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In the years since he left her (alone, frightened, hurt, hurt, hurt) the Inquisition has grown, latched onto the threads of the world like choking vines. Those who do not submit to its long-reaching blade are punished; those who rebel are quashed, bent as nails under the fall of a mighty hammer.
Her name is passed among the people of Thedas in a cautionary whisper. Her heart is carnage, her words are plague. With each passing year she grows more deranged in her fury, an icy gale which leaves none unscathed. Not even those she had called friend.
Before the first year was out, she had expelled her rogue archer and the First Enchanter, their names erased from the Inquisition's history.
The second year saw the loss of Varric Tethras; he wrote only one account of the day he left, comparing her to a door forced from its hinges, hanging crookedly from its frame.
Dorian Pavus was next. Blackwall disappeared into the wilds, when none of his words would stay her hand.
What is the wind to a mountain?
The third, the fourth, the fifth years were much the same, the closest of her allies trickling through like water through a sieve. As more leave, she becomes more and more frenzied. If time is the skeif on which some are polished, then she is the diamond it cuts to punishing angles.
But she rises each morning, wills her time weary bones out of bed. She grips both sides of a washing basin in white knuckled fists, raises her head to gaze into the mirror.
Her hair, once long and golden, is skew-whiff all about her head, chopped to a blunted edge, the rest shaved down close to her scalp. Scars limn her face in rippling webs, the most damning cutting clean through her right eye, now glazed over, sightless.
Some say she has made the scars a surrogate for her vallaslin, stripped from her all those years ago. They are right.
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Cassandra remains never far behind, always at her side. It seems proper, for The Right Hand to always be there, somewhere in her peripheral vision.
She shuffles through sheaves of papers, of requests and contracts, of all manner of worldly concerns that seem so trite, so little compared to the scrabbling, clawing way the people were when war breathed down their necks, when Corypheus, not Malfinneth Lavellan, was the looming shadow on the horizon. She thinks on this, heavily, while Cassandra leads her down a hall. Onlookers part for them without a word, heads bowed.
“-he's a nobleman from Nevarra, though in truth I've never heard of him before now. He requests a personal audience with you...”
Cassandra's voice has grown gruff with age, a shot of gray lacing through her hair, but her body remains strong, her spirit indomitable.
“Denied.” Curt. Cuts like a blade.
And Cassandra nods.
“A delegate from the Orlesian court wishes to meet and discuss a trade agreement. It would benefit both the Inquisition and Orlais, to establish a talking point -”
“Also denied. We have enough trade agreements between Orlais. I could swim in them.”
That, too, is shuffled to the back, as one shuffles a losing deck.
“Should I say the same for Lady Trilaine? You met with her five months ago to secure a mining contract.”
They round a corner, sweep through the doorway and into the main hall. On an afternoon ten years ago, it would be full to the brim with people from all over Thedas, tables heavy with food and drink. Now, none dare cross the guarded threshold. The hearths are cold, the flags sway like a funeral march.
The Inquisitor's seat has become a judge's pulpit, a charnel for those who dare raise their heads in defiance to her order.
Ten years ago, Malfinneth would sit upon it as a queen; now, she withers beneath its luster, though none dare voice the observation.
Cassandra joins her side. Her chin is high, but her heart sinks, a shipwreck at sea.
“Very well, Inquisitor.”
And the day passes by.
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That evening, Leliana takes her aside, into a shadowy corner. Her eyes the keen shine of a dagger; her softness has been ripped away, replaced by something raw and gaping, like an old wound that refuses to properly knit. Leliana is like her, and she, too, is never far from Lavellan's side.
“There have been rumors,” she begins, voice like midnight.
Malfinneth crosses her arms, mouth pulled down, brows furrowed. “I hope these are important rumors.”
Leliana's wicked-sharp eyes dart to the side.
“My scouts speak of a lone traveler in the woods. An elven mage.”
Teeth bared, animal, savage. “That means nothing.”
Leliana actually winces, the slightest snag, the one loose thread. “He matches....his description. I would not tell you this were it coincidence.”
Hands at her throat, fists tight in violet robes. Lavellan has her shoved against the wall, face to face, eye to eye. She'd kill if provoked. The anchor hisses, sputters madly between them, igniting their faces in supernatural green.
Leliana is all grace and water. The Inquisitor needs her.
Lavellan's anger is a spitting snake. “You send more scouts. You find this mage. You bring him to me – alive – so that I may see him for myself.”
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Weeks pass. The scouts always come back empty-handed. She kills a few of them to set an example, recruits more before the bodies are in the ground. It cycles like this.
Then:
“We've made contact with him, Your Worship. He evaded capture...but he wishes to meet with you. Only you. He's given me a letter with the location and time.”
The scout bows before her (she's never asked them to, but they do, they all do,) gives her the parchment with trembling hands. She orders everyone away. Only when the hall is empty does she deign to look.
A sprawling, elegant hand. Her lips part, her blood turns to frost.
Crestwood.
She burns the letter.
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The memory of this place is covered in dust, stuffed deep into the ragged corners of her mind.
It's largely unchanged: The Hart statues are worn, the bases slick with algae from the pond, faces shorn away from the rain. The air is still damp, the rocks are still mossy. It smells of wet, green things, the earth spongy beneath her bare feet.
She sits on the edge of a crumbling wall, weeds shouldering through the ancient crevices, the mortar cracked. The moon cuts a clean scythe along her back, throws her shadow onto the ground like a great, black pool of water.
She lifts her head, bares her throat.
“Come,” she says, and whistles.
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The Veil is still thin here, so pliant that she can pass through it with little more than a thought.
She lifts her foot out of the waning dusk, and places it down into a calm, cool evening, years ago.
Malfinneth watches herself kneel at the water's edge, her hair long, face unmarked. She watches herself unsheathe a dagger, take a great fistful of her hair, and cut it away, throwing its remnants into the murky water.
She watches herself rise, walk straight past her, and leave. The world around her changes; leaves furl and unfurl to an ever-shifting sky above her, the pond lowers and rises with the passing seasons, and still her other self returns, each time just a little different. Her shoulders lower, her face becomes drawn, more scars litter her skin. It's like looking into a mirror, but worse, because the person she sees becomes increasingly unfamiliar, a name on the edge of her tongue.
The Malfinneth in the present closes her eyes, sucks in the air through her teeth, and when she exhales, he's there, with her, all those years ago.
The sight of him, or the memory of him, spears her through. Her feet take her closer before her mind can stop them. She stands behind her other self as they kneel in the grass. She watches the motes of light and color play on his face as he casts his spell. Had he always looked at her with such great sadness? A trick of the Fade. A slip of her memory.
Ar lasa mala revas, he says, and in that moment, the world falls away.
Malfinneth wakes.
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Her fingers are on her bowstring before her eyes open.
Someone stands at the edge of the clearing, half-shadowed in the moon's waning light.
She knows who it is. But her bow remains drawn.
“So it is you.”
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Of all the things she expected, it was not this.
The moment he steps into her line of sight, bares his face to the moonlight, it feels like a decade ago, when her heart was whole and her mind unbent. She is twenty-five again, a woman who bore the weight of the world on her shoulders and grew stronger for it, who knew the first touch of love on her lips.
When he speaks, the moment is gone.
“Ir abelas.”
Where her face is a mosaic of scars, his has been untouched by the tides of time. His lips are still full, his brow sharp, his eyes twin clouds of blue, though there is a shadow in them, a darkness which calls to hers. That same dark pit in her sings, a dirge which rises in cadence, rises to meet him with open arms.
Her own arms remain, stiffly, at her sides.
“Your apology comes too late.”
He doesn't move. The only thing which belies his age is a new found hollowness to his voice, a deep ravine into which the sun cannot reach. It fills her with a howling sadness. She would weep for him if only she had tears left.
Her voice becomes steely, heavy and wanting. “Will you keep your promise, Solas? Will you tell me why you left?”
Malfinneth rakes her eyes over his shadowed form, garbed in a thick cloak. In one hand he holds a staff, a knotted thing of wood, long like the fingers which grasp it. She remembers those fingers. She remembers them in her hair, on her lips, trailing like feathers down her body. She remembers them entwined in her own. She remembers them alight with ancient magic, as they took her heritage away from her, as he took her and broke her in twain all those years ago.
She wants to cut them off. She wants to take her arrows and plunge them into his heart, so that when he chokes on his blood he will know, so when she turns all of Thedas into ash they will have him to thank. She wants, but she will not, will never. Her fists tremble at her sides with the wanting.
He steps fully out of the shadows, so that his form is silvered in light, so when he kneels before her she can see all of him, every sharp, quaking line of his body. He bows before her like all the others, but he supplicates himself in deep, aching sorrow, not in red-hot fear.
She doesn't pull away when he kisses her hands, each knuckle, the touch of his lips racing up her arms. She stands utterly, completely still, digs deep into the pools of her resolve. She strangles the urge to throw herself around him and kiss him, properly, deeply, to drown in the warmth she's dreamed of for a decade, only to wake to the cold space of his absence.
“I cannot,” Solas murmurs against her marked palm, “I have plans. Plans that will rend what remains of Thedas asunder. Plans that I will not subject you to.”
“Coward. Liar. Traitor.”
He looks up, fixes her with a stare which fells her as a tree is felled before the axe.
“I am all those, and more. I do not deserve your forgiveness. I did not deserve you.”
Her voice quavers, the first, insidious crack in her veneer, the first ragged shred of feeling she's allowed herself in the past ten years.
“You can still have me. But you cannot have both me and Thedas. I won't let you.”
His lips part on a silent breath. Eyes widen in dread.
She bends low, so that her forehead touches his. Her lips graze his scalp, his brow, each closed eyelid. Her breath is ice. With steel fingers, she takes his face in her hands. Her lips pass his like a ship in the night, the barest promise. Her eyes close, and she whispers -
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“Choose.”