Dragon Age: Last Flight Read Online Free Page A

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