Quest Five - The Devil in the Dark
Quest Five
The Devil in the Dark
“Halt.” They were waylaid by a group of soldiers blocking the entrance. “Go back to the camp.”
“Excuse me?” Sirius’s brow quirked as he took in the crowd. “What is all this?”
“There have been unexplained disappearances during patrols,” said the lead guard. He was quite tall, and dark-skinned, which led Harry to guess that either he was from Rivain or his ancestors were. “Until we get it sorted out, no soldiers are allowed into the tunnels except in groups of five or more.”
“Well, I’m not a soldier,” Sirius said pointedly.
The guard stared at him for a second before realization hit. “Warden-Commander. I’m sorry, I should have recognized you right away. Grey Wardens are of course allowed to pass. Your order has always managed to handle itself in dangerous situations better than most.”
“There have been disappearances?” Harry asked. “Were they taken by Darkspawn?”
“We’re… not exactly sure,” said the guard. “It’s always small groups or individuals taken, and never with witnesses.”
“Have you found any bodies?” Harry asked.
“There’s been absolutely no trace of them,” said the guard.
“That’s not like the Darkspawn,” Sirius mused. “They like to… show off their ‘trophies’.”
“If you discover any clues about what happened to them, we’d like to know what we’re up against,” said the guard. “And… there are a lot of widows and widowers who would greatly appreciate having some closure.”
“We’ll keep an eye out,” Harry said. “If whatever happened to them doesn’t happen to us, that is.”
It was quieter in the tunnels once they got away from the bulk of the army. A grey sort of mist hung over everything, giving the tunnels an eerie glow that made Harry shiver. Sirius seemed unaffected, walking with a skip in his step and whistling a little tune as they walked. His dog barked at the appropriate moments in the song.
“So, what have you been up to all these years?” Sirius asked after they had been walking for several minutes.
“Nothing,” Harry said, unable to keep the resentment from his voice. “Why did you leave me with the Dursleys?”
“I thought you were killed with your parents,” Sirius said. He stopped walking, his expression turning morose. “If I had known… You must understand, the Grey Wardens aren’t a responsibility that you can easily abandon, but I would have found a way to leave if I had known. I would have tried to raise you myself. I owed your father, and your mother, that much and far more.”
Harry looked away. It almost hurt worse, knowing how close he had been to living another life, to having a real family that actually cared about him.
Sirius made a weak attempt at a smile. “Ah, but you’d have probably hated me before long. I make a good friend, but I doubt I’d be a good parent. Anyway, surely it wasn’t too bad, living with your aunt and uncle?”
Harry frowned. “Yeah, it was great fun. Being treated like a slave, going without meals for days at a time, getting beaten for ‘mouthing off’-what’s not to love?”
Sirius flinched as if he had been slapped. Harry immediately felt awful and wished he hadn’t said anything. Slowly, with an expression of somber sincerity, Sirius put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “We can’t change the past. What matters is that we’re together now. I promise, things will be much better. You’ll be a Grey Warden. All of us, together, protecting each other: that’s what makes a true family, not who you’re related to.”
Feeling as though he were about to cry in the face of such a genuine declaration, Harry awkwardly tried to make a joke before he could embarrass himself. “I don’t think that most families spend their time hunting Darkspawn.”
“They ought to,” said Sirius. “It’s a great bonding experience.”
As the two of them laughed quietly, they suddenly heard sounds from further down the tunnel. Listening closely, they could pick out shouts, hissing, and strange clicking noises. The mabari hound let out a low warning growl.
Sirius drew his bow. “Sounds like Tonks and Moody have started without us.”
Harry unsheathed his daggers and followed Sirius as the three of them ran down the tunnel, the echoing pound of their boots against the rocky floor adding to the din of noise.
They entered a wider cavern lined with glossy white webs, where they found Tonks and an older warrior fighting a group of giant spiders. Several of the creatures were already dead, but many more remained, making horrible hissing noises and clacking their huge pincers together.
Harry and Sirius quickly entered the battle, daggers flashing and arrows slicing through the air. Harry leapt on top of one of the spiders, using his momentum to drive his blades through the creature’s armor-like shell with a crunch, followed by a grotesque squish and a splash of greenish viscera.
After stabbing the bladed tip of her staff into the head of a spider that came too close, Tonks cast a fire spell that decimated a large number of the giant arachnids. The old warrior swung his blade, sawing almost effortlessly through the group attempting to mob him. Sirius’s hound bit several legs off of one of the spiders, leaving it helpless against the dog’s next attack.
While he was busy fighting with one spider, Harry found himself crushed against the ground by a heavy weight when another spider tackled him from the side. No amount of kicking could get it to move, and his daggers were pinned by the spider’s hairy, spindly legs. He felt pain followed by a wave of dizziness as the spider dosed him with venom.
“Oh, no you don’t!” he heard Sirius bark. An arrow shot out of nowhere and pierced the spider directly in one of its eyes. The spider flipped over on its back and curled in on itself, legs bent at odd angles like dry branches. “Are you alright, pup?”
Harry stood, shaking off the after-effects of the spider’s poison. It seemed that was the last of them.
“Who’s the whelp?” the old warrior asked. He had shaggy grey hair, his face was cragged with scars, and he wore a patch over his left eye.
“He’s my… well, let’s call him my nephew,” Sirius said with a shrug. “He has just volunteered to join the Grey Wardens.”
“Oh, this is Potter, the one I told you about,” Tonks said excitedly. “He killed an ogre by himself.”
She sounded impressed, but at that moment Harry felt far from impressive. Especially considering that he just had to be saved from a damn spider (albeit a rather large one).
“Is that so?” Moody grumbled. He gave Harry a once-over with his good eye. “What else can you do?”
“I have depth perception?” Harry offered.
Oh, Maker, why did he say that? Tonks looked horrified, her large eyes darting back-and-forth between Harry and Moody as the old warrior scowled at him. Harry tensed, waiting for Moody to do something in retaliation.
At last… the old warrior started to laugh.
“Good, we get too many spineless suck-ups as it is,” said Moody. “But take some advice, lad: always keep your eyes open. Even when you think you’re safe, pay attention to your surroundings. Being a Grey Warden requires constant vigilance!”
Sirius snorted and Tonks hid a smile. Harry got the feeling that they had heard this warning many times before.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Harry.
“See that you do,” Moody said with a sharp nod. “Now, let’s go kill some Darkspawn.”
Harry nodded, eager to redeem himself for the spider incident. The four of them spread out into formation with Harry at front. He was pretty surprised to find himself appointed the outing’s designated leader, considering he was the least experienced of the party, but he thought that Sirius must be curious to see how he handled the job. Harry resolved to do him-and his parents-proud.
“If you’re ever short on funds, check the spiders,” Sirius said. Harry stared at him, utterly baffled. “I have no idea why, but giant spiders always have coin on them. At the very least you’ll get some venom for poison-making.”
Half-disbelieving, Harry rummaged around the nearest spider carcass, and to his surprise, he found a handful of bronze and a silver lodged in its belly. He grimaced to imagine how the money got there.
Harry looted the other corpses and then continued down the tunnel, three Grey Wardens and Sirius’s mabari hound following after him. He suddenly felt awesome. He was leading a Grey Warden contingent. Sure, it was only to explore some tunnels, but for a second, Harry felt like an utter bad-ass.
“Trap, there,” Sirius observed mildly. Harry froze and realized that he had very nearly planted his heal right into a bear trap.
Awesome feeling, gone.
Harry knelt down and started disarming the trap, while Sirius located and disarmed another. After a few minutes, they had the tunnel cleared and they continued onward. He led them exploring through the tunnels, finding a few simple supplies like mushrooms along the way. They also came across a few more spiders, though not in the same kind of numbers they had faced before.
They had just passed through a large chamber and were about to duck down one of the side tunnels when Sirius brought them to a halt. “Don’t just rush in,” he said quietly. “They outnumber us, so let’s try to plan an ambush.”
“What?” Harry asked. “Who outnumbers us?”
Sirius stared at him. “You can’t sense them?”
“Why would he?” asked Tonks. “He isn’t a Grey Warden, yet. He hasn’t gone through his Joining.”
“What’s going on?” Sirius asked. “I thought you said that you sensed the Darkspawn when they attacked Redcliffe?”
Tonks gasped. Moody gave Harry a suspicious look.
“I did,” Harry insisted. “You lot are the Grey Wardens here, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“This is getting stranger and stranger,” Sirius muttered thoughtfully.
“Thanks, I didn't feel enough like a freak in the first place,” said Harry.
Sirius let out a soft laugh. “Sorry. Come on, let’s take down this group of Darkspawn. Then we’ll have what we need for the Joining, and we can go see what Albus thinks of all this when we meet him later. You’re in charge, pup. What’s your plan?”
Harry considered this for a moment, then sent Sirius ahead in stealth to scout the area. There was a group of Darkspawn, about seven Genlocks strong and led by a big Hurlock. Once Sirius returned, Harry had Tonks cast a glyph of paralysis on the bulk of the group. The others came running. Moody blocked the entrance of the tunnel, keeping Sirius and Tonks safe behind him as they fired over his head at the Darkspawn archers. Harry and Sirius’s dog darted around Moody and started attacking the Darkspawn from the rear.
They had disposed of a number of Darkspawn when the glyph of paralysis gave out, releasing the cluster that were previously frozen. Moody engaged the big Hurlock in battle while Harry and the others mopped up the rest. Harry was a bit cut up when two Genlocks ganged up on him, but he felt a strange tingling warmth and a burst of energy that healed his wounds-courtesy of Tonks’s magic, no doubt-and allowed him to take down his opponents.
Harry quickly scanned the area and saw that all of the Darkspawn were down. He let out a small sigh of relief. As disturbed as he had been by his ability to sense the Darkspawn in Redcliffe, Harry was just as unsettled to find his ability inexplicably gone now that he’d come to expect it.
He ran around to each of the corpses and looted them for whatever seemed valuable. There were a few coins, which he thought made even less sense than when he’d found them on the spiders, but he wasn’t going to complain; money was money. He also got out a small vial and filled it with blood from the Hurlock at Sirius’s urging.
After checking that this cavern was indeed a dead end, Harry led them back to the main branch and continued down another side-tunnel. There was another group of Darkspawn lurking at the conclusion of the trail. Harry decided to use the same plan as before, since it had worked so well, and nearly got his eyebrows burned off by a fire trap he didn’t realize was there until he set it off.
They continued wandering the tunnels for several minutes, taking out any Darkspawn they came across, when they found what looked like a human skeleton. It was lying on the ground about fifty feet down a smaller tunnel with lots of boulders near the opening, as if a cave-in had once blocked the way.
“Who do you suppose that was?” Tonks asked with a wince.
“One of the missing soldiers?” Harry suggested.
“No, these bones are far too old for that,” Moody said gruffly.
Harry knelt down and searched the skeleton. He found a few torn pieces of paper in a blood-stained leather satchel.
It’s been at least five days since the seismic disturbance. No one responds to our shouts.
We’ve resorted to eating those caught in the landslide. We share our meals with Andraste’s children. If worst comes to worst, they will eat and we will go without. At least there’s plenty of water from the spring.
--
8 days. Where is everyone?
Something in water. Three more dead from sickness. The children don’t seem effected.
--
Alone now. Hungry. Nothing left to eat.
Andraste is silent. Maybe she left with the rest of the village.
I’ll soon be dead. My flesh will feed the children. They will live.
Harry shivered.
“Starvation, cannibalism,” Tonks said with a grimace. “What an awful way to go.”
“They must have been trapped by the cave-in around the same time that the Hero of Ferelden destroyed the cult,” Sirius exclaimed. “The Darkspawn probably dug their way through the blockage only recently.”
“I don’t know about these ‘children of Andraste’,” grumbled Moody. “Sounds fishy to me.”
As creepy as the messages were, Harry couldn’t repress a thrill of excitement. This tunnel and whatever lay inside hadn’t been seen by anyone since the cult was destroyed. Not even the Hero of Ferelden had seen it. Who knew what could be in there?
Harry led the group deeper down into the tunnel. They emerged in what appeared to have once been some sort of laboratory. Broken remnants of tables and shattered glass were scattered over the floor.
A pile of skeletons and mangled armor were arranged in a heap. Unlike the bones of the cultist, these were all fresh. They were slick with blood and still had chunks of… meat.
Before Harry could investigate closer, there was an ominous rumble. For a horrible moment Harry thought that there was going to be another cave-in, that they would be trapped and reduced to eating each other just like the cult members, but then he realized that it was actually something digging its way into the cavern.
“It’s not Darkspawn!” Sirius shouted for Harry’s benefit.
“Then what in flames is it?” Harry demanded, drawing his daggers.
He had his answer when, with a great explosion of dust and debris, a dragon burst through the wall of the cave.
It was large and had almost translucent scales and sightless milky-white eyes. The dragon had clearly lived in these tunnels its entire life. Harry had no idea what the thing had subsisted on all that time until the tunnels opened up, but he knew what mattered: the dragon wanted to kill and eat them just like it had all of the missing soldiers.
It snapped at Moody first, clearly hoping to take the strongest of them down while it still had the element of surprise on its side. But Moody was not a man easily surprised. He swung his greatsword, catching the dragon on the side of its head and leaving a long gash down its snout. The dragon flinched back with a screech of pain.
Harry tried to maneuver himself around the dragon to attack it from the rear, but he only got a few good shots in before the dragon smacked him aside with its tail. “Oof!” Harry tumbled backwards and hit the wall with a thump that rattled his bones and made his vision swim. He forced himself back into the fight.
Sirius and Tonks remained carefully out of striking distance, attacking from long range while Harry, Moody and the dog dealt with the beast up close. Harry was avoiding a blow from one of its front talons when the dragon suddenly snatched him off the ground and tossed him up into the air.
Harry didn’t even have time to be scared by this turn of events. Instinct made him grab at the first thing he saw that might keep him from falling to the hard stone below-or worse, down the creature’s gullet.
It turned out that the thing he grabbed was one of the dragon’s horns. Harry maneuvered so that he was essentially riding on the dragon’s neck, just behind its head, and he held on for all he was worth as the dragon tried to shake him off.
Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, Harry told himself fervently, even as he began wildly stabbing the dragon’s neck in the rhythm of Die, die, die!
The dragon flung its head up-Harry was thrown into the air again, and this time, as he plummeted back down, Harry lunged with his dagger. The momentum of his fall dug the blade deep into the dragon’s vulnerable eye socket, plunging beyond it and into the creature’s brain.
And then, before Harry had a chance to realize what he’d done, the dragon was falling down and Harry was going down with it. He tucked and rolled forward to land unsteadily on his feet.
Feeling wobbly-kneed, Harry took in the astonished stares of the other three, glanced back at the dead dragon, and finally put it together: Andraste’s flaming knicker-weasels, I just killed a dragon.
Of course, Harry nearly passed out from blood-loss immediately afterward from a wound in his chest (apparently caused by a poor landing on one of the dragon’s horns, which he hadn’t felt at the time), but he thought this was beside the point. Luckily Tonks was quick to apply some healing magic.
“That was incredible!” Sirius said. He pulled Harry into a quick hug and clapped him on the back. Even Moody gave Harry an approving smile. Harry plucked some scales from the dragon’s skin, and found a few simple weapons and a helmet in the dragon’s belly.
The tunnel through which the dragon had appeared was too steep and treacherous to explore, so they remained in the laboratory chamber. First, they examined the pile of dead soldiers, picking up various mementos and personal effects. There were a few more human skeletons carelessly scattered around (which were older and likely belonged to the dead cultists), as well as skeletons of what appeared to be baby dragons. The children of Andraste, as they had been described in that note. It was clear that the baby dragons started eating each other once the human corpses were picked clean, until only the strongest one survived.
While picking through the trampled remains of the laboratory, Harry found something that gave him pause. It was a book made of multiple stone tablets, secured together by seven metal rings. The front-facing tablet, which Harry assumed must be the cover, bore strange symbols on its face.
Incredibly careful not to break the tablets, Harry slowly turned over the cover and saw that the pages within were carved with runes.
“Can you read those?” Sirius asked, “Because I can’t.”
Harry shook his head.
“Maybe we should take this back to First Enchanter Albus,” Tonks suggested. “He collects historical artifacts. If he can’t read it, he knows how to find someone who can.”
Harry turned through the pages, scanning through the symbols for anything he might recognize. As he turned the third page, he saw a piece of parchment stuffed into the book.
Cloak of Shadows
Staff of Ancients
Stone of Resurrection
Cup of Fortune
Sword of War
Crown of Time
Amulet of Secrets
“Kind of an odd shopping list,” Harry joked. He put the parchment back into the book and stuffed the book into his bag.
“I don’t think there’s anything else in here,” said Sirius. “We’ve been down here long enough. We should get back up to the temple.”
Harry agreed, and the four of them made the long trek back to the surface.
They approached the soldiers guarding the blockade.
“Have you found anything?” asked the dark-skinned soldier.
“It was one of the dragons bred by the cult that used to live in the village,” Harry explained. “It was trapped in a cave until the Darkspawn tunneled their way in.”
“Maker’s breath!” exclaimed a sandy-haired soldier.
“But you don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Harry said, unable to stop himself from gloating a little. “We took care of it just fine.”
“The dragon is dead? You killed it?” the leader asked. “You’re certain?”
“The body is still down in the tunnels, if you want to see it for yourself,” Harry said.
The sandy-haired soldier grinned. “A dragon-that’s brilliant! Can you believe it, Thomas? I’d like to have a look at that.”
“In a moment, Finnegan,” replied the dark-skinned soldier, apparently named Thomas. His expression became more subdued with mourning as he returned his attention to Harry. “What about the missing soldiers? Was there any trace of them left, after…?”
(Mini) Audience Participation Time!
DIALOGUE WHEEL
- We found these. (Hand over soldiers’ belongings)
- (Lie) There was nothing.
--
Codex Entries Added: ONE-EYED MOODY
“Constant vigilance!”
Alastor Moody has been fighting Darkspawn for most of his life, first as a young man defending his home, then eventually as a member of the Silver Order alongside the Grey Wardens. He did not join the Wardens himself, however, until much later in life.
When what began as a routine training exercise became an ambush, Moody sacrificed himself to give the young Wardens an opportunity to escape. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived, let alone a man of his advanced years-therefore it came as quite a shock when his funeral service was interrupted by Moody himself, alive and in (mostly) one piece. But he had been tainted by Darkspawn blood, so to save his life, the Wardens put him through the Joining. He cheated death yet again and became a Grey Warden.
Moody’s considerable experience in battle and the loss of his eye has made him understandably suspicious to the point of paranoia. Only a fool would dismiss his warnings, however.
--
A/N: Do you guys prefer having Codex Entries included in the same posts as the quests, or just having a link to the main codex (like I did last time)? I'm trying to make things more organized, but it's up to you guys.