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“Allow me to introduce Divine Victoria.”
“Cassanda, please. I don’t think my position will do us any favors in Tevinter,” she says and does her best to withhold a sigh at the Inquisitor’s introduction, but the taller woman only shrugs. She wore nondescript clothes provided by Dorian’s allies in Minrathous rather than her ceremonial garb or her old armor for a reason, after all.
Rook is a young man, younger than she had expected from the description in Harding’s letter or what the Inquisitor had said of their previous meeting, hardly half her own age. He’s an elf, deeply tanned and bearing Dalish tattoos, and he does not seem impressed with her presence.
Good. She isn’t there to impress him.
“We heard some of what happened in Arlathan Forest.” Cynthia Trevelyan is a woman with little tolerance for dillydallying or small talk and when she ushers Rook to join them at a table he follows quickly. “We would hear more of it from you, as much as you can.”
It is not a kind tale. Venatori and horrific blood magic rituals go hand in hand after all, and Cassandra is under no illusion that witnessing the rising of an Archdemon is anything less than harrowing, but she listens, fists clenched below the table.
“Solas got us out of there,” Rook says as he reaches the end of his tale. “I don’t know that we could have escaped without his help, and we saved a lot of lives. Elgar’nan really doesn’t like him.”
“The feeling is mutual, I expect,” Cassandra snorts. “He never held much interest in the elven gods during his time in the Inquisition, beyond to express disdain, for most. I recall when we visited an old site of worship for Elgar’nan that he had more unkind things to say.” She stifles the fond smile she often finds on her face when she thinks of those times. “He was never as good of a liar as he liked to believe.”
“The god of lies isn’t a good liar?” Rook blinks stupidly at her.
“Not when telling an outright falsehood, no. He is very good at not saying things, however, omitting facts. And he is skilled at earning enough of your trust that you do not look further than his words.” A lesson they learned all too late, when he vanished.
Once, long ago, Cassandra made the mistake of trusting him.
“I’ve been wondering why you stayed with the Inquisition.”
Cassandra lay in her bed, naked, watching Solas as he dressed. Some nights he left while the sky was still dark, others he stayed until morning. This had been the latter. Despite Cassandra’s nudity, the night had involved little sex, instead the pair finding pleasure in the warmth of skin and the gentle murmur of conversation.
But there were appearances to keep up, and so Solas waited until the changing of the guard had passed before making for his rooms to ready himself for the day. Cassandra was loathe to face another dawn.
“What do you mean?” Solas was sat on the edge of the bed, carefully wrapping his lower legs in the tough linen he preferred to boots, and his motions did not pause despite his gaze turning to her.
“When this began, you were an apostate in a village overrun with the Chantry. You know that I am not ignorant to what a risk that was.” Indeed at the time, she had been among the most obvious threats to his safety and freedom, distrustful that such a convenient man should be at hand when they needed someone to stabilize the future Inquisitor and find answers in the wreckage of the Conclave. “I’m sure Leliana offered you safe passage to depart, but you stayed.”
A small frown creased his brow, rumpled the minute scar on his forehead, before it smoothed over into a wistful smile. “It is true that I could have left, and that it may have been wiser. But despite my lack of faith in your Chantry I found your cause a worthy one. A peaceable end to chaos. Discovering who made the Breach. They are… valiant ideals. I will admit, the Inquisition stirred a passion in me I thought forgotten.”
A passion she had benefited from. Cassandra levered herself up from the bed and grasped the cord of the bone pendant he wore, pulling gently until his lips met hers.
“I hope,” she said when he retreated, “that you never change your mind.”
“Indeed, Vhenan.”
Two days later Corypheus rent the sky anew and was slain by the Inquisitor’s hand. And Solas vanished.
She heard nothing of him in the years following, as she took her oaths as the new Divine and fought for all the changes she wished to see in the Chantry. Not until the Exalted Council’s end, when Cynthia Trevelyan marched into the meeting, missing the arm that bore the Mark of the Maker’s Favor which she’d still had that morning.
And only then did Cassandra learn the true depth of how her trust and love and been misplaced.
It does not sit well with her, that she stands among those that would plot Solas’ demise.
Minrathous is a writhing mass of Blight, a far sight from the bustling city it had been mere weeks ago when she came with Cynthia to meet Rook. The South suffers too, and her keepers had begged that she remain in safety in Val Royeaux while the they quashed the last of the noble rebellion in Orlais, but Cassandra had never been one for idleness, certainly not when it came to the fate of Thedas.
The outcome of what may well be the last stand, here in Minrathous, would dictate what happened in Orlais and Ferelden too. The small pockets of Blight in the South that had started growing larger when Elgar’nan took over the city would kill her home as surely as it would Tevinter.
And so she donned her armor, hardly worn in a decade now, and followed Cynthia again through the eluvians, arriving just in time to watch a giant wolf be carried away by an archdemon.
“I cannot betray him,” she says, voice solid as steel, interrupting the hasty deliberations. “Fool him if you must, let him think that he has won, but I will not be party to it.”
Perhaps he brought it upon himself, with his scheme to have Rook bring down the Veil by killing Elgar’nan now revealed. Perhaps it was childish of her to cling to a man who had long since abandoned her.
“Give me a chance to speak with him.” Before they did something that could not be reversed.
The man who had been introduced to her as The Viper watches her with narrow eyes set between a veil and the brim of a hat. But he nods. And slowly, one by one, the rest of the table agrees to her plan, to varying degrees of reluctance. Whether they believed in Solas, or in Divine Victoria, or simply in Cassandra Pentaghast she did not know.
“Thank you.”
Solas is a solid mass of bruises after his battle with the Archdemon. He limps at Rook for the dagger, hand clutched against bruised or broken ribs.
He is easy to subdue, something Cassandra had never expected of the man. He kneels so easily to the apparition of his old master that Morrigan conjures with the dragon statuette Rook provided.
But Cassandra finds herself on her knees beside him in an instant. Despite herself, she touches the dark bruise on his head, fumbles for any elfroot potions left in her hip pouch.
“Vhenan.” His hand cradles hers, presses her palm into the open cut on his lip to place a kiss there.
This, too, could be a lie. But he had never been one for outright falsehood, never been one to look her in the eyes and lie. His lies are lies of omission, and there is nothing to omit here. Only despair and regret and a deep devotion she had once convinced herself that he had faked.
The Veil is crumbling, but the plan is simple. To save the Thedas she loves, to find a new path to fix his millenia of mistakes, she asks that he tie it to his own life as he once had to the elven gods. An offer he would take in this moment, brought low as he is by the weight of his regret.
“And I will go with you,” Cassandra promises. It was not the plan, but the words fall from her lips and she finds no desire to take them back. There was never any other option, she thinks. She cannot abandon him, the man who has held her heart for over a decade.
She wants to follow him. She needs to see him shine, see what he becomes. She wants to hold him and be held by him and finds she does not care where or how it happens.
They have wasted enough time, she thinks.
There are many moments that day that would be recorded in Thedas’ history. The death of a god. The end of the Final Blight. The first and last meeting of the Black Divine of Tevinter and Divine Victoria.
Most spoken of, however, was how Fen’Harel tenderly held his lady’s hand as they stepped through the Veil and into the Fade to save them all. How he was the creator of the Veil, and she the Divine herself.
It was whispered in dark corners and shouted on streets corners alike: the Maker and his Bride returned to the golden city.