The half-crystallized Grand Enchanter Fiona let me and Dorian know that we had been flung a year into the future, that the aforementioned “Elder One” was some evil, godly figure that needed to be stopped, and that Leliana was somewhere in the castle. I also found Cassandra and Sera further on, languishing in cells. They both thought I had died when the time spell made me disappear, and were looking… redder than the last time I’d seen them. And they sounded more echoey. They filled us in on what had happened during the year we’d missed, which mainly involved the Elder One using a demon army to slaughter almost all resistance and take over the world. Without me around to seal up rifts and the Breach, nobody had been able to stop him. After freeing my companions, we forged on and found Leliana in a torture room. She was less red and echoey than the other two, but more, well, pruny.
Maybe the Venatori had tried torturing her with a really long bath.
With my former spymaster in tow and reliving her arrow-spewing glory days, we fought our way through demons and Venatori until we got outside. It’s one thing to have someone tell you that you’re in a grim, dystopian future. It's another to see what had been a normal castle warped beyond recognition and filled with skeletons, corpses, bizarre demonic idols, and red lyrium. And it’s truly an another to see chunks of castle floating in the air and that the relatively small hole in the sky you remember has just become the sky.
Okay, new rule: green whirlwinds are always bad and should be avoided.
We tore through the rest of the castle, wading through waves of foes until we reached the door to the throne room, where Gereon was holed up. Our entry was barred by one of the same shard-powered doors we had found in the Forbidden Oasis. Since this was a RaMO-free, and thus truly terrible, future with no shards to be found, we had to find a new bunch of trinkets to unlock the door. These came in the form of small chunks of red lyrium being held by the Venatori Spellbinders that occupied the castle’s upper levels. After we’d collected five of the things, it was time to confront Gerry. He and what was left of Felix were waiting for us in the throne room. Still rambling about the Elder One, Gerry was actually quite calm. Right up until Leliana cut Felix’s throat. Then fire and demon-summoning ensued. We took down Gerry, then Dorian took the amulet that had been the key to sending us into the future in the first place. Unfortunately, the Elder One wasn’t going to give us much time to figure out the time spell, as he had noticed my presence and subsequently sent hordes of his minions to wipe me out. Apparently the locking of the door was a one-time thing, so the future versions of my companions volunteered to buy us time with their lives. And they did. And Dorian and I leapt back to the past, captured that version of Gerry, and set our timeline back on a less bleak path.
…
…
Let me tell you, it’s an odd thing. I can look around right now and see for myself that demons aren’t appearing everywhere, bits of buildings aren’t floating in the sky, and red lyrium isn’t growing out of people. Cassandra, Leliana, Sera, and the others are all fine, no redness, no echoing, no wrinkles. So, part of me says none of the horrific events I’ve just described ever happened. And it’s right, because we stopped them from happening. But every time I tell myself that, another piece of my brain pipes up and yells “I watched it happen, I saw it happen, don’t tell me it didn’t happen!” And it’s right, too. They can’t both be right, but they are. Only one of those sets of events could have happened, but I experienced both of them. Time travel is weird. I’m going to go talk to my friends.
I’m back, sorry about that. Everybody’s great, by the way. Getting back to the tale, I met King Alistair and Queen Anora of Ferelden, back in Redcliffe, before we returned to Haven. That’s definitely worth mentioning, and they were very pleased that I was taking the mages off of their hands. The shunned spell-slingers had decided to not accept the deal with the Venatori after we uncovered the part about them trying to destroy the world and all that. After we got back to Haven and got the mages settled in, I had to assuage a lot of concern amongst the Inquisition about letting them roam freely as our allies instead of yoking them like animals, and Dorian officially joined the cause. And with all that settled, and my brain sufficiently recovered after the madness it had just endured, we only had one task left: taking our new magically-inclined friends to help me close the Breach.
