"Sounds good."

It's actually not that bad right now; most of the guards are still dead, so there are just a lot of bodies. She checks the other side of Vaughn's room. There's nothing. She checks the storage room in the kitchen, once again doing the ritual she needs to do to pass through it without killing anyone. There's nothing there either. The door to the dungeons isn't even present. None of the other doors appear to go anywhere new. She circles back around to the entrance hall, and - 

"Oh," she says, "I'm an idiot." And she forces open the door to the outside.

It doesn't lead outside. It leads to a stone room with bloodstained walls. There are a lot of corpses on the ground, mostly hideously deformed people. There's a dead little girl in mage's robes.

"This is Draconis's."

Fazil and Mahdi follow.

In the other rooms the abominations are still alive and walking. They attack pretty viciously. There's nothing at the top of the tower, so she heads back down. There are a lot of dead mages - many of them children - and a lot of abominations, and there's even that one Tranquil they found who had continued sweeping the floor as people died around him. But there's no Draconis. 

She heads out of the tower. It comes out in an enormous cavern, dotted with ruins she recognizes from the Deep Roads below Orzammar.

There are darkspawn. A lot of them. There are two broodmothers at the far end of the cavern, giant swollen things with six breasts, mouths with too many teeth in them, and legs that have long since become incapable of supporting them. They're surrounded by their children, screaming deformed humanoid things that have somehow ended up armed to the teeth.

Draconis is holding them off from the tower alone. He's mostly alternating between doing some kind of paralysis attack and breathing fire.

Fazil and Madhi both look - relieved, honestly, maybe because this is the kind of problem that they are accustomed to solving. They take off into the air again.

"Is there any reason I shouldn't light all of this on fire?" Madhi asks.

"Burn it."

Madhi looks positively gleeful. He points and a streak of fire shoots from his finger and explodes among the darkspawn; he zips over to mop up any of them this didn't catch with more fireballs.

Well at least someone's having fun. 

She zips over to Draconis. "Hey! Sorry we're late! You're dreaming!"

"I know I'm dreaming! I don't like it! Mage, remember!"

"Oh. Right. I don't think there's anything else in the tower, have you seen any ways forward besides - "

"No!"

"Okay. Obvious forward it is, then. Hop on and keep blasting fire. Mahdi, are you gonna be able to cover us all the way to the other side of the cavern - "

"Yes. I think that after the first one I was able to cast them using the local magic rather than my own."

"Nice. There are a lot of deep roads but I'm not sure how much of them you have memorized here - "

"We spent almost two months eating weird lizard vermin, Aria - "

"Look, we're gonna push on until we hit something. Or until we run into something we can't route around."

She scoops him up and flies ahead.

Madhi is having so much fun.

She's so happy for him!

There are kind of an implausibly large number of darkspawn in these caves, but they can fly over them and also burn them to cinders, and that's not really very nightmarish, is it, so eventually they come out to the part that opens up into Orzammar. She leads them up and into -

- Sothis, actually.

Huh.

"...any idea where we find Hagan?"

They glance at each other.

" - one assumes the palace," says Fazil. "Though they won't let us in."

"Okay, any idea how we get them to let us in? Or otherwise contact him? You were able to contact him in actual Sothis - "

"I could buy the components for Sending? I used to leave messages with someone who he told me was his landlord but I assume he doesn't actually rent an apartment there. We could try him anyway?"

" - try Sending first, maybe? It's not like he doesn't know who we are."

" - anyone dreamed up money to buy the components?"