Chapter Text
Clemency
I was gonna have to do everything with these two, wasn’t I?
At least I was getting better at keeping a rabbit shape, these days.
Solas led Joy away from the caves entrance, and back towards what everyone was running from. I had no idea what he was planning, and honestly, when we got there, I kind of wished she hadn’t agreed to follow.
The darkspawn were starting to spill over the ridge and down into the basin of Old Crestwood, where the lake’s shore was today, but there was something…strange about them. Something wrong. Joy’s seen monsters. She’s seen what spirits can turn into in the Fade and in her world, seen them twisted and corrupted into demons and merged with mages to become even worse than that. And she knew what darkspawn were in theory, though she’d never encountered any personally. Not yet. Her only idea of them came from writings and illustrations in Chantry books, Circle literature on the Blight and first- or secondhand accounts from the people and Wardens who survived it.
This didn’t look like any of that.
This didn’t look like…much of anything at all.
Despite those storied legends, despite the fear and panic that surrounded them and the sense of…helpless dread with which they were written, these things spilling down into Old Crestwood were…wisps. Dark wisps, sure, awful little things I wanted to get as far from as possible, but they were just wisps. Everything about them was wrong and angry and ravenous, and I could feel their rage even from here, but their aura was so much worse than the little wisps themselves. It was like each of them housed a tiny core surrounded by a giant ugly miasma of hate, condensing the Fade and…
…And…
…We all watched in horrified silence. A little elven child, a spirit exploring the form of a crying da’len, was dropped by his stumbling mother trying to get to the caves, and fell to the horde. It didn’t even finish demonizing into Terror before it was torn apart and absorbed.
Gone.
It was just…gone.
The spirit exploring the idea of her husband grabbed at her and hurried her on.
Making sure that she wasn’t next.
Nehna swore, ice rippling along her skin, freezing my little bunny toes with her fear. Only Pride’s touch warmed her, startling her out of paralysis and pulling her away, and she disappeared right out from under me, skidding back into view along a nearby roof, crouched and working to keep her revulsion from souring the currents.
“I don’t like that,” she announced, looking down at us. I landed gently enough on the gross wet stones and Vhenan’Then caught himself midair. He found Pride’s shoulders to drape across instead as the three of us looked up at her. “We should go. We need to go.”
Pride held out a palm for me and I did a pretty good job of jumping into it and onto his arm using just my legs. I leaned against his chest and he covered me with his other hand like a real bunny, and we circled the house to meet Nehna as she dropped down the far side and came back.
“Even spirits dislike the Blight,” he lectured, setting me on the woman’s shoulder once more. I pressed my little rabbit cheek against hers to try to calm her. I hoped it was working. “It is made of something repellant and corruptive to their natures. They struggle to emulate such an antithesis to their forms, and rarely succeed in crafting a facsimile more complex than what you have witnessed just now.”
“They just…destroyed that spirit,” Nehna half-whispered. “They didn’t turn it into a demon, they just dissolved it.” She stopped and looked at him, then back behind us. “We…We should stop it. Stop them. Before they kill anything else.”
Pride pressed her along, palm digging into her back, and shook his head. “To approach such pits of hate is dangerous. They are corruptive to living elves as well, Joy. To encounter them unprepared risks significant and potentially permanent injury. The Blight is not a thing to be opposed without careful strategy and significant forethought.”
Every stumbling footstep Nehna managed under his insistent guidance jostled us both and rattled through her. She was torn at the thought of it, the thought of condemning spirits to a fate that she could flee from.
“Can’t you teach me to stop it? At least here? Don't you have careful strategy in the Fade?”
Solas carried on, a grim set to his mouth and eyes. He was leading us back to the caves. More spirits rushed around and between us, beating us to the old wood door and flowing inside.
“Recall, this is the past,” he warned, “a loop of history caught in the eddies of the Fade. Even were you to overcome them here and now, the process would simply repeat. These memories take no benefit from our presence nor any from our interference, either. They will dissolve of their own accord, and all we would gain for their passing would be the scars they inflict upon us.”
I get it, Nehn.
I snuggled against her to try to remind her that we were here for her, and she wasn’t the only one feeling like this.
I hate it, too.
This had been a bad idea, and we hadn’t even bothered talking to Solas about it.
We’d just…followed him into the lake.
Sticking with Trevelyan on the shore would have been a walk in the park by comparison.
The mayor’s old house passed us by, another plaque like the one in New Crestwood nailed above the door. We hurried into the caverns along with the flow of spirits.
Two layers shimmered here, one atop the other. Today’s was dark and wet, layering the bright torchlit past with a film of oily shadow. Boxes and bodies floated freely in the water in the present, while spirits of the past huddled in corners and pushed each other into the depths. We followed, down into twisting rock, paths doubling back and campfires at every bend. Refugees huddled here and there around them, some pitching tents, others just wrapped together under blankets and coats.
They’re dead.
Nehna didn’t mean to say it, but it came out anyway. They’re dead and these are the corpses that spirits are possessing.
Pride slowed to a stop near one of the camps and shored up something inside him. Between his palms he cast a bright light and focused, and with it the present day was illuminated, too.
Skeletons in the corners, bones stripped by fish and crabs. Some were still fleshy, bloated and swollen and floating along the ceiling. Bodies long forgotten, waiting for demons to drag them back and send them towards the village they all wanted to go home to.
Nehna was sick to see it. And I didn’t like it much, either.
Pride darkened his spell. We hurried along.
This is awful, she mourned. All these people…
We will be quick, he promised, lengthening his stride. I wish only to learn the size and magnitude of the rift below, and then we may return to less distasteful surroundings.
Nehna kept up.
Hardly a surprise that it's big, with a tragedy like this to weaken the Veil.
Pride nodded in quiet agreement.
Under the caves the villagers had built a spiral of wooden planks into a shaft in the ground, and at the bottom of that was something much different. Something much, much older.
Dwarven, Pride lectured absently, walking us through silent, shaped halls as Nehna looked around. They were enormous and carved of a bronze-colored rock, in pretty and perfect geometries where they hadn’t crumbled away. The Stone Children crafted expansive underground cities, some theorize they span the whole of Thedas. It is little surprise we find their tunnels here, as well.
I’ve never been in one, Nehna answered. She was just filling the silence. I could tell. They feel strange.
Do they? Pride asked, eyeing her as he led us through giant chambers and airy halls.
Nehna nodded, and picked me off her shoulder to hold me to her chest.
Don’t they feel solid, to you? she asked. I liked the way she cuddled me. It was nice. She was so sweet and gentle about it. No wonder Solas liked it too. I know they’re old, they predate even the First Blight according to scholars. They predate the Tevinter conquest. But they just feel…immutable. There’s so much weight to them here, like it would take so much more to change them than it would take to change other parts of the Fade.
Pride looked at her a long time after that.
He looked at her the same way he had when he’d “accidentally” wanted to kiss her above.
They’d return here, when they woke. He wanted her to remember this feeling, and examine it from the other side of the Veil. Remember it, and tell him whether it felt the same way for her there as it did for her here.
She shared with him her trip to see Warden Mac Tir, the cave he was hiding out in. The thousands of sparkling facets all bouncing her magic back at her. She shared her discomfort at that, focusing on how it was a thing she’d never experienced before. How she’d felt trapped, claustrophobic, sealed in. Pride listened and nodded, and shared more of dwarves, the stone-shapers who’d made these great halls in ancient times, how difficult they were to study from the Fade. He shared theories of their emphasis on reality. How what they mined, the Lyrium they pulled from the depths, created and reinforced Templar powers. He raised all kinds of theories and connections, the difference between the “real” world and the dream realm, how some things like spirits had aspects only of one, and some things like deep earth and dwarves had aspects only of the other.
Elves often felt this way too. Particularly elves of magical talent. Elven ruins, especially those that dated back to the time of immortals, those weren’t like dwarven stone. Ancient Elves infused magic into everything they did. It was once as natural as breathing for their People. The Guiding Eye came to mind—a simple statue to so many, yet filled with hidden potential for the sensitive and capable. So much of the remains of the ancient elves were like this, and yes, dwarven architecture was, in a sense, its opposite. It was almost as though the Children of Stone had crafted their domain to repel the elves, to reject anything ephemeral or transient. They dealt in absolutes, in objective materiality. In unambiguous truth. Even their Shaperate was a perfect record of the past, around its holes or missing pieces, of course.
Contrast that to the Dalish, who knew so little of their history.
Or the city elves, who remembered even less.
The Fade Tear was huge, its lowest twists brushing the rock floor while its upper expanses towered overhead. A current had been drawing us here this whole time, one I was glad Nehna was holding me back from. There weren’t as many spirits down this far, but every now and again one would spiral by, carried on the wind and drawn toward that mountainous green seam.
I wondered if we were still in the past. If it cut across time, too.
Solas nodded. These veil rifts cut deeply into the Fade. Especially ones this large. This was what he’d come here to check. That a sufficiently powerful tear could release layers of the Fade, potentially all if it at once, and not just its outermost recent shell.
Nehna, Vhen, and I had no idea what he meant by that.
“We haven’t been talking,” Nehna realized, a chill pluming inside her and seeping into me through her palms. She was right, and none of us had even been…thinking at each other, either. We’d all just been…concepting ideas collectively, and holding an entire conversation like that.
Like spirits did.
Like I used to, before Nehna and Pride had gifted me language to express myself with.
Pride’s smile was wide and warm as he watched her.
“At last, you notice. As you push our friend Fenris to understand our tongue, so too is your capability examined, Joy. There are depths to the Fade so many of our kind never experience, whether through timidity, inexperience, or simple lack of interest. That you have exchanged pure intention with me, bereft of words, for the better part of half an hour now, warms me greatly. You have come very far in a very short while, and I intend to push further. I have not met another like you in quite some time, and I consider often how simple fortune and pure circumstance crossed our paths. How many more may yet be like you, that I have simply not encountered. I begin to wonder if a limit exists to your capabilities at all.”
And he wanted to kiss her, again. This time he was neither ashamed of nor startled by his shared intention.
I wiggled my way out of her hands and hopped off, and Vigilance unspooled from his shoulders to coil beside me. The Rift’s currents rustled her hair and his clothing alike as he gathered her into his arms and pressed her to the ancient dwarven threshold.
Whatever other intentions flowed between them, they weren't for us to know.
But he did start glowing a warm white-gold after a time, and so did she as she pulled him to her and matched his gentle hunger, chest to chest, hips to hips, mouth to mouth.
Part of me felt the need to give them some privacy. Vhenan’then watched the pair go at it as comfortably as if he was watching a stage play.
It is my nature to observe, he remarked, when I teased him on it.
Sure it is, I answered, stretching into a taller size, like the Joy Spirits back at the Winter Palace. You can just say you like to watch.
I do, Vhenan’Then answered, oblivious as always. His beady little snake eyes followed as Pride took Nehna down to the stone, sweeping her gracefully off her feet in direct defiance of that promise they'd both made not even an hour before not to get caught up in each other like this again.
It made me laugh at the two of them, trying to deny their own natures like that. They’d both feel better if they just let it out and stopped trying to hold back so much. But I turned to look for other ways to leave them alone.
The currents tugged at me, spiralling through that great dwarven door and into the open chamber. If I wasn’t careful, I could slip right across the floor and into it. Big bunny legs with chunky boot-claws let me dig into the stone, but it wasn’t easy to. I couldn’t get that good of a grip. Dwarf craft just wasn’t spongy. It didn’t yield to will. Like Pride was saying.
But I did want to get closer.
The chamber the Rift was in was like the others, big and airy and open. I wondered what they needed all this space for. They were the smallest race. Some of them were literally afraid of the sky, or so Nehna had once read in her Circle library books. Why was their architecture so huge?
The currents picked up near that giant green seam. I could feel the Fade pouring out, feel it whipping at my…at whatever I was made of.
It was like a door. A big open door to their world. Nice and wide and roomy, like everything else here. It wasn’t like the other rifts, a tight squeeze that would twist and tear and scare us into demons.
It was just…a door.
A door I could step through, and be on their side of things.
Not bound to Nehna.
Not bound to anything at all.
Maybe if I just got a little closer.
Not to go through.
Just to…to see what it looked like, up close.
The currents were strong here, the spiralling wind kicked to a roaring gale.
All I could see was green and bright. But if I looked close enough, I could see a darkness beyond.
The darkness of their world. The real world.
Nehna’s world. Nighttime. Underground.
“—Clemency!”
My boot-claw slipped, kicking my feet out from under me.
Elven arms seized my chest and pulled me back before I could be swept through.
The howling wind dissolved into distant screams of panic and the rush of spilling water as Solas and Nehna wrested me away from it and back towards stabler currents.
High above, the dam had been closed, and the caves were beginning to flood.