Last Flight Read-along: Chapter 1

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THE READ-A-LONG

What is this? The read-a-long is an opportunity to do a long distance book club with other Dragon Age fans, where once a week one chapter will be discussed in Liane Merciel's tie-in novel, Dragon Age: Last Flight

[Official book teaser blurb]The Grey Wardens are heroes across Thedas once again: the Archdemon has been defeated with relative ease and the scattered darkspawn are being driven back underground. The Blight is over. Or so it seems.

Valya, a young elven mage recently recruited into the Wardens, has been tasked with studying the historical record of previous Blights in order to gain insight into newly reported, and disturbing, darkspawn phenomena. Her research into the Fourth Blight leads her to an encoded reference scrawled in the margins of an ancient map, and to the hidden diary of Issenya, one of the last of the fabled griffon riders. As the dark secrets buried in Isseyna's story unfold, Valya begins to question everything she thought she knew about the heroic Grey Wardens. . . .

If you've read it and have Thoughts or Feels, comment to discuss! Discussion can be serious or snarky, but please keep it constructive and not destructive.

(If the first person who gets to this post can start a comment thread entitled 'Serious Discussion' and a second one for 'Snarky Discussion', I would greatly appreciate it.)

[Chapter 1--Synopsis, DA2 spoilers]Chapter 1 Synopsis

9:41 Dragon
(which places this several years after Act III of "Dragon Age 2", a few years after the events of Asunder and The Masked Empire, and possibly another year past Cassandra's questioning of Varric in DA2)

We meet Valya, our intrepid narrator, an elvish mage from the Circle at Hossberg (implied elsewhere in the chapter to be within the Anderfels) who, along with four other junior mages and one Senior Enchanter, have made the journey to Weisshaupt to join the Grey Wardens in lieu of the chaos that is rumored to be gripping Thedas in the wake of the mage rebellions and templar reprisals. They are shown to a shared room and met by an elvish Warden, Caronel, who informs them that they are to be put to work in the libraries analyzing the original writings of the Fourth Blight to try to identify any odd events or movements that could be linked to "talking darkspawn" or strange behaviors.

In the library, Valya finds two things: a sarcophagus holding the arms and armor of Garahel, a great elvish hero, the Grey Warden who slew the Archdemon of the Fourth Blight, and a secret note, written in ink imbued with lyrium, within a troop movement map within a book. She recognized the note as elvish and a reference to an ancient elvish poem which opens about blackberry vines and, based on that, found a carving of a vine. More lyrium there, and triggering it released a secret compartment within the wall, and in the compartment she finds an old book that begins, "In the year 5:12 Exalted, my brother, Garahel, and I flew to Antiva City"...