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Ellana listens. It is why Keeper Deshanna sends her to the Conclave, and why Solas steps away. Brown, wide-eyed, more a twig in form and gait than a woman, Ellana presses her ear to tree bark and her fingertips against Skyhold’s walls, her mouth against the inside of Solas’ wrist as she asks, again and again, for a secret world uncovered. Ellana collects, pages and carvings and murals before which she stands, not breathing, while the colors of her own deeds wash across her memory. She gathers Cole’s words, his bits-and-pieces, folds them into birds which she releases from her balcony. She bends, to harvest, to sow, to pick up and to carry. And so she grows, slowly, leaf by leaf and branch by branch: an easier laugh, a defter hand at cards, more invitations to her quarters, more nights spent in her bed than out on the battlements, smirks and smiles which stay rather than dart. She even puts her feet up.
But always she hunches, young-old, in spite of Josephine and Leliana’s demonstrations on posture, like a child over its marbles, nibbling at a thumb - and never, never, does she fill out the throne.
*
The Hinterlands bubble in fire and spite as Ellana turns over body after body, face after face, for a missing ring, a bloodied letter, medicine. By day she collects the cries and complaints of the refugees in her ear, the crackle of lightning as it sears past her hair, the sound their staves make against the wind as they beat back the anger. So Vivienne does not understand what Ellana hears, a low thrum in the heart of all things, when she runs her hands along druffalo hairs and guides the beast, slow and steady, across the stream back to its owner. So no one understands what Ellana hears beneath the calm of Solas’ voice, the lyric of his tales, as they tread back to base with red templar on their clothes. By night, in hours of quiet, she collects from him on tip-toe the sadness of the Fade to look away from her blistered hands, the mark on her left.
Sometimes she straightens, against his condescension, her young against his old that she has begun, slowly, to tease, to sift through, to prise open – he shifts, she grows, and he leaves her standing with her arms empty.
*
With all that she has collected Ellana – the Inquisitor - does not expect herself to suffer for love. That sort of love is for those who do not have to grow and move pieces at the war table, or collect masks and formal attire for a game of nations, or gather demon spittle and skin at the bottom of a closed rift. Love, for others, is a dead son, dead daughter, dead husband, dead wife, dead friend. Love, for her, for all of them at the end of the world, a world grown so large in her chest it pulls down her shoulders, is to be carried lightly. Like a handkerchief tucked into a pocket, like a good-luck amulet around a neck, like a sylvanwood ring around a finger, to caress or murmur to before feet planted firm on the battlefield. She has grown enough to know this, but there is still that same young-old itch, a child’s curiosity, almost a demon of greed, for a last stone not yet turned. Solas.
Tall and tiny she stands, the branches of her vallaslin bold and brave on her face, holding herself up while he walks away for the second – third - time –
The last time.
It isn’t supposed to be so heavy. Not this.
*
She has listened to the world, held it, closed a pit in the heart of it, put it back together into itself and will do so again, and again, as long as it keeps asking. But what of her own asking? Time hurtles forward and finally she gathers her old friends, collects mirrors, and Qun corpses, and all new but faded for her as she travels through lands like the songs she has heard in his voice and now - now she stops, at the Wolf on the wall, removing lines from an elvhen face, and hears him. Fen’Harel. Yes, she will kill him – stand tall, she’s supposed to be, but then she’s on her knees again, the child who collected pebbles to toss into the pool for ripples to watch, expanding ever outwards, patterns, life, light – who knew they would break her? Var lath vir suledin. Until she speaks them she does not know that she has carried them with her.
Perhaps she never grew, after all, and cannot now, this love cut off like the stump of her arm. Perhaps she is already old, against her will, for a child would not utter such words knowing so deeply how heavy, how impossible, they are.