Dragon Age: Last Flight (34 page)

Revas was waiting on Starkhaven’s walls, in the same place she’d perched during the wars. But where ten or more griffons had once alternately quarreled with and haughtily ignored one another, now the black griffon was the only one there. Alone among the crenellations, she stood silhouetted against the lightening sky.

She came down in a flash of black wings when she spotted Isseya. Revas sniffed at the bundle of eggs, flaring the feathers on the back of her neck in curiosity, but when the elf shooed her away, she huffed and waited for her rider to climb on.

A deep ache of nostalgia came over Isseya as she lifted herself into the well-worn saddle. This would be, in all likelihood, their last flight.

First they’d go to the Anderfels, where she had scouted a careful refuge for Smoke’s eggs. After the eggs were secure, she and Revas would go back to Weisshaupt. There, Isseya intended to hide her diary, and its twelve years of secrets, behind a series of enchantments that none but an elf was likely to unlock.

What she’d said to Amadis had been true: she didn’t believe the First Warden deserved to hold the fate of future griffons in his hands. He was the one who had ordered her to use blood magic on the animals, time and again. He was the one who ignored the warnings of the unafflicted and had opened the door for the darkspawn taint to become a contagion. And he was the one who had not only acted too sluggishly to enforce an effective quarantine, but had ordered his Wardens to fly all across Thedas to help build the new peace—and to spread the griffons’ plague into every known nation.
Even if he acts tonight,
she thought,
it will be too late.
This very second, it was too late.

But Isseya still wanted the Grey Wardens to be the ones to reawaken the griffons, if and when that day might come. She didn’t want that partnership to vanish forever. What she had experienced with Revas, and Garahel with Crookytail, and Amadis with Smoke … That was too precious and powerful a friendship to be completely lost to the ages.

So she would hide her treasures, and lay her trail, and then leave it to the fates to decide what became of them.

When it was done, she and Revas would formally abdicate their duties and embark upon their Calling. They wouldn’t be the first team to do so together, or the last. In recent months, as the nature and extent of the rage plague had revealed itself, many of the Grey Wardens who had spent years alongside their feathered partners had chosen to depart in that manner. The wild fury that came over the beasts was seen as their version of the Calling, and the most loyal Wardens chose to fight together with their veteran griffons one last time. Even if their own Calling was not yet upon them, few wanted to live in a world without griffons.

Isseya didn’t. And wouldn’t.

She touched Revas’s neck lightly. The feathers were smaller there, and softer. In the griffon’s youth they had been midnight black, and sometimes shimmered with iridescence like the green on a mallard drake’s head. Now they were gray in the softening night before dawn, and would be white in the sun, and felt worn and insubstantial under her fingers. Time and the Blight had been kind to neither of them.

But today they were here. Together. Today they had one last flight.

“Revas,” she whispered,
“lift.”

25

9:42 D
RAGON

“You’re saying there are still griffons in the world?” Caronel asked, thunderstruck.

“Not for certain,” Valya admitted. “Their protective magic might have failed, or some hungry drake might have come upon the eggs and eaten them. Maybe Isseya didn’t purify the taint from the eggs as completely she thought. Four hundred years is a long time, and her sanity was failing when she hid them, she was very candid about that. Many things might have gone wrong. But … I think there’s a chance, yes. I do think there’s a chance.”

Together they had ridden out to the dusty, barren steppes of the Anderfels: Reimas, Sekah, Caronel, and Valya. All three of her friends had agreed to accompany her to the Red Bride’s Grave on the strength of her promise that she’d explain her reasons after leaving Weisshaupt. After most of a day’s ride, Broken Tooth was a receding shadow on the southern horizon, its westward side painted red by a spill of sunset, and Valya had decided it was time to reveal what she knew.

“When Isseya hid the eggs there, it wasn’t yet a shrine. Andraste’s likeness was there, etched into the stone by unknown hands, but there weren’t any monks. The Anderfels were far too badly devastated by the Blight for any such settlement to have survived. At that time, it was a dragon’s cave, and Isseya thought the beast would make a fair guardian for the eggs.”

“She wasn’t worried about it eating them?” Reimas asked, with a touch of humor that surprised Valya, coming from the melancholy templar.

The elven mage shook her head. “She hid them. I don’t know how, specifically. I suppose we’ll find out when we get there. All I know is that it involved ‘walls of magic and walls of stone.’”

“And walls of restless churning bone,” Caronel said, imitating her intonation. He made a wry face. “Sorry. Impromptu poetry should really be punishable by bludgeoning, I know. But the fact remains: there
are
undead in the Red Bride’s Grave. While I understand now why you wanted to go there—and I fully agree that the possibility of griffons warrants exploration—it isn’t going to be easy. Are you quite sure you don’t want to ask the First Warden for support?”

“No,” Valya said, even as she recognized and was inwardly grateful for his deferral to her judgment. “I don’t have any idea what we’ll find there. Whatever it is, though, I know that I want us to be the ones to decide what will be done with it. The four of us. Not the First Warden, not the High Constable, not the Chamberlain of the Grey. I don’t trust them to place the griffons’ well-being over power or politics. I asked you three to join me because I
do
trust you.”

“Two mages, a Grey Warden, and a templar,” Sekah mused aloud, fingering the carvings that rippled across the ebon wood of his staff. His dark eyes, always somber, rested on each of them in turn as if gravely measuring their worth. In that moment, he looked more childlike than Valya had ever seen him, and yet more adult, too. “It sounds like the beginnings of a bad joke, but we do make a formidable force. We should have a chance.”

“You don’t have any idea what’s in the Shrine,” Caronel objected.

The young mage shrugged, turning to regard the elf with the same solemn gaze. “Am I wrong?”

The Warden threw up his hands theatrically. His gelding whinnied and startled, misinterpreting the gesture as genuine agitation; Caronel had to grab the reins quickly to calm it back down. “I can’t even manage a horse,” the elf grumbled when it was suitably soothed. “I don’t have much optimism about shades or snarling skeletons.”

“Do they actually snarl?” Valya asked, curious despite herself.

“I wouldn’t know,” Caronel said. “I couldn’t hear much over our screaming. They certainly do have fangs, however.” He flicked the gelding’s reins, urging the sandy-colored horse northward at a canter that soon outdistanced the others.

“He wasn’t nearly so flippant about it before,” Valya murmured when the other elf was out of earshot.

Only Reimas was close enough to hear her. The templar shrugged, adjusting the round steel shield slung over her shoulders as her own horse trotted unhurriedly after Caronel’s. It had once borne the templars’ flaming sword, but she’d painted over the original sigil with a simple chevron of blue over gray: the Wardens’ colors, if not their design. “Everyone deals with fear differently. Some by roaring at it, some by laughing.”

“I think I’d prefer the roaring,” Valya said. “Laughter makes me nervous.” She nudged her own mottled gray after the Warden. The light was rapidly failing, and they were in a poor place to make camp. Dust storms were a constant threat in winter, and they could easily prove fatal to the unsheltered.

It was a grim land they journeyed through. Weisshaupt had been carved into forbidding terrain, and the steppes to its north soon gave way to a dry, cracked crust of earth that refused to support even the scrubby grasses and needled brush that eked out a meager existence closer to the fortress. A rime of salty white coated the broken plates of dirt. Their horses’ hooves beat it into powder, and it stung Valya’s eyes ferociously whenever the slightest wind stirred it up.

Ahead, a broad band of green marked the faraway flow of the Lattenfluss River. They’d find some respite there, and their horses would have fair grazing—but then the land would get harder yet. Around the Wandering Hills, it was said, the earth was stained an indelible red from the blood of all those who had suffered and died during the First Blight.

Valya thought that a bit of bard’s fancy, but she couldn’t deny that she quailed a little at the prospect of crossing those arid hills. Many died of exposure in the Wandering Hills; many more choked to death or had their skin flayed off in dust storms. Others became so hopelessly lost that, as the place’s name suggested, they wandered fruitlessly among its dead dry slopes until finally, inevitably, they perished.

“What
do
you intend to do with the griffons?” Reimas asked as their horses trotted toward the river-fed greenery ahead. It was nearing nightfall, and the shapes of the trees that lined the Lattenfluss were fading into the blue blur of dusk. “Assuming that there are eggs, and they’ve survived all this time, and Garahel’s sister succeeded in purging them of the darkspawn taint.… What is your plan for them?”

“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.