Shortly prior
"I'll go first." Cyrus stepped up to the chalice and stared down into the horrific mixture - lyrium, darkspawn blood, and Andraste and Maker only knew what else. He grabbed the chalice and took a quick drink.
The taste was indescribable. If fear and pain and death had a taste, it would have been what was in that chalice, an icy tendril of fire and evil curling its way down his throat and into his body, spreading through his limbs, like lightning crawling across his nerves and fire under his fingers, slivers of wood under his fingernails and steel splinters driven into his flesh. Cyrus staggered back, gagging. Dropped to the ground, his body trying to retch, trying and failing. Thin liquid poured out of his mouth and nose, leaving a gray spatter on the stones, and then he slumped down to the ground in his own vomit. Then his eyes rolled into his head and the darkness overwhelmed him.
The sound of shifting and twisting meat, and wet splattering sounds. Cyrus turned his head, and if he could he would have vomited once again. A fifteen foot tall creature, wider than it was tall, with huge, swollen breasts that lay flat on its massive, rotund belly and huge, twisting wormlike things going into deep, bloody holes in its belly and plucking out squalling Hurlock, while dozens more poured out of the creature's bloody vagina, a crawling, screaming torrent, crawling over each other, driving their feet into each others eyes.
He turned to flee, only to see another, this one more horrific than the last, bent over and regurgitating dozens or hundreds of fetuses that rapidly began growing and crawling, another with its belly laid open, more crawling out five at a time. Another mother. Another, another, another. Dozens. An endless torrent of this nightmarish parody of life.
Cyrus' eyes snapped open, now lying on a bedroll, his gear stacked next to him. He rose and began to dress and armor himself, trying to blank out the images that rampaged through his mind of the million-strong army of fresh births he had seen. Real? Symbolic? Just a nightmare? He prayed to never know the truth. Andraste be merciful.
He strapped his greatsword to his back and made his journey to the meeting. He kept his face neutral, but he felt a little irritated at King Alistair's display. It wasn't that a little black comedy really bothered him, but it was unfitting for someone of his status.
He looked over his fellows, but held himself reserved from the rest of them, instead approaching the Elven warden.
"You didn't emphasize quite enough how unpleasant the potion is." He gave her the broadest smile he could manage under the circumstances, which was thin-lipped and tight. "That was the second most unpleasant thing I've ever done." From most people's mouths that would be a joke. For Cyrus it was absolutely true.
