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The knelling is no longer gentle and kind – it is the furious ringing like the horns of war. She knows what’s coming.
Aeres can see the near future in the scars of her face – how they’ve deepened in these last years to trenches the cleave her lips in two. The streaks of silver-white that have overtaken her temples at the young age of forty. The rustling ache in her bones that make every swing of her sword that much more painful.
And, of course, the song. It has gotten more rabid as the years have progressed, more familiar. She can hear words in it now, feel a sort of beauty to it that she didn’t understand before. When she was just an ensign, it was exotic and frightful, but now… now it’s an old friend beckoning. A call to one final fight.
She doesn’t want fanfare.
Aeres leaves in the dead of night, with only the light of the moons to guide her down, down, down into the depths below.
She carries Starfang and the shield proclaiming her as an ally to the Legion of the Dead; everything else she leaves behind. Baubles and trinkets and old friends will do her no good where she’s going.
And this… this is the beginning of the end.
She fights, as is custom, against the first stragglers, the ones close to the surface that lack organization, then she crawls deeper into the belly of the Deep Roads.
She can feel them all around her, smell their stench and hear the beat of their blighted hearts, just as surely as they can sense her.
They come in ragtag bands now, led by bastard emissaries that have found their way to her on the broken roads and out of caverns, subsisting solely on the victims they manage to pull down through the earth. These darkspawn are hungry and Aeres knows what her blood could do to them if she’s unlucky enough to fall at their hands. So she fights, sword clanging as sparks light the darkness. She fights, crushing emissaries in her web. Eventually, they scatter. They always scatter.
How long has she been down here? Days or weeks, living on nothing but borrowed time and the word that sounds over the pounding beat inside her head. Duty. She must fight, for there is nothing left in this world for her now.
It comes in inches: Her scars peeling back to reveal her elven fangs, her hair falling loose and coarse around her face. Her eyes seep into a wretched milkiness as she grows accustomed to the dark and the wounds no longer heal, but neither do they fester. She grows ashen as the blood clots in her veins and her heart stills to naught but a murmur.
For the first time in her life, she hears the voice plain as breathing. It is calm and still as winter and it soars over the Call.
“You will because you must,” it whispers, echoing as the song knells.
She clenches a hand around Starfang’s pommel, knuckles scraped down to the bone, and pulls her sword loose from its scabbard.
The time has come.
When she presses forward, she is no longer Aeres. Not really. She is a force, a body possessed by a perseverance seen only in the Fade. Tenacity has her now, holds her up as her limbs wilt and her face sinks in. Tenacity is her sword and shield; determination is her web of power. There is nothing left of the Warden-Commander, of the Hero of Ferelden. There is nothing left of the elf that saved Thedas from Urthemiel and the Fifth Blight.
Tenacity haunts the Deep Roads, stalking darkspawn, wielding a sword spun from stardust – a legend, a horror story, a guardian.