Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  It noticed when Revas hit it a second later, though. The griffon sank her talons deep into the Archdemon’s flank, tearing out a double fistful of scales and spikes. Thick, cold blood showered the rainless clouds as the griffon pulled away. The dragon screamed, a soul-rending sound, and snapped its tail like a bullwhip through the air.

  Folding her wings tight against her body, Revas plummeted to dodge it. Isseya’s stomach dropped with the griffon, and a knot of panic swelled in her throat. Beside her, Amadis screamed.

  The Archdemon’s tail slashed over their heads, close enough to entangle and rip out a few strands of Isseya’s hair on its spikes. Its enormous head swung around, fixing them with an eye that burned like a cauldron of black flames. It didn’t quite have the angle it needed to catch them in the sweep of its ruinous breath, but that wasn’t likely to stop it for long.

  Abandoning its pursuit of Crookytail, the dragon swerved its whole body through the sky toward them.

  Revas danced along with it, adjusting her position with furious wingbeats and occasional claw-grabs at the dragon’s flank to keep herself shielded by the Archdemon’s own body. Massive as the creature was, its bulk constituted a formidable obstacle. As long as the griffon stayed close enough to use it, they were safe.

  They might be able to keep it up for another two minutes. The other Wardens were out of sight; Isseya had to assume they were safe beyond the storm. Garahel had an opportunity to save himself, too … but he wasn’t taking it. He was coming back on a wide-angled approach. Crookytail veered around a bulwark of dark gray cloud, his furry ears flattened by the speed of their flight.

  At the very outermost range of his magic, Garahel’s passenger, Calien, raised his serpent-twined staff to the heavens and called a fireball from the Fade. It hurtled straight toward the Archdemon, picking up speed and substance as it streaked through the air.

  Even muffled by the dragon’s body, the force of the fireball’s impact ruffled Revas’s fur and washed over them in a tide of heat. It seared through the corrupted Old God’s hide, eliciting another roar of fury.

  The Archdemon heaved itself upward, contorting its sinuous length in an attempt to face both of its foes at once, but no matter how it twisted in the sky, it could not catch them in a single sweep. Nor could it reach Crookytail and his riders without turning its back to Revas.

  Instead of trying, the Archdemon drew in a breath so powerful that it sucked clouds into its gullet and pulled the griffons’ flight feathers forward on their wings. Revas screamed, fighting back from the pull of the Archdemon’s inhalation. Crookytail might have too, but Isseya couldn’t hear him over the inward rush of the darkspawn’s breath. She braced herself for a torrent of violet energy, but none came.

  Its exhalation, this time, was a vortex of pure death.

  What the Archdemon spat at them was unquestionably magic, but it was like none Isseya had ever encountered. There was no sense of the Fade in its spell; nothing in the realm of dream or nightmare could have encompassed what the Archdemon made.

  It was a cyclone of darkness both spiritual and physical. Hungry winds dragged them toward its maw, even as spectral ones tore at the vibrancy of their lives. Isseya could feel the Archdemon’s vortex draining her strength, and the closer it drew them, the stronger it became. If they were pulled much closer, they’d be crushed—and dead long before that.

  There was nothing she could do to stop it. Revas was fighting the vortex with everything she had, but the griffon was steadily losing. Feathers ripped from her wings and spiraled into the darkness. Their glossy raven barbs paled to frail white skeletons; their healthy pink calami drained to dead pale hollows. Isseya could see her own hands turning white as the vortex sucked them in. On its other side, Crookytail was fighting, and losing, the same battle.

  Calien struggled to rise on the gray-and-white griffon’s back. His feathered hood whipped off his head and was lost to the vortex; he had to clutch his staff desperately with both hands to keep hold. The pouches tied to his belt tore away in a flash, swirling and vanishing along with Crookytail’s larger wing primaries and tufts of soft white down. But the mage persevered, and the shimmering blue lines of a crushing prison formed in the air around the Archdemon.

  The spell was nowhere near strong enough to hold an Old God. The Archdemon was pinned for only a heartbeat in its grasp; then its scaled bulk shook the magic off like so much rainwater. The prison’s outline shuddered, breaking apart.

  But it lasted long enough for Calien to hit it with a second spell.

  Isseya couldn’t see what he cast. Her vision was growing blurry as the vortex neared. She couldn’t focus on anything harder than breathing, which was rapidly becoming impossible. The air was sucked back out of her lungs before she could draw it in again.

  She felt the shockwave, though. Whatever Calien threw at the Archdemon caused the waning vestiges of his first spell to explode in a massive nova of concussive force. It knocked both griffons from the vortex and sent them spinning helplessly through the sky, tumbling away from the Archdemon far faster than any of them could have flown.

  Isseya’s head snapped back as if she’d been punched by an ogre. Blood filled her mouth, threatening to choke her as she fought to breathe again. She spat it out desperately, grabbing on to her saddle with one hand and clinging to her staff with the other. Amadis’s arms were a girdle of crushing iron around her waist. Around and around they spun, sideways and upside down, falling all the while—and then, finally, dizzyingly, right side up again, as Revas panted and strained to level off her flight.

  She did it, barely. They were far below where they’d started. Only a few hundred feet separated them from the ground; Isseya shuddered to think how close they’d come to crashing.

  Full night had fallen, and with the Blight’s perpetual storm clouds blotting out the stars, it was impossible to distinguish the darkspawn horde from the rest of the desolate land. Antiva City glowed in the distance, though, its walls holding in the light like a cursed cup of flame.

  Maker only knew how many others had died that night, but it seemed that they, at least, had escaped.

  “Land,” Isseya told her griffon. She was too tired, and too shaken, to contemplate flying anymore tonight.

  Their survival had been a miracle. Finding Wycome would be another. And she wasn’t inclined to ask the Maker for more than one miracle in a day.

  6

  9:41 DRAGON

  Two months after the Hossberg mages arrived in Weisshaupt, they still hadn’t heard a word about when they might undergo the Joining. Valya wasn’t sure the Wardens even wanted them to join. Every morning they went to the mausoleum-library to resume their research, and every evening they gathered in a dusty lecture hall for lessons on combating darkspawn, but never was there any mention of becoming Grey Wardens themselves. A few more refugee mages trickled into the fortress from other Circles, seeking the same sanctuary that Valya and her companions had, but they’d heard nothing more than the Hossberg refugees had.

  In a way, it was a relief. The Fifth Blight had ended only ten years ago. In the entire history of Thedas, no Blight had occurred within a hundred years of the last. And while Valya could understand laying down her life to end a world-consuming devastation like that, it seemed pointless to embrace the madness and corruption of the darkspawn taint when there wasn’t going to be a Blight in her lifetime.

  But it worried her too. If they weren’t Grey Wardens, then they were refugees. And if they were just refugees, not comrades-in-arms, how hard would the Wardens try to protect them if the Chantry came calling?

  The uncertainty nagged at her.

  One morning, unable to bear it any longer, she sought out Caronel in a little courtyard where she knew he liked to read before the day grew too hot. Green and white tiles, chipped and faded but still lovely, made a simple geometric mosaic around its perimeter. A small fountain burbled in its center, adding to the cool in the early blue shade.

  It wouldn’t last long.
Summer in the Anderfels was as brutal as it was brief, and the heat of the day would soon burn through the courtyard’s enchanted languor. But for these few ephemeral hours, it was glorious.

  Valya almost didn’t want to spoil it by asking the question she’d come to press. But she needed an answer more than she needed this illusion of peace.

  “When will we go through the Joining?” she asked.

  Caronel took a moment to look up from his book. She couldn’t tell if he was pleased or annoyed by her question, but he certainly seemed to be surprised. Placing a thumb on the book to mark his page, he shook his golden hair back and asked neutrally, “How did you find me?”

  Valya pulled a folded letter from her satchel. It smelled extravagantly of lilacs and, she suspected, was equally extravagant in its contents. In a way, she found it impressive that Berrith still found opportunities to go through headlong girlish infatuation despite their circumstances.

  Offering the letter to Caronel, she said, “Some of us take notice of your comings and goings. Promising to deliver this was all I had to do to get your entire schedule.”

  The blond elf sighed, simultaneously amused and irritated. He took the letter and tucked it into the cover leaf of his book without another glance. The fragrance of lilacs wafted inescapably from it. “She’s a remarkably persistent girl. And very much a child. As are you all.”

  “Is that why we haven’t been asked to do the Joining?”

  “It’s one reason. Another is that we have use for you presently. If half of you choke to death on the Archdemon’s blood, I’ll have to go through all those tedious old letters and maps myself—a truly awful prospect.” Caronel cocked his head at her. “Why are you so eager to undergo the Joining anyway? Setting my selfishness aside, it’s a dreadful experience. Many who attempt it die. There’s no Blight, and you’re already safe here. I don’t understand the urgency.”

  Valya brushed gritty dust from a bench on the opposite side of the courtyard and sat. The stone was cool and rough under her thighs, sloped downward in the front by countless Grey Wardens before her. Sitting in their shadow felt a bit like standing in the footsteps of ghosts; once again, the sheer weight of history in Weisshaupt pressed down upon her.

  She did her best to shake it off. That history didn’t embrace her. Not yet. “The urgency is that I’m not sure we are safe.”

  Genuine puzzlement shone in Caronel’s eyes. The morning shade, she noted absently, made them bluer. “Who would threaten you here?”

  Valya shrugged unhappily. “The same people who threatened us in Hossberg. Templars. The Chantry. People who fear apostate mages. You’re an elf. You don’t have Dalish markings, so you must have grown up in an alienage, like I did. Surely, then, you have some idea what it’s like to depend on the protection of people who don’t consider you one of them.”

  The older elf’s smile was a little sad. Not many of their people had the privilege of living among their own kind in the precarious, but precious, freedom of the Dales. The Dalish elves tattooed their faces with wild, fanciful inscriptions, proclaiming their independence. But the elves of the alienages, who lived among humans, took no such chances. They kept their faces unmarked, the better to be overlooked and forgotten. Drawing attention, for an alienage elf, was seldom safe and never wise. “I do.” He paused, studying her. “Do you want to be a Warden?”

  Valya fidgeted with a frayed thread on her sleeve. She’d worked about two inches of it loose. Absently, she began to roll the end into a lopsided gray ball. “I don’t know.” She looked up, half curious, half challenging. “Did you?”

  “I don’t know either,” Caronel replied. He pulled his thumb from the book, letting it close completely, and set it beside his leg on the bench. “It was a different time then. A different world. Ferelden in the early days of the Blight.”

  His gaze drifted to the fountain, where he watched the ripples on the water without really seeming to see them. His voice was soft and toneless. “You were right in guessing that I was born in an alienage. And a Fereldan alienage, with the Blight’s shadow looming large across the country, was not a good place to be. People were frightened. Food was scarce. The night we learned King Cailan had died at Ostagar, rioters attacked the alienage. Not the first time, not the last. The rioters burned down my parents’ shop. They were shoemakers. A humble occupation, but an honest one. That shop was all we had.

  “I became a Grey Warden not because I wanted to save humanity from the Blight, but because I wanted to save myself. I didn’t care about humanity. If anything, I wanted to watch the shemlen burn just like they tried to burn my family. Given the chance, I would have thrown them all down the Archdemon’s gullet, one by one, and counted myself lucky to have done it.”

  There was no anger in Caronel’s words, only calm simplicity, as if he were reading off the ingredients to a recipe of no particular interest. Inwardly, Valya shivered, knowing the depth of pain such blandness must conceal.

  “But you chose to undergo the Joining anyway,” she said. “To sacrifice yourself for the world.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” Caronel put a hand to the hilt of his sword, which he had unbuckled and leaned against the side of the bench in its scabbard. His fingers lingered on the griffon embossed on the weapon’s pommel, although he did not look at the emblem. “I’m still here, and the world’s still here. The Blight demanded no sacrifice from me. I didn’t even see any fighting, other than a few genlock stragglers here and there.”

  Fixing Valya with a cool blue gaze, the elf let his fingers slip from the griffon’s mark. “I escaped the Blight unscathed, but the darkspawn taint will kill me in twenty years. Thirty, if I’m lucky. Considerably less if I’m not. So when I say that you should be in no hurry to make that decision—not when you’re so young, and there’s no pressing need for you to become a Warden now—it’s because I wish I had that choice again myself.”

  “What happens when the templars come?” Valya asked. The frayed thread finally snapped, leaving a grimy little knot of string between her fingers. She flicked it away, watching it vanish into a crack between two sand-colored paving stones. “Will you protect us if we’re not Wardens? Really?”

  “I will,” Caronel said with a slight smile. Seeing that she wasn’t about to return it, though, he relented. “Yes. You’re safe here, as safe as anyone can be in this world. You don’t need to go through the Joining for that. As to your other question, though, I doubt the First Warden knows himself. Most likely he’ll wait to see what the Chantry says, and then what it does. He’ll want to assess any possible schisms between the Chantry and the templars, and within the templars. And he’ll want to wait and see how the mages’ rebellion plays out. Only then, I suspect, will the First Warden take any definite stand. He’s a cautious man.”

  “A cowardly man, more like,” Valya said bitterly.

  Caronel shrugged. “Politics is a game to be played cautiously or not at all, and the First Warden doesn’t seem to be able to keep his hands off the board. Best he’s careful with them, in that case.” He stood, picking up his book and sword. “We’ve dawdled long enough here. You have work awaiting you in the library, if I’m not mistaken. Work that you need to be alive to finish.”

  * * *

  A week later the templars came.

  The dust of their arrival preceded them by hours. The Wardens first caught sight of it around noon, and from then on they could track the templars’ progress toward Broken Tooth throughout the long hot day. Little glints of sunlit steel occasionally escaped the cloud of brick-red dust moving slowly across the Anderfels, but no one in Weisshaupt would have known them for templars if they hadn’t had spyglasses in the towers.

  There weren’t many. Only five templars and a single pack mule, the sentries said, trekking stubbornly across forbidding terrain in a wagon’s weight of steel.

  Valya felt an unwilling twinge of empathy as she, along with the other Hossberg mages, watched them from an arrow slit high in the fortres
s. Lacking a spyglass herself, she was unable to see the individual templars through the faraway haze, but she didn’t want to. If it came to fighting, she preferred not to have to think of them as people.

  But she remembered how arduous the journey through the Anderfels had been, even without being encased in a portable oven the entire time. And she felt a pang of pity for the templars, even as she wished they’d never come.

  One by one her companions drifted away, but Valya stayed by the archer’s slit for hours, watching the templars cross the cracked red earth. When they reached the base of Broken Tooth and began the ascent up the path to Weisshaupt’s gates, she lost sight of them for long stretches. She tried to read to fill the time, leafing through Isseya’s diary halfheartedly, but it was impossible to focus on the words. Worry blurred the ink before her eyes, and she found herself reaching for the reassuring solidity of her staff more often than she did the next page.

  Finally, after a creeping eternity, she heard Weisshaupt’s gate thud open. A blur of voices reached her ears: questions, answers, no distinct words. An unfamiliar rumbling baritone echoed through the halls.

  That must be the templars’ leader, Valya thought. Impelled by equal parts curiosity and dread, she picked up her staff and made her way to the gate.

  The day was dying over Broken Tooth, but it wasn’t the sunset that made the templars red. A thick patina of dust dulled their armor and stuck to their sweaty skin. Their donkey, blinking wearily through its coat of dust, looked like a strawberry roan.

  They didn’t look imposing, exhausted as they were, but Valya shrank back into the shadows of the hall anyway. Fear of templars was too deeply ingrained in her; she couldn’t look at the flaming sword on their breastplates without remembering years of watchful hostility. She was glad for the half circle of Grey Wardens that stood between her and the templars, blocking her from their view.

  “… word from our brothers in the south?” Sulwe was saying.