"Maker help us both if darkspawn are what pass as normal these days," he snorted. That thought brought the stray, uninvited memory of a darkspawn more unusual than most. The memory of its voice still elicited a shudder after all this time. He almost gave voice to a question that rose on the tail of the thought, glancing her way, only to decide to save it. It had the potential for becoming an involved conversation. Those never mixed well with fighting for one's life.

Duncan's reaction was as immediate as hers. He leaped back to give her the room she needed to finish dispatching her foe and zeroed in on those accompanying it. "Never a dull moment," he growled. "I'm going in low." It made the most sense in order to give her more room with her sword, and it was a position from where he was comfortable and experienced fighting.

He snaked forward with a lunge and struck out with both daggers, slashing the tendons behind the knees of the first two close enough. The lack of support did nothing to take the fight from them. It led to messy and brutal hacking of extremities before he worked his way up to the heads. A dagger to an open mouth and another to an eye ended their thrashing. He yanked them out with force and rolled under the weight of another attacker. How could anything so dead be so hungry?