Dragon Age: Last Flight (7 page)

Numbly, the young elf nodded. She climbed onto Revas’s back and held out a hand for Amadis to pull herself up afterward. The human buckled herself into the secondary saddle, just as Isseya had been buckled in herself until today.

Isseya took up the reins, leaned down to the black-feathered neck, and whispered the word that she’d dreamed about for so long:
“Lift.”

Revas dug her talons into the palace’s stone, tensed her muscles, and leaped into the air with two powerful beats of her broad black wings. Wind rushed into Isseya’s face, the world dropped out beneath her with a giddy lurch, and pure exhilaration momentarily erased her dread of the Blight. She was flying.

And down below, Antiva City was dying.

The sight killed her joy as swiftly as it had been born. Distance and smoke obscured the details, thankfully, but Isseya could still see the doll-like silhouettes of people pinwheeling across the burning buildings as the ogres dragged them from their windows and threw them into fires for sport. It didn’t look like there was any organized resistance. She didn’t see anything breaking the chaotic swirl of people trying to flee into the river or out through the walls. Now and then one tiny figure, cornered by the black wave of darkspawn, would turn back to fight—but they were always alone, or in small groups, and they were swept away as easily as twigs on the tide.

The Grey Wardens were sworn to stop the Blight, and yet they were fleeing from it. The injustice sat in Isseya’s throat like a caltrop.

“Survival first,” Amadis said behind her. The sound of the other woman’s voice startled the elf; she had momentarily forgotten that she had a passenger. “Survival. Then vengeance.”

“How do you propose to get revenge on darkspawn? You can kill them, but you can’t make them care.”

“Then we’ll kill them.” Amadis said it so coolly that Isseya was taken aback. She turned to look at her passenger, who was watching the carnage with no expression. The only movement on Amadis’s face was the flutter of her short black hair.

“Who are you?” Isseya asked. “You’re not just an Antivan lady. Not by the way you handled those blades.”

Amadis laughed. “You must not know many Antivan ladies. Some of them take their knitting lessons from the Crows. But, as it happens, you’re right about me. I’m not from Antiva at all. My family is in Starkhaven. They sent me here to make some friends and win some suitors. A second daughter needs all the help she can get.”

“The ladies of Starkhaven are killers?”

“Some of us.” Amadis’s smile didn’t touch her cold black eyes. “Some of us are quite good at it. Handy during a Blight, wouldn’t you say?”

Isseya looked forward again, pushing her hair behind her ears. She’d braided it back tightly, but the speed of the griffon’s flight had pulled it loose. If she wasn’t facing into the wind, the long brownish-blond strands whipped into her eyes relentlessly. “There are a lot of darkspawn who need killing.”

“Not really. It’s just one, isn’t it? Kill the Archdemon, and the whole Blight collapses.”

Even as Amadis spoke, the Blight’s unnatural storm split open ahead of them. Sickly violet lightning forked through the gray pall, fissuring the clouds in all directions and casting spectral light shadows up on their bellies.

In the midst of that storm flew the Archdemon. Its wings were tattered and immense, its body a sinuous line of spikes. Unholy fire burned in its gaze. It resembled a dragon in outward form, but no dragon was ever so terrible within. Darkness crackled around it, and darkness was its soul.

It dove upward through the sky like a newly launched arrow, defying gravity effortlessly in its pursuit of the griffons at the head of their formation. A torrent of violet un-light erupted from the Archdemon’s jaws, showing each of its jagged teeth in a flash of nightmarishly sharp relief.

And then the Grey Wardens and their griffons were spinning, spiraling, plummeting from the sky like so many blackened snowflakes. Isseya couldn’t see which was which, but she knew that those tiny figures falling to the darkspawn horde were Dendi and Huble and the Queen of Antiva and her father, or uncle, whoever he’d been. And their griffons, Blacktalon and Skriax, who had been two of their best.

A bitter jolt of shock stung the back of her tongue. Turab and the others had warned her, of course, but she had never truly believed they could
die
. Not like this, so suddenly, without any semblance of a fight. She hadn’t even heard them scream.

“It’s coming for us,” Amadis said.

She was right. Flaring its wings out wide against the glowering skies, the Archdemon had turned and was cutting swiftly through the storm to reach the remaining Wardens. Behind it, lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, zigzagging horizontally among the hulking pillars of cumulonimbus.

Isseya froze in the saddle, just for a heartbeat. Then she saw Garahel altering his course to intercept it.
Is he mad?

The white-splotched griffon he’d chosen was incredibly fast. Crookytail folded his wings close against his body, tucked his legs in tight, and sliced through the air like a diving falcon. It seemed impossible that the griffon would be able to reach the Archdemon before it came upon the other Wardens—but as Isseya watched the angle and trajectory of the two fast-moving fliers, she saw that, somehow, her brother was going to do it.

He
was
mad. That thing had just destroyed Huble and Dendi in less than an eyeblink, and Garahel, who had never slain so much as a genlock, was hurling himself directly at it.

The Archdemon seemed surprised too, if the creature was even capable of such an emotion. Its wings snapped open, catching the wind like sails to pull itself short before it collided with Garahel and his griffon. The lower half of the Archdemon’s body swung forward; its hind claws raked the air as its spiked tail lashed up to strike at Garahel.

It wasn’t anywhere close enough to hit him, but in that moment Isseya glimpsed her brother’s strategy. He wasn’t trying to fight the Archdemon. He was just trying to confuse it long enough for the rest of them to fly away. And his griffon was almost fast enough to pull it off.

That “almost” was going to get them both killed, though.

A plume of spectral violet energy split the night. The Archdemon had breathed its coruscating corruption at Garahel. But the griffon stayed in the air, a small black shadow at the edge of the brilliant un-light. Somehow, in the instant it had taken Dendi and Huble and all the others to die, either Garahel or his mount had calculated how far the Archdemon could reach with that lethal blast, and they had kept their distance just far back enough to avoid it.

Either that, or blind luck loved them beyond all belief.

Isseya touched her heel to Revas’s side, urging the griffon on a slanted course toward them. The great beast hesitated—she felt the split-second lull in the air as Revas made her decision—and then hurtled forward, angling to the Archdemon’s right side to pull it in the opposite direction as Garahel.

The others, Isseya was glad to see, were taking no part in their stupidity. Kaiya, Taiya, and the tribesman from the Anderfels were all streaking rapidly out of sight, fleeing through the cover of the Blight’s black clouds. In a few more minutes their escape would be assured.

Just a few minutes. Two, three. Maybe four. That was all they had to buy.

She gritted her teeth and pushed Revas on.

Two thousand feet away, the wind carried the Archdemon’s scent to them. It prickled the hairs on the back of Isseya’s neck. Powerfully rank, utterly inhuman, it smelled of cold dead places under the earth. It was the smell of the innards of rotten teeth and the sludge at the bottom of a poisoned river. It was absolute corruption.

An echo of that same corruption tickled at the edges of Isseya’s mind. The Archdemon’s strange siren song was still there, faint and barely perceptible, but all the more maddening because she couldn’t hear it fully.

Not that she
wanted
to, knowing that it was a precursor to the Calling. But it was hard—impossible—to ignore. She couldn’t shut it out. She was too afraid, too new, too conscious of how desperately they were about to be tested.

So she loosed the reins, giving Revas complete freedom to choose their course.

It was a wild, foolish gamble. Isseya was asking her new griffon to respond to her with the same connection that veterans developed only after years of partnership. But it was the only chance they had.

Revas didn’t hesitate. The griffon soared upward, beating her powerful black wings to catch a current of hot air from the battlefield below that accelerated their rise. Isseya could smell burning flesh on that smoky thermal, but she shut her thoughts to what it meant. The Archdemon was all that mattered now.

They were closing on it rapidly. A thousand feet. Five hundred. Its shadow engulfed them; its tattered wings rose like cliffs above Revas’s head. Isseya could see every grisly detail of the blood-smeared spikes that erupted through the dragon’s hide like crystals of corruption in its flesh.

A hundred feet. Into the lethal zone. It was close enough to destroy them with a breath, if only it turned its head and loosed its jaws.

But it paid them no mind. The Archdemon’s attention remained locked on the brindle-and-white griffon and his riders, who were now veering to the left in an attempt to draw it away from the surviving Wardens’ retreat.

Bracing herself against the saddle, Isseya raised her staff and reached for the Fade. She had just enough time to pull a wisp of magic into the world and hurl it at the Archdemon in a burst of inchoate lavender-edged energy before Revas swerved sharply to the right. The mage’s spirit bolt slammed into the dragon’s bone-spiked side, coruscating across the plate-size scales in hissing arcs of energy, but the Archdemon didn’t even notice.

It noticed when Revas hit it a second later, though. The griffon sank her talons deep into the Archdemon’s flank, tearing out a double fistful of scales and spikes. Thick, cold blood showered the rainless clouds as the griffon pulled away. The dragon screamed, a soul-rending sound, and snapped its tail like a bullwhip through the air.

Folding her wings tight against her body, Revas plummeted to dodge it. Isseya’s stomach dropped with the griffon, and a knot of panic swelled in her throat. Beside her, Amadis screamed.

The Archdemon’s tail slashed over their heads, close enough to entangle and rip out a few strands of Isseya’s hair on its spikes. Its enormous head swung around, fixing them with an eye that burned like a cauldron of black flames. It didn’t quite have the angle it needed to catch them in the sweep of its ruinous breath, but that wasn’t likely to stop it for long.

Abandoning its pursuit of Crookytail, the dragon swerved its whole body through the sky toward them.

Revas danced along with it, adjusting her position with furious wingbeats and occasional claw-grabs at the dragon’s flank to keep herself shielded by the Archdemon’s own body. Massive as the creature was, its bulk constituted a formidable obstacle. As long as the griffon stayed close enough to use it, they were safe.

They might be able to keep it up for another two minutes. The other Wardens were out of sight; Isseya had to assume they were safe beyond the storm. Garahel had an opportunity to save himself, too … but he wasn’t taking it. He was coming back on a wide-angled approach. Crookytail veered around a bulwark of dark gray cloud, his furry ears flattened by the speed of their flight.

At the very outermost range of his magic, Garahel’s passenger, Calien, raised his serpent-twined staff to the heavens and called a fireball from the Fade. It hurtled straight toward the Archdemon, picking up speed and substance as it streaked through the air.

Even muffled by the dragon’s body, the force of the fireball’s impact ruffled Revas’s fur and washed over them in a tide of heat. It seared through the corrupted Old God’s hide, eliciting another roar of fury.

The Archdemon heaved itself upward, contorting its sinuous length in an attempt to face both of its foes at once, but no matter how it twisted in the sky, it could not catch them in a single sweep. Nor could it reach Crookytail and his riders without turning its back to Revas.

Instead of trying, the Archdemon drew in a breath so powerful that it sucked clouds into its gullet and pulled the griffons’ flight feathers forward on their wings. Revas screamed, fighting back from the pull of the Archdemon’s inhalation. Crookytail might have too, but Isseya couldn’t hear him over the inward rush of the darkspawn’s breath. She braced herself for a torrent of violet energy, but none came.

Its exhalation, this time, was a vortex of pure death.

What the Archdemon spat at them was unquestionably magic, but it was like none Isseya had ever encountered. There was no sense of the Fade in its spell; nothing in the realm of dream or nightmare could have encompassed what the Archdemon made.

It was a cyclone of darkness both spiritual and physical. Hungry winds dragged them toward its maw, even as spectral ones tore at the vibrancy of their lives. Isseya could feel the Archdemon’s vortex draining her strength, and the closer it drew them, the stronger it became. If they were pulled much closer, they’d be crushed—and dead long before that.

There was nothing she could do to stop it. Revas was fighting the vortex with everything she had, but the griffon was steadily losing. Feathers ripped from her wings and spiraled into the darkness. Their glossy raven barbs paled to frail white skeletons; their healthy pink calami drained to dead pale hollows. Isseya could see her own hands turning white as the vortex sucked them in. On its other side, Crookytail was fighting, and losing, the same battle.

Calien struggled to rise on the gray-and-white griffon’s back. His feathered hood whipped off his head and was lost to the vortex; he had to clutch his staff desperately with both hands to keep hold. The pouches tied to his belt tore away in a flash, swirling and vanishing along with Crookytail’s larger wing primaries and tufts of soft white down. But the mage persevered, and the shimmering blue lines of a crushing prison formed in the air around the Archdemon.