Dragon Age: Last Flight (3 page)

She glanced over her shoulder. No one was paying her any mind; they were all immersed in searching through their own letters and journals.

Cautiously, but curiously, Valya drew a thread of mana from the Fade and tried to view the map through the shifting lens of magic. The pale blue agate in her staff gleamed, just faintly; she could pass it off as reflected sunlight if anyone looked her way.

No one did, though, and when Valya glanced down at the map, she was very glad for that. A single line of Elvish script shimmered on the map, glowing pale blue as magic flowed through the lyrium-laced ink in which it had been written.

Lathbora viran
.

Valya released her hold on the Fade as soon as she saw the words. They faded back invisibly into the parchment, but they stayed bright in her mind.
Lathbora viran
.

The spelling was archaic, as were the forms of the letters, but she understood the words all the same. There was no exact translation into any human tongue, so far as Valya knew, although the phrase could be clumsily reduced to “the path to a place of lost love.” It was a quote from one of the few great poems to be remembered through the oral traditions of the Dalish and the alienages, and it described a wistful wish for beauty that one had never actually experienced in life. It was a sweetly painful sensation, akin to nostalgia but laced with greater bitterness, for a nostalgic man remembers the pleasure he has lost, whereas one experiencing
lathbora viran
longs for a thing that he can never really know.

“Under the blackberry vines, I felt it,” Valya muttered under her breath. That was how the poem opened: with the musky fragrance of ripening blackberries, bitter and sweet, and a wish to remember the long-lost scents of Arlathan.

The poem itself was
lathbora viran
, because no elf she’d ever met remembered it in the original Elvish. The elves had a few fragmented words and the skeleton of the story, but the poem itself had been haltingly re-created in human tongues. No alienage elves knew enough of their own history or mother language to recall their civilization’s lost works of art. They didn’t even know the original title. “Under the Blackberry Vines,” it was called, because no one knew the true name anymore.

It was a strange thing to find on a war map from the Fourth Blight. There was no question in Valya’s mind that the lyrium-laced message was contemporaneous with the map’s original drawing. Indeed, the spell that hid it from casual view might have been woven into the same enchantment that preserved the map’s more obvious markings.

But why? Why would someone conceal a snippet of poetry so that it could be found only by a mage and understood only by an elf? Unless it
wasn’t
just a line of fanciful nostalgia …

Had there been blackberry vines among the carvings in the other room?

Valya went back to find out. The main library was mostly empty, with just one gray-haired Warden looking through the windows at birds singing in the inner courtyard. Valya moved quietly around him to examine the carvings of fruit upon the walls.

They were as she’d remembered: figs, pomegranates, citrus fruits … and one solitary blackberry vine with broad-petaled flowers blooming alongside tight buds and lush berries. The carved vine encircled a torch sconce tucked between two shelves, then trailed down to a gray stone bench built into the wall.

Valya peered under the sconce. Nothing stood out to her there. Under the bench, however, there was another faint shimmer of lyrium dust rubbed into one of the stones in the walls. This time it was so light that she would never have seen it if she hadn’t already been holding on to the Fade.

With another backward glance to ensure that no one was looking, she touched the Fade again and channeled a second wisp of magic into the stone. It vibrated as her magic touched the lyrium-rubbed rock, and the block shifted outward an inch.

Tense with nervous anticipation, Valya gripped the sides of the block with her fingertips and awkwardly wiggled it loose. When it was almost out, she eased it down to the floor carefully, and exhaled in quiet relief at how little sound it made.

Behind the loose block was a little hole in the wall, and in that hole was a single book, small but thick. Its cover was scuffed and bloodstained, and its pages were warped with old moisture, but it seemed to be in good condition. Biting her lip, Valya pulled it out, and then she carefully replaced the stone block and sat on the bench as though nothing at all were amiss.

She opened the book, unsure what to expect. It was filled with script in a fast, careless hand, feminine but not soft in the slightest.

In the year 5:12 Exalted,
it began,
my brother, Garahel, and I flew to Antiva City.

2

5:12 E
XALTED

The second time Isseya climbed into a griffon’s saddle, she was riding to join a war.

Neither she nor her brother, Garahel, was anywhere near ready for it.
Greener than seasick frogs,
their lieutenant had called them, and he’d been right.

The two of them had become Grey Wardens scarcely a year before, and had been assigned to the Red Wing of the griffon riders only four months earlier. They were still practicing on horses with big wooden boards on their saddles to mimic the obstruction of griffons’ wings. Only once, strapped into back saddles with more experienced Wardens at the reins, had either Garahel or Isseya ever flown—and that was merely a test to see whether either of the young elves suffered from crippling vertigo or fear that would make further training a waste. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t have seen aerial combat for another year.

But the Blight waited for no one.

Four months earlier, darkspawn had come pouring out of the north, answering the call of a newly awakened Old God. They’d boiled up from the depths of the earth, using the ancient dwarven Deep Roads to travel unseen by human eyes. Caught by surprise, the nations of Thedas had been wholly unable to mount an effective defense against the darkspawn hordes.

Antiva, which had come under attack first, had lost ground as fast as the monstrous army could claim it. The scattered militias of the towns and villages in its outlying lands were no obstacles to the darkspawn. Their walls were smashed and trodden underfoot, their citizens slaughtered or carried down to the Deep Roads to meet a worse fate.

The river city of Seleny, fabled for its graceful bridges and sculptures, had fallen after a siege that lasted only four days. For weeks afterward the river had been fouled with corpses. The people of Antiva City had watched them float by, spinning out to sea, day after day, and with each bloated body their fear had grown.

In such desperate straits, there was no time to finish the young Wardens’ training. And as Isseya flew into Antiva City, clinging to the back of the senior Warden ahead of her and squinting against the whipping wind, she understood just how dire the capital city’s situation was.

Antiva City sat on the edge of a shimmering blue bay. Rich green farmland and orchards surrounded it in a ten-mile belt inland, stretching farther along the shores of the river that ran to the ruins of Seleny.

Beyond that fringe of fertility, the Blight had swallowed Antiva. The corruption that flowed through the darkspawn had poisoned the land under their march.

Even from a thousand yards in the sky, Isseya could see that the earth was barren and twisted where the horde had passed. Above it, the sky roiled with clotted black clouds. Leafless trees stood like skeletal sentinels over shrunken creeks, which ran low in their banks as though the earth itself were drinking them dry. Fields of grain lay withered and rotted, with nary a green patch to be seen amid their curling gray stalks. The few animals she saw were mostly crows and vultures, their hunched bodies scabby and featherless from the Blight disease they’d contracted while feeding on darkspawn corpses.

The darkspawn army itself was a blur of black mail and tattered banners. Isseya barely saw anything of them. While the darkspawn themselves could not fly—other than the Archdemon, which as of yet few had seen—their arrows and spells could reach some distance into the air, and so the griffons climbed high to avoid them. Clouds sheared off the sight of the hurlocks and genlocks massed around their emissaries and ogres, and for that, Isseya was quietly grateful.

Past the army, they descended again, for the air above the clouds was too thin and cold to hold the griffons for long. Isseya saw no people in the blighted lands as they crossed over Antiva. They were dead, fled, or in hiding. There were hundreds camped outside the gates of Antiva City, though: refugees clad in rags and desperation, living in wagons and crude makeshift shelters, eating whatever they could find. Their stench was overwhelming. The city’s gates were closed to them, and had been since news of the Blight reached the capital, but they had nowhere else to go.

“They can’t go on like this,” the elf whispered into her companion’s back.

She hadn’t expected her words to carry over the rush of the wind and the griffon’s wings, but somehow the senior Warden heard her. His name was Huble, and Isseya didn’t know him well. He was a grizzled old veteran, survivor of countless skirmishes against hurlocks and genlocks, and he spent most of his time ranging far afield of Weisshaupt on the back of his griffon, Blacktalon. He was not one to frighten easily, but his face was grim when he turned in the saddle to answer her.

“No, they can’t,” he said, and returned to guiding the griffon.

A few minutes later they were circling over Antiva City. Holding the loose wind-whipped ends of her hair back with one hand, Isseya craned to look down between Blacktalon’s sweeping wings. She’d read about the glories of Antiva City many times, but had never seen them herself.

The port city was said to be a glittering gem, and from the air, that was true. The Blight had not yet touched the capital. The Boulevard of the Seas was still strikingly beautiful, its turquoise and sea-green tiles bright against the white marble of the main road. The Golden Plaza still threw sparks of fiery sunlight from the dozens of gilded statues that adorned its broad expanse. And the Royal Palace remained a sight of breathtaking grandeur, its slender towers and stained-glass windows set alight by the sinking sun.

But there weren’t as many ships in the harbor as Isseya had expected. There were some royal warships, and a scattering of smaller vessels painted with the Antivan golden drake, but few merchant craft of any kind. She guessed that most of them had fled to safer shores, bearing as many passengers as could pay whatever exorbitant fees their captains cared to charge. Even the little fishing boats seemed to be missing.

There weren’t many citizens abroad on those beautifully balustraded streets, either. The markets were sparsely populated, the stalls mostly bare. Although the danger had not yet reached their gates, Antiva’s people seemed to have hunkered down in their homes, bracing themselves against the storm they knew must come.

Then they were descending past the palace’s curtain walls, and Isseya’s view of the city was cut off by high sheets of stone.

The palace courtyard was a maelstrom of dust. Two dozen griffons had been assigned to the Royal Palace, along with an equal number of Grey Wardens, and the clamor and chaos of their arrival overwhelmed the castle’s servants. The griffons were particularly difficult; the great beasts were territorial and short-tempered at the best of times, and the long flight had made them especially irritable. Several of them had flown up to the curtain wall, where they beat their wings and shrieked at anyone who came near.

The Antivans gave the griffons a wide berth as they brought bread and wine to the Wardens, and Isseya couldn’t blame them. She’d been working closely with the animals for months, grooming them and feeding them and learning to read their ever-changing moods, and
she
was still routinely intimidated by the winged predators.

An adult griffon could grow to be more than twelve feet from beak to tail, with a wingspan even greater. The males weighed more than a thousand pounds, the females only slightly less. Their beaks were powerful enough to snap an elk’s thighbone effortlessly; their claws could shred plate mail like damp paper. Although the Grey Wardens tended to select their smaller and lighter members as griffon riders, enabling the beasts to serve as steeds longer and under harsher conditions, a healthy griffon was fully capable of fighting with two men in full armor on its back. They were fierce, fearless predators, full of wild beauty and quicksilver rage.

Isseya loved them. She loved their power and their grace and their musky leonine smell. She loved the way their bright gold eyes would close halfway when they were pleased with her grooming, and the earthshaking rumble that passed for their purrs. And she loved the sheer unfettered freedom they had in the air, and the extraordinary gift of flight that they could share with their riders when they chose.

Because a griffon always
chose
. One could not compel the great beasts to carry riders they did not want. A griffon would sooner hurl itself into a mountainside than it would accept servitude to a master it disliked. They were never servants, never slaves. A griffon was a partner and equal, or else it was a foe.

That was why training a new griffon rider took so long, and why Isseya didn’t fault the Antivans for being wary of their huge feathered guests. A griffon was nothing like a dog or a horse, or even one of the spotted hunting cats that some Orlesian nobles were said to keep on jeweled leashes. They were proud and jealous and wild, and a wise man never forgot that.

The Wardens certainly hadn’t. They helped the servants set out washtubs of water for the griffons, tasked one of the senior Wardens to watch over the beasts, and filed into the castle. The griffons would be fed later, separately. Offering them meat while they were crowded together was too likely to start fights.

Isseya hoped no well-meaning servant tempted them, but it wasn’t her duty to watch the griffons this evening. She followed the others into the palace’s shade, falling in alongside her brother.