peopleofthedas | You Can't Stop Falling (Menage 20)

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Title: You Can’t Stop Falling (Ménage 20)

Words: 1877

Rating: G

Characters: Philomene/Zevran/(Alistair in the Fade) featuring Sigrun, Velanna, and the Architect

Summary: In which we learn that sylvan ambushes and arcane floor traps are bad ways to introduce oneself to new friends.

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Finding the trail wasn’t difficult: there were still, even now, the last charred remains of wagons and smashed-open boxes lying down the sides of the road. And past them were the bodies of darkspawn, showing where Alistair had passed through. Past those was the face of a ruined building set in stone, but no signs seemed to lead there at all, not even from what looked to be the camp set across from it on a hill.

The camp, though: that was a discovery, and a sobering one. Elven graves marked with human swords, a combination that made Philoméne pensive and Sigrun jittery.

“Perhaps the work of the Dalish woman they saw?” Zevran suggested, studying the makeshift cemetery with his arms crossed. “They are not deep graves, not more than one could manage alone. She believed the humans were at fault, did she not?”

“She did,” said Philoméne, “and something killed off her band, it would seem. I can’t imagine it’s as old a feud as Xathrian’s was, or it wouldn’t have taken the locals by surprise. Something started this recently.”

“I vote for darkspawn,” Sigrun chimed in. “If you don’t have dwarven nobles or cartels, the answer’s always darkspawn.”

“We do have human nobles and cartels,” Philoméne smiled, “but that doesn’t rule out darkspawn, especially lately.” She stopped to reach toward a vague ripple at the edge of her senses, frowning. “And in fact… but it’s very faint. To the west.”

The sense of darkspawn remained faint as they moved westward, but they did find the human bodies. These had not received the respectful sendoff that the Dalish had: in fact they were all simply dumped into one great hole, all ajumble. The reek was impressive, but even the flies would have none of them. Zevran knelt beside the edge, eyes narrowing, and spoke quietly. “Someone or something has crawled out again,” he said to Philoméne. “This way.”

The first thing they found around the bend, however, was burning trees. Or, no, since one of them promptly lurched forward to swing a blazing branch down toward Zevran’s head – burning sylvans. He rolled under the blow and pulled something from his belt. “Back, my Warden!” he called as he threw it.

The smoke of the bomb let her fall back a step, but it was hard to decide what to do from there. Both of her companions were dagger fighters, less than optimal against walking trees; and then on her own part, it seemed redundant to blast things already on fire. But there it was.

Burn more, she entreated in her head. Burn faster.

They did: they blazed fantastically, but even that did not kill them quickly, and Sigrun in particular insisted on rushing their flanks to swipe at them in spite of the fire. Her skin was visibly burnt and her clothing singed by the time the sylvans fell.

“Ugh,” Philoméne frowned, pulling medicines from her satchel, “don’t fight so recklessly. I’m not Wynne. Not that you know… I’m not Anders, either. I can’t just fix you.”

“S’what the potions are for,” Sigrun grinned, her voice husky from the smoke. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, it means I stabbed a tree! How many dwarves ever get to stab a tree?” She chortled, then coughed a bit of sylvan ash out of her lungs.

There was a groan from among the innocent shrubbery. “Mmm…medicine. Need. Please.”

Zevran’s knives were out and trained on the voice instantly, but as no movement accompanied it, he did nothing further yet. The man they found lying on the ground was beyond the reach of medicine, his eyes and skin greying with spreading Taint. Philoméne shook her head at him slowly, though she could not yet bring herself to tell him he was doomed. “Ser. What happened here? Who are you?”

“Olaf.” He wheezed his way through an effort to sit up; ultimately Sigrun propped him against a tree trunk, and they silently agreed that this would do. “Woke up in the pit. They’d… everyone’s dead. Carried our weapons to… where they done the elves.”

“Who did?” Philoméne thought it through and stared in disbelief. “The darkspawn did? Darkspawn tried to frame you?”

“Make it look like we fought. Didn’t. Spawn killed all of us. Still. Watching.” His eyes were milking over further. “I’m… s’no hope, is there, miss?” Philoméne shook her head at him sadly, and he winced. “No. Could you… speed it up, then?”

“I could,” Zevran said quietly. “Draw your last breath, my friend, cross the Veil and the Fade and all the stars in the sky. Rest at the Maker’s right hand, and be forgiven.” With one smooth wave of motion, he pulled Olaf’s head back with one hand as the other drew a dagger across his bared throat, and as the black ribbon of tainted blood rose, air and life faded from the doomed man, and he slumped back against the ground, dead.

They all sat silent for a moment as Zevran wiped his blade clean. “That was very pretty,” Philoméne said at last. “It was from the Chant, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed. I have always considered it an excellent verse for a mercy killing.” He rose with fluid grace, then offered his hand to help her up.

Still watching, she remembered just as the same information flared in her blood. She leapt to her feet with a shout, and as soon as her hand left Zevran’s it was filled with lightning. Sure enough, the genlocks emerged from around them. But they were nothing special now, even if before they had thought to ambush two camps, turn them against each other, and use the whole works as a trap. Whatever intelligence had guided all of that was not present.

Zevran was clearly thinking along the same lines. “Another of the clever ones must have been here at one point,” he said between efforts to wrench a blade free from bone. “But it was not in this group.”

“Maybe its purposes here were done,” Philoméne mused. “But why would it go to such lengths to disguise what happened? And having done so, why would it leave without making sure the trick had worked?”

“And was the trick for us in particular?” Zevran added.

Sigrun snorted. “I’m really not enjoying this ‘smart darkspawn’ thing you surfacers have come up with, here. It’s just a bad idea.”

“Maybe we should go back and look at the Dalish graves again,” Philoméne suggested. “Maybe something about them we missed before would tell us what’s really going on here.”

But almost immediately, the way back was overshadowed by an angry little figure perched on a ridge. “Why?” it demanded in a high, clipped voice. “Why must still more of your kind come to defile the bodies of my people?”

Philoméne turned to face her challenger. “More of our kind?” she drawled, having gathered that the woman above her must be Dalish. “I beg your pardon?”

The Dalish woman must have been the one who had confronted Nathaniel: she was frosty blonde, her hair pulled into a tight bun, and some of her features were indeed familiar, though pinched. Certainly to a human there would be a strong resemblance.

“Knife-ears,” the woman snarled. “Come to prove yourselves as traitors. Even better.”

Zevran, however, was laughing. “Ah, yes, I see it now! It is as if you and Morrigan had a daughter, is it not?”

“I don’t suppose I can blame you for not knowing how silly it is to say that,” Philoméne called up to her. “But certainly you should be thinking about what these darkspawn are doing here, and what it means about what you think happened, and what you should do now.”

“The Dread Wolf take the darkspawn,” the woman snarled. “Tell me where the shemlen have taken my sister!”

Zevran stopped laughing and looked thoughtful; Sigrun asked what a shemlen was; and the Dalish woman stared down at them furiously for a moment, then disappeared in an eruption of magical branches and was replaced by more sylvan. These were not burning, which Philoméne soon corrected, only to realize afterward that she’d recreated the problem for the others that they’d had the last time.

“It’s all right,” Sigrun said while Philoméne healed her again. “I like the smell they make when they’re burning. Seriously, though, what’s a shemlen?”

“An elven term for humans,” Zevran told her. “She does not seem willing to accept the truth of the situation. If the girl she wants was not among the Dalish bodies….”

“Then where is she?” Philoméne shrugged. “No idea. Probably she ran off.” She thought of an alternative theory, and curled in on herself trying to forget it. “Hopefully she ran off.”

Zevran stepped in and stroked her hair comfortingly. “Ssh, cocca. We must find their den now in any case, yes? We will make sure. No one will be left to such a fate here.”

Philoméne nodded and stepped into his embrace, content to breathe in the smell of burnt pine that was clinging to him. Sigrun watched them with interest. “That’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask, if you don’t mind.” She waited until Philoméne shrugged assent. “You and Alistair, you and Zev… what’s all that about?”

“We love each other,” Philoméne said.

“Um. Which?”

Zevran chuckled and rubbed the top of Sigrun’s head. “All three of us! I have infected them with my wild Antivan ways, you see.”

“Oh! All right, then. That makes sense.” She smirked. “I’ve read about you Antivans.”

They’d reached an impasse on the western side, so they went back eastward. There were, of course, more darkspawn, and this time – after a truly fabulous opportunity to throw a tempest into the center of an unsuspecting horde had been properly enjoyed – they found the entrance to where the underground lair would most likely be. It looked like it had once been a mine, which was hardly unusual. Philoméne thought perhaps dwarven, since the ceilings were comfortably high and fairly neatly carved.

How was it, anyway, that the shortest race she knew of could carve out such high ceilings? She considered asking Sigrun, although as a duster and not a stoneworker she might not know. Wondering how the question would go over, it took her a split second to notice the feeling of something strange beneath her foot – magic, not of the Circles, not like the Dalish or Flemeth or Morrigan, symbol on the floor, no, no, n….

The world snapped shut around her. When it started to come back, she was not in the same place. She was still underground but in some other room, on her back, restrained. Over her loomed a peculiar, wasted face on an impossibly elongated head that was already beginning to blur around the edges again, even as she fought to stay conscious.

“Do not be frightened,” the slow, cool voice said. Ridiculous. Just like Cullen reassuring her before he tortured her. Madness. “I apologize for what I must do. I do not wish to be your enemy. But now is not the time for this. Rest.”

She thought she might be screaming as the darkness took her again.

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