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When Iris left Skyhold for the final time during the blight, she had expected the keep to eventually fall to the darkspawn, as Weisshaupt had months earlier. King Alistair and Queen Ellie had been put in charge in her absence, and the queen, who had long made clear that she did not particularly like that the former Inquisitor was a political player once more, said that she would abandon Skyhold without hesitation should doing so save Fereldan lives.
She had been fine with that: Ferelden was their nation and she was looking ahead to the deaths of the false gods, and what she hoped would be an unending life with Solas.
The keep survived and is now Ferelden’s most popular tourist destination. Given its position high up in the Frostbacks, the government has connected it to the rest of the nation via its railway network, and horse drawn carriages bring tourists the rest of the way up the steep mountain pass, to a more contemporary elevator leading up to the front entrance to the grounds.
To her understanding, most book tours. Not wanting to revisit Skyhold surrounded by strangers, she and Solas take the train up into the mountains, watching as the red, orange and yellow of autumn turns into powdery snow, rock faces and sparse evergreen trees. Solas dozes beside her, his legs twitching, and for a moment she allows herself to watch him - his lips slack, and his head tilted back in a manner that’s liable to leave his neck aching, but she lets him sleep. Is he exploring memories from the blight?
The rail line this train now travels was once a pilgrim’s path for thousands of refugees whose tired feet packed the snow down. Desperate hunters scoured the sparse forests for rams, nugs and rabbits long decimated. Children wept, first because their feet were sore and tired, and then because they were cold.
It wasn’t the crying that haunts her to this day, but the silence that came when starvation set in and the little ones lacked the energy to protest.
Are those the memories Solas finds as he rests?
She shifts in her seat, the motion jolting Solas awake and he winces as he lifts his head. “We’ll arrive soon.” Solas runs two fingers down the back of his neck, his hand glowing with the soft green of healing magic and his body loosens, the aches of sleep washed away. “What did you see in your dreams?”
“The warrior king and queen of Ferelden dressed in leathers and fur capes, hiking this path, leading refugees from Denerim to the relative safety of the keep. On the queen’s back were two swords, one bearing the Cousland family crest on the hilt. Her blonde hair was long and contained in a single braid that swung with every turn of her head.”
“Sometimes I wonder what she thought when it came out that I left for the Fade with you,” she says in Elven. “On one hand, the Inquisitor who ‘took control’ of her country was out of the picture. On the other hand, you weren’t hanging at the end of a rope. She had the audacity to tell me to my face that, if she managed to catch you, that is where you’d end up. Denerim square. Morrigan chided her - ‘that won’t help matters,’ she’d said. I swallowed down my fury; matters were too dire to fight with the queen over you more than we’d already had, but I cried later, alone in my tent. In a twisted way I was grateful to the queen, if only because I’d been too numb to cry for weeks and I felt better for it as I dried my tears.”
The king and queen of Ferelden were some of the few people they’d kept tabs on, for the sake of their own security, but as far as they could tell, the two of them didn’t so much as consider breaching the veil in search of Solas. They had a ruined country to rebuild and when the two of them died, their niece, the oldest child of Fergus Cousland and his second wife, took the throne, ending the Theirin bloodline.
“Iris, she was angry and blaming me for the suffering of her people.”
Anger is easier than sorrow; a lesson she’s learned countless times in her life.
“Somehow, she kept Skyhold standing and protected the people who found safety behind the ramparts. I respect her for that, even if we never got along.” She sighs; she’d hoped these weren’t the memories that would come to mind as the train approached the station. Solas fetches their backpacks and pays for their admission, and an hour after their arrival, they’re making their way up to Skyhold in an elevator filled with a tour group excitedly chatting about the history of the keep. She reaches up, brushing the brim of her hat, ensuring her white hair is completely covered to minimize the risk of being recognized.
Her red lipstick, a mainstay for her, remains, but right now bright red lipstick is a trend in Orlais, so with a hat to cover her hair, she looks like nothing more than a trendsetter on vacation. Crammed like sardines in the tight space for the 90 second trip up, she leans heavily on Solas, who has his back against the wall and his arm around her, focusing on the feeling of his flat stomach and broad chest in an effort to pull her mind away from the blight.
The fucking blight. She spent three years at Skyhold, yet it’s the final months of the blight she thinks of as they’re about to visit? Why not her hours in the rotunda, watching Solas paint his frescoes or work silently in the shared space? Visits to the Undercroft to plan the development of new armour and weapons for both the inner circle and the Inquisition army. The Herald’s Rest, where Krem used to shamelessly moon at Maryden while sitting on the back of his chair.
His thumb rubs circles into her back and she thinks of how he held her hand when they were reunited. How he desperately reached for her, feeling a sliver of hope for the first time in thousands of years at the prospect of a life by her side, and his thumb rubbed circles into her remaining hand.
The elevator stops with a creak of machinery in desperate need of oil and a good tune-up and the elevator attendant opens the gate, revealing the ancient bridge leading to the front entrance; a bridge they’d once discussed blowing up in order to slow the darkspawn incursion.
Her heart races. She takes a breath and Solas walks with her, his hand resting on her back.
Staff dressed in red uniforms - she assumes as a homage to the classic red Inquisition uniforms cheerily greet them; a greeting Solas returns, if only out of courtesy. While walking up the stairs, she thinks of the day Leliana and Cassandra thrust a great sword upon her, announcing that she would lead the Inquisition as its Inquisitor. Legs jelly, she’d stumbled up the stairs, feeling as if the knot in her stomach might never find itself undone. A knot now back in earnest.
Mage lights hover in the rafters and the wall sconces are all lit, giving the Great Hall the same warm feeling it had towards the end of her first year as Inquisitor. Gone are the Dalish furnishings - the curtains, and banners, replaced by Andrastian ones featuring the sun symbol of the Southern Chantry. She frowns. At the head of the room is a throne. Covered in gold leaf, the Andrastian throne serves as the focal point of the room and she watches as a boy slips under the rope fence to sit on it, only to be loudly scolded by both his mother and one of the staffers.
She chuckles. “I’m glad someone likes that damned throne,” she mutters in Elven to Solas, who gives her a wry smile.
“Is that not the one you sat in as I offered my very specific brand of worship between your legs late one night?”
“No, that was the other Andrastian throne. I know because my cunt ached and my smalls were soaked every time I sat in that throne after that.”
“Well, that is…” Solas clears his throat and his head darts around the space. It brings a ghost of a smile to her face to fluster him; a smile that disappears as they step further through Skyhold; starting with the rotunda, where bits of coloured plaster remain affixed to the walls but not enough to make sense of what the murals had once been. To her understanding, bits of plaster were recovered and used to try to re-create Solas’ murals at a museum in Val Royeaux.
Solas’ desk is long-gone; someone had moved it shortly after they had arrived at Skyhold with the intention of making it a haven for Ferelden’s refugees, and whoever decided to turn this place into a tourist attraction never bothered to track it down again, leaving it feeling like little more than a hallway leading up the stairs and out to the ramparts.
A dozen people could sleep in this room if they put out bed rolls from head to toe. A fact she murmurs to Solas from her spot in the centre of the room, where his desk once stood. “The most vulnerable were able to remain indoors; most were in tents. Those protected by the charm that ensured the weather remained mild on the grounds of the keep managed, but soon we had to set people up outside its protection and in the bitter cold of the Ferelden winter, people suffered. Many froze to death. I heard - whispers; none said as much to me aloud, that there were agreements made concerning what was to be done with the remains of those who died of exposure. I expect you understand what those agreements would have entailed.”
“Vhenan,” Solas says, soft and pained. “You never spoke of that until today.”
“I got what I wanted, so how could I allow myself to ruminate?”
Hollow eyes flash in her mind; the dead and dying and her breath hitches. Leaning forward, she braces herself with her hand on her knee and Solas takes a step closer. “Let us go to the Herald’s Rest for breakfast.”
It’s not the Herald’s Rest as she knew it; the brick is of a modern make, suggesting it was built around the time the government was renovating the grounds to turn it into a space capable of supporting tourists. No longer does she recognize the interior; instead of homey, it feels sterile, with blank white walls and a cafeteria line sprawling around enchanted iceboxes with clear doors, allowing people to select from fruit salads, pre-made sandwiches, and a selection of beverages. Solas reaches for a bottle of red wine. “It’s nine in the morning,” she says and he gives her a look.
“You’re struggling and nearing some manner of breakdown. Let us sit and consider other things for a time.”
Because Solas pitched this to her as breakfast, he grabs two fresh fried egg sandwiches that are served on thick slices of Ferelden whole wheat bread. He pours them each a glass of wine and they sit on metal chairs, at a metal table; so completely contrary to what this place once was that she can pretend for a few minutes that she’s not back at Skyhold, but at some other tourist trap cafeteria.
“We can head back to Redcliffe after this,” Solas says, his tone painfully gentle; a gentleness that grates her because she doesn’t want to be treated like something broken; she wants to wander through her former keep and remember the moments where she felt powerful instead of the ones where she watched as the world ended in inches.
But, will it be any better if she steps back inside? Will the Undercroft bring back fond memories or will it look different from what it once was, reminding her that, at the worst of it, King Alistair spent hours in the Undercroft at night, repairing damaged swords and shields, using skills he had picked up during his templar training that he had not put into use since before he could grow whiskers on his face?
“We need the forge running at all hours and this is better than staring at the ceiling all night,” Alistair had told her and his wife. Following her husband’s example, Queen Ellie crafted arrows in the Undercroft; a skill she’d learned from her mother, who had been an acclaimed archer, apparently, though Ellie had been trained as a duel-wielding warrior.
Her? She woke with the sun and spent a few hours tending to the Skyhold garden and crafting potions, tonics and grenades. There was a comfort in being useful for more than just standing around a war table moving pieces about while they waited to die. Quietly, she thanked Alistair for his leadership; for finding a task and just fucking doing it for the sake of maintaining some semblance of sanity.
“Oh, I was just bored,” Alistair had replied and she’d chuckled. Things had been strained between the two of them too, but perhaps in other circumstances she could have been friends with the king and queen of Ferelden, instead of the usurper who made a grab for their power and was stupid enough to invite the Dread Wolf into her bed in the process.
She tells all of this to Solas, who listens, asking the odd question about how Alistair’s smithing skills were (“passable”) and whether Ellie’s arrows flew straight (“the straightest of any made at Skyhold”). “They’d tried to have children since the day they had married,” she says, thinking back to the lone vulnerable conversation she’d had with Ellie who, a bottle of wine deep, admitted to a deep fear of what will happen to the country once a Cousland, and not a Theirin takes the throne.
“Kieran was Alistair’s,” Solas says, as if it were a mystery to her and not something Morrigan had sheepishly admitted after visiting with her now-adult son in the Crossroads while they had been travelling together during the blight. “I can’t say I am shocked to discover that they had tried and failed to begin a family. The taint steals away one’s fertility in a matter of months. A year or two if one is especially fortunate.”
“I’m gossiping,” she says, looking over Solas’ shoulder at the bland white wall of the cafeteria.
“About people long-dead. History tells us whatever the queen feared would come to pass did not occur because her niece was accepted readily at the Landsmeet that occurred following the death of the king.”
They leave the cafeteria after finishing the wine and their sandwiches, and she suggests heading up to her old quarters, which takes them past a tour group congregating around a large mural of her, with long hair covering the vallaslin on her forehead, her face free of even the limited signs of age she’d had as a woman in her late-20s when she’d been Inquisitor, and wearing a white gown. “The Virgin Herald” is the title of the painting, and according to the metal plate beside it, the artist had painted it well after she had left for the Fade, basing it on previously completed paintings by other artists that had been drawn from life.
“Virgin. Right,” she mutters to Solas while an elderly human kneels before the alleged virgin, prostrating himself. “Fuck this. Fuck this,” she says, words spilling out of her as panic sets in and Solas grabs her hand, guiding her through the door on the left and up the stairs towards her quarters, as he used to do hundreds of years ago. Only now, it’s not to fuck her or settle against her body, but to look upon a space that pretends to be her quarters as they once were.
“Tell me I’m not a god,” she whispers frantically as they climb up the wooden staircase.
“You are not a god. You are a woman and I am a man, and we both are subject to tales of our achievements and legend spun wildly out of control. They crafted something palatable to them out of the person you are, sanding off your edges; everything that makes you brilliant and fascinating, because they wished for a woman sent to them by their all-knowing, silent god.”
“People. We’re just people,” she murmurs, before pushing the wooden door open and stepping inside.
Strange, to see the bedroom with none of the furniture she once knew well. The Orlesian-style bed that had been too large and too soft for a woman who had grown up in an aravel. Her desk, which had constantly been covered with missives gone, replaced by a bare wooden desk that looks as if it were picked out of a thrift shop.
They’re alone in the room, save for one of the facility guides, who watches them from atop a round black and red rug that definitely had not been in her quarters during her years at Skyhold.
Mind quieted, she looks around, feeling like she’s staring at a reflection of her existence in a mirror rather than living it. She wants to leave but outside this room is a bustle of tourists chatting about her life as if they were experts and not drowning in Chantry propaganda.
Eyes burning, she tries to imagine something else. Anything else. Noticing this, Solas abandons his examination of the brick walls and comes over to embrace her. “Vhenan,” he murmurs. Not Iris; he can’t risk calling her Iris here.
This is the first his pet name for her has ever left her bothered. So badly she wants to just be Iris.
“Inquisitor Lavellan courageously found respite in this space,” the woman in the room says. “She had caught the Dread Wolf’s scent, as the Dalish would say, but here she found peace away from his burning gaze.”
Despite her tears she snorts at how boldly the woman speaks utter Andrastian bullshit when she happened to ride Solas like a horse in this very room as soon as he felt comfortable being intimate with her.
Many, many times. Often stoned after smoking elfroot together on the balcony.
“I hope you find respite from whatever ails you here, where the Maker protected the Inquisitor from the one who sought to take her.”
Now it’s Solas’ turn to snort. “Is it not commonly accepted that Inquisitor Lavellan and the Dread Wolf were lovers? One would assume they did as lovers are wont to do. With great frequency,” Solas asks, his tone mock-curious, sounding more like a da’len around a campfire instead of a grown-ass adult.
“Chantry lore indicates that Inquisitor Lavellan was a pious soul who sacrificed herself to save Thedas from the wrath of a man set upon destroying the world,” the woman says and Solas pulls away from her, allowing her to dry her eyes and find distraction in Solas arguing with this woman about what his own dick was doing in the Dragon Age.
“I’m curious what branch of the chantry believes the inquisitor to be Andrastian when history tells us she was a Dalish elf.”
“A convert undoubtedly,” the woman says politely. “Do you believe in the Maker’s grace?”
“Not even a little,” Solas says, forgetting that he’s liable to get them a sermon from a woman intent on believing the door to her quarters was somehow Dread Wolf-proofed by the Maker.
Dutifully, the woman recites an addition to the chant by Divine Victoria detailing how Inquisitor Lavellan departed Thedas for the Fade, vowing to protect the world from the Dread Wolf, thereby proving herself to be Andraste’s Herald.
“I think she just wanted to be with her lover after a decade of bullshit,” she mutters irritably, not intending for the woman to hear, but instead she turns her focus to her, explaining how the Dread Wolf is a trickster, feigning affection so he could influence her “innocent heart”. Undeterred, the Inquisitor saw a means to save the world by sacrificing herself to the Dread Wolf because that, for some reason the woman does not explain, satiated him.
An Orlesian couple arrives up the stairs and the woman greets them with far more enthusiasm, presumably judging the human men to be more open to Andrastian nonsense than the two of them, and she grasps Solas’ hand while they walk down the rickety wooden steps - not the original staircase but there’s comfort in it; the reminder that, while some things change, others remain a constant. “Train station?” Solas asks her quietly and she nods.
They’re alone in the elevator down - most tourists spend a whole day at Skyhold, and some even opt to rent the cabins built on the grounds, over the bones of the innocents who died of starvation, injury and illness during the blight.
He’s still holding her hand on the walk to the train station. Then, aboard the train he seeks out an empty car and pulls her into his lap, where she breaks, crying into the collar of his suede coat.
“I’m sorry. You probably wanted more time there to explore.”
“I lived there for a year and had once had a keep where Skyhold now stands. I’ve spent plenty of time in the region.”
“I wish I could have remembered our time together. That I could wander through the rotunda and enjoy what little remains of your murals instead of thinking about the groans of dying refugees shivering in threadbare bedrolls. The war room was not meetings with my advisors but desperate planning with Morrigan and the king and queen of Ferelden as we tried to figure out where we’d lose the least of our dwindling forces. Asking ourselves if it was worth sacrificing a platoon to save a town, not because saving innocents was the right thing to do, but because the town had an armoury that, as far as we had known, was untouched. Only, when we made that sacrifice, we discovered it had been looted. A hundred soldiers dead and 30 townspeople saved. That trade might have been the worst deal I’ve ever made. Solas, I was so angry because they were mouths I needed to figure out how to feed when we were stripping bark off the trees to ease the aches in children’s bellies. Every fond memory from Skyhold is gone; sullied by the taint of the blight.”
Solas doesn’t say anything and she loves that about him. No empty words. No platitudes. Just a silent acknowledgement that being the one to throw bodies into the grinder really fucking sucks.
“If you want to go back tomorrow, I can stay at our hotel in Redcliffe.”
Solas snorts. “I am not leaving you alone while your memories are causing you such pain.”
“Did I make the wrong decision? Trying to save that town?”
“I cannot answer that, for I was not there,” Solas says gently, “but I trust your judgement. With the information you had, you made the best decision you could. The country still stands five ages later. Find comfort in that.”
Even as the train picks up passengers on the journey back to Redcliffe, Solas does not remove her from his lap though, to bystanders, the two of them are behaving like horny teenagers unable to keep their hands off one another. Solas; her beloved Solas who has kissed her around other people all of twice in their many centuries together; who is so shy and private about affection that he’ll rarely so much as hug her around strangers, cuddles with her in his lap.
She’ll heal; tomorrow she suspects Solas will suggest a quieter day in Redcliffe - a wander through the cobblestone streets where centuries old buildings bear the scars of two blights, followed by dinner at the tavern across from their hotel, where they’ll indulge in beer and cheese soup or shepherd’s pie while they split a bottle of wine. Then, perhaps she’ll suggest they dig into their elfroot stash and smoke on the balcony before slipping back inside to lazily make love in their bed, just as they once did at Skyhold.
Perhaps, with enough time and distance from this trip to Skyhold, she’ll be able to think of nights unwinding alone with Solas rather than stepping over bodies of the dead and dying while Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain ravaged the continent.
For now, she remains on Solas’ lap until the train arrives at the Redcliffe station, seeking the comfort of Solas’ touch and the reminder that the two of them made it through the blight and found the forever she’d spent years longing for.