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anneapocalypse · 2 years

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Dragon Age: Last Flight

Last Flight is the fifth novel in the Dragon Age series, written by Liane Merciel and published in 2014, just two months before the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Through the framing device of a mage refugee at Weisshaupt finding a hidden journal, the story explores the Fourth Blight 450 years ago, and the true story behind the extinction of the Grey Wardens' legendary griffons.

At 300 pages, this is the shortest of the Dragon Age novels (not counting Hard in Hightown which in our world at least is technically not long enough to be a novel). I do not think this is the strongest of the novels—I think it has some lore issues in particular, and its characters are on the whole less memorable. At the same time, I think it does add a lot to the canon in terms of establishing history and contextualizing in-game events. So this entry will be an exploration of both the book's weaknesses and its strengths.

This entry will contain spoilers for the whole story as well as for some bits of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

The Blights

This is going to involve a lot of preface before we actually get to discussing the book, but bear with me!

I think Origins does a good job establishing the stakes and scope of the Blight and the need to unite the land and all its people to face it. The darkspawn feel like a real threat, the Archdemon is scary, the Deep Roads hold secret horrors which add additional scale and dimension to the darkspawn threat. As the game progresses, you watch the Blight creep across the map, and some locations become inaccessible as they are overrun. It's solid worldbuilding for a stock fantasy epic. That the Blight doesn't really extend outside of Ferelden is fine for this story, because the scope of the game is Ferelden, and it is well established that if the Blight is not halted here, it will spread to the rest of the world. It feels as big as it needs to for the story Origins is telling.

So it's interesting to learn later that the Fifth Blight is actually the shortest Blight in Thedas's history, canonically ended within a year and never spreading outside Ferelden beyond a few isolated darkspawn outbreaks.

If you read all the Codex entries when you played Origins for the first time (which I definitely did not), you learned that the First Blight lasted nearly 200 years and nearly collapsed two civilizations. Both the Tevinter Imperium and the dwarven empire were devastated by the Blight and would continue to decline even after its defeat. This of course can be accounted for by the fact that at the time, no one yet knew how to kill an Archdemon. Every time Dumat was slain, it would be reborn and the Blight would rage on, until at last came the creation of the Grey Wardens, and eventually Dumat was permanently killed.

With the Second Blight, they cut that down to 90 years, and by the Third Blight it was down to 15, and then 12 for the Fourth. A decade of war is still devastating, but it's not civilization-destroying on the scale of the First Blight.

There are reasons for the Fifth Blight being ended so quickly, beyond our heroes getting really, really lucky at the Battle of Denerim. (If Riordan hadn't managed to damage the Archdemon's wing, grounding it atop Fort Drakon, or if all of the 3-4 wardens present had been killed before its defeat, Urthemiel very well might not have been killed that day.)

For one, the Fourth Blight is said to have wiped out so many darkspawn that some believed they would never return, and it does seem to have taken them quite some time to replenish their numbers again. More than 400 years passed before the next Blight arose, and over time it must have felt more and more unlikely that another would come. It becomes easier in that context to see how the horrors of the Fourth Blight fell out of common memory, and how the Wardens fell out of favor, especially in Ferelden—which was not even a nation yet at the time of the Fourth Blight.

For another, it is revealed in Awakening that the Fifth Blight was actually begun by the Architect's failed attempt to perform his modified Joining ritual on Urthemiel in order to prevent further blights, resulting instead in Urthemiel being corrupted and rising as the next Archdemon. It's never explicitly stated in canon, but my guess is that had things taken their "natural" course (if such a thing can be called natural), the darkspawn might have amassed much greater numbers by the time they found and corrupted Urthemiel, thereby delaying the Fifth Blight but making it ultimately more devastating when it occurred. So I think it's possible that the Architect's interference, even though it failed in its goal, might still have saved lives.

The Fifth Blight was so short that we didn't witness the full extent of what darkspawn invasion does to the world over time, and this we get to see in more detail in Last Flight: barren ground, dead crops, sickly animals and children, even deadly storms. Sickness and starvation kill more people than darkspawn swords. A Blight is war, famine, and plague all rolled into one.

Weisshaupt and the Anderfels

One thing I was very excited about in reading this book was getting to see Weisshaupt Fortress firsthand, as previously we'd only heard about the famed Grey Warden headquarters secondhand. By extension we also learn a bit about the Anderfels.

Our point-of-view character for the present-day frame story is Valya, a mage from the Anderfels' Hossberg Circle, arriving at Weisshaupt with a small group of fellow mages seeking refuge from the mage-templar conflict quickly spreading across Thedas. With the Fifth Blight ended, the Weisshaupt Wardens are in no great hurry to put new recruits through the Joining, and instead put them to work helping with research in the fortress's library, sorting through old documents from the previous Blight.

In said library stands a memorial to Garahel, the Hero of the Fourth Blight, which I thought was pretty neat. It was also cool to learn that it was an elf who killed the last archdemon, and we'll learn more about Garahel and even more about his sister Isseya, our point-of-view character for the Fourth Blight storyline.

We also learn that the Weisshaupt Wardens are investigating intelligent darkspawn like the Architect, which is not very relevant to this story but was a piece of continuity I appreciated.

We are told, from Valya's point of view, that "no one, absolutely no one, save the truly heroic or the truly desperate, wanted to become a member." I think we already know just from what we've seen in the games that this isn't strictly true. But I also wonder if it's more true in the Anderfels—if the cost of becoming a Grey Warden is more common knowledge here.

Similarly we are told in the flashback part of the story, from Isseya's point of view, that "Everyone who had ever heard of the Grey Wardens knew that someday the darkspawn taint that the Wardens absorbed during the Joining would overwhelm them." So… perhaps that was common knowledge at the time of the Fourth Blight? It certainly isn't in the south in the present day, though again it might be in the Anderfels.

We're told early on that "By tradition, the Wardens took only one recruit from each Circle of Magi in Thedas." One at a time only, to be replaced when they die? Does this apply all the time or only in peacetime? I have no idea, and it isn't explained further.

At one point in the frame story some letters arrive at Weisshaupt, and it seems the Wardens of other nations write to Weisshaupt for supplies, which seems a little inefficient, frankly, given the sheer distance and difficulty of travel. On another note, the unnamed arl requesting a personal guard after his wife insisted she saw a genlock in the cellar amused me greatly, because I could just imagine the arl going to the poor beleaguered Warden-Commander of Ferelden and being told that if he really wanted his own personal contingent of House Wardens, he was more than welcome to write to Weisshaupt and ask for them.

In this story that Ferelden has a new Warden-Commander, which I believe lines up with the default world state BioWare uses for the novels and comics, in which the Hero of Ferelden is dead.

I think this story is especially compelling in how it establishes some of the terrible choices the Wardens have had to make in order to save the world. An early sequence in the flashback portion involves the Grey Wardens facing the cruel reality of choosing who to evacuate from Antiva City. Nobles have land, armies, and coin to aid in the war effort. Peasants have nothing to offer and will be left to die, and though the Wardens find this distasteful, they don't have enough time to save everyone, and this influences Isseya's decisions later on. The hard choices the Wardens must make are a major theme and I think one of the strongest aspects of the story.

Additional Worldbuilding

It was also really cool to see more of Antiva, which is where the Fourth Blight began. Antiva City on Rialto Bay sounds just beautiful, and that's sad when you realize you're seeing it just as it's about to be destroyed. Antiva was caught off guard by the Blight and quickly overwhelmed, and then the darkspawn spread south into the Free Marches which were not nearly unified enough to mount a proper defense.

They rebuilt after the Blight, of course, and I really hope we get to see Antiva City in-game one day and that we get to see more of it than we saw of Val Royeaux.

I do wish that we got some effort put into showing us that the fashion of the Exalted Age was different than what we see 450 years later, but nope, from what is described it appears to be exactly the same Origins-era fantasy-medieval aesthetic. On the other hand I am pleased to see the story acknowledge that language would have changed over the centuries.

Lore & Continuity Issues

Caronel is a Grey Warden side character in the present-day storyline. He is memorable mainly for the fact that I was immediately suspicious of him as soon as he said he became a Grey Warden during the Blight in Ferelden. This makes no sense unless he either left the country and underwent the Joining elsewhere, which is strange since Ferelden is where the Blight was, or he didn't actually join until the Blight was ended, which is also strange because the Ferelden Wardens desperately needed rebuilding after the Blight given that they only had 2-3 people left and their first group of reinforcements from Orlais were slaughtered to a one at Vigil's Keep within six months. I honestly thought Caronel was lying, like he was some kind of proto-Blackwall, and that either he hadn't yet joined or was concealing his true origins for some juicy reason. But nope, it just never comes up again and never pays off.

There is some very weird stuff in this book about aravels, the wheeled wooden "landships" Dalish clans use to move from place to place, drawn by halla and able to move swiftly through the forest through magic. Her limited knowledge of the Dalish and their aravels leads Isseya to devise a similar scheme for evacuating civilians from cities threatened by darkspawn, using modified boats and griffons. This is clever, and an interesting plot point.

The first weird thing is that Amadis doesn't think aravels are real. I can accept that perhaps she's never seen one, having perhaps never encountered a Dalish clan. But aravels are universal among the Dalish, and according to their Codex entry, so well-known to humans that their approaching flags are considered a warning to stay away. I guess it's possible that in Exalted Age, the Dalish maybe have been scarce enough in the Free Marches that their aravels might have become mere myth, but it's weird, and I'm not sure why it would be true.

The second weird thing is that these characters (and by extension the author) seem to believe that aravels fly. As in, fly high in the air, like a sleigh drawn by reindeer. This cannot be true. Halla are not winged creatures; they don't fly. (Unless we're counting that one glitchy halla in the Brecilian Forest.) Aravels have wheels on them. Humans call them landships, not airships. I don't even consider this to be debatable; it has to be a mistake, and I parse it as a misreading of the Codex entry, where "flying through the forest" is a figure of speech and "the sails of our aravels flying above the tops of trees" pretty clearly has to mean that the sails are visible above the trees as the aravels pass, not that the entire aravel is literally flying.

That Isseya decides to fly the refugees to safety using magic and griffons is all well and good, but to suggest that Dalish aravels fly… it's just a mess, and there's no way that was supposed to be canon from the start.

And then there's the blood magic lore, which is getting its own section.

Blood Magic

The blood magic lore was probably my biggest issue with this book. I can write off Caronel as a liar, I can write off the flying aravel nonsense as these non-Dalish characters having misconceptions about aravels. The blood magic stuff has much greater ramifications to me, because it touches the very fabric of the universe.

The first line that caught me off guard was "Blood magic required considerable sophistication." I thought, really? Because it sure seemed in Dragon Age II that a mage in a fit of desperation could just cut their hand with a knife, spill their blood, and immediately summon demons. This was never indicated to be a school of magic that required "sophistication," whatever that means, especially when it is so often a last resort of the desperate.

It also appears in this story that to control someone's mind with blood magic requires drawing their blood, not just any blood. While this would make sense in and of itself, I am not sure whether it lines up with what we've seen elsewhere, as the general attitude seems to be that if a blood mage is about, anyone they've had contact with could be in danger of having their mind influenced. Ordinary people could be mistaken about this, but not templars, whom we've heard speak of the dangers of blood mages being able to control the minds of those around them.

But I was really pulled up short by the part where Isseya picks up on Calien using blood magic, and confronts him:

"You're a blood mage. I can see when you're casting spells without touching the Fade."

This is where I stopped and said: Wait, WHAT?

This is… there is just so much to unpack about this, and more you think about it the less sense it makes. If blood magic doesn't touch the Fade, wouldn't that make it less dangerous, and not more, if there is no contact with the realm of demons? Why does blood magic attract demons if it has no connection to the Fade? If blood magic doesn't touch the Fade, why does it thin the Veil, which we know to be true because it's a very important piece of worldbuilding for the entire series?

Furthermore, the Fade is supposed to be what gives mages their abilities in the first place. It's why dwarves and Tranquil can't do magic. If blood magic has no connection the Fade, then dwarves and Tranquil and anyone else should be capable of performing blood magic.

The book even kind of contradicts itself on this stuff later, because we see Isseya reaching for the Fade as she prepares the blood magic ritual to Join the griffons. In the most explicit example, when she uses blood magic to enter a griffon's mind to find out what's killing them, we are told, "She grasped the Fade." So does blood magic touch the Fade, or doesn't it?

Thing is, this piece of lore is... sort of? maybe? affirmed by Solas in Inquisition, when he says that blood mages have more difficulty entering the Fade. (Never mind that Merrill never seems to have any trouble entering the Fade during "Night Terrors.") Which is not exactly the same thing as "Blood magic doesn't touch the Fade," but it could be related. So, I think there is something to this, regardless of how confusingly it's presented in this book.

I think what we ultimately have to take from this is that using blood magic makes it more difficult to enter the Fade in spirit, but… also potentially makes it possible to enter physically, if enough blood can be spilled to tear the Veil open. Why that is the case, I don't think we yet have enough information about the Veil and the magical qualities of blood to say. Maybe we'll find out. As for blood magic touching the Fade, I think the point is supposed to be that blood is a separate source of magic from the Fade, not merely a fuel for it like lyrium (which is also a kind of blood, but we're not getting into that here). It's just not handled very well. And as for what is required for mind control... your guess is as good as mine.

(Tangentially, there's also mentions of the Archdemon creating some kind of magical vortex in the sky during battle, and Isseya notes that its power does not come from the Fade. This I think ties into the face that darkspawn draw magic from the Taint, not from the Fade.)

Initially I just hoped all the blood magic stuff would be quietly forgotten along with flying aravels, but having realized some of it was confirmed in later canon, I think that much at least is here to stay. So I don't think the blood magic lore here is entirely erroneous, but the way it's presented is kind of a mess.

General Writing Weaknesses

Very embarrassingly, when I returned to this book about a month after finishing it to do this write-up, I could not remember the name of the present-day point-of-view character. (It's Valya.) This is not a problem I had with any of the other novels, and I think it's representative of the fact that a lot of the characters just weren't as memorable or compelling. The one I remember best is Isseya, and it's not because she had a particularly distinct or engaging personality but because her actions were central to the story. If pressed, I don't think I could really tell you anything deeply personal about most of the side characters, and despite them being from different time periods, I kept getting Calien and Caronel mixed up to the point that at one point I forgot Calien wasn't a Grey Warden.

And in such a character-driven fandom, I think the unmemorability of these characters is born out by the fact that I'd never heard of any of them or the book itself before I started actively seeking out every piece of Dragon Age media in existence. I've only ever been on the edges of the wider Dragon Age fandom and I'd heard of, for example, Rowan and Fiona and Rhys and Michel, at least in passing before reading their books; I've never heard anyone talk about Isseya or Valya.

While the frame story of the mage and templar refugees sets the story clearly in the time period right before Inquisition, I don't feel like it particularly serves this story, which is not about the mage-templar war, and the references to it, including the tension between the refugees at Weisshaupt, don't really go anywhere or have any payoff. Valya didn't need to be a Circle refugee and her companions didn't need to exist, basically; all they do is add more superfluous characters who don't matter to the story. Isseya's journal could have been discovered by any Grey Warden initiate who was both a mage and an elf, and I actually think it could have been more interesting to see the story of how the Wardens wiped out their own griffons through blood magic unfold through the eyes of someone who's already undergone the Joining and has that sunk cost in believing the Wardens heroic and good.

Valya suspects that the story the Chamberlain tells her about how the griffons died out is a lie, at a time in the story when she still has no reason to suspect that. It throws some intrigue to the reader, sure, but from a character point of view it's not believable, and Valya is too underdeveloped a character for it to make her seem smart. Instead it just feels like the writer wants you to know there's more to the story.

And then there are just some language issues I have with the writing, things that I think it behooves anyone writing in a fantasy genre to be aware of. There is always a certain level of suspension of disbelief required for fantasy, and all language derives in some way from the cultures it arose from and reflects the world in which it's used, but if the origins of a word are too obviously not of the fictional universe, they become immersion-breaking. I call this "the Brussels sprouts" problem. In a fantasy world where the country of Belgium and the city of Brussels do not exist, you cannot have a vegetable called Brussels sprouts. You can have that vegetable but you can't call it that without risking the audience's immersion. In this cases, the author uses the adjective "spartan," as in "a spartan respite." Most people know what Sparta was and who the Spartans were, and this word absolutely does not belong in Dragon Age.

There's also this one simile, "studded with arrows like a ham stuck with cloves," that stuck out to me, not because it was out of place in the universe necessarily—Thedas has pigs and it has spices, fine—but because it just seemed kind of uncreative to me. Like, oh, I guess people in this fantasy world with dragons prepare and eat ham exactly the way we do. Cool, I guess?

Merciel also has kind of a problem with unnecessary epithets.

In this book Dragon Age continues to be sort of iffy with its portrayal of transgender characters. They arguably did finally do better with Krem in Inquisition, but this is something that in general the franchise has a history of fumbling (see my post on the first three graphic novels for more on that). This book has a character named Lisme, who seems to be what we would describe as genderfluid. A huge deal is made of Lisme's presentation being dramatic and costumey, which seems both highly impractical in wartime and not necessary to establish the character's genderfluidity. I mean don't get me wrong here, if Lisme wants to dress up like a drag queen to fight darkspawn, I for one support her, but I also question the choice to write the character that way, as well as to have the narration tell us that no one knew "which was the truth" like his gender presentation is a lie. For a franchise that prides itself on the inclusion of LGB characters, Dragon Age has been sort of behind the 8-ball on trans representation, but the trend at least does seem to be an upward one--and I hope that continues.

There are couple of issues I'm going to mention which also apply to other Dragon Age books and so it's going to seem like I'm singling this one out unfairly. If I ignored them in previous books it's because they weren't enough of a distraction to take me out of the story, but they were still present and I will mention them briefly here.

We do set up the obligatory het romances real early; this is a thing in nearly every Dragon Age novel (hats off to The Masked Empire for breaking that mold) and while I wasn't invested in most of the characters, I did enjoy the thing between Amadis and Garahel, which of course ends in Garahel's heroic sacrifice. (Amadis despite not getting a ton of character development was still probably my favorite character in the book.)

There are moments in these books when it feels like the writer grabbed at the first name that popped into their head without thinking about why it popped in there. Like Asunder having a major character named Adrian mention an Enchanter Adria who never appears or comes up again. Or in this case, a character name Fenadahl, not to be confused with the elven Tree of the People, the vhenadahl. I understand that in real life sometimes people have similar names, and sometimes names sound like things, but in a book it's distracting and if you don't have a reason to do it and you aren't going to lampshade it in some way, you should probably avoid this sort of thing.

This is a small thing but it also represents a hole a lot of franchises seem to fall down as they age and expand, and one I fear Dragon Age is also succumbing to: the pressure to utilize characters that fans have heard of before. (I think this is way more of an issue in Inquisition and some of the comics, but that's another entry for another day.) In short: I know fans like to hear familiar names, but Brother Genitivi does not need to be the only human historian in all of Thedas. There can be other scholars who have written books. Mix it up a little.

Strengths!

I want to go out on a positive note, so let's finish with some more general things I liked!

While it initially feels a little dramatic the way Valya finds the super secret Grey Warden journal by following a hidden message on an old map to a secret hidey-hole in a stone wall, instead of just finding the journal in a trunk full of Fourth Blight stuff no one's had time to sort through, it does turn out to have been hidden that way for a reason, and specifically so that a mage and an elf would be most likely to find it, so that worked for me.

I mentioned that Amadis is my favorite character and it's mostly for this:

"Who are you?" Isseya asked. "You're not just an Antivan lady. Not by the way you handled those blades." Amadis laughed. "You must not know many Antivan ladies."

She goes on to explain that she's not actually Antivan, she's from Starkhaven, but it was a great line all the same.

The battle descriptions are great! I tend to find the battle scenes the most boring parts of these books, but this was an exception. The griffon-mounted battles were really fun and exciting. It becomes clear in this story how much differently a battle feels when you're not even trying to kill an Archdemon at the moment, only escape.

Blood magic stuff aside, I also like the way Merciel describes mages doing magic as reaching for the Fade, opening themselves to it, weaving threads of magic and so forth. It's more visceral than Gaider's descriptions ever were, and makes more vivid what it might feel like to do magic in this universe.

I liked the mention of the Wilds flower from Origins that can cure blight sickness (at least in Mabari), and it makes sense that it would sound like a fairy tale in the north because the flower doesn't grow there. That was a nice piece of continuity.

I think it works well that Valya knows the outcome of Isseya's story before we do, allowing for some foreshadowing in the frame story, with Valya saying "She did terrible things" before we know the extent of those things.

And I like the griffons! I like the descriptions of them, the bonds they have with the Wardens and their individual personalities, and I cared about them enough that I was genuinely sad about the sickness taking them even when I knew from the start that they were all going to die. The surprise came from the discovery of the hidden, magically-warded and unblighted eggs, and the revelation that griffons are going to return to Thedas! That's very exciting to me!

Final Thoughts

I think Last Flight is one of the weaker of the Dragon Age novels, but I still think it's valuable for some of its worldbuilding, and particularly for its portrayal of how much the Blights have cost Thedas and what has been sacrificed to stop them. It's almost unfair to compare it to, for example, The Stolen Throne, which had no continuity to break when it was written, and while it also didn't have the strongest characters in the series, their proximity to the first game automatically added interest to their story. Last Flight comes later in the series and thus has a lot more continuity to build on, and I can appreciate the added challenge of that, even as I wish the lore had been vetted a little more carefully. It doesn't have the strongest characters, but I can appreciate it as a world-driven story more than a character-driven one, even if I think that's a little out of step with the rest of the series.

It's not my favorite, but I enjoyed it and I think it's worth reading.

Addendum

More recently, I watched Ghil Dirthalen's video series about this book on YouTube. She noted some of the same issues I did, and she added one piece of context in particular: Merciel wrote Last Flight on a pretty tight deadline. She also shares a few quotes from Merciel from the old BSN forums, offering some lore-questionable justifications for certain writing decisions, and also mentioning that she hadn't read World of Thedas when she wrote the book. (Ghil also catches some lore issues that I didn't, so really, you should go watch her videos, part of her Book Emporium series; it's good.)

And given that this book doesn't actually set up anything that happens in Inquisition, I'm not sure why it was so important for BioWare to publish it when they did; it could just as easily have come out after the game. But that time limitation probably explains a lot. And knowing that just confirms for me that we probably shouldn't favor this book over other sources of lore where they conflict.

#dragon age meta #last flight #dragon age #blunders of thedas

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