Dragon Age: Last Flight (29 page)

The Archdemon’s flame scythed through the Grey Wardens’ disorganized flight. Griffons and riders went up like dry leaves tossed into a bonfire; Isseya saw their skin shrivel and their mouths expand to gaping black holes, and then they were gone, spiraling down through the swollen clouds into the waiting mass of darkspawn.

One of the mages transformed as she fell. Liquid fire burst from her skin and melted her features into those of an abomination as she lost—or surrendered—control of her connection to the Fade. Isseya had just enough time to glimpse the horror, and then the inhuman rage, that twisted the mage’s face before the woman tumbled through the storm and out of sight. The burning remains of her robe drifted in her wake, impossibly slow.

And then the griffons were coming back up through those torn, cinder-flecked clouds, looking even more horrid than the abomination that had just plummeted past.

Not all of them came back. Not even most of them. Only the two Joined griffons who had been possessed by the fallen mage, and who were now free to pursue their vengeance unleashed. Isseya caught her breath, squinting through the wind to watch them.

Their saddles were askew, the silver trappings of their harnesses tarnished to coal-colored lumps by the Archdemon’s corrosive breath. Neither carried its rider. Their feathers were molten and matted with tarry black blood—their own, twisted past recognition—and Isseya heard the wind warbling through the holes in their shredded wings. One’s face had been blasted off, leaving half its skull a shattered ruin of bare bone and blackened gore; Isseya couldn’t get a good look at it through the clouds, but she saw enough to know she didn’t want one.

But the griffons were alive, impossibly. They were flying, impossibly. And, impossibly, they attacked.

The Archdemon wasn’t looking at them. The corrupted dragon had turned its burning eyes to Garahel and the remaining riders, who had recovered some semblance of organization and were retreating toward the ambush they’d laid.

The raging griffons hit its exposed belly like a pair of ballista bolts. The Archdemon rocked to one side, knocked almost out of the air by the force of their strike. Blood and black scales rained down from its wounds, hissing as they tore holes through the clouds.

One of the griffons had broken its neck on impact; Isseya watched its corpse drop from the sky. The other sank its claws into the Archdemon’s underbelly and latched on, ripping at whatever it could reach. The dragon rolled through the air, lashing its entire body to and fro in an attempt to dislodge the griffon, but it could not shake its foe free.

Their struggle carried them through another bulwark of bruise-dark clouds and over the water of the nearby bay, well out of Isseya’s sight. Revas kept flying, rushing to catch Garahel and the others. Her wide black wings cut through the storm, and rapidly they closed toward the remaining Wardens.

“What happened?” Garahel called as Isseya reached earshot. He and the rest of the flight had been too far ahead to see what had caused the Archdemon’s sudden distraction, although they had surely seen that it had broken off its pursuit.

“The griffons came back!” Isseya shouted in reply. “The tainted ones. They attacked. One died, the other’s still fighting.”

“Alone?” Garahel’s incredulity carried clearly across the wind. “It’s fighting the Archdemon
alone
?”

“Yes,” Isseya said, but even as the word escaped her, the Archdemon’s spiked head speared through the clouds behind them. With each beat of its wings, the immense dragon closed on them as inexorably as a warship crossing a rough sea. There was no sign of the other griffon, and no indication that any wounds it had inflicted were slowing the Archdemon at all.

A familiar prickle ran across Isseya’s skin. She had just enough time to think,
Magic?
before a spinning vortex of violet and black energy whirled open in the Wardens’ midst.

Crookytail reacted fastest. The brindle-and-white griffon folded his wings and plummeted straight down, dropping altitude with reckless abandon. Revas tried to do the same, but age and injury had slowed the older griffon’s reflexes, and she couldn’t fall far or fast enough.

The other griffons tried to split right or left. One even tried, foolishly, to climb up. The vortex seized them like straws in a hurricane, tearing the beasts from the sky and hurling them against one another. Isseya, clinging desperately to Revas’s reins, winced at the percussion of snapping bones and crushed plate armor that peppered the deafening roar of the winds.

She couldn’t see anything. The wind stung her eyes mercilessly; she had to close them against the tornado of feathers and bloody debris. The whispers of the Fade’s demons rose to a thunderous cacophony in her mind, but even they were not enough to drown out the cries of fear and pain from the Grey Wardens all around her.

The Archdemon strafed the disoriented Wardens with blast after blast of corrupting flame. Isseya saw the bright streaks of it painted against her eyelids; she felt the indescribable alien chill of it rush past her, shivering through her soul.

It overwhelmed her. She couldn’t possibly hold all the blood-bound griffons in her web of possession, not with Revas fighting desperately to stay in the air, not with the Archdemon so close, not with the darkspawn corruption thrumming its response through her veins and the Fade demons clawing at the insides of her skull.

She let go. Three of the possessed griffons slipped from her grasp. Isseya saw the magic break apart in her mind like glowing filaments that had frayed too far, trailing sparks across a limitless expanse of blackness. The rest of them she held.

The freed griffons launched themselves at the Archdemon, flying heedlessly into and through its stream of fire. One went up in a burst of purple flame, casting burning feathers into the vortex with every beat of its wings; then the whirlwind caught Revas’s left wing and spun her away, and Isseya could see the Archdemon no more.

Just as she was despairing of escaping its grasp, the vortex died.

Feathers spun in the empty air. A rare shaft of sunlight hung like a benediction in the stillness between them. For a frozen, eternal instant, Isseya sat transfixed by the slow dance of wing feathers and sunlight where two dozen Wardens had been.

Then the Archdemon boiled back into her view, tangled with a pair of tainted griffons who fought long past the point that they should have been dead. Around and around they somersaulted through the air, a ball of spikes and scales and singed feathers and fur. Blood rained from them in staccato showers of red and black, punctuated by flares of magic and abbreviated arcs of flame as the Archdemon sought to be rid of its assailants and the Grey Wardens who had evaded the vortex threw spells as fast as they could to bring the corrupted Old God down.

The dragon had hooked one of its hind claws into a tainted griffon’s belly, yet the smaller beast fought on, insanely, refusing to accept death or defeat even as the Archdemon’s talons splintered its ribs and snapped the thick leather of its saddle girth. The empty saddle went spinning away, and the griffon screamed and tore its hooked beak along the dragon’s flank.

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.