Chapter Text
"But I closed the Breach," Lucas had said, words skirting dangerously close to a whine. "Shouldn’t that have gotten rid of the rest of the rifts?"
It wasn't common practice to include him in War Table discussions, particularly not after the, frankly, miraculous debacle that he incurred while they were off recruiting the templars. He was too emotional, too prone to the sort of outbursts expected of a boy his age. Not to mention, he had no patience to sit through anything involving politics.
Josephine had given him a sympathetic look from across the table; that meeting was an exception to this rule because the mission under discussion involved him, directly. "Unfortunately, it seems that this is not how the rifts operated. But you can at least take solace in knowing that there is a limited number for you to take care of."
It was true. With the help of both a veritable army of mages and templars, Lucas had managed to close the Breach at long last. It was an effort that left him exhausted for days, but still alive and well. …The whole thing was strangely anticlimactic, really, looking into the sky and finding it clear for the first time since the Conclave.
Nonetheless, news of the Inquisition’s success spread quickly, not to mention tales of the work they’d been doing to reestablish peace from their meager position in Southern Thedas. After they saved both Redcliffe and the Templar Order, it was only a matter of time before more people asked them for aid.
Thus came the matter of the village of Crestwood in northern Ferelden. A letter had arrived to Haven supplicating the Inquisition for aid, as a gigantic rift in the middle of their lake was leading to massive attacks on the villagers from demons, and none of the nobles responsible for them were doing anything about it. There were a great deal of dead in the region, thanks to the losses the village suffered during the Blight, and the spirits filtering out of the Beyond seemed to find their bodies ripe for picking.
Naturally, the Inquisition said they would help. But that did mean Lucas was going to have to come along.
He wasn’t pleased when they told him. "This is going to be just like the mire, isn’t it?"
"Potentially, it could be even worse," Josephine had admitted then, even as Leliana looked at her desperately to shut up. "We have reports of more than just the rift to deal with—the people of Crestwood are apparently suffering attacks from bandits, wyverns, and a dragon…"
And Lucas hadn’t been any more afraid after hearing that, nor had Leliana expected him to be. Instead, it was Lavellan who put her head face-down on the war table. "They’re all going to be dead by the time we get over there," she said in a hoarse voice.
"You will find that the Fereldens are a hardy people, Ser Lavellan," said Cullen,
Cassandra and Leliana both nodded in agreement, surprisingly for a Nevarran and an Orlesian, respectively.
"I just don’t want to go if it’s a marsh," Lucas interjected, raising his hand.
"It is not a marsh. When the weather is fair, it is even a rather pleasant place," Josephine insisted. "...Though the weather is not often fair."
Cullen, meanwhile, just gave him a weary look from across the room. "Whether you want to go or not, you are the one with the mark upon your hand. People will die if you do not assist the Inquisition in this affair."
Of course even Lucas—giving the commander a death glare—could not argue against Cullen's logic, though perhaps in the past he might have tried. Later, once the war meeting was over, he told Lavellan that he didn’t mind, really. He wanted to be out of Haven for a while, he insisted. There were too many templars about now after Therinfal, he’d said.
From what Lavellan understood, there had been some tension outside the village as a result of both rebel mages and templars camping out in this desolate part of the mountains. Arguments between the two groups were an almost daily occurrence. One or two skirmishes had happened between them, too, though any real fighting was quickly stifled out. Cullen made a point to expel those few troublemakers who dared to go that far; a considerable threat for templars wanting for lyrium. For her part, Fiona demanded exceptional behavior of her followers, and it seemed her word was respected.
Still, she doubted Lucas had faced trouble personally from any of their new soldiers. Mostly because even up till the hour they were set to head out for Crestwood, the boy was trying to put it off and stay by the village.
She found him engaged in conversation with Blackwall when the time came, regaling him with a story, very boisterously told, while Blackwall sat on a stool by Harritt’s blacksmithy, paying the child his full attention.
"---I knew what I had to do, though—I threw the bees and I made a daring escape right before he saw me, and I ran as fast I could through the castle. I didn’t even know where I was going, I just needed to get away from him," Lavellan could hear him saying; he’d perched himself on the stone, waist-high wall that had been erected around the smithy, and looked like he might climb on top on his feet at any moment.
Not liking his odds of falling and breaking his neck if that should happen, she called out, "Lucas!"
"I found a room with…" His voice petered out as his head snapped in her direction, and the smile on his face diminished. He waved. "Hello! Serah Lavellan, I’m telling Blackwall about Redcliffe."
Blackwall turned a friendly nod in her direction, polite acknowledgement from someone she barely spoke with. "I’m not sure how credible it all is, but it sounded like quite the achievement."
"It is quite the achievement!" Lucas insisted, hopping down from the wall and putting his hands on his hips. "Ask Dorian, he’ll tell you it’s all true! He’ll try to take the credit, but—"
"Lucas, do you not remember what we’re supposed to be doing this morning?" Lavellan cut in, and once more the boastful expression fell.
Blackwall narrowed his eyes at him, nudging him with the back of his hand in feigned affront. "Oh, I see. Just using me to put something off, I gather? Here I thought you wanted me for an audience."
"Well, I can want two things at—I mean—" Lucas coughed, folding his hands behind his back as he turned back to Lavellan. "I can’t go yet, I haven’t eaten anything and all we’re going to be having on the road are rations."
She hefted her pack. "I made you scones. They’ve got cheese and bacon in them; you can eat these on the way out."
"I wanna finish telling Blackwall my story. I can’t tell Sera, she doesn’t like hearing about magic, and he’s not coming, so–" he tried again, but Lavellan just shook her head before he’d even finished talking. She reached for his hand, and with a sudden hardening of his gaze he shied back.
The whole thing was making her nervous, as it usually did, not that she was so careless as to let it show. But fortunately, Blackwall spoke up from where he still sat. "I’ll keep in mind where you stopped. When we see each other again you can pick up from where you left off, and then tell me about what happened in Crestwood, ay?"
The idea that this constituted an adventure in itself hadn’t, apparently, occurred to him until then. Lucas relaxed, nodding. "Okay." Then as he followed along after Lavellan, he chirruped, "I want a scone, now."
"Could you say please?" Lavellan found herself saying as she rifled through her pack, approaching at an ambling gait the mounts waiting for them a little ways down the mountain.
Lucas easily kept pace beside her. "No."
"Hm."
Now, once they'd reached Crestwood, Lucas had returned to one of his phases of "quiet and sullen". Lavellan couldn’t say she blamed him, because everyone else was acting the same way.
As Josephine had said, Crestwood wasn’t an inherently ugly place, and it wasn’t half-drowned out the way the Fallow Mire had been. But it was, at the moment, crawling with undead corpses and doused in a rain that sputtered on and off without end. Even getting to the Village of Crestwood meant having to carve a path through a swarm of the creatures, hearing the locals complain of how there were more that came each night.
Speaking with their terrified mayor confirmed this; spirits filtering from the rift were possessing the dead who had drowned when Old Crestwood flooded, and now they were "returning" to their loved ones in the new village. For a little while, a couple of Grey Wardens had assisted the village with keeping them at bay for a brief time, but they were long gone now. (Curious, that. Leliana was still looking into the Wardens, herself.)
Those bandits that Josephine mentioned had made things all the worse; the keep they occupied, Caer Bronach, held the controls to drain Old Crestwood and reach the rift. Obviously the villagers were not going to be able to take it back, so that would be the Inquisition’s first step in trying to help this wrecked, battered corner of Thedas.
Once they were able to assess the situation, Cassandra made clear her intention to defend the village from some of the other threats around, including the dragon and wyvern mentioned, taking with her with a handful of soldiers. The rest of them went out for Caer Bronach in a group of five; Lavellan, Sera, Vivienne, Solas, and Lucas. They would set themselves up at a camp where they could more easily reach the keep and prepare for their attack, with Solas planning to scout the area out more thoroughly from the Fade.
Most of the morning was spent looking along the countryside for a good campsite. That, and cowering from their gigantic high dragon as it flew, screaming, overhead when the rain let up for a little while. Eventually they picked out a rocky ledge off the main road, one which provided level ground for their tents. It had a good enough view of Caer Bronach by the coast while also being enclosed with stone fencing, so they would not be easily visible should the bandits come looking.
It was damp, cold, dark, the wind constantly howled, and what few people they encountered were unfriendly. It was the worst conditions they’d gone camping in since the Fallow Mire, and they all knew it.
"I have heard that you intend to teach young Trevelyan magic, Madame de Fer," Solas said.
In the quiet, dark afternoon, his voice shattered the silence. Everyone had been locked up in their own thoughts since leaving Crestwood, especially after finding their campsite. The silence had persisted for approaching an hour—until now.
Glancing over with her staff in hand, having been studying the distant lights of the rift on the water, Vivienne’s eyebrow raised. "You have heard correctly."
There was no invitation for further conversation in her reply, but Solas was not to be deterred by whether or not he was prompted. "I am simply curious as to his decision, as well as yours."
In the distance a lone wolf was prowling over the grounds, snuffling for food; kneeling at a section of the wall that had crumpled, Lavellan watched the main road and pretended to contemplate bringing out a crossbow while she listened. She was curious, as well. Lucas hadn’t told her he was getting instruction from Vivienne now; she only knew because Leliana had mentioned it to her over the war table.
It sounded like a good idea to her, but apparently Solas did not agree. Vivienne spoke to him coolly, "Simply curious, are you? And what part of our arrangement troubles you, my dear? That he selected my expertise over your own?"
Solas chuckled, though there was a darkness to it. "Not exactly. The idea that he chose you over anyone else is what I find baffling. He hardly cares for your… beliefs."
"Do you mean my beliefs that mages need a safe and controlled environment in which to improve themselves?"
"It is clear that Lucas himself did not find his Circle to be a place of safety and learning," Solas responded dryly. He was gathering together kindling and other fuels for a fire, though clearly his true attention was on the First Enchanter. "Nearly every experience he has shared has been one of being stifled by his superiors, disparaged by his peers, and treated poorly by templars."
Vivienne nodded, face neutral. "There are many young mages who would describe their lives in the Circles as such, yes."
Solas’ eyes turned hard. "Yet you would take him back to such an environment, if you had the chance."
"Whoop!" called Sera, loudly, from her side of the camp. She elbowed Lavellan, who gave a startled quake to remember that she was right next to her. "Can’t weigh in on mage shite. I’m going scouting for more caves. Got to be better than this."
Lavellan nodded, speaking in a markedly lower voice. "Er—be careful, Sera."
"Yep!" Sera said, even louder.
"That is a complete and utter fabrication, Solas," Vivienne was saying in the background as if Sera hadn’t spoken up, ignoring the girl while she scampered deliberately past her. "I have never once insisted he return to the conditions he saw at Ostwick."
"But you would still see him confined to a tower, if the Circles are restored," he was insisting.
Another laugh, this one noticeably colder; it matched the chill of Vivienne’s staff, the orb on top always a bright blue. "Don’t pretend to be his champion, my dear; this whole conversation has arisen from your ego." She smiled. "Does it not trouble you in the slightest that you are using a small child as a trump card in your argument?"
It was around that point, as the rain picked back up, when Lavellan realized that she didn’t see Lucas in the camp anymore. Whatever Solas responded with next, she abruptly stopped listening; she was on her feet, moving out to the perimeter while taking deliberately slow breaths, searching for his unruly mop of hair.
As usual, she needn't have panicked; she found Lucas halfway down the path to the main road, plenty close enough to shout if something was wrong. In the past hour he had dug out a lengthy ditch, which he helped to dam up with stray planks, until it became a pool of water the size of his forearm.
While he knelt by the water, Lucas seemed to have submerged something—a small figurine, a toy fashioned out of pewter. Varric had been steadily gifting to Lucas the odds and ends they sometimes found abandoned out on the field, including a growing collection of toy soldiers (something she was nervous to encourage, given that some of them were taken off of corpses.)
Now, with one hand he held this particular toy soldier under the water. With the other, he twitched and jerked it from side to side, causing little splashes. The motions were disturbingly familiar...
"A-are…" Lavellan's eyes widened as she got closer. "Are you drowning him?"
Startled, he glanced up, and then quickly darted his eyes back down. There was a nervous squirm to his movements, but he did not stop. "No. He's just drowning."
She watched the figure twitch and shake like a stiff little fish, his splashes turning the water into burbling waves. After a moment, she found herself wetting her lips and, hesitantly, speaking up again. "You don't want to save him?"
"I'm not here," Lucas said, frowning down at the toy.
Lavellan sat back, blowing a strand of hair off her eyes as she considered this. Lucas' gaze shifted to her and then back, and she coughed. "Am I here?"
"... No you're—I guess so." He straightened up, taking one hand off the toy soldier as he did—in the process, it "went limp" under the water, like all the life in the little soldier had finally been smothered out. The muddied water flowed over it, undisturbed.
Keeping her movements slow, Lavellan reached down into the pool herself and flipped the soldier upright, in the process taking it out of the boy’s hands. In her grip, the soldier "swam" to the makeshift bank and then flopped down on the wet grass, emitting ungodly gasping noises that she let out from behind her free hand.
Then she flipped the toy soldier over and made it "vomit". Lucas burst into giggles, half-rolling backwards.
"You should be careful with these," Lavellan said at last, as she used her sleeve to polish the mud from the toy. On a closer look, it appeared that she had ultimately rescued a Ferelden soldier from his watery demise. "It might hurt Varric’s feelings if you aren’t."
Lucas just rolled his eyes in response, though he did not protest the sentiment.
So Lavellan just looked at the soldier again. Sparkling a dull silver color, it was sturdy and vaguely detailed, "dressed" in heavy chain armor that melded with skin. Like many Ferelden soldiers, he had an articulation of fur that ran around the back of the suit, though in practice it was more spiky than soft, or even coarse, to the touch. The face likely did not even exist underneath the curved and jagged edges of the helmet. Just a simple plaything, something that would probably look quite special to a peasant’s child.
When she raised her head back up, Lucas’ careful eyes were watching hers.
"I got to take some toys with me when I went to the Circle," he said as if his interest needed explaining, taking his unlucky soldier out of her unresisting hand. "But then Ser Edme took them away because I kept talking to them. She said it wasn’t safe."
"I… see?" said Lavellan. She risked a glance back up, to where Solas and Vivienne had finally reached a stopping point in their argument (though judging by the way they still avoided each other, not an agreement.)
Lucas didn’t look up from the toy now, frowning as he inspected a warped part of the body where the metal had dented sometime before. "They promised they wouldn’t throw them out, but I never got them back. Maybe Mother and Father have them now."
"We could always send a letter–" Lavellan began tentatively, and he quickly shook his head.
"... I don’t play with toys anymore anyway." Though he spared a single nervous glance at the other toy soldiers piled by his side; all part of his collection, all some degree of wet. "I’m too old for that. These are just because I’m–I’m—because I’m bored, that’s all."
She nodded sagely. "Ah. The discussion back there wasn't terribly interesting, was it?"
Lucas had to peer over her shoulder to see where Solas and Vivienne had gotten to, the former having, despite the wetness, successfully constructed a small fire onto which he was burning an assortment of herbs. Lucas wrinkled his nose. "No. I didn’t hear much of what they were talking about. I just know they were arguing about me."
Of course; Lavellan decided to spare him the precise details. "It wasn’t just about you, I think," she admitted after a moment. "Did you… wish to talk about it?"
Beside them, water gently overflowed the little ditch in the rain while Lucas gave this some thought.
"...There isn’t much to talk about. I hate Solas, but I don’t really like Madame Vivienne either," he said matter-of-factly, playing with his hands. "I guess… if they’re fighting, I’d rather she won than him."
Hm. Lavellan chewed on her cheek.
"If I could ask you a question," she replied at length, shifting to bring her knees out from under herself. "Why do you hate Solas so much?"
For an instant she worried that she might have overstepped. But the annoyed look that Lucas shot her lasted a few moments before it faded; he laid himself down on the grass, standing up the Ferelden soldier on the dirt with narrowed eyes. "Because—because—because he’s mean, that’s why." Afterwards he added, quickly, "It’s not just me, either. Sera thinks so too."
Yes, Lavellan had been witness to a few of the conversations between Sera and Solas; it was something else she was, personally, terrified to get in the middle of. Sera hadn't exactly been kind to Lavellan either. "I don’t think he means to be mean to you. Sometimes his manner is a bit rough—but it seems like he was alone for a long time before all this. He talks like his only friends have been spirits."
"So what?" said Lucas, wobbling the Ferelden soldier back and forth.
"So, spirits aren’t very complex. I imagine they must be easy to talk to," she said, as if she had any real knowledge on the subject. She could count on one hand the amount of spirits she'd ever spoken with. Lavellan idly drew back a lock of her hair. "People are more difficult."
Lucas evidently had no ready response for this, because he stalled for time by just making a grunt and sticking out his tongue at nothing in particular. "That doesn’t mean he isn’t mean to me."
"I know. And I think he should be kinder… to more people than just you. But he deserves some credit." When the boy glanced up, she had folded her hands together on her lap, legs crossed in a tailor sit. "When you first stumbled out of the rift at Haven, your mark would have killed you if he hadn’t helped heal it. Varric told me that Solas stayed at your side day and night while you slept, using his magic—even when it would have been safer for him if he left."
Fumbling with his soldier, Lucas blinked, his scowl easing. "I didn’t know that," he mumbled bitterly into the ground.
"You don't need to get along with him, but Solas isn’t a bad person," Lavellan continued. She couldn’t help one more glance over at the camp as she did so. "I do believe he means well."
Solas’ mind was far away now, deep in a trance as he scouted out the area using the realm of his dreams, the smoke from his fire rising drowsily in the stormy sky. Most people, when they dreamt, looked relaxed and nothing more. Mouths would be open, comically so, and their bodies would drape in whatever odd way they found comfortable. Solas was composed, even resting. Like he was never "asleep" asleep, and simply forever waiting for that final moment when his consciousness went under.
"Wouldn’t you be tired if you’re even awake in your dreams?" she’d asked him once.
He had just looked very confused. "...I am not sure I understand the question."
"Anyway," Lucas’ voice brought Lavellan back to herself; his feet swished lazily through the air while he lay setting up his soldiers, abruptly finished with the topic. "What do you think we’ll find when we drain the lake? Aside from more corpses, I mean."
She sat back and smiled, entwining her fingers. "I’ve heard plenty of stories about lakes, growing up. They would always have fantastic treasures in them. Ancient swords and armors. Wise spirits. Even entire castles.
"But under Lake Crestwood, there’s probably just… a lot of rust and angry spiders. That’s what I think."
Ah, and the remains of hundreds of innocent people who drowned. But as she watched Lucas play with his toys, Lavellan kept that part to herself.