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He finds her once again in nightmare. Beset by spectres looming and compressing, they narrow in around her like a bramble thicket until she is drowned in thorns. Real or imagined? It matters not. In the Fade, it is always both. In dreams, she dies and she does not die a thousand times over, her will a shield but not a shelter.
The Fade is cruel in the way that wild things are cruel, in the way of an ancient forest which cares not what lives and dies beneath its canopy, only that all things eventually succumb, their empty bodies consumed to feed its growth. Though she still breathes, the corpse-ridden battlefield of her fretting mind makes for fertile ground. The Fade falls upon her like a scavenger, and he no better.
He, the great deceiver, cannot truly lie to himself. If demons haunt her then he is among them, for he is as ravenous as any shade. How many times has he promised himself that this will be the last? All things must end, and when one of them wakes, he will allow that to be the severance. He will not again seek her out, warping the distance of the Fade like folding cloth until the edges of their dreams again muddle into one. That he never crosses that indifferent threshold is cold comfort. Were he truly mastering himself, he would keep his promises and abstain. Yet he hungers still.
In the harsh stillness of the world he has created, each element its own and no other, it is easier to hold to himself. He is enforced by borders of the body, borders of the world, which even the mockery of magic left to him can shape only by duress. In the Fade, he betrays himself by his own facility. It takes but a thought to shape the world of dreamers, and his thoughts turn ever to her. It is easy to allow himself to be drawn back, to surrender to the yearning pull that stretches out from somewhere behind his sternum. Even her misery is solace to his solitude.
Months pass between these encounters. Paltry currency, a token show of resistance. He is a creature of and out of time, displaced thousands of years from the sea of Elvhenan into this thin, straightforward stream. It might be less of an embarrassment to cleave to her like a shadow than to give in with such frequency.
He had hoped that after Adamant the fretting of her sleeping mind might ease. There is little good to be said about what transpired at the Warden fortress, but if some victory might be salvaged from such ruinous defeat, he had hoped that in facing Nightmare and coming out alive, if not triumphant, Athesa might take more control over the lesser nightmares of her dreaming self. The strength of her mind is no help to her here. In this, she is her own adversary, and the pain channeled deep into her history fights hard to be acknowledged.
He knows she will have to face it. She holds her own, keeps her mind, but her magic destines that she will return to the Fade in every dream to find herself there waiting. To intervene is no kindness.
And yet. Her face twists, soft features distorted with pain, eyebrows drawn in and lines of hurt radiating out from wide, gold eyes. She sleeps so ill as it is, resistant to the basic needs of her body, distracting herself with books and late night walks.
He thinks, unbidden, of dark circles beneath her eyes, of the low thrum of a headache against the base of her skull and the potions she drank to dull it. Of the first time she denied herself rest so long that she fell asleep in front of him against her own volition: her hair spread out across his desk, head pillowed on her arms. She impeded work he would have found it impossible to focus on regardless, arrested by the business of watching her breathe, face relaxed as he rarely saw it in her waking hours.
That sight is closed to him now, a stolen comfort that was never his due. He cannot see her easy in unconsciousness, cannot hold her hand through calm dreams. But this-
His will extends as if it is a separate thing from himself. The decision his mind has not come to is a foregone conclusion in his heart. Things are easier in the Fade, he once told her, but he truly should have said more impulsive. He feels, and the Fade responds: he responds, for he is part of the Fade.
Like an eroding tide, his thoughts wear away their surroundings. The gnarled shadows which box her in, trapping her without view of the sky, begin to lean away. The blood-soaked and bone riddled ground absorbs its grisly texture. Grass begins to grow where before there was only desolation comparable to that left by the Blight. He means not to be seen. If he holds himself at a distance, changes her environment by degrees, she will at some point break free of the nightmare and he can retreat back into his own mind, leave her to sleep uninterrupted by either his observation or her own subconscious wounds.
Her face turns to him.
He raises trees between them, saplings growing faster than they have any right, ancient trunks bursting forth from what was seconds ago raw, green wood. He calls upon the forests of Elvhenan, the ancient world sleeping beneath every corner of the Thedosian continent. The Fade has its own geography, its own knowledge, and it is always more willing to respond to what it remembers, however distantly.
It should be the work of seconds to obscure him, but those wide, golden eyes pierce through. Trunks bend, roots slide away, and no matter how he shields himself with greenery, he cannot evade the persistent sightline. He knows this place as she does not; she will never reach him, but she can do enough to hold this gap in his defenses.
Her mouth rounds, the first syllable of his name forming on her lips, her hand raising to reach across the immeasurable distance he has created between them, as if the length of her arm can cross leagues. It is too much. He turns on his heel, folds the Fade with a thought. Two steps and he's gone, releasing the distance behind him until he is safely away from Athesa's accusing gaze and outstretched hand, a charge he cannot answer and a temptation he cannot resist.
He enters the Fade to find himself in the center of an expanse of sand. The grains shift as if wind-touched, flashing a myriad of colors not seen in the material world. The air on his skin is as still and dead as a bleached skull. The constructs that the spirits of the Fade present him when he asks them for nothing are almost as interesting as those they conjure when he seeks out their recollections, a glimpse into his own histories from the perspective of one who can barely begin to capture them. The landscape sighs around him as if somewhere beneath the desert a Titan still breathes.
The Titans are gone, the impressions left in the Fade only mimicry, reflections on water. Knowledge pilfered from his memories without context, divorced from its body. The Fade constructs the world piecemeal, borrowing from a million minds who have carried in their perceptions and left behind only impressions, layered upon each other like paints on canvas. Or, rather like paint on sand, always wearing away. The canvas, the backing, lives on the other side of the Veil he has created: a still, unliving structure. He tore knowing from being in hope for the being of what came after, and look what arose from that separation. More fool, he.
The temporary nature of his frustration does not sufficiently dilute the feeling. He can trace the failures from which it stems, knows that it will end. His works are akin to Ghilan'nain's great monsters, dangerous in their invisibility. Only when the end is already decided does the beast's head break water, and the true size of it become clear. Every day, elves stream through the Crossroads seeking to put right his wrongs. To give to others the fate which they were denied. He has always been humbled by the spirit and generosity of those who have chosen to follow him. It was never a requirement to desire freedom on someone else's behalf, and they do so all the same. Beneath the surface of the water, the great serpent swims on. That he is not yet ready to raise its head does not mean it makes no progress.
But there is knowing and there is feeling, and the knowing does not entirely ease the burn of living amidst what he has wrought. The cruelty, the senselessness, the exploitation. The death for power repeated at the hands of those who have never known true powerlessness, lives ever snuffed out in handfuls for a second's adulation. This world was meant to be better.
He will set right his wrong. The din'anshiral is a winding path, crossing over itself on a gentle downward slope. The feeling of stagnation is only the nature of the journey. Even his own impatience can be waited out. He need only give it time.
The spirit behind the Fade’s current appearance makes no approach, but as soon as Solas takes a step a hot, burning wind arises from nothing, thick with sand that scrapes him raw in seconds. The air turns orange and hazy, like the worst of the storms which at times whirled through the Western Approach.
With a gesture, the air parts around him. The current still blows in from the left before breaking, as if against the prow of a ship, on the invisible redirection of his will. Though he cannot see more than ten feet in front of himself, with his body as anchor there is no danger of his becoming lost or trapped in the Fade. He has no destination in mind, no agenda. Whether the disquiet here stems from its inhabitants or from himself, he is willing to see where it will lead.
He walks. The wind howls relentlessly around him, the sand shies from and claws at his footsteps by turn, always pushing and dragging, attempting to coerce him to its shape. For as long and as far as he travels, both approximated measures, he walks alone. The spirits willing the Fade into this form do not approach to greet him, to tell him of their purpose and their journeys. When he reaches out with his mind, none reach back.
Even as he feels the impotent grasp of frustration recede from him, the clenched fist with nothing to strike loosen, solitude occupies its place. What in this world like him? Even his closest kin, spirits, are turned so often from their purpose by force that they hold themselves apart when they encounter a stranger in the field.
The crunch and sigh of sand beneath his boots gives way to the thump of stone. The change is a second's worth of warning before the winds die with the same abruptness that they arose, suspended particles raining down on all sides, hitting the ground in a dry susurration. While he walked, the surrounding Fade narrowed down to an experience encompassing a few feet around him, the shifting ground and an orange haze that swallowed the world. Standing on the other side of the storm, he is momentarily arrested by the expanse of his surroundings.
The dream has dropped him off on one of the floating islands of the raw Fade, precious feet from the edge of a soaring height. The obligations to biome and terrain which shackle the dreamless world on the other side of the Veil have no hold here. Behind him, the desert is as quiet as it was when he first stepped into the Fade, going about the eternal business of reshaping itself beneath a tempestuous green sky. Before him, a short jut of rock culminating in a jagged point. A nameless distance below, some other dreamscape goes about its business, the spirits which call this region of the Fade home little more than bright points of color against the landscape.
When mortals imagine the viewpoint of a god, Solas guesses they picture something like this. The word sits ill on him - what is a god but a story, an explanation for some act or happening which cannot be explained? It was not divinity by which he sealed the Evanuris from the world they set themselves to feast upon, it was not distance which he felt as he erased their markings of ownership one by one. Hand to cheek, eye to eye. The wrath he felt then was not that of heaven, but that of the earth, of his people, a solid, burning thing within his chest. The legends of his hope and his determination and his failure were all started by those close enough to touch.
He takes himself to the edge and sits upon the spar of rock, lets his legs hang off into the abyss. If he focuses, he can bring into clarity the landscape below. The outskirts of a city rise from the raw Fade, the reflection of a dreamer. On the edges of the dream, visible from his perch, he sees the suggestion of walls and buildings, all stacked upon each other like slides of paper in a light box, creating a false impression of depth. A cavernous bell tolls from nowhere in particular, the sound so consuming that even Solas, high above, might as well be sitting directly inside it. He counts: though he passes twenty, the metal cry echoes on. Not keeping time, then, but sounding war.
The sparse woodland directly outside the flat city walls thickens quickly into proper forest. A convenience of the dream, landscape compressed in service of emotional, not geographical, truth. Solas leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and sharpening his attention, the shielding canopy thinning until he sees through to the forest floor.
Silhouettes dance in between the trees, flickers of motion that resist every effort to perceive them in more detail. Projections of the Fade, like the distant city skyline, meant to suggest that the dreamer is not alone. The shadow of a naked blade passes over one of the tree trunks ahead of its formless wielder. This impression, Solas gathers, is not meant to be comforting.
Littered across the ground as liberally as leaves are corpses, each one elven. Unlike the spectral soldiers, these bodies lay in carefully wrought agony, blood splashed around them from rents in throats and bellies, organs spilling across the ground and unseeing eyes staring in every direction. Vallaslin mark adult faces and bodies, bare-faced children tossed in among them indiscriminately.
His stomach wrenches. The specifics of the location do not align, but Solas has seen enough of the Exalted March on the Dales to know this story intimately. The blood spilled there sunk so deeply into the Fade that the stains can be expunged by no mortal work, the memories of all that was wrought rising to touch a visitor's mind with the slightest provocation. One does not have to sleep deeply in the Exalted Plains to dream with the memories of the dead.
Nothing new in all the world, he thinks in disappointment. For all that he has seen, the wonders and beauty of the world beyond the Veil, it always returns to this. The sword in hand, the shadow on the wall, the bodies abandoned where they fell. It is the mundanity of the horror that most disturbs him. Within the greater context, he cannot even count this slaughter exceptional.
A flash of movement catches his eye. He stops half turned away, preparing to leave, to watch an arrow zip through the underbrush and pierce through flesh. The target folds with a grunt, body bending in around the intrusion.
Not the dreamer. The stricken figure distorts at the edges, his features sliding ever so slightly away under close examination. He is only a suggestion of an elf, a memory layered on top of a spirit. The being inside is evident to Solas, though he guesses that not all observers would find it so easy to discern. A bow droops in the spirit's hand, readiness lost as he was punctured. His free hand presses to the wound in his side, the size of the hole left behind obscured by the thick, black welling of blood. Wild-eyed, his oddly familiar yellow gaze darts about the trees, looking for the one who has shot him.
A performance. The arrow was as Fade as the spirit's borrowed features, the wound left behind weeping blood that can be infinitely lost. It is real enough; were Solas closer, he might feel the slickness of it turning tacky on his fingers. It will be real to the dreamer. The harm is the theatre, the spirit beneath the mask untouched. The dreamer must be close, to earn such pageantry. Solas turns his attention back to the surroundings, scanning for the mind at the center.
The spirit finds her first. It is trivial for Solas, even from this height, to manipulate distance in the Fade that he might hear the dream beyond the continued clangor of bells. The spirit groans a name, drawing Solas' attention so sharply he catches the moment its eyes lock onto something. "Athesa."
Athesa.
The sudden knowledge of her presence shutters his field of vision, detached observation torn from him as he centers on her, only her. Her head, bowed to the body she kneels beside, shoots up in response to her name, her shoulder-length hair swaying, loose, as she moves. In seeing her, the other figure resolves itself - blond, messy haired, downturned gold eyes, the similarity of their features obscured by the lines of his vallaslin. She’d once had a brother.
A knife of insoluble longing buries itself in Solas' stomach. He has hoarded every aspect of her so carefully, watched her smooth her hair back and gather it at the back of her head a hundred times, made miser with the knowledge of the impending end. Despite every moment he memorized: the unpleased curl of her mouth beneath a sudden downpour, the twist of her fingers in the hem of her shirt, the heat of her breath when she embraced him, all that he does not know about her could fill a room of the Vir Dirthara. Does she struggle to tie back her hair now? Does she bow her head before other's hands, allow Sera or Vivienne to help her where he could not?
Resentment would be beneath him. He is glad for the love that she has, for all that he cannot give her and she has sought in others. Envy is the killer: the aching, animal wish that he could have that, too. That the intimacy which he allowed to grow between them might be recaptured, even as he knows it impossible. One person, no matter how spectacular, cannot be allowed to outweigh the good of a world. Solas will not be so selfish.
Though his attention is entirely ensnared, she spares him not a glance, caught up in the weaving of her dream.
"Adriel!" She stumbles forward, already walking even before she's fully risen. Her hand extends to the seeming of her brother, streaked with blood to the elbow, her knees and feet dark with it. How long has she been stumbling through this death-strewn forest, before this spirit intervened? The corpse-ridden landscape stretches out in every direction; there is more than enough death to hold her for a time.
"You have to help me," the spirit rasps. "You have to do something."
Athesa's hand closes over his, the blood they wear commingling. "Let me see."
Adriel hisses. He pulls his hand away, the wound overflowing with the sudden loss of pressure, blood soaking through his shirt and dripping down to his trousers. In the material world, one hand would have done little enough to staunch it, but the logic of dreams is not that on the other side of his Veil.
"What happened?" Her hand illuminates in fits, magic slipping from her grasp as she reaches for it in desperation. The few seconds it takes for the healing to come to her draw her mouth tighter, her eyebrows together. But it does come, a glow coalescing around her fingers and reaching out for the puncture in his side. The details of his repair are abbreviated and difficult to see from Solas' position, but when she pulls back Adriel no longer hunches around the injury.
"Fucking shems happened." He bares his teeth, touching his skin through the rent in his shirt, feeling the place where she willed him back together. "They killed - everyone. They're killing everyone. Shems with their swords coming in to cut down Mamae and Keeper Istimaethorial and the children - we aren’t people to them!"
Shadows fall across Athesa's face. "I know."
"No, you don't!" Adriel swallows hard. "You weren't here." His hands tighten - on the grip of his bow, on his own skin - his eyes sharp and accusatory. Even with his weapon held at his side, the angles of his expression and the words he looses are honed to a fine point. "You didn't see- And you show up now, when it's already too late? The Keeper wrote to your Inquisition,” he heaps the name with derision, “to beg you for help! Why couldn't you even do that?"
Athesa reels back a step. "I tried," she pleads. "I sent word to Wycome, asking them to support you against the bandits! By the time the Duke rallied his men it was too late."
"Shemlen," Adriel spits. "You trusted your Clan to shem soldiers. You were always weak. Always willing to listen, as long as someone was talking. A Keeper would know that some people aren't worth listening to."
"I'm sorry." Her lower lip trembles, her hand fisted at her side, gripping tightly to her clothes for something to anchor herself on. "I didn't want anyone to get hurt."
"Sorry?" The spirit wearing her brother's face stares her down. Where the pain on her face is a revelation, her truest heart held open in love and willingness, he wears his as a weapon. "Sorry doesn't make them not dead! Sorry doesn't fix your mistakes!"
"I can't." Athesa holds herself in tension, but Solas can feel the sway of her, her heart leaning towards the spirit even in his anger. Remembers her hands on even the most minor of his injuries, the way she sought to clean, to soothe, to mend. She would help this brother, if she could, though he is not real. She feels his pain as acutely as she feels her own. "I would if I could. Some things just can't be undone."
"If you could, though?" Adriel's eyes are intent upon hers. "It's your fault, but you're the only one who has a chance to put it right. Aren't they worth it?"
"I-" Athesa hesitates. "It isn't possible."
"Not for me." He scowls. "Don't you think I'd have already fixed it if I could? I would do anything. It's not too late. You weren't too late in Redcliffe, and you don't have to be now. Clan Lavellan gave you everything, Athesa. You owe them this."
Amateur mistake. Athesa's gaze clears, wary. "How do you know about Redcliffe?"
Adriel makes a pained noise. "You told me."
"No, I-" She shakes her head, backs another step away. "I can't."
"So you're just going to leave us like this? Leave me to die?" From beneath his hand, blood again begins to leak from his wound.
Though her lip trembles, her voice is steady, soft and sad as a lone hart's call. "You're not going to die."
She takes another step back. as she does, her heel collides with an obstacle that was not there before, sending her teetering backwards. Her lone arm windmills: with a second, she might have caught herself. As it is, she wavers and then falls, sprawling back over a bloodied elven corpse.
The body’s torso is viciously rent, blood soaked and gaping from half a dozen wounds, fat and tissue peeking through the skin. Her head is pristine. A blond woman, her nose small and upturned, her face contorted around the scream that died on her lips. The color drains from Athesa's face. She instinctively reaches towards the likeness that he surmises to be of her mother, though she must know there is no saving her.
"Not me, then?" Adriel chokes. "If you won't save me, won't you do it for her? For our mother? She gave everything for you, Athesa!"
"She's gone," Athesa answers, voice thick. "She's gone!"
"Selfish!" Adriel staggers towards her. "You were always selfish. It was always about what you wanted. You won't even do this one thing. Aren't you sorry? Don't you care?"
"Of course I do!"
"Then save us!" Adriel reaches out a scarlet hand. His face has gone fully gray, his clothing soaked down to the foot, trailing blood with every step. "Please, Athesa!"
She draws her knees to her chest, curling up in her melancholy as if to shelter under a rocky overhang from a sudden downpour. Tears stream silently down her face. "I'm sorry," she whispers.
He falls. Slowly, to the knees first, his hand still outstretched as he crawls towards her. The seconds elongate as Adriel succumbs, beseeching all the while. Though Athesa's eyes overflow, she does not take them from him, does not turn away. The strength of spirit Solas saw in her before she saw it in herself holds. Only once Adriel stills, face down in the mud, does she allow herself to bury her face in her knees and sob.
His chest hurts, as if a hand has reached within and made a vice around his heart. For once, he has done nothing to the space between them, found her on accident as his own wandering spirit, separate from his body, sought safe harbor. And yet this distance feels more insurmountable than any infinitude of his own creation, for the knowledge that it is only his own will which prevents him from falling to her. He knows too intimately the solitude of grief. It was never his desire to abandon Athesa to it. Yet he must bear the blame. For all his warnings and suggestions that she turn aside, only he knew from the beginning how this must end.
With her eyes downcast, her arm folded over her face, she does not see her brother's body begin to stir. It stretches, distorting the air uncomfortably, then collapses back against the ground as the spirit who wore its likeness pulls free of the impression, leaving it to the landscape of the dreaming Fade as an insect crawling from too-small skin.
Regret is sunken, skeletal, its form more hollow than substance. It looms over Athesa, casting no shadow, one hungry eye bright within its face.
Enough.
Solas sends the word echoing, not through the air but through the material of the Fade itself. In the days of Elvhenan, to say something was to make it true. Solas has not forgotten. The Fade - diminished, spectral thing that it is - remembers. The cacophony of the bell fades into background, the scrape of metal and the stamp of boots disappear entirely, shadowed soldiers melting back into the trees as if they never were. The ubiquity of blood wavers, the exquisite definition on the faces of the dead softens. Regret, no longer the director of this performance, looks up.
The Fade knows all of Solas' faces. He may choose one or the other to suit a purpose, but here he is as much the wolf as the spirit as the man, a hundred incarnations preserved inside him from a time before time. When Regret beholds him, he allows it to see them all. He is not a being contained within skin, but the concept of rebellion, of resistance, of the fall of gods. He is boundless, many-eyed, sharp teeth and open hands and old, older than this young spirit, this cradle-sprung predator, can even comprehend. He has allowed it its hunt, and it has fed enough. There will be no more.
Regret does not understand, except in the way that all things do when they have stumbled into the way of a beast with larger teeth and sharper claws. It beholds and it has the sense to retreat. The terrain of the dream is no impediment. It glides smoothly backwards, directly through the trunk of a tree, its glowing orange eye never leaving Solas.
The dream remains. Regret was only an opportunist, a spirit drawn to the mind of a dreaming mage and able to reflect and amplify her subconscious. The fate of Clan Lavellan lives within Athesa, and will not so easily be dismissed. Without revealing himself, the most he can do is to soften it: encourage the Fade towards indistinct detail, drive away the spirit exaggerating the horror for its own gain. A soft, eerie silence descends upon the landscape, the quiet after a slaughter. Nothing can be done for that. Unlike the panicked bells and the stomp of boots, the hush comes from Athesa's own mind, a desolation known too well. Like every grief, her only path to exit is through.
To Solas' surprise, while the body of her mother remains by Athesa's side, Adriel's sinks into the earth, absorbed quickly by grass and root until it is nothing more than an uneven mound of texture upon the ground. He scans the surroundings, in case a spirit he overlooked waits in the shadows, but finds only the Fade, listening attentively to a dreamer and to the creature who set it upon this path. The change must have come from within Athesa's mind.
As if responding to the turn of his thoughts, she raises her head. She gathers herself, swipes her arm across her face to clear away the tears, her nose and cheeks pink, the tender membranes of her eyes red. There will be no Dalish burial for her mother - no ground disturbed, no planted tree - but she still says a quick prayer over the body-that-is-not-a-body, closes those wide gold eyes with her fingers.
And then she looks up.
She finds him, unerring, through the tree cover which he disturbed to watch her, as if she has known of his presence the whole time and waited only to acknowledge him. Their eyes meet, and her face is as open to him as it was to the simulacrum of her brother. Hurt and longing and sorrow and resignation and hope, always hope. It is that last ingredient which cuts him. They have been through this ritual so many times, and still she regards him as if there is a possibility to change the story. To rewrite the ending, as she promised. As he invited.
Bloody fingers raise to him, reaching across the paltry distance. A few hundred meters. A few seconds to fall. Her mouth shapes his name and the Fade carries it dutifully to him, in a voice he has been too wise to let address him since he last stood before her on the other side of the Veil. His fingers curl around the ledge he sits on, pushing against the ragged rock. It would be the work of a second to fall.
Athesa vanishes. She is there and then she is gone, and with her leaving the Fade springs back into its natural state, green and jagged.
Solas plummets. He thinks of diffused momentum, of impact spread across an area far greater than the confines of his body. When he hits the ground, knees bending, it is with no more force than that of a kicked pebble bouncing against dirt. He uncoils the spring of his body, shaken. It is not the fall which disturbs him, but that he cannot say with certainty which happened first.
Solas retreats as he has not since the height of his war with the Evanuris. Stunned and bloodied by the blow-back of his efforts, it is all he can do to scrabble backwards into the Fade, throwing up barriers around his body that he can only hope will hold. The soul of an Evanuris, even one sundered from host and form, does not submit easily. He had believed he was ready to make use of that which he has taken from Mythal, that further preparations would yield only incremental rewards from an exponentiating expenditure of time and effort.
He was wrong.
Mythal fights. Even incomplete, hers is a soul which has persisted across eons, asserted herself upon the fabric of history while the other Evanuris paced beyond the Veil and it was all Solas could do to sustain himself in uthenera, his building strength ever wicked away into sustaining a body striving to succumb to decay. She is not truly conscious in this form. It scarcely matters. She predates him by millennia, her strength an ageless, bottomless well. By the power of instinct alone, her spirit resists him with force that is very nearly his unmaking. Even bolstered by the Fade, it takes all of his effort to hold. He is more powerful here, not she less.
Time dilates. He is unmoored from reality, caught within the fevered haze of the soul melange inside him ripping itself apart. How much time passes? A year? A hundred? Will he wake again to find all of his efforts fallen to dust, with the long road of recovery stretching once more immeasurably before him?
He snatches these thoughts from the maelstrom, stitching them together in the seconds of interlude as everything goes white, gray, burning, the sum of his existence winnowed in on a mindless, unvoiced howl. She submitted too easily when he drew her down, and this, now, is the price. He will be rent asunder for his hubris.
For now, the denizens of the Fade keep their distance. They will pick his bones the moment he succumbs, but even the most enterprising scavenger has no wish to be drawn in and unraveled. He is as grateful as he can be for the solitude. He has before flattened that which came between himself and his progenitor, but this time it would be without his volition.
He recognizes the approach of another presence only when it is close, too close, standing a mere... accessible length (all static measures of comparison escape him) from where he writhes. He releases an emanation of sound, a concussive blast which radiates in waves from his nexus. A warning. Whatever the damage it may cause is laughable before the consequences should this foolish construct wander into him.
The being cries out as it lands, the sound achingly familiar. The paths of Solas' memory have been restructured around that voice, impossible though it is, in this bare and unvarnished corner of the Fade. Even past the agony of his being in mortal conflict, he cannot bear to see her harmed. Not yet. Not in this way. If his path must cross into the unforgivable, he will at least abstain from this trespass.
He opens his mouths - six of them, protruding from his being at raw angles and dripping black ichor from teeth as long as her forearm. It will not suffice. He closes them, tries again - with focus, this time, his spare scraps of effort bent to coalesce thought past the screaming vortex of his being - and manages only a single jaw, half the size of the originals. The placement may be wrong. He cannot say.
"Athesa," he scrapes out in a voice like the gates of the Black City closing, no kin to any version of himself that she could recognize. "Go."
His attention attuned now, he feels her struggle to her feet, the single step she takes toward him as momentous as if she crossed oceans. She hesitates, searching him for a hook of familiarity she will not find. "...Solas?" her voice trembles.
He cannot explain the ways in which that question has no answer, and not only because he is infinitely shredding himself, caught within his own vicious maw. He is not what she thinks, he has never been, and in this state he is not any one thing at all. She should not be here. She should never bear witness in this way.
He bears down on himself, digs hands multitudinous into the bedrock of the Fade, scoring up chunks of shale that halo him in a burst of shrapnel. Frightening! he chides himself. It was not his intention that she be thus exposed. She is, in all ways, marvelous, a creation far beyond the crucible of her forging, but some things are too much to ask.
Regrets notwithstanding, the effort focuses him enough to speak, gritting out a single word as the tongue he has summoned for himself makes a bid for exit, lolling grotesquely out of his temporary mouth. "No." A lie, not a lie. A truth delivered to wrong purposes. If she believes him, if she flees, it will protect her. That is worthy of the dishonesty.
Silence. He strains, as much as he is able, to understand the environment beyond himself. No movement, no sound. He teeters on the verge of relief, that she has accepted her mistake, that she has retreated to somewhere where she will be safe, when the soft sound of her bare feet on stone devastates him once again.
Go away, he thinks, shapes a mouth and throat to give voice to the sentiment. It becomes easier with practice, form rising more quickly from the chaos of his being. In truth, his spirit divorced from his body is a Fade-thing, requires no air or shape to make words. Like so many aspects of the Fade, the mouth is symbolic. A shortcut. He would expend more effort forcing sound from nothing than by taking advantage of the preconceived notions of every mind which has touched this place for the last millennium, even if his execution is unconventional.
She disregards him, continuing her slow approach until she once again stands at his side. He tenses, draws more tightly into himself to keep from spilling over onto her in his furor. He wishes for this chaos to harm no one else, to bear the consequences of his mistakes alone, but to damage her by it would be intolerable.
"What's happening to you?" Her voice wobbles, fear and uncertainty spilling out with the question. And still she stands before him, when it would be so much simpler for her to run. "Solas? What is this?"
He groans, trying to marshal himself, trying to think. Blue light assails his consciousness, pushing back wherever he reaches for the self. It fragments his thoughts, batters against the knowledge of the form of his body, the ideals and goals and drives which complement it. A spirit need only have one goal, one purpose. He grasps for parts of himself, each disappearing from his mind in turn as he attempts to connect it to the next. Be pride. Be wisdom. Be as you were created, as you were called forth.
Athesa reaches out, her hand hovering only inches away from his storm. He feels her self-concept brush against the Fade, her belief in its solidity reinforcing her belief in her own. She is unarmed, and she has put herself in a position where she cannot run. Despair runs through him like a current of lightning. Does she not understand the danger? Can she not see, now, as he never wished to show her, why he ought to have kept his distance? He wished for the pain of his regrets to fall upon him alone. That he failed is not cause for her to further hold her hands to the fire.
She speaks to him in Elvhen: not the fragmentary, adapted tongue of the Dalish but the old tongue, lost knowledge flowing through her. "I am here. If I can, I want to help."
Do not, he answers. He fears to touch his mind to hers, but the force of the aversion permeates the very ground, spreads out around them like dye in water, and she understands all the same.
"You're in no shape to argue this," she retorts. "I'm staying."
"Besides," she adds, so softly that he has to strain to hear, the whole of his frenetic and unfixed being leaning towards her before he is able to recall himself. "Who knows when I'll get to see you again?"
He keens, the ache within him turned to action without benefit of filter. Laughter echoes through his mind like a tangible thing, bouncing off of every surface. His being towers higher, a long neck and head oozing out at its apex, a multitude of eyes opening for the first time since he absorbed this backlash. He sees her sixfold, a dot upon the ground, golden eyes wide as she looks up, up at him, with the panicked, rapid pulse of prey. Her mouth parts around a soundless oh.
She, familiar with the wolf, should have thought more on the aspect of dread.
He wavers. If he is to be one thing, this is a thing he can be. It is almost irrelevant, in this moment, that this is not the thing he wishes to be, only that it is possible and that it would resolve him, prevent him from being pushed into something else. He can regroup, he can recollect, he can-
"Is this what you didn't want me to see?" She raises her voice to be heard, calling out to him. "Is this why you ran away? Has this always been in you?"
Yes. No. Like the answer to most of her questions, it's complicated, and requires explanation of the kind that she would only half-appreciate and which would open him up to be assailed by her, drawn from his path by her questions and her certainty in turn. There has always been danger in telling her too much. This is part of him, but the spiritual turmoil which pushed it to the surface, which released his hold on the aspect of self that he carries at the front, is not a force he must always fight.
He closes his eyes. Too much, too much. She is plagued enough by nightmares, she does not need him to become one of them.
"Solas!" she calls. Undeterred. Always undeterred. Even in the first days of the Inquisition, when pain and sleeplessness shadowed her and she was scarce seen outside the war room, she did not shy away. Particularly not when there was something she wished to know. "Can you hear me?"
It is a simple enough question, one which deserves a response. Though he is scattered and at odds in a way he would not show her if he had any other choice, he can gather himself enough for this.
With force of effort, he cobbles together an approximation of the voice she knows, cracking open his maw to voice a single word. "Yes."
"Are you-" she wavers, then makes a decision. "I miss you, my heart."
How can she name him such? After all that has passed between them, all of the distance he has caused? Even with her determination and her promises, he knows too well that he has not made himself worthy of such devotion, that it is his selfishness which draws them back together, even as he is the one who chooses to stay away.
"It's not the same without you," she continues. Her voice is quiet, pitched as if she speaks to him from a separate bedroll in the same tent, late into the night with others sleeping only feet away beneath their own canvas awnings. Though she is soft in sadness, he is caught on her words, reeled in like a fish on the end of a line. "I miss sharing the Fade, and books, and our space. I miss talking things through and hearing your thoughts. You weren't just my love-" her voice cracks around the word. "You were my friend. I would still be yours. I would not see you lost to this."
She speaks, and Mythal listens, Athesa’s voice underlain with supplicant and servant, every mind given to the Well speaking through her. The chain which binds them runs both ways. As she can be pulled, as she is now subject to something greater than herself, when she supplicates, Mythal must listen. He must listen. The blue-lit hurricane which tears through him slows, follows the bend of his mind toward Athesa’s small form, her outstretched hand.
She cannot know what she does. It would be too much insight, too much revelation. Stripped of all other tools, she speaks because it is the only recourse left to her, and in doing so she makes him space. She shows him mercy. Within the embrace of her voice wrapped in the language of Elvhenan, he reconstructs himself. The pressure within him dissipates, the chaos of a myriad of selves stretched over thousands of years sorted back into their housings as he assembles Solas bit by bit.
In the Fade, form follows thought. As he recovers in spirit, his body returns to that which is most familiar to her. He hangs for a moment, suspended in the eye of a fading storm, and then the chaos severs: he falls, limp bodied, to the ground.
"Solas!" Athesa rushes him. She all but falls atop him as she goes to her knees, hand pressed against his chest, fumbling for his face.
Relief pins him as much as exhaustion, filling him with the elated and and inappropriate desire to laugh, accompanied by no motivation to yet sit up. He looks up at her, their eyes meeting as if for the first time in centuries. The heady thrill of reunion is a sudden and terrible rush. Not like this, he thinks. And, I am so glad you are here.
"I am sorry." Solas puts a hand over hers, pressing down against her fingers. He looks away, not able to voice his shame and look her in the eyes at the same time. "I would not have had you witness that. And... thank you."
"What happened?" Adrenaline catches up with Athesa as it did him, to less pleasant results. The fear which she restrained as she spoke to him comes rushing to the surface, her hand tensing. When she speaks now, it is in the common language of the beings which live in this era. "What was that?"
He opens his mouth to answer and is waylaid by a full-body shudder, as if his self-concept must probe the whole of his assumed form for completeness. His breath catches, his fingers spasming over hers, her hand pinned in his grasp. "Forgive me," he murmurs, releasing her and dropping his hand back to his side so that such a mistake cannot again occur. "A moment, if I may."
Her eyes widen. "Does it hurt?"
"Not as such." He closes his eyes. It is too easy to lean into her touch, her fingers soft and cool against his cheek. She has on more than one occasion remarked in surprise on the heat of his body, hers always a few degrees cooler. He wonders if he is warm to her now. "It is just... discomfort."
Behind his eyelids, he conjures the image of the nervous system which lives within his corporeal body. His shines blue within his skin, humming with the traces of Mythal's overwhelming power. The corner of his mouth turns up. Though he would little like to repeat this experience, it is less a failure than an absence of success. He knows now the extent of this borrowed energy. Once he can master it, it will take him far, indeed.
More immediately, there is the pleasure of Athesa's body beside his. Her calf presses against his hip, her knee tucked against his ribcage. Her fingers stroke slowly over his cheek. If she is angry, it is no less than he deserves; that she is kind regardless is a reflection of her character. Even unearned, he absorbs her proximity gratefully, drinks up her touch to store against the solitude that is always on the horizon.
Two days, he tells himself, knowing that the reality is none. Two days, here, to hold her, and then I will let go. This is impossible for a myriad of reasons, not least of which that Athesa's body would suffer from even a very short hibernation. He opens his eyes, letting the fantasy dissolve.
"Solas?" Her gold gaze latches onto his.
"I am recovered," he answers, which is near enough to true, as he braces his hands underneath him to push up. Athesa rocks back as he rises, her hand falling from his face back to her lap, so that they end up sitting face-to-face on the black silt Fade. Solas spares a moment of gratitude that they are not also sitting in several inches of water.
"Recovered from what?" she presses. "You were... I've never seen anything like that, not even-" she cuts herself off, but the imaginative range of her nightmares is loud in the silence.
He sighs. "It is complicated." This may as well be a rote warning, prelude to any conversation they could have for the rest of her existence.
"Isn't it always?" A hint of accusation, no less deserved.
Solas looks at her ruefully. "It is indeed."
"I would still like to know."
The corner of his mouth twitches in an echo of the easy intimacy they once shared. "Don't you always." If there is a thing which might be understood, Athesa will pursue knowledge of it. Solas has always admired that about her.
"It took immense power to raise the Veil," he starts, buying himself time to collect his thoughts by beginning with something she already knows. "The effort took all but my life; for centuries, I was unable to wake, and when I did, my strength was not as it had once been. To unmake it will require at least as much raw strength, and the Anchor has been..." he smiles thinly, though there is scarcely any humor to be found here. "Compromised. As well you know. I was experimenting with other solutions."
"What sort of solutions?"
"That, I will not say."
Athesa's brow furrows, denied. He knows her curiosity must be intolerable to her, but, as ever, he risks divulging too much. To her particularly. From the beginning, he has answered her questions in more detail than is wise, too relieved by the opportunity for conversation, by her sincere interest where so often he had been met with suspicion and revulsion, to restrain himself.
"What about the Anchor?" she asks instead. "When you say compromised..."
"No part of your body remains attached," he assures her. "I- buried what remained, once the Anchor was extracted. It seemed the closest approximation to Dalish practice, though I did not plant anything to mark it." That would have been too much like declaring her dead. That might mean less to a child of this age, but Solas is Fen'Harel, the Dread Wolf. He knows how symbols become reality.
Athesa looks down at the soft nub where her arm ends. "What's wrong with it, if not me?"
"You are right." Solas follows her gaze, tracking it as it lifts so that their eyes meet in the middle. A charge shoots between them, the space between their bodies suddenly a tangible thing. He folds his hands in his lap so that he does not reach for her. "To call it compromised is imprecise. It would be better to say that the Anchor is changed."
"Changed in what way?"
"In much the ways that you are changed, I imagine. The Anchor... experienced the Inquisition, albeit from a different perspective. It is shaped by the use that was made of it, by being a part of you." He will come no closer to explaining the intimacy he feels for the Anchor now, even as he must work to harness its new shape. It has become less his than theirs. Part of her body, part of her history. She, unknowing, put her hand out and shaped his power; she might as well have reached inside his chest and molded him similarly. He does not object, but he does not entirely trust that she will understand. The base love of dominion, of claiming and being claimed in turn, is a harsh and consumptive sort of affection, neither gentle nor wise. Gods love as philosophers and as animals, with an intensity that crosses mortal bounds.
"And that changes your plans?"
"Not as much as you would hope."
At that, Athesa draws into herself a little. Her face goes pensive, her eyes drop back down towards the ground. She traces a finger through the fine black dirt, inscribing circles and swirls into the ground.
Solas watches her for a minute, then interrupts. "I have a question for you, if I may."
Athesa looks up at him from under pale lashes, a flash of a smile darting across her face. "I thought you knew everything."
It is almost too much, this delicate shadow of how they used to relate to each other, each of them embodying the ghosts of people who at least pretended at having nothing to hide. She told him she was happy, then, and the worst part was that he was too. That he had been happy despite everything. "There is so much I do not know," he admits gently. Sorrowfully.
"I will answer if I can."
Solas acknowledges that with a nod. She has her efforts, as he has his. He is not so proud as to believe his agents have given him more than pieces of the whole. "How did you end up here? This," he tilts his chin up towards this bare and empty corner of the Fade, without even a population of spirits, "is no easy place to find."
Athesa turns her head, looking back over her shoulder as if she expects to find something there. "I followed... someone."
Solas' brows furrow. "Who?"
"I don't know. I was dreaming, I think." Athesa's teeth scrape her lower lip as she tries to recall. "And... someone appeared. They said you were in trouble, and that I should follow. They said you needed me."
"And you listened?" That the spirit spoke truly was immaterial; he is horrified to discover this gap in her defenses. She cannot afford to have a vulnerability in his shape to the things she sees in dreams.
"It was telling the truth."
"You couldn't have known!" he pushes, concern for her safety making it impossible to keep his counsel.
She cuts him off from continuing his objections. "I did. And you were in trouble. What would you have done if I weren't here?"
"I would have found another solution." Solas sighs. "But I am grateful nonetheless. Your intervention spared me hardship."
She raises her eyebrows at him, astute as ever. "But?"
"I wish you would not place yourself in danger on my account."
"You can't stop me from worrying about you. My feelings are my own."
He takes her hand, squeezes it. It is easy, in the end. To simply reach across and touch her, to tear down all the barriers he has carefully set around himself and twine her fingers with his. "I know."
Athesa untucks her legs from beneath herself, wincing a little as her bare feet and ankles scrape against the ground. Without needing to speak, they adjust themselves until they sit side by side, her shoulder pressed against his arm, fingers still interlaced. Their legs extend in front of them, knees bent and thighs leaning against each other. He wishes he had eternity, all the time of Elvhenan, to spend on this. In the sky, the green lights of the Fade dance, and somewhere beyond them, a sensation like falling.
Eventually, Athesa speaks. "Come back with me."
He bows his head. "You know I cannot do that."
"You could. Var lath vir suledin," she repeats. “It is not too late. For this world or for you."
"I wish that could be so."
Her hand tightens on his, pulling him toward her. "What would it take, Solas? What would convince you that this world is worth saving?"
He touches her face, fingers ghosting across the ridge of her cheekbone. "You would have to convince me that the world I destroyed is not."
He sees the weight of it land on her, the Vir Dirthara, the Eluvian network, the magnitude of all she doesn't know. A lifetime of studying Elvhenan, of chasing down every scrap of a history she could not even begin to imagine - even with the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of lifetimes of Mythal's servants, a power which he is sure she has been diligently learning how to harness, how can she begin to refute Elvhenan? But she nods, as if what he has said is reasonable, as if it is possible. "How do I do that?"
A simple, forthright question. The right question to ask - the only question to ask, for all others would just be sideways stabs at it - and one he cannot answer. "If I knew that, we would not be having this conversation."
Athesa lapses back into contemplative silence, her face turned toward the horizon. He watches her, cataloguing the softness of her hand and the weight of her thigh and the angles of her hip, feeling her ribcage expand against him with each imaginary breath, storing her upturned nose and her downturned mouth and the frame of her lashes against the morrow, when he will have none of them.
Slowly, her face turns toward his. "Solas..."
He cannot say which of them kisses the other, who leans forward first in the magnetic gravity that draws them together, only that her lips ghost across his and then he captures them, his hand coming up to cup her chin as he kisses her, falling eagerly into her, into everything she will give him, if only for this moment. She makes a noise in her throat, a hiccup like the prelude to tears, but when he pulls back to check on her she gives him scarcely an inch before drawing him back in. He has always been so weak to this.
She clambers astride his lap, his arms coming tight around her waist, holding her as if she might at any moment dissolve. Her hand grips the back of his neck as ardently, the two of them clinging to each other, shipwrecked survivors in a temporary suspension, a reprieve from the drowning. "Athesa," he whispers against her mouth, holding her name as close as her body. Again. "Athesa."
It ends in time, as all things must. A slow winding down, a decrescendo to their foreheads pressed together, eyes closed, their breath commingling in the still. One hand knots in her hair, his thumb stroking over the knob of her vertebrae.
"Come with me," she pleads.
"I cannot."
"I can't bear for you to leave me again."
"I am sorry." Solas opens his eyes, his hand coming around to cup her cheek. "I did not want us to reunite like this."
"Better than that we never reunite at all."
There is no answer to that. She has always been stronger than he. He kisses the tip of her nose, her forehead between her eyebrows.
"Is this it, then?" She can hear the unsaid goodbye, feel the remorse as he gives what he can, too little for what he takes.
"Not yet."
"How long?"
"I will stay until you wake." He can walk out of the Fade at any time, but her body and mind are not so accommodating. There is a time limit on this interlude, as there must be to any dream they meet in. He has only to wait it out.
"Well, then." Athesa sits back to look at him properly, a light like stubborn sunrise in her golden eyes. "I suppose I should make the most of it."