The Stolen Throne

The group moved through what might once have been a great promenade of the city. Once a palace had been carved into the face of the rock wall itself, and Katriel pictured beautiful archways and stairs leading from one gentle terrace to the next. She imagined merchants selling goods from their stalls on the colored cobblestones, with great fountains shooting columns of water in the air. Once there had been grandeur, but now there was little more than crumbling ruin and the husks of buildings so fallen apart, they could not even be approached for all the scattered rocks and collapsed floors.

The remnants of the palace now showed only as broken columns and worn holes that no doubt led into a veritable labyrinth of passages within the rock. The home of the spiders, Loghain pointed out. Indeed, as they passed through the promenade, it was easy to see that here the greatest amount of burnt webbing had collapsed from above. Great mounds of charred ash and sticky tendrils clung to everything, some of it several feet thick or worse.

As the webs had burned and collapsed, they had brought down with them the charred remains of spiders, some of them still quivering lifelessly as they lay on their backs with hairy legs splayed. There were many bones, as well, black and burnt. Most were only small shards, while others seemed to be bigger and a few were even whole. Katriel noticed something odd amid the piles and fished it out. It was a skull, vaguely human but clearly monstrous. And large. The entire promenade was all but filled with bones just like it, like a great rat’s nest of a graveyard had been spilled over the entire ruin all at once.

“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 naïveté. 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.