The other attacked the Archdemon’s head. Heedless of the dragon’s teeth or its lethal flames, the steel-gray griffon raked its claws at the Archdemon’s eyes and tore cruel furrows in its snout. Scales glittered like a shower of gems as they tumbled away through the air.
Squinting through one blood-filmed eye, the Old God drew a mighty breath. The griffon’s feathers pulled forward in the force of the dragon’s inhalation.
Then it breathed out, and the griffon was obliterated in a wall of fire.
The Fade demons screamed in Isseya’s head, clamoring for vengeance. She slammed the heel of her hand against a temple, trying to shut them out. The world blurred before her eyes, but the demons quieted sulkily.
Seconds later the other Joined griffon tumbled out of the sky, crumpled past recognition between the dragon’s rear claws. Freed, the Archdemon roared exultantly and raised its talon-scarred head to pursue the fleeing remainder of the Grey Wardens—only to find that they had already wheeled back to press their own attack.
“Wardens! Wardens, to me!” Garahel was shouting. He must have been calling them to the attack for some time; the rest of the flight was already in battle formation behind him. Consumed by her demons, Isseya hadn’t heard, nor had she noticed Calien’s increasingly frantic prodding behind her. She urged Revas toward the formation, but it was too late for them to take their place in the line. All she could do was watch from fifty yards away as the rest of their companions streaked toward their serpentine foe.
In a stream of steel and sun-sparked silver, the Wardens flew toward the dragon. Their bows sang a storm of arrows; their staffs flashed with the spirit-lights of the Fade. The clouds seemed to break apart at their charge, and in the sudden clarity of sunlight, Isseya saw that the Archdemon was more badly hurt than she’d realized. One side of its lower jaw was ripped away, stretching its maw into a skull’s smile of raw red bone. Its right eyelid hung low, slashed by a griffon’s claw. Wet flesh and corded muscle glistened through rents in its scaly mail, and a flap of skin hung loose on its flanks.
The Archdemon was far from defeated, though, and it answered the Wardens’ charge over Ayesleigh with another plume of flame. The left fork of the griffon’s formation went down in screams and smoke, trailing to Earth in spirals of hazy gray. The strain of Isseya’s spells became suddenly lighter as several of the beasts she’d been possessing abruptly perished.
The remaining Wardens swerved around the fire and came back for another pass. Gone was the neat line of their earlier formation; now they flew scattershot, each griffon darting in dazzling maneuvers intended to confuse their quarry as they closed. The risk, Isseya knew, was that the griffons might fly into one another’s lines of fire—but they were down to fifteen riders in the sky, perhaps fewer, and evidently her brother felt their numbers were small enough to accept that chance.
He wasn’t far wrong. Three of the griffons fell in the confusion: one that dodged a near collision only to veer into the Archdemon’s breath, another grazed by a frost cone so that it was forced to the ground on ice-weighted wings, and a third that Isseya spotted only after it was already falling, an ashen comet across the low belly of the sky. It landed in the ruins of a cathedral with a bone-shattering thud.
The rest stayed up, and fought.
The Archdemon lunged at them like a dog snapping at flies. It twisted toward one white-chested griffon, close enough to pull a mouthful of feathers from the smaller beast’s tail. The strike turned the dragon’s blind side to an archer, though, and whether by extraordinary luck or more-extraordinary skill, the bowman landed a crippling shot. His archer’s lance punched through the webbing of the Archdemon’s left wing and buried itself deep in the joint of the right, collapsing the wing like a sail on a storm-snapped mast.
Spinning around its ruined wing, the Archdemon spiraled into a steep descent. Calien hurled a fireball at the dragon as its huge spiked bulk flew past. Revas joined the pursuit, diving through its trailing cloak of acrid smoke.
Down it spun through the cloaking clouds, and down they chased it, across the city’s battered walls, to the tall stony skeleton of a church tower that stood alone in a blackened courtyard overlooking the bay. A haze of smoke and sea mist obscured the tower’s base and swirled around the balustrades of the ornamental walls that enclosed its nearby graveyard.
Is this the end? Isseya thought, too astonished to feel even triumph as her black griffon trailed the wounded Archdemon through the sky. Can this really be the end?
It seemed so. It truly almost seemed so. Shouts of jubilation joined the spirit bolts and gray-fletched arrows that the Wardens hurled at the descending dragon. The Archdemon folded its good wing as it fell faster toward the tower. Emboldened by the nearness of their victory, the Wardens dove after it.
Out of the smoke below, a thrumming chorus greeted them. A black-tipped bolt sprouted from the throat of the Warden to Isseya’s right; the man jerked back in his saddle and slumped to the side, blood burbling down the front of his armor in a wet bib. Two more bolts punched into his griffon’s exposed belly, and one into the back of Isseya’s left calf.
The shock of its impact brought her back to her senses.
Through the smoke and clinging mist, Isseya saw the blurred shapes of darkspawn lining the heights of the abandoned houses ahead: genlocks, hurlocks, tall gaunt shrieks. They crouched along sagging rain gutters, squatted between weatherworn gargoyles, peered up from holes in neglect-manged roofs. She couldn’t make out all their weapons, but in her bones she knew that all held bows and crossbows at the ready. The Archdemon had turned the Wardens’ own tactics against them: it had lured them along as expertly as a mother bird feigning a broken wing, and now the jaws of its ambush had closed.
Revas pushed upward, screaming in fear and anger, and so did the others around her. But the damage was done. Of the griffons who had followed Garahel into the Archdemon’s trap, only eight remained. Eight griffons, and maybe ten riders—too few, far too few, to bring an Archdemon down. Even as Isseya counted, another griffon, mortally wounded, vanished into the swirl of smoke and fog.
“Release the ragers,” Calien said behind her. His voice was taut with fear and pain, but his suggestion carried calm through the chaos.
It took Isseya a moment to recognize that it was her old friend who had spoken, and not another demon of the Fade; it took her another moment to see the sense in his words.
One tainted griffon had been able to challenge the Archdemon. Two had been able to hurt it. Three or four might be able to end it.
She had to hope so, anyway. Four Joined griffons were all they had left. And even if they survived this fight, the Grey Wardens would not be able to mount another strike like it anytime soon. Maybe not ever again.
Isseya severed her spell. The voices of the Fade demons vanished from her consciousness, leaving her alone with the deafening silence of her own thoughts … and with the griffons’ screams.
That was no trick of Fade spirits, though. The screaming was real. It filled the elf’s ears with raw fury and their thirst for vengeance—a thirst they were now free to slake.
Loosed from their magical leashes, the griffons hurtled toward the waiting dragon. The darkspawn’s arrows troubled them no more than gnats. Their riders perished swiftly, Isseya winced to see, but the griffons hardly seemed to notice. They flew through the barrage, bearing corpses in their saddles, and drove the Archdemon from its desecrated perch.
The black-winged dragon had not entirely feigned its injuries, but it could still weakly fly. It fled the church tower with the Joined griffons in hot pursuit, skimming eastward over the lead-gray waters of the Rialto Bay toward a cluster of listing, abandoned ships. Their masts made a leafless forest over the water, and in that forest, the Archdemon sought refuge.
There it alighted on the upward-tilted beakhead of a partly sunk galleon. No attacker could reach it from land or sea, and the approach from the air was little better: a twisting course through the unpredictably shif
ting canyon of the other ships’ sails and masts. The salty sea fog amplified the constant risk of collision, and even were an attacker to thread the aerial route successfully, it funneled directly into the Archdemon’s field of fire.
It was impossible, and it was the only chance they had.
“We’re going in,” Isseya told Calien. “Be ready to shield.” She raised her own red flag to signal to the other riders that she intended to lead an attack. As they fell in behind her, she urged Revas forward.
Isseya loosed the reins, giving the black griffon freedom to choose her own course, and opened herself to the Fade again. Magic surged into her grasp, and she spun it out into force and fire as they crossed over the darkspawn archers to reach Rialto Bay. The instant the hurlocks and genlocks came into range, Isseya launched her spells at their pale, dead-eyed faces.
Force waves knocked genlocks and gargoyles alike from the ruined roofs of Ayesleigh. Fire obliterated the hurlocks’ arrows in midair and snapped their bowstrings in melting curls. The griffon riders behind her continued the barrage, hammering the darkspawn with fireballs and ice blasts and skull-crushing boulders. Hot white steam filled the air as their spells boiled away the icicles hanging from the empty houses’ eaves.
The steam helped hide them from the archers, but force made a better shield. As if in response to Isseya’s thought, Calien conjured a globe of faintly shimmering blue energy that blinked into being around them. What few darkspawn arrows found them through the fog splintered against the mage-born barrier, and by the time the archers found their footing amid the hail of spells and had new shafts nocked, the Grey Wardens were already past them.
The creaking graveyard of ships rose ahead. Revas waited until the last possible moment to dive in, then twisted and turned through the rigging, threading her way past teetering masts and sagging, ice-weighted canvas sails. Loose ropes whipped at them, banging against Calien’s shield. Every time the sea swelled under the ships, a mighty chorus of creaks and groans reverberated through them, prickling Isseya’s skin with fear that all those masts around her might collapse under the next passing breeze. The cries of darkspawn followed them, and the slap of cold water on wood and iron echoed all around.
The screams of enraged griffons joined those sounds as Revas shot through the last arch of tangled rope and sail to reach the Archdemon’s redoubt. Curled around the beakhead’s water-slicked prongs, the immense black dragon breathed gouts of violet-tongued fire at the two griffons who circled its head. The floating shipwrecks around them had been reduced to steaming, smoking flinders; the water underneath wore a motley coat of floating shrapnel. A bent wing bobbed amid those wooden shards, marking the watery grave of a third griffon; the fourth was nowhere to be seen.
They’d left a fair accounting of themselves, though. Great holes gaped in the Archdemon’s scales when it moved, and its right forelimb dragged uselessly against the barnacled wood of the ship’s lower beak. Both of its wings were ruined; they flopped brokenly against its spike-crowned back, and the spines of its own body had torn their webbing to lace. For the first time in Isseya’s recalling, the Old God looked like a thing that could die.
But it wasn’t dead yet. Another blast of purple-black flame finally caught one of the tainted griffons, throwing it back against an ice-sheathed sail and then down to the water in a shower of smoke and glittering frost shards. The last one screeched, an earsplitting peal, and leaped at the back of the Archdemon’s neck.
The others were past the fog now. They emerged from the misty forest of shipwrecks like ghosts made flesh: Garahel on Crookytail, a young dwarven woman named Edelys on the black-eared griffon she called Wren … and no others. That was all that was left of them. The rest of the Grey Wardens’ glorious procession was gone, dead and scattered somewhere over the ashes of Ayesleigh or lost to the gray waters of the Rialto Bay.
Calien’s forcespell winked out like a pricked bubble. “Let’s make an end of this,” he said. Blue light flared about the mage’s staff and struck the Archdemon in a concussive bolt—but before he could hurl another, Garahel shouted him down.
“No! A Warden—it has to be a Grey Warden who kills the Archdemon! Stay your hand, or this will all be for naught!”
“It doesn’t look near dying to me,” Calien muttered, but he tipped back his staff and let its magic gutter out. He knew the risks as well as the rest of them: if anyone other than a Grey Warden struck the fatal blow, the Archdemon’s essence would simply leap to the body of the nearest darkspawn, and the Old God would be reborn, untouched, in new flesh. No true death was possible for such a being, unless it came at the end of a Grey Warden’s blade—and at the cost of that Grey Warden’s life.
That meant the duty fell to Edelys, Garahel, or Isseya. There was no one else.
And the dwarf would not do it, Isseya saw that at once. Brave she undoubtedly was, and lucky to have survived where so many others had fallen—but she was young, very young, and green as summer grass. She’d begun this battle as a second rider, not first, and now clung awkwardly to a bloodstained lead saddle that had been made for a human to sit. Edelys didn’t have the near-telepathic connection with her griffon needed to navigate a battle like this.
Even if she did … seeing death march so close beside her had put a frozen panic in the dwarf, and her fingers trembled so badly on her bowstring that every shot went wide. If she managed to sting the Archdemon, it would be by pure blind fluke, and Isseya did not believe the Maker loved them that well.
So it would be Garahel or herself. The realization brought a pang of bittersweet pride. Isseya gathered the reins, preparing to urge Revas into one last dive—but her brother thrust up a hand to stop her.
“It’s too tight,” Garahel called. “We’ll crash into each other. I have to go in alone.”
“But—”
“I have to.” He was already passing her, pushed so close by the rigging that their griffons’ wing feathers touched. White over black, black over white.
Garahel smiled at her, back over his shoulder. He’d lost his helmet somewhere over Ayesleigh, and his golden hair flew loose in the mist-choked wind.
“Give my love to Amadis, and my weapons to the Wardens,” he said. “And, Isseya, be kind to yourself.”
Then Crookytail beat his brindled white wings, and elf and griffon swept toward the waiting dragon.
Isseya guided Revas to a perch on a sturdy mast. The griffon’s neck feathers bristled; she wanted to be in the fight. But it wasn’t for her, any more than it was for Edelys and Wren, who had found their own perch in another ship’s rigging. They were out of the Archdemon’s reach, and out of their own weapons’ as well. All that remained for them was to watch.
The elf prayed that she could. The rhythmic thudding of the swell-pushed shipwrecks sounded no louder than the beating of her own heart.
The Archdemon had finally torn the last tainted griffon from its neck and was stamping its broken body against the galleon’s upturned hull when Garahel rode out to challenge it. Blood and torn flaps of scale-fringed skin hung around the dragon’s jowls like a wet lion’s mane. The naked bone of its spine showed through its mangled flesh, not white but gleaming basalt black.
It raised its head as Garahel neared. Malice flared in the corrupted Old God’s eyes like wind-stirred embers. Violet flame hissed behind the cage of its long black teeth.
Crookytail drove in straight and hard, with no attempt at evasion, just as the raged griffons had before. And just as it had done before, the Archdemon spat a blistering torrent of flame to engulf its winged challenger.
At the last second, when it seemed physically impossible to escape, Crookytail dropped from the sky like a stone. One instant he was barreling directly into the Archdemon’s geyser of death, the next he was gone.
And then he was up again, rising through the salt fog on the Archdemon’s right side, where its damaged eye left it nearly blind. He wasn’t flying; there wasn’t room to fly. Crookytail leaped up, scrabbling along the
barnacled curve of the galleon’s hull, digging his talons into wood and chalky carapace for leverage. He moved faster that way, and the brindled griffon was on the Archdemon before it saw him.
Not for long. When finally it caught sight of the daring griffon, the Archdemon lunged—and Crookytail did not try to dodge. The dragon’s black teeth buried themselves in the griffon’s striped white fur. Swiftly, the Archdemon snapped its neck upward like a terrier with a mouse, then let go. Without a sound, Crookytail vanished into the flotsam-specked sea.
But the griffon’s sacrifice had served its purpose. Garahel had been standing in his saddle, awaiting the Archdemon’s attack, and when its head dipped low, he sprang. Clinging to its countless spikes for purchase, the elf clambered across the dragon’s brow. It whipped its head around to dislodge him, but Garahel kept his grip. Handhold by handhold, he crossed the final ridge of its horns to reach the gap that the tainted griffons had torn in the back of the Archdemon’s neck.
Bracing himself against the Old God’s rough scales, Garahel raised his curved knife over the bare bone of its spine, then stabbed it downward into the base of the Archdemon’s skull.
There was an instant of electric silence. Isseya saw her brother’s lips move, faintly, but if he spoke any words, she could not make them out. She saw a spot of blood on his cheek in stark relief, and a strand of golden hair that clung to it. Overhead the Blight’s storm was breaking, or perhaps simply gone, and the pure untarnished light of the sun fell across the floating ships like rays of gold in one of the Chantry’s grand cathedrals.
Then the concussive blast of the Archdemon’s death hit them. Cedar- and canary wood burst apart around them; heavy canvas tore like rotten rags. Ice rained down in tinkling showers from ropes and rigging. The shockwave flattened Isseya in her saddle and pressed all the breath from her lungs; if she hadn’t been buckled into her saddle, she would surely have been thrown into the sea.
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