Dragon Age Inquisition: Their Wonderful Abnormality

For The World

 Terrible flames licked the sky. Their tongues of dreadful gold whipping up the darkness, sending buildings down in clouds of floating embers and ash, roaring and groaning. The world was turmoil. A sanity-gnawing havoc of wailing, howling, people running, stumbling and bleeding. Man and horse screamed alike. Man and horse died alike. The sky was haunted by a creature that screamed, shaking the world. A dragon.

 So this is what death sounds like, the Commander thought as the sickeningly warm wind dried the sweat on his face. His sword dripping, his hair clinging to his forehead, his chest heaving. The order of retreat had been sent in panicked cries, men ran to the wooden doors for the safety of the fortress but the Commander couldn’t move. He couldn’t.

 Haven was falling prey to an army and a dragon and he was stuck to the spot. Watching. Watching for her.

 He had been told not to trust her. He had been warned and advised, listened in on stories, rumours and whispers and there was a line drawn between them. It was for the best. It was for their safety.

 Yet move now, leave her out there, he simply could not.

“Elsa!”

His voice was lapped up by the chaos hungrily, the splintering of wood in fire and the distant rumble of destruction turned his cry into the tiniest of whispers. There was a strange emptiness in the upper courtyard he looked over, an unusual pause in the havoc and the only movement seemed to be the whirling of the sky and the tormenting dance of the fires. Only bodies and blood.

 There was a screech and a shadow from the sky swooped low, a split-second of a piercing note that cut through him before there came a bone-shattering thud and the Commander was thrown off balance, ears ringing, heart hammering. The dragon had struck. The stone wall skirting the upper courtyard lay scattered across the cobbles in burning rubble and scorched stone. Everything reeled and when he next looked, struggling to stand on ground that churned beneath his boots, it hissed gently in its last moment of stillness.

 An in-breath, ragged and laboured and an outbreath, long and shaky… and then it happened. Elsa Trevelyan leaped over the scorched rubble, hair flailing and daggers drawn red. Her long legs quickly found purchase among the blacked rubble and she leapt nimbly down into the courtyard, landing in a cat-like stance just metres away from where the flaming boulder had struck. She looked eerily beautiful, all in blacks and silvers, her deep crimson hair ablaze and there she waited. Her leather coat tails flickered behind her like a fire of her very own.

She was watching something. Waiting.

Although she was far below him, Cullen could see the steady dripping of dark blood from her arm splash into a steadily growing pool beside her feet. The Commander could have called, ran down to get her but instead he waited with her, his gaze following her own. Her dagger glinted in the firelight as she readied them. What was she doing?

 A scream. A scream so twisted it was like no noise the Commander had ever heard before and dark shivers ran through his bones. In a scramble of monstrous blood-lust  they came, clawing through the rubble of the ruined wall like wounded animals, screeching, howling. What she had been waiting for. What once were men were now creatures, flesh mutated grotesquely around the crystallising poison rooted in their skin. Only Red Lyrium could do this to a man. Only Red Lyrium could turn a man into his own walking nightmares. Elsa stood her ground.

 “Elsa!”

She did not flinch. She only watched as the Templars followed their tormented creatures, swords drawn.

 “Elsa, run.”

 She did not waver. Still crouched she watched them near, terrible howls of agony their only voice.