Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  “I’m not sure,” Valya confessed. “Isseya believed that the Grey Wardens would be the best stewards, once they’d had time enough to reflect upon and correct the mistakes of an earlier age. I can’t think of anyone better. Can you?”

  “Perhaps they don’t need a master. They could go out to freedom,” Reimas said, sweeping an open hand over the twilit steppes.

  Valya gave the templar a half smile. “As hatchlings? They’ll die within hours. No, they’re no more able to have that kind of freedom than we are. They’ll need food, shelter, water. Roosting space, and places for their nests, if they live long enough to breed. I don’t know where to find any of that outside Weisshaupt. I don’t know if there’s any choice other than hoping that the Wardens have learned the lesson Isseya prayed they would, and trusting that they’ll take better care of their charges this time.”

  “They might,” Reimas conceded. “One thing we were taught as templars is that, in moments of doubt, you must always give people the opportunity to do good. Sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes they don’t.”

  “Which one’s the surprise?”

  Now it was the templar’s turn to offer a small, unfinished smile, barely visible in the dark. “That anyone ever actually gives someone else the chance.”

  * * *

  They reached the Wandering Hills a week later. The hills rose steeply above a swirling cloud of red dust, which sleeted across the barren earth in an endless, suffocating blizzard. Valya and her companions had wrapped damp scarves around their noses and mouths to hold out the dust. It made her feel like she was approaching the Red Bride’s Shrine as Isseya had, seeing it through the same eyes as the other elf’s.

  Certainly the hills looked untouched by time. The Wandering Hills seemed more a nightmarish figment of the Fade than a real place on Thedas. Stark and forbidding they soared to the sky, and they seemed to march on forever. The ceaseless whirl of dust-laden winds at their base made it appear that they floated on a bank of crimson mist, free from any earthly anchor.

  It was said that the Orth people lived in those hills, but Valya could not imagine anything in those hard red stones that might nurture life. There hadn’t been any grass for miles, nor water that she’d seen. Scattered black rocks jutted from the flat earth like scabs clotted over garish wounds. The only thing of beauty, anywhere in view, was the serene visage of Andraste carved into a cliffside half a mile away.

  The Bride’s face was turned away from them. All they could see from here was the gentle curve of her shawl, a lock of hair, and the suggestion of a patient smile. The petals of a water lily were just visible, garlanding Andraste’s neck; Valya had read somewhere that the early artists in the Anderfels had been enchanted by the idea of a land so rich in water that it could have entire species of flowers that floated on lakes. It struck them as an impossible paradise, and so they included it in their depictions of the Maker’s Bride.

  “The caves are on the other side,” Caronel said through the scarf that muffled his face. Over the previous few days, his levity had drained away, and now that they stood within sight of the Red Bride’s Grave, the tension in the Warden’s voice was thick enough to crack. “As soon as we go in, the walking dead will attack.”

  “Then we’ll just have to be ready for them,” Valya said. If we can be.

  Lowering their heads against the blowing grit, they circled around and between the looming hills until they reached the one that bore Andraste’s likeness. The openings to the dead monks’ caves honeycombed the top third of the steeply eroded wall like missing tiles on a mosaic. At the base of the hill, a small cleft offered some shelter from the wind. While it wouldn’t protect against one of the Anderfels’ true, lethal sandstorms, it was enough for Valya to feel comfortable leaving the horses behind for a few hours. Maker willing, they’d be gone no longer than that.

  Reimas, who was the strongest climber among them, went up first. The templar set aside her heavy shield, long-ax, and plate, leaving them bundled for Caronel to carry up after her, and began the ascent. Surefooted as a spider, she clambered up the cliff’s splintered face, and a slender web of ropes and pitons spun out behind her.

  When she was halfway to the cave entrances, Caronel started the climb behind her. Sekah followed him, and Valya went up last.

  The stone was deeply pitted, and the ropes made it much easier to pull herself up the rock, but a clammy sweat broke out on Valya’s back as she climbed. Drifting red dust soon hid the ground, and while it was in some ways a mercy not to see how far she’d have to fall, having nothing solid to greet her downward glances didn’t help her dizziness. Several times the wind pushed the elf on the ropes, and she had to stop, squeeze her eyes shut, and remind herself to breathe before she could continue upward.

  Her shoulders were burning and her legs shaking when she came to the top and Caronel pulled her into the cavern. Panting, Valya sat with her back pressed firmly against a wall and waited for her heart to stop racing. When her breathing was more or less steady, she finally dared to open her eyes.

  Reimas had struck a torch to illumine the cavern, which fell rapidly into darkness past its opening. Valya could just make out the networked tunnels of other monks’ caves twenty feet in. Farther back, there was only blackness.

  She didn’t notice that at first, though, because her attention was seized by the carpet of dead birds that littered the entryway.

  There must have been nearly a hundred of them. They ranged from bald-necked vultures to tiny insect-eating rock darters, and they were scattered about the cavern’s floor in a wavery line that ended where the darkness began. Some were so old that there was little left of them but mummified shells of dust-coated feathers over bone; others were fresh enough that they still smelled of rotting flesh.

  The back of Valya’s neck prickled as she realized that the birds’ corpses traced the pattern of shifting light in the cave. Where the sun always reached, there were no dead birds. But where the slanting sunlight gave way to shadow, changing over the course of the day, the bodies lay thick—and they were piled up highest where the darkness never wavered.

  “They hunt in the darkness,” Sekah murmured, raising his staff as he looked upon the feathered corpses. “They hunt in the darkness, and they fear the light.”

  “Maybe,” Valya said. She untied her own staff from her back and summoned a spark of magic from the Fade. Blue light poured from the staff’s pale agate, driving the gloom back much farther than Reimas’s torch could. The layer of dust in the tunnel’s depths was thinner than that near the entrance, but there was enough to show the ghostly outlines of human feet in red powder.

  No, not human, Valya thought. Those are the steps of corpses’ feet.

  Stabbing her torch into a crack in the cave wall, Reimas buckled her armor back on, strapped her shield onto her left arm, and hefted her wicked long-ax. “Ready?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Caronel said, striding past Valya’s light and the torch’s smoky flame. His jaw was gritted tight. “We’re here.”

  She felt them before she saw them. Weakness reached out to her from the darkness, sapping the warmth from her body and the strength from her limbs. Shades.

  A susurration filled Valya’s ears: the nightmare tongue of demons. It closed in from all sides, crushing her in claustrophobia, even though she knew—or thought she knew—that only sunlight and clean air was behind her.

  That light might as well have been on the other side of the world. What surrounded her now were terror and frailty and death. She heard Sekah gasp behind her, and knew that he had felt the same.

  “Come out, you bastards!” Caronel bellowed into the dark. A crackling bolt of spirit energy coalesced around his bared sword and howled into the gloom, crackling as it struck some enemy none of them could see. “Face us if you dare!”

  They did.

  The mummified corpses came shambling out first, some in the remnants of Grey Warden armor, others in shreds of ancient monks’ robes, a few in nothing but
their own discolored bones. Their hair and beards hung in fraying dreadlocks crusted with brick-red dust. Their yellow parchment skin, stretched tightly over their skulls, had torn around their demonically deformed mouths. It flapped in papery fringes around fanged, unmoving grins. In the black pits of their eyes, madness burned: the insane fury of demons who had unwittingly trapped themselves in those dead shells.

  Valya stumbled away from them, shaking with terror. Dead birds crunched under her feet as she fumbled blindly backward. Behind the wall of shambling bones, the shades roiled out from the cavern’s depths. Oily, flowing darkness filled their alien forms, bound into shape by bulky straps and hoods made of something that wasn’t fabric and wasn’t leather and might not have been solid at all. A single point of eldritch light shone in the center of each shade’s head, somehow illumining nothing.

  “Fight,” Sekah shouted beside her, shoving the elf in the back. “Fight, unless you want to join them.”

  The shout and shove jolted Valya out of her paralysis. Fear kept its claws deep in her, but she raised her staff and reached, shaking, for the Fade. Magic filled her, erupting through her staff’s agate as a series of incandescent spirit bolts. She hurled them at the skeletons and at the faceless drifting shades, and around her the cavern lit up with the others’ spells.

  Reimas shouldered past the mages to take the fore, raising her shield against the clattering of the skeletons’ daggers. Some of the monks wielded ancient bronze knives, and the Wardens had the weapons they’d died with, but other skeletons had only shards of stone and rust in their bony hands.

  They looked lethal enough, though, and they left long gouges in the paint of the templar’s shield. Reimas fought back in grim silence, bashing skulls with her shield and hacking at shades with powerful sweeps of her long-ax. Caronel stood beside her, surrounded in a shield of shimmering arcane force that deflected or absorbed the skeletons’ stabs. His sword was a radiant beacon, its entire length of steel shining as brilliantly as any mage’s crystal.

  Dark energy swirled around the two of them, sucking the life from their bodies and drawing it toward the shades. It seemed to restore the demons nearly as quickly as Reimas and Caronel could hurt them. Worse, it weakened and slowed them, forcing down their guard and letting the angry dead draw blood with their crude knives.

  Spirit bolts aren’t enough. Valya reached for a stronger spell. She had tried it only a few times in the Circle and wasn’t sure she could manage in the chaos of the fight, but she had to do something before her friends fell to the shades. Electricity crackled around her, lifting her hair onto its ends—

  And then something huge and dark and cold slammed into the small of her back. It froze the blood in her veins, and the budding lightning fizzled away into useless sparkles. Valya fell to her knees, gasping for breath.

  Another shade had materialized behind her. She looked up through a blur of panicky tears into the churning darkness of its hood. Its lidless eye stared down at her like a cold blue moon, inhuman and pitiless. Inky vapor wafted from its claws, and where the vapor drifted over her skin, the elf’s flesh went white and weak.

  Valya scrabbled along the ground, fumbling for her staff. She’d dropped it when she fell, and in her panic she couldn’t find it. Only the bodies of dead birds met her hands, crumbling into feathers and brittle, useless bone when she grabbed at them.

  The shade croaked in its meaningless tongue as it closed on her, its breath foul and strangely hot against the chill of its presence. Desperately Valya reached for the little knife she hid in her robes, knowing it wouldn’t help her against such a thing as this. Her shaking fingers closed around its horn hilt and she pulled it out, closing her eyes against the certainty of her own doom.

  When she opened them, the shade was frozen above her, arched stiffly with its strap-crossed chest thrust out, as though it had been stabbed in the back. An instant later it collapsed into murky smoke and was gone.

  Sekah stood behind it, his staff held level at the empty space where the shade had been. His eyes were enormous. “Is it dead?”

  “It’s dead.” Valya scrambled to her feet, spitting out the taste of her own fear. Her staff was lying against the cavern wall behind her. It had been within arm’s reach the whole time. She snatched it up, shaking off the dust and feathers that clung to the ridged wood.

  Reimas and Caronel were standing back to back. The elf was bleeding from a dozen small wounds, and his shimmering shield had thinned until it was insubstantial as a soap bubble. Sweat and blood slicked the templar’s hair to her forehead, but she never lowered her long-ax to wipe it away. The skeletons around them were gone, reduced to a rubble of bones in a rough ring around the two, and the last of the shades was failing.

  In their place, a new foe had risen: a gaunt, bent creature of ash and cinders that loomed over the Warden and templar. Its body was a twisting pillar of smoke, its midsection an enormous mouth lined with red-hot teeth. Heat distorted the air around its body.

  An ash wraith. Valya had read of such foes during her studies in the Circle, just as she’d read of shades and skeletons, but while she had thought that she might fight the lesser demons someday, she had never truly expected to face an ash wraith.

  It struck at Reimas and Caronel in a blinding whirlwind, its claws blurred by its surrounding cloud of cinders so that Valya couldn’t tell whether it had actually grown four more arms or only seemed to in the swiftness of its movements. When the ash wraith’s flurry ceased, the elf was lying insensible in a pool of his own blood, and Reimas sagged against a wall, clutching her shield weakly for support. Both of them looked to be dying, and fast.

  Valya hurled a blast of wintry cold over Caronel’s prone form, striking the ash wraith and freezing a portion of the inferno that made up its ghastly body. The frost-choked cinders fell away in a hiss of steam, and the creature turned the glowering pits of its eyes on her.

  It coiled and leaped with impossible speed, compressing itself against the cavern ceiling and coming down in a torrent of blistering heat. Valya had just enough time to anchor a strand of the Fade into herself before the ash wraith landed, crushing her under its fury and weight.

  Black and red motes sleeted across her vision. Her chest heaved in agony and her lungs filled with the stench of burning flesh—her own, she knew, but that realization seemed small and unimportant. The only thing that kept her alive was that slender strand of healing magic, humming through her core and healing just enough to hold her on this side of death.

  She couldn’t get up, though. She had no chance of defending herself against the ash wraith. It didn’t even have to move to finish her off; all it had to do was sit there and let its scorching heat and bulk passively crush her to death.

  But it moved anyway. Not toward Valya, whom it seemed to think was already dead, but in another swift leap at Sekah, the last one standing. He had retreated to the waning spill of sunlight that came through the cavern’s entrance.

  The young mage didn’t flinch or falter as the ash wraith’s leap threw him into shadow. He didn’t try to defend himself either. Valya watched in horrified disbelief as Sekah spun out a web of shining mana instead, encompassing his fallen allies in a wave of healing energy. Strength flowed back into Valya’s body, easing the crushing pain in her chest and restoring sensation to her limbs. Metal clattered against metal as Reimas moved somewhere out of sight, and Valya heard Caronel curse mightily at his wounds.

  Then the wraith came down on Sekah, and the magic died with its maker.

  Valya threw another burst of cold at it before she was even really conscious of what she was doing. Ice cascaded from her staff and her open palm, again and again, faster and more powerful than any spell the elf had ever managed before. Snowflakes whipped through her hair and frosted her fingers around the staff’s wood, but she never felt them through the force of her anger.

  Caronel came to stand beside her, adding his own ice spells to hers. Reimas strode past them, smashing away the frozen pie
ces of the ash wraith’s body with her long-ax. It slashed at the templar, but she drove its claws away with her shield and continued her assault.

  In moments the wraith was gone, reduced to melting ice shards and a final drift of cinder-flecked smoke, and Sekah’s crushed body came into view where it had stood.

  He was dead. What remained had been beaten and burned almost past recognition, and Valya choked back an audible sob when she saw it. She’d thought she’d been prepared to take the risk of venturing into the Red Bride’s Grave … but it had never truly sunk in that any of them could die doing this. She understood, now, the horror Isseya had felt when she’d first watched her companions die before the Archdemon.

  Suddenly the promise of griffons seemed infinitely less alluring. And more important, because Valya could not bear the thought of living with herself if Sekah had died for nothing.

  Reimas lowered her long-ax wearily. Letting her shield fall, the templar mopped the blood and sweat from her face. She made a pious sign over Sekah’s body and, moving past them, gazed down the tunnel from which the shades and skeletons had come. “That was the last of them. I don’t think we have any more coming.”

  Caronel wiped his sword clean on his own clothing and sheathed it. “We’ll honor him in Weisshaupt,” he told Valya. The Warden pressed a hand to the worst of his remaining injuries, sealing it with a minor weave of magic. He tended to Reimas as well, and to Valya, although she hadn’t asked for his attentions and didn’t particularly want them. She deserved to make the rest of this journey in pain.

  But, plainly, what people deserved was of no matter, or it would be her and not Sekah on that blood-splashed stone.