Ruined Temple, Haven (Urn of Sacred Ashes)

Death Economy

The corridor had been pretending to be a chapel annex. A place of worship. A place where people quietly disappeared.

Emma noticed the carved panels first. Circular, hypnotic patterns that read as decoration until they didn’t, until you’d been looking at them for too long. She tracked the arches, the way they broke sightlines just enough to be a problem. Torchlight split the room into warm gold on one side and sickly blue shadow on the other.

Leliana was a step ahead. Not far. Just enough to clear the archway first, eyes already moving, taking in the table, the books, the patterns worked into the walls.

Emma was mapping exits and somewhere in that accounting, she had missed Leliana. Who was two body lengths ahead of the tank.

Fortunately, the ambush came from behind.

Alistair had already half-turned, shield coming up on instinct, catching the first rush where it should have been weakest. Steel rang, boots scraped, his opening strike settled into it cleanly. The cultists had expected his back. They got his blade in their face.

Then the sides filled.

“Back—” Alistair warned.

The alcove off the left arch produced more of them, and the corridor revealed what it had always been: a kill box dressed in pointed arches and warm stone. She’d read the room wrong. They were already inside the problem.

Too many bodies, too fast. The doorway they’d just come through narrowed into a choke point, and suddenly everyone was in it at once.

There was a mage at the back of the new group.

Cold hit everywhere at once. Frost crawled up armor, found the gaps, sealed into joints. Leliana’s arm jerked mid-motion and stopped. Alistair’s armor cracked and ground to a stop. The walls caught the spell and held it, amplifying rather than dissipating.

Everything stilled.

Everything except Emma and her enemies.

Every step back put someone into someone else, and the arches on either side meant there was no diagonal, no flank, nothing to step into that wasn’t already occupied by stone or cultist or frozen party member.

She was stuck.

A cone of flame flared out from her raised staff, catching bodies at arm’s length, licking across armor and cloth alike. Too close, too wide. She knew. She did it anyway.

The frost cracked off all of them. Her people moved again. Badly, but moving.

Morrigan’s position told her what it needed to: exposed, already targeted, going down. Emma pulled a force field over her. Light folded around Morrigan in a hard, shimmering shell.

Safe. Stationary. Useless.

The other mage was retreating down the open corridor, the one she’d almost read as an exit, putting distance between himself and the choke, drawing them out, keeping pressure on the line.

Her bomb hooked into him mid-stride, locked, timed.

Leliana broke free from the frost with the momentum of someone interrupted mid-commitment, body finishing the thought without her. She didn’t know about the bomb. She went straight after that mage.

“No—” Emma said something. It didn’t help.

The explosion caught the reaver, the two behind him, and Leliana as she darted past.

Emma saw it happen, she saw Leliana drop, but there was no time to regret it. There was already a next problem.

The reaver now between her and any sane line of retreat, and the four melee fighters behind that, and Alistair managing the rear press under at least one hex she could see in the way he was moving wrong.

The reaver had strong opinions about taking fire. Emma cast it anyway.

Someone went down behind her. She didn’t look, just felt her mana correct itself.

Alistair’s hand caught her shoulder, finally free of the melee, shoving past a staggered attacker to put himself between her and the reaver. His shield came up just in time. The impact shuddered through him hard enough that she felt it through the contact.

“Stay—down—!” he prayed at the man, beating on him.

Behind her, she heard a soft crack, felt air rushing back into the space where Morrigan’s barrier dropped. A pulse of force followed. Some of their enemies succumbed to her magic, locking, stuttering, freezing in place.

But the mage had begun another cast. Emma reached, not for the spell, but for him. She caught the thread of it, the living part, and pulled. It resisted. Then broke. Power came back thin and unpleasant.

She continued with a lyrium potion. It burned going down. A cultist made a decision that cost him. Emma closed the gap. Ticks of correction, accumulating. She waited for the arithmetic to catch up.

Her electricity crossed the reaver. It staggered. Alistair had cleared the rear by then, come back through the melee carrying everything that had hit him while hexed, and peeled the reaver off Morrigan. Emma’s bolt finished it.

Two left in melee. Bleeding, staggered, still trying.

Morrigan, back up and conducting herself with a furious dignity, put paralysis on the retreating mage. Emma closed it with an arcane bolt.

Alistair and Morrigan handled the last two. Emma was already with Leliana.

Emma’s regeneration had been running on an unconscious body. She pressed her hands to Leliana’s temples and knitted what hadn’t closed on its own. Cracked skull. That regen had done useful work. The bomb had done more.

Alistair sagged slightly where he stood, breath rough, hexes still clinging. He shook it off with a cold chime of negation.

“She going to be all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He took a breath and cleansed everything, hexes lifting across all of them like cobwebs dissolving in heat, and rolled his shoulders.

Emma stayed where she’d stopped, listening for the absence of enemies. Morrigan was examining a scorch mark on her robes. Emma’s work, identifiable by its radius.

Alistair looked back at Emma, his eyes already making apologies for her.

She let that stand.