince bit is… unfortunate.”
“You are more,” Daylen interrupted, his voice dropping to a resonant whisper that vibrated in the bones. “You are destined to preserve the very fabric of this realm. There is a great danger on the horizon, Alistair. A shadow behind the Blight, behind the darkspawn, behind the politics of men and elves. I have seen it in the spaces between stars. I cannot yet make sense of its shape, but I know it comes. And you must be ready.”
All the glibness drained from Alistair’s face. It bled away, leaving behind the stark, sober man beneath—the soldier, the survivor, the man who bore the weight of a nation’s secret on his shoulders. He stared into Daylen’s unnatural eyes, and he saw no jest, no hyperbole. He saw only the chilling, absolute certainty of someone who had walked through fire for a thousand years. He swallowed, his throat dry. “My transformation,” Daylen continued, “was the first step. Yours must be the next. We go back to the temple. Now.”
They left the camp without a sound, two ghosts slipping through the pre-dawn murk of the Brecilian. Alistair followed, his questions held back by the grim set of Daylen’s shoulders and the sheer, oppressive weight of purpose that rolled off him in silent waves. The forest itself seemed to part for them, the gnarled roots less obstructive, the thickets less dense.
When they reached the clearing before the ancient temple, Abe’las was waiting, as if he had known the moment they decided to return. The ancient elf stood by the shimmering surface of the eluvian, his hands folded within his sleeves. As they approached, he did not bow this time. Instead, a slow, knowing smile spread across his weathered face, a smile of deep satisfaction.
“You return not as a pilgrim, but as a guide,” Abe’las said, his voice like stone rubbing against stone. “You understand the sanctity. You do not betray it; you fulfill it. The crucible awaits.”
Daylen gave a single, grave nod. He placed a hand on Alistair’s pauldron. “Trust me.”
Alistair looked from the frighteningly serene elf to the chaotic, star-churned surface of the mirror, then back to Daylen. He saw the friend he’d fought beside, laughed with, trusted with his life. And he saw the stranger who had come back. He took a breath, squared his shoulders, and met Daylen’s gaze. “Always.”
Together, they stepped forward.
The transition was less a step and more a sudden, soundless unmaking. The damp forest air, the smell of moss and loam, the chirp of a waking bird—all of it was snipped away. Alistair gasped, staggering as the world reconstituted itself around them. They stood in the same austere, circular chamber of polished white stone, but the air was still and dead, holding a pressure that made his ears pop. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, casting no shadows.
And it was cold. A deep, marrow-chilling cold that had nothing to do with temperature.
“What… is this place?” Alistair breathed, his voice oddly flat, absorbed by the immense silence.
“A place outside of time,” Daylen said. He was already moving to the center of the room, his movements fluid and assured. “A testing ground. A forge.” He sat, crossing his legs in a meditative pose. The simple motion seemed to anchor the entire vast, empty space. “Remove your armor. Your clothes. All of it.”
Alistair blinked. “I’m sorry, you want me to fight… naked?”
“You are not here to fight yet. You are here to begin. The artifacts of your old life will only hinder you. They are lies you tell yourself about what you can endure.”
Hesitating only a moment longer, Alistair began unbuckling his plate armor. The pieces clattered to the luminous floor with a series of deafening clangs that echoed into the infinite. Soon, he stood shivering, completely exposed, the chill air raising gooseflesh on his skin. He felt vulnerable in a way he never had, not even in the most brutal battles. This was a vulnerability of the spirit. Yet, as he stood there, a strange fortitude settled over him—a stubborn, unyielding resolve that was uniquely his own. It was the same grit that had carried him through the Joining, through the loss of Duncan, through every sneer and dismissal. It was, perhaps, the truest thing about him.
He faced Daylen, who sat like a statue carved from primordial stone. “Alright,” Alistair said, his voice steadier than he felt. “I’m naked and confused. But I’m here. What do I have to do?”
Daylen opened his eyes. They were full of a terrible, loving pity. “As I did, you must walk the Path of the Tarnished. You will be sent from this nexus into a land of relentless trial. You will fight. And you will die. You will die to beasts, to men, to things that are neither. You will die to blade, to tooth, to claw, to magic you cannot comprehend. You will die to your own fear, your own pride, your own limitations.”
Alistair listened, his blood turning to ice water in his veins.
“You will die,” Daylen continued, relentless, “until death becomes a teacher, not an ending. Until the very concept of pain is a dialect you are fluent in. You will fight, and die, until you cannot be touched, or hurt, or killed by skill alone. Until your reflexes are etched into eternity, and your will is harder than the substance of this place.”
“And then?” Alistair asked, his mouth dry.
“Then you will find your way back to this spot. And you will fight me.”
A bark of disbelieving laughter burst from Alistair. “Fight you? The man who looks like he ate a god for breakfast?”
“Yes. And you will kill me.”
The laughter died. Silence, thicker than before, pressed in.
“This isn’t a metaphor, Alistair. It is the ritual. It is the only way. When you kill me here, in this place outside of time, we will pass back through the mirror, forged together in a way nothing in our world can break. We will be ready. For Flemeth. For the Archdemon. For the shadow behind it all. We will defeat this evil, and any that dares to rise after.”
Daylen closed his eyes again, his breathing slowing until it seemed he didn’t breathe at all. “Now,” he said, his voice final and distant, already retreating into a deep trance. “Walk.”
A section of the seamless white wall behind Alistair shimmered and dissolved, revealing a bleak, ash-choked landscape under a bruised purple sky. A cold wind, smelling of ozone and old blood, swept into the chamber.
Alistair stood naked on the threshold, every instinct screaming at him to turn back, to find his armor, to retreat to the simple, mortal dangers of the Blight. He looked at his friend, sitting immovable at the heart of eternity. He thought of the “greater danger.” He thought of the realm he was, apparently, destined to preserve.
He squared his shoulders, felt that stubborn fortitude lock into place like iron bars, and took his first step into the wasteland.
The silence of the white chamber deepened, thickened, as the portal sealed shut behind Alistair. Daylen did not move. He became a fixture in that place, a axis around which uncountable moments spun. He felt the distant, muffled echoes of Alistair’s journeys—flashes of rage, bursts of agony, the profound silence of a life ended, again and again. They were like pebbles dropped into the still ocean of his consciousness, creating ripples that he observed, catalogued, and let fade.
He waited. He meditated on the structure of the Veil, on the precise nature of the shadow he had sensed coiled behind the Blight. He practiced holding the sun within him behind a screen of normalcy, crafting a persona of the man he had been over the furious truth of what he had become. Time, here, was a clay he could choose to feel or ignore. He chose to feel it, to let the weight of Alistair’s absence build into a geological pressure.
A century passed in the silence. Then a millennium. The polished floor around Daylen did not dust. The light did not change.
He felt the shift before he saw it. A resonance, familiar yet utterly transformed, vibrating through the immutable stone of the chamber. It was a frequency of relentless will, of death embraced and mastered, of a strength tempered in a forge of endless, bloody repetition. The air in the center of the room began to warp, to whine as if under an immense strain.
Daylen opened his eyes.
The space tore open, not with a flash, but with a sound like a mountain sighing. A figure stepped through, and the portal shredded itself into fading motes of light behind him.
It was Alistair. It was not Alistair.
He was a monument of muscle and grim purpose, dwarfing the sturdy frame Daylen remembered. His shoulders strained against the dark, oiled steel of knight’s plate, which was scarred with the memory of a hundred thousand blows but remained unbent. In one gauntleted fist he held a massive flail, its spiked head resting on the floor as if it weighed nothing. A shield, tall enough to bury a man behind, was strapped to his back. His face, visible beneath an open helm, was harder, the lines around his eyes and mouth carved by eons of concentration, but his eyes… they held a clear, focused light, sharp and sane and utterly resolved.
He moved into the chamber, and his grace was disquieting. There was no heavy clank of armor, only a smooth, predatory glide. The flail’s chain whispered a metallic sigh as he lifted it. He stopped, fifteen paces away, and looked at Daylen. No smile. No joke. Just a slow, acknowledging nod.
Daylen rose. He did not summon his star-forged armor. He called his spear, Spirit Serpent, which materialized in a coil of emerald light and solidified into polished bone-white wood tipped with a cruel, shimmering point. In his other hand, a sphere of chaotic fire bloomed, licking at the air with orange and black tendrils.
“Show me,” Daylen said, his voice the only sound in all of existence.
Alistair moved.
The flail became a blur of screaming metal. It did not swing; it uncoiled, the force behind it threatening to atomize the very air. Daylen was not there. He phased, a step sideways through a fold in reality, and the flail-head cratered the floor where he had stood, sending spiderwebs of fracture across the indestructible white stone. The spear lunged, a viper’s strike aimed for the gap under Alistair’s arm.
The massive shield was there, not with a clumsy block, but with a precise, tilting deflection that sent the spear-point skidding harmlessly wide with a shriek of sparks. The counter was already coming, a shield bash that carried the weight of a landslide. Daylen let the impact come, meeting it with a palm swathed in kinetic energy. The concussion wave slapped outwards, silent and devastating.
They broke apart, reassessed, and clashed again.
Fire chaos roared from Daylen’s hand, a torrent that melted stone. Alistair pivoted behind his shield, the metal glowing cherry-red but holding, his feet braced against the thermodynamic fury trying to push him into oblivion. He came out of the flame, shield-edge leading, a battering ram of soul and steel.
Daylen was everywhere. He was the spear, flickering in and out of vision, leaving lines of searing light in the air. He was the caster, weaving glyphs of gravity that sought to pin those colossal limbs. He was the phantom, dodging the relentless, economy-of-motion devastation of the flail. He fought as a being who had conquered time itself.
And Alistair weathered it. He absorbed blows that would have shattered castles. He learned the rhythms of Daylen’s phase-steps, predicting, adapting. His valiant efforts were not flashy; they were foundational, immutable, a wall that would not fall. He was grace and obliteration fused into one.
Little by little, through the hurricane of spear and spirit and fire, Alistair came closer. His defense became his advance. The distance closed from fifteen paces, to ten, to five. The air itself grew hot and heavy with their expended power.
Daylen saw an opening, a nanosecond of lag after a mighty, shield-cleaving swing. He committed, driving Spirit Serpent forward in a thrust that could pierce a dragon’s heart.
It was a feint within a feint.
Alistair’s recovery was impossible. He didn’t try to block. He spun into the thrust, letting the spear tip screech along the curve of his pauldron. His left arm, moving with that unnerving speed, hooked over Daylen’s extended arm, pinning it in an overhook of crushing, plate-augmented strength.
Daylen’s equilibrium vanished. The world tilted.
Alistair’s right hand released the flail’s handle, the chain whipping around his armored fist in a practiced spiral. The first punch, a short, piston-driven blow from this new, closer range, shattered Daylen’s remaining balance and filled his vision with white static.
The second punch blinded him. It was not metaphorical. The impact against his temple scrambled sight into a soup of gray noise.
All he could hear after that was the windup—a faint, leather-and-metal strain—and then the wet, final crunch of the spiked flail-head impacting his skull.
His world went black.
Consciousness returned not with a jolt, but with a slow, warm tide. He was whole. Unharmed. Lying on the cool floor of the chamber. The muted light felt gentle on his eyes. He sat up.
Alistair stood a few feet away, the flail and shield gone, his posture relaxed. The hard lines of his face had softened into an expression of quiet expectancy.
A feeling, vast and warm, rose in Daylen’s chest. It was pride, pure and undiluted, a ferocious joy that had nothing to do with victory or defeat. It was the satisfaction of a creator witnessing his most profound work not only completed, but exceeded. He looked at his friend, this brother forged in a private eternity, and knew they were ready.
He stood, a smile touching his own features. “Shall we?”
Alistair smiled, a real one, familiar yet deeper, and nodded.