Callida coughs and attempts to not have foul black blood on her face, but that's rather hard to pull off. And then she's being tossed around like a ragdoll, again, and she can't worry about that anymore because something else is trying to kill her.

Ugh. She loosens the giant's grip on its axe and the axe goes flying instead of impaling her.

And then the giant can be impaled, instead. With her lightsaber.

The giant goes down in a veritable geyser of arterial spray. Today is not a good day for the cleanliness of Callida's face.

Blech, how disgusting. Lightsabers cauterize wounds and there's still a lot of blood, that's just annoying.

Back to murder. This time, Callida will not be thrown, damn it.

Her efforts are successful: she is not thrown.

Gosh that sure is a lot of corpses piling up all around her, though. Most of them don't bleed much, but cauterization only goes so far, and the giants' arteries are large. She is getting increasingly gross.

Meanwhile, the dragon stalks toward her and blasts her with flame whenever doing so would not incinerate more than one or two of its own minions.

She endeavors to not be only surrounded by one or two of its minions, but sometimes it happens. Luckily she often has convenient corpses to hide behind, how ever did those get there. The smell of burning corpses is unpleasant, but less so than being on fire. And she can just stop the fire if it gets too close for comfort. The benefits of being Sith.

The dragon's army is looking quite a lot less numerous. There's still some left, she's not going to try killing the dragon again, but it's nice to know that in a pinch she actually can take out an army on her own. Even if it gets her increasingly gross. Murder!

A missed swing with a massive axe strikes sparks from the floor. Tiny flying chips of stone or metal sting Callida's face and hands, and the sting is much worse where she had creature blood on her. That probably doesn't bode well.

The rearguard of the dragon's army is finally coming into view. They all seem very determined to fling themselves into battle against Callida. Maybe they're all idiots, or maybe the dragon has more minions elsewhere and needn't worry about running out.

And something falls from the edge of the ravine onto the dragon. A short, slight, armoured figure whose eyes and breath blaze with a fierce blue glow. His trajectory is targeted with exquisite precision, and the impact of his landing would probably be enough to kill most people, but he just plants two daggers in the dragon's back and then draws a sword and starts hacking at its neck.

Okay!

She has no idea what the fuck this tiny person is doing, aside from the obvious, but if he's going to start dragon murdering, clearly she needs to finish killing the rest of the dragon's minions as quickly as possible.

So she readies her blaster and lightsaber, turns the Force speed up as far as it will go (she'll be hurting later for it, but it is something of an emergency...) and then - murder.

There's still approximately a third of an army left by the time the stranger's blade severs the dragon's spine. Its half-attached neck flops limply to the cavern floor, its body convulses once, and its death explodes into the Force.

The dark song recoalesces moments later... into the tiny figure atop the dragon's back. But he does not appear to be turning into a dragon. He appears to be dying, fighting a losing battle against the dragon's soul, a struggle that is rapidly consuming them both.

Oh, oh fuck.

Well, the little glowing blue person was an ally, however briefly, and Callida has a rule about her allies. They do not die if she has anything to say about it.

She doesn't weigh the pros and cons of her next action, she doesn't even really think through the consequences. She switches off her lightsaber and sprints to the tiny figure's side and thinks maybe I can help him in some way, weigh down in his favor with all of my power -

Except she doesn't really have a way to do that, does she. The problem is not that the figure's not powerful enough, the problem is that the dragon soul is literally too big for anything but it. Okay, well, that's fixable, she can rip it into pieces and try to shove the soul fragments into other things, let the little person have a fairer, less doomed fight. Figure out something to do with the dragon soul-bits later, when they're not in the middle of a crisis. Maybe present them to Occlus, 'Hey look I got you a neat toy.' Where are the darkspawn, she didn't get to killing all of them, she searches for their signatures and -

- in the process she notices that something about her has changed to be like them. That's - alarming, alarming is what that is. Like she's been poisoned with their darkness in some subtle way - was that when she failed to kill the dragon, or was it the ingested blood while she was being thrown around? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that, actually, she fulfills the same requirements that this figure did. If she had killed the dragon, its soul could have - done exactly the same thing to her that it's doing to this one.

And maybe that can be used to her advantage. The figure's doing pretty well against the dragon soul, almost winning, even, she thinks she'd at least manage to match him. And they could both win, if the dragon's power were halved.

"This is stupid, this is so very stupid," she mutters, "I'm insane and suicidal and incredibly stupid and I need to get my savior complex fixed because I'm insane."

Then she reaches out with the Force, grabs at the bundle of energy she recognizes as the dragon's soul, and she rips.

The dying man groans and coughs. No longer dying, now, just very unhealthy.

All around them, the dragon's creatures howl in grief and anger.

And a ten-foot-tall suit of armour leaps into the chasm to land atop the more recent of the two dragon corpses, then raises an enormous iron hammer and starts flattening dragon-minions. All remaining creatures outside its reach turn and flee.

Awesome, because Callida is down for the count, on account of ow now her soul feels like it is on fire ow.

She turns out to be right about being able to win against the bit of dragon soul, but holy shit wow does it hurt. Pain! Pain and anger and sadism and it's inescapable, she's got nowhere to run, she can't change her mind and put it back in the blue glowing person, she's stuck fighting it. And every time she fights it, it hurts more. But somewhat depressingly, she's used to pain. She's especially used to fighting through it. All she has to do is not stop, and she can beat it, fuck you dragon, she's winning.

Just, until she beats it into submission she'll be this crumpled slightly whimpering heap. Let's hope the armor thing is friendly, because Callida can't possibly defend herself right now against anything but dragon soul.

The suit of armour yells something in an unfamiliar language. Someone up by the bridge yells something in response. They carry on this exchange for a while, and then there is a silence, an then an arrangement of ropes is anchored to the bridge and lowered into the chasm. The suit of armor gently picks up the blue glowing person for its friends to haul up onto the bridge, and then does the same for Callida, and then collects their weapons and steps into the contrivance itself. Once they are all safely out of the ravine, the suit of armour opens an enormous stone gate, and two of its stone friends carry Callida and the glowing man through while the other two retrieve the rope apparatus. Once they're all inside, they close the gate behind them.

The architecture is beautiful, not that Callida is in a position to appreciate it.

She really isn't, no. She's busy dragon slaying. Or, dragon soul slaying. Same difference.

She does not, actually, have the means to erase it from existence. It's clear that getting the soul piece out of her would be an endeavor that she can't accomplish right now, not without preparation and study and probably some outside help. But she can definitely beat it into submission. This is her mind, this is her body, the bit of dragon does not get to be in charge. She's not at the dragon's mercy, it's at hers. And if it disagrees with that assertion, it can be beaten, over and over and over again, with her pain and pride forged will, until it fucking gets the message. It's vicious, it's dirty, and it's incredibly personal, because the fight is between souls. There is no taking prisoners, and there is no mercy. The dragon deserves none, and it'd take advantage of any to try to kill her, anyway.

It takes hours. Exhausting, subjectively eternal hours, where every slip in concentration gives the dragon a bit of ground with which to defend itself from her, where every stray thought could be twisted into a tiny breach in her defenses that draws out the conflict a little bit longer. Luckily for her, she doesn't slip often, and she doesn't get distracted.

And so eventually, the dragon is well and truly beaten. Something in it still remains, some traces of a dark song, lurking at the edges of her thoughts, but for the most part... her mind's her own. For now. She suspects that the scattered and broken bits of it will try to reform, later, and attempt to take over again if she doesn't keep it in check. This is a temporary solution. She's not done.

But it's a repeatable temporary solution, and all of her victories after the first will be much easier, so after a last cursory look to make sure it is definitely defeated, she feels sane enough to open an eye and try to figure out where the hell she's been moved to.

She is in a stone room, nestled among blankets that smell a lot better than she does, not that that's saying much. Her lightsaber is close by.

The room is carved out and decorated in an elegant geometric style. A lot of work must have gone into it. The floor is bare apart from her blanket nest and the angular patterns carved into the rock; the door is ajar.

There is a distant sound as of someone quietly whimpering in pain.

Oh, good, she has her lightsaber. She doesn't have to storm her way through this insane underground tunnel network to get it back. Good, that would have been annoying. Instead she clips it back on her belt where it belongs, and she painfully gets up. Ow. Ow ow ow. Why did she have to put half of a dragon soul in her soul. Why.

Once up, she carefully makes her way towards the whimpering.

The source of the whimpering turns out to be the blue glowing man, who is now glowing bright silvery white instead. He has his own blanket nest in a different, larger room just down the hall, and he is curled up tightly there, making pained noises.

Something is definitely very fucked up here. He's not dying anymore, and the dragon soul is mostly gone, but his ongoing battle with its last few remnants seems to be agonizingly painful for him.

Oh dear.

Is there an obvious way to help? ... Besides trying to take the last remnants of the soul, because fuck that, she's not doing that again.

Nothing jumps out as obvious, unless she'd like to try inventing an applicable healing technique on the spot.

Silver glow. Agonized whimpering.

She thinks that might do more harm than good. She's not a healer, just a - a well, she doesn't really know how to describe herself succinctly. She's just a Callida. Smart enough to save his life, not skilled enough to spare him his agony. That seems to be her modus operandi.

Which is incredibly depressing and also now she wants to go be elsewhere. Maybe finding food. She can go attempt to find food.

She'll leave him to his suffering.

Besides the sound of the small man suffering, the only other detectable noise down here is a rhythmic clanging coming from over thataway. It doesn't sound edible, but it might indicate people, who could in turn help her locate food.

Hmm.

One of the things besides the dragon soul fight that she vaguely recalls is a metal armored person killing darkspawn, and she's no longer in the ravine, and isn't dead, and has her lightsaber, so... Probably helpful.

She follows the clanging.

The clanging proves to originate from a metal armoured person hammering something at a forge.

The smith doesn't look up when she enters the room, but one of the statues standing by the door turns to her and says something incomprehensible in what might be a friendly tone once you adjust for the statue part.

Well, she is adjusting for the statue part. So, she'll consider it perfectly friendly. She inclines her head in greeting.

"Hello. Do you speak Basic?"

The statue says something else, also incomprehensible, also friendly.