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“Tell me a different story, Varric. We’re supposed to save everyone. This one isn’t right.”
It had been exactly a week since her mother died: 168 hours or 10,080 minutes, whichever made it seem farther away so maybe, just maybe, it would stop hurting so badly.
Carver’s leave from the Templars had ended three days ago, and between her duties as Guard Captain and still new and exciting relationship with Donnic, Aveline could no longer stay in the house at night. Anders was always needed at his Darktown clinic, and if he’d kept the “Closed” sign up any longer there may have been a riot.
One by one, Molly’s friends were drifting back into a semblance of normalcy, but she felt tethered back to that one moment when that creature had turned around and it was wearing her mother’s face.
She’d cried openly at the burial: something she had never done in front of anyone other than her brother. She had shut and locked her mother’s bedroom door and threatened bodily harm to anyone who disturbed it. She had even laughed again for the first time last night at one of Varric’s stories, famously begun with “No shit, there I was…”
Yet still she was stuck. It was easier when the others were around; she felt safe and protected by their presence. But that evening, even Merrill had drifted out for a few hours, promising vehemently beforehand “I’ll be back soon.”
Molly listened to the last of the rain trickle against her bedroom window. She willed herself to feel something in response to it: rain had always comforted her and lulled her to sleep before. But now, she felt nothing…simply stuck.
“Ma vhenan!” a voice cried from downstairs, shrill from either excitement or fear (Molly was still learning to distinguish the two). Assuming the worst, as she was wont to do lately, Molly bolted to the landing, terror rising in her throat.
“What? Are you okay?” she demanded, clutching at the railing.
Merrill stood in the foyer, hair plastered to her face and clothes to her body by rainwater. She was grinning widely.
“I want to show you something, Molly!”
“Merrill, I’m—“
“Please, ma vhenan! It’s so wonderful!”
Molly did not hold back in the sigh she heaved, but Merrill did not seem dissuaded in the slightest, instead continuing to bounce on the soles of her feet. She had only made it about halfway down the stairs when Merrill flitted back outside, hands flapping in sheer joy.
It was the first time Molly had been outside since Leandra’s death, and even though the rain was just dissipating it was still bright enough to make her squint. She stood barefoot in the garden with Merrill and surveyed the empty courtyard in front of the massive steps leading up to the Keep.
“Uh…?”
“Look!”
Merrill extended a hand and pointed upward into the sky, tracing an arc with two fingers.
There was a rainbow.
Normally, Molly would have found Merrill’s exuberance over something so simple endearing, but her brain felt too foggy with grief and being tethered to care much.
“Merrill, it’s just a rainbow.”
“Don’t you know what a rainbow means?!”
“Um….something with light and water. I don’t really know.”
“Mahariel always loved the color green, so I see her there.”
Merrill traced the fourth arc of the rainbow in the air with her two fingers again. Molly said nothing, so she continued.
“And your mother…she wore red often, didn’t she? So that’s her—at the very tippy top. What was Bethany’s favorite color?”
Molly felt a smile creeping up onto her face.
“Blue.”
“See?! She’s there too! They all came to say hello to us, ma’salath.”
Molly came up behind Merrill and let her arms circle around her tiny waist.
“Is that what the Dalish believe?”
“It’s the truth.”
Molly had never been much of a believer in the Maker (though this wasn’t an opinion she expressed often), and notions of an afterlife were fuzzy and complicated at best. It all seemed too neat and tidy of an explanation with a seedy underbelly of condemning mages and elves for existing.
But Merrill’s smile almost made her believe.
“Maybe it is.”