A review by deanna
Last Flight by Liane Merciel

4.0

Tears blurred in her eyes until it seemed that she looked at her once-familiar world through a pane of warped, melting glass. The lyrium dust and Archdemon's blood dragged her down like a thousand pound of steel chain. The churbling purrs and occasional snaps of griffons at rest filled her ears as she climbed into the tower that they'd claimed as their own, and Isseya didn't know whether she wanted to glory in the sound or mourn its impending loss.

[...] The Blight takes too much from us.

But it was impossible to refuse. How could she? This was the very purpose of their lives. Every time they went out to the field, the griffons and their riders willingly courted death. They fought the darkspawn with all their hearts, and risked oblivion freely, so that others might survive the horrors of the Blight. The Grey Wardens had already made the same sacrifice that she was asking of the griffons. Was this really so different?

Like previous Dragon Age tie-in novels, Last Flight establishes an important plotline of the installment of the game it precedes. In this case, it was foreshadowing the disappearances of Grey Wardens for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Valya and other mages from the Hossberg Circle of Magi, seek shelter by joining the Grey Wardens after the outbreak of the Mage-Templar War. They are welcome with opened arms and quickly put to work pouring over centuries old documents looking for accounts of wardens acting strangely and abandoning their posts as well as references to darkspawn acting more intelligently. However, this plot point is not the main focus of the book. Valya finds the journal of Grey Warden Isseya and slowly uncovers the truth of the griffons' extinction and shows just how far the Wardens are willing to go to end the blights.

The story is told both from Valya's POV in the present and Isseya's POV in the past though it's much more heavily focused on Isseya, which I enjoyed because I found her the more interesting character. There also isn't a love story subplot in the installment of the series, which is maybe unusual for a video game series so well known for providing an abundance of opportunities for the player character to romance other characters, but I found that a nice change of pace from the previous novels.

It might be worth noting that, unlike Dragon Age previous authors, Liane Merciel is not affiliated with Bioware in any way. I have no way of knowing just how much of this story is Merciel's own and how much of it was outline for her by other writers at Bioware, but I really enjoy the end result. Merciel's writing is lyrical and emotional and it's obvious that she's knowledgeable on the basics of the game lore (though I'm still wondering if the details of the Joining are truly common knowledge throughout Thedas as she claims through Valya or if Dragon Age: Origins just misled me into assuming that). I hope to read more of her work soon.