Free Dragon Age: Last Flight by Liane Merciel Page A

history didn’t embrace her. Not yet. “The urgency is that I’m not sure we are safe.”
    Genuine puzzlement shone in Caronel’s eyes. The morning shade, she noted absently, made them bluer. “Who would threaten you here?”
    Valya shrugged unhappily. “The same people who threatened us in Hossberg. Templars. The Chantry. People who fear apostate mages. You’re an elf. You don’t have Dalish markings, so you must have grown up in an alienage, like I did. Surely, then, you have some idea what it’s like to depend on the protection of people who don’t consider you one of them.”
    The older elf’s smile was a little sad. Not many of their people had the privilege of living among their own kind in the precarious, but precious, freedom of the Dales. The Dalish elves tattooed their faces with wild, fanciful inscriptions, proclaiming their independence. But the elves of the alienages, who lived among humans, took no such chances. They kept their faces unmarked, the better to be overlooked and forgotten. Drawing attention, for an alienage elf, was seldom safe and never wise. “I do.” He paused, studying her. “Do you want to be a Warden?”
    Valya fidgeted with a frayed thread on her sleeve. She’d worked about two inches of it loose. Absently, she began to roll the end into a lopsided gray ball. “I don’t know.” She looked up, half curious, half challenging. “Did you?”
    “I don’t know either,” Caronel replied. He pulled his thumb from the book, letting it close completely, and set it beside his leg on the bench. “It was a different time then. A different world. Ferelden in the early days of the Blight.”
    His gaze drifted to the fountain, where he watched the ripples on the water without really seeming to see them. His voice was soft and toneless. “You were right in guessing that I was born in an alienage. And a Fereldan alienage, with the Blight’s shadow looming large across the country, was not a good place to be. People were frightened. Food was scarce. The night we learned King Cailan had died at Ostagar, rioters attacked the alienage. Not the first time, not the last. The rioters burned down my parents’ shop. They were shoemakers. A humble occupation, but an honest one. That shop was all we had.
    “I became a Grey Warden not because I wanted to save humanity from the Blight, but because I wanted to save myself . I didn’t care about humanity. If anything, I wanted to watch the shemlen burn just like they tried to burn my family. Given the chance, I would have thrown them all down the Archdemon’s gullet, one by one, and counted myself lucky to have done it.”
    There was no anger in Caronel’s words, only calm simplicity, as if he were reading off the ingredients to a recipe of no particular interest. Inwardly, Valya shivered, knowing the depth of pain such blandness must conceal.
    “But you chose to undergo the Joining anyway,” she said. “To sacrifice yourself for the world.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” Caronel put a hand to the hilt of his sword, which he had unbuckled and leaned against the side of the bench in its scabbard. His fingers lingered on the griffon embossed on the weapon’s pommel, although he did not look at the emblem. “I’m still here, and the world’s still here. The Blight demanded no sacrifice from me. I didn’t even see any fighting, other than a few genlock stragglers here and there.”
    Fixing Valya with a cool blue gaze, the elf let his fingers slip from the griffon’s mark. “I escaped the Blight unscathed, but the darkspawn taint will kill me in twenty years. Thirty, if I’m lucky. Considerably less if I’m not. So when I say that you should be in no hurry to make that decision—not when you’re so young, and there’s no pressing need for you to become a Warden now —it’s because I wish I had that choice again myself.”
    “What happens when the templars come?” Valya asked. The frayed thread finally snapped, leaving a