Chapter Text
She wasn’t the best mage by any means. What would have taken Dorian a few years took her nearly two decades to figure out and plan, but she was all she had now. Not everyone had died, but her choices in trying to persuade Solas to stop rather than simply opposing him with the full force of the Inquisition had ensured that. So she made due.
Other factors complicated her efforts, of course. The Veil was down. Peace was hard to come by at the best of moments, and she couldn’t just ignore all the people screaming out for help. They were her responsibility just as much as if she had pulled he Veil down herself. She was the Inquisitor, and her Inquisition had stood for the people. It may no longer exist, but she still had to help in any way she could. If that meant struggling alongside them as yet another refuge and putting off any attempts to fix it until they were safer, so be it.
Ellana Lavellan was not like Solas. She would not stand by watching people suffer in disgust out of love for a dead world. No matter how many months it took away from her studies.
But, with time came time for herself. The Evanuris were eventually defeated once and for all by Solas, and that meant less war. Less destruction. She stayed away from the resistance because she knew she would not be welcome, but there was only so much they were willing to do. Without the Evanuris threat, most effort went into rebuilding. Into providing homes. She had to run, once. Her efforts at preserving the refugees had been noticed, and they wanted to talk to her. Talk to the woman with one arm who had been helping people. It was pretty obvious who she was, when put like that. And she didn’t want to face any of them. There were too many emotions, and it would put her plans at risk. She had to remain forgotten to have the space to even begin to try to reverse this.
So she vanished. Disappeared into yet another group of world-weary people, kept her head down, and hid. They stopped looking eventually.
Time travel was an incredibly complex topic. It had to be, for only two people to ever successfully manage it. And that was with the Veil still in existence. Still, she tried. She had the pieces of the original amulet. They could provide a vague guide. It helped that as Arlathan rebuilt, their libraries opened to the rest of the world. She could go in and read about magical theory, as simply another unimportant quickling. It didn’t matter that she had been Inquisitor so long as no one she knew spotted her. The ancient elves viewed them all the same. How quick they were, to judge within their own People. How satisfying it was, to know their prejudice was what let them give her the information for their downfall.
She missed having support. She missed having friends who trusted her, advisors who respected her, and structure to ensure everything was carried out properly. But she had lost it all because of her own damned actions. Because she had thought something as frivolous as caring was enough to change a mind and save a world. Because she was a fool. A tool. She’d had trust placed in her and she’d broken it and then spit on the remains.
So she‘d do it alone.
She didn’t want accolades, not anymore. The Inquisitor who had seemed so far away now, locked behind bars of misery and betrayal and death. Now all she had was anger, and a burning need to fix this.
Trudging through books in a language she could barely read taught her patience. She relearned how to handle failure every time the amulet broke because she’d messed something she didn’t understand up again. Hiding in plain sight forced her to be humble. She’d been a good person, once, but so naive. Now she was only what she’d rebuilt by force every day. Only having one arm sucked. It made everything harder, made people was willing to accept her help, and made her so much more noticeable. But it was as much of who she was now as the Anchor had been to being the Inquisitor. Ellana, daughter of a Dalish clan long dead, the one-armed helper wrapped up in mystery and determination.
She would’ve preferred to never notice them, but there were good parts of this world. The people she had helped once were now in charge of their own lives and their own families. They didn’t struggle. Mages weren’t terrified of demons and Templars anymore.
But she cling to the bad. The lack of dwarves, of Qunari, of humans, of everyone who hadn’t managed to survive the world changing. The mass graves from Evanuris attacks. The areas that were yet abandoned. These were the things that kept her going in her worst days. The memory of her friends dying as the Veil fell. The absences. They stuck out to her like nothing else could.
If she fixed this, there would be all peoples again, not just the People. All species, all races, all cultures. Everything.
But there would also be such rampant hatred. The oppression of all elves. The Circles. Terror. And that was assuming she managed to fix it and not make it worse. She could easily just end up provoking Fen’Harel into killing her immediately. Or start a war that destroyed everyone in its wake. Or fail to stop Corypheus. Or die, and have this happen again anyway.
No. She couldn’t think like that.
She had to remember what she was working for. Why this was important. Why every species deserved to live no matter how they interacted with each other. Not just the bad.
Eventually, she could account for most of the factors of time travel. Not well, but enough. It shouldn’t break the world, if nothing else. It could kill her. It could rip a hole in the Veil once she got back far enough to challenge the Breach. But it shouldn’t destabilize the fabric of the world itself, and that was enough for her. It could work.
She reached for the fixed amulet, and hesitated.
Would she really be any better than Solas, if she sacrificed the progress made in this world to try to save the past? Was it worth it? Was it even up to her to choose?