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Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
— W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”
The rotunda was never truly quiet. It hadn’t been used as a thoroughfare by any but the brave and oblivious since Solas laid claim, as if his gravitas sunk into the stone together with his plaster—the man claimed solitude the way warlords claimed land—but the space itself didn’t allow for silence. The tower opened upward to the library and rookery. Raven calls echoed between the walls. At all hours, footsteps pattered overhead, shuttling messages to and from the spymaster or the Grand Enchanter. Voices wandered where their owners did not.
Still, it was quieter at this time of day. Dusk bruised the sky beyond the walls of Skyhold, shrouding the snow-capped mountains in lavender shadow. Torches flickered along the walkways. Within, shadows pooled in the dips and hollows of every shelf and archway. The flickering teal light from the veilfire sconce seemed to hush itself out of respect for the lone figure at the centre. Solas was half-present, gazing at the budding fresco in his mind’s eye. It refused to settle into shape. Even genius, it seemed, had its off days. His posture was easy, his expression composed—but to most, there would be something a touch too motionless about him. As if his body were made of stone, or he were not truly inhabiting it.
The door creaked. He didn’t turn, but his attention shifted, subtle but certain. He’d already sensed who it would be. Sulahnmi always arrived like a question with its answer already tucked in its back pocket. The Dalish in her kept her steps soft, as if wary of waking something beneath the earth; the boots she’d taken to wearing these days hadn’t cured that instinct, only added a bit of stomp to it.
She was already smiling as she stepped through the doorway—short and sharp, all knobby limbs and too many thoughts. “Lethallin1!” she called, warm and easy. He looked occupied; she didn’t know if he’d noticed her already. Still, she liked to be the one to break the quiet—if only so it wouldn’t press too close around her ribs. “There you are. Thought I’d find you grubby with paint again.”
He turned. His smile had the careful polish of courtesy—until he looked at her. Then it faltered into something too soft to be planned. Her golden olive skin had drunk deeply of summers spent just south of Rialto Bay; her vallaslin, Mythal’s branches in brown, matched the colour of her eyes and complimented the broad plane of her cheekbones, her small, round mouth. She was a slight thing, yes, but held herself with the easy grace of someone who knew exactly how much space she was owed.
“If you had arrived only a little earlier,” Solas jested, “you would have caught me. You’ve been spared a lecture on mineral-based ochres.”
“Oh, no.” She crossed the floor toward him, hands clasped behind her back in an exaggerated mimicry of his own stance. When she reached him, she looked to the same section of wall as he had. To her, it was only naked stone. She squinted, half-hoping she might see something just by standing near him. It was a silly instinct, childish, maybe—but there’d always been something alluring in the idea of borrowing someone else’s mind’s eye. “And here I was, desperate to hear about the pigment crisis of -2000 Ancient. Will I ever recover?”
“That particular year,” Solas said with mock gravity, “was devastating for ochre. The subsequent shortages caused a complete collapse of the previously favoured styles. Public art was never the same.”
“Tragic.” She stepped up beside him, and her tone softened, just slightly. “How’s it coming?”
He gestured, vaguely, to the bare stretch of stone before them. “Slowly.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Then it’s coming very slowly.”
She hummed and tilted her head, studying the naked wall with all the seriousness of someone judging a gallery piece. “It’s a bold interpretation.”
“Indeed. The critics have been ruthless.”
A flicker of mirth passed between them. She straightened. “Actually, I came to ask you something.”
“I’m listening.”
She wrung her hands, suddenly hesitant. The question was simple. But wrapped in it were implications she hadn’t quite parsed. Would he approve? Did she care if he didn’t? Apparently, yes—since her heartbeat was already thudding in her ears. She cleared her throat. “As you probably know, I’ve started training as a knight-enchanter.”
“I had heard,” he said. The blue of his eyes looked terribly regal on either side of that nose, Sulahnmi thought. “If I’m not mistaken, the techniques descend from those of ancient elven mages called arcane warriors.”
“I doubt they called themselves arcane warriors.” The ancient elves did love a good metaphor. Especially the kind contained in a single word the length of a paragraph with the airs of a riddle. “Sounds like something a shemlen scribbled in a margin and it just stuck.”
“The formal name was the dirth’ena enasalin—knowledge that led to victory. Mages who eschewed physical confrontation called it ghilan’him banal’vhen, the path that leads astray.”
She leaned toward him, shoulders just shy of touching. “What else do you know of them?”
“They were elite guardsmen, serving as bodyguards or champions for nobles, as I understand. Mages who focused on spirits or the Fade might sneer at their physicality, but never doubted their honour. They were the living embodiment of will made manifest, mind shaping the body into the perfect weapon.” He tilted his head, speculative. “I wonder what they would think to see their magic used in defence of the Chantry.”
“Hmm.” She nodded slowly, considering. “Well, their craft’s surely taken on strange shape by now, but I’ve done my best to honour it. I hope they would be proud to see a descendant practising their techniques.”
“I hope so, as well,” Solas said, unusually gentle. Much more typical was the momentary, profound distance in his eyes, the note of wistfulness. “So much knowledge has been lost…. Perhaps having something they created carried forward, even in such a different form, would gratify them.
“I… would quite honestly like to pick your brains about this right now immediately,” she said with a touch of half-mock desperation. Visibly, she made an effort and sobered. “But I did come in here with a more specific thought.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m to craft a hilt.”
“A foundational task, one would assume.”
“The blade comes after,” she explained, and her cadence steadied—less precise, accent a little thicker—as the topic turned to craft. “’Tis will woven into mana, made solid. The hilt anchors it.” An errant strand of wavy black hair, on the run from her chignon, brushed her cheek. She ignored it, or didn’t notice. Solas noticed. He very responsibly did nothing about it. “And within the hilt is bound a spirit—a willing one.” She was quick to add that part, hand raised in preemptive defence.
Solas made a small sound of acknowledgement, but caution tempered it. He’d known the modern techniques shared roots with the old, but had never, in any iteration, studied them in detail. That it involved binding…. He kept his expression even.
“You know yourself, Dalish have no dealings with spirits. None at all. So I am….” She blew out a breath, launching a stray bit of hair out from her face, and inhaled slowly. “I find my cup not just empty, but with no way to measure what it’s being filled with.”
“I am sure Commander Helaine excels at her discipline,” Solas said cautiously. “The Inquisitor wouldn’t be relegated to a subpar teacher.”
“Ah, but it was you who got into my head about spirits first,” Sulahnmi accused, in a friendly but exasperated manner. He resisted an impulse to put up his hands. “I won’t claim I understand it all, but what you say sits easier than what the shemlen do.” Her voice had turned contemplative now, no longer the firm cadence of a humorous complaint but the softer rhythm of thought being formulated as it was spoken. “I’m used to thinking about spirits… well, no more than any Dalish thinks on another people in another place. But to Commander Helaine….” A plaintive sort of frustration entered Sulahnmi’s voice. “They’re the Maker’s first children. There are good spirits and evil demons. The Beyond is the high seat of her god.” She began to pace, gesticulating, circling an idea at the same time as room. Talking helped. Moving helped. Sitting still with this knot of unease in her chest made her feel like it would solidify into something worse. The errant strand of hair swung back and forth; whenever it got in her eyes or nose, she pursed her lips and irately blew it away. “Studying the ritual, the spirit I call must indeed be willing—but beyond that? I’ve not the learning to tell.”
“Bending a spirit’s will into indefinite subservience generally requires blood magic, yes,” Solas crossed his arms loosely behind his back. He spoke with academic precision, his tone carrying a touch of disdain—for the Chantry’s contradictions, rather than Sulahnmi’s ignorance. “Though modern delimitations of the phenomenon vary wildly, of course. Regardless, the Chantry would be unlikely to sanction such a thing.”
“Fearing the road’s not the same as hating where it leads.”
That made him look at her. A small thing, that phrase—but spoken plainly, sour with contempt. “It surprises me that this matters to you,” he said, slowly, carefully.
Sulahnmi stopped in her tracks and stared at him. “I don’t know the Commander. Her ways are not mine. Yours aren’t either, but you’ve shown both knowledge and sense.” She cocked her head, blinking at him. “This surprises you? I’m a poor student and an even worse friend, then.”
“You are not,” Solas refuted, too quickly. That blooming in his chest again—soft, dangerous. “What, precisely, is the line of your inquiry?”
She puffed out her cheeks, held the air for a moment, and let it go. “I don’t know. Is there a way to… politely knock on the Veil and ask if anyone might be keen? From what I gather, the ritual the Commander gave me will just yank something out.” She wrinkled her pointy nose, crinkling the lines of her vallaslin. “That feels rude.”
“I would agree with that assessment.” A small smile tugged at his mouth.
That earned a soft hum from her, somewhere between agreement and amusement. She was staring—slightly stupidly—at his lips, the sort of thing that happens when your conversational partner has nice diction and a better jawline than is strictly fair. Then she remembered herself and stiffened. But she wasn’t flustered. Her gaze simply rose, smooth as ever, to meet his. “I take it you have a better idea.”
“I can show you, if you’d like,” Solas replied, casual and quick. If there was a pink tinge to the tops of his sharp cheekbones, it was easily attributable to the bite of the mountain air. Sulahnmi’s heart gave a little knock against her ribs. Not from nerves, exactly. Not even from excitement. Just… awareness. “In the Fade.”
They didn’t need to say more than that. It was already habit—nightly, almost. A shared discipline. The Dreamer equivalent of a walk taken together after supper, though no paths they followed ever looked the same. He had the ability by nature, sprung from the by-mortals-unplumbed depths of idea and emotion as he was. She by chance—or by destiny—due to the shard of divine magic lodged in her palm like a splinter of heaven.
“Tonight, then.”
“Tonight.”
Between the two of them, no farewells were needed. As dreamwalkers, they were never truly apart. Which was very lucky—neither of them were much good at letting go.
Sulahnmi stood on her tiptoes and leaned forward, gazing down the cliff. Voice steady but vibrating with that raw curiosity she was never shy about, she said, “What is this place?”
“A nursery, of sorts,” Solas replied, clasping his hands behind him like a scholar before a lecture hall, though the only audience was the embryonic dream-stuff below.
The Fade didn’t have a sky, as such. Here, the above stretched on and on without horizon or depth, swirling with the characteristic, unnatural green light as if it were mist or dust; here and there, a chunk of black stone might be suspended, as if torn out of the ground by a wrathful god. Below, the Fade boiled and blossomed. Wisps of light eddied like breath in winter air, stitched through with bright, star-bright sparks. It looked not empty, but expectant—a place where beginnings clung to the air like mist. Sheets of green and violet flowed like the sails of a ship adrift on starlight; between the folds, points of silver flared and faded, too slow to be called lightning, too alive to be still. The stuff of dreams, heavy and restless, billowed like sea-foam churned by an unseen tide.
“A spirit’s purpose,” Solas continued, calm and confident, “is inspired by strong impressions from the physical world, but they form in places like these. The Fade here is—denser. More saturated.” A pause. “The metaphor fails, but you lack the Elven to speak the truth of it properly.”
If he regretted that—as he always did—he didn’t show it on his face.
Sulahnmi straightened and tilted her head at him. In dreams, where she didn’t need to keep her curls protected from friction and heat and moisture, her raven hair flowed freely around her shoulders, down to her waist. “So you’re hoping a spirit will be born here. And then come fight for me.” Her brows rose, wry. “Isn’t that a bit exploitative? ‘Ah, sure, I know you’ve just been born, but would you mind going to war? ‘Tis for a good cause, I swear it.’”
Solas chuckled, low and liquid. “A spirit is never young the way humans are. If its purpose draws it to you, then it is willing—and would remain so even given time to reflect.” Covering the most minute of moments where his eyes grew distant, he cleared his throat. He focused on his pupil again, though his voice lingered for a beat. “Not all spirits abhor violence. Even gentle ones sometimes find it harmonious with their purpose.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Like Cole.”
“I suspect Cole’s path has been—complicated. But, yes. He is an example.”
Silence fell, the kind that feels more like weight than absence. Sulahnmi stared out over the spirit nursery again.
“I can see the sense in that,” she said at last, and without preamble, sank down into a cross-legged seat at the cliff’s edge. She didn’t know if she was ready to see what might crawl out of that nursery, but she’d long since stopped waiting until she was ready to do things. “Even good people with a good cause turn to violence.”
Her voice was even, but not bored. Thoughtful. He flexed his hand, as though inclined to reach for her—but didn’t. The stiffness in his spine didn’t left him, though his expression softened. He was not a man often caught between words and gestures—until she, so often, tilted the axis of his thought off its mark.
“Like myself, supposedly,” she added, not looking at him. Her hair had fallen forward again, half-hiding her face. It was a joke, almost. Except it wasn’t. She didn’t quite mean for it to slip out that way, but once spoken, she let it stand. If he heard the ache behind it, fine. If he didn’t—well, oughtn’t she be happy?
He replied only, “Corypheus is unlikely to be stopped by anything less.”
“I had—killed, before.” She looked down at the ground, her hair sliding forward and fully veiling her face. Solas’ fingers twitched. “Animals. A halla with a broken leg we couldn’t mend. A few shemlen who started it.” She shook her head, her loose hair broadcasting the subtle movement. “Now? I’ve lost count. I’ve set ambushes, I’ve commanded armies, I’ve—” Her breath hitched; she held it for a moment, before she let it out in a deliberately even exhale. “Ir abelas. Now’s not the time.”
“It’s an excellent time, lethallan2.” Solas sat down on his heels beside her, slow and deliberate. His hand hovered before it settled on her shoulder—the trepidation of a man unsure if comfort was allowed, or whether it might be wanted. She turned to him, framed by her fringe and long hair. Her hair veiled half her face, but what he could see was steady, unsparing. Her eyes were bright. Not tear-bright, but sharp, lit from within by something more dangerous than grief. There wasn’t a trace of pity in them—not for herself. He looked at her a moment too long. He wanted, quite badly, to kiss her. “The spirit in your blade will be your partner in battle; its temperament ought to match your own. In truth, we’re unlikely to see anything emerge. Meditating on a particular topic might help. The purpose of violence would seem a suitable one.”
She looked out over the nursery again. But she didn’t withdraw from his hand, and he left it there. Even in a dream, she was warm. “Bull tried having words with me about this, months ago. I suppose I looked a touch too grim after a fight. He said there’s no good in carving the pain deeper than it’s already cut.” She made a soft sound that would almost be amused if it weren’t so bitter.
“He’s not wrong. Although, I would caution against taking too much of his advice. To survive his own life, Iron Bull has had to tie himself into knots.”
“Well, I’ve hardly joined his post-battle carousing, now have I?”
“Indeed.”
She drew her knees up and rested her arms across them, watching the breath-like flow of the dream-stuff below without blinking. A slow-moving light curled into being—a pale blue wisp, sketching the shape of a tree’s root system through the air, before dissolving. Solas’s fingers twitched against her shoulder. He hadn’t meant to tighten them—but then, the things about this moment he’d never intended were myriad. “The necessities of your role….” he began, seemingly a bit unsure of his right to broach the topic. “They trouble you so?”
“I don’t know what wilds you called home before all this, but mine weren’t at war. Death was no stranger. But now, I’m its coursing hound.”
He looked out across the spirit nursery, to the mists that clung to the canyon walls below. The place held stillness like a bowl held water. Nothing born here had yet deemed them interesting enough.
“A significant difference between you and your enemy,” he said at last, “is that Corypheus, if unopposed, would sow death and destruction to an even greater degree. If it were not for Corypheus, you would be with your clan.”
If not for me, he did not say. From how she spoke of them, he understood her to have been happy, if a bit bored. It’d been a hard life—a simple life. No books. He imagined showing her the wonders of Arlathan, the way her eyes might widen, the way bright words would bubble from her lips like the crystal waters of a wellspring. She deserved such things—but…. Her clan loved her and she loved them. Deeply. Purely.
He removed his hand from her shoulder.
“That’s about what Bull said, too.” She didn’t seem to notice, still staring out over the expanse. Though there were few of them, or perhaps because, she was not the sort to ask questions she didn’t want answered. That was why he so often told her more than he should. “But I still kill people.”
“Yes. It’s a noble thing, to take on this burden so that others do not have to. Most things worth having do not come easily. In shouldering pain, a leader spares her people—perhaps the highest calling of all.”
Her gaze was on the movement below, but she wasn’t looking at it. When she finally spoke, it was quieter. “I suppose.” She looked down at her knees. “I’m not denying there’s a burden. But if it’s mine to carry, it’s mine to measure. If I keep saying it’s necessary just to make it bearable… what if I end up making it heavier than it needs to be?”
“Of course.” He studied her face, noting the quiet tension at the corners of her mouth. As she often did, she had the look of someone bracing for truth, ready to follow—even with gritted teeth—wherever it might lead. “That is the knife-edge any general finds herself on. Most fall to one side or the other.”
“Which is worse?”
“Either is a failure.”
“To bring violence to a place where none was called for—that’s a monstrous thing.”
“Ah,” Solas said, “but inappropriately staying one’s hand can lead to greater harm. Failing to remove an enemy might allow him to mount an incursion. Action is not inherently preferable to inaction, but one is not less culpable for the events one allows than the events one causes.”
A pause. Not because she had blindly accepted his words—she was still thinking—but because she was considering herself.
“The first life I ever took was a rabbit’s,” she said eventually, meditative. Afterwards, she’d claimed the meat was tough and stringy, as if that were the reason she hadn’t eaten. No one had believed her, of course. She hadn’t cared. “Watching the light go out in its eyes was awful. I was only a little thing, and the rabbit even littler. It was so soft in my hands, still warm when I pulled it from the snare. The halla was easier, in a way. She understood. I could see it in her eyes. But that made it worse, too. It was so unfair; she’d only tripped on a silly little rock. We tried to save her, but we couldn’t. I wept through the hymns to Ghilan’nain and Falon’din as we buried her.”
She wasn’t speaking to him now—not exactly. She was speaking through him, to something else. To the Fade. To the memory. To the part of herself that needed to hear the words aloud. His luck was simply such that he just happened to be sitting beside her while it happened. To his credit, he saw this confession for what it was: hard-won, and easily fumbled. He didn’t interrupt, not with words, not even with a breath. The Fade held its hush, and so did he, like even exhaling might disturb the fragile balance she’d struck.
“And the first time I killed a person….” Her hands, cupping her knees, flexed. “It was him or me. I knew then as I know now that I wasn’t wrong to choose myself. But it took something from me that I’ll never get back.”
“Yes. It does.”
The words fell into the air like a stone into still water. No splash, no spray—just a ripple, expanding outward. The Fade around them responded in kind. A low wind whispered through the dreaming cliffside, brushing strands of hair across Sulahnmi’s face. She didn’t react. Solas folded his hands in his lap.
Slowly, more to herself than to him, she shook her head. “I think pain is pain. We have to find meaning in suffering so it doesn’t drown us, but we mustn’t lie about what it is. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get it backwards.”
“That is well put,” he commended her. And then, wryly, “If not particularly comforting.”
Sulahnmi huffed out a laugh. “Ah, I can stand it. I’ll be comfortable forever once I’m wrapped in the roots of a tree.”
The Fade around them stilled, like when a breeze at sea dies all at once. The mist below coiled tighter against the canyon walls. The light took on a pale sheen, faintly blue and flickering, as though it, too, had drawn breath to consider her words.
Solas lifted his head, eyes narrowing. He knew that shift. Something was paying attention.
A glimmer. Tendrils of light-mist-dust shot up past the lip of the cliff like the growth of a sapling to mighty oak condensed into a single moment. A shape, barely more than a suggestion at first, unfurled in the open air just beyond the cliff’s edge. Not birthed, exactly—revealed. As if it had been there all along, waiting for the right thread of thought to tug it loose. Sulahnmi sat up straighter. The dream-stuff shimmered, condensed. Legs appeared first. Six of them, delicately jointed. A round, heavy body, smooth as a river stone, followed.
A scarab beetle.
Or something shaped like one, but the size of a small house cat. The susurrus of its wings, as it flew to land on solid rock, created tiny gusts of cold that stirred Sulahnmi’s hair and raised gooseflesh on her arms. It clambered forward on limbs too dainty for its size, its footfalls leaving no mark and making no sound. Its body was the colour of frost on a lake at dawn—so achingly blue-white, it was opaque and perhaps luminescent. Its presence filled the air like a held note. Solas, still crouched beside her, didn’t move.
Sulahnmi extended her hand, palm up. Her voice came soft and sure: “Andaran atish’an3. Who might you be?”
“Some manner of… sorrow, I believe,” Solas said, but frowned. “Wait, no. Hope?”
“You can tell just by looking?”
“It is possible to sense—in a fashion—the nature of a spirit, yes. Although this one is—“
As if pierced by an arrow, an icicle shot up and forward from the beetle’s thorax, growing and bending into a jagged horn; from the head, another icicle sprouted to match it. The beetle-shape wavered. As if some part of the dream recoiled—or tightened into something it wasn’t meant to be.
Solas inhaled sharply. “Wait—” he began. But it was too late. Something inside the spirit had caught a scent and followed it down, down, down….
Sulahnmi leaned forward, hand already outstretched. “Shhh-sh-sh-sh,” she murmured, running her palm over the smooth carapace behind the head. It pressed up into it, like a cat pleased to have its forehead scratched. To touch this creature put a knot in her throat, but strength into her hands, too. She didn’t think. She didn’t weigh the consequences or look for Solas’s signal. Her hand moved before her mind caught up, some old instinct older than war, older than speech. “Him atish’an4, da’len. I have you.”
The spirit’s antennae twitched; it rubbed its back legs over its body, as if grooming itself. Once, twice.
It evaporated.
Sulahnmi exclaimed in alarm, raising her hands into the air—what had she done, what happened, where—but then, where the spirit had been, coalesced a curl of mist. It swirled in an arc, forward and down. Another curl condensed, and another and another, like strokes of paint, until a beetle-shaped cloud, sans all wicked horns and jagged edges, heaved itself up onto her thigh and into her lap.
“Don’t stop,” it said in a plaintive little voice.
Sulahnmi blinked. Insistently, it rose up on its back legs against her chest and nudged at her hand.
“Ma—ma nuvenin5,” she said, and resumed petting it. The antennae twitched approvingly.
Despite now being seemingly made of water vapour, the texture of its back was more like raw halla wool, except Sulahnmi’s fingers sank slightly into it and became damp. She could feel its presence against her chest and legs, but it seemed to not weigh anything. The vapour was in constant movement, as if swirling around inside an invisible, beetle-shaped container.
“You asked my name,” the beetle said, rather formal for something currently with great pleasure having its head scratched. Insofar as a beetle could puff itself up, it did. “I am that which fear passes over and through. I am what bends and is not broken. I am both the bird and the diamond mountain, the century as well as the second. I am the reminder that this, too, shall pass. Ir Suledin.” Its antennae moved a little as it spoke; if its mouth did the same, it was too small to tell. “I was almost something else, but you helped me. Ma serannas6.”
“I’ve never heard of a spirit of endurance,” Sulahnmi said. “I’m honoured to meet you.”
She’d been bracing for something violent, or at least grand. Not this—this soft, sorrow-shaped thing, ancient and small and shivering like a newborn halla lamb. The beetle shifted in her lap, six legs folding with thoughtful grace. It gently pushed its smooth head into her hand—not demanding, just present.
“Lethallan—Inquisitor—walker of the lonely path: will you ask me?” it said.
Sulahnmi blinked, startled by the simple confidence in its voice. As if it had been waiting for her all along—not just tonight, not just now, but long before either of them had a shape to call their own. She took a breath. “I have made a hilt, and I find myself sore in need of a blade. Not to make killing easy, nor to dress pain in glory. I would not wield you for cruelty, nor for pride. Only where sorrow’s already heavy would I lift you—and even then, only to lighten what weight I might. Will you walk that path beside me?”
The beetle’s antennae twitched once. Its wings shivered softly, releasing a chill that smelled of snowmelt and old stone. “I do not fear becoming a blade,” it said. “Only forgetting why I was given form.”
“I’ll remember,” Sulahnmi said. “And sure I’ll remind you, if you ever find yourself lost.”
“As I will remind you,” the spirit said simply. “Ma nuvenin5. Let me be borne. Let me bear in turn.”
It pressed gently into her palm once more. Not just contact—consent.
Behind her, Solas let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He didn’t speak, not yet. The moment wasn’t his to interrupt. But his expression changed—barely. Relief, shaded with something stranger. Pride, perhaps. Or longing.
The spirit didn’t withdraw, exactly. It softened, like condensation curling back into mist. Like breath onto snow. Its form blurred at the edges, as though the Fade itself were reclaiming it—not to erase, but to hold. Still nestled in Sulahnmi’s lap, it looked up at her one last time. Then it diffused, unhurried, into the air—carried not away, but inward, as if in the first place never truly apart from the substance of the dream.
Solas exhaled. Barely. The sound was no more than the whisper of a thought. But his shoulders lowered, just slightly. He’d knelt beside many spirits in many moments. He knew what danger could take root in the fertile silence that followed creation, what fears could bloom from grief, or from desire. And this—this could have ended otherwise.
But it hadn’t.
His hand hovered, indecisive, as if he meant to place it back on her shoulder. He didn’t. He didn’t need to. The shape of her remained etched in the air beside him—her warmth, her steadiness, her hands curved around something that hadn’t asked for its pain, but still found peace.
Sulahnmi sat still for a long moment, as if the shape of the beetle still pressed against her legs. Maybe it did. Maybe, even in a dream, such insubstantial things left an impression behind. Her hand remained outstretched, fingers slightly curled. Her brow was furrowed—not in confusion, not in sadness, but like the hush that follows revelation, as one is gently buffeted by the wake of something sacred.
“It chose well,” Solas said, finally.
Sulahnmi blinked. Her eyes flicked to him.
“The spirit,” he clarified. “In choosing you.”
A faint, wry smile ghosted across her face. “Boldly spoken. It’s scarce been a moment.” But she didn’t argue. And she didn’t laugh, either. Just let the silence hold the compliment like something placed gently in her palm. She looked down at her hands again, rubbing her thumb over where she had cradled the dream-stuff creature. She half-expected to find residue there—mist clinging to her skin like dew, or a lingering coolness. There was nothing, of course. Not on the surface. “It said I helped it. That it was almost something else.”
“Spirits are defined by their purposes. It’s rare they enjoy the thought of even a slight shift.”
“Whatever it might’ve been, I’m glad I spared it the trouble.”
“The distinction would have been subtle. Something that believed the weight of pain would be proof of purpose. A noble form, in its way—but dangerous, if untempered.” He stood slowly, unfolding like a willow branch in the breeze. “Such spirits rarely know when to stop giving.”
She followed suit, brushing her palms against her thighs. She didn’t stretch. Didn’t shake off the dream. Just… stood. Changed in some indefinable way. “Ah. Well. I do prefer not partnering with someone who thinks bleeding’s the same as being brave.” It was flippant. Mostly. But something in her bristled at the idea of pain mistaken for honour—too many nights after battle spent biting her tongue, too many morning briefings with blood drying under her nails. If bravery needed proof, let it take the shape of her standing here, alive.
In profile, Solas studied her. The curve of her jaw. The rich, nutty brown of her eyes, her dark eyelashes as they kissed her golden cheek when she blinked. Her loose hair, despite not being, at present, strictly “real,” now fraying around her pointed ears. There was something in her bearing—calm, yes, but more than that. Settled. Like a tree that had foreseen its shape and meant to grow into it with intent. She didn’t fidget. Didn’t smile. But she wasn’t bracing for anything either. The storm in her chest—the questions, the doubts—had stilled, not by being answered, but by being witnessed.
Sulahnmi folded her arms, shooting him a sideways glance. “You might’ve warned me it’d be that adorable,” she lilted, as if he’d committed a grave scholarly omission.
“I assumed you’d rather experience it for yourself.”
“Mmm. How generous of you.”
He allowed himself a small smile. “Would it have changed your approach?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I might’ve brought a treat.”
“I believe it found your affection sufficient.”
A pause, like the quiet during snowfall. Then—
“Ma serannas6,” she said. She didn’t need to say it. But such truths deserve the dignity of being spoken aloud. He only inclined his head; he was still unused to how easily she offered him those words. How heartfelt they were, all the same.
The cliffside dissolved around them like mist at sunrise. The dream forgot its shape, as dreams often do just when they start to matter most.
They performed the ritual just before dawn, in the morning hour when everything is holding its breath and the world hasn’t yet remembered its own weight. Because of course they did. Nothing says “summon a metaphysical entity and invite it to live inside a weapon” like the hour when even the birds can’t be arsed yet. A storeroom, the kind with practical uses and a healthy amount of dust, had been cleaned and prepared. The summoning circle swirled across the floor in pale chalk, each segment a flowery arc of glyphs. The air smelled faintly of juniper and lyrium, and something else too—an edge of cold, as though the Veil itself were drawing breath.
At the circle’s heart, Sulahnmi placed the hilt. Empty still, but finished. The carved steel crossguard had been inlaid with lapis lazuli in the same swirling motif as her vallaslin, the blues so deep they looked almost black in the torchlight. Down the grip ran a broad band of mother-of-pearl, iridescent as hoarfrost and no less delicate. It hinted at what lay at the core: lyrium. Raw might made a feather mattress, ready and waiting.
Commander Helaine, standing at Sulahnmi’s side, began the incantation with the precision of someone who knew exactly how badly this could go if so much as a syllable got uppity. Sulahnmi joined her. Their voices moved together, threading through the Veil like a needle through cloth, calling not with force, but with invitation.
A shimmer coalesced in the circle.
Not a flash. Not a blaze. Something gentler. A slow rising of mist, shaped by circumstance, memory, will. Endurance was called, and—because Sulahnmi asked kindly—it came. The scarab-like shape hovered just above the hilt, no longer a wisp but no more fully flesh. Not quite insect, not quite idea. It pulsed with faint blue light, like breath blown into a glass jar. Six translucent legs stretched to touch the floor. Its antennae twitched modestly.
Sulahnmi crossed the chalk boundary without hesitation, her bare feet padding against the stone floor. Her crimson shawl hung loose around her shoulders, her hair in the Dalish warrior style: two long side braids at either side of the head, starting at the temples and sweeping back to be tied into a loose knot at the nape of the neck. She met the spirit’s gaze—if it could be said to possess such a thing—and knelt in front of it.
“It’s with care I shaped this,” she said, voice low but sure, tapping the hilt with two fingers. “It’ll hold you well, if still it’s your wish.”
The spirit did not answer in words. It simply moved—slow, certain. Mist poured inward. Light curled, not blinding, but cold and clear. The hilt began to glow….
And the light winked out. The hilt lay there, subtly different somehow—now dead matter hosting a living thing. Silent. But… whole. Sulahnmi reached out and lifted it. It was heavier than it looked. Not in mass—this wasn’t the kind of weight one trained for. This was the kind that came with meaning. Like an oath made metal and leather. Her breath caught. Her eyes closed, brow furrowing not with strain, but with something almost like awe. Or maybe like someone in a library who’s made a grand discovery, lips pressed together to hold back a delighted peal of laughter. A chill raced up her arms, not unpleasant, more like the nasal sting of the day’s first breath of winter air. The presence of the weapon resonated through her, a gentle pressure against her mana that felt oddly familiar, like a childhood melody half-remembered. It wasn’t just weight in her hand but a connection, a thread of awareness extending from her will into the hilt and back again. Every muscle in her body seemed to know exactly how to move with it, as if they’d been twined around this partnership already in the womb.
A sound, like the strike of a crystal glass before a speech at a banquet. The bright chime trembled through the air. The blade began to build from mist and mana and memory. The base first, then the spine, then the edge. It didn’t appear, it arrived: frost unfurling across a windowpane, a glacier creeping down from the mountains. Beautiful, terrible, deliberate. Delicate and jagged, inevitable and immense. Pale light—ice-white, tinged an aching turquoise—shimmered outward from the hilt. It rose and rose, until it almost matched its wielder in length. The blade was not glass, not water, but something between. Translucent, but solid. The kind of cold that preserved, that endured as the land slept beneath it. Subtle patterns shifted beneath the surface of the blade—veins like underwater rivers, like bark or roots—glimpses of something grown and growing, not forged.
The chime faded. But its echo remained, like a fingerprint in the air, resonating through Sulahnmi’s hands. She didn’t speak. For a long moment, she only stood there, sword in hand, her expression something too large for one face.
Then, gently, she nodded. “Suledin7,” she whispered.
It pulsed faintly in her grasp—fluid and unbroken. Not noble, not a higher calling. Only the weight of a cold, clammy hand to hold in the darkness.
If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
[1] “Kinsman.” return to text
[2] “Kinswoman.” return to text
[3] "Enter this place in peace." A formal greeting. return to text
[4] “Be at peace.” My own construction from him = "become" + atish’an = "place of peace." return to text
[5] “As you say.” return to text
[6] “Thank you.” return to text
[7] “To endure; the concept of finding strength in enduring loss or pain.” return to text