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The forest outside this temple had nearly swallowed it whole with its dripping, humid, hot mouth—but inside the temple, the air was still and cold. They plunged deeper, one at a time: the Inquisitor, Dorian, Cole, and Solas.
Solas dragged a hand along the wall as they descended, despite being the only one who could see in the dim light. He knew he need not playact finding his way, for those in his company would mistake his familiarity with the temple for mere eagerness. This was a remnant of the People, after all.
Instead, he felt dread with every step.
The moonlight across the stones cut away into nothing as they finally turned into the underground depths of the temple. There was no light. There was no sound from within. There was only the scent of deep, dank rot, as of centuries of fallen leaves, fallen trees, fallen soldiers…
Solas cast a veilfire flame in the palm of his hand in an attempt to calm the pounding of his heart. “No sense walking down stairs in the dark,” he explained flippantly. “Our journey need not end on account of a bad fall.”
“A fall,” Cole agreed, his voice scant of breath. “Faster, darker, apart from all the rest, like missing a stair in the middle of the night where no one can hear you. No one heard their secrets in the end, even when they screamed.”
“Cheerful!” Dorian retorted. “What a hopeful prospect. I do adore when you share your thoughts, Cole, it makes for such entertaining conversation.”
Cole’s hat bobbed in the darkness. “No you don’t. You’re frightened. It’s alright.”
Dorian scoffed, and perhaps responded, but Solas lost track of what they said as a faraway glint of pale light caught his eye. He took the lead, offering the Inquisitor a nod by way of assurance, and approached it.
It was a veilfire rune—it responded to the flickering flame in his palm. Solas caught the brazier nearby with the memory of flame, and it roared high, casting the passage into bright blue relief. What greeted them, as Solas had feared, was a vine-wrapped statue of a wolf. He ignored the curious sounds of Dorian and the Inquisitor, as well as their questions posed to the room at large, and laid his hand on the rune that flickered against the wolf’s side.
He flinched. Emotions— memory?— ran through him like a chill, akin to fear, anger, agony and despair. He sensed the person who scrawled this rune, and what he felt was their scrabbling fingers. It felt as if they grasped at his hand across space, across time—his palm ached from the scratching of ancient nails.
His hand dropped to his side, and he turned away.
As he and his companions pressed deeper into the carcass that was this temple, the waking world felt as if it faded away around him. He saw these halls, and he remembered how they had once glistened in alabaster and gold. He raised his staff against corpses that rose again, and saw priests that had served for millennia. He raised a light to cast it upon mosaics that were dull with missing tiles, and gazed upon the face of his brother.
“How best to protect the People?” Dirthamen scoffed. “Why, they are safe from that which they know nothing of.”
Solas raised his hand to rest upon another rune—this one stung him with the memory of a cry, the gut-deep moan of a man with no air in his lungs with which to scream.
“Or draw it into the light of day,” Solas said, “and they can defend themselves.”
Dirthamen regarded the scarlet-sweet liquid in his glass. He swirled it with one beringed hand. “No. No, Falon’Din is right. It will remain deep within the Void, where it will touch no one. And if none know to look for it, it will not be found.”
It was a body, it seemed, that was hidden away as this temple’s secret. The Inquisitor and Dorian murmured together with horror over the discovery of the High Priest, but Solas recognised this magic—he had been there when such a spell had been written.
No-one shall come, dear mentor.
In our eternity, only darkness reigns.
It was Solas who found the mentor’s beating heart, hidden away for nigh a thousand years. The Inquisitor could not bear to carry it, so he did—it seemed only right, to be the one to feel every one of those despondent heartbeats against his ribs. It sat in his pack, wrapped in a rag, and thumped irregularly against his back.
As they pressed on and gathered more—more secrets, more wounds, more cursed, half alive organs—that heartbeat became the pulse of this temple to Solas’s mind. The falling water matched its rhythm. Their footsteps in ankle-deep water rang out to the same tune. Even Dorian fell silent, reduced to mere muttered incantations that turned the will of the dead against those that attacked them.
“He was bloodied in his own temple!” Dirthamen cried out, pacing his rooms, his silken sleeves draping along the floor as he went. “Now he will concede. Now he will pull back. There need be no more violence.”
Solas cast aside his mask and dragged a hand over his face. He could not hide his ire from the Keeper of Secrets—it rang upon the very air. “And what will prevent him from committing such abuses again? You saw the bodies of the slaves that littered his holy ground, lethallen. You witnessed the carvings made upon the faces of children—”
“He has learned!” Dirthamen’s face was terrible in his rage, beautiful in his determination. “We are one! I will turn him from this path.”
Solas put out his hands. “His conscience is stained with the blood of thousands upon thousands! How can he have learned, when he was turned from this sin by force?”
The Inquisitor called out, then knelt in the water. They pulled a flash of gold from beneath draping vines—it was a mosaic tile, beautiful in its crafting, and Solas recognised it from a larger piece. When the Inquisitor joined it to the first that they had found in this place, a yoked figure emerged. Solas thought, with no small amount of bitterness, that it was fitting that such art should be discovered here.
They retrieved the final message, or memory, that the veilfire had to offer, along with a tongue that still twisted in an attempt to speak.
But it is our blood he seeks
A sacrifice dark and unholy
A prison of evil to keep us in and all else out.
After their battle against the demons that rose to defend the High Priest’s punishment, Cole slinked close to Solas’s side. “He would have sacrificed them all,” the spirit whispered, “to keep them secret. To keep them safe. How can they be safe if they’re dead?”
The heart thud-thud-thudded against Solas’s back, in time with the one that pounded in the cage of his ribs. “It was not about keeping them safe, Cole. It was about being right.”
“But the ones who trapped him,” Cole said, “they weren’t right either, were they? Anger of a different shade, justice that screamed like vengeance, despair killing what killed their faith. They couldn’t believe in more when what made them more was gone.”
Solas looked at the boy beneath the hat. His chin was stained with ichor, and more of it dripped from the knives he still clutched in his hands. Instead of answering him, he pulled the Inquisitor aside to draw their attention to an artefact that stood in the temple’s furthest corner. At a mere touch of their Anchor, it sprang to life—he could feel the Veil’s humming ease once the artefact began spinning its green sigils.
“He wants to be free of me,” Dirthamen sighed. He plucked a grape from Sylaise’s vineyard and popped it between his lips. “Claims he is smothered. He wants no claim on a physical form.”
Solas accepted a bunch of grapes from Dirthamen’s outstretched hand. “And should he be free?”
“Oh, he will return to his violence and debauchery, I am certain.” Dirthamen was silent, chewing thoughtfully, then chuckled. “It seems fitting that his fear is tangential to my own. Where he dreads confinement to the physical, I too dread becoming trapped. Imagine, being a prisoner in one’s own body, alone only with one’s thoughts.”
Solas hummed. “I can think of worse things.”
“Can you? Why are you here, ma’falon, if not out of fear of being alone?”
Solas could taste those final grapes upon his tongue as they gathered the High Priest together in the central room of the temple. Water splashed with every footstep he took. He felt somehow heavier when he removed the heart from his pack and placed it in the ceremonial bowl. And when Despair rose to greet them, wearing the body of this former High Priest, Solas saw Dirthamen’s face stretched over the skull beneath its hood.
Cole was a flash of dark leather and polished daggers, while Dorian raised bodies of the dead with a flick of his wrist. The Inquisitor ran into the fray, their weapon as much a part of them as their own hand, and Solas tried to focus on keeping them standing. But with every flash of flame, every brief glow of magic from his staff, every bolt of ice that the demon cast, Despair reminded Solas of what he had done.
How could he not, when the Veil he had risen was the very reason this demon stood against them now? When the magic he struggled to reach could be merely sipped through the resonance of his construct? When every glimpse of Despair’s face beneath its hood showed him only Dirthamen’s features, frozen in an expression of open-mouthed betrayal and fear?
Solas had not been near when the Veil had trapped the Evanuris within the husk of their folly. He did not know how they had felt, but could only imagine. But Dirthamen’s final words remained with him—words that Dirthamen could not have known would spell his fate when he said them.
“If we must stop him again,” Dirthamen murmured, “I need you to make me a promise.”
They waited behind the curtain that separated them from a waiting celebration—one that heralded the joining of two brothers into one. Solas’s fingers lingered on the edge, as if about to sweep aside a bride’s veil.
“Promise me,” Dirthamen hissed, “that you will not let me get in the way of justice. If I become complicit in his crimes, strike me down.”
Solas met his brother’s eyes. He laid his hand over his. “Ar dirtha'var'en, ma’falon.”
The High Priest slumped into the water with a wail that shook the temple. Dorian and the Inquisitor paused to collect themselves, cursing and finding the will to joke back and forth, before heading into the sanctum that was now unlocked in search of treasure. Only Cole hung back with Solas, who stood, frozen, over the finally-still body of the priest.
No tongue thrashed. No eyes darted back and forth. No heart thudded in his ears but his own. And yet Solas still slowly lowered himself to his knees beside the body and smoothed its glassy eyes shut, then closed the mouth that hung open in a silent scream.
He wondered if his brother screamed, helplessly, within the Void where Solas had entrapped him. He wondered if he was awake, or if he blessedly rested within the prison of his own mind.
“You’re not the same as the ones who did this to the priest.”
Solas looked up at Cole, took in a ragged sigh, then rose to his feet.
“You didn’t do it to be right,” Cole insisted. “You did it to save them.”
“Then it was all the more cruel,” Solas replied, “that it did not save them in the end.”