Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  “Not exactly,” Valya said. “I’d just prefer to know I’m right about this before I tell them.”

  “Why could that be, I wonder?”

  “Take me to the Red Bride’s Grave,” she said, “and you’ll find out.”

  21

  5:24 EXALTED

  It was after Starkhaven that Isseya’s hair began falling out.

  The battles for the Free Marches passed in a blur for her. Allies and new recruits came and went faster than she could mark their names in her memory. Some were taken by fever, some succumbed to the madness of the darkspawn taint, many fell to swords and arrows. A few—very, very few—survived long enough to hear and answer the Calling. The Grey Wardens and their comrades-in-arms reclaimed the Free Marches, town by town, city to village, but every mile they took was bought in blood.

  Amadis said they were winning, and Garahel said the same. Others said the opposite: that for all the territory they reclaimed in the Marches, they were losing ground in Orlais and the Anderfels, and perhaps in the Tevinter Imperium too.

  Isseya didn’t know who to believe, and most days she didn’t care. The elf had long since forgotten what victory might look like.

  They marched across empty riverbeds and dead forests and plains of blown dirt stubbled with the stiff leavings of grass. Dust sleeted across the blighted land in a perpetual dismal haze, while overhead the bruised and swollen clouds promised rain that never fell.

  Allies came to them. Some were refugees, willing to fight in exchange for food and a semi-safe place to sleep. Others were soldiers, sent by grateful princes or ambitious captains or less-affected nations who offered up their forces to keep the Blight away from their own borders.

  Many more, however, were outcasts.

  Garahel had a talent for drawing support from unlikely quarters. He gathered exiled and casteless dwarves under the banner of a split mountain; they called themselves the Stone’s Bastards and fought for the chance that their bones might be returned to Orzammar and restored to the Stone after their deaths. He won the allegiance of rebellious elves who had murdered their owners and fled from the Tevinter Imperium into the Blight, claiming the name of the Masterless and offering to fight for whomever would give them arms. And he took the Broken Circle, a group of apostate mages who had flocked to the Grey Wardens’ side to escape the templars’ hunts.

  Their allegiances were not to any human nation, nor even to the hope of destroying the Blight, but to Garahel personally. Again and again Isseya stood on the sidelines and, in silent awe, watched her brother work his magic.

  He inspired them. It was that simple, and that complex. He was an elf, the abandoned child of nameless parents in a poor and dirty alienage. And he was the hero who had saved Hossberg, helped the people of Kirkwall and Cumberland find safety in the Retreat, and brought a combined army of unlikely allies to drive the darkspawn back from Starkhaven.

  Some of those things, Isseya thought, had been hers. Originally. But she had given them gladly to her brother, because Garahel could do more with the glory than she could. Especially now, with the slow death of darkspawn corruption transforming her into a monster.

  They needed allies. They had too many enemies to go without.

  Every day, it seemed, brought another battle. They fought hurlocks, genlocks, ogres. Bands of desperate, starving men who had turned to banditry and cannibalism to scratch their own survival from a dying land. Bereskarns and corrupted spiders and the occasional wretched ghoul. All of them melted together in Isseya’s memory, and all of them added to the carpet of bones that followed the army’s passage across the Free Marches.

  It wasn’t only the monotony of the brutality that made Isseya forget the faces of her foes. The taint fogged her thoughts a little more with each passing morning. Her diary, once a detailed chronicle of every day’s thoughts, went neglected for weeks, sometimes months. She was losing her mind.

  She wasn’t the only one, of course. It had gotten harder to tell the reality of the Blight from the horrors of her dreams. Sometimes she wasn’t sure which one she walked through, or which one she fought in. The elf had learned to recognize the confusion that sometimes passed over other senior Wardens’ faces. They, too, heard the Archdemon’s song echoing through their heads, a trifle louder every night. They, too, fought to block it out and to hide the signs from their comrades—because, while each of them would have to answer the Calling someday, the war against the Blight was too urgent for that day to come soon.

  Revas was her touchstone to sanity. The black griffon was aging, and the toll of wounds and strains showed on her. Under normal circumstances, she would have been retired a year or two ago. But a Blight meant no respite for anyone, Warden or griffon, and anyway, Isseya needed her. Without the griffon, she’d be lost.

  That was why Revas had not been transformed, despite her age. Most of the others in her condition had been.

  At first Isseya had used the Joining ritual only on the tiny handful of griffons at Fortress Haine. But others had seen her altered griffons when they came to evacuate Cumberland and Kirkwall and all the other struggling Marcher cities, and they had witnessed the strength and fury that the ensorceled beasts possessed.

  After that, the demands had been limited, but steady and implacable. While all the Grey Wardens recognized that a griffon in its fighting prime was better than one of the Joined beasts, the long trial of the Blight had left them with many griffons in poor condition. A significant number of their steeds were older, malnourished, injured, or breaking down from the strain of hard work over years. For those griffons, the improved speed and power bestowed by blood magic outweighed the loss of their intelligence and free will, or the grisly nuisance of the red spume they started coughing within hours of the transformation.

  And so the orders came from various Field-Commanders, and sometimes even the First Warden himself, for one griffon or another to undergo the Joining so that it could stay in the fight. And for every griffon that they Joined, three or four others had to be altered so that they would tolerate the presence of a tainted companion, or else the griffons would tear one another apart.

  Every time, if there was no complaint from the griffon’s rider, Isseya obeyed her orders and did the Joining, because there wasn’t any choice. In the beginning she had objected, but the objections had always been overruled, until finally she gave up. She didn’t have the strength to protest forever, not when it was so transparently useless. The despair of it made her own taint accelerate faster, and maybe the blood magic’s corruption did too; by the time she and Garahel fought together in Starkhaven, she looked like she’d been serving as a Warden for twenty years longer than her brother.

  But she’d forgotten how to care, or why. Mired in the endless Blight, fighting day after day with no end in sight, she could see no reason why it mattered. What difference did it make if the griffons kept their own minds or were tainted? What did it matter if blood magic had to be piled atop blood magic, and possession was necessary to control their wild rage? All the Wardens had accepted similar sacrifices. All of them were doomed.

  Sometimes the Wardens did protest against their griffons’ transformations, and then Isseya would almost grasp some glimmering of why she had initially rebelled … but always she lost it, drowned in the mire of confusion that the darkspawn corrosion wrapped around her thoughts.

  What she remembered—what she told herself, repeating it each night like a prayer—was that this was the price of ending the Blight. Pushing the darkspawn back across the Free Marches. Silencing the Archdemon’s song. At tremendous cost, yes, but still … it was a promise. That if she paid, the nightmare would end. Someday.

  She clung to that hope as her hair fell out in ragged clumps and the purple-black stains of corruption spread through her flesh like bruises flowing through her blood.

  It was enough, until it wasn’t.

  “We have a chance to end this,” Garahel said one evening in his tent. He and Amadis had gathered a handful of exp
erienced Wardens and military leaders for a private conference. His squire bustled around them, lighting braziers filled with sweet-scented woods. Isseya thought the perfumed smoke a frivolity, but Amadis insisted on her small luxuries. She said they were necessary as reminders of beauty in a ruined world, and it was her tent as much as Garahel’s.

  “A chance,” Amadis emphasized, reclining in a folding chair lapped with plush black sheepskins. The mercenary captain’s hair had grown out to a fall of ebon silk that reached nearly to her waist, and it swished over the curly furs as she leaned to the side to collect a glass of spiced wine from a tray the squire had laid out. “If we act decisively. We’ve driven the darkspawn to the edge of destruction, and they know it. This is our chance to seal a final victory.”

  “What do you propose?” Isseya asked. The others gave her strange looks, as they often did when she spoke in recent days. She wore a voluminous gray robe with the hood pulled down to hide the corrosion’s marks on her, but she couldn’t conceal her voice. It sounded muddy and lost, the words distorted by gargling. She knew it was disturbing, and as a result seldom spoke, although that only made the reactions sharper when she did. Two of the newer mercenary captains and an Orlesian chevalier made superstitious signs when they thought she wasn’t looking.

  Garahel, however, stayed perfectly unruffled. “A strike into Antiva,” he replied. “We’re close enough to threaten it now. We’ll challenge the Archdemon in the heart of its own territory.”

  “You think this beast will answer if you throw down a gauntlet?” the Orlesian chevalier scoffed. He looked far grander than the Grey Wardens in their battered and scratched plate, and he carried himself puffed with importance to match. His cuirass was a marvel of intricate gilt over shining steel. Silver-traced roses, polished until each petal shone like a mirror, crowned his spaulders. “You imagine it has honor to be offended?”

  Isseya knew his name, but she struggled to summon it to mind. Mon … Mond … Montfort, that was it. He had been at Fortress Haine; he’d arrived not long before she left. A brave man, she dimly remembered. Not a fool, despite all his efforts to appear one.

  “I do, actually,” Garahel said. “Pride, not honor, but it’ll serve as well for our purposes. The Archdemon will answer if we bring the fight to its door.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Amadis agreed. “It has been beaten back too much to tolerate. No, it’ll savor the chance to crush us before its rallied troops.” She flicked the ornaments on her bracelet: the eyeteeth of the hundredth ogre she’d killed, strung on a cord of braided leather. The teeth clinked against the rim of her goblet. Tick, tick, tick, they said, tapping away the seconds as shivers through the bloodred liquid in her cup.

  “If we can reach it, which is where you all come in,” Garahel said. “The griffon riders will have to lead the strike. No one else can get deep enough into Antiva to draw the Archdemon out. But we’ll need support.”

  “I will go,” Montfort said at once, stepping forward to sweep a courtly bow. “Allow me the honor of leading the cavalry in support.” His armor gleamed brilliantly in the tent’s lamplight. A few of the Grey Wardens exchanged amused looks behind his back.

  Garahel, however, received his offer with solemn dignity. “Thank you. Your courage is noted.”

  “You’ll have the Ruby Drakes too, of course,” Amadis said. After that, the other mercenary companies vied to be next, each extolling its bravery and skill over the others. Garahel listened straight-faced to their boasting and then chose the ones he wanted. Mages, archers, and the Stone’s Bastards to make a wall of steel around them. Almost all were chosen from his companies of outcasts.

  The ones who need to be heroes, Isseya thought, and the ones who have nothing to return to in peacetime.

  She wasn’t surprised, then, when he dismissed most of the Grey Wardens along with the mercenaries at the end of his selections. Once again, the ones that he asked to remain were the ones who had little left outside the Blight. Several, like Isseya, were deep in the darkspawn taint, and in calmer times might already have departed for their Callings.

  “You don’t expect us to survive,” one of those Wardens said when the others were out of the tent. He was a grim, hard-bitten man of the Anderfels, his face browned by the sun and lined with wind wrinkles. Ritual scars hatched his cheeks in vertical white lines. Isseya thought his name was Lehor, although she wasn’t sure.

  Sagging purple bags shadowed the undersides of the Anders’s eyes, but all the Grey Wardens knew it wasn’t weariness that had made those marks. They might not mention it to their allies, who did not need to know such things, but the Wardens recognized the onset of his Calling. It had gone almost far enough to take control from him.

  “I never expect any of us to survive,” Garahel said with artificial lightness, “but it’s true that the odds will be rather worse than usual this time. If that troubles you, you’re free to stay behind.”

  “I will not,” the Anders man said scornfully. “I shy from no battle.”

  “Good, then that’s settled.” The elf walked across the tent and traced a line with his finger across the battle map laid out on his folding desk. It ran from their camp’s location straight to the sketched castle that represented Antiva City. “This is the route we’ll be taking. Directly over the bulk of their army, because we want them to see us coming. Amadis will lead our ground forces to Arvaud’s Barrow; the hill should give us some advantage over the darkspawn. They will wait there as we try to bring the Archdemon within arrow range.”

  “That’s a long flight,” Lehor said, crossing to look over Garahel’s shoulder. “Maybe too long to fly at top speed.”

  “That’s why we’re only going to be taking the strongest griffons,” Garahel replied. He glanced at the shadowed corner where Isseya had retreated. “The ones that won’t tire.”

  Lehor frowned, and some of the other Grey Wardens exchanged uneasy murmurs. “You want us to ride the Joined beasts?”

  “Unless your griffon is strong and swift enough for the task, yes.”

  “They’re mad,” Lehor said bluntly, putting his hand down flat on the desk. “They cannot be controlled. The rage is too much in them. Near darkspawn, they lose their minds. They spring to attack and cannot be called off. To ride such a beast into battle with the Archdemon … it is inviting death. Only disaster will come of it.”

  “If I thought that, I wouldn’t use them,” Garahel said. “But I trust my sister, and I believe our chances are best this way. We may not be able to lure the Archdemon back to our allies. If it won’t come with us, we’ll need to be able to defeat it in the air. That means bringing griffons who can—and will—fight under any odds and through any wounds.”

  They turned to look at Isseya. Under her hood, she shrank back from their stares. She read doubt, and distrust, on the Wardens’ faces, and there was none of the hope that shone from them when they looked at Garahel. I’m a monster to them.

  She didn’t blame them. There wasn’t much left in her of the elf she had once been.

  But there is enough, she thought, to see them through this. To do her part in bringing the Archdemon down. One more battle, and she could bid farewell to this endless march of grief and sacrifice. One more, and she could leave the crushing burden of heroism to others.

  “They’ll be controlled,” she said.

  * * *

  Night had fallen over their camp while Garahel laid out his plans.

  By the time he finished, the sun was long gone, and Isseya walked back to her own tent under the mantle of darkness. Around her, campfires glowed ruddy in the blue-black gloom, islands of light and warmth in a sea of solitude. The noises of restless horses and snoring soldiers and the occasional sighs and moans of people taking solace in one another drifted past her, as familiar as the nocturnal songs of crickets had been in another life.

  Her own tent was quiet. Revas did not like to sleep amid crowds and always sought out her own roosts away from their camps, and there was no one e
lse Isseya would have invited to stay with her. Especially with the corrosion creeping through her blood, it was safer and more comfortable to lie alone.

  Tonight, however, she found herself restless. Almost without realizing it, she walked past her tent, moving aimlessly through the forest of canvas and stakes and ebbing campfires until she came to a familiar sight: Calien’s tent, patched together from vibrant swatches of green and gold because he said the colors helped keep the Blight out of his dreams. The cloth had faded over the years, and the night leached much of its remaining brightness, but nevertheless it stood out among the other drab domes.

  Isseya paused. If there’s no light, she told herself, I’ll just go on.

  But there was. The golden glow of firelight limned the tent flap, soft but distinctly visible.

  Pushing back her hood, Isseya approached and knocked at the door. Her knuckles made scarcely any sound as they dimpled the cloth, but Calien answered: “Come.”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Isseya said, lowering her head to enter.

  “You aren’t,” Calien said. He was rumpled and unshaven, and dark circles ringed his eyes, but he managed a weary smile and tossed a horsehide pillow over to Isseya. The elf laid it on the floor and sat awkwardly next to the single oil lamp that illumined the tent’s cramped confines.

  An open book rested near the mage’s knee. Isseya gestured at it. “Up late reading?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. You’d think that by now I’d have learned the importance of resting before a battle … but somehow the thought of flying out to challenge an Archdemon makes it hard to close my eyes.” Calien gave her a self-deprecating shrug. “I thought a little pious reading might settle my nerves. Or bore me to sleep, either way.”

  “It’s a holy book? That doesn’t seem like you. I thought we’d agreed years ago that you were well past the point of prayers.”