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Lethallan.
He called the shadow that because it was a simple kindness.
It cost him nothing to use a word that made the boy feel safer, calmer. A kindness that brought a hesitant smile and made a victim of all of this suffering stand a little taller. What had happened was Solas’s fault. It was…not part of the plan. Lavellan was not part of the plan.
Except, now, he was.
Now there was no choice but to use the unlucky mage.
So he used a name that no shadow could have earned.
He owed Haleir of Clan Lavellan at least that much.
He wasn’t even sure if sealing the Breach would kill the boy or not. The mark certainly would. One day. And it would not be a gentle death. And it had never been a choice.
Solas had not expected to care when he felt the Iron Bull’s grip on his arm yank him away from the dragon and back up the hill. (He had not expected to care when he looked up from aiding the healers in stabilizing a woman and seen golden eyes weigh the lives of all those who still lived and decide to place himself in the path of a monster to give them a chance. A slim one, at that.)
He had watched people die before. For so many things, so many times.
And he ached in his chest to watch a boy – a child by the reckoning of Solas’s people – who had just a week before spent the entirety of a trip to the Hinterlands to seal a Rift trying to convince Solas of the merits of coffee of all dreadful things settle the weight of his own death upon his shoulders and quietly look away at Cullen’s desperate inquiry.
Solas had not expected to care when Cassandra and Cullen carried the shivering da’len down the mountain.
Injured, battered, but not broken.
The Inquisition had survived. Haleir had survived. And Solas wondered at the part of himself desperate to keep it that way.
He had seen the wide-eyed fear – the panic – written across the da’len’s face.
Herald, they had called him. Fen’Harel, they had once called him.
And he cannot help fearing the implications of that. He knows the destruction he wrought – he will wrought. But he cannot know what damage Haleir Lavellan might bring. Not yet.
He can only hope that it will be less. And…he can help make it less. Help guide the boy the right way.
Lethallan, he said. Our People, he said. And he meant it.
And somehow – that was worse.