Dragon Age: Last Flight
Page 28
Valya accepted the healing with a mute nod of thanks. There was a spare cloak in her pack, and she laid it over her fallen friend to cover him as best she could.
Then she straightened, squaring her shoulders. Speaking quickly to avoid choking on her own grief, she said: “The eggs were hidden in a dragon’s lair. Isseya thought a mother dragon formidable enough to guard her own eggs would serve well as an unwitting guardian for the griffons’, too. There aren’t many passages in this place large enough to admit a high dragon, so I imagine we only have to find one that is and it’ll lead us to the lair.”
Reimas nodded, although the grave compassion on the templar’s face told Valya that the human woman wasn’t fooled by her attempt at a brisk matter-of-fact tone. “Then that’s what I’ll look for,” she said, striking up another torch to replace the one that had been ruined during their fight. Holding the brand aloft, the templar led them deeper into the monks’ abandoned shrine.
It was a strange, sad place. The faintly spicy odor of dry desert death filled its unlit halls. Markings of piety covered its walls: alcoves for long-gone prayer candles, empty fonts that had once held cleansing waters, crumbling mosaics depicting the first Exalted March and Andraste’s martyrdom in Minrathous. The mosaics had been finely made, if of simple materials like shell and painted ceramic, and must have come at extraordinary expense in this poor and remote land. After generations of neglect, however, many of the tiles had come loose, while others were dimmed with a patina of dry dust.
Less than an hour after they began their exploration, Reimas stopped before a corridor vastly wider than any of the ones they’d seen before. She raised her torch high, signaling for the others to come forward.
Where the other halls had been cramped and tiny, as one would expect from tunnels chiseled out of solid stone by humble monks wielding simple tools, this one was wide enough for them to walk two abreast and high enough that two feet of empty space cleared over the crest of Reimas’s helm. Here the mosaics on the walls had been fashioned with tiles of foil-backed glass and costly colored stones, and the alcoves for prayer candles still held stubs of precious beeswax.
“They made it into a chapel,” Valya breathed, realizing what the monks had done.
“Of course they did,” Reimas said as she walked down the hall. Tiny, fragmented reflections of her torch glimmered in the jewel-like glass of the mosaics. “It was the grandest part of this place. They must have thought its existence was a sign from Andraste.”
“Provided the dragon wasn’t still living here when they found it,” Caronel noted. He and Valya fell in behind her, gawking at the ornate artistry. There were even mosaics on the ceiling, depicting the Disciples of Andraste amid blue and gold quatrefoils.
“I can’t imagine any monks would have survived to tell the tale if it was.” The templar paused again as she came to the end of the hall. Her torch guttered in a draft. Ahead, an enormous chamber yawned, its far recesses lost to shadows that the failing torch couldn’t break.
What they could see, however, was a wonder of religious expression that seemed impossible in the harshness of the Anderfels. Not an inch of the stone cavern had been left bare. Nearly all of it was sheathed in painstakingly detailed carving, scene after holy scene etched into the rock with such minute precision that Valya felt there were tiny people trapped in the stone, caught perfectly between one heartbeat and the next. Bands of intricate scrollwork separated each hagiographical scene.
“Where are you going to find the eggs in this?” Caronel managed after a moment’s awed silence. “There can’t be any of the original markings left.”
“There never were any,” Valya replied. “Isseya didn’t want to risk them being found.” She opened herself to the Fade again, as she had in the library at Weisshaupt in what seemed like a thousand lifetimes ago.
And just as it had then, a thousand lifetimes ago, the blue-green glow of lyrium caught her eye. Not in ornate calligraphy, as it had been on the map in Weisshaupt, but just a faint, irregular smudge on the wall, as high as a short woman’s arm might reach. Maybe once it had borne some written message, but the monks had carved so much away that only a choppy blur remained.
“There,” Valya said, drawing out more magic and channeling it into the lyrium. The glow intensified until she had to squint away from its luminance. “Behind the stone.”
“Do we just … smash it?” Caronel asked. The teal-blue radiance reflected off the elven Warden’s nose and cheeks as he gazed up at it in befuddlement.
“No. There should be a better way.” Raising her staff, Valya went forward to find it.
Isseya had hidden the eggs well. The monks who had colonized the Shrine must have spent weeks carving a depiction of Disciple Havard stealing the ashes from Blessed Andraste’s pyre directly over the lyrium-marked stone, yet it did not seem that they had ever noticed anything amiss about that section of cavern wall.
But then, they were only looking with ordinary eyes, and the secret compartment was all but invisible without mana flowing into its markings. Even with the lyrium showing her the way, Valya could barely make out the lines, obscured as they were by the carvings over them.
When she reached out to the stone with magic, however, it vibrated silently and came forward an inch, shattering Disciple Havard’s stony nose as it moved. The section was large enough for a person to crawl through, and far too heavy for the three of them to manage physically, but it pulled out freely at the first touch of Valya’s magic and slid to the side, revealing a passageway cut so smoothly into the rock that its edges shone like mirrors.
“How are you doing that?” Caronel asked in astonishment.
“I’m not,” Valya answered, as surprised as he was. “I’m barely touching it. It must be Isseya’s spell.”
“After four hundred years?”
“She was a great mage,” Valya said. “Greater than I’d realized.” She pointed her staff’s glowing agate at the newly revealed passageway and, leading with the light, stepped inside.
It didn’t go far. Valya had thought there might be traps or wards or perhaps some sort of riddle to test whether the seeker was worthy of Isseya’s treasure … but she found none of those things. Perhaps the dying Warden had been too weary, in her last extremity, to add more safeguards to those she’d already chosen, or perhaps she’d thought that secrecy and remoteness and the high dragon that had once lived there were guardians enough.
After twenty feet, the tunnel ended in a rounded alcove. A shimmering, translucent globe of force hovered over a ring of runes painted in shining lyrium upon the center of the alcove’s floor. Within the globe, Valya glimpsed a wrapped bundle of large, rounded lumps.
The eggs. Her heart leaped in excitement. Could they be real? Grief and weariness fell away; a thrill of adrenaline coursed through her veins. With trembling hands, Valya reached out to touch the sphere of magic.
It vibrated under her fingers, warm and yielding as living flesh. A ripple ran across her palms, and then the globe lowered itself to the floor and opened like a flower, petals unfurling from the top down. Layer after layer unfolded, dizzyingly complex, all opening so swiftly that Valya could not begin to follow the magic they contained. Here an echo of a force field, there a scintillating variation on a healing spell, beyond them a layer of raw mana to sustain the other spells … and then they were all gone, in the blink of an eye, before she could fathom what Isseya had done. And the eggs lay unprotected before her, in stasis no more.
Holding her breath, Valya reached out to lift the corner of the blanket that hid them. It, too, was warm. The gray wool had been worn to a fuzzy softness, and still carried a faint whiff of a musky animalic odor that vaguely recalled a tomcat in rut. The scent of griffons. She was the first person in centuries to experience it.
Under the blanket were the eggs. Thirteen of them. They were beautiful: a pearly bluish white, whorled with irregular swirls of black and gently tapered on one end. Each was large enough to fill both of her ha
nds together. Valya caught her breath, gazing at them.
She looked up, delighted and slightly terrified, as Reimas and Caronel came to stand behind her. “Are they … Are they safe?” she asked the other elf. The Grey Wardens could sense darkspawn taint, and if there was any suggestion of it in the eggs …
But Caronel smiled, shaking his head gently. “I don’t sense any corruption in them. Not a trace.”
“Then they’re safe,” Valya said, scarcely daring to believe her own words.
“They’re safe.”
She looked back at the eggs. One of them was stirring. A crack appeared in the black-spotted shell, then another. It was thunderous in the sudden hush. The three of them crowded around, all raptly focused on the hatching egg. Valya gripped her staff so tightly that her fingers went numb on the wood. Nervous and eager, she wanted to help the griffon along, and yet she was terrified that any wrong motion might kill the precious chick.
An eternity seemed to pass before another crack appeared, splitting the first one wider. The tip of a stubby beak, crowned with the tiny point of an egg tooth, appeared through the hole. A glimpse of wet feathers stirred under the fragmenting shell. Then the egg jumped again, and another crack split the glossy blue shell.
The other eggs were beginning to move as well. Soon the tunnel reverberated with the cacophony of breaking shells. It went on for hours, and yet none of the companions moved or spoke, and Valya was sure that none of them wanted the time to pass more swiftly. They were in the presence of history, the three of them together and alone in this shrine that had become witness to one of the Maker’s greatest miracles, and the magic of the moment electrified her.
Finally a downy head emerged from the first shell. Its damp fuzz was white in places, striped gray in others. The flat nubs of its ears lay close against its skull, and its wings were absurd brindled stubs. Valya couldn’t tell which parts of the chick’s indistinct fuzz would turn to fur and which would become feathers, but she knew what—who—she was looking at.
“It’s Crookytail,” she murmured. “That is Garahel’s Crookytail.”
The others were hatching too. One by one they emerged hungry and awkward from their eggs, shaking off bits of shell and sticky membrane. They came out in the colors of smoke and charcoal, some light as morning mist, one a pure, unbroken black. Thirteen griffons in shades of gray, each of them distinct, all impossibly fragile and perfect.
“What do we do with them?” Reimas wondered.
“We take them home,” Valya answered. “We take them home.”
NOVELS IN THE DRAGON AGE™ SERIES
Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne
Dragon Age: The Calling
Dragon Age: Asunder
Dragon Age: The Masked Empire
Dragon Age: Last Flight
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DRAGON AGE: LAST FLIGHT
Copyright © 2014 by Electronic Arts, Inc.
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First Edition: September 2014