Dragon Age: Last Flight Read Online Free PDF

singers make you out to be such legends, but you want us to surrender our entire city—our entire country —before the first blow has been struck?”
    “A city pinned against the sea with all its hinterlands seized by darkspawn,” Huble said. Impatience and anger had crept into his voice, although his face remained frozen in a respectful mask. “Have you looked at Antiva City on a map? You’ll get no reinforcements and no resupply. The rest of the country will already be overrun by the time the horde comes to your walls. The darkspawn don’t have siege engines, it’s true, but they don’t need them. The ogres will hurl genlocks over your walls to crash down on your people. Whether the genlocks survive their impact hardly matters. Once enough of them have come down, they’ll spread the Blight disease, and that’ll be the end of Antiva City. And that presumes the Archdemon doesn’t come. If it does, you won’t even have days.”
    The royals had gone pale. Isseya sneaked a glance back at the knot of Antivan nobles. They, too, looked deathly frightened. She felt more than a little of that fear herself. It had been two hundred years since the last Blight had touched Thedas, long enough for tales of Toth and Hunter Fell to fade into children’s stories.
    Now the monsters had come out from under their beds, and their claws were sharp indeed.
    “I asked Huble to bring a force of Wardens so that we’d have a chance to evacuate the city,” Turab said with the same dogged patience. “You still have enough ships to take your people into Rialto Bay. They can find refuge on some of the larger islands. Darkspawn can’t swim and don’t have ships, so you and your people will be safe there.”
    King Elaudio closed his eyes for a minute as he tried to run through the numbers. “We’ll be lucky to save a third of them.”
    “You won’t save any if you stand and fight,” Turab said. “Your Highness, these Wardens came here willing to lay down their lives to save your people. But they need you to lead them to safety.”
    “I’ll think on it,” the king said quietly. He raised his hands and put the palms together in a soundless clap, signifying that their audience was at an end.
    Warden-Commander Turab and Huble bowed to the royals. Along with the rest of the Wardens, Isseya mimicked the gesture, then followed their leaders out of the hall.
    “They really wanted us to defend their city?” Garahel murmured to her as they were passing through the rose garden again. “For the sake of some paintings and fountains?”
    The flowers’ sweetness was lost to Isseya, and the sun on her skin left her cold. She couldn’t stop thinking about all those people huddled outside the city gates, hoping desperately for a salvation that would be closed to them, and the people inside the gates, equally desperate, who might lose theirs if the king and queen clung too long to their impossible hopes of beating back a siege.
    “Of course they did,” she whispered back to her brother. “They’re people. They want hope.”
    “We gave them hope,” Garahel replied. “We gave them all the hope the world is going to allow. And they won’t take it because they want more ?”
    Isseya shook her head unhappily, unable to articulate her sorrow. As they left the garden and passed back into the relative cool of the palace’s interior halls, she shivered. The sun hadn’t warmed her in the slightest, but the shadows seemed unbearable.
    Turab took them down to one of the guard barracks. It had been cleared for the Wardens’ arrival. Even with the Blight on the city’s doorstep, the palace servants had taken the time to lay out clean blankets on the cots and hang bundles of dried lavender from the walls.
    The peppery-sweet fragrance of those tiny purple flowers was painful to Isseya. The darkspawn had no concept of beauty, no use for the small, civilized gestures that made the world a more pleasant place. They just … killed and destroyed and