Sisters of Tevinter

Pack Mentality

           Cassandra laid a hand on her shield. "Solas?"

            The mage did not answer. He looked pale in the dark, snow fell and gathered on his clothes and eyelashes as he gazed down the tunnel of the canyon. "...They're coming. I sense..." 

            Varric kicked a booted foot into the fire, a flaming bough flipped upward for him to grab like a torch. Light flickered in ghostly red shadows along the stone. It glimmered in the blank, deadened spheres that approached from the blackness. Growling rumbled along the rocks like a chorus of low thunder. "Uh oh." 

            A pack of slavering wolves paced out of the darkness, their tongues lolling, caked in dry, flaking red. There were seven of them, each the size of a small horse. They looked... wrong. Their shoulders jerked and moved out of rhythm with their haunches, as if the joints didn't fit right. Their lifeless eyes seethed with pearlescent light, tinged slightly with shades of sickly green, as if infected. 

             Jor rose slowly, feeling ill. Dim green light pulsed through the leather of her gloves. "These aren't wolves." 

             "They were," Solas hissed, cracking his staff against the wall of stone at his side, sending up a shower of blue sparks.  The wolves moved. The largest gave a snarling bark and leapt at the mage, loose muscles fluid with the predator's unnatural strength. Solas struck it aside with the wood of his staff and it skidded to the stones with a heart wrenching yelp, embers sizzling and bursting into flame along its side. 

              One lunged for Varric, barking madly. Jor in a panic, flung one of her dirks with haphazard force. It buried itself up to an inch in matted fur and hide, the wolf did not flinch. It didn't even bleed. Varric gave a shout as gleaming fangs snapped at his arm, twisting so that they crunched down on thick oak branch, fire licking at its ears. Cassandra roared a battle cry to rival the howling and slammed her shield into the wolf's underbelly, flinging it away from the rogue dwarf with the crunch of bone. 

                 Jor, left with only one blade, backed along the canyon wall as the other five diverged in a blur of shadow and teeth. One came for her, weight slamming her to the ground, ivory snapping frantically at her face. Jor bellowed, bracing her arms against the wolf's scrabbling, rotting chest, gloved fingers digging into the side of its muzzle, just barely keeping it from taking out her eye. Two made for Cassandra, their barks echoing off the stone. Varric kicked another torch up into his other hand, driving the first up through the roof of a canine's maw as it leaped at Cassandra's back. Foul black ichor splattered the stone and the rogue's face. Solas shouted an incantation, bracing his fingertips against his brow as a blast of pure silver radiance rolled out from him like a wave, slamming the wolf he'd set ablaze and two others away into the canyon walls. One did not get back up. 

                  Jor drove her plated knee into her attacker's underbelly, snapping her shoulders to one side and slamming the snarling mass of teeth into a boulder. Ichor drenched her face as the wolf snapped, kicking and struggling with desperate howls of bloodlust. Again, she drove the creature's head into the unforgiving embrace of rock, her heart thundering in her ears. She was screaming, but she couldn't hear herself over the blood rushing through her brain. 

                  Cassandra drove her sword deep into the haunches of one of the others, its hind leg hung from barely a sinew as it scrabbled in the blackened snow. The Seeker plunged her blade into the crown of its skull and yanked it free. The wolf fell still. Yet another jumped over the carcass, howling with rage. 

                   Varric kicked aside his own wolf, fending it off with the arcing fire of his torch as it paced and snarled. Solas struck the butt of his staff at his feet and a bolt of lightning fell from heaven to reduce the dog to ash.