Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  The other two ogres grabbed at the griffon. One seized hold of Shrike’s left wing and wrenched it violently. Isseya saw the griffon jerk downward in the ogre’s grip, then lost sight of Shrike and his rider as Revas turned away to make another pass over the battlefield.

  She expected the griffon to be dead when Revas came back around, but to her astonishment, Shrike was still fighting—and, somehow, still flying. His injured wing flopped on each beat like a damaged kite, but by dint of magic or adrenaline or sheer ferocious will, Shrike stayed off the ground. Danaro clung to his back in terror, firing half-finished spells at the ogres whenever he had a steady moment to cast.

  “What did you do to him?” Calien asked breathlessly behind Isseya.

  “I don’t know,” the elf confessed. “I only wanted to spare him from the darkspawn taint. This … It wasn’t what I intended. I don’t know what it is.”

  Turning away, Isseya raised her right arm and called out to the other Wardens: “My flight! Attack!”

  Revas was already plunging forward as the words left her lips. Unlike Shrike, Revas and the other griffons in their flight kept to their trained tactics. They skimmed low over the fighting, twisting rapidly from side to side in an effort to evade the darkspawn’s spells and black-shafted arrows while their riders hurled their own volleys into the fray.

  Seeing a small group of Ruby Drake mercenaries being picked off by genlock assassins, Isseya sent Revas that way. Valiantly as the men and women were fighting under their crimson dragon pennon, the genlocks had the advantage. A rare magic ran through their veins, enabling the stocky darkspawn to flit in and out of shadows as stealthily as the best Antivan Crows. They vanished whenever the Ruby Drakes turned to face them, then slipped around to flank their enemies and bring them down with quick merciless stabs.

  Magic could even the odds, though. As Revas swept past the genlocks and mercenaries, Isseya sent a tightly controlled blast of supernatural cold sleeting across the edge of their fight. Calien hurled a second frigid cone in an intersecting path, overlapping Isseya’s at the point of origin but fanning outward to catch targets she couldn’t reach.

  Their dual burst caught most of the assassins—and, unavoidably, a few of the Ruby Drakes—and froze them in thin, cracking shells of glassy moisture. Some of the injured died immediately inside their cocoons of pink-stained ice. Others, pinned helplessly for a few crucial seconds, could only struggle and snarl in their frozen bonds as the remaining Ruby Drakes cut them down.

  All around the battlefield, other griffon riders were doing the same, swooping into small conflicts amid the bigger conflagration and aiding their allies with whatever tactics were necessary to help them prevail. Smoke and cinders spiraled up from the dozens of spell-driven fires on the field, stinging their eyes and choking their nostrils, but they ignored the pain and fought on. They threw down covering arrows to enable land-bound Wardens to retreat, drove back hurlocks and genlocks with barrages of fire and stone to let their allies regroup, and distracted ogres and spell-flinging emissaries with flashy aerial feints so that warriors on the ground could exploit their confusion.

  A hurlock emissary, dressed in tattered, too-large robes like a mockery of a true mage, clipped one of the griffons with a streak of ebon-edged flame. The griffon flapped and spun wildly, struggling to regain control, but an ogre’s boulder knocked it from the sky before it could recover. The two Wardens mounted on the griffon went down with it, crushed under their steed’s weight even before the darkspawn swarmed over the mortally injured beast and tore it apart with their claws and saw-bladed swords. A fine mist of blood clouded the air above their savagery.

  It happened too quickly for Isseya to react, and there was little she could have done to stop it in any event. She was in danger herself: a group of genlocks with crossbows was shooting at Revas, and though the fireballs that she and Calien hurled back at the archers incinerated some of their quarrels in passing, the onslaught was too risky for the griffon to withstand.

  A bolt creased Isseya’s forearm; a second later two others plinked off the armored foreguard of her saddle. Hunching lower to take what cover she could, the elf shouted at Revas to retreat, and then used her firespells to buy them time.

  Scratched and quarrel-stung, the black griffon climbed into the air. The genlocks’ bolts chased her, but their weapons didn’t have the range or accuracy to pose a serious threat once Revas was a few hundred feet up.

  They circled above the battlefield, too high to do much but watch for the moment. To Isseya’s astonishment, Shrike was still fighting on the ground. He was so soaked in blood that she didn’t recognize him immediately. Danaro was nowhere to be seen. Either he had fled his griffon’s madness or, more likely, he had died.

  She wondered if Shrike would have noticed either way. The griffon was completely lost in the frenzy of his fighting. He kicked an ogre back into a crowd of hurlocks, hitting the horned brute with such force that it was knocked off its feet, then leaped onto the ogre and ripped at it with all four claws while savaging its throat with his beak.

  The heedless aggression of his attack left him vulnerable to the hurlocks. As they got back to their feet, the smaller darkspawn mobbed him, stabbing and slashing.

  Yet, somehow, Shrike managed to evade many of their blows. It was as if he knew before the darkspawn did where they were going to strike, and could dodge or deflect their swings before they landed. Not always—there were too many, and Shrike wasn’t about to give up his prey to avoid them—but it began to explain how he’d stayed in the fight as long as he had.

  His strength and quickness, too, had increased to supernatural levels. He could pull a hind leg away from a hurlock’s sword without looking, and then—still without looking, far faster than Isseya could follow the motion—whip that same leg back with enough force, despite the awkward angle, to rip the hurlock’s stomach open and spill its guts across the ground.

  Calien had seen it too. “How is he doing that?”

  Isseya could only shake her head. Her throat was painfully dry from shouting through the smoke. “I don’t know. I’ve heard that some of the oldest Wardens can do something like it. Late in their service, when they’re on the brink of the Calling, some of them have such a kinship to the darkspawn that they can hear echoes of their thoughts. It never lasts long, though. It always means the end is near.”

  “It does seem that Shrike’s is, yes.” Calien paused, and although he was sitting behind Isseya and she could not see his face, she’d been fighting alongside the blood mage long enough to know when he was struggling with something he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask.

  “Spit it out,” she muttered.

  “What you’ve done—”

  “It wasn’t what I wanted,” the elf said curtly. All she had intended was for Shrike to survive. Not for him to become some winged avatar of destruction.

  “But it is what others will want.” He pointed down to where Shrike was finally beginning to falter. The griffon’s gray wings were soaked with red and black; the few primary feathers that remained on each one left dripping trails of blood whenever he moved. Frost burns and gaping cuts marred his flanks. A broken arrow stuck out from his neck, another from his right forelimb.

  And yet his struggle had barely slowed, and the ring of dead around him was heaped five high on every side.

  At the front, brass horns were blowing to signal the allies’ victory. They’d won. The darkspawn ranks were breaking, dissipating into chaos as, somewhere, the faraway Archdemon lost interest in the field and gave up control of its defeated minions. Hurlocks and shrieks scattered mindlessly, fleeing over the corpses of their comrades. The ogres, too big and slow to escape, fought on, bent on bringing as many others into the void as they could.

  A cheer went up from the Wardens and their allies, who rushed at their defeated enemies with renewed determination. Soon their victory was a rout, and the darkspawn were being driven into the Lattenfluss, where they floundered and drowned or were shot d
own by archers.

  Isseya didn’t share their jubilation. She looked down at Shrike, who had finally fallen. They’d won this battle … but the war raged on. As long as the Archdemon lived, none of their victories could be sure to last. Hossberg was free today, but in a week or a month or a year, it might fall to the darkspawn again.

  Calien was right. Isseya knew it as surely as she flinched from admitting it. Many would want the griffons to become even deadlier than they were. The griffon riders wouldn’t—not the ones who saw their beasts as friends and trusted partners—but those who viewed the animals as mere machines of war, to be expended strategically and with no more emotion than skyburners or catapults, those people wouldn’t care about the cost.

  “It was my spell,” she said aloud, both to Calien and to herself. They were high above the battle, and though the wind carried the scent of blood and smoke from below, it was fainter up here. Stronger was the leonine musk of Revas’s fur. “Mine, and mine alone. No one else has the secret. And I’ll never do it again.”

  15

  9:41 DRAGON

  “Have you ever known a blood mage?” Valya asked. She didn’t intend for the question to sound timorous, but it came out that way anyhow. Even after she’d spent months learning to accept the presence of the templars in Weisshaupt, the habits she’d learned in Hossberg remained.

  Despite her occasional hesitations, however, she had genuinely come to like Reimas. Under her melancholy exterior, the woman had a core of humility and profound kindness. If all the templars in Hossberg had been like that, Valya often thought, her formative years in the Circle wouldn’t have been stunted by such fear.

  She felt no such connection with the other templars. They mostly kept to themselves, anyway. Knight-Lieutenant Diguier had died a few weeks earlier while attempting the Joining, and since then Valya had seen even less of the remaining templars.

  But Reimas continued to meet her for morning tea and walks around the parts of Weisshaupt that they were permitted to visit, and gradually, to Valya’s quiet surprise, the two had become something like friends.

  Close enough, at least, that she felt comfortable asking the other woman about some of the things that had been troubling her.

  Reimas didn’t answer immediately. She watched a little brown bird hopping along the rough stone of the low courtyard wall, looking for insects under one of the fortress’s small, stunted apple trees. Black speckles dotted the bird’s wings and the sides of its neck, and its belly was a creamy white.

  It was one of a family of such birds that lived around Weisshaupt, drinking the rainwater from its cistern catchments and building their nests in the crags of its high towers. Valya, too, had spent days watching the little birds and daydreaming that she shared their freedom, even as she recognized that in truth the birds had no more freedom than she did. They, too, were tethered to the fortress.

  The bird, startled by something out of sight, flittered away. Reimas turned slowly back to Valya. The sunlight caught her hair, which had grown longer since the templars’ arrival and was beginning to show wider streaks of gray. “Yes, of course.”

  “What were they like?”

  “Frightened, mostly.” Reimas stroked a callused thumb around the rim of her empty teacup. Her long face always seemed set in lines of sadness, but the melancholy felt somehow deeper as she spoke. “But what can you expect from a blood mage who’s been discovered by the templars? Of course they were frightened.”

  “Were they evil? I mean … were they all evil?”

  The human woman shrugged. “I’d have to know what evil is to answer that, and I don’t believe I do anymore. The cleaner answer, the clearer one, is that they all broke the prohibition against maleficarum.”

  “But why?” Valya pressed. “Doesn’t the why matter?”

  “It should,” Reimas agreed, “but sometimes it can’t. Everyone has reasons for what they do. Some are persuasive, some are absurd. A few might be things I’d be tempted to believe. But how can you know? Whatever anyone tells you is only a tiny fragment of what is, and it’s colored by their perceptions and hopes and fears. Even if they’re honest—and what blood mage is, with either you or themselves?—their story is no more ‘real’ than a vision in the Fade. The one and only thing you can be sure of is that they have committed, and become, maleficarum. As a templar, that ends it. It has to.”

  “The Grey Wardens have used blood magic,” Valya said. She dropped her voice as she spoke, but in truth there was little risk of a Warden overhearing them. Weisshaupt was much diminished from what it had been centuries ago. Most of its halls and courtyards—including this one—were given over to relics of the past and emptiness in the present. “What about them?”

  Again Reimas was quiet for a time. The gnarled branches of the apple trees shook under a short-lived breeze, shedding the last of their dry brown leaves. The templar’s hair blew across her face in a gray-streaked curtain. She sighed, closing her eyes and touching one temple as if to push away some unwanted memory.

  “The Chantry teaches us that human pride and human ambition created the darkspawn,” she said, brushing her hair back into place when the breeze died out. “The magisters used blood magic to enter the Fade and despoil the Golden City, and in so doing, doomed all of Thedas to pay the price for their folly. Blood magic created the evil that the Grey Wardens devote their lives to stopping. I can’t help but feel that it is wrong to use that same cursed weapon to fight them.”

  “They use the taint, too, though,” Valya pointed out. “They take in the darkspawn corruption so that they can fight it. It’s a tool.”

  “A tool that destroys its user,” Reimas said grimly. “Whether blood magic or darkspawn taint, it’s all a bargain with destruction.”

  “Do you think that’s why Diguier failed?” Valya asked. She had never discussed the Knight-Lieutenant’s death with Reimas, except to offer polite condolences when it had happened, and it felt awkward to mention him now. But she wanted to know.

  “Maybe. I think the ritual is unforgiving of weakness, and although Diguier was not a weak man ordinarily, he was full of doubt since making the decision to leave the templars. I suspect that doubt left him fatally vulnerable to the taint. It takes a hard soul to survive corrosion.”

  “Do you think you’ll survive?” Valya tilted her head curiously. It was probably rude to ask, she thought, but surely the question must have crossed Reimas’s mind. How could it not? Fearful speculations on that subject often kept the younger mages awake, whispering across their beds late into the night.

  “I’m not sure they’ll ask me.” Reimas’s thin, colorless lips turned in a pensive frown. “I predict the First Warden won’t let any of us attempt the Joining until he thinks he knows what the consequences will be of Diguier’s failure. That is well enough by me; if I were given the cup today, I believe I would end as the Knight-Lieutenant did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have my own doubts,” Reimas said. “This is an old and heroic order. But the evil it was created to fight … I do not know that I want to dedicate my life to the Grey Wardens’ cause. I know why I became a templar. I understood what I needed to do to protect people on both sides of the Circle’s walls, and I was proud to serve my duty. I have no such understanding, and no such pride, here.” She shrugged, a gesture heavy with fatalistic defeat. “And because I am not pure or certain in my purpose, I’ll likely fall when I drink from the poisoned cup, just as Diguier did.”

  “I don’t know that I want to be a Grey Warden either,” Valya said softly. “I don’t know that I have the strength for it. I think … I think heroism takes a harder heart than what I have.”

  Now it was Reimas who gave her a curious look. “What do you mean?”

  Haltingly, Valya said: “I found a diary.” She folded her hands over each other in her lap, looking down at them uneasily. Although she’d finished it weeks before, she had never mentioned Isseya’s diary to anyone. At first she hadn’t been sure it w
as anything important enough to warrant the Wardens’ attention—although obviously of historical value as a Fourth Blight relic, there hadn’t been anything in it that seemed relevant to the subjects that the Chamberlain of the Grey had asked them to research—and then, when she read Isseya’s confession to blood magic and what she’d done with it, she’d been shocked into silence.

  Garahel, the hero of the Fourth Blight, had had a sister who was a blood mage. Isseya had been a Grey Warden, and a blood mage.

  And an elf, which shouldn’t have mattered, but did.

  Garahel was the one glorious legend they had across Thedas, the hero whose greatness nobody could deny. Whatever people thought or said about the elves, whatever slurs and indignities they hurled at the “knife ears,” they still had to acknowledge that they owed their nations’ survival and the existence of their lineages to his selfless slaying of the Archdemon Andoral.

  Revealing Isseya’s confession would tarnish that shining image. It was the right thing to do, but … as she stood on the precipice, the admission bitter as lye on her tongue, Valya felt like a traitor to her people.

  “Whose diary?” Reimas prompted. The gentleness of her tone, and the caution in her eyes, told Valya that she’d noticed the elf’s reticence.

  “A Warden’s,” Valya answered numbly. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “A Warden from the Fourth Blight. She was a blood mage, and she did terrible things … but she did one great one too. That’s why I asked you about the blood magic—whether it was possible to do anything good with it. I thought, if a templar agreed that it could be done, then maybe I wasn’t just lying to myself. Maybe it was true, and this … her legacy … might be worth recovering.”

  A silence stretched between them. The little brown bird came back to the apple tree and hopped along its knotted limbs. Or maybe it was a different bird; Valya couldn’t tell. For all the time she’d spent watching them, she had never learned to distinguish one from another.