Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

— The Fade —

— Six months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Ithalia spends a day with one name on the tip of her tongue, like a little serrated blade in her mouth. She swallows it, over and over, suffering the taste of bile to keep it caged behind her teeth. It fights to leave her chest when the sun sets. She wrestles it down, down, until at last sleep drags her addled mind down, too.

When a forest blooms around her in the Fade—the same conifers and alpine foliage she’s seen for the better part of a year—she finally sets it free.

“Arranna.”

It comes out like a curse. Good. She means it like one.

The forest knows why, because this forest isn’t a forest at all. Not really. This is a dream—and because it is a dream, it is someone else’s domain.

The only problem is, glaring at leaves isn’t half so satisfying as wiping a smile clean off of the face of the accused.

Ithalia squares her shoulders anyway, facing down a tree at random. “She’s gone. I know you know. I know how this goes by now.”

They’d been talking just last night, she and Arranna. One of the only elves left with any ties to the Inquisition—it had been a rare dose of good fortune, to make better acquaintance after the rest left in a blink. Arranna had been a kitchen maid at Skyhold. She said she’d heard of whispers of a force outside the Inquisition, but hadn’t indulged. She kept her vallaslin. She spoke of home, family, and the pride she found in both.

She lied. For months. Just like the fucking rest of them.

But of course the forest has no answer. The birdsong chirps along as it’s always done, without a single bird in sight. Not even a breeze graces Ithalia with its presence.

Like this doesn’t matter. Like Arranna is just another piece on the board between them.

“Did she even matter to you?” Ithalia challenges, setting her flesh-and-bone hand on a hip. The other, woven of spirit magic, blurs when she waves it in aimless gesture. “What’s one more pawn, weighed against the whole world you plan to end? What’s one more life, or one less?”

None had seemed to be of consequence. This was never a fair fight, and he’d made sure of it. Ithalia woke days after he’d gone through that last eluvian, pain roiling through her limbs. It would take her twenty more to return to Skyhold, but her haste would never have made a difference. The elves, she’d learned, had all gone the night she’d been hurt.

Almost all.

“Maybe that’s why you kept her around me. Because one life makes the difference, at the bitter end.”

The tree doesn’t grant her a response. Why would it? So she faces the next one, like it’ll change anything.

“You let her be the only one left. Isn’t that poetic of you? I should applaud, really. You narrowed it all down to one last confidant, one safe haven—you laid her out like bait for my grief, knowing I’d take it. Is that it?”

That the forest remains tranquil feels like some cosmic joke.

Of course that was it. She shouldn’t have to ask. Her only mistake was letting herself deny her own cautious instincts, whittled down by Arranna’s sunny smile, her easy laugh. The way she told jokes about their time in Skyhold until Ithalia could not help but laugh along, and the way she kept up the tradition as the Inquisition moved its remaining members to Val Royeaux.

In every hour spent talking of home, of family, Ithalia had indulged the enemy. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been warned—but Arranna had passed all Leliana’s extensive questions without so much as a drop of sweat. She’d been nothing but kind, no matter the hour. She’d never pried for details.

She’d never had to, in hindsight.

The sky overhead darkens. A damp chill descends over the dream-wood. Ithalia laughs, low and dangerous.

“What, no sudden gust of wind? No taunting laughter in the leaves? Should I dare to call you wounded?”

She turns and stalks away, no use taunting motionless branches.

“You know, I never asked for this,” she goads as she moves, grass pliant under her bare feet. “If you can’t stomach your guilt? You have no one to blame but yourself.”

But as she walks, the foliage ahead of her stretches out longer. The water on the distant horizon, always further away. The forest, bending its perimeter around her.

She bares her teeth at the sky. Distant thunder growls in answer.

“I never asked to play this game. You put me here. You twisted this around the both of us. You keep me at arm’s length—but you won’t let me leave!”

Her hands, one spirit and one flesh, curl into fists. A yell burns up her throat.

“If you’re not going to be here, why won’t you let me go?”

Nothing moves.

A drop of rain lands on Ithalia’s cheek, and faraway lightning forks across the sky.

Chapter Text

— The Vhen'Theneras —

— Six months since Fen'Harel's departure —

On a ledge hanging over open sky, Solas stands beneath a pine. He takes a slow breath of the sharp scent, allowing his shoulders to fall when he releases it.

Echoes of questions flit in the air around him, words flung like daggers toward a target Ithalia cannot see. Eventually, he gives the last an answer she cannot hear.

“You might understand, one day.”

He’d been in the library of the Vhen’Theneras—the Lighthouse—when he caught the cadence of her voice sounding from the courtyard. Jarred from his thoughts, he’d checked the whirring contraption on the table: six concentric rings poised atop two little pillars, spinning in sequence to track Thedosian time.

Tonight, it had not chimed. Not for three hours, he realized once he examined the malfunction. The song punctuating every night’s passing had quieted when it shouldn’t have.

He should have kept a closer eye. He knew he’d face her ire soon enough.

After all, he’d received word Arranna had reached her post just before the contraption’s song had stopped. Ithalia was right: he knew.

What she couldn’t understand was why he knew; why Arranna left. Why all of this had transpired in the first place.

To that end, Solas has only one recourse: lowering himself so his back rests against the pine, the one place of the Lighthouse courtyard that resembles the forest of her dreams. From there, his spirit can project a splinter of itself to plant where she is, as though he, too, were asleep nearby. 

Eyes closed, he lets his understanding of his own form shift. In one moment, he is the elvhen mage she knows, sitting alone by the Lighthouse she isn't aware of.

The next, he opens the eyes of a wolf, four paws landing on the grass of her forest. A fragment of Pride, of the Dread Wolf of legend and times long past. The same six eyes, but much smaller, when splintered.

It is richer here than where he came from. An abundance of aroma is kicked up by a sudden breeze, grass and bark and drying leaves whirling together in heady air. The damp in the atmosphere thickens the mixture, heavy and warm in his nostrils.

His fur is scarcely stirred by the wind—but the electric charge of a coming storm is impossible to miss.

Has it ever stormed here?

That should be an impossible question to ask—the elvhen mage still at the Vhen’Theneras knows that the nature of any weather is different in the Fade. But the wolf’s answer is a simpler one: no. There is no damp here, usually. Not like this. The trees and leaves should be parched, primed for kindling, and only aren’t because no one here believes them to act the same as trees in the waking world.

Nose to the ground, he searches for the familiar. Tries to find the scent of spindleweed where there is no water, rising instead from Ithalia’s scalp, her neck, all the crevices of her body.

He will keep his distance. He always does. But a scent will point him in the right direction, and eventually, she will feel a set of six lupine eyes following her every move.

She always does. Then the wind calms, until some remark of hers changes the elvhen mage’s breathing. But it always calms again.

He catches it before long: the spindleweed, always a softer smell than what’s nearby. Such a contrast to the one who bears it, all sharp angles and quick, decisive movements. Bitter retorts the elvhen mage still savors, many moons too late.

The wolf lifts his nose, eyes pointed to the source, and freezes in place.

Ithalia is already watching him, white-blonde hair whipping in the wind, every line of her body taut. A wounded thing, still. The wolf tracks the ways she carries herself, almost invisibly protective of what remains of her left arm. She bares her teeth, but both wolf and mage understand the impulse: faced against an adversary, better to show anger than weakness.

Eyes narrowed, her mouth curves into a vicious sneer.

“Now you decide to show your face.”

Chapter Text

The white wolf watches her without expression, closer than he’s ever been before.

Wind sweeps through the trees. This near, Ithalia can see it stir the wolf’s fur. She can find the subtle lavender-blue of his eyes, a keener ache lancing through her chest than any other night spent in this place.

She grits her teeth. Just another taunt. He might be closer, but that doesn’t mean he’ll ever be close enough.

“Just what do you hope to gain?” she calls above the sound of quaking leaves. “The sight of me with no elves left to call my allies? Was it not enough that you stripped me of ties to my clan? My home? Was it not enough to look upon my face then?”

The wolf stands still. Impassive. Easier for a canine face not to crack, as long as the ears are kept still.

Harder for Ithalia to curse the sight of him.

“Why? Why take it all away now?” 

Despite her best efforts, her voice wavers. It shouldn’t. She shouldn’t sound like the weeping thing he left behind at that last eluvian months ago—not when that had done nothing to stop what came next. 

But despite it all, she aches to know.

“The Inquisition changed the world. Put a new Divine in power. Wrested the Orlesian Empire from the Empress that burned Halamshiral, effectively laid it in the hands of an elf. All of that—I thought it meant something. I thought I…”

She swallows. The wolf only stares back, even as the wind picks up. She takes a step closer, and… stops, testing the ground. Waiting for it to change under her feet.

It doesn’t. The wolf stays, and the forest stays in place. Where once he was thirty steps away, now he is twenty-nine.

“If it was never going to matter… if the—our—world was going to end all along… then why?” She chances another step, fists falling slack at her side. It works; nothing in the forest changes. The ache in her chest allows itself to bloom. “Why not give orders? Why let someone else take the helm and make change? I know you, Solas. It was never for no reason.”

Another step. “If you’d just let me come with you—”

The ground lurches. Ithalia’s breath catches. Lightning cracks, and the forest moves as it flashes.

Thunder rolls—closer—and it covers the curse hissed through Ithalia’s teeth.

“Again?!” she cries as the boom subsides. “Why ever come here, then, if only to do this? Why watch, night after night after night? Is it supposed to be some comfort? Tell me, so I can understand this cage beyond its bars!”

The ache spreads further, knotting tight in her stomach, tensing every limb.

“Just tell me, vhenan , why you insist on leaving me here! Why you make me useless, night after night, watching from—”

She raises her arms to point, and sudden heat roils through her center. A charge coalesces in the air, all drawn in toward her left arm. The energy of a spell, twining with the storm, until—

Green erupts in her vision. She tries to pull her arm back toward herself, and a part of the sky comes down with it. 

Lightning splits a tree down its middle. When the blinding light subsides, the gouge in the trunk smolders bright orange, flames licking up the bark around it.

When Ithalia’s vision refocuses, the wolf’s ears are pinned flat against its skull. He stares at the tree.

A new grin carves wide across Ithalia’s features. That drew a reaction from him. A piece of his old power, illuminating the veins of her residual limb in green light as bright as she remembers it.

“Is that what rattles you? This? That some part of it is still here, when it no longer serves you?”

The wolf turns his eyes to her in time for Ithalia to lift her left arm to the sky. This time, she pulls it down with intent, spirit-made fist closed, strength behind the motion.

A crack across the heavens answers. A bolt of green crashes down. Another tree, left to smolder.

This time, the wolf takes a step back.

Ithalia takes another one forward, refusing to let the gap grow further. “Why teach it to me then?” she goads, to keep him listening. “Why spend all those nights walking the Fade with me, just like this? Teaching me how it responds, like this.”

Punctuating her point, she brings another bolt down. The wolf sinks ever so slightly lower in its gait.

Wind howls in answer, sweeping Ithalia’s hair up from its place hanging around her jaw, fanning flames. Something shifts in Ithalia’s periphery, but she doesn’t turn toward it.

No. She closes in toward the wolf, always the wolf.

“Why prime me to lead an Inquisition doomed to fail? Why hide your intent?” Another step forward, another crack of thunder, another bolt. This one strikes foliage, and fire roars up wide from where it its. “That’s the problem with raising someone up to this station: when you leave, they stay there. They keep the power you’d rather be forgotten. They keep the anger you don’t want to see—and when you take from them again and again without remorse? They find it in themselves, at long last, to strike back!”

Lightning cracks into the space between them, showering sparks onto the trees on either side. When it dims, it leaves a line burned down Ithalia’s vision.

By the time it refocuses, the wolf is no longer where he was. He sprints away, into the churning dark.

He won’t get far. Not this time.

Chapter Text

Below the thunder, something wakes. It rises, snarling, in the trees. The wolf runs so he can draw its attention.

Spirits. Here, answering a call he never meant to give, then turned from their purpose by the fury in the air. He’d veiled this place from their view, the best that he could manage, but it was not enough tonight. Now, there is little he can do. The wolf does not have the same pull as the elvhen mage back at the Lighthouse, and he hadn’t expected both might be needed here.

Surprises. Always surprises, with her. Unheeded, her anger has caught, quite literally, like wildfire in the Fade.

He felt it first as two bolts struck, the pines beneath frayed at their seams. At first, he felt Compassion in their branches.

No longer. In the wake of flame, Compassion becomes something else.

Nothing the wolf can do will turn the tide, now. He bolts into the dark, crashing through foliage, brambles scoring over his face. That is his best hope: that since spirits of  Compassion followed his call, answering the splintering ache in his chest, perhaps these incarnations of Rage will set their sights on him, too.

Ithalia does not sense them. If she does, she does not care. The wind rises in a torrent that fans her ire, spreading her destruction wide. Fire clings to trees she does believe will kindle, and kindle they all do at her command.

The forest of their dreams is burning, and all she does is chase.

“She was my friend! ” she cries. The shout comes from both her lungs and through the thunder overhead. Her savage grin forks blinding-white through the clouds, then green, and another tree is lost beneath her malice. “Don’t you remember losing yours? Why won’t you answer for that, at least? ”

The wolf does not know the same loss, but feels the hurt in the elvhen mage’s chest, so far away. The Rage chasing them—four wolves of a different kind, half-resembling men—scents it, too. The four demons hasten their pursuit, like sharks to bloodied waters.

All four will close in, soon enough. Better that he is the only one left, when they do.

“You’ve never fought me fairly!” Ithalia calls above their snarling, her thunder louder than everything else. “You manipulate the board before the pieces know they’re in a game. Arranna was no different.”

Another flash, and the wolf almost collides with a gnarled root, if not for the guidance of his nose. Wood cracks nearby. A tree groans as it falls, flaming. One of Rage’s lupine forms descends over it.

Everything on all sides has become a wall of blazing, sweltering orange.

Ithalia is right. And yet she must not close the distance between them, no matter how he deserves this vengeance.

But she has learned from him, and learned well. It matters not that he is a wolf, and she an elf on just two legs. She wishes to gain ground, and the sharpness of her will cuts through the natural haze of dreams. The Fade heeds her demands.

“Turn around and face me, Solas! Meet me as your equal, just once!”

He cannot. If he did, she could be lost. The wolf lacks the precision of the elvhen mage’s magic, and half the power besides.

“Or do you find yourself a coward, now that I’m without a leash?”

Another crack. Another groan, so much closer. Ash and embers in the wolf’s nostrils, flooding the air from everywhere—and then the scent of burning wood directly above.

A tree falls. The wolf turns sharply to avoid it, tail narrowly missing flying sparks.

Ithalia skids to a halt just a sapling’s length away, caught off guard, breathing hard through parted lips. Sweat beads on her brow. Blood drips from her cheek.

She waits.

Then scoffs. Shakes her head in disbelief.

“Damn you. You won’t change. You won’t do anything, even now.” Her hands are still closed in fists, one flesh and one spirit. Her body is still tensed to strike. “You are prideful.”

The wolf dips his head. Growls low in warning. Ithalia’s glare narrows in a challenge.

She doesn’t choke on the acrid air. She knows she doesn’t need to.

“Hotheaded,” she snarls, voice smooth as ever.

Another flash throws the shadows of her face into sharp relief. No rain plasters her hair to her face, her neck. It billows in the wind, so much shorter than it was. Pieces blown across her face are dotted crimson with her blood.

It is the only thing he can smell, besides the ash. The dying wood. The Rage, everywhere around them both, closing in.

“Foolish,” she needles again, unaware of what is soon to come, “and so much more besides.”

There are tears in her eyes, the wolf can see at this distance. They well, but do not fall. The line of her mouth bends, but does not tremble.

Behind, a mound of orange rises from indistinguishable flame. Thunder cracks so loud Ithalia does not hear the roar that accompanies the flash of fangs above her.

“You are taking everything from me, and won’t give me so much as an explanation!” she shouts above the calamity. Hands extended, she tips her head up to the sky. Face contorted in anger, nothing in her eyes but vengeance, drunk on the power bestowed to her by his mistakes.

She sees, too late, what is about to befall her.

Lightning forks across the sky. She does not look to where it lands.

The forest of their dreams flashes green, then blinding white.

Blazing heat subsumes all else.

For one ear-splitting moment, everything is dark. An agonized cry, lost to thunder.

The wolf, gone.

The mage at the Lighthouse pitches sideways, ducking out of the way of a bolt of lightning in the nick of time.

The skies are blackened above the courtyard. The pine Solas’ back had just been against is alight with wildfire. It catches fast, flaring out over the grass beyond it. Racing outward in all directions, it nearly catches his robes. His hands.

He scrambles back, turning his gaze up in horror as the sparks from Ithalia’s lightning devour every branch here in flame.

Here, where she could not possibly…

Solas’ hand lifts. Ice descends upon the tree, the ground. The flames are quelled, replaced by a thick layer of frost.

His chest stays tight.

She should not have ever reached him. But she did.

Rage descended over her, and in that last breath, she looked not to it, not to Solas, but the vengeful skies. Called out for nothing but retribution, even if it meant—

Thunder cracks again over the Lighthouse. Solas pushes to a stand. The pine may be frozen, but its boughs are still connected to her dreams.

She screams, and her cries brush against his ears. His own name. A dozen curses. Even more wordless agonies.

The Fade could kill this piece of her, and she welcomed it.

Solas’ hands curl nearly to fists. His breath comes shorter, harsher. Her anger may have been deserved, but what she’d allowed it to make her?

“Ma banal'him,”^[1] he seethes, venom on his tongue. Lightning forks across the sky, and he imagines it taunting, inviting the scowl he means for her to see. “Ma ena mar din'an."^[2]

His eyes screw shut. His heart pounds harder.

She’d smiled, watching all he’d built begin to burn. Struck down a piece of him, not knowing if—

“Asha dirth tel'athim—dirthara-ma!"^[3] he shouts to empty air, teeth bared. Palms out, he shoves with both arms.

A crack as loud as thunder, and the tiny grove he’d tended splits off from the courtyard, ground and roots tearing apart from the whole. The Lighthouse itself heaves, adjusting to the sudden absence of some of its weight. Wind roars. Everything tilts.

Then settles. The wind dies.

The grove is cast adrift, a little island too far to leap to. Its tree is frozen. Its ground is ash.

It falls quiet, and he knows Ithalia’s dream is doomed to fall quiet, too.

The clouds above do not abate. He stares down at his empty palms, but gone are all the places that she burned him. It was all a dream he could not shake. Her dream, made too real.

Now every part of her is severed from his home.

Only when the tension in his arms abates does he realize how just real he let it become. There had been no need to push the grove away from the rest. He’d done more with less effort than a blink.

Why now?

The answer sinks into him like a blade between ribs. Simple. Quick. All the more lethal for it.

He wanted to. Wanted the violence of the motion, as she had. Wanted to—

No. He shakes his head, though none can see it. Not hurt her.

He  wanted the impact. The relief of being halted, the feeling of his palms making their landing.

The contact, nothing more. Any contact at all.

Now that want hangs in the air past the courtyard, detached from the rest. The grove, going dark, adrift in the shadow of the Lighthouse itself. Everything here, now cold and clouded, though when he left there had been sun.

“Vhenan,” he starts, his voice a whisper, but what is left to say? She would never hear it from here.

It would not matter if she did.

Chapter Text

A blazing flash of light gives way to fire. Flames not in the trees but overhead, directly overhead, cutting down.

Ithalia catches Rage too late, claws raking deep into her face. Smoke obscures her sight. As soon as she sees it, really sees it, it clogs her throat. She chokes on what she did not notice before: air she expects to be acrid. She swelters under a sea of wildfire that, now, she expects to be hot.

A second spirit barrels into her side. Rage, again, gouging through her nightclothes, splitting the skin across her stomach. Ithalia hits the ground with a scream. Her vision blurs.

She tries to find the white wolf.

He isn’t there.

The ground is blackened in his place.

Rage—the first—descends over her, jaws tearing deeper into the bloodied mess of her abdomen.

It has no way into her body in the waking world, but that does not mean it is not starved for the taste of her pain.

‘LET OUT YOUR FANGS,’ it demands from inside her skull, a voice that isn’t one voice so much as the screams of a thousand wounded soldiers.

“No,” she tries to shout back, but it comes as a flood of blood and bile up her throat.

Another shadow descends, wreathed in flame. Another. All of them wolves of a different kind, here not to watch but to gorge themselves on their prey.

‘THEN YOU LIE,’ say all three, and a fourth as well, with the voices of dying empires, kingdoms lost in showers of ash.

Ithalia tries to kick. To shove. Something. But fangs sink in everywhere, and her will is growing duller as blood that isn’t real spills from a dozen gaping wounds.

Above, the clouded skies lose their light. The flames dim.

Trees crash downward—not toppled, but folding in over the ground.

An entire world, beginning to buckle around her.

Rage laps up her gore, unaware of the collapse until the heavens are nearly upon them. Folding, falling, crushing—

The wolves bolt from their prey when the stars fall over their backs, sizzling fur and skin like stray embers.

They leave Ithalia wide open, bared to a thousand thousand more constellations. They are fire; they are agony; they are, perhaps, atonement.

*

She wakes with a scream bottled in her throat.

Her eyes fly open, and yellow paneling greets her.

A breeze, scented of city filth intermingled with pastries from a bakery below. Warm morning air, not sizzling embers, because this is not her dying forest.

This is Val Royeaux, and she has been here for weeks. She wakes late, judging by the light outdoors, because she had no need to rise early. Though she’d planned to sample pastries today, the arrangement has gone up in smoke.

Because Arranna is gone. Because the last piece of her fractured heart snapped off from the rest, and she finally voiced months of hurt. Hurt the wolf only watched, before he ran. Ran, because she wouldn’t relent. Because at the end, she…

Ithalia tosses aside her covers, staring at her clean nightdress. No blood, no ash—but echoes of the pain are still there, the memory of claws raking across her flesh. She isn’t hungry, despite the hour. Only… cold. Tense, as though any moment—

It may be a good day for tea. She tries not to notice her stomach sink at the thought.

She rings for an attendant early, laying the covers back over herself when they peek their head through the door in answer. She feigns a smile, ignoring the persistent roll of shivers up her spine, a heat in her palms that shouldn’t still be there.

While the attendant warms a kettle in the kitchens at her request, Ithalia forces herself through the motions of becoming what all Val Royeaux expects of the Inquisitor. Layers of finely woven cloth in shades of black, gold, and white; a green silken sash that harkens back to the Breach none of them can afford to forget. Robes, not traveling leathers, because it is better that the Inquisitor looks ill-prepared for war. Better the world see her de-fanged.

Her skin prickles at the word. Pain spreads in the inside of Ithalia’s cheek, and only then does she notice how she’s bitten into it, her grip white-knuckled around her comb as she tugs out the knots in her hair at the room’s vanity.

It’s as though she can almost see the forest ablaze, still. The wolf running. Refusing to heed her warnings. All that chaos, tangled in the memory of how Ithalia had searched for Arranna yesterday— yesterday— and found no trace of her. No belonging left behind. Only an empty space in Divine Victoria's personal staff where her friend once had been, not even a note left behind to bandage the wound.

The stain of the Dread Wolf over all of it.

Ithalia blows out a breath to steady herself, watching her face in the mirror. No scars beyond her usual two, through eyebrow and lip. No smear of ash, nor blood across her throat. It was just a dream.

But that phrase had lost all its meaning years ago, and remembering that now only throws her stomach into another somersault. A shiver runs down the sides of her neck, like claws are still seeking skin, grasping for…

When the attendant comes back with something caffeinated, she imbibes it so fast she scarcely remembers the taste. With a nod of thanks and a sovereign pressed into their hand, she marches on.

Because with the nagging heat finally shed from the back of her neck, there truly is nothing left of the dream.

Of the words that set the wood ablaze.

Of Arranna. The last of her people left on her side.

With only the hollowness in her chest left to call her own, there is only one fitting recourse.

The Inquisitor veritably glides through Val Royeaux, from opulent chambers down aromatic merchants’ streets to its grand Chantry. She does so with the requisite two guards at her side, whose faces she knows better than to look at long, lest another attachment turn sour. Chin held high, she moves as she must: as though she, even now, with meager vestiges of her order remaining, is above reproach.

When she intrudes upon the Divine, sitting cloistered with several of Orlais’ Revered Mothers, she is already the image she wants them to see: the Herald of Andraste, clothed in resplendent gold, sash the color of the Breach closed by her hand.

As she says to the Mothers, “I must ask a moment of our Most Holy’s time,” only Leliana’s brows lift in amusement, rather than knit in confusion.

The Divine hums a dainty laugh. “Ah—if our Herald calls for me, who am I to deny Andraste my answer?”

And because it is Divine Victoria who speaks to them, even the half-dozen Revered Mothers manage to swallow their pride in favor of nods and little tittering smiles. They let themselves be placated, for they must be—and that is enough to grant Leliana enough time away to find a secluded alcove near her private chambers, high above the worshippers ambling about the pews below.

Crimson light filters in through colored glass windows, painting Leliana’s skin rosy, the red of Chantry robes the color of spilled blood by contrast. The gold emblazoned on her robes shines molten in the low light.

She wears her concern the same way she always has: her face kept carefully blank, waiting to listen rather than voicing an assumption. It’s been that way for months: Leliana watching from a careful distance as so many opted not to make the transition here from Skyhold, and so many more did not—or could not—stay. Offering only calculated wisdom, keeping clear of anything remotely emotive.

Agents of the enemy could not be called friends, even in past tense. It muddied waters.

“I may need more than a moment of yours,” Ithalia says before anything else.

“Ah.” Another small smile from Leliana. She gestures further into the room, where two chairs serve as the only furniture, packed tightly into the space. “Be my guest, then.”

“You didn’t care for your meeting?”

“It was another discussion on the merits of the Canticle of Shartan,” Leliana confesses, lowering herself into the chair nearest the window. “It is better to let them all squabble it out amongst themselves for a time, I think. They’ll be tired when I return to tell them their squabbling was for naught.”

Ithalia doesn’t rest in the second chair. Rather, she shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Remember when we first talked about your vision of the Maker?”

“Back when you scoffed at the notion of the Maker existing?”

“I think I scoff more, now, all things considered.”

That earns a laugh, light and musical. “Fair enough. But yes, I do remember.”

“I need you to tell me again. Every word. Every detail.”

Leliana gives pause. She folds her hands neatly in her lap after removing the grand hood of the Divine from her head. Bathed in red light, she is so like who Ithalia first met—the former bard with the cutting looks, the constant observation.

“You wish to change our approach with Solas.” It’s not a question. “Something’s changed.”

She’s right—and a piece of Ithalia used to keep her distance for it, as though a shameful part of her was constantly kept under a looking glass. That shame still lives: it was her who’d asked they wait the first few days after she woke, rather than send a flood of agents out at once. Let them all see if great Fen’harel might change his course, all because hearing the Inquisition lived on to see him persuaded away from the end of all things.

He didn’t, and he’d gained a terrible lead.

He’d faced their every mercy with silence, and a fraction of the Inquisition bled away from the core, leaving to join his side.

Now, he is all too close to something none of them can make sense of: an idol Varric remembers from the Deep Roads beneath Kirkwall. Made of pure red lyrium, it is nothing but an instrument of madness.

If it is anything else, she fears they may only find out too late.

Ithalia swallows the thought before it can spiral, just like every defeat before. She faces the dawn painted in the glass, pretending she is looking out at any part of Val Royeaux, or studying any part of the linework. Anything but the truth: that she tries to find the shape of Fen’harel in everything, and has never looked upon the Maker more.

“Too little has changed for us to continue hoping, rather than acting,” she finally answers, “And now we have too little left to lose.”

Chapter Text

— Nevarra —

— Seven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Solas loved the sea, once. It was an easy thing to love: salted wind lifting from clear waters, rolling waves a rhythmic hush. Sunlight glimmering on the surface, the ocean set ablaze with the light of every dusk and dawn.

In the middle of the Nevarran forest, the scent of brine sets his teeth on edge. This is an old revulsion—the one that stole his affection for the shore—made horrifyingly new.

It is not enough to be cloaked in a place such as this, though his drawn hood obscures his visage from unlikely passersby. To shield himself from the very air, he wears a thick scarf bundled around his neck, tugging the fabric up over his nose. 

Word had first circulated the Wardens, weeks ago. But several Wardens had families in a village near the treeline, or lovers quietly taken when few could see. It had not taken long for rumor to swell in the otherwise quiet streets—and not long for word to find Solas through one of his agents making use of the Vi’Revas’ eluvian network.

Something had taken a disastrous turn deep in these woods, and then a mountain had come crashing down to bury it. For some, that was enough to allay the nightmare.

But nothing, he knows, stays so easily quashed.

Not with those who were once his kin.

He might have allowed an agent to survey these grounds, if there were a way to ensure their safety. As it stood, he could not abide it: those who had been close to this more-than-forest were directed to be his eyes elsewhere, scouting in nearby pockets of the Deep Roads. He armed them with a warning: beware the brine, written as a riddle few else would have hope of understanding.

None would ever glean the meaning from the agents themselves. Even alone in the woods, he grits his teeth at the reminder of why.

They all had volunteered to die, should they be captured. The burden, then, was theirs to bear. They knew the risks, with all that might befall them.

His duty is to keep walking in their stead, to get to the rotten heart of this place. It keeps him from standing idle, his mind far from the tempting lure of curiosity. For two weeks, the grove he once passed the time in has floated apart from the courtyard. In the many hours that pass between his agents’ reports, Solas has caught himself steps from his personal eluvian, a hand thoughtlessly reaching out.

No. Not thoughtlessly. Each time there is a motive, and therein lies the problem.

Ithalia could not have asked more clearly to remain alone. It is not his place—nor anyone’s—to challenge such a wish. She is safer, after all, if she is far from even his awareness.

So he walks, a gloved palm held aloft, a mote of Veilfire hovering above. The smell of brine means that traces of what ravaged this place are still here. Solas watches the foliage for a telltale watery glint, light catching on moisture.

He finds little—until, just off the path, the remnants of it nearly cover a little clearing. To touch any part of it might still change living flesh, but even at a distance, the sight and smell are worse than foul. Solas closes his eyes a moment, willing his stomach not to roil. It takes convincing, for he has seen this before: bodies whose insides turn to little more than grey paste. If they do not then turn…

They all but turn inside-out, spilling grey fluid by the gallon, a deluge of vomit soaking everything nearby in the smells of stale seawater and rotting seaweed.

If he could not tell by the heavy, acrid air, he knows for certain now: this is the work of Ghilan’nain, whose influence should not reach here. Or anywhere. Yet does.

It is all the more imperative that he see it truly lost.

Solas turns, not daring to take in a full breath until he faces away from the scene he leaves behind. It shouldn’t be more than a few hours’ walk to the core of this place, if the shivers raking over his nerves are any indication. 

While he moves, he revisits all he’d heard from the village. It had not been long—just an evening in a tavern, the stay just as long as anyone would expect of a traveler passing through. He made only passing conversation with the most inebriated person in the tavern, using every time they lost their own train of thought as an opportunity to listen to small talk elsewhere.

They spoke, mostly, of a man named Jovis. Rather, a being that was once a man, and the memory of that man named Jovis.

From the circulating rumors, he’d become something far worse. A dragon, some said. A great spider, others corrected. In truth, it would never matter: Jovis was dead in every one of the tales, buried under the mountain Solas set off toward.

What meant something was the way those in this village had all begun to hold one another closer, lest the worst befall a loved one. That, at least, was action.

Something other than wind whispers against Solas’ ears, sending shivers up the sides of his covered neck. The Veil is thin where the wild ground gives way to packed earth, then to what remains of cobbled streets.

There was a village here, once. Further in the forest, not nestled on its border. Three rows of houses whose roofs have caved in since their abandonment. Wagons fallen off their rotted axles, deep mushrooms growing from damp wood.

It has been uninhabited for so long that Solas can tell it has been picked through many times over. That only raises more questions.

Spirits linger in the houses. They take the shapes of those who once lived here, echoing their sorrows. Children ask where their mothers and fathers have gone. Other families cry out in search of missing children. Brave villagers promise to take up arms and find them all, but even they know they are doomed.

Solas does not approach them for answers. Not this time. They would have none, for the questions he wants to ask. They do not know of a world where the People were taken and made into monsters at the whim of something worse than any of her creations. How could they know? 

These people never stood a chance, because the only ones who know the name Ghilan’nain are the Dalish, and myth has warped her into something else. Something kind, where the true Ghilan’nain cared nothing for the word.

If only he could know when the last of them died—but spirits have no concept of linear time. Such a thing did not always exist.

More than likely, this fate befell them while he slept. Not long before he woke, but that makes little difference. There was never hope of sparing them.

All Solas can do is whisper he is sorry as he goes, knowing that even if the spirits do not hear the words, they will feel the ripple of sorrow from his chest.

Soon, there will be no more death here. That is all he can promise.

He does promise, over and again, as he makes his way to the ruins of the mountain. The forest is pocked all over with mounds of dirt: dens of monsters best forgotten. Even as the ground becomes rockier underfoot and the trees become thinner, the mounds are just as frequent.

Whatever built them could dig—or chew—through stone.

They do not concern him half as much as what lies beyond: a mountain’s worth of crumbled stone and ruin. As Solas approaches, he strains his senses, trying to feel for a twisted version of a sluggishly beating heart. He cannot find one. Not with his ears or an extension of his own mana, anyway.

That does not stop him from climbing onto the heap of wreckage. It is not enough to listen for what remains here. Every piece must be examined—and even then, he cannot allow himself to come to any swift conclusions.

Not with this.

As he ascends, even his graceful movements kick out little glittering shards. Gems, he realizes, looking behind him as his mote of veilfire hovers in the air nearby. Not uncommon for places such as these. Less susceptible to erosion than paint or plaster, especially with toxins flooding the air.

They hardly matter. What concerns him is larger, even in fragments.

He does not find it at first, buried as it is beneath gigantic slabs of broken tunnel walls. First, Solas’ foot catches on something whose exterior is hard, but cracked. What lies within… squelches, under the toe of his boot. He grits his teeth, holding his scarf tighter over his nose to guard against the smell. It is brine as much as decay; blood as much as festering sludge.

An insect whose every bulbous thorax is as wide as boulders. Further on, buried in stone, Solas knows who lies attached, body broken.

Jovis. Singer of ballads. Teller of stories, when the dark weighed too heavy on his fellow Wardens. Guardian of the innocent. Wise and decisive leader, when called upon. An indomitable spirit, who steeled his will against foul magic long enough for Ramesh to run and live.

Every reverent word that reached Solas’ ears, all owed to Ramesh. The lone survivor of this place, who fled from its wreckage and told every truth he could to all who’d hear him. He ensured Jovis died a hero—and in so doing ensured Jovis would not go unmourned or unloved until long after Ramesh himself was gone.

The villagers on the treeline stand a chance because of Jovis’ resolve. He is the reason they all hold each other a little tighter, able to cherish what is still theirs. They have a chance that the abandoned village deeper in the woods did not.

Heaving himself over Jovis’ body, finding stones large enough to support his weight when used as handholds, Solas climbs. He sifts through what he can on the ascent, finding only inert rock and scattered crystalline fragments.

No lyrium—nor red lyrium. No orb nor idol remains intact here. Only a stronger waft of brine with each advance up the debris.

When he sees why, breath stalls in his chest. His heart leaps, and his stomach plummets.

Every tree past the wreckage is the same ruddy brown as coagulated blood. Sacs of grey fluid hang from drooping boughs, far as the distant night horizon.

She is… everywhere.

The hope for those on the treeline is lost, for it was never truly there at all. Not when he arrived.

His mind races through precious little logic. This is too fast for any natural spread. There had been hope he might cut this horror from its root. It had not been days. There had been time.

There should have been time. Evidently, there never was.

There is only one fitting answer: that it was the blast, carrying the fetid water over swathes of this forest like misted rain. Once there, the woodland drank. And now…

The forest must burn—long enough that the ground is stripped of its moisture. The trees must never regrow. Not even their seeds may be permitted to live, for he has seen what will grow if they do.

At night, the flames will contrast against the dark. The forest will become, itself, a beacon. A warning. One that may allow the villagers at the treeline enough time to gather their dearest ones and flee. Where they would dismiss an elven apostate’s second visit regardless of his message, they will listen to the demands of encroaching wildfire.

The blaze must appear natural. Their suspicions will die down, in time, if it does.

Some part of Solas recoils, deep within, as he bows his head. It remembers walls of flame, smoke burning lungs, embers catching on fur. He does not give it voice.

Instead, thunder rolls in the middle of a clear, cloudless night.

Fitting, that this is what must be done. That he must recreate what Ithalia wrought in her anger. That even here, the echo of her will save lives.

Solas stays long enough for lightning to strike as many times as it is needed. Over and over, violet-blue bolts punching into blighted trees, until flames take on some of the damp wood. This storm sheds no rain—it cannot, for it was never made to.

Wind, he does conjure. Enough to stoke the nascent flames, carrying embers where they will complete his grave work. The smell of brine wars with woodsmoke, burning flesh, and ash. Solas’ throat tightens in protest, his body attempting to purge the wretched air, but he does not leave until the blighted land is wholly engulfed.

The wind, obeying his instinct, keeps the flames from reaching him as he departs from the ruin, walking back the way he came.

That does not stop it from carrying the sound of laughter he has tried and failed to forget. Where the firelight glints on grey brine, the caught light curves almost in the shape of a smile he tries to keep far from his thoughts.

His mind cannot stay idle, lest Ithalia claw her way back to it each time he rests.

He must be the one to stop the tide of this corruption, and he must act alone.

Let all those who can hold each other all the tighter, before the end comes.

Let her be among them, even in her anger, while she can.

Chapter Text

— Val Royeaux —

— Seven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The report comes while all of Val Royeaux believes Ithalia is singing the Chant of Light alone.

It’s how most veiled communication reaches the Inquisition, these days. The organization may be pledged to the Chantry and its Divine, but few of the remaining members are devout enough Andrastians to sit through the services each week. Instead, the story is spun that the Inquisition holds its own private services, its members closer to Andraste and the Maker than most. And of those close believers, it is Inquisitor Lavellan who communes with the divine privately, head bowed in a secluded candlelit chamber that none know the precise location of.

In truth, it’s one of the only places she can find a moment’s peace.

A loud knock sends a jolt through Ithalia. Was one of the only places she could find peace, then.

“Ser?” a soft voice asks outside the room.

“Please,” Ithalia answers, forcing herself to sit upright, arm balanced neatly on the room’s lone desk.

The entrant is a human woman in her early twenties, short black hair twisted back into a small knot. The white and gold uniform of the restyled Inquisition contrasts against the warm brown of her skin. Had she not gone to Antiva, Ithalia would swear Josephine could have chosen no better uniform for for her own complexion. She'd have glowed, even moreso when she smiled. The nobles across Thedas would've stood no chance against her.

This woman carries herself nothing like Josephine, though. Holding a stack of papers in gloved hands, she bypasses the room’s couch without so much as a glance, then elects to stand before the desk rather than relax into one of its chairs.

No thought for comfort, then. Ithalia sits a little straighter, matching what the woman likely expects. “Well?”

“There’s been word,” the agent—Rosana, Ithalia thinks she remembers—says. “A report. From Nevarra.”

“Nevarra?” Ithalia echoes, unable to help the way her voice pitches upward. She forces out a breath. “Not much ever comes back from our informants there.”

“There’s almost no one alive there—or dead, come to think of it—that would have been able to miss this.”

“Miss what?”

Rosana lays the stack of papers gingerly on Ithalia’s desk, between existing piles of reports and notes. Idle scribblings of all sorts, really—these weeks have been quiet, and the time has passed too slowly.

“Ser… an entire Nevarran forest went up in smoke overnight."

Ithalia blinks, like closing her eyes will make them tell a different story about what lies before her. But it remains, plain to see: a drawing, haphazard crosshatching suggesting it was done in a hurry, smears suggesting it was damaged by rain. Still unmistakable.

A forest, engulfed in flame. Lightning forking across a dark sky. A hooded figure silhouetted against the fire, watching it all burn.

"The entire neighboring village, decimated,” Rosana finishes. "All from a storm that seemed to come from..."

"Nowhere ." Ithalia grits her teeth to bite back a laugh. "Because in truth, it came from some one."

And he’d meant for her to know.

Weeks of quiet, of aimless sleep, of trying and failing to find a forest in the Fade while everyone outside believes she is singing the Chant… and this is how the Dread Wolf’s silence breaks. Of course it is.

“Tell me everything,” Ithalia instructs, “Before Most Holy finishes her morning prayer. It’s time we begin following the Dread Wolf’s tracks in earnest.”

*

It is raining outside an entrance to Nevarra’s Deep Roads when Ithalia arrives ten days later.

The droplets sizzle when they land on Ithalia’s armor. Rather, they sizzle on a thin magical barrier that stretches over the metal, then up over her head by a series of tiny metal orbs woven through her braids.

The night stretches dark overhead, and the barrier lights her in faint green. She is a beacon in the gloom, but this is the only way to keep her from the effects of what lies below: lyrium veins. Should they delve far enough, the exposure would kill her. Shining dim green is a small price to pay for protection.

Ithalia turns to those behind her: a handful of agents, both the Inquisition’s and Leliana’s own personal retinue. Most of them archers; two dwarves in their number, miners who’ve ventured in places far worse than this. Ithalia straightens her posture, lifting her chin. With a cloak fashioned to cover her front on her left side, she knows by the reverence in the agents’ eyes that she resembles the Inquisitor she once was: bright, strong, full of promise.

Then the leader of this operation—a human man a head and a half taller than her—steps up beside her, pulling the agents’ attention away. His presence commands as much: he is the picture of a rugged mercenary, the underdog of any human story. His dark hair is tied back in a simple knot and stubble shadows his jaw. The silver hairs sprouting at his temples match his eyes. With an obsidian breastplate fastened over a long coat, obsidian gauntlets and shinguards to match, he looks like a moving nightscape, a cutting figure to distract from the two swords at his hips.

“You all know your orders,” he says, arms folded. “We get in and look for information. Our aim is to verify if our leads are right, and if the mage Solas’ agents have been down here recently. Additionally, we’re looking for anything that might’ve interested them. Elven…”

Ithalia places his accent near Kirkwall, not that it matters much. What matters is the way he chooses, carefully, to say, “architecture,” when so many humans would’ve said, “shit.”

All seven agents give some version of a nod or, “Yes, ser.” Half seem more hesitant—which suggests their temporary commander is familiar with half. Whether the eager half or the hesitant half, Ithalia can’t say.

He looks to her next, the green light from her armor lengthening the shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and jaw. The faint smile he gives betrays little before he turns back to the agents.

“Don’t forget to guard this woman with your life.” He hums a laugh. “Not that any of us need the reminder.”

Ithalia tries to keep her posture straight, her face neutral, but the hushed laughter of the agents cuts through the guise. She cannot help a little smile of her own.

For a split second, it might be three years ago, and they might all still proudly stand under the Inquisition’s banner. The sky might be sliced open with the same green cloaking Ithalia now, and something in the air might feel a little more like hope.

She could almost picture it now. Could almost forget that the reason the Dread Wolf feels as near as he does is because ten miles back, a forest has been reduced to a gigantic black scar on the Nevarran terrain.

But she can’t shake the cold dread that settled into her marrow when she saw the ashen ground, a grim parody of the last dream she can fully remember. Nor can she forget the names of all those he took.

Helaine. Loranil. Melaneth. Arranna.

“Every step we take down there is a step closer to the Dread Wolf,” Ithalia says, “And a step closer to preventing the end of this world as we know it. You make the Inquisition proud. Each of you.”

She knows what they hear. You make the Chantry proud. You make Andraste proud. She ignores the way the words curdle in her insides. They are necessary, to keep the Dread Wolf’s forces distracted and in check.

She turns toward the entrance—little more than an arch built into a hillside—and begins their descent, not waiting for their praises.

*

It’s been years since Ithalia wore armor this far past dark. The world stopped needing her attention through all the hours of the day, and she forgot the razor-sharp awareness of midnight adrenaline, somehow both keener and colder than the same rush in daylight.

The dread she’d felt these past months was owed not to the dark, but to her dreams. Trepidation over what the forest she woke to every night even was, at first—then, apprehension over what it might hold. Hopes raised that it might contain some piece of the familiar beyond a single conifer or patch of flowers. Every hope dashed, night after night, until all her trepidation and excitement both guttered out, apathy left to fester in their places.

The scratching of darkspawn in distant tunnels burns much of that apathy away. There can be no place for it, here.

That doesn’t stop how, as the others’ torchlight dances over the chipped walls of the corridor, Ithalia’s eyes betray her. The light and shadow warp until, for fractions of moments, they are silhouettes she once knew well. Helaine, spectral sword raised, swinging downward with eyes alight. Loranil, knitting socks for his little siblings in the rare quiet hours at Skyhold. Melaneth, wiping flour-dusted hands on her skirts.

Arranna, the last of them to go, pale ginger hair haloed in the glow of every flame she neared.

Their last conversation ended in laughter, and then she was as gone as if she’d never been there at all.

Something touches her arm. Ithalia bites back a shout, grip tensed on her blade.

“Hey. You.” The commander of their small brigade, the human in midnight armor, pulls his hand away when Ithalia turns. The other holds a torch aloft, casting his eyes in shadow.

Ithalia forces out a slow breath so her racing heart will calm. She raises a carefully impassive eyebrow, staring into the dark where his gaze should be. “You?”

“Ah—Inquisitor.”

She smirks. “Closer.”

“Lavellan. Right.” He clears his throat, redirecting his attention ahead, down the passage. “Well. Eyes up, not on the walls. They’ll play tricks on you—or at least, they do for me.”

Ithalia follows suit, watching ahead. Behind, the half-dozen agents comb the tunnel from a few steps away. The dwarves look for differences in the stone; everyone else looks for signs of life.

The quiet would almost be contemplative, but Ithalia can’t help but break it.

“Did you honestly forget my name?”

The commander shrugs. “It’s the least important thing about you, isn’t it?”

“You… really?”

For a second, the commander’s nervous laughter eclipses the sound of faraway scavengers. “I only mean that the title is all most people care about—and that down here, your name doesn’t matter half as much as whether you know how to use the blade you’re holding.”

“You think I don’t?”

“I know you do. That’s important.” He catches her looking and flicks a gaze down to her own breastplate, the green glow. “But not half as important as whether that enchantment works as it’s supposed to, I take it.”

“If it stopped working…” Ithalia pushes out a sigh. “You’d know. Let’s leave it at that.”

She pries her gaze from his, scanning the tunnel ahead, and quickens her pace. The agents behind her mumble their discontent. Their footfalls hasten nonetheless.

“Mallorick, by the way,” the commander says behind her.

“What?”

“In case you’d forgotten.”

“I hadn’t— ”

Something prickles over Ithalia’s cheek. She stops in place, stomach somersaulting. Mallorick draws up beside her, but she doesn’t meet his gaze, only catching his frown in her periphery.

“What is it?” he asks. “The enchantment?”

“No.” Ithalia looks up, toward the corridor’s ceiling. Something has punched through it, exposing a hollow above it, an empty dark that stretches high above. Around the site of the blast, she feels what caused it, the same way one feels a charge in the air before a storm. “Magic. Not… not ancient, I don’t think. But potent, and… recent.”

"You think it's his?"

She hates that he would think she’d know better than most. She hates that he’s right.

"No. Not quite."

Not the Dread Wolf’s, but someone’s. And no one has any business down this far except for his agents—but why? He’d already made a mockery of an entire ruined forest. What more could he be after, other than to make a display he knew she’d wander toward?

The red lyrium idol Varric spoke of was beneath Kirkwall. No one, in all the years since, ever found another like it.

This has to be a test. Weeks without dreaming in the Fade forest she burned, and he’s wondering how far she’ll pry to find a glimpse of him.

“What use would his forces have with the underground?” Mallorick asks, looking into the hollow with his hands resting on his hips. “You’d think most people would be after everything ancient down here.”

One of the dwarves—a middle-aged woman—steps up beside him, stroking her chin. “Unless the ground is precisely what they wanted.”

Ithalia narrows her eyes. “What do you mean?”

The woman shrugs. “I dunno. I suppose it’s easier to dig in secret if you’re going bottom-up, rather than top-down. If we were on the surface, we would be in a field not far from that burned forest. No cover for miles.”

It makes no sense, no matter how much Ithalia squints. “But what else would he possibly be looking for in the—”

“Here!” another of their agents, a human scout, calls from ahead. “A camp!”

Ithalia’s attention snaps to the sound. She stalks toward the sight: a fire doused, its kindling otherwise left intact. Ash smeared into scattered footprints that lead away to all sides.

Whoever had been here had left so quickly, they had been utterly careless.

Why?

“Find what you can,” Mallorick instructs the other agents. “Salvage what you find valuable that you can carry. Document the rest.”

“Yes, messere,” half of them mutter, the rest setting to work without a word.

Ithalia bristles. “That’s it?”

Mallorick’s dark brows stay low, impassive. “That’s it.”

“They left a perfect trail.”

“And the Divine herself told us not to follow it.”

Ithalia opens her mouth to protest, taking a step toward Mallorick, then halts. Something scuffs under her boot, chafing against the stone below.

A slip of parchment. One that hadn’t burned in the flame—not more than its edges.

Mallorick starts to bend. Ithalia holds up her hand. “Let us remember which of us is Herald.”

Whether Mallorick scowls or smiles, she doesn’t know. She bends, lifts her boot, and pulls out the note. Turning, she angles herself so the light from Mallorick’s torch sheds light on the writing—

Her stomach drops. The walls of this tunnel seem, suddenly, far too tight.

What smells of the sea has taken root in the woods. It must not flourish there. Take heed. You may be asked to flee.

She knows the curves of this writing. The easy slant to every character, the long and thin loops even when written in haste. She’s seen it in requests sent around Skyhold—for books, most often. In notes passed discreetly into her hand, later. Ones she kept tucked close in the interior pocket of her coat through the long winter under the Breach. Ones she read over and over after dark.

For a time, these letters felt like they belonged to her. Now, there is only a hollow left in her chest, for there is no place in these tunnels the Dread Wolf has not already claimed.

The group's quiet falls to near-total silence as Ithalia reads the note again. Another time, and another. 

Mallorick's torch comes nearer as he steps up behind Ithalia. He speaks in a whisper. “What does it… mean?” 

Once, she knew the answers to all the Dread Wolf's riddles. But now?

“I…”

Her thought trails off, because another light has emerged in the furthest archway splitting off from this  corridor.

In its glow stands a silhouette. Shorter than Ithalia. Narrowly curved. Elven ears. Pale ginger hair limned in firelight.

Arranna.  

The friend Ithalia called her own not months ago, now on the opposite side of a world- ending war. 

Standing still as stone not fifteen steps away, Arranna's gaze is locked not on Ithalia, but the slip of parchment in Ithalia's hand. Her lips hang parted, as though about to speak.

 Instead, Arranna drops her torch and runs. Ithalia launches into motion after her.

"Inquisi—Ithalia!" Mallorick yells after her, already distantly behind. "We've been given orders not to pursue!"

"You have new orders!" Ithalia shouts back without turning, bolting through the arch after Arranna.

Damn this war. Damn the forest she hasn't found again in a month of dreaming. 

Arranna—Arranna was real , lies or not. 

It wasn't long ago that they'd both shared secrets after dusk, over rounds of drinks—not only Ithalia's. Arrana mentioned a lost love. Three brothers left at home with her clan, while Ithalia had just the one left alive. Her favorite color was yellow. She liked spiced tea.

Arrana is far up ahead, near the end of a new long tunnel littered with fallen stone and debris. She slips sideways, disappearing  through a narrow gap in a half-collapsed doorway. She doesn't turn back to see that Ithalia won't make it through behind her — not with enchanted armor adding to her breath, and not with her spirit-made sword traded for a staff.

But to lose her, when she'd just been so close? 

It can't end like this. Not so soon. 

Ithalia sprints harder to close the distance between them, dashing toward the opening, refusing to slow. Once she's close to it, she sucks in a breath, flicks her wrist, slams the sole of her boot onto the ground—

And comes apart into nothing but air, just long enough to sail through the gap and emerge whole on its other side. She lands with a heel sliding, almost knocked from balance. The expended mana feels like a shard of ice down her spine.

Still, Arrana doesn't turn. She has to expect this—it was she who spoke with Ithalia after long days of training without Helaine's guidance, relearning the flow of her own magic with one less arm to cast it. Relearning to balance through a short-range teleport, even at a sprint.

"Please," Ithalia calls down this new tunnel before it pitches lower. Her voice echoes, calling back from all sides. "We can still stop this, Arrana!"

Nothing. Arrana flees down a long flight of stairs, then takes a sharp left. She didn't have to look before moving, nor check the terrain—she's been here before.

All Ithalia can do is trust that her once-friend isn't leading them both to their deaths. Anything else would mean a delay, and risking losing Arranna entirely.

The next space is a chamber, tall and vast judging by the echo alone. No longer lit by Mallorick's distant torch, it is ink-dark. Ithalia swears, foot catching on a stone. She pitches forward, but does not land. Instead she dissipates into nothing again, emerging mid-stride a few paces forward from where she was. 

She grasps for a single thought—a silent request—and clings to the image of it. Her left arm alights. The wisp that once acted as her sword replaces the shape of her lost limb, glowing a bright green and illuminating the way forward.

Arranna is closer than before, if only just. Ithalia's mistake—and the teleport it forced—gained her valuable ground.

Nevermind the cold shudder down her spine. The chill in her marrow that she can no longer shake. 

“Please,” Ithalia calls again, “Turn back.”

Arranna does. Her pale face is harsher in the green light of Ithalia's wisp. Her eyes are wide. Fearful.

Then she turns away, sprinting as hard as before. On the far end of the chamber, two ancient elven statues tower over the dark. Their breadth almost eclipses a round, polished arch below.

No, not polished—glimmering with thousands of tiny gemstones.

Arranna turns, darting inside. Ithalia pushes harder, determined to end this pointless game. They’d been friends. It had been real. She had been so certain.

A thunderous crash roars through the cavern. Light flashes.

A thousand tiny gemstones fly through the air, and Ithalia comes apart again.

She comes back into being a few steps behind where she was, rocks scattering around her feet. Her teleport allowed her to avoid the brunt of the explosion's force.

The explosion.

How?

A great mass of metal heaves before she can find an answer. The blast knocked one of the elven statues off balance. It tips—slow at first.

Then two towering metal figures crash down directly overhead, forcing Ithalia to dissipate a fourth time in as many minutes.

A trap—one she caught too late, costing mana she can’t afford to keep wasting.

She emerges on the other side of the arch as the statue falls behind her, another titanic crash that rattles the entire network of tunnels.

No time to stand in awe or horror. No time to figure out who laid this trap, or why. She can hear Arranna's footsteps and labored breathing ahead.

This tunnel is narrow and winding. Arranna has no torch, and the glow of Ithalia's conjured arm doesn't illuminate around its many bends. Forced to slow in order to navigate, Arranna won't stand a chance at outrunning Ithalia's sprint.

It’s an opportunity—one Ithalia has to seize, now or never.

Ithalia ignores the way her vision sways. She swipes her gloved hand across her mouth, wiping away the blood there. Every one of her joints is weaker from the exertion of four teleports and maintaining her grasp on the Fade to keep her wisp in the place of her arm.

None of that can matter.

“I won't stop,” Ithalia calls, voice hoarse, as she stumbles around a bend. Her knees threaten to buckle, forcing her to brace her weight against her staff as she moves. Anything, to let her keep her glowing arm raised.

Up ahead, unseen, Arranna grunts. Mutters something indecipherable.

Then, “You should, Ithalia.” 

The words sink in like a knife through her ribs—but the burn of that wound only pushes Ithalia harder.

She rounds a corner and staggers into a chamber, fifteen feet wide and fifty long. Its far wall warbles in a way her eyes struggle to decipher with only the dim glow of her arm. 

Arranna limps down the room’s length, but turns toward Ithalia’s light. Her face is bare. Sylaise’s markings are gone. Her eyes look larger without them. Sadder, framed by strawberry blonde strands tugged free of her braid.

That same hue is reflected on the far wall. An eluvian, Ithalia sees now. As tall and wide as the one Skyhold housed, its golden border ornately carved, topped with wrought metal halla horns. Not two clean spirals, but ten branching twists.

Heat drains from Ithalia’s face. The light of her left arm threatens to gutter. She scrambles to retain her focus, but it keeps slipping, no better than water through her fingers.

An eluvian. A lone figure standing before it. Another moment that feels like the beginning of yet another end.

“Don’t do this,” Ithalia says. Her voice breaks.

Arranna’s expression only falls. Her features fall in mourning that Ithalia has never seen before—that was kept from her. “You shouldn’t have followed. Turn back, Ithalia. Forget this.”

Arranna pivots. Starts to step away, toward the eluvian. Its magic hums as she approaches, as though waking to welcome her. To invite her into a world barred from Ithalia.

Ithalia slams the end of her staff into the stone floor without second thought. Reaches into the Fade, solidifies her intent in her mind, and pulls.

Yellow-green light erupts in the middle of the room. The air itself collapses around the magic for an instant. Then, the spell begins to hum, waves of sound that echo from the outside of the room inward. Loose stones slide along the floor and lift, pulled to a new gravitational source: the spell’s center.

Arranna can’t move away from it. She tries, every inch straining as she struggles toward the eluvian. When she relents, turning toward Ithalia, she skids along the floor until she stands under the spell’s bright center, shadows cast long down her face.

“How could you say that?” Ithalia calls over the spell’s noise. She almost lets the magic go, until she watches Arranna’s foot try and fail to step backward. “Could you forget any of this?”

She does not give voice to the thought aching inside her ribs: Could you forget me?

Arranna’s mouth falls open like Ithalia struck her with it anyway. Her brows pinch. Her jaw feathers. “Don’t make me answer that.”

The spell pulls more energy from Ithalia’s core, sending a spasm down her spine. She doesn’t let her gaze fall from Arranna’s, even when it blurs with tears. “This isn’t the friend I knew.”

“You know what I really was, now.”

“No.” Ithalia forces one foot forward, then the other, battling to keep the spell intact as she closes the gap. “I know you, lies or not. All that time you stayed—it was real.”

How long had it been since she’d wanted to scream the same words before another eluvian?

How many more times will she do it before all the world falls to pieces?

Failing to step backward, Arranna reaches for the two blades strapped to her back. This isn’t the woman of Ithalia’s memory—now in sleek silverite mesh with blades wrought from the same metal, every inch of her lethal. Ithalia knew her only in homespun wool and aprons dusted with flour, in sweaters and scarves every winter. Her mind struggles to make sense of the difference even as Arranna’s stance shifts, body poised for combat.

“There is so much you cannot know, Inquisitor.”

“Inquisitor?” Ithalia echoes, closing in. She lifts her glowing arm toward Arranna, the other shaking with the effort of keeping her staff aloft as her magic channels. “You know me better than that. I called you a friend. Just tell me why—”

Arranna lunges forward to strike.

Ithalia lifts her staff and barely manages to parry. She stumbles back, the yellow-green light above them flickering out as the spell dissipates. All of Ithalia’s focus goes toward her arm, to maintaining her connection to the wisp lending itself to give her limb corporeal shape. It shines brighter, illuminating the sheen of Arranna’s shortswords. The tears rolling down her cheeks.

“I can’t,” she whispers.

“You can.” Ithalia strains against Arranna’s force as the blades press harder over her staff. She digs in her heels, using all the strength left in her legs to push back. “There is still a place for you with the Inquisition. I spoke to Leliana. The Divine could pardon you, were you ever convicted of a crime. You could help us—”

“No!” Arranna refuses to relent. She increases her force. Green light splinters through the wood of Ithalia’s staff. She doesn’t seem to notice, eyes down, shaking her head. “I can’t go back. Don’t you see?”

“You won’t let me see!” Ithalia cries. “Just talk to me!”

Arranna’s mouth clamps closed. Her eyes screw shut, and a fresh well of tears slide down her cheeks. She shoves, and Ithalia shoves back to keep herself in place.

Her staff starts to splinter. Magic swells, ripping every scrap of energy out of Ithalia’s core.

Green light blazes across her vision.

An ear-splitting crack blasts through the cavern, throwing Ithalia backward.

Her back hits the ground first. Her head, next. She reels in the sudden dark, but hears another crash: a dull thud and a shower of shattered glass landing on the stone across the room.

Arranna.

Ithalia fights to stand, but pitches sideways and falls to her knees, every move sluggish with every scrap of her mana sapped. 

“Fenedhis,” she seethes through teeth slick with blood from her gums, then spits onto the stone.

If she cannot run to her friend’s side, she’ll crawl. One hand out, then knees dragged behind her. She tries to pull energy from the Fade to summon her wisp back to her left arm, but it flickers and dissipates before it can bear her weight.

Damn it all, she tries it again. Right arm, made of flesh, thrust out. Knees dragged behind. Left arm lit, then gone too soon. Again, and again.

When Ithalia is halfway across the room, the flicker of her failing magic brings Arranna into view. Reeling from the impact, hands empty of blades, looking frantically around at the broken glass. One of her feet lies at an unnatural angle. A gash down her temple pours blood down her cheek, but she is alive. Alive, and close, and unable to strike another time.

Ithalia forces herself to keep going. 

When Arranna locks eyes with her, she shakes her head again, palms faced outward. “No. Ithalia. Please. Leave. If you listen to nothing else I say— go.”

“I don’t leave those I call friends,” Ithalia chokes out, fighting to close this final gap. “You know that. You know what that did to me, to lose so many—so many, so fast. All because…”

All because Solas stood before an eluvian after a chase that took Ithalia across the waking world and Fade alike. All because he knelt with her as the achor’s magic pushed her body to the edge of failing, cradled her uninjured hand in his, lowered his face to hers, and tore a piece of her away.

Because that loss, and every single one after, kept her shut away in the highest reaches of Skyhold, only ever opening her mouth to speak to Varric or Dorian—for months . Because it was a kitchen maid who found her, the last Dalish elf left in Skyhold after the others left without so much as a word or a note.

Because after her limb, her life, and all Ithalia ever knew about the world evaporated, it was Arranna who listened to the wretched tale first. Who helped her pack her things for the journey to Val Royeaux. Who did not cast judgement when the departure, even after innumerable betrayals, still made Ithalia weep.

“I know,” Arranna says as Ithalia draws up in front of her. She lays a hand on Ithalia’s shoulder just in time for it to quake.

Ithalia lifts her eyes to meet Arranna’s, lacking the strength to sweep strands of her own pale blonde hair from her face. They are wet at their ends with the blood streaming from her nostrils, but her limbs have all gone hollow. No energy left to wipe the red from her mouth and chin.

She spends everything she has left on laying her palm over Arranna’s knuckles, just like she did that first night the whole story of loss poured from her lips.

This time, she gives not a story, but a plea. “So come home.”

Again, Arranna shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, Ithalia.”

Her lips purse, like she is holding back another flood of tears. With her free hand, she lifts a pendant to her mouth—one Ithalia can’t recognize—and kisses it, soft and silent.

Ithalia leans nearer, squeezing Arranna’s hand harder when she drops the locket back against her chest. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You can stop this. You can come back.”

Arranna’s lip trembles. Her mouth parts, just barely. She looks about to speak, until her eyelids begin to flutter.

A thin line of foam burbles out from her lips.

"No," Ithalia gasps. Arranna slumps sideways, and Ithalia follows, leaning above Arranna as she collapses onto her back. Ithalia groans with the effort to summon a new mote of light above her, then reaches to clear Arranna’s airway.

She freezes, mid-gesture. Arranna’s lips are black with poison.

Arranna’s jaw clamps as tight as it can go. Her body goes rigid under Ithalia’s, every limb locked straight.

"No! Arrana! Arranna! "

Arranna gives no answer. Her eyes roll back, revealing bloodshot sclera, and flutter quicker. More blood—Ithalia’s—drips onto her cheeks as their color drains away.

The motion stops as quickly as it started. Arranna’s head lolls to the side, and all goes still and silent.

"Damn it!" Ithalia cries, pounding the stone next to Arrana's lifeless head. Shards of glass cut into her fist. "Don't let this all be for nothing. Come back! Come back!"

But she is gone, someplace Ithalia cannot follow.

A scream burns up Ithalia’s throat. Arranna does not stir. She never will stir again. She will never hear the grief that echoes through the room. She will never see the tears running hot down Ithalia’s cheeks while blood leaks from her nose, her ears, her gums. She will never see the thousand reflections of this green-lit nightmare scattered across the floor, all the light caught in the fragments of the broken eluvian.

Ithalia cries out for a friend who will never come home until there is no sound left in the raw, aching ruin of her throat. She ignores the pounding of footsteps closing in toward her until someone’s arms hook around her middle. She kicks and claws against the restraint until two of her agents pull her from Arranna’s body.

They beg her to quiet, but it is no use. There is too much that demands to be felt, trapped for far too long before this.

They beg again, but it is too late by then. Something else has heard. Something the three of them barely survive.

But it hardly matters.

When Ithalia is hauled out of the dark by the last two surviving agents, no one is left to await them. 

And when her consciousness gutters out before she sees the stars, there is no one waiting in her dreams.

Not anymore.

Chapter Text

— The Anderfels —

— Nearly eight months since Fen'Harel's departure —

As far as mortal eyes can see, the Anderfels are bare.

Solas looks upon them from a particularly high vantage. There is a temple, one of the last of Mythal’s, high in the mountains, preserved better than most. It lies nestled between natural walls, kept out of sight of the other Evanuris millennia ago—and allows him, in this era, to be entirely overlooked by Weisshaupt and its Grey Wardens.

Once, the land below was lush, swathes of sunlit green greeting him each time he peered out from the temple’s uppermost chamber. Bundles of native herbs burned slow in all corners of the room, allowing easier connection with the Fade. In those days, the realm of dreams moved like the wind, inextricable from the sweet-smelling smoke.

These weeks, he has been keeping himself from the Fade with a daily dose of pungent tea, and there is no smoke to obscure the faces of the wolf mosaics glittering in the center of every wall. The lands below fell prey to two Blights while he slept. No sunlit grass will grow again—not at least until the next age, when even fewer ancient beings will be left to remember what splendor came before.

If mountains in Nevarra woke, as they had… it is all he can do to watch over this barren waste, to ensure it is not ravaged thrice. The Grey Wardens do not know what, at any time, might blacken the horizon outside Weisshaupt. They would stand no chance.

The search for his idol will wait, for now. It must.

Out of caution, Solas has gone so far as to sleep here. This temple’s vantage is unique, offering a view of all the Anderfels below, and easy scrying to Nevarra further to the east. No hour may pass with the Anderfels’ border unwatched—not until all eleven other mountains in Nevarra are confirmed to have fallen silent again. 

For days, this room is all he has known. His communication with his collection of agents centers here; he receives food from caretakers below; and in every hour he is not asleep, he watches the nothing at the base of the mountain.

It would be easy to pass through the eluvian in the antechamber outside this room, to find reprieve and more complete solitude in his Vhen’Theneras. But ease will not prevent their doom, and momentary lapses in discipline have proved catastrophic before.

Solas turns from the tall window at the far end of the chamber and faces the desk that sits bathed in its light. On it lays a map of Thedas, but drawn in two layers. The bottom layer, drawn on thick parchment by a local cartographer, shows the waking world. This temple in the Anderfels; Weisshaupt to the northeast; Nevarra southeast from there. The top layer he has drawn in his own hand, on parchment so thin it is translucent. He has mapped the Fade atop the waking world, as much as it can be mapped. The place in the Crossroads connecting to the eluvian in this temple; the thin place in the Veil around Skyhold; and north of the Nevarran woods, the Lighthouse lying in wait for forces that perished in the moment of the Veil’s very creation.

Markers symbolizing his agents are placed all over the map. Much of the smaller objects in the temple were lost to time, so he has made due with common coin. Sovereigns denoting twenty or more people in one location; silvers for ten to twenty; coppers for fewer than ten. He kept only so many coins as needed to signify his own forces, then gave the rest he’d had with him to the caretakers who arrived before him.

There are five sovereigns’ worth of agents in the Anderfels now, pulled from the surrounding regions. Before, many of them had been in southern Tevinter, northern Nevarra, and scattered throughout the Silent Plains.

When twelve mountains awoke and only one was brought to ruin, changes were necessary. It would be a waste, to lose so many to a horror he already faced more times than he ever wished. There is no knowledge to gain that does not already haunt him in the small hours. A week ago today, he sent word to every agent to flee as swift as they could, to not bother with hiding evidence of their camps.

All that remains is a single copper coin near the ruins of that first mountain, deep below the forest he set aflame. That, he tries not to dwell on for long, for he has a name to give to the copper. Arranna, and seven others with her.

There are letters here, a dozen sheets of well-kept parchment that has crossed Thedas thrice by now, in her rough penmanship. Accounts—the last of them—of Ithalia’s movements within Val Royeaux. Her slowly regained strength. The growing frequency with which she left her suite in the Orlesian Divine’s manor, her renewed involvement with the Inquisition’s actions under Leliana’s leadership…

And how, eventually, she stopped taking her meals in isolation. How, over time, she learned to laugh again. 

He can no more dwell on that single copper coin than he can permit himself to reread Arranna’s correspondence. The time devoted to either would be distraction enough to cost hundreds more lives. He has forced bitter tea down his throat each night to bar himself from seeking either in the Fade.

A knock pulls Solas’ focus away from both.

“Andaran atish’an,”^[1] he says to the closed door. Enter this place in peace —a greeting he ensured would be bestowed to all who reside here, regardless of rank.

The door opens, and a figure Solas knows well crosses the threshold. He barely recognized the face two years ago, during his time with the Inquisition—but he had known Vallem since the days of old Elvhenan, and Vallem had remained loyally in the Arbor Wilds’ temple to Mythal in the intervening millennia. His body had, anyway: Vallem, like Solas, had slept through the ages. Long ago, they had traded stories. They both felt the hollow left in Mythal’s absence, as so many had.

Vallem had asked to keep his vallaslin, vestiges of his lingering devotion. The rest at this temple had long since learned not to question his choice.

Solas often wondered, quietly, if the reason was partly owed to the shape of every elvhen’s first form—if Vallem mourned not only the All-Mother, but the life he had before temples like this ever broke ground.

The branches of Vallem’s markings hang low now, pulled down by his stern brows and stoic expression. “Ar-melana dirthavaren. Revas vir-anaris, hahren, ”^[2] he greets with a curt bow of his head. Then, meeting Solas’ eyes anew: “There is news from Nevarra, Wolf.”

Solas lifts a hand to beckon Vallem further inside. “Please.”

Vallem shuts the door behind him without needing to be asked. His simple robes are dusted with pale dirt at the hem—he has gone out of the temple, but not far. Enough to venture down the mountain’s lift system and receive news from a courier on horseback, but no further.

Judging by how his expression does not lift, the news is grim. Solas braces for it, watching the angles of Vallem’s face. His ears often redden with a lie, Solas remembers.

“The last of our forces have fled the Nevarran Deep Roads successfully,” Vallem begins, hands clasped in front of him. “There was only one casualty as this final contingent escaped. One life lost, out of eight total.”

No fidgeting hands, no red ears. Solas nods, turning his attention back down to his map. He has penned red lines near the eleven Blighted mountains left standing, and traces a finger over them now. 

“The darkspawn of Nevarra have grown in number, strength, and variety. One loss of eight…” He lets out a breath, making sure to meet Vallem’s eyes as he continues. “Any life lost is a great tragedy, but even so, this last party could have fared far worse.”

Vallem manages a slow nod. “That is true.”

This time, the tips of his ears darken. He shifts his weight, ever so slightly.

A lie.

Solas lifts his hands from the desk’s edge, allowing his posture to straighten. Clasping his hands behind his back grants the silent authoritative air he seeks, without needing to raise his voice or sharpen his words.

“Preparations should be made to commemorate her name, and the others'. Each who died fleeing those mountains will be mourned here. Their names will all be remembered.”

He would have suggested the same either way. There is power in mourning—power that united an entire village on the edge of a Nevarran forest in a singular purpose. Power that let them escape as one, no life lost when their forest burned under a sudden storm. The name Jovis, the memory of the man alone, sent a ripple through Nevarra that the Warden would never live to see.

The shift in Solas’ demeanor does what he wants it to: Vallem hesitates longer, the fingers of his clasped hands twitching restlessly. The truth will spill from his lips as readily as water from a broken dam.

“Ma nuvenin. As you say,” he begins. Then, “Only, this agent did not die to darkspawn.”

Solas stills. He schools his features into careful neutrality, studying Vallem’s own with renewed determination. This is not the first time he’s ignored his own rattled composure for the sake of decoding another’s. “If not darkspawn, then what was the cause?”

It is a testament to Vallem’s courage that he does not cast his eyes down, even as the line of his shoulders drops. “Arranna Ghislain took her own life with one of our pendants. She gave her life to protect our cause. Her companions went back for her body—what was left of it, after the darkspawn passed through.”

The apple of Vallem’s throat bobs, and Solas’s heart sinks. That is not the full story.

“Who else was in that section of the Deep Roads?” he asks. “Are they allied with the enemy? Venatori, perhaps?”

The answer draws a breath through Vallem’s nostrils.

“Reports from northernmost Orlais suggest it was the Inquisition.” 

Solas’s hands unclasp, falling useless at his sides. All the heat in the room seems to vanish. It is all he can do to maintain the impassive line of his mouth—even though he cannot help the bob of his own throat.

“The Inquisition,” he echoes, his own silent authority lost.

“Travelers along the Imperial Highway say the Inquisitor herself went into the Deep Roads that day,” Vallem continues, watching Solas’s eyes and nothing else. “But I do imagine it was for our intelligence, yes.”

Solas can do nothing but turn from Vallem, staring out the window to the barrens below with eyes unfocused, truly seeing nothing. Only there, facing away, can his brow crease as it aches to. He does what little he can to quiet the rattling breath that leaves his chest, folding his arms so Vallem will not see his fingers curl into the fabric of his sleeves.

Arranna Ghislain had once been part of the Inquisition, as he had. An unthinkable tragedy, to know she died looking into the eyes of one she’d called a friend.

Another thing entirely, for him to know those eyes better than anyone but Ithalia herself.

The truth of those waking mountains was one of the many he had kept from her, knowing what she would do with the truth if she learned it. How relentless she had been when they fought for the same cause, facing Corypheus and mend the Breach. How persistent, to fight her way to him on the edge of death, the anchor— his anchor—sapping the last of her strength.

Now, apart, when he has goaded the worst of her anger, when that same relentlessness has reduced the forest of their dreams to ash…

Few beings alive could be called so stubborn as to deter Solas from the Fade entirely, and yet—

He’d kept himself from it. From her. 

For weeks. There would be no way of knowing if…

“The Inquisitor—the Inquisition’s forces,” Solas starts, cursing his own lapse, “They were found alive?”

The words hang in the air a moment. Vallem’s approaching footfalls scarcely make a sound.

“Half their number,” he says, closer, just on the other side of Solas’s desk. Time stretches too long as he pauses to draw a breath. “The Inquisitor and two others were reported to seek healing in a village nearby. They left two days later, southbound.”

Solas tries not to let out too long a breath, posture kept still as stone.

Alive. Alive. That is all he needs to know—yet it is so far from relief.

Slowly, he uncrosses his arms, forcing himself through the motion of clasping his hands behind his back once more. He turns, erasing all expression from his features, and dips his chin in a nod.

“Very well. Ma serannas,^[3] Vallem. It will bring Arranna's companions comfort to find is counted among our fallen when they arrive. All deaths are worthy, when they are given freely and in service of our cause. Hers should not be forgotten.”

“Ma nuvenin,” Vallem answers, easier this time. He undoubtedly noticed Solas’s lapses and the uncommon turn of his back, yet makes no show of it. Only a small, knowing smile has crept across his face, brighter in the light of dusk streaming in from the window.

“When are her companions due to arrive?”

“They sent word that reached us not an hour ago. I suspect they will arrive past dark.” Vallem’s gaze flicks down to the table and its coins, then back up. “I can arrange the funerary proceedings and any accompanying words you might offer for tomorrow.”

Solas lays an absentminded finger on the last copper coin in Nevarra. Then, a low echo. “Tomorrow.”

“I will leave you to your evening, then, Wolf.” Vallem steps away from the desk, leaving Solas’s peripheral vision. He looks up in time to catch Vallem’s final short bow. “Dareth shiral.”^[4]

“Dareth shiral,” Solas manages, more a habit than conscious farewell.

By the time the door shuts behind Vallem, his hands are braced on the side of his desk. His head hangs; unfocused, his stare lands on Nevarra. Around, the walls and their wolf mosaics squeeze all the air from the room.

How had Ithalia known? 

He had set the Nevarran woods ablaze with lightning that could be dismissed as natural. His agents had been in the Deep Roads weeks beforehand, absolving their connection to the storms happening on the surface. No Inquisition agents had touched that portion of Nevarra, the Chantry’s jurisdiction all but ending at the Orlesian border save for the occasional Revered Mother sent north.

Solas traces the route from Orlais to Nevarra and back again, shakes his head, grits his teeth.

The eluvian network should have enabled his agents to flee the Deep Roads faster then the Inquisition could reach it. Every move the Inquisition has ever made, Solas has preempted through the network of the Vi’Revas. Everywhere they have set their sights, the Dread Wolf has had eyes first. 

But somewhere, he had slipped. The Inquisition caught wind of the fires in Nevarra, and Ithalia—

Ithalia had charged into Blighted lands to grasp at all Solas left unanswered. She’d stared into the eyes of the last elf left in the Inquisition—her friend —as the light within them died. The friend he had planted like a seed before her, only to cut away the bloom.

He knew what it would cost. How could he forget? He’d laid awake with the knowing every night after Corypheus’ defeat. The pain the truth would cause had hung over him like an executioner’s sword far longer, since the moment her wry smiles first doomed his resolve.

What else could he do, but leave a tether behind? What else, but keep for himself some way to reach out to a pain he’d known the shape of for so long?

In mourning, they both spoke the same silent language: a quiet that filled spaces to bursting, that drove daggers in under the ribs, that always threatened ruin. They’d laid it at each other’s feet without a word shared between them—and for so long, those nights were a refuge, their importance never spoken aloud lest that sanctuary be lost.

He hadn’t told Arranna to do anything but listen, for it was all he knew Ithalia would ask of anyone. The letters, and their frequency, were her idea—one he took for granted. And now?

With nothing left, will Ithalia mourn in silence unable to break? With nothing left of him to burn, what will her grief take from her?

Solas’s eyes fall shut. His shoulders slump. His mind reaches, and finds nothing.

Nothing, because he has barred himself from the Fade to keep his focus intact. No—not his focus, but his pride.

He could almost laugh.

He would never have known her loss, if he had not asked for Arranna’s name. In cutting her away from him to guard his own losses, he had closed himself off from hers.

Solas lays a finger on the last copper coin in Nevarra and slides it to where all the others lie: en route to the mountains of the Anderfels, far from Ithalia, far from the blight that might be hours, or days, away from swallowing her whole.

He would never hear of it. If he did, it would be hours, days, months too late.

Ithalia must mourn a loss of his making, and she must mourn it alone. The only way to intervene would be…

Solas looks up into the silent room, the three wolves staring at him from the walls surrounding him. He pads across the floor, reaches out, and turns a latch. No sound comes from the other side.

Beyond the door, the antechamber is small. To one side, a mosaic of Mythal stretching to the ceiling, candles laid out on the floor before her visage and enchanted to burn eternally.

To the other, an eluvian—the only one in the temple. It leads to the Crossroads, into greater danger than exists in this remote corner of the Anderfels. None would approach it from below.

In the space of a blink, he could be gone. In the space of an hour, he could be anywhere. Not too close, and not for too long. Enough only to taste the silence. To see her limbs intact, to count her bruises at a distance—

Solas pauses before it, mere steps away from the glass.

When had he ever left so easily afterward? What more of the world would he throw away, just for the extra minutes sharing Ithalia’s horizon?

His traitorous feet carry him closer anyway. His hand, heedless of the rest of him, lifts toward the pane.

A touch, and the mirror’s surface would ripple. A thought, and Ithalia would light the room, as visible as if he were truly there beside her. The Nevarran night would limn her in silver under the moons. The ostentatious rooms of the Orlesian Chantry would paint her in fire and gold.

He would know, in an instant, whether tears stain her cheeks as they had when he turned away from her the last time. Whether she lay in impossibly heavy quiet, shoulders shaking wordlessly as they had when her clan’s fate hinged on the Inquisition’s scarcely trained militia.

Whether his name graces her lips. Whether she brandishes it like a curse by now, as countless others before her.

Years apart from Skyhold, and Solas knows the truth: a solitary glimpse of her would give rise to a thousand wonderings. An instant would become an hour. An indulgence would become a vice.

Solas’s fingers fall onto the cool surface of the eluvian. The pane ripples, and a different sight illuminates the antechamber. The rosy, unblemished ground of the Crossroads, pieces of its rock floating in the iridescent skyscape beyond. Motes of shadow creep in from out of view, coalescing into a shroud.

Within, lines of teal light take the shape of tendrils that closely match a form Solas once harbored, before this one. A broad helm forms atop the figure, six eyes lighting in holes around its head.

“Wolf,” it says, a voice that echoes from the Crossroads as much as it echoes between his ears.

“Caretaker,” he murmurs, quiet enough that no one outside the antechamber will hear. “I would ask... a favor of you.”

“It has been some time since you have needed.”

A sigh leaves him. “I know.”

“You do not wish to return to this place.”

“Not… yet.”

The Caretaker hums. “You are wounded. It is old and it is new.”

Solas opens his mouth to speak. The Fade speaks first—or perhaps it is the Caretaker, answering a need unspoken with a memory brought halfway to life.

A breeze from the Crossroads passes through the eluvian and whispers over Solas’s cheeks. Laughter blooms under the shell of his ear. The ghost of Ithalia’s mouth brushes over the line of his jaw. The warmth of her palms splays across the skin of his chest. 

The air in the antechamber cools, crisp as an autumn that has long passed. The candlelight swells until it burns as bright as an old rotunda, the scents of parchment and spindleweed and home flooding his senses until the room dims again.

There is no answer Solas can give the Caretaker that would take less than the night to convey. Instead, he relents. “You know her, then.”

“I know you.”

At the base of the two steps leading to the eluvian, Solas must look up to meet the Caretaker’s six eyes. “There is a piece of our old home,” he entreats, “A piece that I broke off in haste. I seek to know… if she has tried to reach it.”

It is no surprise when heat licks up his sides. It is a memory—embers caught on his face, smoke in his lungs, unbearable waves of blazing heat everywhere at once—that clings to him each night and leaves him drenched in sweat come morning. The heat, he expects. The candlelight replaced by dark, then flashing lightning-bright, he understands.

They are the premise: the hurt he asks after.

But the name that reaches him is not his.

‘Arranna!’ calls a voice that splinters. A sob— her sob—shakes inside Solas’s shoulders. His chest caves with an ache that does not belong to him. Not at first.

But all around him, the antechamber falls to darkness, lit by faint flickers of yellow-green. Ithalia speaks from everywhere, from nowhere. The taste of her blood coats his lips. The last dregs of her energy sit cold in his middle.

‘You can,’ she pleads to someone that is not him.

‘Just talk to me!’ she begs of someone who vowed never to do so.

‘Come home,’ when Arranna had done precisely that, on Solas’s orders.

‘Could you forget any of this?’

How hard had he wished to? How many times, before he saw the futility in it?

‘Don’t let this all be for nothing.’

How often had he longed to tell her the very same?

‘You know what that did to me, to lose so many—so many, so fast.’

“I…” Solas’s fingers curl against the eluvian’s glass. He forces his gaze to stay on the Caretaker, lest he shut his eyes and drown in wounds of his own make. “I understand.”

“The skies of the Lighthouse remain clouded, regardless of her absence,” the Caretaker says, and the rest of the Fade’s answer falls into place.

The storm had not abated when he cut his tether to Ithalia away from the Courtyard because the storm over the Lighthouse was never hers. The Fade answered a thought Solas never voiced. He expected the wound her storm would inflict.

He expected to be struck, for he expected pain, and the Lighthouse responded in kind.

Solas’ own guilt had struck down his corner of their forest—and he cut it all away. Left with empty air, he fled. Chased new purpose in Nevarra. Called down lightning to cull a different forest without the forethought to call stormclouds in advance.

Lapsed, and lapsed, and lapsed. Mistake after mistake, until the grounds of the Lighthouse lay in pieces, until a village in Nevarra lay razed, until Arranna lay lifeless in Ithalia’s arms.

“Shadows loom over the Crossroads while you are gone,” the Caretaker continues in Solas’s silence. “The spirits seek aid. If they do not find it, all the Fade is in jeopardy.”

“I know,” Solas says.

“You are sorry.” The Caretaker pauses. "Yet you will remain."

“And I will be there as soon as I am able.”

"Their world is yours. Both, once, were ours." It contemplates a moment. “You will mend this.”

“No others can.”

Chapter Text

— The Fade —

— ??? —

Ithalia tumbles into the Fade before they reach the surface, her bruised and bloodied mouth still trying to shape Arranna’s name.

In her dreams, it is dark and sickly green. Stone closes in on all sides. Shards of glass rain down—and up—from everywhere, slicing all they touch. Ithalia runs, only to flee into a forest that is burning, none of its trees familiar.

Silhouettes writhe and wail behind the walls of fire, matching Arranna’s shape. Shadows twist upward from the ashen ground, speaking in Helaine’s voice. Ithalia tries to blink them away, but they do not go.

They only come back different, wearing the faces of a dozen friends found then lost, and beg her to stay. She opens her mouth to say no, to say she's sorry, or anything at all—but outside the forest she dreamed in for so long, the wolf’s eyes never far, her mouth struggles to shape the words.

Without the woodland—without the way it wrapped around her, easy, made for her eyes and mind alone—she does not dream so lucid as before. She can scarcely gather her thoughts enough to move through the Fade, now.

Perhaps it is better she cannot speak, cannot act. If she could, she knows that what looks like her love and mourning will swiftly twist to spite and rage. The pain in her chest will turn to rot, and she will drown in a void of her own make.

For an eternity of roiling, tumbling dark, the most Ithalia can do is turn away from the eyes of everyone she’d ever loved, to close her mouth and pray she wakes.

Chapter Text

— Nevarra —

— Nearly eight months since Fen'Harel's departure —

It takes an age, but reprieve comes. Slowly, in fits and starts, and never without pain.

From the moment she cracks open an eye, Ithalia keeps that pain buried deep beneath her ribs. A litany of healers ask after her hurt, and she speaks of her bruises, her depleted mana, her residual limb. She falls in and out of sleep and spends what little energy she has to dry her sweat-dampened sheets before the healers take note.

That does not stop Mallorick from raising an eyebrow at the subtle wave of heat from his place in the bed next to hers. He lays atop his own covers, not shivering despite the infirmary’s open windows letting in the autumn wind. The shirt he wears must belong to the healers: a loose wool tunic left unbuttoned to his sternum. A book lays splayed over his chest, neglected for now. His dark hair falls in slight waves to his shoulders, no longer pulled back in anticipation of battle.

“Rough sleep?”

Ithalia hasn’t been awake long enough to hide the puzzled frown pulling at her brow. She turns her attention away instead, to the healers at the far end of the long room, the half-dozen empty beds past Mallorick’s lined neatly along the same wall. 

She tries not to imagine her half-dozen agents all dead, tries to believe they’ve all gone instead, maddened by their boredom and nothing else.

When that fails, she turns back to Mallorick, making no effort to inject levity into her tone. “How often do you dream? How often do you remember the truths of the Fade?”

His curious look sharpens to an amused smirk.

“Fair point.” He lifts the book from his chest, dog-ears a page, and sets it aside. Shifting to sit straighter, he lets his gaze trawl the length of Ithalia’s form, still hidden under covers. “But I know cold sweat when I see it. I know a poor attempt to hide it, too.”

The healers turn toward the sound of their voices. Three of them—one a mage, one an alchemist, one a robust surgeon—crowd Ithalia’s bedside. They coax her out from her covers; they make a grand show of presenting her a new shirt; they turn away like blushing schoolchildren when the Herald of Andraste bares her bandaged flesh.

Theirs is but a small Nevarran village, they say. No great changers of history ever visit—not in life, at least.

All three look at her too long, questions on their tongues, never brave enough to ask. They have never seen Ithalia, and yet they understand as keenly as those in Val Royeaux that there is an inexplicable distance between mortals and that which they call divine. A line drawn by their reverie that, once created, can never again be crossed.

Ithalia knows the look, having seen it hundreds of times by now. They struggle to reconcile her as both. Mortal and divine; famed myth and vulnerable flesh.

They look at her amputated arm as though all it can be is legend, and never simply painful. And because she must not dispel their belief, Ithalia holds her head a little higher during the last of their examinations, determined to ignore the needling ache in fingers that haven’t been part of her for months.

When they are gone, she keeps her posture, though Mallorick’s grin has only widened.

“Count yourself lucky that your nightmares are dulled by your distance from the Fade,” she tells him, chin carefully lifted. “This is no more than that.”

He laughs, and she keeps her eyes from narrowing.

“Ah, of course.” He moves again, swinging his long legs over the side of his bed. Setting his elbows on his knees, he stoops to just below her eye level. When he studies her face, he must look up into it. The humor that guarded much of him falls away, replaced by a far more contemplative crease in his brow, far gentler creases at the corners of his eyes—that is, until his lips pull into another crooked grin. “You know, you can hide it all you like, but that won’t change what you really are.”

Ithalia angles slightly backward. The healers’ stares were less invasive. “And that is?”

“Wounded.”

She holds up her purpled arm in gesture, knuckles still scored with pink lines where shards of the eluvian sliced her skin. “That’s to be expected in the Deep Roads.”

“I’m not just saying so because I carried you to the surface—you’re welcome, by the way.”

“You…”

She lost the memory to the tumbling dark of the Fade, but in truth, the tunnels were where the Fade first took on its darkness. The light of her magic guttered, but she tried to keep it alive anyway—first for Arranna, and then for any hope of fighting the darkspawn that followed her cries.

The third time she called for her wisp, her head clanged against the metal of someone else’s breastplate. The world spun. It felt as though her knees and chest were caged in iron. Their torches were lost. They needed a way forward.

Mallorick’s breastplate, she realizes now.

He told her, over and over, to stay awake. She did until she couldn’t, and then the nightmare swallowed her whole.

“Anyone can see that you’ve earned your fair share of scars,” Mallorick says now, so much quieter than then.

He pays no mind to her arm as he says it. Only her eyes, which have gone greyer each time she’s looked into a mirror. Grey, like they used to be, before she was something so far removed from herself. Like they still are, under the dying remnants of the Anchor's magic left in her irises.

Ithalia keeps her jaw from clenching.

“Then why do Chantry scholars paint me unblemished?”

This time, when Mallorick laughs, she catches the dimples indenting either side of his mouth. “If the Chantry started preaching the truth—that anger makes change—what’s left of the world would fall to shit in a heartbeat. But you already know that, don’t you?”

“And if I do?”

“Then I pray the world never sees the stuff of your nightmares, Herald of Andraste.”

Chapter Text

— Orlais —

— Eight months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Alone in a carriage to Val Royeaux, the thunderous roll of the wheels over pocked ground keeps Ithalia half bound in the Fade, half tied to the world of waking. She stutters on the edge of deep sleep, night over night. 

In one realm, lupine Rage and frigid Despair rake claws of fire and ice over her skin, vying for her heart to drink down what festers within. In the other, Arranna is dead, dead. The warmth of her mirth, banked. The steadfastness Ithalia clung to, gone for good; nothing and no one left in its place.

After hours and days of travel, no sight other than biting autumn rain and cold, opaque fog, she stops being quite so able to discern between the two.

Mallorick is gone, eastbound rather than south, the Marchers rather than Orlais, but that does not mean Ithalia travels alone. Per Inquisition standard, there is a driver braving rain and fog, tugging the reins of stubborn horses; there is a healer riding behind, permitted in the carriage thrice daily; there are half a dozen followers who have ridden half a mile behind since Ithalia crossed the Minanter into Orlais, seeking Andraste’s praises or other platitudes, and a scout who ensures they never come too close.

Inside the Orlesian border, once more in safest domain, the Inquisition’s banner flies as they go, whipped in the wind of the last autumn storms. The standard glazes with ice each night, soaked in the day’s ride.

It is the Inquisitor the people expect to emerge from the confines of the carriage—even the driver, the healer, the scout. That is what Ithalia must craft her face into each time the small door opens: jaw raised to a cutting angle, posture straight, face carefully devoid of anything belying weakness.

The moment she enters Val Royeaux is punctuated by a slap against the glass. It shatters half a dream, sending Ithalia’s heart galloping frantic inside her ribs.

It is a splayed hand, clumsy in its affections. The palm of a commoner against the side of a carriage bearing the Inquisition’s insignia: the closest many will come to divinity.

Another hits the side of the carriage, the face outside blurred far past recognition thanks to the lace curtain affixed to the carriage’s small window.

Words rise to shouts outside: many in praise, and then a handful in warning. A small tide of guards, always a little too late to fend off the first of the worshippers—one tiny move among many in Emperor Gaspard’s Game, as little as he seems to want to play it. The subtlest warning: do not stray, for it is my guard that keeps the fanatics back.

It is predictable. Laughable, to the Game’s more seasoned players, says Leliana each time she’s witnessed it.

Alone in the carriage—loving hands drumming against the wood, swords singing as they leave their sheathes in warning—the only consolation Ithalia can offer herself is her one remaining palm splayed over her fast-drumming ribs.

A deep breath in, a deep breath out.

Jaw raised to a cutting edge, posture straight, face devoid of anything belying weakness.

*

She is back in the Divine’s manor for hours, more than long enough to unpack in the silence of her own apartment within, before Most Holy summons her to its courtyard.

The plush of her bed—while nothing close to home—was hers to sink into for a precious few minutes before. Long enough for it to almost, almost warm.

Then she is up again, bare feet on cold wood before she tugs on socks and boots, before her rain-wetted coat settles on her shoulders once more. By the time she is ready, the attendant who summoned her is gone, replaced by a single guard who follows her down the austere halls.

Her father taught her, once, to watch the nooks and crannies of her surroundings, to track the shadows in corners and crevices and watch for movement.

All Ithalia sees is where Arranna isn’t.

An uncommon mercy, these past years, that there was ever anyone to share amiable silences with in the library, to debate with down the walkways and up the stairwells, to confide in under the towering stained glass windows.

It was one thing, to fill those spaces with her own bitterness. Anger—that she had chosen to go, that he’d taken her, as he took so much else—reduced Ithalia’s fractured heart to kindling, but warmed her all the same.

It is another to know that now, she is gone because she is dead.

That because Ithalia pushed, because she would not relent when Arranna begged it of her… that Arranna felt her only recourse, under an onslaught of pleas and stammered pardons, was to take her own life.

That this distance Solas enforces between himself and Ithalia is somehow worth the blood, the lives, it has cost. A lesson, it seems, that she didn’t learn well enough the first time.

Her stomach curdles, and she wrenches her gaze forward. If she does not keep it from the shadows, the tight line of her jaw will break. Her features will crumple, and her composure will fall to ribbons across the floor.

She cannot risk it with a guard trailing behind her, another two at the courtyard entrance, and a handful of staff flitting about the manor. It is the Inquisitor they expect to see here; it is the Inquisitor they must find.

No telling, after all, which one of them might flake away next, following honeyed words she remembers too well—only to sell their secrets, freely handing over their lives.

Drawing up her hood, she enters the courtyard to more needling rain. It is far more ornate than Skyhold’s ever was: larger, with a fountain in its center instead of a stone well; bordered and shaded by little apple trees whose leaves have fallen and died and been swept away; flowerbeds finely manicured in the summers, now ripped up in anticipation of winter; hedges marking its two entrances, always trimmed into sculptures befitting the Divine’s whims.

Nugs, for Most Holy Divine Victoria.

She—Leliana—stands not by the fountain as she usually does, but under a copse of bare trees in the far corner of the courtyard. With her back turned, all Ithalia sees is the hooded cape affixed to the back of what she knows is a long, slender coat: a shapeless white shroud trimmed in black and gold, the rays of a sun emblazoned at the hem.

When Leliana turns, Ithalia still flinches at what she knows to expect: a broad span of crimson embroidered down the lapels of the coat, gold-bordered roses that still look like spattered blood to Dalish eyes, no matter how far removed.

Above them, a smile pulls at Leliana’s mouth. Her cordiality is impeccable: a gentle, welcoming air offset by the high, gore-red collar of her Chantry-inspired coat.

That she betrays nothing else means this is a test. Leliana is weighing Ithalia’s resolve, and a flinch has already found her wanting.

“A pleasant afternoon, Inquisitor.” She hums a laugh. “Aside from the rain. That, I apologize for.”

Ithalia can’t shake its damp—nor its sting. “You couldn’t have predicted it.”

“I am Divine,” Leliana counters breezily. “I can try, can I not?”

When the next bout of musical laughter leaves her lips, Leliana flicks a glance to the courtyard’s entrance, where Ithalia’s guard has stayed resolutely behind with the others. The trio talks among themselves, now.

Understanding dawns. The coat, the laughter—they were not for Ithalia. They were to create a wordless impression, to set a tone that the guards might convey later in their chatter with the other staff. Three degrees of separation, and all Val Royeaux will know the Divine and the Inquisitor spoke this day—and they will tell stories of the way their Inquisitor shrank before the Chantry, if she is not careful.

When Leliana turns back where she had been, white cloak sweeping behind her and concealing both her expressions and subtler movements from any onlookers, Ithalia takes the chance to follow.

What awaits, blocked from view by Leliana until now, is a brazier. Small, darkened by age—and enchanted, Ithalia can feel, to keep its kindling guarded from the rain.

“My condolences,” Leliana says lowly, no bob of her head to indicate across the courtyard that she is speaking at all. “I know Arranna was a friend.”

It is the first time she has used the word in the better part of a year.

That cannot be a coincidence. She is waiting to see what the word— friend —will do.

She knows what transpired in the tunnels. She must.

“She was one of the People,” Ithalia says, every line of her form kept painstakingly still, “The last one, the only one, to follow the Inquisition to Val Royeaux.”

Her lip will not tremble. She will not let it, no matter how her ribcage caves around the loss.

Saltwater stings her eyes, and she lets it burn there rather than blink.

“I thought we might honour her with an hour spent in the courtyard. It is the closest I could find to an oak grove—there are so few trees in Val Royeaux at all—but I am told that in lieu of oak or cedar, mourning beneath any shade will do.”

Ithalia can’t bring herself to nod. Can’t bring herself to do anything but stare down at the brazier.

It takes a moment to realize that Leliana is speaking of Dalish tradition, stripped down to its barest components because she understands nothing more of it. The rest of the specifics—of her faith—lay in a heap so far behind Ithalia now, she has lost the shape of what it meant before it hurt.

“We did for my grandmother, yes,” she says, quietly. It was a lifetime ago. Another world. A Keeper chiding her gently, encouraging her now-First to memorize the rites. A mother’s comfort when she couldn’t, not perfectly, not at first.

“I was told there would be sun, days ago. Evidently, all we stand under now is shade. But I have always liked these apple trees.”

“Will the Inquisition hold a service?”

She knows the question is out of place. She feels the burn of Leliana’s gaze, and still doesn’t meet it. Ithalia knows how Leliana will answer, but selfishly—childishly—dreams of a better one anyway.

“No,” Leliana says, just as expected. “There will be no Orlesian service, because there there is no one to mourn her in Orlais. She brought no family. Her clan are no more in the Dales. They have moved, north and west, to the Anderfels.”

“To…” The weight of the name—man, god, neither, both—sits like a stone in her throat. She barely works it down with a swallow. “I see.”

“I am sorry.” Leliana angles closer, enough that the edge of her coat veers into Ithalia’s periphery. Her voice takes on an almost mothering softness. “To hold a service in the open, no matter how small, no matter if it were within Val Royeaux or deep in the Dales, would attract the wrong attention. The Inquisition is in a… compromising position.” She sighs, quieter than the rain. “I was never so adept at phrasing it delicately as Josie.”

There it is: the truth of the courtyard visit. The Divine’s real wish: the first hint of well-deserved blame.

“You’ve received word, then.” It isn’t a question. Ithalia knows she has—the question is only from how many sources.

The way Leliana clicks her tongue suggests it is many, indeed.

“What you found was an abandoned camp, and the one agent dispatched to destroy evidence left behind. Namely, to come for the note you retrieved. Seven others survived, and made it to the Anderfels. The world may not know the full story of a former Skyhold cook who took a place on Divine Victoria’s staff as a maid—but our adversaries do. They have also doubtless seen the Inquisition’s insignia all the way from the Minanter to Val Royeaux, given the swiftness and scope of their movements.”

What hangs in the air is the unspoken truth: that Ithalia was fool enough to give chase. Naïve, to hold faith the friend she knew was somewhere inside Arranna still. No better than a child, to try and dredge a dead bond—no matter how sure she’d been that it once was real—from Arranna’s chest.

And she died for it.

“It was… efficient,” Ithalia finally concedes, forcing the words around a sob that tries to strangle her. “To inspire them to guard their intelligence with their lives.”

She looks up only once she is sure no tears shine in her eyes, and finds Leliana paused halfway to reaching for her.

“He will expect you to mourn,” she says, equal parts sympathy and warning. “We know this of him. You must remember: he has watched you mourn before. What you gave him then, he will search for now.”

What she gave him was a night spent laying with her head on his chest, worried tears wetting his shirt in silent waves. Some hours, peaceful; others coloured by soundless sobs shaking her shoulders, his flat-palmed hand easing up and down her spine until the quaking calmed.

‘Ar dirthalen mal’enfenim,’^[1] when she told him it was her clan, that for all the mistakes of the Dalish they were each a treasure. ‘Ar dirthalen mal’enfenim,’ again, when she cried that this was family, that she would raise sword and magic and lay down her life if she could, that she was so impossibly far away.

‘Numin,’^[2] he told her—and now her every tear has been tallied, leveraged.

Ithalia purses her lips to keep her features from faltering, forcing herself to hold Leliana’s gaze. “What would you have me do?” 

“Stand under the trees today, bow your head, feel what you will,” she answers, and Ithalia fights not to look at the brazier again. “Tomorrow, make for Kirkwall.”

The word hits her like a blow.

“Kirkwall,” Ithalia echoes, her own voice far away.

She hadn’t had an hour to lie still. Her coat hadn’t had time to dry.

She hadn’t found a way to say Arranna’s name aloud again.

“We anticipate that is where Solas will move next. Rumours are circulating that his idol may indeed be trapped inside what remains of Kirkwall’s former Knight-Commander, Meredith Stannard. If we act swiftly, your proximity to it will prove advantageous.”

“I’ll be an obstacle.” Ithalia tries not to let the word chafe. “They won’t come near me—he’ll see to it they don’t, like before.”

She waited over two years under a newly mended Breach. His resolve hadn’t broken in all that time. He hadn’t come near—not once—until death’s specter loomed close, too close.

Then, he’d started a war so she’d find him in the fray, all to watch her unravel with adoring eyes.

Leliana angles nearer. Ithalia knows it is well-meant, in Leliana’s silent way: as gentle as a hand laid against a pane of glass. I’m here, the gesture says, from as close an emotional distance as the Divine and the Inquisitor can manage under watch.

In a time before, the show of support would have accomplished something other than the grit of Ithalia’s teeth.

Leliana waits for some unspoken sign from Ithalia. Evidently, it doesn’t come.

“It will be announced that you will participate in a service in Kirkwall’s newly restored Chantry on the eve of the solstice.” Before Ithalia can bristle at the notion of it, this faith that is not hers and yet belongs to her, Leliana continues, “Then, it will be announced you have taken ill the day prior. You will be in the company of the acting Viscount of Kirkwall, but you will not be in Hightown that night.”

“I won’t be with Varric, either.”

She knows the routine, by now. It is why the Inquisition lies with the Chantry these days, not in scattered fragments across Thedas.

A proper distraction, she will be—and not be—in no less than three places at once. All the Inquisition will play a part in propping up false narratives, and the Dread Wolf’s forces will chase themselves in circles.

A single piece on the board with the force to reroute all the others.

“It won’t be what he expects,” Leliana says.

It never is, so long as she makes no move on her own, so long as she stays clear of everyone and everything she once loved.

“Under the Divine’s orders, you are to go out. Have fun, where you can find it, under whatever guise you must take. Most of those not at the Chantry will not be so steeped in Chantry business as to know your face, anyway.” Leliana hums another laugh, but the smile she summons to her features is tight with concern. “I haven’t forgotten your nameday, Ithalia. Take what of it you can for yourself.”

“Ma nuvenin,”^[3] Ithalia replies, too flat. She remembers herself a moment later. “As you say.” 

“Before…” Leliana quiets a moment. “I understand that Clan Lavellan, in the act of mourning, lights braziers for its fallen when there is no body to bury with an oaken branch. I’ve provided kindling. If you wish… the spark is yours to light.”

Leliana makes to lay a hand on Ithalia’s shoulder.

Ithalia takes a step back on instinct, further away from Leliana’s worry-pinched brow, further away from this brazier with no one’s ashes to give name to.

“I should pack,” she says, unable to feign even a scrap of warmth, unable to keep the barbs from her tone. “The journey to Kirkwall is long, and I have a lot of ground to make up for.”

All she can do is go, burying the worst of her bitterness before it can escape through her teeth. 

Jaw raised to a cutting edge, posture straight, face devoid of anything belying weakness.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The chill of winter sets into Ithalia’s bones and remains for weeks of travel.

All down the Minanter, she stays belowdeck, laid low by the roiling currents. Her stomach stubbornly purges itself of its contents thrice daily. The spray of saltwater against the sides of their ship seems to coat her in brine. 

When she lapses into the Fade, nameless terrors dog her steps. She wakes shaking each time, slicked with sweat and seaspray. She wakes clutching a locket like the lifeline it has become.

It always takes a few minutes of Dorian’s daily lamentations to slow the crash of her pulse. For weeks, he has been the first one to greet her, and the last to bid her goodnight.

He needles her, and she summons laughter, stretches a smile he cannot see across her cheeks. He tells her it is alright to speak, and she nods in silence. He offers consolation, and she swallows bile.

To him, she is still the Inquisitor betrayed, forced to hand the organization to the southern Chantry, bereft of better options.

‘Are you going to try insisting you’re not exactly that, again? ’

Ithalia blows out a breath that frosts in a cloud above her. Winter grips every inch of the Orlesian  vessel, and the hammocks belowdecks are no exception. Jaw kept tight, she avoids betraying the chatter of her teeth. “Will your fretting stop if I don’t?”

‘I’m afraid not.’

“We’re at an impasse, then.”

She waves a hand, and the air around her warms. It doesn’t quell the damp. It doesn’t bring the ship into a sudden springtime. It stops the cloud of frost, and warms her clothes but not her bones.

She cages the thought behind her teeth. She asks Dorian about the weather in Ventus.

It is all she allows.

*

A more well-equipped vessel with a cabin befitting the Inquisitor sails a day ahead of hers. It is important that it appears Ithalia is on it. It is doubly important that she is not.

An hour before it docks, she is ushered into a lifeboat, paddled over, hoisted up with a buoy as if she were drowning. She steps off the Inquisition’s proper vessel later that afternoon, while the one she’d been on sails onward, bound all the way down the Minanter toward Antiva. By the time she steps out from its cabin, she has fought her hair back into a braided crown. She wears a cloak befitting the Inquisitor, left over from her first diplomatic event at the Winter Palace in Orlais.

There is an adoring crowd awaiting the vessel. For them, Ithalia raises her right arm, waves, shines a smile.

Her left, she has been advised to keep under the cloak where possible. Better that she remains at least quasi- divine in the eyes of the public. Better they believe anything of her, save for the truth that she can be wounded.

The acting Viscount greets her ship and offers a handful of waves and theatric bows of his own. “Esteemed Inquisitor, here to grace our grimy shores.”

For Varric, Ithalia’s smile warms to something genuine. “Viscount.”

“Acting Viscount.” His smile quirks up on one side, dimpling a cheek, scrunching the scar on his nose. “Don’t let the title stick.”

It sticks anyway.

Titles always seem to.

*

While she walks Kirkwall alone—her sole task on behalf of the Orlesian chantry, just enough to keep the Dread Wolf’s attention half on her—Ithalia lets her fingers brush her locket, even if it means the cold nipping at her knuckles.

She circles the same argument for what feels like the tenth time.“I’m only the Inquisitor when the Chantry requests me in its halls.”

‘Which is always, the last time I checked.’

“Not this week.”

Dorian sputters through the locket’s connection. ‘Solstice week? Really? And they let you get away with that?’

His laughter warms her, and he laughs often at what he sees as her absurdity.

“The Viscount did,” she tells him, not for the first time since she docked.

‘I have to give our Master Tethras a little credit, then. I had no idea he played the Game that handily.’

Ithalia laughs, and another puff of air clouds in front of her face. “He doesn’t. He just doesn’t suffer it, either.”

Heading northeast through Lowtown, the water surrounding the ports comes into view, grey and choppy, unwelcoming even a a distance. A cold haze blankets everything in Kirkwall—during all four seasons, Varric often grumbles—but this close to the solstice, the gloom is offset by string upon string of little lanterns crisscrossing over the streets. 

All over, warm light spills out from frosted windows. There are endless crowded abodes in Lowtown, and this time of year, each is full of chatter and mirth. No one is bored enough to look out to a cloaked Inquisitor moving through town on the edge of nightfall.

Thanks to Varric’s coin and powers of persuasion, not even Kirkwall’s city guard seems to ever look her way.

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

“What what means?”

‘Your freedom, my dear. You might’ve forgotten the sensation: for the first time in four years, it seems no one needs you.’

“That’s not…” Ithalia trails off. That is precisely what it is: the restlessness dragging her for the third cold-weather stroll of the day. For so long, she’d filled her days with a constant balancing act—one that doesn’t exist, here in the cold Kirkwall fog.

‘You see it now, don’t you? Good. So: what will you do with this newfound power?’

“Would you do anything other than sleep?” In truth, that’s where she’d been headed: back to her small inn in cloistered Hightown, far from busier streets, where no building promised a draft.

Dorian’s laughter echoes loud between her ears. ‘Given your track record with sleep? Yes.’

“Fine,” she grumbles, drawing to a temporary stop. “What would you suggest?”

‘Oh, I don’t know. What would you suggest to someone whose heart has been in stubborn tatters for three-quarters of the time you’ve known them?’

That stings, a cold sinking into her middle that has nothing to do with the fog. Ithalia’s silence stretches longer than she means it—and then too long to recover from.

‘Look,’ Dorian entreats. ‘All I’m saying is… when is the last time your bed has been warm?’

The winter solstice, Ithalia almost says, three years ago.

But that’s not entirely true. The ground by the border of Crestwood had been warm, in its own way. Before that, Wintersend, a stolen second behind a crumbling wall in the Arbor Wilds.

And therein lies the flaw in her thought. There had been heat, but it had been fleeting. She and the Dread Wolf danced around something unnameable—or something neither ever summoned the courage to name. Always, they walked an unspoken ledge.

Neither ever leapt.

If someone keeping her bed warm implies keeping it warm ‘til the dawn? If warming her at all means with skin laid bare on skin, hearts splayed wide open?

“A lifetime,” she answers at last, arms wrapped around herself to stave off the cold. “Are you happy?”

‘No. But neither are you, I think.’

*

As it turns out—entirely unsurprisingly, says Dorian—there is a pub less than five minutes’ walk from where Ithalia stood. The Hanged Man, its sign reads; above it, lacking all semblance of subtlety, a woodcarved silhouette of a man hanging from his ankle sways in the biting wind. Varric mentioned it, Ithalia remembers, though whether he paired it with, ‘If you do nothing else, see where all the stories come from,’ or, ‘For the love of Andraste’s warm bosom, do not go see where all the stories come from,’ she can’t seem to recall.

Whatever the case, it’s warm. Heat floods over her when she opens its door. It matters little that the shift in temperature comes bundled with the aromas of all manner of sweat and refuse.

Before Dorian can remark, Ithalia slips the locket off her neck, stowing it in one of the interior pockets of her coat. Far enough from skin that she won’t open their connection unintentionally; far enough from prying eyes that it’s in no danger of attracting a pickpocket.

This, she’ll do alone, if there’s anything to be done at all.

She steps in from the foyer, rounding a corner into the main parlour. With a slow inhale, she lifts her hand and lowers her hood, straightening her posture out of habit. Chin lifted, she searches for the eyes that always seem to find her. The doubtful, the downtrodden, sometimes even the doomed—they all seem to seek out their Herald, expecting something Ithalia cannot name, much less give.

No hush falls over the Hanged Man, though. The patrons, enough to fill the bar nearly to bursting, keep their attention on their own tables. Swells of boisterous laughter don’t fade. A bard’s bawdy tune—raucous and humorous, nothing like Orlais—goes on unhindered in the corner. Also nothing like Orlais.

Only one head lifts: someone seated at the bar, drink already in hand. Tall; broad; a sweep of dark hair pulled back in a knot. Different, with his armor replaced by a cable-knit sweater.

Mallorick, letting a grin spread across his lips.

The seat he gestures to beside him is one of the only ones left in the Hanged Man. That, Ithalia tells herself, is why she moves to it. Ease of access. A familiar face.

She can almost hear Dorian purring, ‘Familiar?’ into the locket she is not wearing.

Mallorick dips his chin and grins as she slides onto the seat: an old, rickety thing that groans under her every move. “Ithalia.”

She affords him only a sidelong look. “Now you remember.”

He awards it a smile, a hum into his glass while he takes a sip. “I wouldn’t forget a name,” he says on the back of an exhale, “Not when I’ve had good reason to learn it.”

“Not so loud—”

“Ah, right,” he scoffs. “Because everyone knows your name, is that right?”

Ithalia answers with a dark laugh of her own. “You make everyone, I suppose.”

“So modest, Inquisitor. A model of humility.” He pivots in his seat, facing the rest of the Hanged Man behind him with a sweeping gesture. When none look up, he raises an eyebrow at her. “Go on. Order something, see if the bartender falls to their knees in reverie.”

A frown pinches her lips. “I never said I enjoyed the attention.”

“No?” Elbows set on the bar, Mallorick’s voice lowers to a rumble, a wicked twist to his mouth. “Just mine?”

His eyes, a conniving amber honeyed in the lowlight, pin Ithalia in place. She shifts, watching the barkeep. Considers a drink, then backs down from the challenge.

“I needed the quiet,” she says, keeping her eyes away, sitting up a little straighter in her seat. Her voice stays low, her chin down. “Away from the Chantry. This Chantry.”

“This Chantry, she says!” Mallorick laughs, back arched in her periphery. She turns as he settles, the flush of drink rosy across his cheeks. “Tactful as ever. Please: no one visits. Not even after the—what did they call it? The grand remodeling.”

Ithalia can’t help the bitter laugh that echoes his. “I wouldn’t, either, under normal circumstances.”

The words turn her blood colder. Normal circumstances—yet here she sits, forever bearing the wounds the Dread Wolf inflicted upon her. Bereft of her vallaslin; scorned by the clan that would’ve made her its Keeper. Normal has not graced Ithalia’s field of view in years. It is as distant a prospect as the stars themselves.

Mallorick watches the liquid inside his glass—amber, two pebbles of ice melted almost to nothing—as he swirls the contents. He smiles to himself.

The patron on Ithalia’s other side nudges her with a wayward elbow. Mallorick’s attention darts up in time for nothing; the patron turns away, engrossed in other conversation.

Then, something dawns on him.

“Shouldn’t you be giving a sermon right now? It’s a week ‘til Solstice, isn’t it?”

“Something like that. Most track the days with lit candles in the days leading up.” Ithalia looks him over: the shadow of untended stubble at his jaw, the ease with which he holds his drink, the way nothing about her parts his lips with awe. “You don’t strike me as devout.”

Another snicker; he downs his drink, breathes out sharp. “Don’t I?”

“No.”

He bends a little closer—close enough for the sharp note of liquor to flood her nostrils, chased by his own warm scent. 

“I could be,” he says, quiet enough for just her to hear. Then, flashing teeth: “I know more of the Chant than you’d guess. My great-aunt is a Revered Mother, in fact.”

She laughs as he does. Their breath mingles, and suddenly she is aware of every inch of space between them. Of Dorian, whose locket is tucked safely away, and what he’d say. How he’d delight, seeing her so close to another.

How there are so, so few left who would ever argue otherwise.

Ithalia can’t voice any of it. Instead, she keeps herself perfectly in place, still as snow in the dead of night. Raises an impassive, calculating brow. “Truly?”

A hand runs along her thigh, the barest brush of knuckles over fabric, and her careful stillness burns to ash. A shiver runs up her spine—one Mallorick does not fail to notice.

She can feel his eyes on her, heat scoring over her cheeks, even as her gaze stays transfixed on his hand, now running down the length from hip to knee.

“Heart that is broken, beats still unceasing,” he recites, careful as a whisper and yet the only thing she hears in this crowded room, “an ocean of sorrow does nobody drown.”

Her gaze lifts—to meet the challenge, she tells herself, to square her shoulders and raise her chin—in the same instance that his palm lands above her knee. She waits for some faraway cry of disdain across the room. Some protest from someone—anyone—here.

But left on her own, her face burns under his easy, half-lidded smile. The tips of her ears set themselves aflame.

Her knee angles toward him without her meaning to. The barest lapse in composure; a damning break in her veneer.

Dorian’s voice echoes faintly within her. When was the last time your bed has been warm?

Before she can answer, Mallorick goes on, refusing to let go of her gaze.

“You have forgotten, dearest Inquisitor: within my creation, none are alone.”

Never—never—did Ithalia imagine the heat that would roil below her navel at the Chant, of all things. Not as the pride of the Dalish she’d been before; especially not with what she’d become since. Yet she stares at the mouth purring something between praise and blaspheme, fighting to think of anything other than the ache building in her center.

“You… presume to be the Maker,” she starts. She moves to straighten again, but all it does is shift her beneath Mallorick’s touch, forcing his hand to move an inch over her—and spurring another wave of traitorous warmth. “A bold choice.”

“Of course not,” he answers, too easy. “But do you presume to be anything but alone, hiding in a bar rather than your usual Chantry this close to Solstice?”

Averting her gaze from his taunting smile while avoiding the coaxing bun of his stare means looking down. Down, just in time to watch the arc of his thumb, confounding a body that hasn’t known gentle touch for years. 

Three snow-covered Solstices. A lifetime, she told Dorian, minutes that seem hours ago.

Months, since she’s dreamt in the forest that caged her for so long.

“You presume a lot,” she says, too soft and slow to be anything near protest. She sets her hand on his wrist, then fails to move to pry him from her thigh. “Assume, as well.”

He stills, waiting for her action. For the end.

When it doesn’t come, he hums his satisfaction. 

“Maybe I’m just perceptive,” Mallorick answers. “Tell me I’m wrong, Ithalia.”

“I…” She finds his eyes crinkled at their corners, smug in his presumed victory. Unyielding, when she meets them with a glower. More arrogant still, when that glower relaxes, a scowl softening to petulant defeat. “Fine.”

He laughs—just enough for her to hear, just enough for another flash of teeth—and she loathes that here, now, it is music. That anything, these days, is preferable to the hymns that line every street of the Andrastian world. The stares at their elven Inquisitor, somewhere between adoration and open suspicion. The unspoken demands that she never bend, lest she break; never falter, lest she ever be known as fallible.

Mallorick’s hand slips away. More than everything else, Ithalia hates the cold that comes creeping back in its absence.

“If you want to be anything but alone tonight?” he murmurs, bending nearer as he rises from his seat. His hand skims down her arm, then something metal lands in her upturned palm. “Have a key. Leave a quarter-hour after me, walk three blocks straight, then four left. Stop at the last house on the lane. Keep your untouchable reputation intact.”

Chapter Text

Solas

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The Crossroads are a paradox. A miracle, for their survival through calamity. A certainty, when it comes to their doom.

They both exist in and act as a divide between the sundered worlds of waking and Fade. They are functionless and essential simultaneously. As such, they are constantly devoid of life both spirit and mortal; yet there are always lives to be saved, spirits to be coaxed back from a dangerous brink.

Today, it is Contemplation that ambles behind him. It is fitting that, of all spirits, it is Contemplation that manages to amble without manifesting feet. But Contemplation knows something Solas endeavors to learn—and will be safer here, with him, than the deeper reaches of the Fade.

Soon, the same will be true of all spirits. But that is a far more delicate matter, and not for Contemplation to know.

“Where is it that you wish to go?” Contemplation asks.

Solas lifts a brow, but does not turn. Soon he will reach one of the Caretaker’s floating docks. “You do not hear my intention?”

“I do!” Contemplation pipes up excitedly. The thrum of its joy warms between Solas’ ribs. “I also know intentions change when spoken. The words make them real.”

Real, he knows, in the way spirits mean it. Immutable. Unchangeable. Chained to one possibility.

“The Vhen’Theneras,” Solas answers.

“The house of dreams; the heart of Light,” Contemplation chimes. That, Solas flicks a smile toward, a chuckle filling the air despite himself.

In the moment he is turned away, a boat materializes from empty air, the Caretaker at the helm.

“Dweller,” it greets as Solas steps into the vessel, for that is the only name that matters here. “Where do you wish to—ah. Of course. The Vhen’Theneras?”

Here, the lightness in Solas’ center, the faint intention to nod, is all the answer that is needed. There is relief in that, even now: that there is still one place where he can speak as he used to. There are still some who can hear the song between all things, who know the melody without needing to ask.

His shoulders relax. The boat glides over wind that does not move. Time bends around the boat, cut like water beneath a ship.

In a blink, they go further than a mortal mind could understand. The boat pulls toward a new dock, slowing to a halt. An entire journey, begun and ended in the space of a single breath.

This new dock is one of three connected directly to the Vi’Revas, and the Vhen’Theneras by extension. They are the most stable, of all that exists in the Crossroads: a well-tended garden, compared to all that lies beyond. Once, an army dwelled here, dedicated to the preservation of these wonders as they once were, before much of the empire crumbled in one horrible moment. Then, after, a smaller force remained. Friends, they called themselves, who will see this through to the end.

Solas steps out; Contemplation drifts behind him.

“It is as they remember it,” it remarks. It feels the sting before Solas can reply, and recoils in a way he can feel in his own bones. “Or… not?”

“It is—in some ways.” He needs not voice his evidence, only look upon what is similar. The trees fashioned of gold, practically singing with their magical charge; the turning skies of the Fade beyond; the tread of thousands of soldiers and refugees, still faintly worn into the stones below.

“And in others…” Contemplation hums, and its awareness moves. It feels another spirit nearby, like the charge that hangs in the air before a storm. Unmistakable strength emanates not far from here: the first and highest good to manifest, and the first deceit that laid the Dread Wolf low.

It is no coincidence that all that surrounds that splintered piece of her is eternal winter.

“That has changed,” Solas answers curtly, moving toward the Vi’Revas with hands clasped behind his back. “It is an old wound now, determined never to heal. Any contact would…”

“Hurt,” Contemplation supplies, with no small hint of sorrow.

Solas, before ascending the final steps leading to the Vi’Revas, spares a last look down to that wintry grove he has not entered in years.

“Fester,” he amends, then slips through the Vi’Revas’ cool, rippling pane.

At last: the Vhen’Theneras—and with it, peace. Held fast within the Fade, it exists in its own carefully maintained sphere. No spirits visit that are not invited; no weather clots the vast horizon without Solas’ request.

When Contemplation drifts in behind him, it relaxes, many ethereal tendrils floating lower. The song in its core—a hum heard not with the ears, but in one’s bones—lowers.

The Lighthouse is the perfect place to learn from a spirit like Contemplation, whose memory will run deep, but whose fear would cause chaos elsewhere in the Fade. It is rare for spirits to possess such clarity in their recollection—but Contemplation is of the same family as Wisdom, and it is its nature to be precise.

Precision is what Solas needs, when inquiring after the blight. That, and something to ward against Contemplation’s pain.

He leaves the eluvian’s darkened chamber, ascending to the library, and smiles to himself when Contemplation’s song rises in pitch and fervor. The vaulted room is nothing short of spectacular, in the most literal sense. It is the last that remains of the Vir Dirthara’s true majesty: bookshelves that float in a neatly arranged ring, their path spiraling fifty feet high. Murals that hum with encased memory line every wall in the Vhen’Theneras’ central tower, peaking at twice Solas’ height. Above that, every tome known to mortal minds, and half again that number that no mortal has ever dreamed.

This is the Fade, though. It is not the decoration that matters, nor the arrangement. It is the promise of all that is known on every page. The echo of elation at new discoveries, drawn in ink. The warm bloom of acceptance, from every person throughout history who read one of these tomes and felt understood. The heat of rising debate, from all those who clashed with any of the millions of ideas contained in this room.

“The old songs once sang the same,” Contemplation hums, rising past Solas. Without corporeal limbs, it is a collection of tendrils formed of pure magic. Four eyes glimmer like stars near its crown, wider and brighter with awe. “But these…”

“They are songs, still, but of a different kind.”

Contemplation soars, and its exultation fills the library. “They are thought and idea. They are prayer and proclamation. Pieces, little pieces—but ours. Theirs, ours, many and all.”

They are home, to one so close to Wisdom.

“Home,” Contemplation echoes, mirroring the thought.

“What of yours?” Solas asks. Not home, for spirits of the Fade hardly have a concept of such a thing, but… “The place where I found you. What became of it?”

Contemplation draws still. “The dreams grew teeth. Teeth, and something else.”

The dreams. Not the dreams of sleeping mortals, not the spirits who dwell in the Fade—the dreams that were imprisoned, millennia ago. The ones that stay caged in a pocket of the Fade out of reach of everyone but Solas himself.

The nightmares of beings too tall and vast to measure: sundered titans. The terror that, trapped, would become the blight.

“Terror,” Contemplation echoes again. Then, it pauses. Lowers, until its tendrils brush against the library floor. “Home—your home, when home was old, when home was alive. Terror. Something else first, then terror, now nothing else.”

Despite the dread, Solas smiles. “You understand when. There is a now, a before, and a yet-to-be in the world of waking. Do you know soon, or recent?”

“I have talked to many dreamers. I know both.”

“What do the dreamers say of the terror? How recent are its claws?”

“Soon. Recent. Thousands of years of scratching, and finally the gate begins to buckle.” It pauses. “The gate is yours. The lock is yours. Yet you would…?”

“Yes,” he answers. “It is what must be done. A wound that must be mended—a dam that must come down, so what surrounds it can heal.”

Pivoting, he looks upon the rest of the Vhen’Theneras: twin curved staircases leading up to a well-adorned landing, polished gold rails casting the entire second floor in a warm glow. How many roamed these halls, once, who fought for something better—

“What is many? ” Contemplation asks behind him.

“Many?” Solas straightens, hands clasped behind his back: an old habit. “You know of many: a great multitude.” He allows his eyes to close, his focus to center on that old army. So many gone, far too few left. All deserving of a better world than he left them.

“There is one. One army.”

“Within it are many spirits.”

“Then what is one?” Before Solas can redirect his thoughts, Contemplation’s song shifts: quieter, slower. “One face. One friend. Dead. Gone. Ir abelas. But you say it so much.”

Something in him goes cold and still. He tries in vain to clear his mind, to wipe all thought of her away—but Ithalia remains there, hurt and bleeding. When last he saw her. When she’d been broken.

One friend. Dead. Gone.

He’d tried to clear his mind of it for weeks.

“One,” he starts, unmoving, “is… infinite. One face; one set of eyes; a whole world within. One path for every one life, yet endless sprawling branches. One friend—countless memories. All held in one body. All kept in one dream. And when one is gone, it never returns the same way.”

“Ir abelas,” Contemplation says, mirroring an old inflection from a memory he won’t bury.

“A tragedy each time. Worse, when a rare spirit is lost.”

“You want this? For the one—the all—to… go?”

“Of course not!” His voice booms. Echoes. Solas takes in a shuddering breath, steeling himself. “But if it is not done, more lives, more spirits—more infinite—will be lost. It is necessary.”

“What is necessary? ” 

“It—”

“The songs are sundered, the land dead. Yet still it breathes, sleeping, never to wake. It breathes, and it is theirs. It is home.”

That strikes home: a knife in the chest that Contemplation feels, then quiets toward. Silence hangs in the air, only the inaudible song thrumming between them for a long moment.

“They do not know what was lost,” Solas says at last.

“Those who do know are at peace. They are dead.”

It is true. But that alone is not enough. It can’t be.

“What other recourse is there?”

“Ma ghilana,” Contemplation says, in someone else’s voice. Someone that should not—could not—be here, and yet refuses to leave Solas alone for long.

He turns, and she is there: her lithe frame, in old armor. Her sheet of ashen blonde hair, carefully braided out of her face, slightly disturbed from the diadem she removed that day nearly a year ago. Sunlight, not from the Lighthouse but from memory, limns her silhouette. She is everything she was then: regal, warm. Fractured, cold. Desperate, yet unyielding.

Ithalia’s brow—Contemplation’s, but unmistakably hers—pinches like it used to, bending the scar above her right eye. Her left arm drowns in green light, fading out before his eyes. Her right reaches toward him, just like it had the last time they were close.

It is Contemplation in her shape, but that does not change the ache spearing through him at her sad smile. The sting of the softness of her every word.

“This is what you want, is it not?”

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

A quarter of an hour hasn’t felt so heavy in years. Worse than anything, this time, there is no reason for it to. No part of the world is ending. No sky is breaking apart.

This precipice is the smallest she’s reached in what feels like a lifetime, but still, Ithalia’s stomach writhes in knots.

She runs her hand over the pocket where her locket resides. It would be so easy to reach out—Dorian probably sits on the edge of his seat in Minrathous, understanding what her absence for this long must mean. No doubt he’ll sing her praises, shout down her apprehension, or both.

Instead, she lifts her hand away. Raises it, calling the barkeep’s attention; orders a drink when, again, she isn’t recognized.

It would almost be easier if she were. An excuse, for why she left, rather than—

Why should the very name of the act give her pause? She hadn’t indulged it since before her time in the Inquisition. It wasn’t sacred before; it isn’t sacred now.

It’s heat. That’s all. A break in the tension. A glimmer of something other than her many, many nightmares.

She swirls the contents of her glass: a wine common in Wycome. She won’t find any guidance swirling in their depths, so she drinks. Tips her head back, welcoming the warmth that washes through her, the faint haze between her ears. 

She won’t call it courage. It wouldn’t matter if she did.

Ithalia stands. Leaves five more sovereigns than she has to, even if that’ll give her away after she’s gone.

Ducks into the wintry cold once more, heart in her throat, to find a scrap of warmth.

*

Ithalia raises her chin before she knocks.

This room is part of a number of suites built into a repurposed house, every entrance outdoors. The midwinter wind bites at every inch of exposed skin.

But now is not the time to be some small, cowering thing, flinching from the cold.

The door clicks open, and Ithalia tries not to melt into the warmth that floods out. Mallorick looks down at her with a raised brow, one arm braced on the doorway while the other holds the door ajar.

He is clothed just the same as a quarter hour ago, hair gathered back the same way. Yet here, every line of him is softer, the dimensions of him all too real without a crowd of drinking patrons or the dangers of the Deep Roads to distract her.

A dimple indents under his stubble. “You have a key, if I recall correctly.”

“Yet who would I be if I stormed in unannounced?”

A low laugh rumbles out of him. He pivots back, lifting his arm away from the doorway and gesturing inside. “A quite welcome guest, indeed.”

His gaze stays on her as she crosses the threshold, passing just inches from him.

Inside is a single, spacious room. On the left wall, a wood stove burns. Two chairs rest near its warmth, a little rug underneath them. They’re where Ithalia shrugs off her cloak and the fitted coat beneath, in the absence of a coat rack. While she does, the door clicks shut.

When she turns afterward, Mallorick stands just two steps away. The lowlight deepens the hollows of his cheeks, just like in the Deep Roads. Bathed in the dark, warm glow, though, his dark eyes turn molten. This time, his appraisal of her is far from quick, and far from businesslike. His is a slow appreciation, not examination, of her every inch.

She waits for him to pause. To look upon her arm and hesitate, to call a retreat. Instead, as his gaze crawls back up to greet hers again, he takes a step nearer. Rather than his tall frame straightening as it had every time before tonight, he keeps himself bent near her. The broad ridge of his shoulders, relaxed as though prepared to reach for her at a second’s notice.

His every breath, languid and indulgent, as he nears enough for her to hear its rhythm.

“So,” he murmurs, less than an arm’s length away, “What would the Herald wish of—”

Ithalia knots her fist in the collar of his shirt. Drags him down to her. Closes the meager gap between their mouths, and tastes his tongue in answer.

She catches his gasp against her lips, then the rough sigh that warms her burning-cold face. Mallorick leans into the sudden contact—but just as his fingers ghost over Ithalia’s hip, she lets him go.

From inches away, she watches his face. His eyes crack open before they blink, once, disoriented. Ithalia waits for a sign of shock, of protest; for Mallorick to take this last chance to step back from this edge.

All she gets is a laugh, hummed low in Mallorick’s chest. Rather than recede, he closes the meager gap between them, hand trailing over the hip she’d just taken from him. From under a half-lidded veil of dark lashes, he issues a challenge in a single amused look.

“This is what you want? Something rough?”

Ithalia lifts two fingers to the unlaced front of Mallorick’s shirt, her touch feather-light down his sternum.

She tells the truth.

“I wouldn’t have taken your key if I didn’t—”

Two hands close around her hips. One fluid motion turns her sharply and brings her body flush with Mallorick’s. An insistent step forces Ithalia backward as Mallorick angles forward. One step, another, another—

Her shoulder collides with the wall, and before she can suck in a breath, his mouth is on hers in a fresh wave of heat. The world narrows to the clench of his grip in the soft of her hips, the scrape of his stubble, the sting of his bite into her lower lip.

Her body bows against his. She tugs the tie from his hair and winds her fingers in its dark strands, but Mallorick snares her wrist. He brings it up above her head, pinning it to the wall with little effort. In the same breath, his opposite hand snakes up from her hip, calloused palm snaking under the hem of her shirt.

The touch is so simple, so easy. After so long starving, it sets Ithalia ablaze.

She sighs into Mallorick’s mouth, and her parted lips are all the permission he needs to taste her tongue again. This time, an ache builds low in Ithalia’s core, escaping in a little sound up her throat.

As though answering a question before it can form, Mallorick pins her squirming hips with a thigh shoved between them. She tilts upward, into the breadth and warmth of him, a needful charge mounting in her center. 

An old need, reborn as something else—but no less maddening.

Years have left it sharp, a hunger that consumes. Ithalia fights against Mallorick’s immovable hold, and finds herself craving victory more after every second of defeat. With her hand pinned, she has no way to snare him but by catching his bottom lip between her teeth, dragging a groan from his throat.

And it is not enough.

His palm slides down her wrist, her arm, then tantalizingly along the curve of her breast. Freed, Ithalia grabs not for his hair, but his shirt, clawing for the hem until it’s up past his shoulders. She scrapes skin, careless at first, then indulgent at the ragged breath it evokes.

Mallorick’s hands leave hers only to pull the garment off entirely, tossing it aside. Her hand roves over the expanse of his chest, the thin field of dark hair across the center, trailing down.

When next he hums his amusement, it rumbles under her touch.

“What is it the Chant says?” he murmurs, voice thick with the want pressing insistently against her thigh, “ An unquenchable flame? All-consuming, and never satisfied?”

He indulges a kiss before she can answer. Their tongues brush anew, rekindling heat that Ithalia could fall into, if she just—

She shoves her palm against his chest, breaking their union. Grips Mallorick’s wrist, before he can think to move. She slips out from the wall, around his broad frame, pulling him in tow.

Only when he follows of his own accord, gaze affixed to her swaying hips, does she release him—and only to bare herself to him, leaving her own shirt abandoned on the floor. Walking backward, it’s her turn to lift her brow in a challenge.

“If you’re so keen to prove yourself devout,” she says, lowering herself onto the room’s plush bed, “Then go on: prove it.”

If it’s worship he wants, she’s been molded into an answer for that for years, now. A statue for the reverent; an altar for the repentant.

But Mallorick doesn’t kneel. He descends over her, palms indenting the mattress on either side of Ithalia—a wordless command to move back and invite him chasing after her. 

This is a dance she knows well from her younger years. Clumsier steps, then: fumbling hands greedily throwing clothes to the wayside, eager mouths clashing hard enough to send teeth against teeth. Hot tongues and stammered words, never an escape long enough to sink into.

She came to the lip of it, three solstices ago. Slower. A moment she would have lost herself in, in a kinder world. Every step measured, until they weren’t; until time froze, until the Dread Wolf pulled away to keep the truth of him hidden, until the cold came rushing back in his absence.

Ithalia smothers the thought with Mallorick’s mouth. Her fingers wind in his hair, keeping them locked in place long enough for the world to fall away again. His hand rakes up her thigh, heightening the charge in her middle until it eclipses everything else.

Further up, he makes quick work of her belt, then the buttons below. She tilts her hips up to meet the fingers that delve down her slick center, then sings her praises into his parted mouth when they push inside.

Every rhythmic motion is the promise of oblivion. Nothing matters but the slow bend of two long, thick digits, every new angle a new revelation. The world could end here, with her every nerve alight—if not for the need for more, growing more urgent by the second.

Ithalia arches into Mallorick, a moan trapped between their warring mouths. The cruel bend of his fingers threatens to drive her over an edge, far too soon. It’s all she can do to gather a little focus, concentrating on retaliation.

Her right hand, made of flesh, stays rooted in his hair because that’s all it can reach.

Her left coalesces into being, a thousand tiny motes of green light forming the memory of the hand she lost months ago. With it, she reaches down, palming the swell of Mallorick’s want through the strained fabric of his trousers.

“Wicked thing,” he growls against her jaw, driving his hips down into her touch. Angling his wrist, he moves his digits deeper in her, drawing out a gasp so deep her focus falters.

The light of her hand sputters, her head swimming with wine and want, and then the glow is gone.

She could manage it, once—motes of light slowly circling trees while another’s kisses peppered down her jaw, arms wrapped savoringly around her waist. Conjured snowfall swirling around a heated embrace on an otherwise starry solstice night. Years ago, she could gather enough focus to light the candles across that old rotunda while mouthing ‘good morning’ against smiling lips.

Tonight isn’t about indulging illusions.

“I want you,” Mallorick says near the shell of her ear. “The real you, wretched and divine.”

Another push, and he drags his fingers down the most sensitive place within her. Ithalia barely manages to trap a cry behind her teeth, eyes screwed shut as her head tips back. The scrape of Mallorick’s stubble runs down her throat, followed by something sharper.

Bared teeth, his breath hot on her skin.

Just like—

Ithalia clamps her hand around Mallorick’s wrist. Locks her eyes with his, the moment he looks up. Pulls his fingers from within her, hooking them in the waistband of her trousers instead.

Another kiss, and he slides her trousers down her hips, raking greedy hands along her smooth contours. In the same breath, she makes quick work of his, finally wrapping the hand he wants around his swollen cock.

The sound he makes, half growl and half surrender, is a victory.

A victory, and too alike a memory.

Tonight isn’t about what is gone—what she burned to ash months ago. Tonight, Ithalia runs her hand down Mallorick’s shaft, thumb pressing into tender flesh on her way back up until another rough-edged noise escapes his mouth. She bears down over him, knee brought up to plant on the other side of his wide frame, ready to take what she’s been starved for.

A low laugh, a wide palm on her shoulder, and a shove sends her back against the mattress. A curtain of hair obscures the entire room in sudden dark. There is only the scratch of stubble and the scent of Mallorick’s breath: sharp liquor and mint.

“No—let me, Your Worship.”

His knee drives one thigh apart from the other—far, then farther, to fit the width of his human frame over hers. Mallorick is hot against her slick center, a hand brought down to run his cock teasingly down her middle until they’re aligned.

She sucks in a breath when he drives inward, but it isn’t enough. His width pushes at the bounds of her until her teeth sink deep into her lower lip. Forging deeper pushes a sound—half a moan, half a whimper—up from her chest.

Mallorick’s mouth finds her ear, and every whimper becomes a low, desperate groan. The pain of the size of him sweetens until she cannot tell it from pleasure, both warring for purchase in her nerves.

He moves through her like the tide: slow, at first, an ocean taunting the shore. Ithalia arches back, and his palm closes over a breast, her nipple pinched between forefinger and thumb. Every inhale becomes a gasp. 

Ithalia’s hips rock in time with his, a rhythm to pull him down deeper, release him slower: the shore begging the sea for all the storm it can bring. Every loss, every night spent in silent grief, surrendered to the harsh ecstacy of now. Let it all drown, under the rhythmic crash.

For too long, she dreamed of this: shaking breaths against her ear, warmth bearing down over her every inch, heart hammering against another’s. So long has she been parched that she demands all this moment can offer: every hurt, every thrill.

Everything dreams could never give.

She pushes Mallorick’s hair from his brow, curling a fist in the strands. She forces their gazes to meet, then lock. To see the now, and only the now, before her eyes: the sweat beading across his forehead, the tight set to his jaw, the flush across his stubbled cheeks.

His eyes rove over her face as he moves above her. His features falter, lips parted, a moan surrendered inches from her mouth.

“You’re—fuck.” An arm hooks under Ithalia’s knee, pulling it higher. Mallorick pushes deeper—deeper, against the bounds of her, enough to tangle Ithalia’s fist even tighter in his hair. His other hand knots in the strands of hers, now, tugging her head back to bare her throat.

The noise Ithalia makes—the high note, or the way it breaks—sends a shudder down the length of him. Mallorick savors the sound against his lips before his kisses find her jaw anew, and before his teeth trail down.

Every scrape is sweet pain, but the now is gone from her sight. She shuts her eyes, banishing every memory that threatens to surface, burying them under raw feeling. Ithalia fights to bring Mallorick in closer, deeper, harder: hips bruising against hers, teeth carving over skin scraped raw. Fingers raking hungry over every soft place of her until nothing, nothing is left unmarked.

She dreamt of this.

Years of lonely silence, always this release swimming at the edge of her thoughts.

Now, she pulls them both toward its ending: a racing rhythm, harsher breaths, her heart hammering against another’s. Her own surrender to her body’s quaking as his starts to tremor; a cry, when his every inch goes tense.

A last word surrendered against her skin:

“Ithalia.”

Chapter Text

Solas

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

“Ithalia—”

No, Solas reminds himself. Not Ithalia: Contemplation, standing in his library where it had been floating a moment ago. Embodying a memory of the last time Solas glimpsed Ithalia’s face in the physical world, the last shocks of the Anchor’s magic tearing through the remains of her arm.

The last second he looked upon her. Her hand—Contemplation’s—flakes away in a wind that isn’t here, never quite falling apart. Her hair spills over her shoulders, as it did not so long ago. So much is plastered to her brow. She had hidden the fever for weeks before Val Royeaux, but the powder that hid her flush had all gone when she’d found him.

“But this is what I heard you ask.” She takes a step toward him, slow. “You wish not for Contemplation, but for me.”

It is hard to hide his song from it. That is the sole trouble with spirits: their knowing means his heart betrays him every time it bleeds. Turning away to hide his face would do nothing to deter Contemplation now.

And it has been some time since he has seen any version of Ithalia, even in dreams.

In dreams, she is so far beyond his reach. And now?

“I wish nothing,” he says, willing himself not to close the gap between them. “You need not change. I ask only after the blight.”

Contemplation does not change. It cants its head in perfect replication of a memory. Its voice softens, just like Ithalia’s hours after they physically stood in the Fade. When he shook, and she held his tremoring form against hers until the world stilled again.

“Banal nadas, you said once to the Nightmare,” it says with her same softness, “Nothing is certain, those words mean. But then…” A frown. “You turned away from me.”

“Because it falls to me to fix the damage,” Solas retorts, firm and unyielding. His hands ball to fists at his sides. He grits his teeth to better hone his focus.

If Contemplation has grasped that quiet hour and the moment of his departure, what else lies in its reach?

It must be shut out of his thoughts, and to do that, he must allow himself no access to them, either.

“Those words aren’t what you want to hear,” comes even softer from her lips. Ithalia—Contemplation—takes slow steps toward him. “They don’t address these wounds you see, the ones you forced yourself to walk away from.”

Her armor, like then, is stained with the blood of dead Qunari. It hides the fact that she was bleeding, too. Yet even on the edge of death, she holds herself with shoulders straight, always impossible to turn away from.

Did she really think he would have chosen to, given any other choice?

“Vhena—” He cuts himself off, taking a step backward, rubbing at his temple. “Contemplation…”

This is not real—not in the physical sense. She is not real.

Yet by the time his eyes crack open again, her hand is almost at his cheek.

“You see?” she whispers. He freezes at the proximity. At her eyes, so close, irises practically glow with the dying magic of the Anchor. At her smile, parted just the way it used to. “Your voice may ask after the blight, but ma vhenan, there’s something else that haunts you.”

When her fingers meet his cheek, they are warm. Real, but only in the way that sends his flesh heart racing.

The rest, he turns from—barely. “What I did was what I must.”

Now, Ithalia’s fingers graze his neck. “But?”

Contemplation’s, he forces himself to think, Contemplation’s touch, Contemplation’s breath by his ear—but it is too late. The shudder has already gone down his spine.

“But nothing,” he growls, harsher than he needs to, wrenching his shoulder away. He forces himself into motion, out of her reach. “There is nothing left—”

Across the room, on the opposite side of the sofa, he hears the little sound in her throat. The choked noise that always followed a sharp intake of breath.

That always preceded the first tear down her cheek. First, when her clan wrote they were in danger. Again, after they fled the Nightmare, when no one else was left awake to watch her crumble.

But the first droplet of water lands on, of all things, his ear. Not a tear, but…

Rain.

He turns, so far from her. All he has done is strafe to the other side of his furniture, yet it is an ocean that stretches between them now.

All around Ithalia—Contemplation, Contemplation—the light cools. Wind that should not exist here lifts the hair framing her face. Her left hand, still glowing, comes away in larger flakes, yet never unravels.

Only now, she has her vallaslin. An even earlier memory wars for purchase on her skin. The lines and flecks of Dirthamen’s markings appear and then vanish like a watery reflection over a wall. Droplets of water land on her cheek, her nose, her shoulder, and suddenly he understands where—and when—this version of her has been drawn from.

Crestwood. The downturn of her mouth now is a perfect reflection of what tore him in half then. The same tears glisten in her eyes: the shimmer that begged him stay, stay.

He rode away all through the night, far off the marked paths. By the time the morning came, and the rain with it, there was nothing left of him.

Nothing left. The words called the memory back when he uttered them aloud. Now she—the spirit—has brought the memory to life in the Lighthouse, the very reason Solas warded against stray spirits in the first place.

The Vhen’Theneras darkens when she speaks, bathed in moonlight that should not exist.

“If that were true, you would not wish I’d followed.” 

Her words are sharp as lashes, but her lip trembles through them. That was always the way with her: hackles raised to hide the cracks underneath.

She deserves this anger, though. Then and now. Yet if he does not push it from his mind, the memory will drown them both.

“This is not you, Contemplation,” he says over the wind, holding her—its—gaze.

“And who else do you call my name?” The wind picks up, books tossed from their floating shelves. Rain pelts his skin, the furniture, but the spirit does not flinch. “In darkest night, whose voice fills all your silence? Whose reason do you wrestle with, when measuring this many deaths? Whose contemplation are you really after?”

It is to soothe her, he tells himself—that is why he crosses the room back to her, a hand outstretched. That is why he lets it hang in the air between them, two steps away, an offer she need only reach out and take.

Not because of the ache under his ribs, his only company for years, nor the way it may be all that stitches his chest together by now. A scar that none can see, penned in the shape of her name.

“And if I were to say you’re right?” he murmurs, quieter than the rain, loud enough that she hears him anyway. “What could that ever accomplish?”

He watches her—Contemplation in her shape, nothing more—and wonders, for a moment, what a memory of her would say. If a memory of her would reach for him, or if he has remembered wrong.

Instead she asks, her shoulders squared, “Is your world better without my existence?”

“I would not have you see what I—”

“And what about what I’ve become?” She retreats, stepping backward, both arms wrapping around her middle. Her head shakes, and he swears a darker tear falls down her cheek. “You kept me locked away like I’m some… danger.”

“No, vhenan—”

“Tell me what I’ve done!” she shouts. Thunder cracks across the ceiling in her wake.

Solas winces, despite himself, and Contemplation bends double. She—Ithalia, a memory personified—covers her face, nails raking over her brow.

“Just tell me what I’ve done so wrong,” she continues, barely a whimper, “that caging me remains your only option.”

Solas opens his mouth to speak, then stops himself to watch her covered face.

Streams of dark ichor flow between her fingers, and the ache stitching his ribs together comes undone.

He knows this: the unraveling of a spirit’s light, its purpose splintering apart in dark, wet tatters.

This is a death he would wish for no one. A death whose pain has not let him go.

But she is not gone. Not yet. On this precipice, a little reason—a little hope—may yet bring her back.

“You know that I would never dream—”

“Dreaming is all you ever do,” answers her voice and another’s, tangled up in one.

He knows the memory at once. How could he not? It is the core of him, the wound that will never heal, bandaged only with distracting half-truths. It is the first of his mistakes, and the last of his promises.

It is Mythal’s voice lacing Ithalia’s words. In the wake of her—the memory of a god, drowning the rest of Contemplation’s individuality—the paint adorning the library’s walls slithers down from the stone. Every memory he painted drips down to the stairs as easily as rainwater.

Solas cannot flee, cannot step back, cannot turn away.

He promised not to, a long time ago.

“And in the Fade,” sneer Ithalia and the All-Mother together, “you trap your every problem.”

She pulls her hands down from her face, and cold dread pierces through him.

The eyes he knew, almost alight with the Anchor’s magic, are gone. They have been replaced by twin foci, glowing as bright as the Anchor once did.

They are growing, bulging out of Ithalia’s eye sockets. Bone begins to crack around them. Black ichor streams freely down her cheeks, over the soft curve of her lips.

He must act. He must do something—anything—to stop what has already begun. But violence will only make things worse.

“Contemplation, listen to me—”

Her laughter, two sounds threaded together, ricochets off every wall. Her arms fold tight over her chest, gnarled fingers scraping down the skin of her collar. She bares her teeth as dark fluid sluices from the cuts. “Did you ever do the same?”

He moves to reach for her, but his feet will not move. They are snared by what once was paint, slithering across the floor. The murals he had made have all come undone. Their pigment slides up Ithalia’s legs, eclipsing them.

They are twisting as Contemplation spirals further from its purpose. Soon, her legs—everything about her—will become something else.

“Please.” The sound is strained. It is little more than a choked noise. “Vhenan—”

"You brought me here,” snaps an otherworldly growl. Bones crunch as the liquid around her legs coagulates, hardening into new flesh. She rises from the ground on eight rapidly forming tentacles, tendrils of blighted flesh stretching out of the cuts in her neck. More paint slides up the pillar of her throat, up her stained cheeks. The foci burst from her face in a shower of blood and ichor, and paint runs through her empty eye sockets to stretch over her scalp. What forms is a helm with a downward crescent that spans her shoulders.

Not Contemplation. Not Ithalia. Not the All-Mother, or Ghilan’nain.

Regret, in the shape of all of them.

“YOU MADE ME THIS,” it wails, in Ithalia’s voice and the screams of a thousand dead.

He has heard those words before. One of the freshest of his memories, a wound that still bleeds if he looks too close.

Ithalia turned the forest of their dreams to ash—but before then, she had cried for retribution.

To that version of her, he pleads, “There was a time when you cherished our forest.”

The wind that should not be here howls its wrath. Books fly from their shelves, scattering across the paint-slicked floor. Solas lifts his hands and a new wind rises: one that, at least, throws some of the books to higher, drier ground.

Thunder rolls, and Regret shrieks with the same fury.

“I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS,” it bellows, glaring viciously down and narrowing the black pits of its eyes. “IF YOU CAN’T STOMACH YOUR GUILT? YOU HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT YOURSELF.”

The paint spanning the floor continues to lick up her body. The blue that once coloured the skies of his frescoes trails up her tentacles, down her arms. It coalesces in the shape of daggers sprouting where each of her fingers should be.

Her pelvis snaps apart inside her skin to make room for a second set of shoulders below. The sound coats his tongue with bile.

Solas backs away with two hands raised, no more hardened paint holding his feet in place. He faces his palms out, head bowed.

He gives her deference, in the vain hope it will soothe her, because it is all he has left.

“I know, vhenan,” he tells her, fighting to be heard over the storm, “I can’t forget.”

“YOU PUT ME HERE,” she screams back, Ithalia’s voice breaking in her throat in a way that makes him wince. “YOU TWISTED THIS AROUND THE BOTH OF US. YOU KEEP ME AT ARM’S LENGTH—BUT YOU WON’T LET ME LEAVE!”

The daggers fly, all at once, flung from too-long limbs. Solas braces his arms in front of himself. His vision haloes white, the magic of the Fade easy to reach.

Still not in time.

Daggers sail through the air, singing as they pass. They shred through all they touch: the sofa, the books scattered everywhere. They indent the stone.

One makes him bleed. It cuts through his armor, slicing his forearm to the bone.

He clamps a hand over the wound, for now. There is no time to mend it. He looks into what was once Ithalia’s irises, trying to find some glimmer of recognition in the voids left behind.

“The blame is mine and mine alone.”

Her snarl still does not fade away, and so he lets his eyes fall shut. Perhaps a memory will guide her purpose. He lets the storm around him fade, then turns his mind to better days—the days where she considered him an ally.

He had not held high hopes for Haven, but she would swiftly change that, not only with the Anchor, nor her wisdom.

She listened—not to orders, but to what was never said aloud. It changed him, night by night, to see things through her. Her reverie for mysteries; her smiles bestowed where none could see. The wrath she kept reserved for those deserving.

It was never Contemplation that he wanted, but Ithalia.

The one so determined to see what others could—or would—not. The one who promised to mourn at his side, next—

“SHE WAS MY FRIEND!”

The sound tears up her throat—Contemplation’s, but in her voice and the voices of all the lives he has extinguished. It breaks, so raw it turns his stomach.

Not even Ithalia’s voice had broken like that, in the moment.

“DON’T YOU REMEMBER LOSING YOURS?”

How could he not? It changed him. So few things did.

A friend: such a simple word in the common tongue, for so broad and deep a feeling. A friend: a lone tether in a churning sea. And the death of one?

The thought bows his spine. Solas grips at his temples, fingers scraping skin.

He turns away, bracing against the torrent of rain and wind in his library. This was not what he wished—this is not how he longed to mourn. The flood of memory, of thousands of years dreaming, lamenting the thousands of years that came before, pushes at the constraints of his mind.

His pain ravages Contemplation-turned-Regret, unable to do anything but listen to the awful twist in his song. She screams so loud his ears ring. The wind turns frigid, and the rain to needles of ice.

She is remembering the blizzard so close to the Vhen’Theneras, in a pocket of the Crossroads reserved only for one. She is remembering Haven, an avalanche Solas thought surely snuffed out the one life bothered to tally that night.

She is remembering Skyhold on the cusp of spring, the night Corypheus was killed, his orb shattered. The first night he left her truly alone.

Solas fights to remember the solstice before. The frost on the windowpanes. The heat of his hands cupping Ithalia’s cheeks. The warmth of her mouth.

They all die. The memories fracture. They are not purpose, and they are chased away. The face of his friend takes the place of Ithalia’s. When it dies in his palms, the cold sneer of the All-Mother blooms in the ruin.

For every moment of stillness in Skyhold he can think of, a thousand others in Arlathan spent watching for knives in the dark flood in. Every simple joy, vanquished, for they are not purpose. All that is left is—

“TURN AROUND AND FACE ME SOLAS! MAKE ME YOUR EQUAL, JUST—”

The blast comes before he is aware his body has moved at all. Shards of ice fly out from his hands by the dozen. All the world flashes white.

The frozen daggers sing through the air until Regret’s gasp cuts them short.

It all happens at once: countless shards finding their mark, tearing into flesh while others explode against the walls. As the light of the blast fades, Regret’s back arches, four arms curling inward to cradle her bleeding torso.

Paint becomes paint again. Her tentacles are unmade in a blink, and a flood of colour washes the floor up to his ankles.

With nothing to support her, she falls from twice her own height.

Her body lands with a sickening crack before he can reach her.

She lies in a broken heap before him, while his hands are still outstretched.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Three years before Fen'Harel's departure —

Three years ago, the snow fell gently on the solstice. The window panes of the Winter Palace frosted in dazzling patterns, but Ithalia paid them no mind.

There was only the cold of Solas’ palms, cupping her cheeks. Only their clumsy steps—hers backward, and his forward—into her chambers. The sound of the door shutting behind him, then the heat of his mouth, the soft sting of his teeth plying at her bottom lip.

“Ar lath ma,” he breathed before her tongue could touch his, “Ma vhenan.”

Hands sliding languidly over her hips, he turned them. Just another step in this night’s dance: her arms draped over his shoulders, they swayed together, he the leader and her the enraptured follower. Backward they stepped, moving in time together, until her shoulders met the paneled wall.

The impact, soft and nearly silent, was enough to tip his helmet forward, cool metal thudding gently on her brow.

He smiled, most of his face obscured. He laughed, snorting quietly, the indentation of his dimples bathed in firelight. When she joined him, he brushed his lips against her laughing mouth, as though drinking in the sound.

She slid the helmet from his head, locking her gaze with his the moment his eyes came back into view.

“Mir sa lath,” she whispered—words she had learned just for tonight, pieced together over weeks of his lessons. My one love.

Neither bothered to notice his helmet clattering to the floor. It would dent, and neither would care.

Instead, Solas pulled away one of her gloves—the right—while her arms were still raised. He took his time, made the motion theatrical, then let the fabric fall to the floor once her hand was bared. As he did the same with her left, she ran her free hand over his scalp.

He breathed a sigh into the Anchor’s mark, trailing kisses up her wrist before seeking her mouth anew. She smiled into him, and he planted another kiss in the corner of her mouth. Another, and another, and another, migrating up until his breath was warm and sweet by the shell of her ear.

“Mir sa lath,” he whispered, so close it became the only sound in the world. Her breath caught, and he hummed a chuckle at the way the air lodged in her throat, and it was like the sun rose against her flushing cheeks.

“Mir sa lath,” again, like she was a treasure he had won.

His lips found her throat, and fire licked up her core. The press of his thigh split hers apart, an answer to some unspoken need. She sank into him without second thought, a sweet ache arcing up her spine. His teeth grazed her skin, and her moan filled the silence.

He trapped the next one against his mouth. His tongue met hers, sending another flare of heat through every nerve. He was everything; warmth and mirth and longing. He tasted of—

Wine.

At the tiny press of her hands against his shoulders, he drew back, parting just enough to look upon her face. His eyes, half-lidded; his mouth, lightly parted; his composure, still in sweet tatters.

“Vhenan,” she murmured, lifting a hand to brush a thumb over his cheek. “You’re… you’ve had much to drink.”

The smallest furrow creased his brow.

“I… have,” he said, slow, as though the thought had only just crossed his mind.

He began to draw back, smile falling away. Ithalia cupped his other cheek, and he stilled. In that moment, Solas’ expression became a question unto itself, hanging unspoken in the air between them.

“Tel’ghilas,” she whispered, “Ma dellan.”

Don’t go. Talk to me.

He paused, contemplating. Then, “Ma salin ar ama? That is—”

“Yes,” Ithalia interjected, “I want you to stay. That’s all. I only want you, Solas—the man, not the body—and only for a night. Is that too great an ask?”

His voice lowered, hardly above a whisper. “Is it?”

“All those times I sought your counsel, your company, and you think it’s your body I want?” She scoffed, and almost missed the way his breath hitched. “No: all I want is a night that’s ours, before the day steals us again.”

He bowed, so his forehead rested against hers again. His hands came up to lay over hers, lifting them gently from his face. “Ma nuvenin. As you say, vhenan.”

It took another heartbeat for both to realize what must come next: that to lie down and sleep, Ithalia must first shed her balldown, along with everything else. Solas lifted his hands from hers, but did not retreat from her: another silent question.

“I would not pressure you,” Ithalia murmured, “Not in the Fade, and not here.”

“I…” For a moment, Solas’ lips hung parted, as though he arrived at the precipice of something and paused there. He resolved his features into a smile as his head shook, just so. “Thank you. What would you have me do?”

Ithalia shrugged, and her gown slipped an inch down her shoulder. Solas’ breath hitched in the quiet.

“Whatever you please,” she answered with a grin.

It should not have surprised her that he followed her like a shadow, as he had on so many occasions since Haven, nearly every time they were alone. As she lowered herself onto the vanity seat in the corner of the room, Solas’ silhouette formed in the mirror, shrouded in dark.

Her hands lifted to pull a pin from her hair, and only then did he emerge into the light. Long, pale fingers descended over hers.

“Lasa ma,” he offered quietly, meeting her eyes in the reflection, “Let me.”

“That is what you want to do?”

“When else have I had the chance?”

“Ma… nuvenin,” she echoed, slowly, enunciating the word. “As you say, if you insist.”

She heard more than saw his smirk, thanks to his satisfied hum. Her hands lowered carefully into her lap, and she watched him through the glass. 

He unraveled her with ease: braids and loops came apart in his fingers as though they were ready to unspool at the faintest touch. She would have called it a spell, had she caught even a whiff of magical resonance in the air. But no—he employed no mana, and paused in his efforts only to bend forward and kiss the tip of her ear, his breath warm down her neck.

“You must have sisters, with practiced hands like that,” she teased. “Or maybe your hair was this long, once.”

He laughed, but not for longer than a breath. “A mother.”

Her heart squeezed.

He never spoke of family. She should have known. Perhaps it was her own wine, a small glass forgotten hours ago, that made her judgement clumsy. Perhaps it was the way his fingers worked so close to her scalp.

She let out a breath, and his movements slowed. “Is she still…?”

Ithalia strained her eyes to make out his features. In the shadowed reflection, his eyes fell briefly closed. “No.”

Still, he worked, letting down pieces of her hair that had been tied up for what felt like years. She could not help the little sighs of relief, but if Solas heard them, he said nothing.

When all of her hair had been let down, she caught one of his hands. She held it fast, her grip gentle but uncompromising. Rising from the vanity, she turned, closing her other hand over their twined fingers, warming them with the Anchor’s subtle heat.

He looked down at her touch, but she kept her eyes on his. “I’m sorry.”

“Ir abelas,” he murmured—teaching, even now.

Lowering to a whisper, she followed his lead. “Ir abelas, vhenan.”

He met her eyes a moment, then looked indicatively down, slipping his hand from hers. “And now…”

“Ah. Right.” There was, indeed, the matter of her gown. It almost made her laugh, to find a grown man so yielding. So few ever were. “They’ve unpacked my things, it seems. There should be something in my wardrobe. I’ll… let you decide how chaste you wish to be.”

His gaze lingered. Lowered, to her collarbone and past that, and lingered there, too. Only when she audibly stifled a laugh did he turn, a last smile flashed as he departed. Ithalia went her way, to the wardrobe, as Solas crossed the room to stand opposite from her.

Doubt nipped at her resolve, but she clamped down the ache in her chest before it could bloom. This was not a night to question his want—not when she would not act on it either way.

She wound her hands behind her back, unfastening the hooks and eyes keeping her dress in place. Between that, a row of buttons slipped free of their holds more easily. Without sleeves to hold it aloft, the dress fell from her frame. The petticoats, stitched into the waist, kept the garment propped up almost comically tall on the floor, leaving Ithalia to slip off her shoes and step out from the dress, padding barefoot to the wardrobe door.

The cold air pricked her skin, raising gooseflesh down her middle. She tried to pay it no mind, opening the wardrobe to hunt for the nightdress she knew she’d packed.

“I want it to mean something,” Solas said, shattering the silence.

Ithalia turned, glancing at him over her shoulder, but he did not face her.

“The first time,” he went on, hands clasped behind him. Bathed in moonlight filtered through sheer curtains, she could see how he ran a fingertip over his knuckle, forward and back, contemplative. “No undue haste; no stealing you for myself in pieces. You deserve that and more.”

She did not answer, at first, for her fingers grazed along the fabric of her nightdress. She pulled it on: a simple cotton piece, spun from thread at home in the Free Marches. Cold, in the Orlesian winter, with its thin straps. So much thinner than even her traveling robes, flowing smooth along the shape of her waist.

By the time she made to move across the floor, Solas had shed his jacket, holding the garment in one hand while his other worked the fastenings of the shirt below.

She crept swift and silent, she swore—but Solas turned when she was but a half-step away, his shirt in rapid descent down his arms and off his frame. Ithalia froze, a hand halfway to touching his shoulder, her lips stuck parted.

To say the moonlight painted him in splendor would be an injustice. It was more than that: the light filtering in through the curtains brought his every contour into sharp relief. He was always a marvel, impossible to look away from in the same way as ancient art—and now that marvel demanded to not only be witnessed, but felt, the same way as the sun’s warmth.

She swallowed dryly, cursing the too-youthful heat that bloomed over cheeks. She was no naïve, blushing thing—she had crowned an emperor not three hours prior.

“And the second time?” she asked, voice kept level, chin raised.

He bowed for her, body bending forward until his forehead loomed an inch above hers. His free hand lifted to sweep her hair back over the curve of her shoulder, knuckles whispering over her bare neck. 

“The second time,” he murmured, canting his head so his mouth hovered near her temple, “There will be no pretense left. There will be nothing left to do but devour what I can of you.”

Ithalia swore her pulse would hammer against his touch, would give away the heat rekindling in her core—but if it did, he gave no indication. Only the same sly smile as ever when she tipped her chin to peer up at him, even with his breath so sharply laced with wine. One that made her own come easier.

“What you can?”

His smile turned crooked, an eyebrow raised. “Dare I let myself believe you’ll make it anything less than a challenge?”

She grinned. “No. You’re right. I’ve never been one to lie idle.”

“No, you…” He looked down into her gaze, eyes half-lidded. In the dark, it was hard to tell, but the flush of liquor still coloured him—or something new tinted his cheeks. His breath left him, half a sigh and half a tiny, whispered laugh. “You bring a piece of me to life, one that I thought died long ago.”

“Sweet talker.”

“Forgive the metaphor, but I speak truly.”

The hand that froze found its way to his sternum. It should not have given her pause—Solas was far from the first man Ithalia touched—but the motion stuttered. His heart beat against the tip of her finger, slow and steadfast, as if to say, ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ with every thrum.

“And what does this loud-beating heart of yours say about how late it’s getting?”

His fingers curled around her hand; she looked at them a moment, before Solas’ other hand rose to lift her chin.

“That it is you whose eyes grow tired, who truly aches to lie in bed.”

“Ever perceptive.” Ithalia canted her head into his palm, finding new appreciation for its softness with so much of the rest of him laid bare to match. He was not wrong: she could sink into this, right here, and the sparks he lit within her could lie dormant until morning. She took a half step back, pulling him along by their joined hands. “Ma garas ir.”

Solas laughed, low and languid. Ithalia opened her mouth to speak, too late.

“Make you come?”

“Oh—no—”

He trapped the sound with his mouth against hers, his thumb caressing a broad arc over her cheekbone. This was not the hungry embrace from before; this was indulgent in a different way, a smile shared between them in the same simple motion. She felt him sway against her, still in his cups. Before it was over, he hummed into her skin, and she heard the chiding in it, the wordless thanks for the closeness, the easy affection that had begun to feel like home.

He broke away first, parting only enough to whisper, “Ma garas ar ama. Come with me.”

A correction had never made her so keen to melt. She all but floated at his guidance, his hand now pulling at their joined fingers.

The whole world narrowed on the sight of the bed. Ridiculous—she’d slept in it just last night, as foreign as the satiny sheets felt against her skin, as unused as she was to the ornate canopy and all its embroidered drapery. Yet this was a realm entirely new, something that said, ‘This is yours, this is ours, and you are mine’ in ways that permeated outside the Fade.

Suddenly, the newly crowned Emperor ceased to matter much at all.

Solas drew back the covers for himself and sank into them—exactly when he had divested himself of his boots, Ithalia could not tell. She scarcely took note of anything beyond the way him lifting the covers for her sheltered their little domain from even the moonlight. Her pulse rapped insistently against her ribcage, but it was impossible to pay it any mind, now.

He pulled her to him like the moon pulls the tides: silently, effortlessly. Like this was not the first time they pressed so close, his arm draping over her waist, but the thousandth. Her palms settled against his chest like they had nowhere else to be; like they were made for this, and he for them.

The covers settled around them, up to Ithalia’s ears. With Solas’ cheek on her brow, everything else lay outside their little pocket of space. There did not need to be a Winter Palace, here; this did not have to be Orlais, if she did not wish it, for it could be anywhere. Even the stars were lost to her, then.

Only the Anchor illuminated anything, a dim green glow in the cracks between her fingers. It thrummed in time with her heart; her heart moved in time with his. Ithalia felt more than saw Solas look down to watch it with her. The contented noise that left his lips vibrated, first, against her palms.

Then, another rumble, another murmur: “Theneras ar ama, vhenan.”

She had heard the words before—in pieces, not together.

“Dream with me,” she repeated in the common tongue, rewarded with another praising hum.

Another sweet, quiet nothing, as his fingers traced idle circles along the back of her nightdress. “Atish’an, desen malasa.”

That one took her longer. ‘Peace,’ she could remember from the Vir Atish’an. ‘Held,’ distantly recalled after a moment, from an old lullaby’s ‘desen.’ 

“Malasa,” she said aloud, testing the word in a whisper of her own. “You… granted. One person given to another. So… In peace. Held together. ”

“Mmm.” He exhaled, and his shoulders slumped forward, curling closer against her front. Voice thick with drink and sleep, he spoke again with lips skimming her crown. “Mir lath, souver’inan isala hamin.”

“My eyes need rest?”

“Mmmm.”

She laughed, leaning into him and stretching to lay a kiss below his jaw. “Ir malas.”

His little circles paused. “... Malas inan?”

“No, not ‘your eyes.’ Ir malas. I meant it.”

“You are…”

“I am yours.”

Solas lapsed into quiet. Eventually, she relaxed against him, receding to return her head to rest against his collar. Below her palms, his heartbeat slowed, and the Anchor dimmed as if to guide him into sleep.  Every breath against her temple came slower than the last, with longer silences between.

She waited, held in that silence, wondering if she or the Anchor might feel the moment his consciousness tipped into the Fade. The quiet grew heavy, and she contemplated whether she might fall into the land of dreams first.

But then: a rumble below her touch.

“Ir malas.” The entreaty, just three little notes, broke like a whispered prayer. Solas’ hand curled into the fabric of Ithalia’s nightdress, pulling all of her closer—like a treasure to be guarded, or a tether that could not be lost. 

“I am yours.”

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The slick between Ithalia’s legs cools as she lays above the covers.

Mallorick’s breathing slows.

He does not say her name again. Sleep takes him first.

The night ticks on impassively. It crawls so slow that Ithalia does not know when, exactly, a clawing feeling sinks into her stomach. Only that suddenly she is staring at the ceiling, chilled air needling her skin, and her insides are somehow both hollow and knotted at the same time.

The silence lies thick over the room. It is heavy enough to pin her in place, broken only by the occasional sonorous sound from Mallorick.

She doesn’t warm. She doesn’t move. Not until a belltower chimes, and she forgets to breathe.

One bell: a quarter hour. Then, twelve more: a quarter past midnight.

Today is the solstice. Her nameday. To another person who once lived in her skin, who once called herself by the same name, that meant something.

This one makes thirty. It would be a milestone, in another life. Someone would be here, wide awake in the dead of night beside her. Her mother, maybe, or her Keeper, or—

An ache stabs through her chest. She bites her lip to keep from making a noise.

A name shouldn’t hurt like this. It shouldn’t send her arm wrapping around her middle in some misguided attempt to cradle the pain of it.

But it isn’t just a name. It is the memory of his lips on her brow as the dawn broke over Val Royeaux three solstices ago. It is the way the warmth of his arms changed as she slipped from the Fade to the waking world. His laughter, warm on her cheek, the only sound in the world.

It was a miracle, that Solas stayed through the night. It would only happen once.

‘It is your nameday,’ was all the explanation he gave.

To another woman who once lived in her skin, in another life so much easier than this one, that was enough.

It was warm, in ways more than physical. A dream that, somehow, got to exist in both worlds. It felt like a secret, then, and she kept it like one in all the time since.

Dorian asked when the last time someone warmed Ithalia’s bed was just hours ago, and she lied. She pushed every painful memory down, then threw herself into the first arms willing to take her.

Now there are no smiling lips on her brow. No petal-soft fingers tracing the planes of her face. Only sweat left cold on her skin. Bruises between her highs. Someone else’s touch, stamped all over her body—invisible, yet all she can see when she looks down.

Ithalia tastes bile. Her lungs grow shallow. She looks to Mallorick’s sleeping figure, still oblivious to her, and a lump forms in her throat.

It was not supposed to be this way. None of this should be this way.

Suddenly, she can think of nothing else. This room, this place, is wrong. She cannot surrender herself to sleep here, covered in someone else’s marks, still wet with him between her thighs.

The thought of his touch threatens to make her sick.

She fights the thought back, long enough to slip off the edge of the bed. Her trousers, she finds first, tugging them on in the dark. Her shirt, next. Her smallclothes, she stuffs into a pocket of her cloak. No time to tug them on, when every second she spends in this room squeezes more air from her lungs.

Ridiculous. She has tumbled with many who did not steal her heart. She is no shy, blushing thing. Ridiculous, that a name, a flash of memory might unravel her here and now. That she can’t stomach the thought of leaving a goodbye, because her chest is too full of an ache that doesn’t belong to Mallorick, because if she lets one crack show then all the others might crumble too.

If she says Solas’ name once, a year’s worth of pleas and sobs and useless bargains might pour out before she can stop them. 

Ithalia shoves her feet into her boots and takes the doorlatch in a shaking hand. She concentrates on the motion of it turning, just the motion, until light splinters in from outside and cold hits her face. Then, she slips through all at once, whirls, and takes pains to close the door silently.

Without a second thought—before anyone sees—she pulls her hood up and ducks away. She’ll find Hightown if she keeps moving. She’d rather do that than stop.

Her lip trembles. Her body feels frail, now, compared to yesterday. The bruises between her legs protest with every step, and every twinge of pain makes her whole body feel raw.

She walks a mile, hood down, head bowed, before it dawns on her that she is alone. That no one here is waiting on an Inquisitor they do not know is there. That tonight—today—is the solstice, and since she is not in Val Royeaux, there is nowhere on Thedas that anyone expects her to be.

No one is around. It doesn’t matter how long she wanders, or if she reaches Hightown at all. None of it matters, now: not the Breach that’s been healed for years; not her role propped up in the Chantry like a living ornament; not anything Ithalia might save in this world that is doomed to end.

No one is coming.

The thought sends pain blooming out from her chest. Here—alone—she is suddenly so small. One body, alarmingly mortal, that hasn’t been whole since Solas left it to break behind him.

A choked sound leaves Ithalia’s throat. Ducking into the closest alleyway she can find, a tiny space between two lightless buildings, she digs through her cloak. Her shaking hand fumbles. A piece of her smallclothes falls into the muddied snow. She keeps grasping, further and further down.

The cool ridges of engraved metal pull a broken sound from her throat. Ithalia sinks against the wall of one building. A tear splashes on the locket’s surface as she lays it flat in her palm.

“Dorian?”

If ever silence could crush her, it would be now.

“Dorian—please be awake. Please.”

The sobs come regardless, shaking her shoulders. Under the weight of the quiet, every crack she’d been ignoring for too long splinters.

“Please. I… I need you.”

Nothing.

Ithalia lowers down the wall until she is seated in the damp snow, knees pulled up to her chest. Her tears fall warm, then dry cold on her cheeks.

“I’m… alone.”

‘No, my dear. You are incorrect, and at an abysmally late hour, no less.’

The sound of his voice pulls another choked sound from her. She smiles, and it aches up to her temples, jaw clenched to keep her lips pressed thin, the sobs and laments all caged behind her teeth.

‘I’m here,’ he says, as warm as the mulled wine of Skyhold, as gentle as the few hugs he gave her those years ago, ‘I’m here, as long as you need.’

In the dark, in the quiet, she lets herself believe those words.

For the first time since Arranna’s last breath, Ithalia breaks.

Chapter Text

Solas

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Solas is on his knees before he can think.

He does not wish to think.

Not now.

Ithalia’s shoulders are cradled in the bend of his arm. Her head lolls against his chest. It does not matter that they are not real. It does not matter that this is not her. What matters is her breathing always slowed when he traced a finger down her arm, and that it is all he can do now.

“Solas,” says her broken voice. The sound fades in and out of the air.

She does not have long. It is his fault.

“Vhenan,” he whispers, though the word means nothing to Contemplation. It is what he aches to say, and now, he is past denying that he aches at all. “Ir abelas, vhenan.”

“Tel’abelas.” Her gaze moves along his face, but she has no eyes left to peer from. Regret took those from her, and they did not return. Only their sockets, dark as ink, remain. “I told that to you, once.”

He tightens the line of his jaw, but it is no use. There is no point in trying to ease the trembling of his lip. “You did.”

There is blood. So much blood, mixed with pigment. It is a manifestation of Contemplation’s pain—a hurt it cannot understand, for no spirit knows what it means to die until it is far too late.

“Do you remember?”

“I do.”

He does not know if she sees his smile, so he runs his touch down her arm again.

The rain in his library ceases to fall. The paint on the floor spreads and thins. It will cover the floor and trickle down the stairs to the Vi’Revas. No trace of Regret lingers.

There is more that he could have done. Words that he might have tried instead of all the ones that only stoked her anger.

She shivers, in his arms. He pulls her closer without second thought.

“I am here,” he lets himself say, because he aches to. Because if he bites his traitorous tongue now, he will not forgive himself.

He lowers a hand to her cheek. He traces her temple, then down, as if he could ever lose the memory of her face.

She catches his wrist. Her left hand still blazes green, still flakes away, caught in a hurt that will never resolve.

“Ir enfenim.” Her voice breaks. 

I am afraid.

A black tear rolls down from where once, her eyes were green as spring in Arlathan, grey as summer storms. It trails down her ear, but she holds him fast, forbidding him to wipe it away. “Ma ghilana, vhenan. Ir enfenim.”

Guide me, my heart. I am afraid.

He curls into himself, over her quaking body, his brow laid to hers. I do not know how, he wishes to say. He wishes that were true. 

Countless spirits lie broken and lost in his wake, guided to their deaths by Fen’Harel. When they take another’s shape, they prefer to see the end as though they, themselves, are dying in the fashion of the corporeal world. They bleed from hearts they do not have. They yearn for a life that was never theirs to bid farewell, and do not know not to yearn for it.

They are eased, always, by hope—and where there is no hope to give, they find comfort in memory.

“The Winter Palace,” he whispers, trying and failing to fashion his voice into a recreation of the revelry of that night, “Do you remember?”

“There was wine on your tongue.” Her smile crinkles the corners of eyes she does not have. His stomach turns, heart splintering at the sight. It would not be right to look away. “You were warm.”

“You were understanding.”

“You… stayed.”

“I would have stayed so much more, in a kinder world,” he lets slip. It does not matter that he crumbles with her. Time runs short. “Do you remember what I said?”

Her breath rattles. The veins in her face glow a faint green: blood that is remembering it is not blood. Spirit magic that is fracturing. Failing.

“Theneras ar ama,” she manages, in the same way Ithalia whispered it that night, her breath like a faint breeze on his collar. “Dream with me.”

A lump forms in his throat. Solas ignores it, swallowing. His thumb runs across the line of her blazing palm, and she sighs at the pressure.

“Atish’an desen malasa.”

“In peace,” she murmurs, dazed, “Held. Together.”

He forgives the kiss he places on her brow. Magic ripples out from the touch, and motes of light break off from her body, cast adrift.

It is a nightmare made real, but to give in to the pain burning through every nerve would only deny her comfort in these last breaths.

“Mir lath,” he entreats, soft as prayer, “souver’inan isala hamin.”

“My love…”

“Your weary eyes need rest.” 

“Oh,” she breathes, the softest surprise. The ends of her ears flake away from the rest of her, like embers rising from a guttering flame. Her fingers, burning with the memory of the Anchor’s magic, close tightly around his.

Solas knows how this memory ends. He has lived it, but it is more than that. It has been a refuge in his absence, a spot of light against the dark of the din’anshiral. Fleeting comfort, just hours against the many millennia of his life—but it had been real. Every breath, every touch, he endeavored never to forget.

He had lain on the edge of sleep until her breathing slowed. Kept himself from the Fade for the sake of another, one of precious rare occasions in his long life, just to hold that glimpse of hope for longer.

She is precisely on cue when she murmurs, “Ir malas.”

This time, he cannot postpone the end. Light overtakes his field of view.

“I…” She falters, and his shoulders quake. “I am…”

She is gone. The brilliant shine of her dissipates, and she is less than dust in his wetted palms.

“I am yours,” he says to the space in his arms where, just a moment ago, he cradled her. His hands curl around empty air. Each piece of him she touched burns in her absence.

Solas tries to shape her name with his mouth. No air comes. He gasps for it, but none will fill his lungs. His ribcage heaves, starved for breath, and makes only sobs.

Endless spirits have gone to the Void in his wake. Contemplation should be no different. Long ago, he learned to stop fearing the loss, and hope only that they would die unchanged, their nature still intact. His heart had shattered enough times to allay the sting of the same repeating pain.

Then, death was only a choice: an ending written by one willing to go beyond, or forced by murderous hand.

When he woke after his long slumber, that was the one thing he fought hard not to believe: that his people had become shorter-lived than the trees they cowered under.

That he might blink and, unaccustomed to watching the passage of time so closely…

With nothing left to hold, Solas’ arms wrap around his middle. He curls inward on himself, brow lowered to where hers had been. The scent of rainwater, of spindleweed, is all that remains of her. It is half-lost in the paint that is strewn all over the Vhen’Theneras.

But he cannot move.

He can only drink in what is left of her, before that is gone, too.

Already, this last remnant of her fades. He tries to breathe her in, long and deep, but painful gasps razor down his throat. The taste of bile swells on his tongue. He pulls in a breath mid-sob, and it clogs his throat.

He swore, so recently, that he could protect Ithalia from the Breach. He swore to himself he would, no matter his own weakness, whether the truth of him escaped or not.

That, he knew; that, he could anticipate.

But to let her slip from his sight and lose her to just a sliver of his own life—to turn his back on her for but a moment, only to wake one day and find her wilted, gone, laid on a pyre without him…

It was a selfish nightmare. It assumed he had any right to her life, after all he had done, after what he had become so long before her birth in this world.

It is selfish—foolish—that he lives it now. That the loss of Contemplation leaves him wracked with pain and lost for breath, every bone aching for the weight of Ithalia to return to his arms.

It was not her, he tells himself, over and over, though his heart will not hear it. 

It was never her. It was a spirit compassionately embodying a memory, because—

The realization curls his fingers in the fabric of his coat. It bends his chin nearer his heart.

He is starved for her, without the forest of their dreams. So starved he let a spirit into the Vhen’Theneras through his wards, ending millennia of solitude. So lost that a demon was born from between the cracks in his heart.

It is wrong, the way he needs her, bent double and soaked in pigment. Wrong, the way he has broken her faith yet craves it in her absence; the way he longs for her consolation when it is her heart, her broken body, that he grieves.

Yet, without her…

Solas forces himself into motion. He plants a foot beneath himself, then pushes to a shaking stand. He keeps both arms wrapped tight around his middle, lest he lose what is left of him to the tightness that still grips his chest.

His vision is blurred, his hands caked in too much pigment to wipe at his eyes. He steps across the library in a haze, straining his sight for a flash of familiar gold. Across the room, he finds what he is after: a shower of broken glass strewn over the paint-covered floor, lying inert after shattering against his shelf. Solas crouches, pulling one hand away from himself to lower it, shaking, into the wreckage.

The timepiece, for all its broken casing, is still nearly intact on the inside. It does not move—no doubt, many of its internal workings were bent on impact—but is frozen in the moment before its destruction.

It should have chimed by now. It stopped, in disrepair, just shy of Thedosian midnight.

One day—no, mere minutes—before the winter solstice.

Her nameday, a distant piece of him says, and his ribs ache anew. He grits his teeth to no avail. Now that the realization has struck, it is lodged in his very bones.

It is 9:44 Dragon, by the human calendar. This winter solstice is the third he has missed.

Now that Ithalia is thirty—thirty too-quick years old—his absence has spanned just over one tenth of her life. He has been gone thrice as long as he ever allowed himself to stay.

Solas draws the timepiece closer to its chest. A shard of glass slices up his finger. Blood mingles with pigment down his hand, but he does not stop until the meager weight of the contraption rests against his heart. It is cold, unfeeling, but it allays his stilted breaths. They ease to tremoring puffs of air through his chapped mouth, but he cares not.

His legs carry him elsewhere, to where the core of him aches to be: the Vi’Revas, an arm’s length away from anywhere in the world. It is not connection—not in any way that matters—but the promise of it has often been enough.

The illusion of it, perhaps.

His body takes him through the motions, down the winding steps, across the platform suspended above resonating fog. The light of the Vi’Revas is bright as the moon, glimmering with all the brilliance that June’s every creation once held. He moves toward it, thoughtless as a moth to flame; he is hollow, a husk, his mind blank save for Ithalia’s name.

Solas sinks to his knees. The eluvian towers over him.

This is wrong, protests some sliver of his conscience, but only distantly. Yet it speaks true: he has sworn for so long that this is not a line he would cross. If he were to see her, it would be when she entered their forest of her own accord—and only then. Anything else would be an abuse of their differences.

Ithalia burned their forest to ash for those differences.

She does not want him. He cannot blame her.

But his Vhen’Theneras—the core, the soul, of his domain within the Fade—lies in ruin. His hands will not cease their shaking, cuts dripping that he has no interest in healing, and if he does not see her now he might never draw a deep breath again.

Knelt before his own mirror like a penitent, he presses his bloodstained palm to the glass.

He needs not concentrate to see her face behind his closed eyelids. That is where she has lived: in the blinks between every moment, the last thing to leave each night before sleep takes him.

A brisk wind blows over him, filtering through the Vi’Revas before any light takes shape. It is winter where she is. The night fog carries an icy bite. Ithalia is near a river, or near the sea.

But when her surroundings do bloom across the pane, the glow that floods through the mirror is warm. Solas opens his eyes to it, and at once, he finds the near-white of her hair, a sharp contrast to everything else but the snow—and even that is muddied, unable to touch her radiance.

So little ever could.

Ithalia sits with her back to a wall, knees held to her chest, head bowed. She appears so close in his view, it feels as though Solas could fall through the pane and land at her feet. Finally his chest caves with a long, heavy sigh. His bottled apprehension, laid before her, though she does not know it’s there.

Her hair fans out over her shoulders, brow resting on her forearm. He traces a strand of it, drawing a line on the pane in his blood, to measure it. It is an inch longer now, he thinks, than when last she dreamt with him. It would no longer brush the line of her chin, but hover just above her shoulder, should she raise her jaw like she so often did before. 

It has been months—four? Barely more than a single season, but long enough to change her. He should have kept better count of the days; the hours.

She is wrapped in a cloak, under where his finger lies on the glass. The span of her shoulders has thinned. He would point blame at the fabric, the cut, but neither is the culprit.

Solas remembers this cloak. He should, after all—it was he who purchased it three years ago, from a stall in Val Royeaux. Swirls of silver decorate its hem, a match for the dress she wore to the Winter Palace of Orlais. ‘ Befitting an Inquisitor,’ he said, while Dorian glanced sideways at the choice, and the Iron Bull glanced sideways at his tone.

Ithalia has kept it. Surely she has better. Warmer. She cannot possibly know that he sees this small gesture. She cannot know it unspools something vital within him.

Her breath hitches. He does need to see her face to know that the next sound, almost silent, comes from her pressing her lips white-thin, jaw clenched too tight, trying to delay the moment of her breaking. Trying not to cry.

‘Tel’enfenim,’ he told her once. ‘Ir ar ama. Ma dellan.’

Be not afraid. I am here with you. Talk to me.

Her chin lifts, and the light of streetlamps shines upon her. Solas traces the ridge of her cheek—another mark made in blood—before finding her eyes are already red-rimmed on the other side of the mirror. 

Not only reddened: the edges of their sclera are a bruising violet. The last of the Anchor’s magic eats at her, for no one is left around her to ease it in its final death throes. Her cheeks have grown more gaunt. Since the summer her faint tan has waned, and the freckles across the bridge of her nose stand out in starker contrast against paler skin. Her cheeks are rosy—with cold. The same cold he breathes in, slow, savoring.

It is selfish, to share it. Worse, to intrude upon it and treasure it anyway.

For a moment, though she does not know it, her eyes land on his. ‘Vhenan,’ his mouth shapes without him meaning to, for the word sings through all his veins.

She is alive. She is alive. Her hair is longer, and the change of seasons has worn down her softest edges, but she breathes. He watches the motion of it, the air she releases frosting in front of her. It is the best he can afford, in a world where he has resigned not to feel it on his cheek as he once did.

Then, she raises a locket nearer her mouth. One she was wearing when last he held her hands in his, the last time there were two of them to hold.

“I slept with someone.”

The cold breeze slaps him, now. It is as if he is thrown through the ice of a winter lake, crashing through a surface that cuts him as it breaks, a thousand frozen daggers piercing down to his bones.

He should have known. He has been gone an entire tenth of her life.

Who is he, to pray she does not live it where he cannot touch?

Solas watches her thumb move over the locket’s surface. Ithalia pauses, head canted toward it. Dimly, he recalls when last she mentioned it: under a tree in their forest, the forest of nothing at all now. She mused about her day: one of hundreds she laid bare for him, as much as she could across the lines between Chantry, Inquisition, and his own forces. Every piece of her she could afford to offer him, she did.

He does not remember what season it was when she told him of the locket. Of… Dorian, he thinks, who left it with her when he parted. He remembers only the nagging tick of his own jealousy, senseless bitterness that he quashed as soon as it emerged.

She deserved better of him, and he cannot tell that moment of his guilt apart from the many, many others.

“No—not long ago. Minutes,” Ithalia confesses, head still hung. Her shoulder tenses, the faintest movement beneath the cloak. Solas’ hand itches to go there, even now, as she listens to something he cannot hear. “I don’t know. Of course it… it felt… good, yes.”

All the world narrows on the seconds crawling by while Ithalia listens for Dorian’s next words: a handful of moments where all that exists is the line of Ithalia’s mouth, and whether it betrays relief or…

“An Inquisition agent.” She sighs. “Yes, that one.”

Solas’ stomach falls. Ithalia turns, by faintest degrees, to look up at something past his field of view. Light stretches down her jaw, across her open throat, and throws bruises—not one, but many—into sharp relief.

Someone she knew. Someone who she let in, who stripped her of cloak and clothing and…

Of course it felt good.

He makes to pull his hand away, but falters ere he leaves the pane. This is his penance after all his absence: that he should stay and witness this, these marks of all the time he’s lost. Her hair an inch longer than last he’d seen it; all her bruises; her mouth swollen; her cheeks tear-stained; her smile in tatters.

She tries again, her lips pressed thin; they tremble, but the words do come.

“Why am I alone now? I thought you’d guess that.” Ithalia tries to force a laugh, but its sound stalls, stuck in her throat.

But Dorian can’t see the way she’s been marked. Not the bruises; not her lost smile, her hollowed eyes, how her shoulders shake.

Solas’ mouth hangs parted, on the cusp of an answer only she can rightly give. His fingers curl in strands of hair. They cannot bend. He isn’t there—yet,

“I miss him, still,” she says, as though in answer. “I know that Solas left us all, I know that it’s been months since then. I know that really, it’s been years without him.”

One tear flows down, then another. Solas cannot wipe them all away.

His breathing eases as time slows. Ithalia—no.

“Vhenan,” he breathes, unable to keep the word from escaping.

“Dorian, I know what you’ll say,” she says, for she cannot hear him from Kirkwall, much too far to know he’s listening. “But… I love him. I still love him. And without him, everything felt… awful.”

Half-covered in spilled paint, he nods, still bleeding from the glassy shards. “Ir abelas, vhenan—mir lath tel’din’an.”

I am sorry, my heart—my love has not died. He would be there in but a blink, if he could. There is an eluvian near Kirkwall, still. But that is not how this should end: if he is to see her, let it be her choice and hers alone.

She does not hear him, of course, still speaking into her locket. “It wasn’t worship that I craved. It wasn’t warmth that I needed. The things I miss can never be mine again.”

“No,” Solas says—whether to refute her or resign himself to the truth, he is too far gone to tell. In the meantime, Dorian speaks to Ithalia’s mind alone, giving her some answer Solas cannot hear.

This time, all she does is nod, then shakily rise to her feet. There are a thousand things Solas would readily say to her, consolations she will never hear from this place in the Fade. There is a strand of just-longer-than-jaw-length blonde that has a place tucked behind her ear, but will not settle there on its own. There is a warmth that she deserves—but in truth, she deserves much more, and made that quite clear to him.

Every affection he can think to offer—and all the ones that come from instinct alone—she has already burned away.

All Solas can do is watch her rise from yet another hurt and trudge through the wet snow, hood drawn up, her identity veiled and her heart barred shut, just as time and time before. Even that is more than he is owed, more than he should consider right.

What would she say, though, if she found him looking, and found him broken behind he pane he peers through? What would she say if she saw Contemplation in her own shape, wasting to nothing in his arms, his tears washing away the grime and pigment on its cheeks?

If all the Fade would take on her form, would she understand, then?

Solas finds no answer in her stride, of course. He lingers anyway, his weary temple resting on the cool, rippling glass, the rhythm of his breath slowing as the minutes tick to hours. Ithalia finds her lodging—in Hightown, if he remembers from his prior travels and from Varric’s tales—and sinks into a bed shivering.

He waits until the shivers stop, then waits until her eyes fall shut, then finds a dozen more reasons to remain.

In the end, only one matters:

If he leaves, he will find her in sleep, and he will beg for her return in ways she does not deserve.

In watching, in waiting, he preserves their stasis, and keeps the broken pieces of her heart held precariously together—or he tells himself as much, until she rises with the dawn and he fades into sleep in her wake, unmoved beside the glass.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Morning paints the world in shades of rose. 

Ithalia recedes from the Fade and finds herself back somewhere warm, her entire body cushioned in a plush bed, wrapped in isolated quiet. Like this, she keeps her eyes closed for longer, reveling in the in-between: she is no longer a wanderer of the Fade, but not yet the Inquisitor.

Her head aches. Her eyes sting. Those, she remembers from before she slept: trudging up the stairs of a house kept in the acting Viscount’s name, even while he is not here. Facing the few Inquisition guards posted throughout its wings, cloak pulled up high around her neck. Chin held aloft, despite the way she knew her face would have blotched from tears by then, until she could fall into bed alone and let her sorrow drag her into sleep.

Dehydration pains her, not wine—but here, on the edge of sleep, dulling the ache is as simple as allowing herself to forget, sinking instead into the memory of a different dawn. There, in that better place, sunlight streamed through stained glass and gossamer-thin drapes. A hush of chatter bloomed faintly outside her door, pleasantly distant. It was a world spun of rosy hues beneath her sheets, where the constellations of freckles across Solas’ nose were the only heavens she bothered to worry about holding intact, for the moment.

She mended them with a kiss on this morning three years ago. Her whole world, wrapped in a person, rewarded her with a breath of laughter, a thick-voiced, ‘Vhenan.’

There is a tap on her window, a sharp sound that stabs her throbbing temple. That was not part of her memory.

Ithalia shuts her eyes against the sound, doing her best to forget this aching morning, and cling to the other. 

Three years ago, Solas laid his brow to hers after their lips brushed in greeting. He murmured, ‘Ena shiral?’

“Mmmm.” A pleased hum three years ago, and a groan now.

In the memory she holds behind her eyes, she heard more than saw his smile. ‘Pleasant journey?’

‘Ar ama?’ a younger version of Ithalia answered, her voice not so tired, no throbbing in her ears, ‘Ena… nadas. With you, of course it was—’

The tapping on the window in the present day drags another groan from Ithalia. She pulls one of her down pillows over her head, screwing her eyes shut. The closer she comes to waking, the more of her body aches, and the more she must acknowledge why it does.

She elects to believe, instead, that the tapping against her window now is really the knock on the door that came back then, a murmured, ‘Inquisitor?’ on the other side of the mahogany.

‘Perhaps it’s time to face the day,’ Solas whispered near her ear.

Ithalia remembers how her body bowed against his, how none of it was bruised then. ‘I have one idea of how to face it.’

‘I could not fathom subjecting you to that…’ His teeth stung her earlobe, then melted her middle: a gentle bite, then a pull. ‘While we are urged to be quiet. Besides, I have another gift.’

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Fine,” she seethes between clenched teeth. She casts her pillow aside, pushes up on her elbow, and hauls herself from the protective layer of her covers. The early morning air nips every inch of her skin, within her nightshirt or without.

The first step she takes is bruising, a jolt of pain where her thighs meet. It turns her stomach—not with hurt, but the sudden weight of realization. The torrent of memory, waves of churning dread and the unrelenting tide of loss.

I love him, she confessed last night through trembling lips. I still love him. And without him, everything felt…

Ithalia tightens the line of her jaw, banishing the thought, and forces herself to pad quietly to the window. There, a dark shape resides on the sill: sleek black feathers, with a large, straight beak. The raven pecks again, insistent, thrice. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Two steps shy of the window, Ithalia’s brow stitches into a frown. Nevermind that ravens keep to their own in winters, bothering little where there is not promised food—they are the stars of Dirthamen’s fables, superstitions Dalish children take to bed each night.

Two ravens bring one brother home to the other; two ravens make one whole. Find them together, and delight in union.

Find one set apart, and weep, for Dirthamen shall long eternal for unity that will never be.

One of her favourite daydreams in youth: that with the right murmured words, the two birds would find another, and Dirthamen—no matter what—would go home to the Fade, where the twins would be made whole again.

Ithalia’s fingers skim across her cheek before she can stop them, seeking a scar that was never raised. Solas left her without blemish—without even the echo of a reminder of home.

She knows better now than to miss it. The twins might not be twins at all. Theirs is a mythos built on bloodshed.

All she knows of the Fade, she has burned to dream-shaped ash.

In the same heartbeat she opens the latch, she cries, “Away! Shoo!”

The raven, undeterred, hops inside, sneaking beneath her residual limb. Ithalia whirls just in time to catch a flash of violet light—and find that the raven on her floor is no raven at all.

Morrigan unfurls from a crouch, rolling her shoulders as she stands. She tosses aside dark strands of hair with an unbothered shake of her head. One of her brows arcs up as her gaze settles on Ithalia.

A crash sounds outside the door: metal hitting the wall, then the dull thud of a body collapsing to the ground. Ithalia stands frozen, muscles taut, heartbeat drumming in her aching skull as if to make up for its sluggishness.

“What—dare I ask what has happened to my guard?”

“Nothing more than well-deserved slumber after so long spent at his post,” Morrigan answers simply, without even a backward glance. Something about her veneer is brighter than before—less enchantingly luminous, and more eerily stark. Her easy smile feels barbed at the edges.  “The secrets of the Vir’Abelasan continue to unravel. Deepest mysteries unveil themselves to me. In addition to knowledge that bends the mind like pliant wood, there is, now and again, a trick that lends itself well to a more… mundane purpose. Namely: t’is of import that we are alone.”

She is dressed differently than when last Ithalia saw her. Rather than a skirt hanging asymmetrically from her frame, the low dip of her maroon shirt now extends into a slip that extends nearly to her knees. In the cold, she also sports a form-fitting layer of black that covers from high on her neck to her wrists; from her waist, down each leg, to inside the sleek black boots she sports. Rather than feathered epaulets, a shawl covers her shoulders, a mantle of feathers on the outer layer that veils the black fur lining the interior.

Slowly, Ithalia’s mind churns. She had not expected to appraise anyone so early in the day, through the haze of a headache.

One thought makes itself clear through the murk: Morrigan prepared for the cold.

“How did you know where to find me?”

She cants her head, just so. Advances a step toward Ithalia, whose traitorous pulse shallows under the scrutiny. Morrigan’s hand lifts as she closes the meager distance between them, and for the space of a heartbeat, her touch appears to near Ithalia’s throat. She is keenly aware of her smallness: that she is two inches shorter than Morrigan, her shoulders not as broad, her legs not the strong pillars they used to be.

The idea to call upon her wisp to form her arm crosses her mind just before Morrigan’s finger lands under her chin. Ithalia tries not to flinch, to stiffen, as her jaw lifts, baring her throat.

Her bruised throat, no doubt mottled and purple.

“For those who know how to look,” Morrigan says lowly, far too close for her own detached, bemused air, “the better question is: could one ever forget where you are? Could one ever lose the light of you?”

‘You're too bright,’ Cole said to her once. The echo of his voice, somehow startled, cuts like a blade. ‘Like counting birds against the sun. The mark makes you more. But past it…’

Gesturing faintly with her free hand, Morrigan summons a whisper of cool, serene magic that floats over Ithalia’s eyes, across her field of view.

She wasn’t aware they burned, they itched, until the feeling vanishes. She can only ever remember feeling the sting fleetingly—after long days in Skyhold, in dark caves in Emprise du Lion, after hours of dancing in the Winter Palace. Always, by morning, the feeling abated.

Ithalia should have caught on, should have known: the Well would give Morrigan the same knowledge, the same incantations, as Solas. And of course it was Solas who stole the irritation from her before she could give it a name.

“Why did you follow me here?” she asks, stepping back from Morrigan’s touch, blinking until her vision focuses again. “Why now?”

Morrigan suffers a breath of laughter, and Ithalia swears her eyes flash a brighter, vicious gold.

“Is it not enough that I have remembered the nameday of the renowned Herald of Andraste, hero of the Orlesian Chantry?” Her lingering gaze feels more appraisal than kindness, until something in it loses its fangs, until Morrigan’s attention shifts to the window, the sky. “There is something you must see, in truth. A great deal you are ready, now, to know.”

“Ready now.” Ithalia could almost laugh, could almost bend double if her hips and their bruises wouldn’t complain. Has Morrigan spotted her cloak, hung on a rack by the door, still wet from where Ithalia sank into the snow? Has she spotted her neck, its mottled marks, and has assumed anything other than they mistake they are in truth? No. Ithalia turns to the wardrobe, opens it, reaches for a housecoat with high, plush lapels. “I think we’re past that, aren’t we?”

“My mother is dead, Ithalia.” All the mirth in the room goes out. Morrigan’s voice, so often level, so often light, fractures. “You’ll forgive the time it took to make what I could of the loss.”

Ithalia twists mid-reach, abandoning her effort. “I’m so sorry—”

But Morrigan is smiling again, as though grief’s cold hadn’t just gripped every wall of the room. She shines its light to the clouded sky, the gentle snow, unflinching.

Her mother is no mere mother. The death of Asha’bellanar—of Flemeth—means so much more than grief alone.

“T’was years ago. Three, now, if memory serves. But memory has become quite the paradox unto itself, with every soul of the Well now at home inside the mind of one such imbiber as myself. The sorrows of millennia compress mere years into little more than blinks—ones that I employ every effort to slow, for the sake of my son.”

The mention of him relaxes the line of Morrigan’s shoulders, bowing her head by slim degrees. Her fingers ghost over the window pane before she pivots to Ithalia and the wardrobe. Whatever sharpened the gold in her irises to a cutting sheen has gone away, replaced by the familiarity—the fondness—Ithalia remembers from the Winter Palace and weeks thereafter.

Ithalia holds her tongue, in case mention of Mythal pulls her to some grim opposite.

“T’is those same spirits, Ithalia,” Morrigan goes on, “the ones that bend the mind like an archer’s bow for the sake of the arrow’s victory, that bid me to meet you this morn. Great echoes have traversed the Fade. T’is paramount you see their root ere prying eyes find the spectacle themselves.”

“Spectacle?”

“Questions, questions. Would you not look to their source for better answers?”

Of course: Morrigan dressed for the cold not in anticipation of flying as a raven to Ithalia’s sill, but for the journey she’d planned thereafter.

“Am I safe to assume you don’t really wish for our meeting to transpire here?”

“You always were quick to catch on, Inquisitor. T’is why I found your presence preferable to much of the Orlesian court, within a miraculous quarter of an hour.” She tips her chin in gesture to the wardrobe behind Ithalia, its doors still open. “You will want something warm, yet adaptable: layers to shed, none too cumbersome. Trust we are about to embark on a rather multidinous walk.”

Multitudinous. The way Morrigan’s voice lilts over the word, almost song-like, strikes a chord in Ithalia. Recognition shivers down her spine.

There is one place—if it can be called a place—that shifts, it seems, with every step. Never quite one thing, never quite another; only ever an echo of those who wander its broken paths.

“The Crossroads,” Ithalia whispers as the revelation clicks into place.

“I did not say I came without gifts, esteemed Inquisitor Lavellan. Would it do, to arrive on one of the holy days—your nameday besides—with empty hand and nothing in the way of opportunity?”

She refrains from shaking her head. Steadying her breathing, Ithalia reminds herself that she is in the company of an eternal being—an army of ancient beings, their memories all afloat in Morrigan’s every vein. “Why the Crossroads? Why now? We lost access to the eluvians. We—”

Morrigan—and everything ancient inside her—holds up a finger. “I have drunk from the Well the Dread Wolf spurned. The spirits’ ache is my purview, and, now, my charge. None have failed to notice the absence of brightest light… nor the keening howl in the dark you left behind.”

“The great echo across the Fade…” Ithalia’s blood runs cold. She shied from her dreams, on the edge of waking. She turned from all notion of their dream forest, the one she reduced to ash and prowling Rage, for months. Months. And now? “It was Solas?”

“Patience, friend. It is best that you see.”

*

Ithalia opts for a coat, leaving her cloak to hang wet and abandoned. The left sleeve has long since been tailored to accommodate her loss of limb, now sewn together where her arm ends, just before where her elbow used to be. It is an old, worn garment, one of the few possessions she has left from home; like the rest of her, it has been changed by her last trip to the Crossroads.

It’s fitting, now. Hood pulled up, no heads turn in recognition. In Kirkwall, she has learned, a lost arm is nothing unique.

Once they take to the streets, Ithalia still raises a hand to her neck, letting a sliver of magic through to ebb away at the marks Mallorick’s mouth left behind. The skin, no longer tender, protests less at the cold air.

It’s a mistake to assume Morrigan doesn’t notice. With a raised brow and a flick of the wrist, she supplements her own magic, another healing breeze that mends the blemishes the rest of the way.

The smile she gives in answer is a little too knowing.

After near an hour’s walk south and west, they reach their destination: the gates of an alienage, their controlling levers outside the neighborhood’s entrance. Human control over elven bonds—Ithalia tugs up her hood higher, for there’s nothing she can do here that would not give the Inquisitor away, and the Inquisitor cannot stay. Every change her heart aches to force in the face of this city, she cannot rightly make without endangering a thousandfold more lives than she could liberate this morning.

There will be time, as Leliana always says. Time for Shartan’s words to spread; time for Orlais to usher in change that will ripple over the rest of Thedas; time for the people to believe the idea to reform is theirs, not hers.

The alienage bustles, even so soon after dawn. People of all ages crowd its streets, clamoring for last-minute gifts hours before this evening’s traditions, scrambling to seize the day-old goods passed off to them from Lowtown. All around the Vhen’adahl—the heart tree of the alienage—the smell of bread wafts over the cold cobbled paths, and children cry out in delight at their sated hunger.

A passerby trails a palm over Morrigan’s arm and shoulder under the Vhen’adahl’s shadow, lingering a moment overlong before vanishing into the crowd. Too slow to be an accident; to reverent to be callous.

“Pay it no mind,” Morrigan mutters to Ithalia as they weave through the crowds. “T’is a story I will explain, in time. For now, we’ve too precious little of it. Be swift, friend: t’is in our best interest to make no friends here today.”

Ithalia smothers down her questions, for the moment, but that will not keep Morrigan free of them forever. She cannot afford to make more excuses for what she should have pried at, all along. It cost her too dearly, the first time.

The pair don’t have to move in silence long. Morrigan steers them to a small, winding street near the rear of the alienage, tucked in close to one of the city’s walls. There, the houses are packed tight, as though their builders squeezed in as much life as was possible so near the boundary. Cramped stairwells laden with pots left to cool wind up the sides of the buildings, signs of life across the alienage’s every square inch.

Morrigan fishes a key from a pocket, fitting it into the lock of one of the bottommost units of one such building. With a gesture, she ushers Ithalia inside.

Warmth washes over her, but no light—something other than a hearth keeps the room heated. That is the sole indication that this is no ordinary alienage home, and a subtle one at that. Everything else is laid perfectly in place: tapestries hooked to the ceiling disguise the source of the mildew scent coming from above. Eclectic furniture—a worn table, mismatched chairs, a crooked bookshelf, and stained rugs—crowds much of the space, leaving only a narrow path from one room to the next.

Ithalia wanders further in, just far enough to catch a glimpse of the second of the home’s two rooms. Glaringly, the bed is too neatly made to match the disheveled look of the rest of the interior.

More glaring still: opposite the bed, there is an intact eluvian. It stands half as high as the ones Ithalia knows, its frame gnarled and wrapped with vines that seem to almost breathe on their own.

It hums with familiar, ancient magic: magic she could reach out and touch, for the first time in years.

“This… whose… how did you find this?”

Morrigan saunters in behind Ithalia, leaning languidly in the bedroom’s doorframe. “The acting Viscount never told you of his friends?”

“He did. Yet he didn’t hand me keys to their houses.” She looks past Morrigan, into the lightless kitchen, hopelessly dim despite the eluvian’s faint blue glow. “Much less when their houses have been abandoned, yet somehow tended to. How long has it been since Merrill lived here? How long have you known what she left behind?”

Her tone carries an unintended bite—or perhaps one intended for someone other than Morrigan.

But Morrigan only shrugs. “Much of the network must yet be uncovered. Parts of it elude even Fen’Harel’s grasp, tucked innocuously in the furthest reaches of the Crossroads. T’is the consistent heat here that is kind to the glass, that this mirror shan’t crack within this Age.”

“Much of the…” Ithalia closes in on the eluvian, reaching for its glass, stopping an inch shy of the pane. It feels like an action so much larger than herself: to touch the magic that dragged her into this role in the first place, that rendered her a simple cog in some ancient machination far beyond any mortal’s understanding.

It feels like touching where his hands once laid their prints, thousands of years ago. Like she has snatched a piece of the forbidden—a secret that, once, he might have whispered against the shell of her ear, if only he had stayed—when she should have no more claim to it.

She burned their piece of the Fade, and he locked the bounds of their forest behind her.

That doesn’t stop her from whispering, quiet and hollow, “How long have you known?”

“The Dread Wolf believes that the only eluvians in repair are those accessed by his…”  Morrigan pauses behind Ithalia, as though contemplating her choice of phrase. “The nexus of his own network. But that is not the truth of the eluvians. Even during the millennia of his rebellion, not every eluvian could be reached, not every one of their songs recorded. There are some, like this, that were not granted priority: t’would be most difficult to transport soldier or slave alike through this slender pane, and therein lies our edge. Neither you nor I seek to fit an army through these slivers of the network—only ourselves, and the eyes which are our best resource.”

It is almost too good to be true: that here lies a path to mending all that has gone wrong. Here, in a bedroom in an alienage in Kirkwall, lies the way back from the brink, the one way left to forestall the end of the world.

A path that bridges to the din’anshiral.

Slowly, Ithalia turns, fighting to keep her expression devoid of emotion. She meets the burning gold of Morrigan’s eyes, striking even in the lowlight, and forces herself to hold the woman’s gaze. “But how long have you known?”

Despite her every effort, it still sounds too much like, ‘How long have you known there was a way back from where so much has gone astray? How long have I been senselessly alone?’

“T’is a question I give you, instead: does it matter, in this moment?” Before Ithalia can argue either way, Morrigan strides up beside her, her gaze transfixed on the eluvian’s glow. It sparkles in her sclera, and her features soften in its wake, until her face scarcely resembles the sharp-edged woman that Ithalia knows. 

Delicately, Morrigan lifts a hand, laying it upon the pane with surprising fondness. A fraction of a breath escapes her lips, as though Morrigan is reuniting with an old, forgotten friend—a familiarity Ithalia stood on the edge of, once, before so much more than knowledge was stolen from her, kept from her, kept from all the world.

She turns to Ithalia with what is either reverie or mourning. It’s impossible to say.

“T’is high time that the Inquisitor held in her possession the tools of a god. Such has been her right, from the moment the Dread Wolf claimed her his equal—if not in age then in spirit and heart. And if he shan’t bestow these gifts himself?”

The corner of her lip quirks up. “Well. T’is your nameday, is it not?” 

Ithalia can’t help the way she bristles. “That’s never been your reason. You’re chasing echoes from the Fade—you’re chasing Solas’ defeat, not my triumph.”

“Have those two ends never been as good as one, as similar as sides of the same moon?” She looks back to the mostly-inert glass, offering no visual except the faintest blue glow from somewhere inside the pane, as though it contains a universe within. “If this world is to stave off its own end, it is time that Andraste’s Herald have in her possession a sword to take up once more. And if it is no longer blade you can wield, then allow me to broaden the span of your ability and hone the speed and precision of your intelligence, Inquisitor.”

She offers an arm with the air of an immortal beyond comprehension, but the simple grin of a well-meaning friend.

Ithalia takes it, whatever that may mean for the both of them. Morrigan bows her head.

“Fen’Harel enansal.”

Fen’Harel will be the joy after loss; the triumph after mourning.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Nine months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The meaning hits Ithalia a heartbeat too late, when she is halfway through the rippling pane, bathed in the cool rush of its magic. A hum almost reaches her ears, and then she is gone, between one place and the next.

The next breath she takes tastes of pure potential, charged air buzzing on her tongue. Her nerves sing with sheer magic, heady on the breeze.

When last she was in this place of in-betweens, she broke—and her body remembers. Pain lances down the arm she lost three years ago, fingers curling that will not be there when she cracks open her eyes.

The sensation fades as swift as it arrived. When Ithalia does look down, her chest squeezes in shared mourning and relief.

Her wisp—the one that, once, was her sword, and now has become this missing piece of her—has answered a call she never gave. It curls fingers she does not have, glowing a beautiful, shimmering green so much more vibrant than in the waking world.

A small triumph, after too much loss. The last time she had seen its glow in full was in those last moments spent chasing Arranna, when tears blurred her vision and the green light smeared in her sight.

“Something weighing on your conscience, Inquisitor?”

Only then does Ithalia realize she hasn’t taken a single step. Still, she can’t bring herself to move. Not yet.

“What?” she asks, barely there.

“T’is not beyond my notice that you’ve gone uncommonly quiet.”

Ithalia and Arranna cheered, together, when the wisp first took this shape in the waking world. Ithalia shared the truth—that the arm came to her first in the Fade, sheltered in a forest spun of dreams—and Arranna pulled her into a tight embrace.

It was the beginning of the end. She should have known. But the recollection brings a smile, even now.

“No, Morrigan. It’s not that. Not in the way you think.”

Arranna walked paths like these. Ithalia knows that, now.

But, somewhere deep in her marrow, she believes in equal measure that Arranna would be proud of this, too. Every step in this place she felt she’d never walk again.

“Then won’t you find it in your spine to straighten? Look up, and you might catch a glimpse of our path and its end.”

Ithalia does: first to Morrigan’s features, crafted into an oddly assuring grin, then to the vast swathes of green beyond.

This is not the Crossroads she knows. Taking no cues from memories of ancient Elvhenan, nor Orlais, nor fragments of the Deep Roads, it is something wholly different—but a memory all the same.

These are the Kocari Wilds: a piece of Morrigan’s heart, her life, made real across this stretch of the heavens. The paths are still broken, fractured islands floating in motionless air too far to reach. Their trees—broad oaks and dark pines—grow upside-down toward a sun that doesn’t exist here. They exist in summer stasis, no hint of Kirkwall or its snow to be seen. The scents of fresh rain and dampened loam are alive and well in Ithalia’s nostrils, and the ground squishes pleasantly under her boots.

It stokes the banked embers of an old urge, a childish inclination to take off her shoes and allow her soles to breathe in this new world. Something Keeper Dashenna once encouraged of her: that she imbibe the world with all her senses, that she remember it with every fiber of her being, so she might live and breathe its history the same way the trees live and breathe their own.

Here, she has to stamp it down. To ask questions, to study silently, as she learned before the Conclave.

“How…” she pauses on her wording. “How have you… managed… all of this?”

Morrigan scoffs. “T’is not as though I have languished all these years. I’ve not been labourless.”

They set into motion. It is hard, every step, not to run, to bound into the dense woodland and cry for Fen’Harel’s shadow, for vengeance, for recognition of her every hurt.

It is just as hard not to flinch. Morrigan has neither seen nor lent her mending to the bruises inside Ithalia’s thighs, and she won’t risk the attention with even a silent spell. With every step, she is reminded of just hours ago, when she thought she’d found the end to the haze she could not escape, the shroud of unfelt anguish.

Now it’s all she can do to pull that shroud tight, to betray nothing, to walk with her spine straightened and her features carefully blank.

“You haven’t been… anything, since last we spoke,” Ithalia says carefully, studying Morrigan’s expression. “Not visibly. It’s like you wiped yourself off the map.”

“Indeed I did,” Morrigan answers, glinting eyes downcast. As though a thought strikes her in that instant, she pivots, grasping Ithalia’s shoulders. Her eyes are darker, her tiny smile vanished, as she appends, “T’is better, with all my son has borne witness to—all that was bestowed to him ere he drew his first breath, then taken back before he reached manhood—that he does not tread these paths I walk. There are facets of war we would not wish upon those closest to us, no matter how far we must keep them from it… and ourselves, by extension.”

The din’anshiral, Ithalia almost says. She can hear it, almost, in another’s voice. Someone who should not haunt her any longer, but does, here more than anywhere. Someone who could be one eluvian, one forked road, one moment away.

“It’s kind,” she forces out instead, “That he stays behind.”

She wishes it weren’t true. More than some childish want begs her to pull off her shoes and drink in this new place, Ithalia burns with the need to break from these woodlands and run headlong into the Fade, come what may, that she may at least…

She doesn’t know what, anymore.

They resume walking. A wide dirt trail thins, its edges replaced by scrubby undergrowth and thick grass. The trees encroach closer, their boughs creating a densely-packed arch over their path, blocking out the light of the surrounding iridescent sky.

“T’is borne of good intent,” Morrigan says as they move. “Whether it was kind is for the Ages to tell. There is much that was borne of benevolence that…” She quiets, adjusting one of her rings. Up ahead, gold flashes through the trees. “You will soon see. Come: our next eluvian isn’t far. It will take us to a familiar nexus. From there, we will move swift.”

Ithalia’s insides knot. “Familiar…”

“You know it well, Inquisitor. We tread there, arm in arm, once before. Let us do so again.”

Around a final bend, the eluvian comes into full view. It stands as high as the last one the Dread Wolf vanished into, many months before—but the glass is spiderwebbed with thin gold lines, a thousand reparations glimmering in the dappled light.

Unlike the stunted eluvian they left behind in Kirkwall, this one does make Ithalia feel like the same small, dying thing she was when she collapsed after she was left behind. Alarmingly mortal, no better than a fly against an empire.

Morrigan’s offered arm does nothing to ease the feeling. Not like it might have, once.

She takes it anyway.

Better to be an insect against an ancient, world-ending force than nothing at all.

*

The sprint through the eluvian nexus is just that. Morrigan’s hand tight around Ithalia’s right wrist. Ithalia’s heart pounding hard in her ears, eyes darting over scenery that flies by.

Every mirror, every pathway, is his. Every pane of glass, a door he could walk through, in these seconds that tick by. Every agent that could spot them might be someone whose face she remembers, whose voice she remembers, whose hand she might have shook when they were first invited to join the Inquisition.

All of it, a life that was once in her grasp. A domain that was almost, almost hers.

Rings of eluvians—dozens, at least—span out from a central point. In it, just two, towering high and mighty over the rest. The moment Ithalia thinks to look back, to take stock of how many still function, Morrigan’s grip cinches tighter.

“Every extra second here is naught more than folly,” she hisses. “We do not wish to attract the Dread Wolf’s eye, and no incantation will keep us veiled long.”

Ithalia only has time to bite back a bitter retort before they reach the innermost eluvian and dash through. Abruptly, the air is mountain-cold again, the light of the sky eclipsed by walls of stone.

The smell of cold dust almost brings her to tears. This—the cloistered rooms worn down by age, the battlements on winter nights, that old rotunda in every in-between…

This is Skyhold.

The first thing, the last thing—the only thing, in truth—that was ever theirs.

The pressure of Morrigan’s hand around her wrist is all that keeps her tears at bay. Teeth grit, Ithalia swallows down the lump in her throat.

Nothing has changed. Not from stepping foot here alone.

“T’is by my doing we have the fortress to ourselves for the day,” Morrigan says, releasing Ithalia. She rubs at her wrist, because it’s all that will keep her feet rooted in place. “Those who are involved in the reconstruction effort are on orders from the Divine to return to work on the morrow.”

“Leliana—?”

Morrigan laughs, but the sound comes more strained than usual. “Do you forget, Inquisitor, t’was I who knew her long before that mark appeared on your hand?”

Ithalia shakes off the thought. Her eyes narrow, instead, on stones tossed loose to the floor. This room, containing the eluvian, is on the opposite side of the garden from the fortress’ main hall. If something was shaken free here…

She walks, heedless of her own mind, to the door, as though something else is maneuvering her limbs. Something that weighs like a stone in her chest, that will bring her to her knees if she slows.

It has a name. She knows it does. But to say it now would crack the last pieces of her left intact.

Her hand turns the latch on the door. Steps forward into what could be a different lifetime.

Winter has coated her garden in ice. Only the conifers have any green left to them, by the solstice. The rest is covered in a layer of hoarfrost, just as it was before so much was lost. The well in the garden’s center, the rope hanging down, every branch of every shrub—all white, glinting ice, reflecting every rosy hue of the early morning, hours behind Kirkwall’s.

How many dawns did she watch here? How many more did she believe, foolishly, she had left?

She forces her vision forward. Morrigan brought her here for a reason. The stones shaken loose—some missing from the lip of the well, some shingles cast off from on high—sent an echo through the Fade. Reminiscence, no matter how fond, no matter how many faces and voices dance at the edge of her memory, will gain her nothing.

Her world will end. Soon. That is all.

Ithalia walks the same line she has countless times before: a hundred nights pawing uselessly at unresponsive glass, head hung on the shameful journey back to bed. Only this time, no door awaits her. Blown from its hinges, it hangs crookedly to the side, barely clinging to its frame.

Inside is worse. Bits of fragmented rock, everywhere. Shafts of winter light and flakes of snow filter in from holes in the roof above. Banners, torn. Windows, shattered, likely from the same thing that burst the keep’s main gate open.

The fortress lies in ruin—more than when they found it.

Her keep—her home—torn apart from the inside out.

Great echoes across the Fade. What blood was spilled here? What pain, what death, quaked the walls ‘til stones fell loose, then rattled all the Fade?

Only it is not blood strewn over the floor. Streaks of blue, sapphire blue, mar the rock under the debris and stain the tattered carpet.

Pigment. Paint.

Ithalia launches into a sprint. Ridiculous, that her heart pounds as if he is wounded, as if he could ever have been wounded, much less here. That her chest heaves and aches as if this is Arranna all over again, as if her every hurt was not by his hand. That she worries like he is dying, when it’s not Solas that is bruised, mortal.

Yet she all but flies to the rotunda. All but tiptoes over the worst of the wreckage—fallen beams, whole square blocks of the wall tumbled down, cages from the rookery thrown down from above. Everything covered in a slurry of vibrant colour. 

It’s all bled from the walls. Every brilliant fresco, their memories made eternal, reduced to outlines barely visible in the patchy sunlight. The sketches she once watched come into being late at night, when she stayed out of the Fade because she would rather watch him work than roam her dreams alone. When he smeared paint on her nose for needling him, when she wrested his brush from his hands to flick paint back in new constellations over his freckles. When he kissed her, slow and deep, and the colours blended together across both their faces.

Gone. 

All the plaster from the eighth fresco, left unfinished, ripped from the wall.

Something that was supposed to last an immortal’s lifetime, entirely unmade.

A raven glides over Ithalia’s head, furls its wings, and becomes a woman again as it vaults down to a graceful landing. Morrigan stands among the ruin, gold eyes roaming the wreckage.

“They say a demon rose from here,” she says, canting her head quizzically, “that it took shape from the plaster. ‘Tis strange, ‘tis it not? That such an occurrence would grace these halls, when they have been bereft of the painter for years.”

Ithalia shakes her head. That suggestion would be too easy, in this game of half-truths she’s played for years.

“Solas wasn’t here.”

Morrigan spins on a heel to award Ithalia an approving look, a flash of teeth. “If he were, t’would not be wise to speak of only the faintest remnant. I’d have bequeathed the truth to you, for you’d go sprinting after its source.”

Ithalia takes a slow step back, flicking a look over her shoulder. “Then…”

“Come, now: you are an ornament of the faith. Follow the threads of its narrative, however twisted their knots have grown, untended by any who remember the miracles as they were lived. What is a demon, but a spirit? And what is a spirit, if not…”

Her pulse ratchets faster. All those times Solas wound his fingers with hers as they spoke to Cole. Those nights spent searching for a willing wisp, then learning to fashion the tiny spirit into a sword. The dirth’ena enasalin, the way she treasured the words on her tongue, their ancient pull.

That wisp comes back to her now, slipping easy through the paper-thin Veil, as everything else in Skyhold: a fortress half-made of echoes of its own past… and of the nearby Fade.

Tarasyl’an. The place where the sky is held back—barely. Where it would take not war to wear holes in the Veil, but…

“Memory,” Ithalia says, slow, already cracking under the weight of it. “Emotion.”

Morrigan turns, her back to Ithalia, sunlight drowning in the dark of her feathered mantle. Taking her place where a lone desk now lies in splinters, she raises her arms as if to summon a spell, calling invisible pieces of the Fade to her fingertips.

When she speaks, it is with two voices. One human—one keening howl.

“I am the heart of what was here.”

The wisp forming Ithalia’s left arm brightens. Wind circles the rotunda, wreathing it in a sharper chill. The bent cages rattle, delicate hinges creaking. A green tinge darkens the space. She resists the old instinct to step back, and the newer instinct to intervene.

“An echo that has breached the Fade,” Morrigan continues, woman and growl in one.

Ithalia keeps her breath slow, and stays still as the Veil is breached anew. Vague shapes form in the air, their silhouettes blurring further when she attempts to focus on them.

One grows, sprouting new limbs that fade in the next instant. “Once I was Contemplation, but no longer.”

A shadow looms, pulled from where the plaster broke free of the wall. Half-there, half-not, it stands on seven legs, raises an almost-lupine snout, and bares draconic teeth. 

“There is so much of me that’s here,” cry voices in the walls, the rafters, the spaces between motes of light. Too many sound far too much like his. “So much Regret behind these deeds. I wonder if you know the dread that’s coming?”

Before fear can coil in Ithalia’s middle, the shadow bounds over her, past her, through the wreckage of the rotunda door.

Not a demon seeking purchase: a spirit, compassionately reliving its chase.

Not the Dread Wolf, but a memory. One that bounded past here and…

Ithalia turns to follow. Morrigan stays in place, channeling, unaware of her departure. Her heart rises to her throat. Every limb goes cold.

“The actions here have scarred the world,” new voices say, so many so much like one she shrinks from.

The same green tinge overtakes the main hall, seeping out from Morrigan’s spell in the rotunda. In it, more spirits form, whispering almost-words, howling anguish that belongs to another. 

“You saw the rise and felt the fall,” one confesses, far too close, “Now it all lies in ruin of our making.”

“No,” she says, unconscious of herself. She shakes her head against the thought.

He locked the door. He turned. He left. There was nothing about this ruin that is theirs.

Ithalia catches the shadow bounding toward the garden, leaving no footprints, no sound as an apparition of the garden door is blown back by unnatural wind.

She pulls in a breath. Braces to launch after it, to face it down.

A hand seizes her own, and she freezes.

The hand is brilliant, blazing green. Uprooted from its normal place. It is her arm—her wisp—detached from the rest of her, moved to her other side. Acting on a will of its own, it twines the fingers of what was once her left hand with the digits of her right.

It squeezes tight, then pulls, gently insistent.

Not through the garden, where through the broken bits of wall, Ithalia sees the shadow’s lupine shape scrambling up the garden’s border. Down the length of the main hall, where the ruin is sparse, but the magic runs thickest. Where silhouettes take not the shapes of wolves, but…

Her.

Him.

They fill two chairs at the head of a table, the ghosts of forks in hand, heads tipped back in laughter. They slip, arm in arm, into the storm of the rotunda. They walk, knuckles nearly brushing, ahead of the flesh-and-bone Ithalia behind them.

Outside, the sky over the courtyard is painted over with dark, churning clouds. Lightning streaks outside, and the heavens wail. Echoes of soldiers rise from the courtyard. Voices Ithalia recognizes: Dagna, Sutherland. They cry out for one another. They cry out against the demon, smothered by its howl.

“You think you are immune to me?”

A shout lodges in Ithalia’s throat. No matter what she longs to say, she barely moves through the sea of spirits. Her shape and his, engaged in teasing rapport without any words. Sneaking back from the kitchens in the dead of night. Wiping off their blades and staves, returning after sparring matches in the autumn dirt.

“I am all that you have done.”

“Yet look at all that you’re doing without me!” she fires back. Her life isn’t so much as a blink in the eyes of an immortal. What leaves her bruised is no more than a breath to his kind. What seems an entire world to her is but a passing inconvenience, a bad dream.

His kind get to wake from it before old age takes them. His kind have time, space, to heal.

She fights to pull free of her wisp. Tugs against it, tries to wrench her fingers away. It holds fast, undeterred by the physical.

It stays perfectly still, perfectly patient, until the ire cools.

As soon as it does, she catches a shape—not a shadow, but real—in the wreckage of the courtyard. It flares bright in the spirit-made memory of a storm, the recollection of lightning throwing its distant features into sharp relief.

Tentatively, she steps toward the sight, through the bent arch of the main keep’s broken door. Every muscle in her body, pulled bowstring-taut. The line of her jaw, painfully tight.

What she sees stabs through her anyway.

To ordinary eyes, it’s merely a heap of plaster that collapsed in front of Skyhold’s outer gate, dampened by snowfall and melted hoarfrost. It bears all the markers of the fight that led to its death: even at this distance, up high outside the keep’s door, Ithalia can see bits of whitened ash streaked across its pieces, places where the plaster has hardened under flame or been charred by lightning. It fell to its death inside a circle of ruin, scorchmarks pocking the snow-covered ground. Precious little blood stains the white, but pigment has rained around it. 

The demon’s last anguished noises pierce the air through the mouths of compassionate spirits, but Ithalia scarcely hears them. Everything falls away.

It is hard to tell which pieces of plaster amounted to each limb of the demon’s body, but some are large enough to make out what once was painted on them. The largest—its torso, or maybe the broadest portion of its brow—still depicts the blunted snout that, years ago, she mistook for an archdemon sketched, somehow, before it was slain.

It took too long to understand it was never a dragon whose snout was drawn bowed before the Inquisitor’s blade.

It was a wolf—a wolf who’d absorbed a dragon into itself, maybe. An impossible guess to make… and one she laid awake, night after night, wondering what might have changed if she’d guessed right before he was gone.

That blade, the outline of it, survives. A long, thin stretch of plaster lies apart from the heap, pointing out Skyhold’s main gate.

An arm, reaching out at the moment of Regret’s demise.

Its smallest fragments—its fingers, or its claws—point far down the cable lift, past the borders of this green-tinged storm, to the untouched wilderness below.

A forest, bathed in the pink light of dawn.

One whose every bough she knows, from hundreds of nights spent walking one just like it in dreams.

“Vhenan,” escapes her lips, little more than a broken noise. Both her arms—one made of flesh, the other of spirit—wrap around her middle. She scarcely feels when her knees hit the stone.

A splinter of his being, his broken heart, laid to rest here… in a ruin that points to theirs. Their forest, where this wisp first took the shape of her hand. Their dreams, spun around her like a protective barrier, safe enough ground to learn how to live again after she woke up wounded months ago—but all she called it was a cage. 

Their mourning, shared where she could not see it before now. Would not see it.

But it was theirs, all theirs, as much as the rose-hued world under their shared covers at the Winter Palace, where no chatter, no music, no Emperor could find them for a few blissful hours.

She doesn’t know when the tears come, or how long they persist. Only that the storm is gone, that her eyes burn, when Morrigan comes to stand at her side.

“I felt it,” she says, not waiting for Ithalia to raise her eyes, “when all the Fade caved at your departure. A picture that the spirits will sing into being for an Age.

“The smoke of the ashen woodland trailed everywhere that sorrow touched. The Dread Wolf’s bitterness became a torrent. My son woke in a cold sweat then, though June no more shares his soul—any who felt a spirit’s guiding hand quaked as you fled the theneradahl.”

“Theneradahl,” Ithalia repeats, voice roughened, raw. “The dreaming forest.”

“T’is not the same since, is it, now? Your dreams can no more find their roots. You wander, only half-aware, untethered.”

An embarrassing hiccough seizes her throat. She clears it, slumps forward.

“I know.”

But Morrigan’s hand lands on her shoulder. When Ithalia’s gaze lifts, at first it’s only gold she sees, before the dark of Morrigan’s hair, the blazing late dawn, take shape around it.

“You’re more than a mere mortal thing. The Dread Wolf once declared you his equal—if not in age, then heart and spirit.” She takes the hand of the wisp, now resolutely attached to Ithalia’s residual limb, and waits for Ithalia to haul herself up. “Be not despair’d. Take up your sword, fight this anew—equal, mortal, both.”

Chapter Text

Solas

— Ten months since Fen'Harel's departure —

There was a demon in Skyhold, say a dozen of his agents.

Borne of Regret, it ravaged keep and courtyard.

He knows before they tell the tale, from Free Marches to south Orlais, in each one of his holdings left on Thedas.

He knows because Regret was his: first his to feel, then to fight and lose. It was no wonder the echo broke through the Veil, into Skyhold. In truth, it is a miracle none died there: that old forces held fast against their oldest wounds and Regret’s taunts, that they could bring the demon to final rest.

Still, the blame lies on him alone. Swift corrections now must be made, lest his mistakes cause any further damage.

The first he must tend to: his library.

It has been weeks, since he entered it. He stands just inside his Lighthouse, barely two steps through the Vi’Revas, and at once considers turning, recalibrating the eluvian, traveling somewhere—anywhere—else.

There is work to be done, after all.

But such has been his pattern. There are Dalish sayings about paths too well-tread, deeply dug.

A rut, he can almost hear her needle. A name he dares not say, dares not think, until he is certain no lingering traces of Regret have stayed behind here to coalesce into something new.

Solas pulls in a deep breath, steels his nerves. He moves forward, upward, because he must.

What he finds is what he expects, but that does not make it easier to stand in the center of the room and take inventory of the wreckage.

Gone is the peaceful library of the Vhen’Theneras, its perfectly-kept shelves, its ever-present, serene hum. Paint has dried across its floors, the splatter broken only by the still-frozen remains of the icy daggers he flung in one pivotal, unthinking moment and the shape of where he knelt to hold Contemplation in his arms as she died.

Shards of glass glint in the shadowed corners of the room. The books thrown from their shelves, left unattended, have soaked up pigment from the floor where they landed.

Much has been lost. Delicate contraptions beyond accurate repair. Knowledge kept only in the Vhen’Theneras, lost and forgotten everywhere else.

To say nothing of Contemplation.

He takes another steadying breath, deeper than the first. Forces the next one to come slower, and the next slower than that. Regret will feed on whatever he supplies it, if it is here, so he must supply little.

That does not help him know where to begin.

He supposes if there is work to be done, there ought to be light. Many lanterns hummed with lyrium’s ever-changing song and will require meticulous hands and sharper focus than he has to give at present.

But there are candles strewn amid the wreckage. Those, he can lift with the crook of a finger. A simple twirl of the wrist and bend of the palm sees them moving through the air to their rightful places, leaving dried paint behind as dust so they may settle, unmarred, where they used to be.

A satisfied smile pulls faintly at his mouth, and they light at his unspoken thought. Far from the cool emittance of lyrium bulbs, they paint his library in warmer, softer light than he has allowed himself in months. It harkened, always, to another time, far-removed from his duty.

Perhaps, alone, with the Vi’Revas left inert and inaccessible behind him and the wards around the Vhen’Theneras repaired…

It is not regret, to imagine the burnt-ember glow of Skyhold’s rotunda.

Not with the image of Ithalia stretched languid on his couch, ankles crossed, eyes crinkled as she smiles at him from behind a book. If he holds the recollection of her just like this—ashen blonde hair allowed to spill loose down her shoulders past dark, dressed down in a simple tunic embroidered with Dalish design, captured on a night between when he convinced himself to stay and forced himself to go—his weary bones can warm at the sight of her.

For now, it can be enough.

He leaves the wreckage behind for a moment—a moment, he reminds himself, but even the reminder is distant now—and lowers onto the edge of the sofa. He imagines how, before, this would always play out: Ithalia, drawing her knees closer to herself, sitting up straighter now that he’d come near, laying her book to rest in her lap.

This time, the image of her—a figment of his imagination, not a spirit embodying an unraveling memory—turns her attention from him. She runs a finger along the lip of a tear in the sofa’s fabric, a gouge left by a shard of ice.

She does not have that finger any longer, nor most of the adjoining arm.

Right now, it would be a danger to dwell on that for long, so instead he runs his own touch over the tear’s opposite side.

Work for idle hands, she used to say, before working her own sort of magic. It was a genuine surprise, at first: that the morning after a trek up a rain-slicked hillside in the Storm Coast, the tunic from the day prior reappeared in his rucksack, new stitching in dark thread down its sleeve, the bloodied tear mended while he had not been looking.

Something my Keeper taught me, was all the explanation she gave.

Something stirred in his chest that he would take many months more to name, and he never asked for more than that.

It was a trick he let her play over and over, for the smug grin she always gave when he found her handiwork. Tunics, cloaks, the knees of trousers, the soles of boots.

Not everything Dalish is useless, she needled. He grew to love the sting.

That is the cause he can devote his shaking hands to, one repair he can find it in himself to make. He lifts a hand, prepared to weave the strings together in concert, and pauses.

No. Not this way.

A little Creation magic—the best of June’s legacy in the waking world—and a sliver of the air in the room coalesces, stretches, into dark thread. Another thought, and ice forms between his thumb and forefinger, clear as glass but hard as metal.

A needle: one that pricks his finger thrice as he tries to thread it in the mundane fashion.

It is more difficult than he surmised to recreate the pattern of her mending. Just another of her surprises—one that stirs something in his chest to find, after this long.

When he is done, the line of his work is far from straight. The fabric bunches unevenly midway along his repair.

Ithalia—even this version that he conjured of his own volition—is gone.

A little of her remains here, somewhere in the stitching. A little of her magic: the kind that had nothing at all to do with his orb, her Anchor, the Breach.

Work for idle hands, passed down in the fashion of Keepers. If she heard those words leave his lips, her laughter would fill the library.

He rises before he can dwell on all that she might do afterward. There is yet more work to be done. So much more than a small tear must be mended. All the Vhen’Theneras has suffered at his hands. Its walls. Its floors. Many of its most prized treasures.

Solas steps past them all. What must come next has never been clearer than now.

He pushes open the doors to the Lighthouse’s courtyard with both palms splayed, shoulders braced, not an iota of his mana employed in the effort. He tries not to feel the pang of sorrow when the surrounding skies come into view: vast plumes of smoke, flashes of lightning from a storm he has not allowed to end.

Some part of him never wanted it to end, for all it might mean if it did.

Moving across the terrace, he comes to a ledge that did not exist this time last year. In its place, before, was a tiny grove: one that would sing with her voice each time she entered the Fade. When last he heard it, it sang her fury, insults flung like daggers and worse.

In his outrage, he broke that grove away from the whole, cast it violently adrift. Unmoored, it has traveled, but not far. A single thought would bring it homeward, but he gives it more, just like he had when he tore it away. This time, he curls his fingers toward himself in gesture, pulling the corners of his mouth into what he hopes is an entreating smile.

There was a time when that was all he needed to wreathe her in his arms. Those days are past them both—the din’anshiral demands that much of him—and he cannot deny the smoke still clouding this sky.

But the grove responds to this small token of mending. Its pine is still scorched, split where lightning struck its center. Its undergrowth is little more than a charred smear. The roots, though, stretch out like eager hands, binding themselves to the nearby greenhouse’s walkway. With the slow crunch of stone against stone, the grove settles back against the courtyard it was ripped from.

When the sound stops, he sighs into the quiet, allowing his arms to fall slack, his smile to ebb away. There is no one here to know it was ever there.

That does not mean nothing has changed. There is a space, now, for something new.

He can leave this door open to her anger. Her loathing. He can craft another forest, then see it reduced to her kindling. As many as she needs, until she returns no more.

He will take her fury over this enforced silence, if she chooses to give it again. If it means she chooses anything at all.

Much work must still be done, within the Lighthouse and without. Pieces to recover, knowledge to unearth anew, a world to change, then break, then heal. Today, he will restore his library to what it once was, with the exception of a few lost artefacts and an uneven line in the fabric of his sofa.

Days from now, he will meet with an Inquisition agent—Charter—disguised as a stranger. He will ask, from a careful distance, what the Inquisition knows of the idol that will be at the Lighthouse before they can think to chase after it. He will wait, to see if they know—if their Inquisitor knows—what must come next.

But before he goes, he will say what must be said, lest his mistakes cause any further damage.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Eleven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

Ithalia is mid-stitch when a knock raps against her door. Inquisition business, she knows. Urgent, if a knock has come at this late hour.

“Enter,” she says without looking up, because custom demands it of the Inquisitor, day or night.

This is Val Royeaux, though—the Divine’s manor, where a wing has been set aside for her. Her permanent suite, several floors up on the edge of the Chantry’s expansive grounds, so the knock comes dully through thick mahogany, and nothing goes cold that isn’t warmed by the large, well-stocked hearth she sits cross-legged beside.

The worst thing to spear her is the brief look the attendant—Étoile, who’s only been on the staff as of Arranna’s disappearance months ago—gives Ithalia, before she smooths it out into neutrality. It’s little wonder: in all the time since Arranna’s disappearance, her wisp has hardly been in the same room, much less acting as her left hand. The practice, she finds, hasn’t hurt.

A city elf, Étoile’s next instinct is to take a half-step back and bow her head, but Ithalia holds up a hand—her right, for the girl’s sake.

“There’s no harm done. You’re right: it’s peculiar to see an Inquisitor cross-legged on the floor, with a perfectly good armchair next to me, blanketed in a cloak when I’ve got a perfectly good bed not twenty steps away.” Ithalia flashes smile, but it hardly seems to reassure the girl.

She finishes her stitch, the last one she needed to complete her repair, and ties off the line before rising. Folding the cloak neatly, she sets it on the aforementioned chair, leaving the needle on the side table beside it in a little dish, because in this place there is a little dish for everything.

“Of course, my lady,” Étoile answers, suffering a little curtsy.

“You still find it odd.”

“It is only… the Divine has a tailor on her staff, my lady. If there was a request I needed to send…”

“No,” Ithalia says, indulging a last look at the tidy bundle of fabric. “The cloak was… is… a gift, and suffered a tear on the journey back here. I prefer to mend it myself, even if I’m no tailor. You’ve done nothing wrong. Now: what news is there?”

“Charter has returned, and conferred with Most Holy. Your presence is requested in the study immediately.”

*

It was always hard not to laugh, next to Arranna, even when the news was dire. Even flanked by guards, or under a dozen prying eyes. It was hard to be the Inquisitor, to appear as the Inquisitor, with even a single friend left by her side.

For months, Ithalia wondered how much of it was an order passed from Fen’Harel. Étoile, by contrast, is half perfect adherence to duty, half bashful impulse.

But no—it’s Ithalia that’s changed. Arranna’s laughter was no product of orders. It was natural, easy, and that ease died when she did.

The challenge of appearing as the Inquisitor remains, now, for different reason. While her expression might betray nothing, it is exceedingly difficult to keep her pace slow, her walk formal, in the presence of Étoile and two flanking guards.

There is news regarding Solas' movements, and she is past the point of denying to herself that she cares. For the first time in months, some hint of him is alive in the world. She knew the news would come—she knew of Charter’s whereabouts, after all—but it is different to be mere moments away from it, her stomach in knots, her wounded heart allowed to thaw and bleed.

If she were alone, maybe she’d allow her sense of urgency to show. Only, the rumours that the Inquisitor was entangled with Fen’Harel, a legend come back to life, are still rumours, and it is vital they remain so. 

The study is several floors down, in Leliana’s personal wing of the manor. The patter of nug feet, thankfully, has come and gone by the time Ithalia and her entourage reach its entrance. Étoile gives another dutiful curtsy, leaving when Ithalia gives a nod. The guards position themselves on either side of the double doors paned with stained glass. Ithalia gives only a single knock before twisting the jeweled knob and letting herself inside.

This isn’t so much a meeting between the Divine and the Inquisitor—Leliana leaves the veneer at the door, as much as she or Ithalia can—as it is between friends. Otherwise, Ithalia would have been marched to the Chantry in the cold, no matter the hour.

A nug snorts as it races out of the room past Ithalia’s ankles.

“Boulette—!” Leliana calls from within, then sighs. Ithalia enters, laughing at the Divine whose head is in her hands, fingers gently massaging her temples.

“Will you have your guards chase her? Again?”

She groans. “There would be little point. She would give the Dread Wolf a run for his money, as Master Tethras might say.”

Leaning forward at her desk, Leliana retrieves a cup of tea—one of two—from a tray. She looks entirely at home in her study, filled wall to wall with books dating from every Age. The only indication she was ever the Inquisition’s spymaster, not always Divine Victoria, is the fact that she ordered her bathroom to be made with fabric the same muted purple as her old shroud, trimmed with much paler gold than her Chantry robes.

“Weren’t you at the Chantry under an hour ago?” Ithalia asks, lowering into the chair opposite her. Leliana hums into her cup.

“Mm-hmm.” Swallowing that first sip that sends warmth blooming pink over her cheeks, Leliana looks up from her tea. “I would have told Étoile that there is no need for formality, if I’d known you would come down fully dressed.”

“Oh—no.” Ithalia looks down at herself, smoothing her silver-trimmed green robes. “I hadn’t stepped out of them. I knew news would come late, and I…”

“Fretted,” Leliana supplies for her. “It is alright to say, you know. We are alone. That is why I sent for the tea.”

“You are nothing if not efficient.”

A little laugh, now, before she quiets. “That, and… I meet with you now not as the Divine speaking to the Inquisitor, but as a friend.”

Ithalia’s brow pinches. “Not a debrief, then?”

“Not until the morning.”

“Tell me, at least—are we closer to the idol?”

“No, and that’s all I will say until the morning. Nice try.” Grinning, Leliana indulges a long sip. Ithalia, left with no other retaliation for the moment, takes one of her own. This is a new blend: bitter, but with a spoon of honey already added, it tastes a little of the home she used to have in youth.

“Have I missed something?” Ithalia asks at last. “The meeting about the idol was all that was arranged, wasn’t it? The supply lines on the Minanter won’t open fully until the summer—”

“Ithalia.” Setting her cup down, Leliana folds her hands atop the table, the mirth gone from her voice. “Solas attended the meeting.”

All the air in the room vanishes.

Ithalia’s body freezes in place. Her wisp falters, her focus fractured. It fades for a heartbeat, and her teacup nearly tips.

“Are you…”

“Charter is certain. That was his voice. He attended in disguise, but he…” Leliana pauses, selecting her next words carefully. “He employed a little of his magic.”

A distant ringing sounds in Ithalia’s ears. She tightens her flesh-and-bone knuckles around her cup to keep it steady.

His magic. That means another body turned to stone. A life, ended. Wiped off the board.

She manages only a dry swallow. “Anyone we know?”

“Not personally. The agent you know as Mallorick has not yet been found, but every one of our agents are accounted for, otherwise.” That, she pauses at, watching Ithalia from under the shadow of her lowered brow. 

Leliana knew—of course she knew—as soon as Ithalia returned. Mallorick went missing just days later. What Leliana watches for now is a twitch in Ithalia’s reaction, the hint of some scrap of sorrow.

After a moment, it seems she finds nothing. She goes on, “After this many weeks, I am not sure he will be found—or that he wishes to be, if he left of his own accord. It is no matter. We will assure his wellbeing… or ours, in any case.”

“I don’t need the details,” Ithalia confesses, meeting Leliana’s eyes. Both understand the implication: that he holds no piece of her heart. Looking into the contents of her cup, Ithalia then summons the will to ask, “Is Charter… unharmed?”

“Solas was perfectly amiable, since I know that is what you are really asking.” Leliana takes another sip, hands unfolded. “In fact, tea is what gave his disguise away, while we’re on the subject. He could not bring himself to drink his own.”

Ithalia forces herself through the motions of another drink of her own, in the vain hope her stomach will settle, or her shaking will cease. The ache of him crawls down every nerve, tightening her throat even after the honey flows down. “He always…”

“I know.” Canting her head to the side, Leliana softens—not pity, but deep sorrow. “He… asked that Charter deliver you a message. I would give it to you now, as your friend, not your Divine. Do you wish to hear it?”

Ithalia bites the inside of her lip, a habit left over from when she was small. She curses the way she succumbs to it, that she hadn’t thought before her body moved. Hadn’t thought to think.

But Solas’ voice lilts just at the edge of her consciousness, the memory alone enough to summon the sound. She can still hear him, the little lilts in his not-quite-Dalish accent, even now, as if they still breathe the same air—or had, even once, in months.

She needs strength she does not have… but to deny this now would be to starve herself of something vital.

“Yes.”

Ithalia closes her eyes, at least, to listen—if only to hear the words as he would have said them.

“I am not a god.”

She scoffs—a little, broken sound. She can’t help but hear the growl of the spirits in Skyhold, the Regret they reenacted in compassion: I am the Regret of a god.

Leliana waits patiently for her silence, then goes on, “I am prideful, hotheaded, and foolish, and I am doing what I must. When you report back to the Inquisior… say that I am sorry.”

The ache of him grows as if to wrap around her shoulders, wreathing her middle. The sting of tears threatens her eyes, but no part of her tenses. This is the closest she has come to him in what feels like a lifetime—and for all the pain, she cannot help but relax into the echo of him.

“Thank you, Leliana.”

She smiles like a bard would smile: humbly, with a knowing glint alive in her eye. “We will debrief in full in the morning.”

“I… of course.” Ithalia yawns. Morning seems so impossibly far away. Everything does. “I’d… expect nothing else.”

“Though… I will arrange said meeting for the late morning.” A snicker bubbles from Leliana’s throat when Ithalia aims a look her way. She tips her chin in gesture to Ithalia’s glass. “Elfroot tea, said to soothe the addled mind and relax the tightly-wound body… in addition to granting easier access to the Fade in sleep.”

“I…” Ithalia looks into the dregs of her cup, frowns. “I should have known. How many years did I spend with my Keeper, tending the clan? How many times have I brewed this myself?”

“That is the power of the heart, my friend. Sometimes, it erases what we know to make room for what we need.”

She almost laughs. “You would say I need this?”

“You forget, Inquisitor, that our aim has always been to use the Inquisition’s power to keep the Dread Wolf on his proverbial toes. That that was what we promised while you still laid in a sickbed, in those first days after you lost your arm. You forget that it has only ever worked because he is deeply, irrevocably in love with you—and just as stubborn as you are.” Laughing to herself, Leliana extends a hand, laying it over Ithalia’s own. “And if we are to win this war? It’s for the best that you stay close. Close in his sight, as well as his broken heart.”

Ithalia fights to find words.

“Sleep well,” Leliana says in her place, squeezing her hand. It is as much goodbye as it is good luck.

*

Ithalia retires alone, head swimming in a light haze. Suspended pleasantly away from the flurry of her thoughts, they all feel like a soft, faraway churn, like the snow swirling by outside her bedroom windows, illuminated in the lamps in the streets below.

Tonight she can lead no army, can guide no nation.

All that remains is readying herself for bed.

She leaves her robes in a heap on the floor, stepping out of them like she shed her ballgown four years ago. Smiling to herself, she pads across the space to her wardrobe, just like then, as if someone else is carefully turned away, smiling to himself in turn.

By some small miracle, she’s managed to take her same slip across the world: something gifted long ago by an Orleasian tailor that’s crossed the Frostbacks and come back home. She pulls it on now, ignoring how the years have it pulling and snagging in places it didn’t before. The lace on its low collar chafes more than ever, but the sensation is dulled by the tea, and there’s scarcely anything left in her closet that’s more comfortable anyway.

There’s only one problem, she realizes, turning to a four-poster bed that still doesn’t feel quite hers.

This—the manor, Orlais—is nowhere near Skyhold, where the forest of her dreams likely takes root on the other side of the Veil. No amount of elfroot will let her teleport, and the nearest of Morrigan’s eluvians is still hours’ travel away.

Ithalia scrambles through the haze over her thoughts, but finds nothing. No solution. This is how it’s always been, hasn’t it? A mortal against a god. One life on a board she still doesn’t know the bounds of. Not really.

‘ You are no mere mortal thing,’ she almost hears Morrigan chiding. ‘The Dread Wolf declared you his equal—if not in age, then…’

On a whim, she turns. Pulls a neatly folded cloak from the chair by the hearth, warmed by the low-burning flame, and shrouds herself in it. The silver thread embroidered in the trim glimmers in the last of the firelight, and the room sways as she turns in it. One complete spin, just as she’d been requested when it was first gifted.

It was perfect, that day: lined with fur, so soft, so warm against the near-solstice chill. It sparkled under the moonlight, and earned a nasally laugh when she turned. Easier to twirl in it than the ballgown she donned a day later—and so she did. She twirled, and he laughed, until winter thawed to spring.

Until every truth, carefully buried somewhere in the dazzling snow, came to light, one by one.

The cloak is still just as soft, though, just as warm. The only flaw in its pristine fabric is tonight’s repair, a little line of stitches that doesn’t quite blend into the whole.

As she falls into bed, that laugh still floating at the edge of her awareness, she holds it close: finger running up and down the line of thread, over and over, the same way she once mapped the divots of his knuckles.

She can still imagine the days when it was new, when all the world was real and bright and theirs. When the cloak was this soft, this warm, and still smelled like him.

Like pine, like woodsmoke, like their every adventure.

Like every night in the forest of their dreams.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Eleven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The haze over Ithalia’s consciousness disappears, and a blackened sky takes its place.

Snow crunches underfoot. The ground itself is steep—somewhere alpine. When she scans her surroundings, she finds only heaps of snow behind her path.

Haven. Buried under an avalanche now four years old, the layers of snow never fully melting in the summers… at least, not here.

Wind blows down the mountainside, buffeting against Ithalia’s face, but it has no real temperature. It’s only cold until she asks herself how cold, and then it’s nothing at all but a whisper against her skin.

The Fade. The Fade, finally spread out before her in ways she can notice. Finally steady enough that when she risks a single step, she does not tumble into another scene entirely.

She pulls her cloak tighter over what she realizes is still her slip. In the same heartbeat, she catches the flash of green in the motion: her wisp, already acting as her arm without her having to call it here, aiding in fastening a clasp at the cloak’s front. The gesture works—it well and truly works. 

A piece of her seems to fall back into place, the depth of the hollow it left behind readily apparent now that it’s been filled again.

She looks up the mountain. Blinks. Flecks of white continue to flutter down from above, now catching on her cloak because she watches them land.

Not snow, she realizes.

Ash. All she needs to know she is where she meant to be. Her forest, after all, was burning when last she left it. The fire—the damage, the pain—has remained, all this time.

Ithalia swallows. She expected this much. At the very least, it’s something she can work with, following the path back to the ruin of her making.

Onward and upward, come what may.

*

Climbing takes hours, she thinks. One step after the other, single-minded, only ever looking up at a sky that never stops trailing smoke.

Hours, perhaps, or days.

Her feet are bare, but the rock here won’t slice her skin. All she feels is the pulse of the ground below her, the steady thrum of a heart she wants to believe belongs to the one who haunts this place.

The air begins to taste of ash. Brush starts to snap beneath her steps. The forest of their make is drawing closer. It’s hard to see above the slope, invisible until she nears—until before her stands a sea of ruin.

In one moment, a mountainside; in the next breath, disparate wasteland.

The ground, blackened through every inch. The trees, little more than scorched sticks. Still some smoke rises from the charred undergrowth. Above the skies are tainted brown, the air itself choked and lifeless. 

If Skyhold stands nearby, she cannot see it. 

Nothing exists past the wreckage. 

Behind her, the mountainside is gone.

Ithalia whirls—once, then again the other way, her cloak swaying in ways that would have once evoked his laughter. She tries to find a stray shadow, a wolf prowling between the trees…

But what, truly, did she expect to find here?

There is no scrap of Solas in the dead underbrush, the boughs reduced to ash. There’s only the reminder of all that destroyed this place. Every transgression, every lie, every agent—every elf—every friend—laid bare here like carnage strewn over a battlefield. Maybe that is why Regret died pointing in its direction: as if to say, ‘Look at what we’ve done.’

The thought sends the wind howling. Darker clouds clot the sky. This is the Fade, no matter what else it might be anymore. Grief bears a weight that pulls everything around it, reality following pain like the tides follow the moon.

Ithalia forces her eyes shut.

No more. No more anguish, no decision, until the Dread Wolf shows his hand.

When she finds it, she’ll know. Whatever pain finds her, whatever course she takes, she’ll find her way to healing. Nothing mended, after all, without the needle’s first prick.

Ithalia pulls in a breath, and the wind follows down into her lungs. 

Now or never. 

“I’m here,” she calls above the coming storm. “Solas—I’m here.”

Chapter Text

Solas

— Eleven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The complication of repairing his timepiece is in the core of its functionality: like every eluvian save the Vi’Revas, the timepiece depends on a twin.

What Solas did not expect is that after the rest of the library’s repairs—every bookshelf set right, every book replaced that could be found, every bit of ice dispersed as vapour, and every drop of mural and memory housed safely in a series of lyrium idols—the timepiece would prove… enjoyable. Finding a faceted piece of lyrium in the right size sent him looking personally through dwarven merchants’ supplies, enchanters’ wares, for few ancient elves walk Thedas and their purpose is grander than a simple contraption.

The repair itself has meant hours in his library, working by candlelight, no other lyrium around to distract from the song of these fragments. Microscopic tools fashioned with Creation magic, conjured from memory… a momentary gateway into another lifetime.

A rush of pride, the first night he tests the reparation, when the one his library chimes in time with the twin he had an agent place in Val Royeaux. A little risk: that it is stored but ten minutes’ walk from the Chantry, under the floorboards of a nondescript room in a tavern, enchanted never to make a sound.

Midnight, as close as he can manage to the Inquisitor.

A subtle, bittersweet pang in his chest—an emotion that, in another life, had a name.

For now, he gives it hers.

While he watches those six concentric circles move in sequence over two small golden pillars, just as they used to, he almost does not catch the sound outside his library door.

Her voice.

He is past pretending that that isn’t why he stands. He is past pretending he was not counting each second in the movement of the rings.

Even if it is her fury he finds in the courtyard, Solas finds his way to it like trees to sunlight. The only way he has ever known how to face her: like all his life he has been starved for the privilege.

The heavens surrounding the courtyard still churn with smoke, but Solas has no eyes for it. His purpose is singular: follow the whisper sighing through the burned branches of their grove.

‘Solas.’  

“Ithalia,” falls from his lips in answer. In his many millennia, her absence should be nothing more than a blink—but the bolt of lightning that split the pine he stands beneath is indication enough that a single second can cause unthinkable damage.

Of course, she cannot hear him.

‘I’m here,’ she goes on, unaware he already knows.

Solas lowers to his knees, reaching for the blackened trunk. It would be easy to fall into her from here—as easy as letting go and allowing the ache in his chest to carry him.

He stops short.

It was not so simple, the last time he went to her. When she entered the Fade with a different name on her tongue, and the sight of him sparked the anger he deserved. Anger enough to reduce their every shared night to ash and grief.

‘Solas,’ again, and his eyes curtain shut at the sound. His fingers curl tighter, the line of tension drawn all the way up his shoulder. It is near impossible not to savor the way she frames the word in her mouth, the way sleep roughens her voice to a rasp, even here. In any other world than this, it would summon him in a blink, his every confession laid at her feet.

But here, it is fragile. Her voice is breaking, and it is his fault. Every crack in her heart, poisoned by one choice of his or another.

It is a timepiece he has fixed. That is all. It falls perilously short of what she is owed. If he comes to her now with nothing but peace?

The last time he made such a mistake… the Vhen’Theneras has only just recovered from tha fallout.

If he goes to her now, succumbing to the call of his own tattered heart, it must be honestly.

If she is to see him, to act—to stay, to leave, or destroy what remains of the trees—let the choice be hers alone.

Come what may.

Chapter Text

Ithalia

— Eleven months since Fen'Harel's departure —

The sky, veiled brown with smoke, darkens further.

A shadow descends over the smoldering ruin, darkness crawling up from behind Ithalia and drowning the remains of the forest. The wind answers her fear before she moves a muscle, roiling faster, colder.

She is ice before she turns, and still her blood runs cold.

A nightmare doesn’t just tower before her. It spans the entire horizon. A hulking, blackened mass, pure darkness curling off its form like fog. The monster is a sky unto itself, an abyss darker than any night.

Punctuated only by six unblinking crimson eyes, each as large as suns.

She heard the stories in her youth—of course she did. All Dalish do. To witness it up close is something different. The Bringer of All Nightmares towers high above where mortal eyes can make out distant details of his visage. He is nothing but pure shadow; he is made of every Dalish fear.

She is the child that she once was when her Keeper told the stories: the one who pulled the covers higher that night, fearing that Fen’Harel would come, that in the dark he’d find her weakest points and feast upon her deepest terrors. That she was prey fit for his jaws, that her clan would find her dead by dawn.

Now she sees why Qunari fell, all dead before they hit the ground, each slain in an instant by purest terror. Her bones cry out for that escape, her racing heart begging relief. It takes all that she has to keep herself still.

But he caused this. Every ruin. Every shared pain.

Ithalia stands firm.

“I can’t forget Arranna’s death,” she calls, voice carrying over the distant thunder. 

Carrying over it, eclipsing it, because she wants it to. Because the elfroot tea has given her an edge here.

The wolf, larger than the mountainside, doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.

“I won’t forget,” Ithalia presses. “She was my friend!”

The words echo. Trees sway in her wake.

“ Never did I believe you could have done that. I clung to hope that you’d come back. I swore for years, it couldn’t be—that you would never leave my heart in pieces. Yet here you are. And here I am. Two worlds apart… and my world, still doomed.”

Lightning forks across the sky. It throws the wolf’s features into sharper relief. Darker shadows; redder eyes. Ithalia clenches her fist—just one, her wisp flickering and unresponsive—and grits her teeth. Tears prick her eyes, and she bites them back.

“We’re all now pieces on your board—one I don’t know all the bounds of—where every life you end holds little meaning.” 

Nothing. He gives her nothing.  

“It doesn’t seem to matter, now, that this is not the man I knew.”

No snarl, no roar—and no shred of the love she remembers. Nothing left of what, once, she craved.

“It only matters that, one day, I stop you.”

She wants to cry out something else. 

Is this it?

You’re really still silent?

This is all you have left for me?

In spite of all of it, she turns. No more weapon left to raise. No trace of the man she thought, at least, would listen.

She walks away. The first step aches.

But where can she go?

Where would she want to go, after all of this?

There’s nothing here but the scorched remnants of trees, brandished like spears toward the choked sky. No shelter, no hiding place.

Only the feeling of six eyes on her back, the weight of the world held in one gaze.

Ithalia puts a tree between herself and it. Slides down the bark, slicing the cloak she knows he remembers, until she sits with her knees drawn up to her chest.

This is it, then: a life sentence for one, hardly more than a blink for the other. A mortal, no match for the Dread Wolf, the Bringer of Nightmares, breaker of bonds and maker of cages.

She bows her head in defeat—or nearly does, before blinking back tears, fighting to quiet the drum of her heart.

She may be trapped. She may not be able to ignore every death laid between them.

But death is not all they’ve ever shared.

“Remember when we danced on the balcony at the Winter Palace?”

Ash lands on her cloak. It flutters down like snow, swirling patterns just like that night.

The smoke of the ashen woodland trailed everywhere that sorrow touched.

It would be easy to extinguish her, here and now. Make her Tranquil. End the charade.

But the Dread Wolf grants her one thing: his patient silence.

“The emperor was newly crowned,” she continues, not hiding the break in her voice. “Festivities were dying down. We had a moment, finally, to ourselves.”

Slivers of stars sparkled between the clouds that night. He whispered an incantation so easily, like it took no thought at all, warming his hands enough that she felt it through her long gloves.

The rest of Orlais vanished. It could have been another life. For a few shining, precious minutes, it was.

“You danced with me ‘til it grew late, then found it in yourself to stay.” 

In truth, they’d stumbled into her chambers, clumsy hands and warring mouths like they were so much younger than they were.

But in lieu of youthful tumbling, he let down her hair with practised hands. Pulled her against him under the covers, encapsulated in a world all their own. Laughed under his breath the way he did when he believed no one was listening.

Fell asleep with his cheek laid on her crown, seconds before she drifted off.

“We dreamt and walked the Fade until the morning.”

And there, they danced for hours more, no mention of what lay beneath.

“I didn’t know we were at war.” Ithalia looks upon her hands—one with crescents indented in her skin, the other made of whirling light. Each as empty, as helpless, as the other. “How could I have? You withheld the truth.”

An eluvian network—a world—stolen out from under the Winter Palace. A knife in her back she couldn’t understand, when that same night Solas traced his finger in tiny circles over the same spot.

What does she have to show for any of it now?

Nothing.

Except for the thin lines of warmth spiderwebbing across the skin of her remaining palm, entirely separate from her will.

“We celebrated,” she says to his silence, to all the broken trees that once made up their dreams, “all week long—before the ball, then afterward. We needed the respite, after Adamant. We found the royal frilly cakes. We dreamt of old Halamshiral. You gifted me a cloak that I’m still wearing.”

A rush of wind buffets the trees. Ithalia tenses on instinct.

Let the storm come, if it has to. There’s nothing left for it to break.

“The days were cold. The nights, colder. When I look back on it, though, it’s… warm.”

His hands. His quiet, poorly hidden laughter. The way their companions watched, knew, and artfully said nothing—until they did, laughing all the more. All of it, warm and bright.

Thunder rolls, closer.

“You found a way to love me, then,” she entreats, tilting her head up to the dead boughs above her. “I think that’s what I miss the most. That in all of the chaos, I still had you.”

More wind. An insistent whirl. The air dampens, chills.

A void, where warmth once was.

“I tried—I wanted to, but I…” She bites her lip, jaw clenched hard. Tears sting her eyes.

There’s no way to put it gently: that she nearly drowned in the cracks in her own heart. That she tried anything to fill them. That trying—and failing—only pushed her down further.

“I’ll never love anyone else,” she confesses, hardly more than a whisper. The plainest truth; the heaviest shame. “No war, no death, no pain can dull the feeling.”

She tried to bury it. Tried to forget the weight, like she tried to forget how it felt when Arranna’s last breath shuddered out in her arms.

Wind sweeps up the mountainside. An impossible gust.

Warm, like a sigh breathed from behind her, caressing her cheek the moment a tear falls.

“We can’t go back,” she nearly whimpers, canting her head toward a touch that isn’t there. I won’t erase Arranna’s death. It’s not so simple.”

The silence concedes both their defeat.

Death will lie between them for all the time they have left, and then the world will fall.

But this, at least, they face down together: the death throes of all they’d ever shared.

Ithalia lays her still-warm palm to the forest floor. Traces tiny circles on the ground, though she’ll never reach his back.

“Theneras ar ama, vhenan.” 

Dream with me, my heart.

“Atish’an, desen malasa.” 

In peace, held together.

She bows her head, allows her eyes to fall shut.

“Mir sa lath, mir’inan isala hamin.” 

My one love, my eyes need resting.

Thunder rolls, directly above. She flinches, braced for lightning.

Instead, the sky over their forest breaks apart.

She tries, fails, to shape the rest of the lullaby’s refrain with her trembling mouth.

Vir sulahn'nehn. Vir dirthera.

Vir samahl la numin.

Vir lath sa'vunin.

Because, in truth, her lips beg for only one shape: ‘Please.’

Her tears stream through in full as the rest of the storm—its rain, its cold relief, its life —comes down, down.

When at last they relent, something stirs between her fingers.

New growth: tiny stems and smaller petals, unfurling at her touch. A soft shade of lilac, kissing under her dirtied palm.

The colour of his eyes, in bloom all across the forest of their dreams.

Chapter Text

Solas

— Nine years before Ithalia's return —

He does not know how long he stays, nor does he know how long she dreams. 

All Solas knows is he emerges to green.

The needles, regrown on their pine. The trunk itself, newly mended. It reaches, as before, toward the heavens.

And beneath both of his splayed hands—

Fireweed, the colour of his eyes.