“This must be what they eat,” Katriel said quietly.
“They eat darkspawn?” Maric asked, looking at the skull uncertainly.
There was no answer to give. None of them had ever seen a darkspawn before, and until they saw the bones, they had never seen anything that might have suggested the tales of the old wars, of times when the darkspawn had spilled onto the surface world in great events called Blights, might actually be true. But there they were.
“Those bones could be anything,” Rowan suggested.
Nobody could answer. If those bones didn’t belong to darkspawn, then they belonged to something else just as monstrous, something equally unknown.
They trudged through the soot and bones, sometimes wading through piles up to their hips in order to keep going. They then climbed over a large region so choked with piles of rubble, there was no telling what sorts of buildings might once have been there. Not a single wall or column remained upright. It was if the entire area had been leveled by some great event, or maybe just had not been built as well as the rest of the city to begin with.
“These could be the slums,” Katriel remarked as they climbed. “All the thaigs were supposed to have them, areas where the casteless lived. There are stories that when the noble houses pulled out of the Deep Roads, they actually left the casteless behind. Forgot them.” She spread her arms to indicate the crumbled stones around them. “One day the casteless came out of their slums only to find everyone else gone. An empty city with no one left to protect them from the darkspawn.”
Maric shuddered. “Surely they wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Katriel asked him sharply. “Every society has its lowest of the low. Do you think it would be so different in human society? Do you think anyone would go out of their way to ensure that the elves in the alienages were safe if a crisis came to the city?”
Maric seemed taken aback. “I would.”
The anger dissolved in her immediately, and she chuckled, shaking her head. Well, of course Maric would. And coming from him, one could almost believe it was true. She wondered if he would be different once years of power had worn on him, chipped away at his naivete. Would he still be the same man?
“It’s said some of the casteless tried to run,” she continued, “tried to reach Orzammar on their own. But they couldn’t run fast enough. The rest of them simply . . . waited for the end.”
“Really?” Rowan snorted with derision. “And who would have survived to carry that tale, then?”
Katriel shrugged, unfazed. “Not all of them died, perhaps. Some of those who fled must have reached Orzammar. The rest perhaps lie under our feet even now.”
“We’ve heard enough stories,” Loghain snapped, though even he looked disturbed. Katriel shot him an annoyed glance but remained silent. She wasn’t trying to frighten anyone; these things actually happened here, and there was no point in pretending that they didn’t. But she wasn’t about to press the idea.
None of them spoke after that. The thought that they were climbing over the bodies of dwarves seemed worse, somehow, than dead spiders and darkspawn. Not fled but left behind to die, their screams still echoing in the caves centuries later.
It seemed like hours before they finally found the way out of the thaig. A great set of metal doors, over forty feet high, led into the rock face. Unlike the doors they had encountered at the cave entrance up on the surface, these had not fallen through age and rust but had been burst inward by some force powerful enough to buckle metal many feet thick. Mostly they lay in rusted pieces, having long ago admitted whatever invader had come to decimate what the dwarves had left behind.
Beyond it lay only shadows.
“How do we know this is the way to Gwaren?” Loghain asked.
Maric turned to Katriel. “Is there anything you can do?” he asked her.
“I can try,” she said hesitantly.
Kneeling with her torch and studying the various runes nearby for over an hour, she declared most of them scoured beyond reading. Much of the rock surface had been cracked or chipped off through whatever violent event had knocked the fortress doors inward, and try though she might, Katriel could not find a single rune that she recognized.
“I don’t know where this passage leads,” she confessed, “or if there are even directions.” She felt frustrated. It was her advice that had led them down into the Deep Roads, and they were counting on her to guide them. But it seemed increasingly likely that they would die down there, perish in the darkness with so much dirt and rock pressing down over their heads, and that made it so much worse.
“Wonderful,” Rowan swore under her breath.
Maric looked down at the rubble strewn on the ground, and after a moment’s hesitation reached down to pick something up. The others turned, surprised to see him holding an axe. It was large, with a wickedly curved blade and a spike on the reverse end to prove that it had never been meant for any tree. The more interesting aspect, however, was its primitive make. This was made by no dwarven smith; it was a rusted piece of black metal, crudely attached to its long handle and heavy enough that Maric needed both hands even to pick it up.
As Maric stared at Loghain grimly, the axe head finally fell off the handle and landed back on the floor with a loud thud. The echoes rang throughout the cavern, and almost seemed to be answered by distant clicking back in the ruins.
“Let’s go,” Loghain murmured.
Several hours were spent cautiously traveling down this new branch of the Deep Roads. There was still webbing, and some of it was strewn across the passages waiting to ensnare them. These they needed to burn through, but Loghain remarked that there seemed to be far less of it than before.
Instead, it seemed as if the passages were darker, if that were possible. The torches shone less brightly, and the shadows closed in on them as if they resented the presence of travelers. Even the stone of the walls seemed tainted, somehow. There was a feeling of oppression that made it difficult to breathe, and all of them waited in
