Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  “The trunks contain primary materials. Original reports, notes from the field, letters from Wardens and soldiers. It’s most likely that you’ll find what we’re looking for in there,” Caronel said from the archway.

  Valya barely heard him.

  In the center of the room was a glass sarcophagus raised up on a dais of gilt white marble. At its head, a pair of enormous black horns spiraled up almost to the ceiling, their tips lost in shadow. The sarcophagus was obviously very old; although slightly tinted, the panes of glass set into its walls and lid had been painstakingly cut to avoid bull’s-eyes, ripples, or other flaws common in older glass. The panes in the coffin were no bigger than Valya’s palm, but each one was flawless.

  Feeling as though she’d fallen into some kind of trance, the young elven mage stepped through the archway and approached the sarcophagus. Through the lattice of glass and lead, she could see a suit of silverite plate mail gleaming faintly in the wan gray sunlight. It didn’t look like ceremonial armor. The Wardens’ griffon was etched upon the breastplate, and there was some simple chase work on the helm and pauldrons, but it had the look of hard-used service mail. Old sweat stained the leather straps, and whoever had last polished the armor hadn’t quite been able to get all the dents out.

  The armor’s empty gauntlets were folded over two weapons: a long knife in a plain leather scabbard, and a graceful, swooping longbow with a pair of gray-and-white feathers tied to its top end like a tassel. It was the sight of those mottled feathers, brittle with age, that made Valya suck in a sudden breath of recognition.

  Those are Garahel’s.

  Garahel was the greatest elven hero that Thedas had ever known. As a Grey Warden, he had been crucial in rallying allies to fight the Fourth Blight—and he himself had struck down the Archdemon Andoral, giving his own life to break the darkspawn horde.

  Every elven child knew the story. Garahel occupied a special place of pride in their hearts. As an elf, he had suffered all the same indignities that they had. Outcast, spat upon, considered utterly beneath respect, he had nevertheless risen above that contempt and had not only forgiven his old enemies, but had spared them from sure doom.

  Alone, he had ended the Fourth Blight and saved Thedas.

  Valya passed her fingers reverently over the coffin’s glass facets. She didn’t dare touch them; leaving smudges on Garahel’s memorial would have been impious. But even that light brush sent a thrilling tingle through her skin. The hero of the Fourth Blight.

  The other mages had filtered into the room behind her. They, too, looked at the coffin with its crown of ridged black horns. Their expressions shifted from confusion to awe as each of them came to the silent realization of whose arms and armor lay in that glass casket—and whose horns those were standing like a headstone above his memorial.

  Behind them, Caronel smiled. “We keep relics from all the blights here. This isn’t just a library. It is a monument to honor the fallen.” He stepped away, taking his hand from the arch. “Call out if you need anything. There are always Wardens in the library, and the chamberlain’s office is nearby. There is a washroom near the back on the right, behind the case of ogre horns. I’ll be back to summon you for dinner.”

  Then he was gone, and the four of them were alone with the books and the trunks and the Archdemon’s horns.

  “Do you think those are really Garahel’s arms?” Padin whispered. She was the oldest of them, and the tallest, a gawky blond girl with pock-scarred cheeks and a habit of hunching her shoulders inward in a futile attempt to make herself small.

  “Of course they are,” Valya said. “The Wardens wouldn’t have fakes.”

  “Where do you want to begin?” Sekah asked. “With the official histories or the trunks?”

  Valya hesitated. She knew very little about the real history of the Fourth Blight. Garahel’s heroism was a familiar tale, and she’d heard old songs like “The Rat-Eater’s Lament” and “The Orphan with Five Fathers,” which dated from the infamous siege of Hossberg, but the details of troop movements and battles were a mystery to her. The Fourth Blight had lasted more than a decade, hadn’t it? That was an enormous span of fighting. Where should they begin looking for traces of abnormal darkspawn, or Wardens who had absconded from their duties?

  “We’ll start with the battle maps,” she decided. “We might be able to tell something from the Wardens’ troop movements. A picture’s supposed to be worth a thousand words, isn’t it?”

  “If you know how to read it,” Berrith muttered. The pretty blonde still seemed to be sulking after Caronel had ignored her.

  No one else protested, though. Padin lifted the oversized book containing the official versions of the Wardens’ battle maps and began leafing carefully through the pages. The book was very old, but it had been designed to withstand the march of ages and had been reinforced with spells for that purpose, and the colored lines denoting rivers and forests on the tough beige parchment were as bright as the day they’d been drawn.

  Almost from the start, the darkspawn hordes overwhelmed the maps. Their forces were rendered as simple black sigils, menacing in their starkness. They marched on and on, swallowing kingdoms, erasing the names of villages and towns and cities under their onslaught. But the uniformity of the markings told Valya nothing about which darkspawn they’d been, or how they’d effected their conquests.

  She turned her attention to the Wardens’ movements instead. Perhaps it would be easier to divine a pattern in their responses to the horde.

  Unlike the darkspawn, the Wardens were not all marked with the same map symbol. The griffons were designated with a stylized eagle’s head, sometimes rendered in blue and sometimes in red; she supposed those were the forces headed by two different commanders. Cavalry were horse heads, again in varying colors, and infantry were marked by spearpoints. Little pennons sketched under the spears designated whether they were Wardens or allies from various nations.

  But there wasn’t much of a pattern to those, either, at least none she could tell from looking at the maps without context. Gradually the other mages reached the same conclusion and drifted away, opening trunks and beginning to sift through the primary documents.

  Valya stuck doggedly to the maps. She wanted to at least get to the end of the book before giving up and trying another tack.

  A note in the margin of one map caught her eye. At first glance it looked like just another town or village somewhere outside Starkhaven, right on the edge of the darkspawn horde and doubtlessly soon destroyed by the same. Nothing noteworthy.

  But the name was the Elvish word for “griffon,” which seemed an unlikely choice for a human village, and there was a subtle shimmer of dust rubbed into the parchment underneath it. Lyrium. It was only a tiny amount, and very dilute, but after years of apprenticeship in the Circle of Magi, Valya recognized lyrium dust immediately. That green-blue glow, constant through the world of the living and the Fade alike, was utterly unique in Thedas.

  She glanced over her shoulder. No one was paying her any mind; they were all immersed in searching through their own letters and journals.

  Cautiously, but curiously, Valya drew a thread of mana from the Fade and tried to view the map through the shifting lens of magic. The pale blue agate in her staff gleamed, just faintly; she could pass it off as reflected sunlight if anyone looked her way.

  No one did, though, and when Valya glanced down at the map, she was very glad for that. A single line of Elvish script shimmered on the map, glowing pale blue as magic flowed through the lyrium-laced ink in which it had been written.

  Lathbora viran.

  Valya released her hold on the Fade as soon as she saw the words. They faded back invisibly into the parchment, but they stayed bright in her mind. Lathbora viran.

  The spelling was archaic, as were the forms of the letters, but she understood the words all the same. There was no exact translation into any human tongue, so far as Valya knew, although the phrase could be clumsily reduced to “the pa
th to a place of lost love.” It was a quote from one of the few great poems to be remembered through the oral traditions of the Dalish and the alienages, and it described a wistful wish for beauty that one had never actually experienced in life. It was a sweetly painful sensation, akin to nostalgia but laced with greater bitterness, for a nostalgic man remembers the pleasure he has lost, whereas one experiencing lathbora viran longs for a thing that he can never really know.

  “Under the blackberry vines, I felt it,” Valya muttered under her breath. That was how the poem opened: with the musky fragrance of ripening blackberries, bitter and sweet, and a wish to remember the long-lost scents of Arlathan.

  The poem itself was lathbora viran, because no elf she’d ever met remembered it in the original Elvish. The elves had a few fragmented words and the skeleton of the story, but the poem itself had been haltingly re-created in human tongues. No alienage elves knew enough of their own history or mother language to recall their civilization’s lost works of art. They didn’t even know the original title. “Under the Blackberry Vines,” it was called, because no one knew the true name anymore.

  It was a strange thing to find on a war map from the Fourth Blight. There was no question in Valya’s mind that the lyrium-laced message was contemporaneous with the map’s original drawing. Indeed, the spell that hid it from casual view might have been woven into the same enchantment that preserved the map’s more obvious markings.

  But why? Why would someone conceal a snippet of poetry so that it could be found only by a mage and understood only by an elf? Unless it wasn’t just a line of fanciful nostalgia …

  Had there been blackberry vines among the carvings in the other room?

  Valya went back to find out. The main library was mostly empty, with just one gray-haired Warden looking through the windows at birds singing in the inner courtyard. Valya moved quietly around him to examine the carvings of fruit upon the walls.

  They were as she’d remembered: figs, pomegranates, citrus fruits … and one solitary blackberry vine with broad-petaled flowers blooming alongside tight buds and lush berries. The carved vine encircled a torch sconce tucked between two shelves, then trailed down to a gray stone bench built into the wall.

  Valya peered under the sconce. Nothing stood out to her there. Under the bench, however, there was another faint shimmer of lyrium dust rubbed into one of the stones in the walls. This time it was so light that she would never have seen it if she hadn’t already been holding on to the Fade.

  With another backward glance to ensure that no one was looking, she touched the Fade again and channeled a second wisp of magic into the stone. It vibrated as her magic touched the lyrium-rubbed rock, and the block shifted outward an inch.

  Tense with nervous anticipation, Valya gripped the sides of the block with her fingertips and awkwardly wiggled it loose. When it was almost out, she eased it down to the floor carefully, and exhaled in quiet relief at how little sound it made.

  Behind the loose block was a little hole in the wall, and in that hole was a single book, small but thick. Its cover was scuffed and bloodstained, and its pages were warped with old moisture, but it seemed to be in good condition. Biting her lip, Valya pulled it out, and then she carefully replaced the stone block and sat on the bench as though nothing at all were amiss.

  She opened the book, unsure what to expect. It was filled with script in a fast, careless hand, feminine but not soft in the slightest.

  In the year 5:12 Exalted, it began, my brother, Garahel, and I flew to Antiva City.

  2

  5:12 EXALTED

  The second time Isseya climbed into a griffon’s saddle, she was riding to join a war.

  Neither she nor her brother, Garahel, was anywhere near ready for it. Greener than seasick frogs, their lieutenant had called them, and he’d been right.

  The two of them had become Grey Wardens scarcely a year before, and had been assigned to the Red Wing of the griffon riders only four months earlier. They were still practicing on horses with big wooden boards on their saddles to mimic the obstruction of griffons’ wings. Only once, strapped into back saddles with more experienced Wardens at the reins, had either Garahel or Isseya ever flown—and that was merely a test to see whether either of the young elves suffered from crippling vertigo or fear that would make further training a waste. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t have seen aerial combat for another year.

  But the Blight waited for no one.

  Four months earlier, darkspawn had come pouring out of the north, answering the call of a newly awakened Old God. They’d boiled up from the depths of the earth, using the ancient dwarven Deep Roads to travel unseen by human eyes. Caught by surprise, the nations of Thedas had been wholly unable to mount an effective defense against the darkspawn hordes.

  Antiva, which had come under attack first, had lost ground as fast as the monstrous army could claim it. The scattered militias of the towns and villages in its outlying lands were no obstacles to the darkspawn. Their walls were smashed and trodden underfoot, their citizens slaughtered or carried down to the Deep Roads to meet a worse fate.

  The river city of Seleny, fabled for its graceful bridges and sculptures, had fallen after a siege that lasted only four days. For weeks afterward the river had been fouled with corpses. The people of Antiva City had watched them float by, spinning out to sea, day after day, and with each bloated body their fear had grown.

  In such desperate straits, there was no time to finish the young Wardens’ training. And as Isseya flew into Antiva City, clinging to the back of the senior Warden ahead of her and squinting against the whipping wind, she understood just how dire the capital city’s situation was.

  Antiva City sat on the edge of a shimmering blue bay. Rich green farmland and orchards surrounded it in a ten-mile belt inland, stretching farther along the shores of the river that ran to the ruins of Seleny.

  Beyond that fringe of fertility, the Blight had swallowed Antiva. The corruption that flowed through the darkspawn had poisoned the land under their march.

  Even from a thousand yards in the sky, Isseya could see that the earth was barren and twisted where the horde had passed. Above it, the sky roiled with clotted black clouds. Leafless trees stood like skeletal sentinels over shrunken creeks, which ran low in their banks as though the earth itself were drinking them dry. Fields of grain lay withered and rotted, with nary a green patch to be seen amid their curling gray stalks. The few animals she saw were mostly crows and vultures, their hunched bodies scabby and featherless from the Blight disease they’d contracted while feeding on darkspawn corpses.

  The darkspawn army itself was a blur of black mail and tattered banners. Isseya barely saw anything of them. While the darkspawn themselves could not fly—other than the Archdemon, which as of yet few had seen—their arrows and spells could reach some distance into the air, and so the griffons climbed high to avoid them. Clouds sheared off the sight of the hurlocks and genlocks massed around their emissaries and ogres, and for that, Isseya was quietly grateful.

  Past the army, they descended again, for the air above the clouds was too thin and cold to hold the griffons for long. Isseya saw no people in the blighted lands as they crossed over Antiva. They were dead, fled, or in hiding. There were hundreds camped outside the gates of Antiva City, though: refugees clad in rags and desperation, living in wagons and crude makeshift shelters, eating whatever they could find. Their stench was overwhelming. The city’s gates were closed to them, and had been since news of the Blight reached the capital, but they had nowhere else to go.

  “They can’t go on like this,” the elf whispered into her companion’s back.

  She hadn’t expected her words to carry over the rush of the wind and the griffon’s wings, but somehow the senior Warden heard her. His name was Huble, and Isseya didn’t know him well. He was a grizzled old veteran, survivor of countless skirmishes against hurlocks and genlocks, and he spent most of his time ranging far afield of Weisshaupt on the b
ack of his griffon, Blacktalon. He was not one to frighten easily, but his face was grim when he turned in the saddle to answer her.

  “No, they can’t,” he said, and returned to guiding the griffon.

  A few minutes later they were circling over Antiva City. Holding the loose wind-whipped ends of her hair back with one hand, Isseya craned to look down between Blacktalon’s sweeping wings. She’d read about the glories of Antiva City many times, but had never seen them herself.

  The port city was said to be a glittering gem, and from the air, that was true. The Blight had not yet touched the capital. The Boulevard of the Seas was still strikingly beautiful, its turquoise and sea-green tiles bright against the white marble of the main road. The Golden Plaza still threw sparks of fiery sunlight from the dozens of gilded statues that adorned its broad expanse. And the Royal Palace remained a sight of breathtaking grandeur, its slender towers and stained-glass windows set alight by the sinking sun.

  But there weren’t as many ships in the harbor as Isseya had expected. There were some royal warships, and a scattering of smaller vessels painted with the Antivan golden drake, but few merchant craft of any kind. She guessed that most of them had fled to safer shores, bearing as many passengers as could pay whatever exorbitant fees their captains cared to charge. Even the little fishing boats seemed to be missing.

  There weren’t many citizens abroad on those beautifully balustraded streets, either. The markets were sparsely populated, the stalls mostly bare. Although the danger had not yet reached their gates, Antiva’s people seemed to have hunkered down in their homes, bracing themselves against the storm they knew must come.

  Then they were descending past the palace’s curtain walls, and Isseya’s view of the city was cut off by high sheets of stone.

  The palace courtyard was a maelstrom of dust. Two dozen griffons had been assigned to the Royal Palace, along with an equal number of Grey Wardens, and the clamor and chaos of their arrival overwhelmed the castle’s servants. The griffons were particularly difficult; the great beasts were territorial and short-tempered at the best of times, and the long flight had made them especially irritable. Several of them had flown up to the curtain wall, where they beat their wings and shrieked at anyone who came near.