Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  There was nothing Isseya could, or wanted to, say to that. Instead she focused on the immediate concern, the only one simple enough for her to grasp. “What is your will?”

  “What happens to Smoke when you take her eggs?”

  “She might die,” the elf admitted. “I might be able to save her, but—”

  “No.” The word came vehemently, and Amadis blinked as if startled by her own force. She shook her head and continued in more measured tones. “Don’t. You can make it a peaceful passing, can’t you? With magic? Something as gentle as … sleep.”

  “I can,” Isseya said. The Fade’s powers of entropy had never been her primary focus, but she could manage that much. She could put Smoke into a sleep from which there would be no waking.

  “Then that’s what I want. Make it look like she passed naturally, and peacefully, and without any visible wounds. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Amadis rubbed her eyes one last time and put on a determined air that Isseya knew well. She’d seen it first in the Antivan palace on the day they’d met, and although they were all older and wearier now, and in no way the same people they’d been then, that particular mannerism was unchanged. “If there is no cure for Smoke, I can give her that much kindness. I owe it to her.”

  And it removes your political dilemma. Starkhaven need not worry about the symbolic implications of executing the Grey Wardens’ gift. There was no kindness in saying so, though. Instead Isseya nodded, and made to the door. “I’ll do it tonight.”

  “Wait. Please.”

  The elf turned.

  Amadis’s face was deep in shadow, but the firelight caught her hands and made it seem that she wore gloves of gold. She raised them to her cheeks, mimicking the lifting of a mask. “Take off the wrappings before you go. I want to see you one last time, as you really are.”

  Slowly, Isseya complied. She pushed back her hood, letting it settle over her shoulders before she began unwinding the scarves that covered her disfigured face. Dove gray was the one around her brow; muted blue, the one around her mouth and chin. They both fell away soundlessly, baring her skin to the cold breath of the night’s breeze. When they were gone, and Isseya’s ravaged face was fully revealed, Amadis inhaled a soft, shocked breath.

  Lifting her hood again, Isseya stepped through the door. She didn’t bother with the scarves. Behind her, as the heavy iron-chased wood swung shut, she heard Amadis whisper: “Good-bye, my friend. Thank you.”

  * * *

  The Marchers had caged Smoke in a hastily built gaol in the shadow of the castle, where deserters and mutineers had been imprisoned during the war.

  Isseya made her way there cautiously, slipping from shadow to shadow. A canvas bag muffled the glow of her staff’s head. Her dark cloak blended into the night, and there were few abroad to see her, but still her heart hammered in her throat with every step.

  It wasn’t discovery that she feared. It was failure. She had only one chance at this.

  A single lonely guard sat in a wooden chair leaned against the lee side of the gaol, smoking a pipe stuffed with the acrid-smelling weeds that the Free Marchers had taken to smoking for lack of anything better during the Blight. Its bowl glowed cherry-red in the gloom.

  He couldn’t see the door from there, but Isseya supposed he didn’t need to; if Smoke broke free, he’d know it wherever he sat.

  The guard couldn’t see Isseya approach either, but she had no intention of risking discovery. He might hear her inside, or change position while she worked and catch her as she came out, and all would be ruined.

  Cautiously, she reached for the Fade, keeping an eye on the pipe smoker while watching her staff’s radiance in the periphery. The tear-shaped stone on the staff’s head vibrated silently as magic began to flow through the conduit, but the bag she’d tied over it sufficed to muffle its light. There was no telltale shimmer as Isseya drew the shapes of her spell into being, and there was no sound as she released it, entwining the solitary guard in sleep.

  He slumped in his chair. The pipe tumbled from his mouth, spilling its embers across the hard-packed earth in a smoldering arc that dwindled and went dark. Isseya stepped over it, plucked the guard’s key from his belt, and went to the gaol’s door.

  It wasn’t locked. A stout wooden pole, thicker than her wrist, barricaded the doors shut. There were claw marks gouged deep into the doors, leaving splintered holes that Isseya could see through, yet despite the obvious marks of the griffon’s rage, Smoke herself was nowhere to be seen.

  Isseya lifted the barricade pole from its hooks, leaned it against the wall, and eased open the door.

  Smoke crouched on a scattering of filthy, shredded blankets inside. A heavy steel chain ran from a broad, manacle-like collar around the griffon’s neck to a post that had been hammered deep into the earth. A dark metal muzzle enclosed her beak, chafing the feathers around it. Its upper surfaces were crusted with blood from the griffon’s coughs and sneezes. Large patches of her body had been stripped of fur and feathers, and on the bare skin Isseya saw echoes of the corruption that had marred Tusk in Weisshaupt.

  The griffon’s eyes, black and yellow in the darkness, burned with a rage that Isseya winced to see. The chain around her neck rattled with the intensity of her hatred. A hiss escaped from Smoke’s muzzled beak as she stared at the elf, trailing off into a series of hacking coughs and sneezes that left her muzzle and blankets spattered with a new mist of blood.

  The Marchers had broken down the wooden walls between individual cells to widen the space for the griffon, but the gaol remained cramped and miserable, wholly unworthy of her presence. Even if Smoke had not been chained in place, she scarcely had room to raise her head or spread her wings. The place reeked of old urine and sickness and despair, and Isseya didn’t know which she pitied more: Smoke, for having to be here, or Amadis, for having no better place to confine her treasured friend.

  But it would be over soon. There was some small consolation in that.

  “You’ll be at peace,” Isseya murmured, unsure whether she was speaking to the griffon or herself. She touched the Fade again, pulling a skein of magic as ethereal as mist, and spun it out into another spell of sleep.

  Smoke resisted it for a long time, fighting against the magic for the sheer sake of having something to fight, but eventually her will weakened and the enchanted slumber took hold.

  And Isseya, carrying a knife and an infinity of sorrow, went to her.

  * * *

  She left before dawn. The pipe-smoking guard was still asleep on the ground outside, his lips trembling softly with snores. Inside the gaol, Smoke’s feathered body was a lifeless hulk in the gloom, drained of the anger and tension that had poisoned her last days. Isseya hoped the griffon had found peace, wherever her soul had gone.

  The eggs were a warm burden nestled close against her skin. Isseya had bound them in a padded sling, much like the ones that the Dalish used to carry their babies while traveling, and covered them under her cloak. They weighed down her shoulders, but they lifted her heart.

  There was no taint in them. Isseya’s greatest fear had been that the eggs would already be irrevocably corrupted by the same plague that had afflicted their mother and so many of their kin. But in those tiny, slumbering lives, that curse echoed far more faintly, and she believed that she had succeeded in pulling it out.

  She had done so by drawing it into herself. There was, as far as Isseya knew, no way to destroy the darkspawn taint once it had taken hold in a living creature. It grew and spread like cancer, and she had never heard of a cure. There was only the Joining, and that was only a delay.

  But in the eggs—in those unformed, embryonic creatures—there was little to anchor the taint, and she had been able to draw it out. She couldn’t destroy it, but she could transfer it from the unborn griffons to her own body. And so she had.

  It hadn’t made her any sicker. Isseya had worried that it might, and that she might not be able to reach t
he sanctuary where she planned to hide the eggs … but she felt few ill effects from the added corruption. Only a persistent heaviness in her abdomen, as if she had swallowed something large that she couldn’t quite digest, and a blur of oily darkness in the corners of her vision when she turned her head too fast. A constant numb, tingling cold lingered in her extremities; she couldn’t seem to warm her hands or feet no matter how hard she chafed them.

  But it wouldn’t slow her, and that was all that mattered.

  Revas was waiting on Starkhaven’s walls, in the same place she’d perched during the wars. But where ten or more griffons had once alternately quarreled with and haughtily ignored one another, now the black griffon was the only one there. Alone among the crenellations, she stood silhouetted against the lightening sky.

  She came down in a flash of black wings when she spotted Isseya. Revas sniffed at the bundle of eggs, flaring the feathers on the back of her neck in curiosity, but when the elf shooed her away, she huffed and waited for her rider to climb on.

  A deep ache of nostalgia came over Isseya as she lifted herself into the well-worn saddle. This would be, in all likelihood, their last flight.

  First they’d go to the Anderfels, where she had scouted a careful refuge for Smoke’s eggs. After the eggs were secure, she and Revas would go back to Weisshaupt. There, Isseya intended to hide her diary, and its twelve years of secrets, behind a series of enchantments that none but an elf was likely to unlock.

  What she’d said to Amadis had been true: she didn’t believe the First Warden deserved to hold the fate of future griffons in his hands. He was the one who had ordered her to use blood magic on the animals, time and again. He was the one who ignored the warnings of the unafflicted and had opened the door for the darkspawn taint to become a contagion. And he was the one who had not only acted too sluggishly to enforce an effective quarantine, but had ordered his Wardens to fly all across Thedas to help build the new peace—and to spread the griffons’ plague into every known nation. Even if he acts tonight, she thought, it will be too late. This very second, it was too late.

  But Isseya still wanted the Grey Wardens to be the ones to reawaken the griffons, if and when that day might come. She didn’t want that partnership to vanish forever. What she had experienced with Revas, and Garahel with Crookytail, and Amadis with Smoke … That was too precious and powerful a friendship to be completely lost to the ages.

  So she would hide her treasures, and lay her trail, and then leave it to the fates to decide what became of them.

  When it was done, she and Revas would formally abdicate their duties and embark upon their Calling. They wouldn’t be the first team to do so together, or the last. In recent months, as the nature and extent of the rage plague had revealed itself, many of the Grey Wardens who had spent years alongside their feathered partners had chosen to depart in that manner. The wild fury that came over the beasts was seen as their version of the Calling, and the most loyal Wardens chose to fight together with their veteran griffons one last time. Even if their own Calling was not yet upon them, few wanted to live in a world without griffons.

  Isseya didn’t. And wouldn’t.

  She touched Revas’s neck lightly. The feathers were smaller there, and softer. In the griffon’s youth they had been midnight black, and sometimes shimmered with iridescence like the green on a mallard drake’s head. Now they were gray in the softening night before dawn, and would be white in the sun, and felt worn and insubstantial under her fingers. Time and the Blight had been kind to neither of them.

  But today they were here. Together. Today they had one last flight.

  “Revas,” she whispered, “lift.”

  25

  9:42 DRAGON

  “You’re saying there are still griffons in the world?” Caronel asked, thunderstruck.

  “Not for certain,” Valya admitted. “Their protective magic might have failed, or some hungry drake might have come upon the eggs and eaten them. Maybe Isseya didn’t purify the taint from the eggs as completely she thought. Four hundred years is a long time, and her sanity was failing when she hid them, she was very candid about that. Many things might have gone wrong. But … I think there’s a chance, yes. I do think there’s a chance.”

  Together they had ridden out to the dusty, barren steppes of the Anderfels: Reimas, Sekah, Caronel, and Valya. All three of her friends had agreed to accompany her to the Red Bride’s Grave on the strength of her promise that she’d explain her reasons after leaving Weisshaupt. After most of a day’s ride, Broken Tooth was a receding shadow on the southern horizon, its westward side painted red by a spill of sunset, and Valya had decided it was time to reveal what she knew.

  “When Isseya hid the eggs there, it wasn’t yet a shrine. Andraste’s likeness was there, etched into the stone by unknown hands, but there weren’t any monks. The Anderfels were far too badly devastated by the Blight for any such settlement to have survived. At that time, it was a dragon’s cave, and Isseya thought the beast would make a fair guardian for the eggs.”

  “She wasn’t worried about it eating them?” Reimas asked, with a touch of humor that surprised Valya, coming from the melancholy templar.

  The elven mage shook her head. “She hid them. I don’t know how, specifically. I suppose we’ll find out when we get there. All I know is that it involved ‘walls of magic and walls of stone.’”

  “And walls of restless churning bone,” Caronel said, imitating her intonation. He made a wry face. “Sorry. Impromptu poetry should really be punishable by bludgeoning, I know. But the fact remains: there are undead in the Red Bride’s Grave. While I understand now why you wanted to go there—and I fully agree that the possibility of griffons warrants exploration—it isn’t going to be easy. Are you quite sure you don’t want to ask the First Warden for support?”

  “No,” Valya said, even as she recognized and was inwardly grateful for his deferral to her judgment. “I don’t have any idea what we’ll find there. Whatever it is, though, I know that I want us to be the ones to decide what will be done with it. The four of us. Not the First Warden, not the High Constable, not the Chamberlain of the Grey. I don’t trust them to place the griffons’ well-being over power or politics. I asked you three to join me because I do trust you.”

  “Two mages, a Grey Warden, and a templar,” Sekah mused aloud, fingering the carvings that rippled across the ebon wood of his staff. His dark eyes, always somber, rested on each of them in turn as if gravely measuring their worth. In that moment, he looked more childlike than Valya had ever seen him, and yet more adult, too. “It sounds like the beginnings of a bad joke, but we do make a formidable force. We should have a chance.”

  “You don’t have any idea what’s in the Shrine,” Caronel objected.

  The young mage shrugged, turning to regard the elf with the same solemn gaze. “Am I wrong?”

  The Warden threw up his hands theatrically. His gelding whinnied and startled, misinterpreting the gesture as genuine agitation; Caronel had to grab the reins quickly to calm it back down. “I can’t even manage a horse,” the elf grumbled when it was suitably soothed. “I don’t have much optimism about shades or snarling skeletons.”

  “Do they actually snarl?” Valya asked, curious despite herself.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Caronel said. “I couldn’t hear much over our screaming. They certainly do have fangs, however.” He flicked the gelding’s reins, urging the sandy-colored horse northward at a canter that soon outdistanced the others.

  “He wasn’t nearly so flippant about it before,” Valya murmured when the other elf was out of earshot.

  Only Reimas was close enough to hear her. The templar shrugged, adjusting the round steel shield slung over her shoulders as her own horse trotted unhurriedly after Caronel’s. It had once borne the templars’ flaming sword, but she’d painted over the original sigil with a simple chevron of blue over gray: the Wardens’ colors, if not their design. “Everyone deals with fear differently. Some by roaring
at it, some by laughing.”

  “I think I’d prefer the roaring,” Valya said. “Laughter makes me nervous.” She nudged her own mottled gray after the Warden. The light was rapidly failing, and they were in a poor place to make camp. Dust storms were a constant threat in winter, and they could easily prove fatal to the unsheltered.

  It was a grim land they journeyed through. Weisshaupt had been carved into forbidding terrain, and the steppes to its north soon gave way to a dry, cracked crust of earth that refused to support even the scrubby grasses and needled brush that eked out a meager existence closer to the fortress. A rime of salty white coated the broken plates of dirt. Their horses’ hooves beat it into powder, and it stung Valya’s eyes ferociously whenever the slightest wind stirred it up.

  Ahead, a broad band of green marked the faraway flow of the Lattenfluss River. They’d find some respite there, and their horses would have fair grazing—but then the land would get harder yet. Around the Wandering Hills, it was said, the earth was stained an indelible red from the blood of all those who had suffered and died during the First Blight.

  Valya thought that a bit of bard’s fancy, but she couldn’t deny that she quailed a little at the prospect of crossing those arid hills. Many died of exposure in the Wandering Hills; many more choked to death or had their skin flayed off in dust storms. Others became so hopelessly lost that, as the place’s name suggested, they wandered fruitlessly among its dead dry slopes until finally, inevitably, they perished.

  “What do you intend to do with the griffons?” Reimas asked as their horses trotted toward the river-fed greenery ahead. It was nearing nightfall, and the shapes of the trees that lined the Lattenfluss were fading into the blue blur of dusk. “Assuming that there are eggs, and they’ve survived all this time, and Garahel’s sister succeeded in purging them of the darkspawn taint.… What is your plan for them?”