anticipation for what was to come at them next.
And something was coming. They could feel it.
“Perhaps we should turn back,” Rowan suggested quietly. Her voice was low and afraid, and she stared off into the distant blackness. It truly felt as if there were eyes out there, watching. Circling.
“Back to the spiders?” Maric rolled his eyes. “No, thanks.”
“We’ve no webs to burn down this time, should the spiders come again,” Loghain said with concern. He, too, stared off into the distance, and seemed less than pleased with the nothing he saw.
Katriel took out her dagger warily. “But there’s no other way. We have to continue.” The fear crawled into her stomach and settled there. She was not unaccustomed to battle—but her training had been in fighting men. She knew how to cut a throat, and how to plant her dagger in a vulnerable spot such as an armpit. She could take on an opponent far more armored than herself without fear. None of her training had prepared her to fight monsters.
Maric sensed her discomfort and put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. It was a small gesture, but still Katriel appreciated it.
They had no choice but to press forward. The number of bones strewn about slowly increased, as did general litter and the smell of earthy decay. The walls gradually became wet-looking and sticky, speckled with rot and fungus. Some of the fungus even glowed in the dark, but did so with a strange purplish tinge that unnerved them far more than it actually lit their path.
They passed an area full of old spider corpses. Some of them were easily twice the size of the creatures they had fought, old and desiccated husks that were dusty and brittle to the touch. Most of them were in pieces.
“Something ate these,” Loghain pointed out.
“Ate the spiders?” Maric made a disgusted face. “Maybe it was revenge.”
“Maybe whatever ate them doesn’t care what it eats,” Rowan remarked.
“Darkspawn,” Katriel said ominously, and then scowled when the others looked at her reproachfully. “There is no need to avoid the truth. Obviously they hunt each other.”
Rowan glanced at the rot on the walls, looking nauseated. “Should we be worried . . . about disease? The darkspawn spread some kind of sickness, don’t they?”
“They taint the land around them with their very touch,” Katriel spoke in a hushed voice. “We’re seeing it now, on the wall and everything else here. We are in their domain.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Maric said lightly. “All we need is a dragon to come along now, to really top off our day.”
Loghain snorted. “You insisted on coming down here.”
“So now it’s my fault, is it?”
“I know whose fault it
“Great!” Maric shrugged. “Just throw me at the darkspawn, then, whenever they show up. The rest of you can get a head start while they gobble me up.”
Loghain hid his amused smile. “Nice of you to offer. You have been getting a little chubby these last months. There’s more of you to eat, I’ll wager.”
“Chubby, he says.” Maric laughed lightly, looking toward Katriel. “If they ate him, they’d choke on the bile.”
“Hey, now,” Loghain complained without heat.
“There is no ‘hey, now.’ You started it.”
Rowan sighed. “You two are like such little boys sometimes, I swear.”
“I was just offering up a very reasonable—” His words were cut off as a new sound came from far ahead in the passages, a soft and unnatural rasping sound. Like many things awakening in the darkness, like many things slithering gently over the rocks. They all spun and stared ahead into the shadows, rooted to the spot.
The sound was gone as quickly as it began, and they shuddered.
“On second thought,” Maric muttered, “don’t throw me to them.”
Their weapons out and ready, they edged forward carefully. It was not long before they came to an area where much of the passage walls had collapsed, revealing caves beyond. There were more underground passages than the ones they walked in, it seemed. Everything was coated in black fungus, and the smell grew increasingly more potent, more rancid. Dead maggots littered the floor amid bones and pieces of armor.
The skeleton of a dwarf lay against the wall. He still wore a rusty breastplate and a large helmet that covered most of his skull. It seemed as if he had merely sat down to rest, or to contemplate his death in these roads so far from his home.
“What’s that?” Maric said curiously, approaching the skeleton. These were the first bones they had seen so far that actually indicated that anything other than monsters had once moved through these passages. Katriel wondered why the body would have been left undisturbed, if it had died here. There seemed to be no shortage of creatures in these parts willing to feed on corpses. Or that was her assumption.
“Be careful,” Katriel warned him. “The Veil is thin in places like this, and it could attack you.” Wherever there had been a great deal of death the Veil became thin, allowing spirits and demons to cross over from their realm. They hungrily possessed anything alive, or that had once been alive. This was where tales of walking corpses and skeletons had come from, spirits driven mad to find themselves in a body devoid of the life they craved. She had never seen one herself, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Maric slowed his approach and poked the skeleton’s helmet carefully, and exhaled in relief as it did nothing. Then, his eyes squinted curiously as he noticed something strange. He moved to look where the dwarf’s right hand
