Chapter Text
When the Veil fell, the world was destroyed.
No, that wasn’t quite right. When the Veil fell, only one race was truly affected beyond belief: the dwarves. Without the Titans, they could not handle the force of the Fade. Most died soon, but many lingered. Varric was one of them. But day by day, he got sicker. Until there was nothing left.
The true horror came after.
Spirits, thrown into the world again without preparation. People, reacting to the spirits with terror. Nowhere escaped it. They saw monsters in their lives and found themselves helpless against them. The ancient elves were there, but they helped the People first and foremost and ignored the rest. That was what took out the Qunari and most of the humans. The spirits were as much of victims as the rest of them.
Then came the Evanuris. They were angry, you see, at the one who had trapped them. So angry. She could understand their position with her own emotions towards him, but they were monsters. They left a trail of death and destruction behind them in their quest to eliminate Fen’Harel’s existence. His soldiers were not much better. They took little care as to who they may be hurting as a consequence of their battles, and few escaped unscathed. She was lucky. She’d given up on saving Fen’Harel early enough on to not meet them in person. But she saw it all.
The details of those days were seared in her memory, never to leave. She couldn’t forget them if she tried, and oh she had tried. But they haunted her behind her eyelids no matter what she did, accompanied by a whisper of your fault.
So why couldn’t she just take the amulet? It was right there. All she had to do was reach out and lift it up, and then cast the spell she’d created. She should. It could save entire races. At the very least, she could prepare them so when this did happen again more could survive. Better preparation could save thousands.
But she’d helped the survivors grow. They were so much more than they had been. Even if she could guarantee if nothing else they would end up here again, these versions of these people would never reach this point again. It wouldn’t be the same level of achievement and survival and regrowth. It would be throwing them away for an uncertain ability to fix the past.
But the species that were gone from the world couldn’t be saved by moving on.
Her mistakes couldn’t be fixed by moving on.
The amulet shone in the flickering light cast by her candles, taunting her, and she stood suddenly. Her chair banged against the wall as she walked away. There was time. She had nothing but time. She could do it tomorrow, when she was ready. Another day of going over her plans and failsafes wouldn’t hurt.
.
It stayed on the table. She came back to it the next day, and the next, but couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. It shouldn’t have been hard, but it was. It was terrifying. She’d taken on a lot of responsibility before, but to choose if she should erase a world in order to save another? How could anyone be expected to have that burden?
So she planned instead. She came up with every possible situation if she went, and responses to each. It didn’t help. She still just didn’t know.
She went on walks. She saw the world. There was so much and so little to it now, at the same time. It used to be so much larger, with so many people and cultures and everything. But the desolation of the wars was slowly disappearing. The survivors were living. Against all odds, they’d started thriving again. It was glorious and depressing all in one.
She took to carrying the amulet around in her pocket, but didn’t cast the spell just yet. One more day, she told herself, one more day of meeting people and seeing the world. To remind herself of why she had to do this.
During the days she took to traveling with groups of people, pilgrims looking for a new home or to reclaim an old in the ruins of her civilization. They mourned with her. Some spat on the ground when they came across the husks of yet another human town or mansion, or when they saw chantries in disrepair, but most seemed sad. They talked about what it used to be like, the people they used to know, the things they’d lost.
But at night, there were songs and stories. Hope for their future homes, and memories that were less bitter than before and more about honoring the good parts of the lost. The hatred over how they had been treated never left, but they talked about the good humans. And they looked toward the future without fear.
They were at peace.
If she traveled, what would happen to this? She’d never seen elves so content in her life. Would it be gone from existence, like Redcliffe? Or, she wondered with a chill, fingers tangling with the chain of the amulet in her pocket, was that world even truly gone? They’d assumed it was, but that was merely an assumption born from their inability to go back. What if it had continued? A separate stream of time, where they’d disappeared and reappeared only to leave with destruction in their wake again?
No.
That line of thought bore nothing good. Future Redcliffe had been destroyed. Leliana’s face after all that torture came to mind, and she shuddered. It hadn’t been real. No matter how much the thought of how real it must have seemed to them lingered.
She thought about using the amulet constantly, but there was always someone else who needed her help right that moment, and she couldn’t just ignore them. Couldn’t ignore the lost child far from home or the ill family who needed help putting up shelter and gathering crops or the young mage who didn’t know how to handle their magic or the spirits who had so many questions about the world and couldn’t find someone else willing to answer. They reminded her of her lost friends. They were people she could actually help.
She started to draw attention again, not for protecting but for being willing to help in any way needed. People tried to take advantage of it at times. They failed miserably. If she were still the Inquisitor she might have reacted harshly and punished them, but she’d seen too much despair for that. Instead, they got help. A job with good people, or someone able to work for them in exchange for food, or even just the knowledge of how to provide for themselves. She could do it. They needed it. This way they could help themselves in the future, and she could leave with no guilt.
Except the knowledge that she might be erasing their growth.
For years, she did this. Her mortality had been erased when the Veil was erased, so she had the time. The past could wait. It would still be there once they were in a better place.
They came to her in a seedy tavern. There was recognition in their eyes, she could tell, but it did not change how they approached her. Three of them. Ancient elves, from their bearing and demeanor towards the rest, but not ones she had met before. She would’ve stabbed them before they spoke and run if not for the price it would have cost the owner of the place.
“We come with an offer for you, Lavellan,” the middle one said, and she eased back against the wall, arm over her chest in an instinctive gesture she still hadn’t erased. People looked over at the name. She knew them all intimately, but none knew her. They hadn’t known until then that she was Dalish, and it started whispers. The Dalish had been wiped out or integrated into the Dread Wolf’s forces in the early days of the fight against the Evanuris, thanks to the vallaslin, and it was well known only one Lavellan had ever agreed to be bare-faced. She’d have to move on fast after this.
Ellana tilted her head back to meet their eyes, her mask of humility fading away as she pulled on her past self. No matter what they said, she would not be embarrassed or ashamed or scared.
“Speak your piece, then.”
And they did. Her face remained stoic throughout, no matter how she felt.
She left immediately afterwards, tossing the speechless owner far more money than he was owed for what she’d drank. Whispers followed.
.
What they had offered was simple: she kept doing what she had been doing. It required nothing from her that she was not willing to give, and they were quite happy to allow her to continue as she was without any contact with anyone important. Fen’Harel had not been consulted in this. He would remain unaware as long as they could help it. But she would have support. Anything she wanted or needed in the course of helping the ones who fell through the cracks of their new system, if they could offer it they would give it.
She’d agreed.
It burned at her to agree to work with the people who had helped tear down her world and salt the ashes, but what else could she do? She wanted to help the common person. This way, when she left, there would be more of a system in place to continue her work. They could follow in the example she set up without her having to do anything to force it. It would just take time.
The loss of her invisibility cut worse than anything else.
She didn’t want people to know the she had survived. The Inquisitor was dead. The Inquisitor would remain dead. But now, people recognized her again. Not always, but often enough. The rumor of her presence spread faster than she could outrun. If she came to a farming community with the offer of lending a hand with the crops and teaching them other skills related to survival for nothing more than a roof over her head and some food, she was met with people who could guess who she was. Most didn’t say anything—too grateful for the help—but she knew they knew. It was in their eyes, in their constant distance when before they’d treated her as merely another traveler, in their insistence that she had the best they could offer when all she wanted was the worst. In return, she hid money in their stores. She added to what they could make or grow themselves with supplies she’d taken from the people in charge of bigger cities who could spare it. Most of the time they even offered it.
But no one wouldn’t let her be just another elf.
In cities she could disappear for a time, as another migrant worker in the plainest of clothes who looked for lodging that was as cheap as possible, but her arm always marked her as different. It made it too easy to connect her to her past. She’d use back entrances to gain access to whatever she needed at that moment to do her work, but someone always noticed eventually. The good days it was a servant. They’d be surprised and shocked, but once they registered who she was she got a conspiratorial grin and permission to do whatever she needed without anyone important knowing. They’d find out eventually that something had been requisitioned, but by then she’d be long gone.
The bad days it was one of the people who owned the place she was getting things from. Their anger would quickly go to an uncomfortable form of respect, before inviting her to dine with them or something else she couldn’t reasonably refuse while taking from them. And then there would be renewed rumors.
Without a spymaster to manage them, the rumors were extremely inconvenient. Someone with power had to be doing something about them to keep Fen’Harel from looking for her, but they did nothing about the worst of them. She didn’t want to be painted as a figure of legend. She didn’t want people to respect her. She just wanted to fix things, get them to a place where she could leave.
Most days she forgot about that, now.
The amulet stayed in her pocket but she rarely paid more attention to it than one would a patch on their clothes. She hadn’t gotten close to using it in years. There was always something else more important than the past happening.
She’d do it once the world was properly set up again. It would be cruel to leave when there were still people she could help. It had always been her calling, no matter how naive she was.
Time passed.
Against her will, she struck up conversation with a librarian in one of the libraries she frequented as often as possible around her work. They started expecting her to appear, and to tell them about the world away from their corner of the universe. And, unwittingly, she enjoyed it. She hadn’t even been casual acquaintances with someone in decades, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. They actually treated her as a person, and not . . . uncomfortably close to how she’d known people to act to a legend. Was this how Solas had felt, meeting her all those years ago?
When they invited her to a party, she took it. It was selfish and and for her goals but she . . . she was tired of being alone.
It went so well that she wished it hadn’t.
It had been fine, the idea of walking away and erasing this to start over back when she hadn’t known anyone as anything more than a remnant of what was actually important and needed saving. When the culture had just been tatters of what came before. When struggle outweighed happiness for everyone. When the memory of everyone dying was so bright in her mind she could not escape it.
But now, it hurt to think of going back. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to face doing it all again. She didn’t want to have to have the possibility of failing. She didn’t want to think about what could happen to this current state. They’d rebuilt so far. She was helping.
Would it be fair, to give up on trying to save the other races in exchange for this peace?
She didn’t know.
She never knew.
Why had she ended up with the burden of making this choice? Why had she ever decided to try to make a way to travel back and fix it? It would be so much easier if she’d just moved on. If she could say ‘I wish’ but have no way to do it.
If only she could talk to Solas about why he had torn down the Veil, but she wasn’t ready for that. She didn’t know if she’d ever be ready to see him again. At least he had respected that.
The amulet haunted her thoughts every day now. It was nearly a hundred years since she’d made it, but it looked exactly the same. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t a good enough mage to have done that on purpose. Maybe the fact it was related to time, and so timeless?
She had to make a choice.
And so, as always, she traveled to think about it. To decide. She went to the only place she could think of, when she thought important parts of her past. The beginning.
Nature had long since reclaimed Haven. But it was enough. She knew what to do now.
Ellana Lavellan placed the amulet down in the dirt, and stepped away. She scooped up a pile of dirt on her shovel, and tossed it one by one back into the hole until it was level with the ground once again.
She’d never be able to forget what she’d lost but . . . she wasn’t a god. She wasn’t all powerful, or so convinced in her own righteousness to be able to make a choice like this when she didn’t know everything that could or would happen as a result. She’d made bad choices before when she thought they would be fine. There was no guarantee that wouldn’t be one if she did it. This world had happened, and it wasn’t too bad. It could be improved. But not if she gave up on it because she’d lost in the past.
It would remain, buried there, for ages. Until a curious hunter came across it, and brought it back into the world.