Dragon Age: Last Flight by Liane Merciel Page B

seemed that they were safe.
    It was unclear how long that safety would last. The Blight was spreading out of Antiva like a wind-whipped wildfire. As yet no nation had organized any significant resistance, and the Free Marches were more splintered than most. Each city-state seemed to prize its independent sovereignty almost as much as its own survival; with darkspawn on their doorstep, they seemed nearly as lost in denial as the Antivans had been.
    In the streets of Wycome, the prevailing mood was still caught between disbelief and determination. Every day its citizens could be seen drilling with makeshift weapons in hastily assembled militias, or working feverishly to reinforce the city walls with earthen bulwarks and fresh-hewn logs. They were out at the crack of dawn and, under a parade of flickering torches, worked late into the night, but it was plain to all the Wardens that these efforts were futile. The city’s walls were not made to fend off darkspawn, and its people’s courage was matched by neither skill nor numbers. What they should be doing, Isseya thought, is evacuating their civilians to the safety of the sea islands and sending their soldiers to Starkhaven or Kirkwall.
    But they couldn’t. Wycome was a fishing town. Its boats were made to hug the coast; they weren’t built to withstand deep water, nor to brave storms on the open seas. The handful of merchant ships they’d had were long since fled. And even if the Free Marchers wanted to gamble on their boats, they didn’t have enough to carry everyone to safety.
    Traveling overland to Starkhaven or Kirkwall was no better. To reach either of the larger cities, the citizens of Wycome would have to walk directly into the path of the Blight as the darkspawn raged south from Antiva. The fastest horses might be able to make the journey in time to evade the darkspawn hordes—but people on foot, or in wagons drawn by mules and oxen, would be slow and easy prey.
    So they had no choice but to stand and fight, and they had no chance of prevailing. There seemed a good chance that the city might fall before Ostiver’s ship reached its harbor.
    That, Isseya knew, was the real reason for Senaste’s icy tone. The Warden-Commander was clearly a woman seldom acquainted with defeat. An imperious blond warrior, hardened by twenty years of service as a Grey Warden, she carried herself with the rigor of one who expected sheer force of will to crush all problems in her path—and whose life had been shaped by the success of that strategy.
    The Blight, however, had given her an unwanted taste of failure and promised another. And that, even more than the loss of Antiva’s royal family, or the deaths of two good Grey Wardens and their griffons, was what had Senaste’s temper so sharp.
    “How did you survive where Turab and Dendi did not?” she demanded. The Warden-Commander had claimed the office of Wycome’s militia captain. Pennons and regalia from past campaigns draped the walls, along with old maps whose moisture-curled edges furled up over the nails that held them in place. Senaste’s gaze was fixed on those maps as she spoke, but Isseya doubted that the Warden-Commander was really putting much effort into studying them. There wasn’t any need.
    “It wasn’t my doing, not in any significant part,” the elf said. “Garahel and his griffon baited the Archdemon into chasing them. I distracted it a little—well, more truthfully, my griffon, Revas, did—but they did most of the real work. The Archdemon tried to pull us out of the sky with a … a hurricane of dark energy, I don’t know what you’d call it. No magic that I know made that vortex; it had no connection to the Fade.
    “It would have destroyed us all, but somehow Garahel’s passenger, the mage Calien, was able to make an explosion with his spells that tore us free. They were the heroes of the day. I did almost nothing.”
    Senaste turned back toward the young elf. Sunlight spilling through one of the