“Huh,” muttered Damon.
He looked up from the letter, noticing that most of the others had already finished reading their much shorter messages. Vel was still frowning at hers, and when she finally lowered it, she looked as though she was considering tearing it in two.
“As though she doesn’t actually have a ship,” she muttered. “Silke is literally a city on the ocean! She could spare one, if she truly wanted to.”
“At the very least, she’s given us a path forward,” said Malon. “I think it worth investigating this vessel which Avarice supposedly built for himself.”
“Avaricia is another day’s travel to the south and east from here,” said Ria. “If this does not pan out, we will have wasted a fair amount of time.”
“I trust her,” said Damon. “Perhaps not in everything, but in providing us with accurate information about a ghost ship in a ruined city? Yeah, I’ll take her word.”
“This ship has supposedly been just sitting in the water for five years, and we’re to use it to travel across the Endless Ocean?” Vel frowned and flicked a small rock with her foot. “I don’t see this ending well, to be honest.”
“It’s the only lead we have,” said Damon.
They continued traveling in much the same manner across the next few days, with Lilian splitting off to make the journey on her inverse schedule. It was late in the afternoon when Avaricia finally came into view… and it wasn’t pretty.
Damon hadn’t seen the city since the Red Sky Night. It looked ominous in the distance, with ash swirling through streets lined with burned-out buildings. The city’s citizens had long since abandoned the area, and there weren’t even any camps of scavengers or desperate holdouts anywhere nearby.
“We’re really going to head into that?” asked Vel.
Damon set a hand on her shoulder and slowly nodded.
“We’ll wait for Lilian to meet up with us tonight and journey forth as a group,” he said. “No doubt there will be a few revenants waiting for us once we get within the city limits.”
“This will be far more dangerous than crossing the wasteland was,” said Malon. “We’ll need to stick together.”
She shot a glance toward Ria, who’d fallen back into her habit of hiking alone over the past few days. She shrugged and looked at Damon.
“I have no issue with us moving as a group,” she said. “Though I think it best if we move fast and limit our time within this place.”
They all nodded, and they all waited, and Lilian arrived no more than a few minutes past sunset. Damon could scarcely count the number of times he’d entered Avaricia through the city’s main gate, walking alongside Austine, riding in the back of Len’s carriage with the twins, stumbling through on his own, piss drunk after an evening in the outskirts involving one too many.
Never before had he felt the scope of the city like this. It was a sprawling mess of death, the biggest graveyard in all the world, by his reckoning. Damon could look in any direction and, if he left his gaze there for long enough, he’d see something resembling a body. An ash-covered lump, or a bit of white bone, skulls picked clean by some animal or monster, scraps of clothing turned gray from decay.
They traveled as a tight group of five. Damon took the lead, sword out and at the ready. Ria and Lilian stood on either side of Vel, at the very center, and Malon followed behind, calling advice out and helping keep the calm.
Revenants were everywhere, but they were different from the ones Damon had encountered in the Crimson Wastes and within the Malagantyan. Older, he guessed, more sluggish and lumbering. They were easier to see from a distance and, in some cases, easier to ignore. Somehow that only made them more terrifying, as though they were festering lesions set into the stones of the streets, expressions of the dark trauma the once thriving city had suffered.
It was made worse for Damon by the fact that he’d known this place so well. It had been his city, in a way, the place where he’d spent the latter half of his teenage years and come into himself as a man. He passed by inns that he’d stayed at, taverns he’d drunk at, a clothier who’d once fixed a rip in a costume, a smith who’d sold him a blunted practice sword.
He saw a larger ruin that had once been the Mid-City Arena, now just a crumpled heap of scorched stones and rotted, ash-stained wood. How many bouts had he fought there? He couldn’t even guess, and though he’d long since abandoned his career as a gladiator, the fact that he would never walk through those stands again, let alone fight there, felt like having a part of himself stolen away.
It was hard for him to look at, but Damon wasn’t so selfish as to think it was solely his burden to bear. He slowed, shifting to let Ria take the lead and drawing closer to his aesta. Malon’s expression was heavy with pain and regret, her eyes glistening with tears which she seemed to keep from falling only through force of will.
“We can’t change the past,” he whispered, taking her hand. “But maybe, through what we’re doing now, we can make for a better future.”
“I hope so, solas,” she whispered. Her grip tightened against his, and he squeezed back.
Their route through the decayed city brought them by where Veridas Keep had once stood. Avarice’s former palace had escaped the destruction through the sole virtue of having been coopted as Lascivious’s floating castle. In its place now stood an empty crater, the bottom third full of brackish water with nowhere to drain and not enough light to evaporate.
Damon stared at the spectacle, strange even against the unnerving backdrop of death and ruin surrounding them. How often had he looked at Veridas Keep, first in awe, when it had meant nothing to him, then in anger, when he’d believed that Avarice had set him up to kill Austine. Now, he saw nothing, and he felt nothing, and it still felt wrong.
A ripple ran through the massive puddle at the bottom of the slope. Damon furrowed his brow. None of them had kicked anything into the water, as far as he could tell. He turned to suggest that the group, which had slowed to a stop, continue on. A horrible noise cut him off before he could get a word out.
“True Divine,” muttered Vel. “What… is that?”
It looked like a ball with legs, a fat spider of pallid flesh and black mud with grotesque proportions. A roaring noise echoed through the city as it began climbing up the side of the crater, somehow nasal and sickly and giddy all at once.
“Get back!” shouted Malon. “It’s one of Famine’s creations!”
“She must have been rather inspired with this one,” said Damon.
He saw now that the monster’s entire form was similar to the Old Thinker, composed of mutated bodies fused together into a greater whole, if such a thing could be described as great . The legs were all human, some of them still with stomachs and abdomens attached to allow shorter donaries to walk even with the taller ones.
It had dozens of heads and mouths of various sizes, poking out on all sides of its body. It let out another screech as it came over the edge of the pit, the noise coming from multiple mouths at once, a horrible chorus of malevolent hunger and fury.
Damon drew his broken myrblade and filled the missing portion with a blade of ice. Ria had her spear out, and Malon was poised for casting. Lilian stood near Vel, the shoulders of both women trembling. Famine’s corruption landed harder on Lilian, given her own past with the Forsaken’s experimentation.
“Aesta,” said Damon. “Care to start us off with some fire?”
She flashed a cold smile, eyes pulsing to life with crimson energy, and flicked her fingers at the monster in a dismissive gesture. A rolling wall of fire shot toward it, growing in height to match the highest of the fused heads, which were easily level with a second-story window.
The flames hissed as they swept over the monster, and the wall of fire curled to encircle it completely, the way a thrown net might pull together on the far side. The smell had the same inviting quality of roasting meat, which made it all the more unpleasant, and Damon felt a rise of nausea across the top of his stomach.
Malon sent a large fireball hurtling toward the monster’s center of mass for good measure, which gave off a blindingly bright flash as it exploded against its intended target. When Damon’s vision cleared enough to make sense of the aftermath, a familiar sight greeted him.
The monster was healing. Charred flesh peeled and cracked away, revealing puffy pink skin underneath, scarred but rejuvenated. Damon slowly shook his head as he considered what Famine was doing with her experiments. He imagined a world where revenants were outcompeted by monsters like these, near impossible to kill through normal means, but just as hungry. The urgency of their quest seemed that much more pressing.
“I’ll have to freeze it, then,” he said. “Ria. I’m going to need your help.”
“You will have it,” she said, spinning her spear.
“We need to get a sense of its speed and tendencies,” he said. “Aesta, be ready to hold it with your magic if it finds an opening on one of us.”
“Of course, solas,” said Malon. “Be careful.”
Damon jogged forward, moving in almost perfect unison with Ria, their footfalls slapping against the dirty cobblestone with matching timing. They took angles of attack that let them both fight freely, while still being able to leap sideways to defend one another if needed.
As it was, the monster watched them both, with plenty of heads and eyes leftover. Damon watched the legs, seeing how easily it could rear up to kick out like a horse. He was more concerned of the possibility of it simply rushing forward and trampling them. The sooner they finished the fight, the better.
Ria attacked first, a quick, testing jab with the point of her spear. It sank into the monster’s putrid flesh up to the metal of the tip. Damon briefly held the hope that the bulbous bulk might gush open like a punctured waterskin, but her strike barely had an impact, the wound sealing up almost as quickly as it had been created.
He let out a roar and began slashing with his myrblade, delivering blows hard enough to shatter the weapon and then quickly reforming it as he surged on to the next attack. At first, he tried simply to deal physical damage, tearing into the monster’s flesh with his weapon, but it didn’t take more than a couple of hits before it was clear that his earlier idea was their only avenue for victory.
Damon leapt out of reach of one of the legs as it kicked out, inadvertently putting himself directly into the path of another. His ribs screamed with pain as the heel of one of the monster’s feet collided with the side of his abdomen, knocking him into a sideways roll across the dirty street.
Ria roared and thrust her spear deep into the monster, but she might as well have stabbed a house. The monster reared up, and half a dozen legs dropped down all at once, aiming to stomp Damon into a bloody smear across the ground.
A crimson barrier caught the attack inches from ending him. Damon rolled sideways, seeing the way Malon’s magic wavered from the strain of holding so much weight. He had to end the fight now, or risk being overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of Famine’s creation.
“Ria!” he shouted. “I need a boost!”
She stared at him, uncomprehending until he began to run straight toward her. She looped her hands together, creating a stirrup, and tossed Damon into the air as he set his foot down into it. He rose in an arc, landing midway up the monster’s back. A quick stab from his myrblade locked him in place, though it was a seriously uncomfortable place to be. The monster’s bare flesh was sticky with sweat, with a strange writhing quality, as though bugs were crawling underneath it.
He scrambled up along its body until he was directly atop its back. Then, he brought his myrblade, and with it, the full force of his ice magic. He felt his breath come out smoking cold, teeth hurting, head aching as though he’d eaten too much snow.
Ice began to spread from the point of his stab, slowly covering the monster’s back and the nearest heads. In truth, he was focusing more on freezing it from the inside out, turning its core to a state of crystalline, midnight cold, rather than shelling it with ice.
A choking noise came from a couple of the heads, and then just about all of them, the ones he hadn’t frozen, at least. Its movements slowed, shifting from deliberate motions to involuntary twitches. Ria had returned to stabbing it with her spear, but she hesitated, noticing how dulled the monster’s reactions had become.
The giant creation came to a stop and tipped over with Damon still on top of it. He leapt out of the way, landing ungracefully and dropping to a roll. The monster split in half as it fell on its side, rather than shattering dramatically, but it was just as dead, either way. Damon blew on his hands and rubbed them together to warm them up, ribs still aching but smiling, regardless.
“That was impressive,” said Lilian.
“Very impressive,” said Ria, helping him up.
He nodded and winced, stretching his fingers and trying to work something resembling sensation back into them.
“Your hands…” said Vel. “Here!”
She hurried over and pulled his hands into her armpits, clamping down to secure the warmth.
“Thank you,” he said, chuckling. “That’s exactly what was called for, I think.”
“Warmest place I could think of,” said Vel. “Well, aside from…”
Malon cleared her throat before she could elaborate further, and the party continued on.