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She doesn’t really know what to do with the Fade, with walls that are floors and floors that are ceilings. She doesn’t know what to do with shiny glowing essence of not-people and letters that couldn’t have been written here and stuffed animals with too many ears and gravestones that speak of fear. It’s almost like a place that exists, only the rules are sideways and she’s been given the wrong set of instructions.
There’s not enough ale in the whole of Thedas to make this place right.
Sera and Cole are freaking out in a way she’s never seen before; Blackwall is silent in a way that might just freak her out. Hawke and Stroud were keeping to themselves, but they had a comforting background bicker that reminded her of Lyla and Cornish before she woke to a magic hand.
They were- well, they were. But it was mostly fine, even after the not-Devine floated about in golden glory, after the gravestones and the tack agreement to never say a word, after demons and bodiless voices sneering at their scrambling attempts to reach an exit.
But bronto tits, she just wanted to go home. Home where there’s sun and sky and good solid rock that was rock-like and not all topsy-turvy.
Then she somehow goes left and is left behind. On her own. In the Fade. Which is just, just insane.
And nobody hears her calling, or nobody she wanted to hear anyway. There is a clicking she doesn’t want to think about. She really, really doesn’t want to think about it.
Only she does.
And of course spiders start crawling up from shadowed pools on the ground and bubbling across the walls and floating down from rocks and some appear from air just for the fun of it.
And she’s still alone, with hundreds of eyes and thousands of legs and so very many hungry bellies turning towards her with a starving lust that means she’s going to be devoured and Maker’s balls, it’s so not going to be in the good way. Her palms are sweating in her leather gloves, the tips of her fingers feel numb. She fumbles with her weapons and almost drops her left dagger, a blighted spider is rushing her and something is almost touching her back and she’s so dead because she being pulled sideways, just shy of giant mandibles and being bitten and-
-and spider webs. Blasted blathering baneful spider webs threading about on non-winds tangling her arms and legs and they are going to play with her before they eat her and that will be so much worse.
They are looming around her, chittering with dripping fangs and jostling each other, jeering and leering and kind of laughing at the dwarf cowering in a barbed cocoon of terror. How did this happen? How did any of this happen? She was going to die in the Fade, the Fade of all places. Only it was so ridiculous she mightn’t complain if it weren’t for the fact that she wasn’t going to die- ever.
She's not because she is The Amazing Cadash, blight-it-all, and The Amazing Cadash is much too sexy to die.
It’s exactly the thread of thought she needs to come back to herself. She sniffs in distain and looks at the horde that is still just standing there, not attacking and knows that even they agree. But of course they did, envy demons and high dragons and would-be elder gods couldn’t manage it. Spiders don’t stand a chance against her, even alone and thrust up like dinner served. And yes, thank-you-very-much, she’s that damn good.
The tensile strength of webbing tore against blade and she’s a whirling dervish of voluptuous badassery they can’t hope to match. By the time she’s done severed legs dot the not-cavern and several cephalothoraxes are defying rational gravity to hang in the air.
When they dissolve into nothingness so does the landscape and-
-and Blackwall is there with his shield and Sera is shooting three arrows at once and Cole is flitting about in unnerving green. Only they don’t seem know the others are there because they each have a quiet failing desperation to their movements. Nobody is calling out shots or kills. No one is calling for help.
Her vision is wavering, just a bit, but she can make out what they are fighting with the more effort she puts into it.
There are even more spiders, an army of them, only she’s just so happy to have her people back that she’s laughing her friends back to (what passes as) sanity. She takes command and in no time at all they are a cohesive unit once more unparted by fear-scape and Fade-logic.
She might be laughing manically and taunting them with “oh yeah? Try dodging this” before kicking off of a wall-floor and bringing death from above. Might be. Alright, she totally is and owing the battlefield because this shit is just too crazy to pass up.
It’s an eight-legged slaughter in the Fade and it is glorious. She doesn’t care if no one else agrees with her. This is so going down as one of the Top Ten Crazy Adventures of All Time. Double points for it being where it is and for the fact that nobody else sees spiders.