"Go! I'll cover you!" I shouted, as the towering demon-spider, at least five times the height of a man, that was the current form of the demon Nightmare confidently advanced towards us.
"No, you were right!" Loghain protested. "The Wardens made this mistake! A Warden must-"
I bit off my immediate reply, almost choking to death on the temptation to accept his offer. The former Teryn Loghain, now a Grey Warden, had once almost doomed Thedas to death at the hands of the Fifth Blight when he'd chosen the middle of a Maker-be-damned war against the darkspawn to betray and murder his king and try to steal a throne. He'd done everything he could to stop the Hero of Ferelden from defeating that Blight anyway in his stubborn refusal to believe it was actually a Blight, he'd only allowed himself to be drafted Grey Warden at the very end of that mess as an alternative to being executed, and he'd labored away in obscurity and shadows ever since until he'd joined the Inquisitor and myself on a mission to stop this be-damned king demon from corrupting all the surviving Grey Wardens with blood magic. More than almost any other man in Thedas, Loghain mac Tir could fairly be called a perennial screw-up and human disaster area who'd brought ruin to practically everything he touched, and who would entirely deserve to die even just to partially make up for his sins.
However-
"A Warden must help them rebuild!" I gasped out, knowing that with all of the senior Grey Wardens who had already died or been irreversibly tainted by Tevinter-spawned madness the former marshal of Ferelden was one of the very few Grey Wardens left with the command experience and leadership skills to have any hope of rebuilding the order. Especially with the current crisis facing all of Thedas. I turned and snarled at the demon Nightmare, the otherworldly partner of the undying Tevinter lord who'd caused this entire mess and the sole thing keeping the majority of his demon army yoked to his will. "That's your job! Corypheus is mine!"
"Hawke-" Inquisitor Lavellan sighed softly, sadly, as our eyes met and we nodded to each other. Both of us knew the weight of too many decisions, of always being the right person in the right place at the wrong time, of being responsible for everyone... just as we both knew which one of us had to carry on the fight elsewhere and which one of us was going to end their fight today. I felt all the weight, all the weariness, leave my shoulders and leave behind nothing but a strange peace as I reached out to clasp the leader of Thedas on her shoulder and give her a firm grip, an acknowledgement, a wordless reassurance that she would be the one to succeed where I had failed.
"Say goodbye to Varric for me." I quietly requested, and she gave a slight nod. And then I turned away again and readied my greatsword, charging out to meet the demon's rush and forcing it to turn and defend against me, allowing the other two their chance to run past it and into the portal that would let them escape-
"Failure of a man." the Nightmare sneered as its counterblow hammered me to my knees. "Failure of a Champion. And failure even in this."
I grinned back at it through bloody teeth as I saw the silhouettes of my two comrades leap into the portal back to the material realm and it closed behind them. "Really? Looks like a success to me!" I pretended to gather my strength for a mighty shove, then deliberately went limp and rolled away and under its belly as the Nightmare slightly overbalanced against my lack of resistance. I converted my roll into a kneeling, rising slash into that very same underbelly as the giant spider roared in pain.
"Stay or flee, the end is the same! Doom at either my hands or his!"
The spider lifted a tree-trunk of a leg and smashed it down, splintering the stone on which I was no longer standing.
"You know she's going to close that rift." I mocked it. "You'll be cut off from Corypheus, from Thedas, from all the demons he's summoned there. He won't be able to control them, and that entire part of his plans will fail. And even if you get back in contact with him later-"
"You will not be here to see it." the Nightmare snarled at me as I resumed my stance and stared at it over a gap of a dozen paces, slowly circling around...
"Tell me something I don't know." I eye-rolled.
"You will not die today." it replied levelly.
"... all right, that is a surprise." I raised my eyebrows. "But not a welcome one, I'm sure! Up for a spot of torture, then?"
"Do you know what your greatest fear is, Champion?" it mocked me.
"I damn well should, seeing as how you've been reciting our fears to all of us throughout the entire trip here!"
"Oh, mortals are so deliciously full of fears, all of you. Great fears, trivial fears, large and small I know them all." the Nightmare gloated. "But at this particular instant two fears rise the greatest in your mind, and your death is neither of them. At this moment you welcome your end, not fear it, for it represents a final end to your pain."
"You said two fears," I tried to draw it out, reflexively continuing the conversation as I had so many many times before. After all, the longer you kept them talking, the less you kept them fighting. And seeing as how we'd already discussed that one of my fears is that it would take its own sweet time killing me-
"And you fear never seeing your friends again." it finished.
"Considering how many of them are already dead, you're going to have a tricky time arranging for that." I said. "Even in this Maker-damned dream realm I'll die eventually after you finish with me. And then at least-"
"Such a small imagination for such a small being." the Nightmare laughed. "There are many, many realms beyond your little world of Thedas and the Fade, little man. Even I have never seen them. Even I am a tiny thing basking on the shore of a great eternal ocean, when considered against the scope of all reality. But you are less than a tiny thing, you insignificant little mayfly speck. How will you fare, I wonder, if I cast you into the depths that lay beyond even the Fade, beyond even my knowing? What will await you there? It will be a puzzle I will never solve, that I can only wonder at." it continued calmly, as my blood chilled further and further. "But one thing will be certain; whatever awaits you out there, you will never see anyone you loved ever again. Not even in your hoped-for afterlife."
"Dear Andraste." I involuntarily gasped, paralyzed with shock at the revelations I had just-
"Ahhhhhhh, there we are!" the Nightmare's hollow laughter filled the entire world. "That moment when all defiance is lost, when all heroism eventually fails! That I could bring you to this state before I banished you is revenge enough, even with all that you have cost me!"
"Well, at least never seeing anyone in Thedas ever again means I'll be rid of you too, you overgrown carrion-feeder!" I mocked it. "And that'll be enough to make up for all the rest!"
"Insolent little- Begone!" the demon shouted petulantly, and with a primal shout and a burst of power that taxed it to its very bones I was catapulted away from it, flying helplessly away with the breath knocked from my body as if by the club of a giant. I rocketed away from the Nightmare, away from the rocky platform drifting in the Fade that we'd been fighting on, away from even the distant sight of the Black City that was always visible from anywhere in the-
And as everything turned to silver, I blacked out.
Fire!
I was lying facedown on a strange warm floor, made of some odd substance that felt like carved horn, only wet. But that wasn't what had brought me snapping awake, the sulfurous stench in my nostrils was. I weakly scrambled to my knees, then my feet, feeling oddly dizzy and weak-
A searching glance around the room brought me no answers. I was in a dimly-lit space, a large oval room with a rounded vaulting roof, and a wide shelf running around the perimeter of three-fourths of the room halfway between the floor and the ceiling. The architecture was like nothing I'd ever seen before - parts of it looked alive, and all of it was built to odd angles and rounded corners with menacing spikes, out of materials that were neither stone nor wood nor metal or anything else I could identify. This was certainly no work of men or elves or dwarves, or even qunari. The Nightmare had promised to cast me into realms unknown and beyond the world or even the Fade, and it certainly had-
The floor rocked side to side beneath my feet, almost sending me scrambling, as a muffled inhuman roar sounded from somewhere outside the room. Even after the pitching subsided, now that I was alerted to it faint tremors of movement came to my feet, and a- through a small gap torn in one wall I could see clouds rushing past outside, or billows of smoke. And with that clue all the subliminal impressions came together for me- we were moving, the entire structure. I wasn't in a room, but a compartment. This was a ship of some kind, although certainly not sailing on any water I was familiar with-
I stepped carefully towards the opening torn in the wall - the bulkhead - noting with absent horror the corpse of a strange purple tentacle-faced demon of some kind, its bluish-purple ichor staining the deck. A glimpse outside brought me no sight of land or water, just billowing gray smoke-clouds that this skyship was somehow flying over, with a distant angry red glow coming through from beneath the clouds as if we were flying over a volcanic region-
I shook my head and deliberately drew a deep breath into my lungs, trying my best to shake off this damnable weariness and weakness. And yes, I'd been fighting a pitched battle for the past several hours, then lost a fight to a demon lord and been tossed into what sounded like another universe entirely, and been beat all to hell throughout, but I shouldn't be this weak-
First things first. I was still wearing my armor, but all my weapons and equipment were gone. There were empty black pods, made of the strange alien material, evenly spaced all around the rim of most of the room - a broken-open one, apparently jarred open by whatever impacts had been striking this vessel, stood right behind where I'd woken up to tell me that I had been in one of these pods but had been freed by that impact. A quick search of the room revealed that all the other pods were empty, some strange carved gray tablets on a nearby workbench I couldn't even begin to understand, several bottles of what I hoped were healing potions in a nearby chest, and several more corpses like the purple demon I'd just stepped over. There'd been a battle fought in this ship very recently - one that was still ongoing if the occasional distant sounds I could hear and thudding impacts against the hull I could sense were telling me the truth - and several dropped weapons littering the floor from that battle. I scooped up the serviceable-looking steel greatsword as the weapon I was most familiar with, idly noting that it looked so ordinary in its construction that I could have bought its twin from any blacksmith in the marketplace, and hoped that its familiarity meant I would find other familiar things here too.
"Right." I spoke aloud, comforting myself with the sound of my own voice. "If this is a ship, hopefully it'll have lifeboats. And if anybody's still alive, they'll be rushing for them. So, follow the noise-" I turned towards the room's only door and, bared blade in hand, set out. "I wonder who'll try to kill me first, the crew or the boarders?" I sardonically mused.
Although this place felt solid in the way that the material realm did, not having any of the subliminal sense of being in a dream that being in the Fade always possessed, the very next room made me feel like I was still stuck in a mad dream. The next room looked like some insane mage had been using it for a dissection laboratory - it disturbingly reminded me of things I'd seen in Quentin's lair - but I almost jumped out of my skin when the one vivisected corpse laying strapped to the surgical chair began moving and talking to me in my head.
"Help us! We are trapped!" the disembodied voice called.
"What in the Maker are you?" I demanded, staring at the corpse of a male elf the top of whose skull had been cut off just above the ears, and whose exposed brain was still pulsing as the corpse itself twitched-
"Yes! You've come to save us from this place, from this place you'll free us!" it chanted.
"First you tell me what 'this place' is." I demanded.
"We are in Avernus, the first of the Nine Hells." it replied matter-of-factly, and my blood turned to ice.
"This is a demon ship?!?" I screamed.
"No!" it protested. "We do not belong here, we are trapped here! The devils are our enemies!"
"Then how-" I began, and decided to focus on more immediate priorities. "Is there a way out of here?"
"The helm!" it chanted desperately. "The helm controls the ship! We must go to the helm!"
"And whose ship is this?" I pressed.
"You must free us!" it demanded. "Before they return! We must go to the helm!"
"And what are you?" I tried to refocus it.
"A newborn. Born from this husk." it said placatingly. "Free us!"
So whatever this thing was- the things that ran this ship were- they consumed people to hatch their children?
I raised my blade and cleaved downward, chopping the exposed brain in half vertically and listening to it squeal and die. Whatever these things were, them and the devils who populated this hell could devour each other for eternity for all I cared. I'd just try to find this ship's helm myself and get out of here.
The exit at the far end of the laboratory led to a curving corridor that led around the outside of the ship, on what was the port side judging from our direction of movement. However, the ongoing battle had torn a large piece of the entire outer hull away, leaving the walkway almost entirely exposed on one side. My stomach churned as I looked out and down over a vast, wide expanse of red and glowing terrain, covered by clouds of sulfurous smoke, as this impossible skyship soared rapidly above them. Lots of little moving specks in the distance barely showed the outline of bat-wings as they wheeled around menacingly in the distant sky. Truly this was a vista worthy of the 'Nine Hell's indeed-
A glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye brought me instantly to combat readiness as a slim, feminine figure in silvered half-plate leapt down from a perch above to land about ten feet in front of me. She was humanoid but clearly not human, with a narrow greenish-yellow face, almost reptilian except with an entirely human-appearing little snub nose instead of a snout, and pointed ears. I had no idea who or what she was, but her agility and the ready stance she immediately fell into when she landed showed her to be an expertly trained warrior, and the bared longsword she menaced me with showed that-
"Abomination!" she hissed as she coiled to strike at me. "This is your-"
I gathered my energy and focused it into one of the earliest maneuvers I'd learned, a leaping overhand smash, and closed the gap between us before she could begin to react and brought my greatsword down with both hands to batter her weapon aside and send her sprawling flat on her ass.
"Perhaps not the best choice of words." I said wearily to her as she stared cross-eyed at my sword tip, held steadily a foot in front of her throat as she lay there on the deck. Her sword had been knocked several feet out of her reach, she had no other weapon that I could see, and- wait a minute.
"You're not wearing a scabbard for that blade." I noted. "You snatched it up off the ground, just as I did with this one. This isn't your ship, then?"
"Pah!" the strange lizard-woman spat. "How ignorant of my people can you be, to even suggest such a thing? The ghaik are our mortal enemies, and have been for all of time!"
"But you're not a devil, either." I guessed out loud. "Wonderful, we're not only in the middle of a battle on a burning ship, but it has at least three sides-"
And then a strange twisting burst loose inside my head as my vision blurred. Her eyes and mine met, and a series of disjointed mental images flickered irresistibly through my vision- myself drifting through a silver void, a large horrifying-looking vessel with its profile like a giant version of those purple tentacle-faced demons - the ghaik, she called them? - scooping me up, myself helpless in a pod, suddenly seeing myself through her eyes as she lay trapped in the pod adjacent to mine, one of the ghaik floating into the room to study us dispassionately, and it reaching into a small nearby tank to withdraw two horrible little tadpoles that it-
I flinched and looked away as the pain of being stabbed in the eye suddenly flared in both my memory and hers, and we both sensed each other's thoughts as if it were our own.
"Skva'al!" I heard her curse. "You are no thrall of the ghaik! Together, we might survive!"
"What did they put in our heads?!?" I demanded, as I stepped back unsteadily and lowered my sword. She rapidly got back to her feet and recovered her own.
"Parasites." she spat. "The tadpoles are how the ghaik reproduce. If left in our heads long enough our skulls will warp, our mouths will split, our faces burst open-"
"And our minds will be gone forever and their spirits will be possessing our bodies." I said resignedly. "In our world we called such things 'abominations'."
"A fitting name for such foulness." she agreed. "But if we can escape this realm and return to my people quickly enough, there may still be a cure!"
I doubted that, seeing as how there had never been any cure for demonic possession in the history of Thedas that I'd ever heard of. Then again, I was no longer anywhere near Thedas-
"One of the little brain-creatures that I met said that it needed to get to 'the helm', so it could steer the ship out of here." I told her. "I'm hoping you know where that is?"
"Yes." she agreed. "A ghaik vessel of this type can travel between realms, between planes. That it has not already left Avernus means there is no one left alive on the bridge to direct its flight. But If we can get there-" She cut herself off. "The bridge of this vessel is on top of the hull. We are currently on the lower left side."
"Then we have a lot of climbing to do." I said. "Come on, forward looks to be this way." I took charge and began heading down the walkway, in the same direction that the ship was heading. It took only a few steps to bring us around a curve of the corridor and into a large chamber-
"I'm assuming those are the devils." I said, as we saw the several little bat-winged horrors with glowing eyes stop feeding on the dead and dying - I noted in passing that the dead included people as recognizably human as myself as well as the tentacled ghaik - and turn to face us, screeching in anger.
"Imps!" she agreed, raising her blade. "Now fight, warrior! They are upon us!"
Apparently even in the Nine Hells there had to be junior devils to do the scut-work, because the strange woman and I scythed through them pretty quickly. This strange weakness - possibly a result of the infection currently jammed in my head - kept me from utilizing some of my more powerful maneuvers, but I was still able to draw multiple imps in close and then cleave them all with a single whirlwind attack. The warrior-woman I was partnered with seemed to favor a more sword-and-shield style, and was thus handicapped by not having a shield available right now, but still proved entirely competent enough with her blade to bring down two imps of her own.
"Grab one of those crossbows." I ordered her as I followed my own advice, and then did a hasty check of the fallen looking for anything else useful. Another potion and some loose gold coins - after all, assuming I escaped this hell dimension alive then I'd still need to be able to afford my next meal wherever I landed, it had been hours since lunchtime - entered my pockets, and after a lot of strenuous climbing up a pair of ladders we reached the top deck and continued our journey forward. We came out of the corridor into a room with multiple of those strange reclining chair-benches each holding an unconscious person hooked up to some kind of machine, and another pod like the one I'd been trapped in off in the corner next to a low table.-
A scream of terror from inside the pod brought my examination to a halt and had me running over there to see who needed help. I peered in through the transparent window in the front of the pod and my breath left my lungs as if I'd been gut-punched by an ogre at the sight of those delicate ladylike features, that short black hair, those pointed ears- how on Thedas had she gotten here-?!?
"Let me out!" the strange elven woman begged, and the complete lack of a Dalish accent in her voice shook me free of my shock as I realized that this was not Merrill. Still, the resemblance was uncanny - on a second glance I could see that even though her hair was an identical jet-black and in almost exactly the same cut, her beautiful face was more rounded in the cheeks and entirely free of the Dalish vallaslin tattoos and her ears were less pointed.
"Hold on!" I reassured her, and looked at the sides of the pod for anything resembling a catch or a latch. After nothing turned up there, I tried pressing on the control panel on the nearby table, but nothing happened.
"Leave her! We have no time for stragglers!" my companion said ruthlessly.
I turned to look at her incredulously. "You didn't fancy your chances of taking the bridge alone, but now you want to turn down help?" I tried to reason with her.
"You were already free and armed, a proven warrior! She is a helpless burden and delays us when we have no time to spare! Would you wish to remain on this vessel until it crashes?" the alien woman replied.
"Go on ahead if you like your odds better that way, or wait for us here." I firmly ignored her heartless argument and turned back to the elven woman. "I can't find the latch. Did you see how they sealed you into this pod?"
"There's a key!" she said breathlessly. "It goes in the panel over there- one of them must have it!"
"Wait here, I'll be right back!" I promised her, and after a hasty search of the bodies in this room and the adjacent one I finally found a likely-looking object - a strange carved stone that looked to be the exact same size as the empty socket I'd seen on the control panel. My warrior-companion visibly fumed with impatience but still waited for me to be finished with my 'fool's errand' rather than risk her chances alone in this place.
As soon as I placed the carved stone in the socket the parasite in my brain twisted again, and I felt a wordless connection snap to in my brain as my mind linked with the alien machinery that controlled the pod. I floundered for an instant before I realized that I needed to will the pod open, and as soon as the intention formed in my brain I felt something in the parasite - or beyond the parasite? - respond to that intention. A demanding, imperious presence. An Authority.
I/we commanded, and the machines obeyed.
"At last." the young elven woman gasped, as the pod opened and she fell forward out of it to land on her knees. "Thought... I was done for..."
"Here, let me help you up." I said, reaching down. She reached up and gripped my forearm firmly in her warm little hand, and I let her hoist herself back to her feet as she did a little pull-up on me. She was rather heavy for such a petite elven woman, with a fair amount of dense muscle on her slim frame, although some of that was certainly the weight of her finely-made black-and-silver breastplate-and-chain.
"Thank you." she said politely, before turning away to search for the rest of her belongings. A strange polygonal artifact with silver runes was eagerly snatched up off the table to be hurriedly stuffed in her backpack, and then the well-worn mace lying next to it was picked up and placed back in the sling clearly intended for it on her belt. I was more than a little curious as to what that artifact was, but decided that now was not the best time to raise the subject.
"Our impatient friend says that she knows the way out of here." I greeted our new elven friend. "Care to join the party, at least for the duration?"
"If you've got a way out, then absolutely." she agreed quickly, and and stuck out her hand in greeting. "Shadowheart." she introduced herself.
I smiled at her and shook her hand. "Hawke."
Author's Note: I have no plan for this one, I never have any plans for any of mine, I just write when an idea actually sparks the muse. Which nothing has in a long, long time. So hopefully I'll be able to go the distance, or at least a good long way, on this one.
And yes, this is default appearance Male Two-Handed Warrior Hawke. As for his personality... well, you've already seen the intro to it, the rest you'll get to know as the story progresses. But yeah, the story is 'He did the sacrifice/stay-behind in Inquisition, and then we go non-canon as the Nightmare demon decided to blow him into the deep Astral plane beyond the Fade because that's how I'm going to handle the DA/BG3 crossover element.' As far as exact crossover mechanics, like any other TTRPG fanfic I write exact game mechanics will be a thing I only pay attention to when they help make my plot work and the rest of the time it's fudge factor city.
