~9:34, Fort Drakon in Denerim
Once upon a time and place, specifically a stone tower in the midst of Lake Calenhad in the second decade of the Dragon Age, a red-haired elven mage looked at the stars through a telescope she was not supposed to be using (not at that hour) and said something to Emma about the wheel of the sky.
She meant the stars. She meant envies in the spirits of the Fade. She meant exactly what she said,
“Everything moves in circles, everything returns. Eternally.”
She was not wrong. But she was not talking about a needle skating over Claudia Black’s seventeen thousand lines recorded in a studio in 2008, rotating in the chrome of a Seagate Barracuda since the winter it was installed.
This wheel was the size of a beating heart. Instead of beating, it spun at 7,200 revolutions per minute. When the Calenhad docks loaded, it’s arm reached in rhythm with the read head, seeking. When the Fade opened, something physical ticked across the disk to find it.
The player opens a monolithic black and aluminum case. There are fingerprints from a RAM upgrade, a replacement fan, a graphics card that nearly didn’t fit. The machine has been many machines. It has always been this machine. But save files have not moved, until now.
There is latency in the turn of the wheel.
An OCZ Vertex 2 sits on the desk in an antistatic bag. It has 120 gigabytes and no moving parts, no platters, no seek time. No arm traveling a magnetic surface seeking truth.
The player thinks: the load times are going to be so much better. The Seagate comes out. The OCZ goes in with four screws, a SATA cable, and a molex power connector. The player boots the machine and the Vertex accesses data simultaneously and all at once, through golden threads strung at every point.
Here is what the executable would know, if knowing were a thing it did: It was written for a universe with phosphor tubes and magnetic storage. It allocates memory in 32-bit space, which means it can only see two gigabytes of RAM at once, the way a person standing in a valley can only see as far as the ridge. This was fine in 2009, when the ridge was the horizon.
The executable couldn’t know it is patched. Not by BioWare or EA, who moved on to other universes on new deadlines. This gift comes from a benevolent stranger working with love. They adjust the header and open the executable’s eye. It sees four gigabytes instead of two.
The BIOS finds the new drive in approximately no time at all. There is no arm to seek, no wheel to come around. The wheel has stilled. The universe stopped spinning. The player opens the game and it loads in the time it takes to exhale.
The player opens the second-to-last save, preparing to play the expansion. The un-chosen save ended tragically at Fort Drakon. It exists in the same directory as this one, megabytes in a folder, stamped with the time of the player’s last touch.
Different choices are made in a menu. Now the Archdemon is about to die and both Wardens will walk away from it. The maps load quickly, ready to begin again. The killing blow lands. Spellweaver punches through black scales and rotten flesh and sinks deep. Bone’s resistance breaks down under ringing song…
The old Old God’s voice vibrated from Urthemiel’s skull and jolted into Emma’s arm through the blade. The Archdemon cascaded out and through her in rings of expulsion. She felt herself blown back and watched the sky blur over her. The cobblestones of Fort Drakon’s roof rose to meet her with the indifferent commitment of gravity.
She didn’t feel it when she landed.
Magic floods through everything. The Fade opens in its yellow organic dank, crumbling at the edges against a lattice of glowing green on dark glass. The world outside moved under the surface, almost but not quite still. Emma tried to sit up.
Nothing happens.
“Am I dead?”
“Not for long.”
The spirit of Valor flickered before her with his armored silhouette shifting from templar plate to leathers. It’s forge-light haloed him, just as it had in the Harrowing’s arena, present visually without occupying space.
“How long?”
“Less than you imagine. I have taken the opportunity to speak to you.” Valor paused to read her. “Last I saw you, you were with another.”
“Alistair is probably losing his mind.” Emma closed her eyes. There was a dark pulse behind them. “Let’s make this quick.”
“A fair request,” Valor tilted its head.
“The Archdemon—”
“Is destroyed.” It said it with satisfaction. “Gone. And there is something else I should explain to you.” Valor began.
“The ritual,” Emma was eager to know.
“The ritual.” It paused. “Is the culmination of something difficult to explain to a mortal, who experiences time as a single thread.”
Emma waited. It had not needed prompting previously. Now it was searching for a form that would fit.
“You have died.” it said finally. “The thread was cut and tied until I intervened.”
“How?”
“The word does not survive translation. Roughly: the ritual that saves your life needs the correct arrangement of events. Like a blow to an enemy, I ensured those events struck.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Someone willed you to try again.”
“That someone isn’t you?”
“It is. There is also another whose face I cannot see.”
“They willed,” Emma repeated flatly. “Or do they want to see what happens next?”
“I do not know. The distinction matters more to you than to me.”
Emma thought about that for a moment. She thought about Areli, who apparently never got a second version. Duncan, and Jory, and Daveth. About how many times she had been the arrangement of events that saved someone else.
“You have met spirits and learned what they knew. Secrets of life and death. The way of the warrior inside magic. You did not always know you were doing so.”
“I suspected,” she said.
“I want to teach you to be harder to kill.”
“There it is. The lesson.” Emma folded her arms and frowned. “Learning technique from a random spirit is one thing. This is strange. I’ve known you too long.”
“You should consider it nonetheless.” The spirit’s leather pauldrons hardened back to resemble to steel. Emma sighed.
“I’ll consider it,” she said. He inclined his head, satisfied. The forge-light brightened briefly around him.
“That is enough. Return.”
She materialized at his left, which was where Emma would have been, had they not been blasted apart. The shape resolved and he realized: Not a threat. It was Morrigan.
He almost didn’t process the wings. She was actually descending from the sky, on a span of raven’s wings longer than the height of a man. They folded against her shoulders like they belonged there, then furled into shadow as the witch’s boots touched the ground.
She held Emma’s body.
“The ritual completed,” Morrigan said, without urgency. “She has, quite incidentally, succumbed to her injuries. There remains time to remedy that.”
“Give her to me,” Alistair demanded. She did, with a deliberate gentleness distinct from one who was naturally so. It felt completely at odds with every version of her he’d ever known.
“How much time?” He asked as he took the weight of Emma from her.
“More than you imagine,” Morrigan said, impatiently. “Her body is intact.”
He was walking fast, not quite running. Running would mean he thought Morrigan was wrong, and he needed her to be right. He couldn’t look at Emma’s face. He was sidestepping the dead and injured, watching the way forward.
“It almost seems like you care,” he said. He didn’t mean it as an accusation, but as the closest thing he had to thank you. He looked back for a response. Morrigan became a scatter of black feathers, and then nothing, already gone.
“There will more glorious battles ahead.”
The air hit her first, smoke and copper smell of a city under siege. Pain followed. A lot of pain.
“Please,” she heard Alistair’s voice, close and stripped raw. And footsteps, a few people, fast, non-military, arriving in time to witness their patient stop being dead. Their knees dropping. Someone shouting. No. Not just someone. Many, in celebration. Thousands cheering and screaming.
Emma groaned. Her eyes snapped open and the sky above Denerim swam into focus. Cobblestones burned and adhered with slimy ichor to her back. Her fingers found Spellweaver still in her hand, surprisingly.
“Hi,” said other Warden, near-breathlessly. Blood dripped from underneath his helmet. “Your timing is terrible.”
“What’s happening?”
“What’s—” He stopped. “The darkspawn are—” He looked up briefly, looked back at her. “They’re retreating. All of them. Everywhere. People are noticing.”
Emma could hear the grit of their awful claws on the stone, boots chasing, arrows piercing their backs on the retreat.
“It worked,” Alistair chuckled carefully, like he wasn’t entirely sure of it yet. “Morrigan found you. But she’s—she’s gone. It was—”
The medic asked something technical and Emma answered it. Vibrations tilted toward them. Alistair repositioned to face the edge of the movement, covering them from view, for just a minute. He settled back onto his heels, hands resting on his knees, staring at her.
Emma lay on the cobblestones below Fort Drakon with the body of the Archdemon on the tower above her and the city of Denerim in the process of realizing it had survived, and she thought about what Valor had said. Someone willed her to try again.
She looked back. He was still watching her, steadily wrecked, his armor proving that he had done exactly what he’d always done: Stood in front of everything that tried to reach her.
“Alistair,” she said.
“Still here,” he said, removing his helmet. He was bruised and bleeding above his eyebrow, looking at her with intensity. The crowd was getting louder.
“We did it.”
Someone had recognized the armor, or the staff, or the dead god nearby. People pointed, looking their way. Recognizing them. Emma put her hand on the cobblestones and pushed herself upright. The medic made a concerned noise.
“Are you alright?” Alistair said.
“No,” Emma said. “But we’re doing this anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”
He pulled her up.