Gravity

Chapter 1: The Hero

Gravity

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She was born to die. Yes, that much was clear now.

Blood drenched her. It soaked through her chainmail and straps and undergarments, her skin hot and prickly against the foulness of it. Starfang felt heavy in her numb fingers, her left arm and shield was almost too heavy to lift. Pain laced across her waist where a Hurlock Alpha's sword had caught her side. Liquid fire burned her throat, and darkness swam across her vision with the threat of unconsciousness. Gore and the stench of bodily fluids made her nose wrinkle, the sharp tang the only thing keeping her in the present. Even with all her enchantments and the spells Wynne flooded into her veins, it wasn't enough to completely fight away the fatigue that came from hours upon hours of gruelling fighting.

Yet still it wasn't over. The mass of hulking flesh and darkness and nightmares still moved. It rumbled like a storm regathering itself for one last blast of lightning and destruction. The tainted dragon-god reared its ugly head at her. When its beady, insane eyes roamed deliriously across the roof of Fort Drakon, she still shivered as a coldness settled on her heart. Such evil and malice, unlike anything she'd ever imagined in her wildest dreams. It all conveyed itself with one look to impress upon her mind. The Archdemon had truly earned its name. Even with a wing membrane torn and almost half of its chest carved open from several ballista wounds, the dragon still fought on to live. Its gaze fell on her, mocking her pathetic attempts to slay its vile disease, even as it lay amongst the corpses of all its soldiers it had summoned in a bid to protect itself. With that glare, it was daring her to come at it again, the whispers it promised at the edge of her mind spoke of a thousand tortures and torments. Just try, it seemed to say, you are incapable.

But it was wrong. She was Elaine Cousland, and she was going to put her sword right through its bloody eye – even if she had to die right along with it.

Even that revelation didn't bother her. Never was she meant to survive that terrible night of fire and grief; what right had she to live where all those she loved had perished? Or in Ostagar, why had the King died, only for her to survive? Or the dozens of soldiers and civilians she had ran past on her way here, to this moment, the ones who had given their lives on her orders to fight an evil they believed wholeheartedly she could defeat. All who she had lost on this terrible, exhausting journey, all of them had more right to live than she. So dying was not a fear for her, it had simply been a delayed inevitability.

Smoke from the city below billowed up even to the top of the tower where they all lay. It turned the sky ashen, the lip of the horizon streaked with blood red from the fires. An echo of despair, a symphony of terror and horror distant met her ears. Each cry in this long night reminded her of how she was so close to failing them all. If this did not end now, then their sacrifices would've been worth nothing. It had all come to this moment: the Blight, the Darkspawn Horde filled with their taint ready to spill the poisonous seed onto the world, with the corrupted Old Dragon God at their head, the tongue of an older world baying for the blood of the new. Madness and filth lay in their wake, a world gone mad, and only the few still standing on this very roof had the chance to stop it before Ferelden fell, and the Blight moved on to consume the world.

Her companions were sprawled across the roof, each as compromised as she felt. Sten struggled to even get to his hands and knees, the burns covering half of his body causing the Qunari to emit the closest thing to a pained cry she had ever heard from him. Wynne crouched beside him, her hands aglow as she tried to ease his wounds just enough, her face haggard from straining herself so hard. Alistair, sweet kind Alistair, was struggling to stand straight. The Archdemon had knocked him straight across the roof when he'd attempted to go for the head. The panic she had felt on seeing her dearest friend's head crack against the brickwork had been so much she had almost abandoned the fight to go to him. So she had gone to the ballista's and fired all of them on the Archdemon, and watched with sick satisfaction as the projectiles had crushed bones and sundered pulpy flesh.