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He is part way through his meditations, focusing on integrating the scant reserves of new power into his even-more scant existing ones, when he hears it.
Screaming.
The sense of it, more than the sound, tears through his muddied connection to the Fade. Horrifyingly strong in order to make it so far to him. Any such scream would be chilling, under most circumstances, but he knows that voice.
That is her voice.
She is screaming in the Fade.
Which means she is unconscious; at the mercy of who-knows-what in the wilderness, and at the mercy of their enemy in her dreams.
He grasps the thread of sound. And though he could claim it was for the expedience of speed, in truth, when he lunges off of the top of the tower ruins, he lands on massive paws without conscious thought of choosing them. Shadow whirls and his form changes and the wolf howls. In his instinctive mind he is racing, again, to snatch her away from Dumat.
He is a massive black shape as he surges through the trees, following the echoes of her screams.
Her screams.
Has she fallen, he wonders? Been gored by some unexpectedly vicious prey? Struck her head or…
Through the tops of the trees he sees the camp, and his blood boils.
Her own people.
Her own fool people.
How dare they.
He races into the camp in his monstrous, lupine form. The reaction is immediate; several hunters are bold enough to aim arrows at him, but a brief wash of a fire spell burns said arrows up before they reach him. There are screams. Warriors draw weapons with shaking hands, and the Dalish stare at him, ashen-faced, shocked by the reality of finding the Dread Wolf suddenly upon them.
A stream of furious elvish flies from him, thoughtless and fierce.
“Where is she? What have you done with her? Relinquish my heart, or I will rend you with tooth and claw! Whatever you have done to her, I will do to you all a thousand times over!”
He is a snarling, wrathful beast; an image he has not presented in more years than he can number. But her screams are still in his ears, raising his hackles, fraying his nerves as his lips curl into a snarl and he glares through his many eyes at the terrified elves.
The wolf’s gaze sees the thrumming of their blood in their veins.
How easily it would be spilled.
One man, elderly, finally points towards one of their colourful tents.
“The woman,” he says. “If it is the woman you seek, she in there.”
And they would turn her over to him, heedless of her fate. Knowing he is the Dread Wolf of legend, the supposed monster of their tales; an insatiable beast fuelled on spite alone, by their reckoning.
She is screaming.
He abandons his anger towards them, and stops himself from tearing apart the flimsy structure of the aravel with his jaws. He will scarcely accomplish much by pelting her unconscious form with debris, or jostling her around. He lets his form shift, feels the energy surge – still so weak – and drops down, seeing the camp from a different perspective as he shrinks. For a moment his vision is swallowed in shadow.
Then it clears, and he sweeps inside the aravel.
He smells charred flesh and blood.
Blood that’s seeping through bandages clumsily wrapped around a wound in her back. An arrow, he thinks. Poorly removed, leaving behind a gaping hole, crudely sealed with fire.
An arrow wound in her back.
He hurries to wake her, and gives serious contemplation to burning the entire camp down.