Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  Isseya unlimbered the staff from her back. Magic thrummed through the rune-carved steel. She could feel the strange reverberations of the Fade in the metal, both real and not real. By her will, that amorphous energy could become fire, lightning, ice, or pure entropic ruin as it came leaping down the channel of her staff.

  However reassuring the feel of that power was, the thought of turning it against people made her stomach twist. Isseya clutched the staff tightly as she walked alongside her brother down the eerily empty halls. “Do you think there will be fighting?”

  “I hope not,” Garahel answered, “but if the people feel that their rulers have betrayed them…”

  They did, and it had driven them to violence. Isseya saw the first victim as she came around a great bronze statue of a drake. The statue’s wide-flared wings hid the woman initially, but as the elf stepped around it, she could see the corpse all too well. Blood, bright as the statue’s ruby eyes, soaked the snowy white linen of the victim’s dress. The gold trim on her sleeves said that she had been nobility, if not royalty; their pristine cleanliness, unmarred by defensive wounds, said she had been taken unawares. She had fallen facedown. Isseya hoped it had been quick.

  “There’ll be more,” Garahel said grimly, striding past the dead woman. An instant later Isseya heard it too: the clang of steel on steel, the hiss of magic being pulled from the Fade and hurled into reality.

  It was coming from the audience chamber. The realization seemed to hit them all at once. As a group, they broke into a run.

  The Anderfels man was faster than the rest of them; he overtook the elves to throw the chamber’s doors open.

  A battle raged inside. Huble and Dendi had overturned one of the side tables and were using it as cover. The bodies of half a dozen guards, burned and frozen by Dendi’s spells and hacked to pieces by Huble’s sword, sprawled on the floor in front of them. Twice that number remained standing, though, and their furious demands for blood echoed from the walls.

  King Elaudio lay among the dead. One of his own guards had struck him down: the curved sword of the Antivan Royal Guard stood upright in the dead ruler’s chest, its gold tassel soaked dark red.

  The queen was still alive. Along with a handful of other terrified nobles, she cowered behind the throne. No one could reach them while the Grey Wardens stood, but even at a glance it was clear that Huble and Dendi were tiring.

  “Give up the cowards!” one of the rebellious guards shouted. “Our fight is not with you! We only want the wretches who betrayed us.”

  “You can’t have them,” Dendi snarled back. “Our orders are to take them. We don’t go back on orders.” A fan of ice sprayed from her staff, freezing two of the men where they stood. A third threw his arm up to block the supernatural cold, letting out a high-pitched shriek as frozen blood erupted from his veins in crimson icicles.

  Some of the men had turned back as the door opened. Garahel leaped to meet them. He fought alongside the tattooed Anderfels man as if they’d been practicing together for months. The Ander drove them back with huge, sweeping swings of his bladed war club, while the elf darted in and out, stabbing at any vulnerable spot he could find in his off-balance opponents.

  Behind them, Isseya pulled magic from the Fade as fast as she could, barely pausing to shape the spirit energy before she flung it as bolts of crackling violet energy at their enemies. Her hastily fashioned spells weren’t enough to kill them, but the guards stumbled under the barrage, and then the other Wardens finished them off.

  She forgot her fear, her guilt, her reluctance to harm other people. In the immediacy of the moment, there was only a frantic desire to destroy all who opposed them.

  And then it was over. Caught between the two groups of Grey Wardens, the remaining guards soon fell. The last pair tried to surrender, but Dendi cut them down mid-plea with another deadly sweep of ice.

  The Ander bled freely from wicked-looking but shallow cuts across his chest and arms. Garahel had taken a light scratch along his brow and a glancing hit from a morningstar that was already beginning to blossom into a bruise on his ribs. None of their injuries looked serious enough to warrant magical intervention, and the Wardens were otherwise unscathed.

  “Get them out of here,” Dendi ordered, gesturing to the huddled knot of surviving nobles. “Now.”

  “What about the king?” Kaiya asked nervously. The bald girl looked nearly as sick as Isseya felt, now that the urgency of combat had ended and they had a chance to look upon the carnage they had created.

  “Darkspawn killed him,” Dendi replied curtly. “We can’t have the world knowing that his own people turned against him at the last, and anyway it’s true. If the Blight weren’t about to swallow Antiva City, none of this would have happened. The darkspawn are the cause of King Elaudio’s death, if not the most direct one.”

  “That’s not true, though,” the queen said suddenly, standing. A bit of color had returned to her pale cheeks. “It’s not true at all.”

  “It’s the truth your people need to hear to keep their morale. You can argue with me about it later, if we’re lucky enough to have that luxury,” Dendi said. She ushered the nobles forward briskly, handing them off one by one to the young griffon riders. Huble gave their names as each crossed the room, but Isseya couldn’t begin to keep up with the flurry of titles and hallowed houses’ names.

  Her charge was a compact, athletic-looking woman of some thirty years. The woman’s sleek black hair had been cropped short in a manner more befitting a common soldier than a highborn lady. Amadis was her given name; Isseya didn’t catch her family’s.

  She did notice, however, that Amadis helped herself to the dead guards’ weaponry as soon as she emerged from cover. After choosing a gold-tasseled saber and three curved daggers, the human woman thrust the smaller blades into her belt, arranging them with an ease that suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d had steel in her hands.

  Garahel’s passenger was named Calien. He was an older man, tall, dressed in red-and-gold mage’s robes. A feathered hood shadowed his face; Isseya’s only impression of him was a sharply pointed chin and pale, thin lips framed by dark brown hair. He carried a staff wrought to resemble a dead, lightning-struck branch with a copper serpent twined around it. The workmanship was exquisite, and everything about the staff’s design spoke of power, but Isseya hadn’t seen him do anything during the fight.

  She wondered about that, but only for a little while. Perhaps he just hadn’t felt threatened, even with the king dying in front of him.

  Kaiya and Taiya took the last two nobles. The Anderfels man didn’t have a ward, since the king’s death left them one short. Of the two who remained, one was a dumpy matron in a tight white wimple. She wore a gold pendant depicting the Maker’s blazing sun within a circle, and that pendant never left her hands. The other was her daughter, Isseya thought; she was younger and slimmer, but their round-cheeked faces were very much alike.

  “There,” Dendi said when the last noble had been introduced and paired to a Warden. “Go. Wycome is our goal, don’t forget that. If we fall behind, don’t wait. Your duty is to get these people safe. That is your only duty. We gave you the griffons to save them. Now do it.”

  5

  5:12 EXALTED

  The bells of Antiva City were ringing. Long and loud they pealed, thunder caught in bronze. Their clamor was deafening.

  As Isseya climbed back up the stairs to the wall where the griffons waited, she could see the city glowing under her feet. Radiant orange reflected in the windows of the Chantry cathedral; the streets looked like rivers of ruddy gold.

  It wasn’t the sunset. Antiva City was burning. Smoke hung heavy in the air, thick enough to choke. The shouts of men rang from the city walls, dwarfed by the bells that called out the same message in their dolorous toll: To arms, to arms, we are under attack.

  The darkspawn had come.

  Warden-Commander Turab had been wrong: Antiva City hadn’t been able to hold its attackers o
ff for days. Already the darkspawn were pouring through the gates. Isseya saw the huge horned heads of ogres moving among houses, and the quick flicker of shrieks around the brutes’ feet. People were screaming, fleeing, dying everywhere.

  “They’re not your concern,” Dendi said sharply as she came up the stairs behind Isseya. “Get on your griffon. Move.”

  Numbly, the young elf nodded. She climbed onto Revas’s back and held out a hand for Amadis to pull herself up afterward. The human buckled herself into the secondary saddle, just as Isseya had been buckled in herself until today.

  Isseya took up the reins, leaned down to the black-feathered neck, and whispered the word that she’d dreamed about for so long: “Lift.”

  Revas dug her talons into the palace’s stone, tensed her muscles, and leaped into the air with two powerful beats of her broad black wings. Wind rushed into Isseya’s face, the world dropped out beneath her with a giddy lurch, and pure exhilaration momentarily erased her dread of the Blight. She was flying.

  And down below, Antiva City was dying.

  The sight killed her joy as swiftly as it had been born. Distance and smoke obscured the details, thankfully, but Isseya could still see the doll-like silhouettes of people pinwheeling across the burning buildings as the ogres dragged them from their windows and threw them into fires for sport. It didn’t look like there was any organized resistance. She didn’t see anything breaking the chaotic swirl of people trying to flee into the river or out through the walls. Now and then one tiny figure, cornered by the black wave of darkspawn, would turn back to fight—but they were always alone, or in small groups, and they were swept away as easily as twigs on the tide.

  The Grey Wardens were sworn to stop the Blight, and yet they were fleeing from it. The injustice sat in Isseya’s throat like a caltrop.

  “Survival first,” Amadis said behind her. The sound of the other woman’s voice startled the elf; she had momentarily forgotten that she had a passenger. “Survival. Then vengeance.”

  “How do you propose to get revenge on darkspawn? You can kill them, but you can’t make them care.”

  “Then we’ll kill them.” Amadis said it so coolly that Isseya was taken aback. She turned to look at her passenger, who was watching the carnage with no expression. The only movement on Amadis’s face was the flutter of her short black hair.

  “Who are you?” Isseya asked. “You’re not just an Antivan lady. Not by the way you handled those blades.”

  Amadis laughed. “You must not know many Antivan ladies. Some of them take their knitting lessons from the Crows. But, as it happens, you’re right about me. I’m not from Antiva at all. My family is in Starkhaven. They sent me here to make some friends and win some suitors. A second daughter needs all the help she can get.”

  “The ladies of Starkhaven are killers?”

  “Some of us.” Amadis’s smile didn’t touch her cold black eyes. “Some of us are quite good at it. Handy during a Blight, wouldn’t you say?”

  Isseya looked forward again, pushing her hair behind her ears. She’d braided it back tightly, but the speed of the griffon’s flight had pulled it loose. If she wasn’t facing into the wind, the long brownish-blond strands whipped into her eyes relentlessly. “There are a lot of darkspawn who need killing.”

  “Not really. It’s just one, isn’t it? Kill the Archdemon, and the whole Blight collapses.”

  Even as Amadis spoke, the Blight’s unnatural storm split open ahead of them. Sickly violet lightning forked through the gray pall, fissuring the clouds in all directions and casting spectral light shadows up on their bellies.

  In the midst of that storm flew the Archdemon. Its wings were tattered and immense, its body a sinuous line of spikes. Unholy fire burned in its gaze. It resembled a dragon in outward form, but no dragon was ever so terrible within. Darkness crackled around it, and darkness was its soul.

  It dove upward through the sky like a newly launched arrow, defying gravity effortlessly in its pursuit of the griffons at the head of their formation. A torrent of violet un-light erupted from the Archdemon’s jaws, showing each of its jagged teeth in a flash of nightmarishly sharp relief.

  And then the Grey Wardens and their griffons were spinning, spiraling, plummeting from the sky like so many blackened snowflakes. Isseya couldn’t see which was which, but she knew that those tiny figures falling to the darkspawn horde were Dendi and Huble and the Queen of Antiva and her father, or uncle, whoever he’d been. And their griffons, Blacktalon and Skriax, who had been two of their best.

  A bitter jolt of shock stung the back of her tongue. Turab and the others had warned her, of course, but she had never truly believed they could die. Not like this, so suddenly, without any semblance of a fight. She hadn’t even heard them scream.

  “It’s coming for us,” Amadis said.

  She was right. Flaring its wings out wide against the glowering skies, the Archdemon had turned and was cutting swiftly through the storm to reach the remaining Wardens. Behind it, lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, zigzagging horizontally among the hulking pillars of cumulonimbus.

  Isseya froze in the saddle, just for a heartbeat. Then she saw Garahel altering his course to intercept it. Is he mad?

  The white-splotched griffon he’d chosen was incredibly fast. Crookytail folded his wings close against his body, tucked his legs in tight, and sliced through the air like a diving falcon. It seemed impossible that the griffon would be able to reach the Archdemon before it came upon the other Wardens—but as Isseya watched the angle and trajectory of the two fast-moving fliers, she saw that, somehow, her brother was going to do it.

  He was mad. That thing had just destroyed Huble and Dendi in less than an eyeblink, and Garahel, who had never slain so much as a genlock, was hurling himself directly at it.

  The Archdemon seemed surprised too, if the creature was even capable of such an emotion. Its wings snapped open, catching the wind like sails to pull itself short before it collided with Garahel and his griffon. The lower half of the Archdemon’s body swung forward; its hind claws raked the air as its spiked tail lashed up to strike at Garahel.

  It wasn’t anywhere close enough to hit him, but in that moment Isseya glimpsed her brother’s strategy. He wasn’t trying to fight the Archdemon. He was just trying to confuse it long enough for the rest of them to fly away. And his griffon was almost fast enough to pull it off.

  That “almost” was going to get them both killed, though.

  A plume of spectral violet energy split the night. The Archdemon had breathed its coruscating corruption at Garahel. But the griffon stayed in the air, a small black shadow at the edge of the brilliant un-light. Somehow, in the instant it had taken Dendi and Huble and all the others to die, either Garahel or his mount had calculated how far the Archdemon could reach with that lethal blast, and they had kept their distance just far back enough to avoid it.

  Either that, or blind luck loved them beyond all belief.

  Isseya touched her heel to Revas’s side, urging the griffon on a slanted course toward them. The great beast hesitated—she felt the split-second lull in the air as Revas made her decision—and then hurtled forward, angling to the Archdemon’s right side to pull it in the opposite direction as Garahel.

  The others, Isseya was glad to see, were taking no part in their stupidity. Kaiya, Taiya, and the tribesman from the Anderfels were all streaking rapidly out of sight, fleeing through the cover of the Blight’s black clouds. In a few more minutes their escape would be assured.

  Just a few minutes. Two, three. Maybe four. That was all they had to buy.

  She gritted her teeth and pushed Revas on.

  Two thousand feet away, the wind carried the Archdemon’s scent to them. It prickled the hairs on the back of Isseya’s neck. Powerfully rank, utterly inhuman, it smelled of cold dead places under the earth. It was the smell of the innards of rotten teeth and the sludge at the bottom of a poisoned river. It was absolute corruption.

  An echo of tha
t same corruption tickled at the edges of Isseya’s mind. The Archdemon’s strange siren song was still there, faint and barely perceptible, but all the more maddening because she couldn’t hear it fully.

  Not that she wanted to, knowing that it was a precursor to the Calling. But it was hard—impossible—to ignore. She couldn’t shut it out. She was too afraid, too new, too conscious of how desperately they were about to be tested.

  So she loosed the reins, giving Revas complete freedom to choose their course.

  It was a wild, foolish gamble. Isseya was asking her new griffon to respond to her with the same connection that veterans developed only after years of partnership. But it was the only chance they had.

  Revas didn’t hesitate. The griffon soared upward, beating her powerful black wings to catch a current of hot air from the battlefield below that accelerated their rise. Isseya could smell burning flesh on that smoky thermal, but she shut her thoughts to what it meant. The Archdemon was all that mattered now.

  They were closing on it rapidly. A thousand feet. Five hundred. Its shadow engulfed them; its tattered wings rose like cliffs above Revas’s head. Isseya could see every grisly detail of the blood-smeared spikes that erupted through the dragon’s hide like crystals of corruption in its flesh.

  A hundred feet. Into the lethal zone. It was close enough to destroy them with a breath, if only it turned its head and loosed its jaws.

  But it paid them no mind. The Archdemon’s attention remained locked on the brindle-and-white griffon and his riders, who were now veering to the left in an attempt to draw it away from the surviving Wardens’ retreat.

  Bracing herself against the saddle, Isseya raised her staff and reached for the Fade. She had just enough time to pull a wisp of magic into the world and hurl it at the Archdemon in a burst of inchoate lavender-edged energy before Revas swerved sharply to the right. The mage’s spirit bolt slammed into the dragon’s bone-spiked side, coruscating across the plate-size scales in hissing arcs of energy, but the Archdemon didn’t even notice.