Work Text:
*i*
Upon arrival he is weary. Thin air. Snow. Mountains and mountains he has traversed. Always pressing on. A star. A song. A pull. It is the beating of a heart long silent. He is being driven mad with the echoes of the impossible.
Be he goes. Has gone. Is going still. Ever on. And when he arrives, he is weary. It is a bone-brittle soul-riven exhaustion that brings longing for the Dreaming.
But he has only just woken. Woken alone. He knew he would even as the spell wove itself into his being, to preserve, to endure; he knew he would be alone.
He hadn’t thought it would matter. Failure had taken everything and he knew the Ages to come would hardly give it back.
He is not wrong.
*ii*
It takes too long; harsh, guttural, there are clicks and jabs and lips that do not move until they do and it all means something. Something that he does not figure out, cannot read, because it takes too long for the language of this era to come to him as knowledge.
But they take pity on him. Weakened. Lost. Different. They take him in and give him a space of warmth. Of haven. Haven, but he has not thought of such place for many long years even before he Fell to Dreaming. It is a lie, of course. He tells himself so very many of them still.
There is a hill, and what is one more? he thinks, but it is. It is. Kindness is shown to him with hands that guide and legs that carry him up a hill he cannot surmount. Too much; it is too much. Too much has happened, so much left to go, and too many failings being shown. He has climbed mountains, traveled unrelenting, but it had been a snow-blind ambition, a single stubborn drive. He has climbed mountains following something he cannot name, but he has gone too far and so he cannot go any more.
He does not see anything of the town he had found, he does not see it’s people. He cannot see much of anything. Hasn’t been able to since he woke. Sight is a language. Everything is off. Different. Strange. He is different, too, but he has not thought to look.
Yet this? This, he can See.
It is a wagon, a landship. He had not thought the Dalish survived; had thought nothing could have in the wake of yet another mistake. But he can see it, fractured whole for a partial look. Feathers hang from curved ceiling. Red and brown and yellow. Carved mugs and rune-baked plates, shimmering just so. Beyond that, it is rugged. It is sparse. Functional. It does not strike memory and bring recognition.
But there is even more in the wick and weave of construction that takes his eye and grants him texture that tastes like welcome home. It is a detail of curling stitching, organic, sharp somehow despite how it scrolls along the edges of the fabric and bleeds into nothing. Familiar. Warm. Hearth. Comfort. A quilt. His bedding. His? Yes, his.
Sleep need not steal him, but it comes for him unexpected and so he stumbles the short length of this landship to the bed only by dent of chance. And with help. Because he had that, too.
*iii*
He is even weaker now then the first time he had woken from Dreaming, o so many ages ago. But then, he would be, wouldn’t he? Fool, this one has always been a fool. He had torn down the vale between reality to shape it in memory of what was and had undone the very pinning’s of his world instead. He had thought such possibility improbable. That he thought of this outcome at all, and carried on regardless, should be worth note.
But it doesn’t even matter, or it everything that is wrong, because there is no magic. There is nothing. There is no magic. Anywhere! But he is wrong in this as well. Or lying in grief of what was. But he is mostly wrong.
There is magic. A great deal of it, and it is as different as the very world around him.
He will learn. Or he will not. The world does not show preference. But it’s magic might, someday. Someday will not be kind to him, but he will invite it to hurry-up-and-come-to-me-right-now.
See? This one has always been a Fool.
*iv*
The song he followed is a light that is there, then gone, then everywhere, then nowhere, then far away and left, right, there-gone. He followed it and followed it and kept track of its movements even though he himself cannot track or follow anything.
He is recovering, and that means he is mostly asleep. There he dreams, but it is not a dream he can interact with, not a dream he can change. He dreams like dwarves: in his head; alone. He does not like how he dreams.
He does not like what he dreams. Petrichor permeating the soul, laughter, a smile, a hand, touch. Green. So much green. But there is autumn too, on his pillow, in his bed, stretched out, an aurora of hair, warmth to skin. She is autumn’s pageantry. She is his. She has never been his. She is nothing. She is dust and earth crumbled by time and choice but she had preferred the elements of water, not earth, and water had known the worth of time. He had not, could not, he was out of time and so he had been her enemy. She had been his. Not his. No; always his. They had worked together. Together to stop a beast of his parentage. But that was before; no after; no before. Before what? Swallowing a soul that wasn’t his? Yes. Probably. Before where they are fighting, not shoulder to shoulder or back to back or even spell to spell. They fight in sweeping dance and theirs is the tune to a singular world even when armies rise and fall in the spaces between turns. They are dancing under stars on calcium rot in a court of death; but he had never given her his hand, she had never taken his, and they had not danced on the eve of political victory. Their dancing is a fight. For him, not her. She would have welcomed his hand, his suit, his place in her tune. He had not. Could not. She was not like him. Or he was not like her. And what would it have mattered? She would have welcomed him, he had wanted her. He had wanted something else more. Or longer. Yes. He had wanted something else far longer than he had wanted her. Commitment. He knows this, sacrificed for this. He had sacrificed her for this. For empty nothing. Aching, grasping, gasping, and it’s no longer nothing but ice-jagged in his ribs, his heart. Where is his heart? He has no heart!
When he wakes, he doesn’t quite remember. There is no order, no direction, no agency. His and not his, this dreaming that is forced sensations and memory and fantasy all melded into one.
No. Of course he would not like it. But it is his now; it’s all that’s left.
Well, that, and a song that is light going everywhere and nowhere and cannot possibly be anywhere.
*v*
He is not wrong.
Except when he is.
Then he is very wrong.