Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  The tiny gate in front of them was opening. Exhausted, frightened men and women emerged, blinking against the hot wash of light from the fire spells. Many cradled babies in their arms or pulled small children along by the hands. They brought almost nothing else. Isseya had told the Champion of Kirkwall that the Wardens didn’t have room for material goods on these runs. There would be food and clothes at Fortress Haine.

  “Get in,” one of the other Grey Wardens told the refugees, guiding them to one of the three caravans as each conveyance filled. The Marchers obeyed, their faces taut with barely contained panic. Some of the children cried.

  Isseya ignored them. The strain of holding her spells took all she had; the elf could spare no pity for her charges. She waited until the last of the aravels was almost loaded and the shapes of their flying escorts were visible overhead through the veiling flails of fire from the walls. When she saw the griffons circle in the sky, she knew the Grey Wardens were ready to lead them out from Kirkwall.

  “Ready the skyburners,” she told the Wardens around her, climbing back into Revas’s saddle. “Mages, raise your caravans.”

  At a signal from the airborne Wardens, the defenders’ fiery curtain parted and died. The darkspawn rushed forward, only to be driven back by bursts of concussive force and elemental ice. Buoyed by their mages’ spells, the caravans lifted into the air, then leaped across the gibbering darkspawn as their griffons—two possessed, one free-willed—surged in their traces.

  Again they chased the vanishing path laid down by their escort. But this time, as the darkspawn closed behind them, Isseya signaled for the last caravan to hurl lyrium runes in its wake.

  The dwarven explosives were too imprecise, and threw too much debris into the air, to be safe for use during their entry. Their griffons couldn’t fly through the choking clouds of dust and smoke that the explosions sent up.

  On the way out, however, that was not a concern. And so the Grey Wardens scattered devastation across the darkspawn as they left, sowing azure bursts of death and confusion to cover their retreat. The wreckage of Lisme’s crashed aravels vanished into one such explosion, and Isseya was both glad and sorry to see it go.

  “It worked,” Calien said a few minutes later as they crossed back into the quieter reaches of the Blight. He sounded dazed. “It worked. We can do this.”

  “Maybe,” Isseya said. They were far enough from Kirkwall that she judged it safe to release her possession of the tainted griffons. She relaxed her hold slowly, watching for the first sign that the fierce beasts might turn back to the darkspawn … but they didn’t. Her guess had been on the mark: the griffons had less interest once the horde was out of sight behind them, and the arduous journey had subdued their ire under a heavy mantle of exhaustion.

  Gratefully, she released her connection to the Fade. The demons’ voices finally went silent in her thoughts. Isseya sank back in her saddle, only then becoming aware that her robes were soaked through with cold sweat. She’d been so absorbed in her magic and in ensuring the caravans escaped Kirkwall intact that she hadn’t even noticed.

  “Maybe?” Calien prompted.

  Isseya rubbed her temples. It did nothing to ease the pounding ache behind her eyes, but she tried anyway. “If I have to possess them to keep them from self-immolating, we can’t do this. If we have to break the other griffons’ minds to make them tolerate the Joined ones … No. I can’t. It’s too much, Calien. I can’t do it.”

  The blood mage was quiet for a time. Then, softly, he offered: “I can.”

  And all Isseya could think, hearing the words through the rush of wind and the dulling numbness of her weariness, was: That was what the demons said, too.

  20

  9:42 DRAGON

  “Are you reading about darkspawn again?” Valya paused on her way out of the library, having spotted Sekah sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against one of the shelves. An enormous gilt-edged book was laid open across the boy’s lap, and from twenty paces away she could see the fearsome visages of shrieks and hurlocks painted across the parchment.

  “Of course,” Sekah replied, blinking innocently as he raised his head. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “Not at this hour. It’s past midnight.” Valya raised her staff pointedly. The glow from its blue agate, and the radiance of Sekah’s own moonstone-tipped staff, were the only lights in the library. Night had fallen hours ago, and the other Hossberg mages had retired after dinner. They were the only ones left in the dark, hushed halls. The Wardens allowed them few candles after dusk; beeswax was costly, and the mages were expected to provide their own illumination.

  Valya understood why the Wardens had asked them to spare the candles, but the hushed gloom made the library distinctly unsettling after sunset. One or two mages were hardly enough to light the cavernous chambers, and their tiny spheres of radiance floated like lonely, lost will-o’-the-wisps in the echoing dark. “Why do you stay here so late? Doesn’t this place make you uncomfortable? It’s so … empty. And there are all those bones in their cases, and weapons on the walls, and the Archdemon’s horns.…”

  Sekah gave her another owlish blink. He turned the page, bringing up a ghastly depiction of a broodmother and her squirming misshapen spawn. Whoever had illustrated that tome had been possessed of good anatomical models and a disturbing bent of mind. “It’s just a library.”

  “A library full of creepy creepiness,” she muttered. “I don’t know how you can read about darkspawn here and not have nightmares.”

  The younger mage laughed, a trifle uneasily. “I suppose it is a bit … well, creepy, yes. At night. But the only reason it’d ever trouble my sleep would be if I couldn’t finish all these books.”

  “Why?” Valya asked, baffled. Reading Isseya’s diary was more than enough to darken her own dreams. She could not imagine seeking out more recorded horrors to fill the rest of her waking hours. When she wasn’t working, she’d developed an unexpected fondness for courtly romances and stories about dogs. Even the classic Antivan comedies were too violent for pleasure reading anymore.

  “This is one of the great repositories of knowledge in Thedas,” Sekah said. He touched the open page, skirting the broodmother’s swollen bulk with a fingertip. “Centuries of accumulated lore on the darkspawn, the taint, the Old Gods, all of it. Here, at our fingertips. And we, the fortunate few, are lucky enough to be here in a time of peace, when we have the luxury of studying it at our leisure, unrushed by wars or Blights. I don’t know how the rest of you can waste so much time sleeping.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about the lack of wars,” Valya said. “I hear troubling rumors coming in from the south, and more of them every day.”

  “But those troubles don’t concern Weisshaupt. The Grey Wardens have always been neutral.”

  “You’re not a Grey Warden.”

  “Yet.” His eyes locked with hers under the twinned light of their staffs. Sekah had always been solemn for his age; although he was two years younger than Valya, she often felt that he was the older and wiser of them. The determination that shone on his face tonight, however, was something new, and beyond anything she had seen in him before.

  “You really want to become a Warden,” she marveled.

  “I do,” Sekah said. “The Grey Wardens serve all the people of Thedas. Not mages or templars, Qunari or elves, but everyone. Equally. That … That’s important to me, Valya.” The precocious determination faded, and he looked half a child again. Swallowing, Sekah dropped his gaze back to the sluglike monster in his book. “I want to be part of something that strives to unite people. I want them to remember their better natures.”

  “They haven’t always done good things,” Valya said, glancing at the grim trophies that hung high on the library’s walls. Battle flags, captured weapons, ogres’ horns … Every one was, in some way, a memorial of suffering. And Isseya’s accounts weren’t the only ones that laid questionable decisions and grim costs at the Wardens’ d
oor. Over the bloody years of the Fourth Blight, the heroes of Thedas had committed some decidedly unheroic deeds.

  “Of course they haven’t,” Sekah said. “Have you? There is no empire, no faith, no endeavor of living souls that has ever been flawless. The important thing is that they’ve tried, and more than most, they’ve succeeded.”

  “I suppose.” Valya chewed her lip uncertainly. “You can fail spectacularly, trying.”

  “Not as spectacularly as when you don’t.”

  “Everyone says that, but I don’t know that it’s actually true.” The elf shrugged, straightening her grip on the staff as she moved back toward the door. Under the stone arch of its threshold she hesitated, looking back one last time. “Do you remember when we first came here, and you said we needed to find something to prove to the Wardens that we were worth accepting?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if … What if I did, but it’s not something I’m sure they should have?”

  Curiosity shone in Sekah’s dark gaze, but the boy held back the question he so plainly wanted to ask. Instead he steepled his fingers together over the open book, considering. “I’d ask why you feel that way, and whether someone else would be a better custodian, and maybe whether it’s something that ought to belong to anyone at all.”

  “I don’t know the answers to any of those,” Valya muttered. “I only know they made a mistake the first time.”

  “Then I suppose all you really need to decide is whether they’re likely to repeat it.”

  “That one I do know,” Valya said. “Maybe. Thank you.”

  * * *

  “Do you know how to find the Red Bride’s Grave?” Valya asked.

  Caronel raised an eyebrow, pausing in the midst of stripping off his sweat-soaked tunic. It was a brisk morning, crisp with the onset of winter, and steam rose from his body as mountain winds blew through the training room’s open windows. He’d been working for more than an hour, practicing strikes against a padded dummy with one of the weighted, bundled canes that the Wardens used to build their strength. “You came here to ask me that?”

  “I need to find it,” Valya said uncomfortably. She stepped back as the older elf collected a linen towel from the bench beside her, dipped its corner in a basin of ice-fringed water, and wiped the sweat from his shoulders. “I was told you’d gone there once.”

  Caronel snorted. He splashed a handful of water into his sweat-darkened hair, rubbed it through, and shook it out in a glittering spray. After tousling his head dry with the towel, he pulled on a fresh tunic. “Once is enough for anyone to make that mistake. If you’ve heard the story, you know it was a disaster. Why would you possibly want to repeat it?”

  “I don’t, particularly. But I think there’s something important there.” A frigid breeze rattled the wooden shutters on the windows. Unlike the other elf, Valya hadn’t done anything more strenuous than walk to the training room, and that had been a few minutes ago. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer. It was only trimmed in rabbit fur, not nearly as warm as the Wardens’ heavy sheepskins and fox-lined coats, but it was all she had.

  “What could be important enough to warrant going there? The place is crawling with corpses, and I mean that literally.”

  “I know.”

  The Red Bride’s Grave hadn’t always been called that. Located deep in the Wandering Hills, it had originally been known as the Shrine of the Red Bride. It consisted of a series of tiny caverns burrowed into the side of a steeply walled dry gorge, with an ancient, weathered likeness of Andraste cut into the cliff face between the entrances.

  It was said to have inspired Our Lady of the Anderfels, an even grander sculpture carved into the white stone of the Merdaine—but whereas the Lady of the Anderfels was still a lodestone for pilgrims across Thedas, the Red Bride no longer drew admirers. Now the place was said to be cursed, and the Grey Wardens of Weisshaupt knew those tales to be more than mere rumor.

  Once, the caverns that surrounded the Red Bride had housed an order of ascetic monks who chose to isolate themselves in the harsh steppes of the Anderfels and meditate on the Maker’s works. A webbing of rope-and-board ladders enabled them to leave their perches when necessary, and to accept alms from devoted pilgrims who made the long journey to visit the sacred site.

  In the late years of the Blessed Age, the Shrine had come under attack from darkspawn, and after a long siege, the monks had died in their lonely cells. Although she’d done her best to research the history, Valya hadn’t been able to find a clear account of what killed them, exactly; she wasn’t sure if anyone knew.

  One or more of the monks might have been mages—it wasn’t uncommon for the superstitious and ignorant to seek out such lives of isolated piety, praying for the Maker’s protection, upon seeing the first manifestations of their magical gifts—and it was possible that such an untrained mage might have called a demon accidentally. Or it might have been done intentionally in a desperate attempt to drive away the darkspawn. The histories were silent on the subject.

  All that was certain was that the monks had died, every last one, and that they had resorted to terrible measures in their final days of thirst and starvation. Whether they’d been called by the monks or not, demons had been drawn to the horror of their passing, and their bones did not rest quietly in that once-holy place.

  That was the story Valya knew. She also knew that Caronel had been part of a small group of Wardens who’d been forced to seek shelter at the base of the cliff during an unexpected storm. Seven had gone out, three had come back. That was how they’d discovered what the Shrine of the Red Bride had become.

  “I think,” Valya said, “that if we went in carefully, prepared for what waits in the place, the Red Bride’s Grave might not be insurmountable.”

  “You weren’t there,” Caronel said. He paused, frowning, and canted his head to the side. “What do you mean by ‘we’?”

  “I don’t plan on going alone. I was hoping you’d go with me.”

  The Grey Warden closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and inhaled, working his jaw silently through a knot of tension, before he spoke again. “Valya. Why would I ever want to go back to that cursed place? There’s nothing in it but demons and corpses—including the corpses of my friends.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Caronel pushed away from the wall and collected his weighted practice sticks from the bench where he’d dropped them. He returned the bundled canes to their rack on the wall, thumping each one onto its pegs with more force than necessary. Anger and guilt tightened his shoulders, but he answered her. “We were supposed to be hunting darkspawn. There were rumors of unusual activity in the area, even ogre sightings. The First Warden deemed them significant enough to warrant sending out a company of Grey Wardens, although it’s possible he just wanted us out of Weisshaupt because he was entertaining some politically sensitive guests.

  “Either way, we went. A dust storm caught us in the Wandering Hills. We thought we could take refuge in the monks’ caves. As you know, that was a mistake.”

  “What exactly did you encounter?”

  “The restless dead, what else? Fanged skeletons, withered corpses with bladed claws for hands, clattering collections of bones wrapped in the rags of monastic robes. There were shades among them too, and it was because of those wraiths that so many of my brothers died. They wrapped us in enchanted sleep, and by the time we woke and went for our weapons, the demons and their puppets were already among us. We fled, and we still lost better than half our number.”

  “If we went in with our eyes open, we’d have a better chance.”

  “If, if.” Caronel’s gold-flecked eyes were sharp. He pulled a mantle of curly beige sheepskin over his tunic and clasped it tightly around his throat, then went over to close the shutters that let air and cold winter sun into the training room. “Why are you so bent on going into that place? There’s nothing there, Valya. Just bones and ancient misery and the demons that have laid claim to them b
oth. Four more now than before. Whatever your reason is, it’s not worth the journey.”

  “I believe it is,” the young elf said. “I think there’s something in the Red Bride’s Grave that could change the course of history in Thedas.”

  “Oh, well, in that case let me drop everything, and we’ll rush out there today. I don’t suppose you plan to tell me what it is?”

  Valya shook her head unhappily. Of all the Grey Wardens in Weisshaupt, Caronel was the only one she could truly count as a friend. The other Wardens held themselves apart from the recruits, whether because they were reluctant to befriend people who might die or never go through the Joining or because they were simply too absorbed in their own affairs to make time. They were never unkind to her, not exactly … but a kinship existed among the Wardens that excluded outsiders completely, and while Valya had come to understand something of that bond through reading Isseya’s diary, it still did not embrace her.

  They were friends, yes, but his greater loyalty might yet be to the order. Valya’s might have been, in his place. And she did not want to risk the Grey Wardens leaving her behind to uncover Isseya’s secret on their own.

  “I’ll tell you after we leave,” Valya promised. Her voice sounded tiny, but it did not waver. “I just can’t tell you while we’re in Weisshaupt. But when we go, you have my word, I’ll tell you everything, and if you don’t think it’s reason enough to risk the Red Bride’s Grave, we’ll turn back. I won’t complain. I promise.”

  “So it’s a secret you’re keeping from the Grey Wardens, not me,” Caronel said. He fastened the last of the shutters and, finally, turned back to her. His tone had lightened; a hint of remembered pain lurked in its depths, but she could almost believe he was back to himself again. Almost.