Chapter 2: Beginning of one end
The scent of pine and damp moss was thick as blood in Theron’s lungs. Dawn in the Vinmarks was a grey, liquid thing, the light fighting its way through a canopy so dense it felt like being underwater. He moved without sound, his feet finding purchase on slick roots and patches of soft, rotting leaves.
Beside him, Tamlen was a restless shadow, his hand never far from the hilt of his short sword. "I don't hear anything but my own stomach grumbling," he whispered, the sound like a rustle of dry leaves.
"Quiet," Theron murmured, not looking at him. He paused, one hand resting on the rough bark of an old oak. He closed his eyes, letting the forest speak. The chatter of waking birds, the scuttle of a vole in the underbrush, the sigh of the wind in the highest branches. And then, woven under it, something else. A faint, discordant ring of metal on stone. The smell changed, too. The clean rot of the forest was soured by smoke and something sharper, like sweat and cured leather.
"Shemlen," Theron breathed, opening his eyes.
"Finally," Tamlen grinned, the reckless light already kindling in his eyes. "Let's go tell them to get the hell out of our woods."
Theron shot him a warning look. "We watch first. We see how many, what they're doing. No heroes, Tamlen."
"You're no fun since you became a proper adult," Tamlen muttered, but he fell in behind Theron as they began to stalk toward the sound, their movements a blend of shadow and suggestion.
The trees began to thin, opening into a rough clearing that shouldn't have been there. Stumps, raw and weeping sap, stood like gravestones where ancient firs had once been. At the center, a rough fire pit smoldered, and around it were the unmistakable signs of a crude camp: discarded iron rations, a broken axe haft, the rank odor of unwashed human bodies.
Three of them. They were big, loud things, their voices coarse bricks thrown into the forest's quiet. Two were arguing over a rusted trap, their faces smeared with grime. The third, younger with a patchy attempt at a beard, was poking at the fire with a stick.
Theron nocked an arrow, the motion fluid and silent. He looked at Tamlen, who gave a sharp, eager nod. They stepped from the treeline together, bows drawn.
The humans froze. The one by the fire dropped his stick. The two with the trap slowly straightened up, their hands drifting toward the knives at their belts.
"Don't," Theron said, his voice flat and cold. He kept his aim centered on the chest of the biggest one, a brute with a nose that had been broken more than once. "Hands where I can see them. You're in a place you shouldn't be."
The big one sneered, but he lifted his hands slowly."Elves. Figures. This is free land."
"This is our land," Tamlen spat, his arrow trained on the youngest. "You're cutting trees that were ancient when your grandfather's grandfather was a glint in a drunkard's eye."
"We're just loggers," the young one said, his voice cracking with fear. "Paid by the master in Kirkwall to—"
"We don't care who paid you," Theron interrupted. "You're leaving. Now. Walk south, and don't stop until you smell the sea. If we see you again, we won't be talking."
The big logger's eyes, small and piggish, darted between their drawn bows. He saw the lethal promise in Theron's green eyes, the unhinged eagerness in Tamlen's. He deflated."Fine. Damn pointy-eared—"
"Finish that sentence and you wear my arrow as a pendant," Tamlen said brightly.
They gathered their pitiful gear in sullen silence under the unblinking aim of the Dalish bows. As they shuffled to the edge of the clearing, the young one hesitated, glancing back. "You… you live around here. You ever seen the cave?"
Theron’s finger tightened on his bowstring."What cave?"
"There's a cave. Deeper in. We found it yesterday, ‘fore we got turned around. Ain't natural. Walls are too smooth. There's… marks on the walls. Shiny marks. Jory here," he nodded to the big one, "touched one and said his fingers went numb. We didn't stay. Place felt wrong.Dead."
Tamlen’s arrow tip dipped a fraction. A cave? Ancient marks? His whole body seemed to vibrate with sudden, intense curiosity. Theron felt a cold drip of dread down his spine.
"Just walk," Theron said, his voice leaving no room for further conversation.
The humans vanished into the trees, their crashing footsteps fading slowly.
The moment they were gone, Tamlen lowered his bow."A cave. Shiny marks that make you go numb. You know what that sounds like."
"It sounds like trouble we don't need," Theron said, finally relaxing his own draw. The silence of the forest rushed back in, but it felt different now, watching.
"Trouble? It sounds like elvhen." Tamlen's eyes were alight. "Our people, Theron. Before everything was lost. A real artifact, not some pot shard the Keeper keeps wrapped in velvet. This could be… this could be everything."
"It could be a death trap. 'Felt wrong.Dead.' You hear that part?" Theron walked over to the smoldering fire, scattering it with his boot. The stink of human sweat was overpowering.
"Since when are you scared of a feeling?" Tamlen challenged, coming to stand beside him. "Since the Keeper deemed you ready for a soft bed and a quiet life? You walked naked through camp last night like a god. Now you want to tuck tail and run from a story told by a scared shem boy?"
The jab landed. Theron remembered the weight of the Keeper's judgment, the unspoken expectation to be a pillar, cautious and wise. It sat on him like a new, ill-fitting cloak. He looked at Tamlen, his brother in every way that mattered. The brother he'd always followed into the thick of things, to pull him back from the edge.
"It's probably nothing," Theron said, the resistance already bleeding from his voice.
"Then we check. If it's nothing, we laugh about it on the way home. If it's something…" Tamlen didn't finish. He didn't need to. The possibility hung between them, glittering and dangerous.
Theron sighed, the sound lost in the vast green gloom. "We look. We don't touch. And we're out by midday."
Tamlen's grin was a victory. "Scout's honor. Now, which way did that idiot say? Deeper in?"
The deeper they went, the older the forest became. The air grew colder, damper. The cheerful birdsong died away, replaced by an oppressive silence broken only by the drip of water from high leaves. The ground sloped downward, and the normally vibrant mosses looked pale and sickly.
They found it an hour later.
They found it an hour later. The cave mouth was a raw, black gash in a hillside choked with thorny undergrowth, its edges too smooth, too perfectly arched to be natural. The air around it tasted of wet stone and something else, a metallic flatness that dried the back of Theron’s throat.
“Shiny marks, he said,” Tamlen whispered, his earlier bravado muted by the cave’s silent, yawning presence. He nudged a pile of fresh bones near the entrance with his boot—rabbit, maybe, but the breaks were too clean, too violent.
Theron didn’t answer. He was scanning the tree line, his hunter’s senses screaming. The normal forest chatter had ceased here. A twig snapped. He turned, his bow coming up in one fluid motion. Two stunted, grey-skinned figures were shambling from the deeper brush, their weapons crude axes of rusted iron. Genlocks. The sight hit him like a physical blow; he’d only heard tales of darkspawn in the Keeper’s warnings.
He loosed two arrows in quick succession. The first took the lead creature through its sunken eye socket. The second punched into the other’s throat. They crumpled without a sound. From the other side, a low growl rumbled as three mangy wolves, their eyes glazed with a sickly yellow tinge, emerged from the shadows.
“Wolves too?” Tamlen hissed, drawing his dar’missan.
Theron shifted his aim. He dropped the first wolf with a shot to its heart, the second through its skull as it leapt. The third turned to flee, but his arrow caught it neatly between the shoulder blades. Silence crashed back, heavier than before.
“Well placed,” Tamlen said, letting out a held breath. He eyed the dead genlocks with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.
“We can collect the pelts and meat later,” Theron muttered, walking forward to retrieve his arrows with a grim tug. The arrowheads came out slick with dark, thick blood. “If we come back out.”
“Always the optimist.” Tamlen was already moving toward the cave entrance, his shield—painted with the halla symbol of their clan—strapped to his arm, his face alight with a fierce curiosity that overrode any fear. “This is it, brother. This is where we find something that matters.”
The darkness inside was absolute, swallowing the grey forest light within a few feet. They lit simple oil-wick torches, the flames painting frantic, jumping shadows on walls that were indeed smooth, carved by no natural hand. The air grew colder, thick with the smell of age and damp earth and a strange, acrid scent like burning hair.
They hadn’t gone fifty paces when Theron’s torchlight glinted off a near-invisible strand of wire, taut across the passage at ankle height. He stopped Tamlen with a sharp hand. “Trap.”
He knelt, examining the mechanism. It was crude but effective, designed to trigger a weighted net or a swinging log. His clever fingers found the release pin, his movements careful, deliberate. The wire went slack with a soft click. “Stay close. Watch where I step.”
The cave began to slope downward, the passage narrowing. The first spider dropped from a crevice above with a leathery rustle, its body the size of a large dog, its mandibles clicking. Tamlen swore, raised his shield just as it lunged. He caught its weight, staggering back, and jammed his short sword up into its pulsing underbelly. Dark ichor sprayed.
More skittered from the walls. Theron dropped his torch, letting it gutter on the stone, and nocked an arrow. He fired into the clustered, many-eyed faces of the creatures, his shots precise punches that dropped them mid-scuttle. Tamlen was a whirlwind of focused violence, his shield bashing, his sword slicing through chitinous legs. The fight was a chaotic, breathless mess of shrieks and splattering fluid.
They pushed on, their torches nearly spent. The acrid stench grew stronger, now mingled with a foul, greasy smell of unwashed bodies and rotten meat. A low, guttural chanting echoed up the tunnel. They rounded a bend and saw them: a larger chamber where a handful of hurlocks, taller and more menacing than the genlocks, stood around a crude altar of stacked stones. One of them turned, its lips peeling back from pointed teeth.
Theron didn’t give it a chance to roar. His arrow took it in the eye, punching through to the back of its skull. The others turned, clumsy with surprise. He fired again and again, each arrow finding a vital spot—an eye, a throat, the gap in rusted armor at a armpit. They fell like rotten trees. A final genlock charged from the shadows; Tamlen met it with a shield-bash that shattered its jaw, following through with a downward stab to its heart.
Silence, again. It was worse than the noise. Theron’s breath fogged in the suddenly still, cold air. His fingers were numb on the bowstring. Before them, beyond the altar, the passage narrowed into a doorway.
On the floor just before it, a pressure plate was barely visible under a scatter of dust. Theron crouched, blowing the dust away to reveal the worn stone trigger. He traced its edges, then carefully wedged his hunting knife into the seam, prying it up until he heard a definitive, harmless snap from the mechanism within the wall.
“Is that it?” Tamlen asked, his voice a husk of its usual self. He was spattered with black spider ichor and darker darkspawn blood.
“For now,” Theron said, standing. He looked at the dark doorway. From within, a faint, greenish light pulsed, slow and steady like a sleeping heart. It reflected in the shiny, metallic trails smeared on the walls—the “marks” the human had described.
Tamlen saw it too. He stepped past the disarmed trap, past the altar, drawn toward that unearthly glow like a moth. “Do you see that? Creators, Theron…”
Theron reached for his shoulder. “Tamlen, wait. We don’t know—”
But Tamlen was already moving, crossing the threshold into the green-lit room beyond.