Work Text:
When the bear descended upon her, the sound of its claws wrenching through her wooden flesh tore through his mind, and he realized he was terrified.
She was immaterial, ethereal, but she was also here.
With him.
One minute she was teasing him, affectionately—since when did anyone tease him affectionately?—and the next she was being mauled by a bear.
He tried to move, to throw himself upon the creature, draw its attention away from crushing her. He couldn’t shake the panic that had settled in his chest, curling around his heart. He had to do something, but he was weak, his magic practically nonexistent, and bear certainly trumped wolf in almost every arena, but he could not leave her to this fate. Not when she was—
He heard her grunt, and then roar, as she pushed up against the bear's front paws with her will. It was a sight to see, this being of light and branches suddenly rising up and forcing the bear off of her. He had to remind himself than this spirit had faced dragons, and archdemons, and blighted demigods, in another world. But this reminder did nothing to quell his fear: she'd been solid then, naturally unyielding, undoubtedly beautiful. The mark in her left hand, or what he supposed to be her left hand, had grown brilliant, but she did not draw upon the anchor's power. She pushed and managed to knock the beast back, and he realised then that the bear had torn into her completely, and he could see right through a gaping hole where a tightly bound wood and bark chest had been.
Indomitable, he thought, as she stared down the bear.
He swore with a wolfish snarl, and leapt up like an uncoiled spring towards the disgruntled beast. The creature seemed to be second-guessing the decision to attack her first, and the wolf knew he had only short moments to exploit the bear's doubts and strike.
Together, though it was not quick, they brought the beast down, a feat that shouldn't have surprised him, and he couldn't help the light relief that washed over him as his chest heaved, breathless. She was still here, with him, perhaps not whole, but he didn't know if she had been whole to begin with.
His companion faltered for a moment, and he looked at where her wooden skin was ripped open. She had, with some difficulty, used a nearly intact branch from her arm and bluntly skewered the bear with it. She hardly glimmered except for the gleam of the anchor. Rain had begun to mist over them.
He remembered his own hunger then, and the wolf descended upon the bear's carcass and started ripping flesh off the beast and eating it. He was starving, had been starving since leaving the Fade, and no matter how much he devoured he never felt sated.
While he ate, she crouched to the forest floor not far from the bear's shredded form, and she used damp moss to repair the cracks in her armour, and leaves to cover her hands. It seemed half-conscious and meditative, the process of repairing her form, and he noticed fresh green vines winding up her limbs, smoothing over the cracked bark and wood.
"Are you doing that intentionally?" he asked her, licking some of the blood off his paws.
She stopped, then, for a moment, and though he wasn't always certain what exactly she was looking at he was fairly certain she was looking at her hands, her limbs. "No," she admitted.
"Remarkable." he said, unnerved but impressed. Back in the Fade, when he’d woken up for longer than a few moments and finally gotten the story out of her, he’d made several hypotheses on what kind of spirit she was. He was already starting to narrow down the possibilities.
He didn't want to share yet what he thought she might be. It would frustrate her, and him, speculation alone could not prove a theory, especially since his suspicions weren't yet confirmed. Not quite. She was connected to his orb, and bearing his anchor, this was true. But her being here, her having found him, in an exile where no spirit should have been able to find him...
What were you thinking? he asked himself, while looking out just past the clearing they had stopped in.
The rain intensified when they returned to their journey, keeping a northern heading, and he kept close to her side. He was grateful she was still there with him, relatively unscathed by their encounter with the bear. In a sense, he was probably more wounded than she was. The bear had swiped at him, and not missed, unfortunately.
It took them several hours of a painfully slow hike before they found shelter in an old ruined tower. It offered shelter from the rain but was otherwise lacking in charm. He padded the first floor quietly, sniffing and sneezing slightly in the rain, while his companion carefully climbed the rotted staircase up to the top floor. He let her be, stretching out his front limbs, careful not to worsen the deep scrapes left behind by their encounter with the bear.
When she did not return after a long while, he rose to his feet and decided to follow her above. Perhaps she had decided to keep a look out. He would prefer to keep her company than remain alone below.
He stilled when he reached her, eyes widening in disbelief. She was standing still, upright, in front of an old elvhen artifact, one he had not seen in an age. He felt hope for a brief moment, before he reached out with his magic and realised the artifact was broken, drained, useless.
Not much more than an old bauble.
"I felt it," she muttered then, causing him to shake his head.
"Impossible. It is broken." He frowned, then. What was she feeling? Was it because of her current form? Could she sense what had once been?
“No, it’s not.”
What he saw next would have made more sense if it had happened in the Fade, in a dream. She reached over and activated the globe in a smooth, practiced manner. The globe twirled, and the light that emerged was bright green and white, and engulfed her, shimmering. He thought, for a moment, that he could make out the contour of what she had once been.
He waited for the power to spread and reach out further, but it never did.
He was watching her absorb the power for herself.
It was like being submerged in freezing water, when he realized exactly what it was that he was seeing. He remembered when the Fade had shown him her memories, and he’d seen himself, years into a future that would not come to pass.
“You are so beautiful.” The dream had said. And she had answered that dream with a name, with his name: “Solas…”
The thoughts crawled within him and wouldn’t get out. She was here, with him, because some part of him could not exist without her and had reduced her to this, and he even had the gall to be grateful for her presence. When she had been destroyed by his touch, by his…
“No, this is not possible.”
She was looking at him, now, in this moment. He could tell even though he couldn’t, not really. The wolf tried to pull himself back into the present moment. Here he was, weak as a newborn kitten, aeons older than this wood-sprite, and she had just had the gall to break open an ancient artifact that she should not have been able to unlock and still she did it and she was wielding his strength, his magic, and she still wasn’t conscious of it and how had she not realised that, that everything…
How could she not feel it?
“Solas could sense them…” she offered him, and he found that he had lost any semblance of patience with her.
“I should sense them!” he couldn’t believe she hadn’t put it together yet. Was she perhaps trying to fool him?
No. She wasn’t.
He tried to calm down, but found himself growing a little angry. She tried to offer some excuse, some reason why he could not feel the artifact. It did not soothe him.
She told them about the artifacts she had found with Solas, about activating dozens of them before in her future. He told her of their purpose: repositories of power, interconnected and linked, like a network. She had used them to strengthen the Veil, and undoubtedly he had consumed their power subtly. She had certainly not picked up anything amiss with the beacons.
She herself was like a beacon, a lighthouse in the dark, and the power within the artifact had completely ignored him, no doubt because of his diminished state.
He bit back a snarl, and considered his words carefully despite his anger.
“It recognized you first. Why? The anchor?” You know why, you brute. “But if it is the anchor, then others should have done the same thing in your own timeline. Am I simply too weak still?”
He growled again. “All the more reason to need that extra strength, then. How infuriating.”
He could almost feel her scowl upon him, though she had no face to speak of.
“Those with the greatest need are often afforded the least relief,” he heard her say. He found he was tired of being on the receiving end of her disapproval.
“You stole what should have been mine,” he grumbled at her. How petulant. You sound like a child.
She was definitely looking at him now. He felt her edges sharpen—even out of the Fade he could not block out his awareness of her ire.
She had pushed back a bear and stared it down, just a few hours earlier that day. He wondered if she thought it much different from staring down what her people considered a god. She was shimmering a little more than usual, but that might have been the effect of swallowing the power of the elvhen beacon. It was also likely because she was quite angry with him. The wolf shivered a little.
He remembered the word he’d thought of that morning, during the fight with the bear. Her face was made of wood and light, and he could make out two eyes, shining like two small, furious stars illuminating the wood that had shaped itself around her face.
Indomitable.